Read One to Count Cadence for Free Online

I’m tired of base. Sometimes I stay on base ‘cause I’m tired of Town. Ain’t new anymore. Only so many ways a man can get laid.”
    “I wonder,” I said, touching a wooden maiden who clutched a small and hairy object to her crotch which I assumed to be a monkey, “after seeing this thing. There may be something new under the covers.” We chuckled together in that easy way which told both of us we would be friends.
    It pleased me that Novotny did not seem ill at ease or in any way treat me as a sergeant, and at the same time we understood that the moment would come when I would have to tell him to do something or other which he did not want to do. If he respected me, he would do it and not, as others would, dislike me for the accidents of time and place which made me his sergeant. The months at Fort Carlton in training school had been unpleasant because I had been a barracks sergeant, a bad barracks sergeant, too easy at first, then too hard later when the man tried to take advantage of me. I had no business being a sergeant anyway. I was just a guy who had stayed in the reserves for the hell of it and the money (and maybe because I hoped I wouldn’t miss the next war as I had the Korean one). That lack of experience, and my attempts to be intellectual about something which isn’t, caused me much trouble. There is no rationale about orders: they have to be given and taken, but never can make much sense if thought about. Given a choice, I would have preferred to forge my tiny link on the chain of command out of mutual understanding of and respect for the necessity and value of discipline, but men who defied God certainly were not going to bow to any abstract discipline. But oddly enough, my foolishness was going to work in the 721st because the men were good. Not all, I guess, but enough. Like Novotny: good men whatever their educational or personal differences.
    As our conversation faltered, I asked Tom about a place to eat on base.
    “Say the food is okay at the NCO Club,” he said, giving me an out if I wanted it.
    “No club tonight.”
    “Pretty fair steaks at the Kelly Restaurant.”
    “Where’s that?”
    “I’m going up, if you want to come along.”
    “Sure. What about your letter? I’ll wait if you want to finish it.”
    “Fuck it,” he laughed. “She’ll marry some prick before I get stateside anyway. Get ready.”
    As we walked down the hall to the central stairwell to call a cab, I was again struck by the quiet, the sense of desertion, but as I moved between those rooms, those walls which could not hold even a breeze, I realized they provided an unusual privacy for enlisted men. People were behind those walls — signaled by a muffled laugh or cough, a book falling from sleepy hands, a radio humming, a bunk groaning under a restless sleeper — privately behind them. I could not remember a single moment during my first hitch of being alone in the barracks, not even in the latrines.
    “You people live good,” I said.
    “Ain’t home,” Tom said, turning into the stairwell.
    * * *
    The Kelly Restaurant was exactly what you would expect on a military installation: the second-best eating place in any small American town where the Baptists and Methodists gather to exchange weather complaints, clothing compliments and pessimism, a warehouse of scratched and chipped formica and cracking plastic, except the Kelly Restaurant served Japanese beer in liter bottles.
    “The steaks were okay,” I said as Tom and I were on our fourth or fifth bottle, “but the waiters were surly as hell.”
    “Fuckers,” he said, grinning so hard his cheeks bunched into tight little balls of leather. “Real shits. Don’t tip ‘em, they pick your pocket on the way out.” He raised the tall green bottle. “Banzai!” We drank to that. “Crazy little Japs,” he said, “Tried to win the war.” He shook his head without shaking his grin at all. “If they’d a give this stuff away free, they could a walked on