Страница 79 из 81
"I never said anything about joining the Huks."
"You didn't have to," he said, taking off his glasses. He cleaned them slowly, then handed them to me. "There. I only need them to read, really, and I'm through with that, with reading and talking and thinking, I'm tired of all that. Give them to Gallard and tell him I'm sorry."
"Well, no sweat," I said, drinking and shaking it off, "they probably won't take you."
"They've already taken me. That's fu
"I don't doubt it," I sighed, "but I wonder how long you'll last."
"Long enough."
"Yeah. Think about this. You're not a soldier, Morning. Maybe you're tough and smart, but you don't know anything, you haven't…"
"I know as much as you knew," he interrupted.
I had to smile. "Maybe so. Shit, I don't know. I just hate to see you go."
"No other way for us," he said.
"What about your folks?" I asked.
"It doesn't matter," he said. "It doesn't matter at all."
I stood, then wandered to the latrine, peed, wondering how I might stop him, but when I went back to the table, he was gone, the phony wheelchair sitting empty, his glasses gleaming from the tabletop. There was nothing to say. For an instant I wished that he had died in Vietnam, but I knew I didn't. I sat for a moment in the wheelchair, slipped on his glasses, and drank his beer, but it just didn't fit, so I drank my own.
Two, maybe three hours passed, and I thought nothing, said nothing, and drank very little. The Filipino, the student with the dirty mouth walked up to me, and in not an unfriendly voice said "Hello."
I hit him in the mouth and he tumbled backwards into the latrine.
I sat and the music and talk went on for perhaps fifteen seconds, then stopped. I took an easy drink of beer and when the student nearest behind me swung at the back of my head, I ducked, and elbowed him in the ribs. You could hear them break like a bow snapping. He lay on the floor, out of it, and I moved into the corner by the jukebox. There were seven of them, but only two miners, and they were all moving toward me, but I wasn't waiting.
I went for the nearest miner, catching half a dozen punches on my head and shoulders as I went. I had my neck tucked inside my chest and I wasn't waiting. I blocked the miner's roundhouse with a left and his foot with my knee, then hit him in the throat. As he went down, a wave of bodies hit my back, but I rolled as I fell, and came up with my back to the door. The other miner came first and I took two good shots to the forehead before I grabbed his arm and swung him out the door. He rolled over the hood of a car (and a taxi ran over his arm and the driver went for the police).
The bodies again flew at my back and forced me to the wall, but my foot came down on a shin with the edge of my shoe and I caught an inquisitive nose with the back of my head and smashed it like a tomato, and I rolled out again.
They had me in the middle now, swinging, kicking. I missed with a right, hit the top of a lowered head, and felt the bones give way. Kick one inside the thigh, miss another's kneecap, and fall under their hands and shoes. I know I was down and up at least twice, because I remember, and then there was just reeling darkness and spi
I came back as the sirens approached, but when I stood, the room tilted and I stumbled across the room to the far wall, then rolled back to the bar. The barroom looked like hell, furniture splintered, blood, glass, a tooth shining in a puddle of beer, an empty shoe under a broken table… I closed my eyes, reeled again, then opened them. I felt my face: nose, somehow, intact; a lump as big as my nose on my right cheek; a gap in my lip up through my moustache for my tongue to tiddle; teeth, traditionally strong, still there, but loose; another lump with the skin split across it like a splintered mirror; lumps on my head. Second and third knuckle of the right hand pushed halfway back to the wrist. Half an inch of my left ear disco
As I walked behind the bar, the two girls scooted around the other end and out the door like flushed quail. I opened a beer, poured it in my mouth, then over my head. For some reason I looked around the room for Morning and wondered why he wasn't there, then wondered why I was. And as the police and APs came in the door, the hurting began.
Gallard and Abigail cried and cursed as they repaired me, but I merely sat and endured. The words I spoke were to ask Gallard to knock me out for a while. I didn't tell them about Morning; I didn't know about Morning.
So there it is.
I told them about Morning the next afternoon, sitting on Gallard's porch watching the shadows leap over the ridges, down the valley, over the ridges, across the sky, just trying to tell them about Morning as moths as pasty as powdered sugar and one butterfly as big as my swollen, bandaged hand and black as dried blood contest the border between day and night; moths out too early, butterfly out too late, white moths, daemons of the night, butterfly black as day, and Joe Morning gone… perhaps if he had known that I shot him… but then perhaps not, too.
The morning of November 3, 1963. As I waited for my plane to Clark I noticed in the Stars & Stripes that the Diem's had been overthrown and killed by a junta of Vietnamese generals. Let shit eat shit, I said.
As I walked out to the small transport a little ceremony was being performed for a casketed body also going down to Clark. A ta
And so I flew back home, across the sea, more hopeful than Morning, less hopeful than ever before.
The day after I was discharged at Oakland, John Fitzgerald Ke