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"Leech bitch," Novotny said.
"Who?"
"Fucking leech. Dependent child. Sixteen years old and already given the clap to thirty-seven guys."
"You know her?"
"Comes to the pool all the time to make us holler. Ain't hollerin' yet. Only airmen mess with leeches. Below our principles."
"Might be all right."
Novotny straightened up, dropped his grin, and very solemnly said, "Man might as well be a lifer as screw a leech." He paused, concerned, "You ain't no lifer, are you?"
"Lifer?"
"Taking twenty?"
"Shit, I don't know…"
"What the hell you doing back in the Army anyway?"
"Shit, I don't know. After my wife left me, I…"
"Woman trouble. Knew it," he interrupted. "Soon as I laid eyes on you, knew it. Woman trouble. You know I'm the only guy been here long as I have hasn't got a Dear John. Only one left. Seen 'em all go down. Woman trouble. Spot it a mile away." He shook his head. "What you need is a seventy-five cent love affair, fellow."
"Is it that cheap? I don't have a pass yet, anyway." All new perso
"No, no. This's different. Over at the Airman's Club. Six bits. No nookie, just true love and dancing. Be my guest."
We settled the check, then walked through a drifting mist toward the barn-like tin building which housed the Airman's Club. Our voices and laughter rang in the cool, damp night, clear and echoing along the glittering black streets. The soft halos of the street lights wavered in easy breezes and jeeps and trucks hissed politely past. I remembered, remembered those Friday nights in Seattle, Ell and I wandering home from weekly hamburgers and beer at a neighborhood bar; madcap rainy evenings that seemed to dance to our laughter, alone and together, untroubled as never before or again, wet and cold and happy as when we were children. And later tipsy and steaming under the shower, slick and soapy, and we could never wait, never.
Novotny danced and furiously danced with his seventy-five-cent-love-affair until I expected his bad leg to fly off and tumble right up to the bandstand, felling potted palms as it went; but it seemed as able as his other. Able enough to play football, he explained, and added that the season would start soon and anyone who wanted to play could go over to the Agency outfit and sign up. The three Army units – Agency, ACAN and the 721st – had one team among them.
"We really tear up airmen," Novotny said, sitting down while his girl caught her breath – my affair had long since left me to my sullen silence. Novotny had that same strained grin again, as if he did not intend to wait for the season. "I hate this fucking place, but we get a good club like last year – won the base championship – and it's okay. Football season goes real quick, bam bam bam, then six more months and I'm going home. Back to the ZI, the Zone of Interior, the Land of the Big PX, multicolored staff cars and concrete barrios. No more PI for this GI. I'm going civilian-side."
All the way back to the barracks he explained why I too would soon adhere to the motto, IHTFP or I Hate This Fucking Place. At the time I wondered what there was to hate, though I later understood that it was the time itself, the slow, inexorable murder of the time, the boredom of escape, the pure nihilism of the peace-time soldier, suffering not only the contradiction of terms "peace" and "soldier" but that of "time" too. But I didn't hear what Novotny was saying then: I had my own enemy, blacker and vaster than time – memory, or history as it is popularly called. I named it my enemy then, hating it as the Roman soldier who pierced Christ's side must have hated Him. Salvation is a hateful thing: surely the memory of man proves that.
No, I didn't hear the pain in Novotny's voice, the grinding agony of having no meaning. I fell asleep, thinking, Surely soldiers gripe in Heaven… no one understands the reward for virtue… only the penalty for guilt. Then I dropped away to visions of a scarred leg dancing alone in the desert, a vast stone leg pursued by a girl-child, pretty and pink, but when she caught it, her hands rotted black and fell away as my father's voice tolled, "My name is Ozymandias, king of despair: / Look on my works, ye warrior and king." (I always dream what I've read, though changed in my mind as if I'd written it. A mighty conceit.)
Later that night I dreamed of home, a cool spring morning, soft and fresh. As I walked to my car, the sweet air tickled my face and sprinkled goose-bumps with a quick shiver among the sun-white hair of my arms. The chill, pleasant and deep, touched with excitement, caused me to pee in the thick grass where the washing machine emptied. It was right, the sky open and blue and the long run of the pasture glistening clean and dark green with the dew, and the patch of grass curled and thick, and all this mine, and the sky and the fields and the grass, all mine, and me, young and king in the heart of her.
The stream, golden arch into the tight grass, sparkled and slowly rolled, then I too, like a wisp, toward the dark tangled hairs flew. As I drifted, the grass bore my Ell, my first, naked and green in the sudden night, arms and shining legs lifted. Then finished, easily I rested in her, lovers on the patchwork fiber of my back seat, my car half-hidden in a low brush thicket, and I lost in her, in the ease and softness of her under the wide sky of night, my Ell, my fallen breath cupped in the curve of her neck. But quickly she whispered of things wet, warm, and dangerous, of spermy traps, and I leaped away to clutch the condom bloated with the tinkling afterthought of a pee. The thin walls burst, flooded the shame of my waste across the moonlight plain of our loins. I cried in guilt for she saw… and woke crying in fear of the loneliness too she must have seen. Else why she should love me? I asked half-dreaming as I crawled from the damp bed.
I stripped the bunk, flipped the mattress, and wandered to the latrine to shower. Back in the room I smoked, leaning against the screen. I wonder if John Wayne ever peed the bed? The stretch of a grin on my face only eased the mood for a second.
Ah, you crazy bastard, Krummel. What are you doing here? Came to laugh. You dream of being a warrior? Seems to me you pee the bed and cry for yourself. What else should I do? You could have been anything? I wanted to be everything. I couldn't decide. I always got to places too late. Now you've learned the worth of a limited choice. No, I just made the wrong ones. So now you wait for a war like a fool? Why not start your own? You know your history. You need nothing else. Whatever I say, you'll say I'm just afraid, which I am. I can only be what I am. And your history, your memory as you call it, dictates what you must be? Yes. You wandering purposeless fool, out of time and place, remembering wars that never happened, heroes that never died much less lived. I couldn't stop dreaming of a better time, of honor and heroism and virtue. Where else can I find them? They told me that is where they were, cast in the fires of battle. Maybe they're right in some way they don't understand. Maybe you're a fool? Maybe.
I watched the rain suck at the curling blue smoke, the mourner's rain, chokingly heavy and black, and the glittering drops plummet to earth, to earth and who knows how much farther.
The next morning Sgt. Tetrick gave me a guided tour and lecture on Clark Air Force Base, Philippines. Clark Air Force Base lies on the central Luzon plain in the province of Pampanga near the city of Angeles. It is bordered on the west by the Bambam river which skirts a heavily jungled range of hills and on the east by the Manila-Baguio highway. Clark is one of the largest bases in the Far East. It provides runways and support facilities for countless jet fighters and bombers which guard Southeast Asia against China, or for American business interests, or against the Eskimos, depending on your politics and memory. The base, in its turn, is also guarded. A strong hurricane-wire fence encloses the entire base. The fence, as any other important facility of the base, is also closely guarded by the Air Police, Filipino constabulary and Negrito pygmies. The APs patrol the perimeter in jeeps and three-quarter-ton trucks, armed with Browning automatic shotguns, submachine guns, carbines, rifles, pistols, and angry German Shepherd police dogs. The APs shoot on sight, usually forgetting the warning shots, and quite often kill, not only thieves and infiltrators, but expensive dogs and each other on occasion. When an AP kills a Filipino intruder, he is quickly court-martialed, found guilty, fined one dollar, given a carton of his favorite smokes by an apologetic major, then flown back to the states on the next flight. The Filipino constabulary, being indigenous, suffer no such inconvenience. They are merely required to reimburse the government for each round of ammunition expended that does not find a human target. They seldom miss; ammunition is expensive. The Negritoes, true pygmies, live mainly in the hills except for a small group which resides in cardboard, tin and board shacks near the back fence. They are famed for their unreasoning love of Americans, their righteous hatred of Filipinos and Japanese, and their action against the Imperial Army of Japan during World War II. Their favorite trick, since they are able to stalk and hunt quite well, was to quietly remove every other man's head in a Jap barracks or bivouac at night, placing it on his chest so that his comrades might find it the next morning. This usually disabled the whole unit: those who weren't sleeping forever never slept again. In spite of these gruesome tricks, the Negritoes are jolly little folk in their gray uniforms and silver badges, bare, dusty feet and bush hair only half hidden by helmet liners, and faces split by smiles twice too large for men only four-feet-six. They perform their work in the highest of spirits and with the greatest of efficiency.