"You really are crazy, aren't you? I guess you look sort of crazy."
Ah ha, I thought, a nonbeliever, a discounter of dreams. And a warrior must dream. "I'm warning you, watch that hand."
"You better stop going to those movies. You're liable to get hurt," he chuckled as the doctor entered, brisk, impatient, another blessing in hand.
"Away! foul son of Priam or be split asunder," I shouted, waving my arm. "And the smoke of your pyre will trample the night like the hot, raging breaths of a stallion and the flames lick the sky like the hounds at his flanks."
"Jesus," the doctor said.
The AP laughed and stepped to the side of the bed. "Okay, sir, I'll handle this crazy bastard," he said, smiling just enough to bend the line of his mouth. I sneered, bunched my arm on my chest. He reached for it, then hesitated and shook his head like Larkin, then reached again.
But it wasn't there. It had sped like a spear into that soft spot below the sternum, in, in to the knot of nerves, and quivered there. His eyes opened in the shadow of his visor. I had only intended a poke, a tap to let him know that I could, but my arm raised a soul of its own and spoke to something in mine. Again, swifter than thought, strengthened with a short grunt of nervous energy, my hand rejoined the battle. The AP's mouth opened, though not in laughter, and the upper half of his body tilted over the bed. I raised the cast-bound arm, serious now, and swung, remembering a Paiute ghost dancer granted invulnerability by Wovoka, a Bulgarian under Krum seeking a Byzantine skull for his drinking cup, remembering every violent image dredged from the limitless memory of man, and the ghosts lent me strength. I took him on the side of the head above the ear. His cap flew away; his head and shoulder crammed against the wall, shattering plaster. He shivered in a spasmodic dance, then his eyeballs, visible now, rolled, and he joined Larkin on the floor. I, purged, lay back to ease my ragged breath. Then the pain came from my leg, twisted and sucked my soul back into the void, and I went thankfully away.
There was a bird, a woodpecker, standing on my head, pecking my nose. I clenched my eyes and rolled my head, but he kept up that incessant pecking. Each one came as a bright flash, tapping me out of the peaceful darkness. Goddamned bird. He wouldn't get off my nose. He pecked exactly where it had been broken once, right in the tenderest spot. I strained to get my hands on him, but they would not move. Then a phrase from a bad Tennyson sonnet jumped into my head, something about a "still-recurring gnat." But it wasn't a gnat, it was a vulture… Then I woke.
Another Air Policeman, same size, etc., leaned over me, hitting the bridge of my nose at perfectly regular intervals with his billy, very light blows, only slightly heavier than a raindrop. He was good. No matter which way I turned my head, his baton was waiting there to keep up the beat. Tap! Tip! – ha, you Tap! missed Tap! that one. Tap! But only that one. Jesus, I thought, this is getting damn repetitious. I pictured an unending line of APs waiting outside the room. Surely twelve trials would be enough, I laughed to myself, But will this ever stop? Does a wave ask the circle of the sea for the shore? I laughed. Straps held my arms and I moaned. But the beat still went on. With a chant now, to my open eyes, "Tough guy. Tough guy. Tough guy." I snarled at him, a growl, a lion harassed by the beaters: "Yaaaawwwwllll!"
The cadence stopped blinding my eyes, and I saw that he had stepped back. He was older, tougher than the other one, and informed me in a quiet voice how happy he would be when I recovered from my injuries, probably self-inflicted, and I could come visit his friends and he in their stockade. I snarled again, snapped like a hungry hound. He leaned solicitously over me, smiled clean teeth, and pleasantly intoned, "Tough guy." His baton captured my attention as he rapped me gently in the crotch, almost tenderly. Then a bit harder, and the ripe, spreading pain and nausea began to flow, in, then out, leaving a great hollowness in my guts. "One more time," he murmured.
Doctor Gallard came later, came with his portable X-ray and his concern.
"How's the leg?" he asked as the technicians laid sheets of lead covering on my chest. He asked only about the leg. "I came as soon as I heard… about the incident. You didn't hurt that leg, did you? Surely hate to go back in there."
"I don't know."
"Why is your nose bleeding?"
"Lt. Hewitt popped me one this morning when I made what she called advances toward her."
"It shouldn't still be bleeding."
"I sneezed."
Gallard glanced at the AP, then back at me as if to say I probably deserved worse than I had received. "Go ask the nurse for some ice and a cloth, corporal."
"I'm supposed to guard him, sir," he said, nodding at me. Like all warders, caged men frightened him more than free ones.
"I think I can prevent him from biting me, corporal. Go on."
"I don't know, sir. He's a mean one, he is." He chuckled.
"Don't mock your betters," I said to him, "lest they notice you."
"You guys never learn, do you?" He stepped toward the bed.
"The ice, corporal."
"Yes, sir."
Gallard did not speak while the AP was gone, and made him wait outside when he came back. "You feel it's your right to rape and pillage?" he asked, cradling the back of my neck with the ice.
"Achilles called rear-guard soldiers wine sacks with dogs' eyes and deers' hearts."
"So what? You haven't seen enough war to even know what it's about, and yet here you are raising more hell than a regiment of Marines."
"I knew, now I know. Besides, small things lead to bigger ones without anyone's help. Acorns and oaks and all that crap. I wanted a drink. This came of only that. Takes two to make war. Things grow in this crazy world."
"Of course," he said, digging his hands into his hair as if searching for something very small and incredibly important. "So?"
"Not an excuse. Just what happened, that's all. It was my fault, but I'm not going to say I'm sorry, or say I won't do it again. I want to be left alone, and I will manage to be left alone."
"Victim of an undeclared war, huh? Fighter for right and humanity? Killer of small, hungry men."
"I was raised for a warrior. What else would you have me do?"
"That's your problem, not mine."
But you want it to be, I thought, And it will.
He finished with his business and went away.
I sang softly into the afternoon, sang to the green grass and sky, to the bright, burning haze of the sun, "Joe Morning, Joe Morning, where have we come?"
1. Base
"This is a strange outfit, Sgt. Krummel," 1/Sgt. Tetrick said on that morning I first arrived in the Philippines in the late summer of 1962. "Unusual. Different. We're a small outfit, less than seventy men. It really ought to be good duty, but somehow it ain't. The work's too easy, and these kids get bored, and when they're not bored, they're pissed off. Their bowels jam up or run like crazy because of the work schedule, and their sleep is always screwed up." Tetrick stood and shuffled his way over to the trick schedules. His feet were still tender from a case of jungle-rot he caught in Burma during the war. He was careful never to put a foot down any harder than necessary. He explained that the 721st Communications Security Detachment had only an Operations Section and a small Headquarters Section of cooks and clerks since most of the administration and personnel work was handled on Okinawa. The men in Operations, "Ops," were divided into four tricks of ten men. Each trick worked six days, 0700 to 1600, then had a seventy-two hour break; six swings, 1600 to 2400, then a forty-eight hour break; and then six mids and another seventy-two hour break.
"Your trick is on break now," he said, "and they're all in Town – that's what they call Angeles – drinking and whoring and anything else they can think of to get in trouble. Town is bad. Three-fourths of it is off-limits forever, two-thirds of it after 1800, and all of it after 2400. But will they be back before curfew? Shit, no. They got to run and hide from the APs and laugh about how much fun it is. And if they can get knived by a calesa driver or run over by a jeepny or drown in a sewer for all I know – or care." He shrugged, sighed, then walked back to his desk and continued, "But somehow all the bastards will get back in one piece just in time to wash off the crud, shave, brush their teeth maybe, and get to the three-quarter before it leaves for the Ops Building." He shook his head and folded his long arms, then stared at the rain beyond the half-screened passageway. "It rains all the goddamned time, too."