One to Count Cadence Read Free Page A

A plane crash. Shit.
    And here I was, shot in the arm and leg by an American first lieutenant three hours after the attack was over. I hadn’t been angry yet, partly because I had done a foolish thing, and partly because I had not thought about it. There were others dead, and I counted myself lucky to be alive, fortunate enough not to bitch about the conditions of being alive. But anger is easier than reflection, so I paced the afternoon remembering every stupid officer I had ever known, and learned to hate them all over again.
    After evening chow Ramon and I handled our transaction at the window. I had a snort, then hid the bottle under my pillow, and tried to sleep until taps. I, fool that I was, wanted a peaceful drink without any nosy nurses bothering me.
    It must have been three o’clock before I awoke. My leg hurt, my head ached, the scabs on my side itched and my mouth tasted like the inside of a tennis shoe. Like a wounded crab I managed to pour a large amount of tepid water on my nightstand and a small swallow in the glass which I drank without drowning. Now was the big moment, the drink I had been waiting for all day. Mellow Scotch to sooth an angry soul. It tasted like shit. Strange how that taste cuts through romantic notions.
    I choked on the first swallow and spit half of it on my bedclothes. Three more fast sips, then I rested, waiting for a little numbness. I wondered why I objected to being drugged with drugs, but not with alcohol. Matter of middle-class taste, I supposed. Another sip, then a swallow, then a real man-sized drink. It didn’t make any difference; I still gagged each time. I rested again.
    A delicate chill had touched the air, and it seemed too heavy and damp for the mountains. Slight rustlings and tiny chirps like drowsy questions peeped through my window from the two pines. Past the trees a misty fog slept in the hollows, solid and white under the moon, gauzy and glistening beneath the street lamps. I searched the drifting mist, waiting for the Scotch to nudge me into that magic world outside my window, but I quickly began to feel silly: like a midnight rendezvous that doesn’t come off, and by one o’clock you are tired, cold and wish to hell you had never come, and hate the day you met her. And as I thought of a woman, supposing one to be just what I needed, I wondered what a climax in traction might be like. In my shape? Why not? Anything Fredrick Henry can do, I can do better. But then she came, the one I had been waiting for. Pale and delightfully breathless, a virgin reborn in the cobweb tangle of moon in her hair, her mouth opening like a flower under mine… As if by magic I was drunk, the cold air bubbling in my nose, the hot kiss of Scotch in my belly.
    For fifteen minutes I laid waste to those fifteen hundred famous virgins whoever they were. Within the next five minutes I banished evil from the house of man, smashing mine enemies with my virtuously white right claw. I shot a little more time trying to say “white right claw.” I had had love, virtue and honor, so I tried wine again, and drank seriously for a while. But it all amounted to — within half an hour I was drunk and bored, securely immobilized, without a soul to talk to me, to see me, or even pity me. Just me, alone in the dark, with half a bottle left and too many hours until dawn. But even boredom lacked constancy. My mind ranged the wide world of all incoherencies. I was grief-stricken and appalled by my survival; then certain that it was only my due as the fittest. There was much guilt, then bountiful thanks, for the death of Joe Morning.
    All things are possible on dark mornings, and by the time dawn revealed the troubled corners of my room, I hated, hated Lt. Dottlinger, who I had never liked anyway, and then the bastard shot me… well. I dug a pen from the nightstand drawer and signed my own cast, scrawled FUCK YOU exactly over the hole in my thigh. I wanted to write SLUTFINGER, as Dottlinger was known in