Excerpt from "Morgan," page 111

Sfc Lewis Morgan, who had a rep as the best mess sergeant in the KComZ, always played a game in the streets of Pusan to see just how close he could nip the foot-traffic with the fender of his jeep. He managed at last to kill a gook, a baby boy slung on the small of its mother’s back. "Shit, boysan," one of Morgan’s buddies said, late the next day, after all hell broke loose around the headquarters compound of the 68^th Engineers, "she’d a froze to death long before this if the American Army wasn’t here. Why, you better mother-fuckin’ believe it, sarge." Morgan himself never said so much. His glasses flashed as he looked up at his buddy and his smile was meant to please and threaten. His smile was straight as the side of his hand. He went back to planning menus, sitting alone at a table in the middle of the empty messhall, while his buddy shuffled uncomfortably away. Morgan had a black belt in judo, and it put a stamp of license on anything he did. GIs went out of their way to visit friends in the 68^th so they could eat in Morgan’s messhall, where the food was good and everything was clean.

Excerpt from "Morgan," pages 131-133

Everybody at the gate was dark around the collar and under the arms and shiny-faced with sweat. With the bundle crooked in her arm, the woman kept spreading the rags to show the dead child’s face to Weems, to Pong Nam, to Cummings, to the man in the white American shirt. Then she walked up sideways between the bayonets and tried to show it to the soldiers who, at Cummings’ whispered command, stared straight past her into the mob. She pointed at the little body to show where it had been hit, in the back. "You could smell it," Pfc Levin said later, and it made his gut grind. She wept, sharply, when she saw the soldiers wouldn’t look. Pong Nam said to the Lieutenant, "She say sergeant make her run off street. She say sergeant do this all the time." Lieutenant Weems wanted badly to shift, from his cold right hand to his left, the .45 that he kept pointed in the air.

"You’re accusing the man of manslaughter. This has to be done in court," the Lieutenant said.

"Court no good," the man said.

"Goddamnit," Weems said, "the court is good."

"No good."

Lieutenant Weems looked, beseechingly, at Pong Nam. "Why won’t he believe me?" Pong Nam shrugged, and gave a big, slow smile. With a drawl, "These people," he said.

"GI court no good," the man said. "Korea court no good."

"We just convicted a soldier for beating up a prostitute a month ago."

"Ahh, prostitute, yes," the man said. "She no prostitute."

"I didn’t say she was a prostitute. I said that our courts do render judgements in favor of Koreans too."

Suddenly, out in the middle of the cindered motor pool, the very ground broke open in one place, and a Korean heaved himself up on his elbows, climbing out of the old sewer hole. "Now that’s exciting," Berens said, on the asphalt ramp by the flagpole. The men around him whistled with rigid recognition that they might really be carried into this event.

From "Custom," pages 48-49

Her quick white and winning smile leashed and drew me with her hand. That woman must have been a foot shorter than me, but I always seemed to be looking gratefully up at her. And then I jolted with the thought that this was the whorehouse, the strangest, the most enticing in the world. Why else be so eager for my company?

Inside she hooked a bawling boy under his arms, swung him upright. She helped him straighten his train on the track.

"Now this is no place to be shy," she said, "please play with us."

Might as well shit or piss as grin the way I did.

My fingers throbbed digging into the carpet. I strove to keep my head low so the kids wouldn’t treat me as a foreigner. Mrs. Tarrington traipsed from child to child, giving praise, guidance, caution. I played with an erector set. She was pleased discovering that I was building a ship.

I said, brazenly jerking up my head,

"Where is your husband?"

"Oh, he left on some business. And what difference does it make? He won’t come back for quite awhile."

"A shame he can’t enjoy himself with us," I said.

I noticed that we were all boys. I had the feeling a little girl sneaked among us, but I could never turn quick enough to see her.

And then we only wanted to play with the ships.

Everyone was pushing ships. She saw our irritation with the way the carpet roughened the ships’ movements. She said, with a dreamy abruptness that intrigued the whole room,

"Now here’s a game we play when we tire of everything else."

Her hips moved with easy grace avoiding collisions with furniture. She approached a huge faucet that protruded from a wall across the room. Kids were rushing around my legs, picking up toy trains and trucks. The only inside door stood at the wall-end of a landing that jutted about five feet high into the room. Steps led down the front of the landing to floor level. Arms jamfull of toys, the kids dashed up these steps and through that door.

With a sailor’s lanky leg-bending sureness Mrs. Tarrington worked the faucet’s wheel-shaped handle.

An inundation poured out, spreading through the living room, already flowing over my uppers and creeping up my ankles. Toy ships were jogged afloat, rocking on the waves, the building blocks among them. How could I protest? I’ve been in many strange places and seen many strange customs, and it’s my business to accept and figure their reasons. But with water steadily rising up each leg like a tickling ring, I sure needed clothespins to keep that polite expectant grin clipped on my face.

The kids came running back through the door, no toys with them. They leaped screaming into the water. I was up to my thighs, and the kids were up to their necks, walking on tiptoe or swimming for dear life.

Her brown skirt drifted ballooning on the thundering turbulence around her waist, her slip floating out from under it. She was like a flower coming apart. Breathless, I tell you, with the water ever rising.

Excerpt from pages 102 - 103

He must have started talking as soon as I ran up. But I needed rest and the light hurt my eyes. I stayed on the lower step, entrenching my head snugly in my arm against the wall. And it was easy to breathe, hearing my heartbeat, alone and man to man, his voice without body filling the darkness.

"Yes, I managed to come here before the clerk tore your bags to pieces. Do you know that when I took the knife away from him he fell on your things raging to tear them apart with just his bare hands and teeth? That’s amazing, you think?"

A big wobbly roach crept from under the wall and scuttled toward my foot. If I couldn’t trust the cats, much less the whores in this town, I’d every reason to suspect the roaches were organized on Tarrington’s side too. And he might just be distracting me with talk to facilitate the roach’s sneak attack. It scuttled under the warp of my sole. I rocked the shoe down firmly.

I chuckled hearing Tarrington,

"You do find it strange, don’t you? Oh, you mustn’t think his rage was honest, spontaneous, true, whatever those words mean. It was mainly his simple desire to please me. And how you distinguish between his own desires and his desires to please me becomes almost impossible. If he appeared beyond restraint, it was only to show how beautifully helpless he was before the strength of his own passionate fidelity to me. And I’m afraid the whole town has treated you with the same honest sort of dishonesty. And I think you know why I tell you these things."

As asylum, this town, and I didn’t have the qualifications for admittance, that’s what he meant. But maybe he was jealous of the spiritual time I made with his wife too. And maybe Betty was his whore.

Now he got folksy, confiding.

"Remember old Shipley? You couldn’t have stayed thirty minutes in that house without me there and not heard of old Shipley. When I came to this town, Shipley was just gone. And these people had never seen my kind before. Just as they’ve never seen your kind. But soon you’ll be gone too." His laugh was cool and easy. "I think you really don’t understand me."

He was damned hard to understand. I dropped my arm. I faced him. I shriveled with the awfulness of my appearance. You only see yourself when others look at you. He didn’t change his leaning position.

I started up the steps. I couldn’t trust that my words, going through the air of the town, would arrive in his ears still believing and saying what they’d believed and said when formed on my tongue. You have to watch a tongue closer than a woman anyway, treacherous the way it changes its mind.

Excerpt from "Visit to My Grandfather's Grave Alone," pages 259-261

At twenty-eight, arriving from Mexico, I was certain that my full beard would excite a memorable exuberance in my grandmother. I grinned with the thought as I walked form the bus station to her house, through the dry, austere sunlight of September.

I bounded onto her porch through the spyrrhea that shook dryly. Through the screen-door I saw grandmother, in hazy shape in the living room, already hit by the sight of me and my beard. I swung open the screen-door, strode up beside her, and the screen whanged shut behind me.

Me and my beard grinned down into her incredible glee. Her glasses flashed when they caught the light just so. She is short. She does not look fat. She looks perfectly shaped. She glanced up at me and then doubled over with laughter, her back broad as a table. She glanced up cautiously again, as if the beard might have providentially disappeared, and then doubled over laughing again. Above her rheumatic knees, she is remarkably agile.
For the first time she seemed stopped from hugging me.

Curtains bellied gently by the windows around the room and I went momentarily barren thinking that her hesitation meant I wouldn’t receive the usual overwhelming welcome. She folded her hands across her belly and bent gracefully back, her way of standing and talking to anyone six feet tall. she was squinting up at me as if the sun came over my shoulder into her eyes, looking fore any opening where she could get through the beard to me. A grin was tweaking her lips. “Now where am I going to kiss you, John? That awful thing on your face.”

I stated, “Most women like it.”

“Well, I don’t” She whooped with laughter, pounding her knee.

She looked slyly up toward me. She grabbed my head with both hands and jabbed a kiss onto my cheekbone above the beard line. “There,” she said, as if even at this age I was still contriving to escape, and again had failed.

We settled down with coffee in the kitchen. Her talks is run-on, ranging the daily happenings of seventy years. The subject suggested by everything is her life with granddad, or everything is suggested by it. Now that granddad is dead she has come into her own with her men grandchildren. She is tuned nimbly to those natural rhythms in story and listener.
She was cooking while talking.

Her hands guess everything. She has never used a measuring cup. She could bake a thousand angel-food cakes in the wood stove on the farm without one cake falling. She complained that every angel-food she tried in her blaring-white gas stove collapsed. “Seems like me and that old wood stove just knew what to do. Oh, John, I’ll tell you we worked hard. All the children. All the work. Dark to dark. Cooked with my hands and feet, they used to say.” She laughed. She demonstrated. She kicked the oven door shut and reached in the same movement onto a shelf.

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