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"What's he, crazy?"
"I told you, sir. The rats," I said, saluting again.
"Stop the rat shit," he said, gri
"I'm fair," Morning said amidst a giggle.
They played out the hole, then sat with us on the patio of the Halfway House, drinking until dusk. Gallard had been right about the waiters, but he hadn't mentioned that they could be bribed. The young men were both Navy carrier pilots and both in love with the young woman who worked in the American Embassy in Manila. She refused both of them on the grounds that carrier pilots just don't live long enough to love. But we had a good time, a college time, saving the world with loud assertions and booze, loving each other in a wonderfully maudlin way. As we parted, the girl kissed Morning and me, saying she could love us because we were out of it. We exchanged addresses and promised to keep in touch, then they climbed in a cab heading for the Igloo for more drinking, and Morning and I headed back through the long cool shadows to the hospital.
In the ward the mirth of moments before seemed sinful among the broken and twisted men, the blind, the deaf, the dumb. The afternoon became unreal for me, as it seemed all my afternoons were becoming, and as it would seem unreal to the young pilots drifting in at the tiny carrier deck at two, three hundred miles an hour, sweat stinging their eyes and their clammy shorts climbing as their assholes sucked fearful wind and the brassy fear sick in their mouths. Death ca
Abigail and I drifted through the two long sweet weeks, discovering love and our bodies during the cool evenings. I had rented a hotel room downtown, and we went there every night for two weeks. Gentle sweet mound of her belly, dimpled, hipbones hard, rib cage delicate as a bird's, red-headed lover of a pussy, legs ever reaching apart… and only once did she mention marriage. I answered nothing, she said no more.
Morning would kid her when she came puttering around my bed (Gallard had moved Morning into the bed next to mine), her eyes puffy with nightwork, but her face shining like a fresh apple. He called her Catherine and me Fredrick Henry, and said he was sorry but she would have to die as soon as I deserted. The joke fell quickly, and in a few days Morning, in spite of the afternoon when he ate the golf ball, slipped once more into sullen silence. He went to town every night, and from what he said, was drinking again at The New Hollywood Star Bar with Communist students and unemployed gold miners. His eyes turned cold and secretive when he spoke to me at all, and there were no repeats of that friendly afternoon of the golf ball, no confidences, just superior smiles all day long.
Abigail asked me, one sleepy Sunday afternoon as we lay naked in my hotel room, "What's the matter with Morning lately?" One slim white arm rested behind her head and the other dangled off the side of the bed holding a black Filipino cigarette.
"Nothing," I said, kissing her pebbled armpit.
"Don't do that," she said. "I think he's faking; I think he can walk."
I rolled between her legs, bent to kiss her neck, then bent farther to run my tongue around the nipple of her small left breast. "So."
"Don't do that," she said. "Be serious."
"God knows I am, what-ever-your-name-is honey." I nipped the corner of her mouth with my tongue.
"Don't do that," she said. "You're never serious when I want you to be. Never."
She held her mouth slack as I kissed her and she brought the cigarette and burned the back of my hand propped on the bed. She burned, but I didn't jerk away.
"Shit," she said, "don't do me that way." She twisted, grabbed my hand, and sucked the hole burnt into the skin. "Why do you do that?"
"Why do I do that?"
"Yes," she said, a stray tear dropping on my hand. "You would have let me burn clear through your hand. You're just crazier than shit, Jake."
I laid my tongue into the stale salty ear.
"Don't do that," she said. "I'm trying to talk to you. Oh, Christ… Oh…"
"Can I do that?"
"Oh, Christ… yes," she said, falling back on the pillow, then pulling my mouth to hers, whispering against my lips, "oh, Christ, yes, for about two days, ten months, and fifteen years."
"How about something more reasonable, lady, say forty-five minutes." I felt her giggle.
"Braggart."
"Slut." I felt her giggle again.
"You're just never serious when I want you to be."
"I try."
Then one day Gallard took the cast off, issued me a cane, approved fifteen days convalescent leave, and invited Morning and me and Abigail for drinks that night. Abigail and I had pla
Gallard had a place off base over behind the Country Club, a house perched on the edge of the bluff like a child's dare, a lovely house with a screened porch ru
"Split-level houses and wheelchairs go together like shit and potatoes," I said, as I rolled Morning up to the bamboo couch.
"Yes, that's of course why I didn't answer the door," Gallard said from the couch.
"You gotta be kidding," Morning said when he saw Gallard. He wore red silk lounging pajamas. "Fucking indecent."
Gallard looked down. "These wrap-around flys were always the very devil to keep closed. I understand that's their purpose."
"I don't mean you're showing, man, you're just glowing," Morning said. "Pour me a drink, Fu Manchu; eyewash, if you got it."
"Just gin," he said, waving us to chairs.
We sat, drank as the sun disappeared from the ridges across the valley and and darkness fell like a swift blow, ate curry and purple rice and roast pig and sweet and sour ribs and fried rice while moths as large and white as our hands bobbed against the screen like itinerant ghosts seeking work and rice bugs pronged like suicidal maniacs off the wire. Drank again as the tiny lights in the valley expired, drank and talked, mostly about why we were here, Gallard's lack of ambition, Abigail's loneliness, Morning's bad luck, my marriage, drank and talked as if we were never to see each other again, soldiers in a foreign land.
I had just finished my own sad story of love and mistakes and marriage, very drunk, when it started.
Abigail kissed me on the cheek and said, "But we'll do it all right, Jake-baby."
"Better stay way from that ugly bastard," Morning muttered, then gri
"That's right," Gallard sneered. "Professional killer."
"Yep," I grunted.
"Bullshit," Abigail crooned, "he's a lover."
Gallard suddenly stood up, walked to the screen, then turned and nearly shouted, "Fuck. Stop that silly 1940s shit. Woman, this isn't some goddamned movie shit, some romantic Hemingway novel. Oh, yeah, Miss Lonelyhearts, he's your white knight, but he's a fucking killer and I know it." He leaned back against a beam. "I'm sorry," he said quietly. "I'm sorry, but it's true."
"Right," Morning hiccupped from his chair.