Free One to Count Cadence by James Crumley

you?”
    “You’re quite correct, sir. Not that particular problem.”
    “Well, goodnight, sergeant. Ah, and don’t neglect the major’s desk.”
    “No, sir. The major’s desk. Yes, sir.”
    As the heavy door slammed behind Dottlinger, Cagle slipped from his chair and up the ladder as quickly as a monkey to let him out the gate, then lowered Franklin through the trap. He was still out. Novotny lodged him in his chair and slapped his face with cold water until he came around. He woke, mumbling, “Fuck ‘em, goddamnit, fuck ‘em,” then staggered to the latrine. He returned in better shape, his eyes puffy but awake and a silly grin on his face.
    “Jesus Christ, it’s four-thirty,” he said, stretching his arms and yawning. As he rubbed the back of his neck, he found a few pieces of gravel. “Hey, where’d this come from?” Novotny explained. “You guys did that for me? Jesus…” He started to say something smart, then stopped. “Jesus. Thanks… Thanks.” He started to cry, bewildered tears. “Nobody ever …” He stammered, then sat down and put his headsets on.
    I put things in order, caught up the hourly log, then grabbed a can of wax, a mop and the buffer out of the utility closet. I took an hour on the major’s floor, waxing and buffing until the tile was as shining hard and brittle as my anger.
    When I went back upstairs, everything was clean and glistening except the floor, and Franklin was waiting for the mop and buffer. “I’m sorry, sarge,” he said, taking the gear from me, “I promise you, if it ever happens again, I’ll turn myself in. Promise. Thanks.”
    “Don’t sweat it, kid. It won’t happen again,” I said, admiring the immaculate room. You, Krummel, you got troubles? A Trick-ful. It was different now, easier and more relaxed, like a family, now that I had pulled Franklin into the Trick by his shirt front, stepping into the living room myself. We knew where we stood, for better or worse: together.
    * * *
    But Joe Morning and I were friends from the beginning. Perhaps it was as simple as two men just liking the look of each other, or as complex as covering hate with love. We looked somewhat alike, enough so that we often passed for brothers in Town, except for our coloring, Joe fair and I dark, and our noses, mine hooked and crooked as sin, his straight as an arrow. I affected a ferocious, drooping moustache, and Morning his scholarly spectacles. We stood the same six feet, but I was thirty pounds heavier than his 195, and I suppose it was the size which started us.
    “You ever play any football, Sgt. Krummel?” he asked on his fourth trip to the coffee pot that first morning at work. I could tell he wanted to say something, to start a conversation, but he didn’t, so I waited.
    “I played a little in college.”
    “Where?”
    I told him. He had heard of the small South Texas school. They had been NAIA contenders two seasons before.
    “You play on that team?” he asked.
    “No. I was at the University of Washington by then.” We went through the routine about what I was doing in the Army, and then I pulled a quick history out of him. (Actually no one ever had to pull anything out of Morning. He told everything, which is a nice way to lie.)
    He had been born in Spartanburg, South Carolina, but spent his first ten years or so in Phoenix, then back to Spartanburg for the rest of high school. He went to a large Southern university as a single-wing tail-back and Accounting major until he changed to drinking and Philosophy in his second semester, which he continued until he was expelled in his junior year. Then he commuted between Phoenix where he sang folk songs in a bar and the South where he sang in demonstrations, until, so he said, an Alabama judge, at Mrs. Momma Morning’s request, sentenced him to three years in prison or the Army on an assault charge. Morning had forgotten how to passively resist. He took the Army as the greater of two evils, gave the judge as a