by James Jones
“Well,” Andy said, “thats up to you. You got the money. You can go if you want to.”
“What’re you guys goin to do in town?” Prew said. “If I may ask?”
“Just fool around.”
“You wont fool very far, takin only four bits taxifare. What’ll you do after you get there? How’ll you get back?”
“Well,” Andy said. “Bloom’s got a queer lined up out in Waikiki he thinks we can roll, a guy with quite a bit of dough.”
“I wouldnt go,” Prew said, “if I was you.”
Andy looked up indignantly. “Why not? Its easy for you to say. You’re goin down with Angelo.”
“Because Bloom’s lyin to you, thats why. How long you been in Wahoo? You oughta know by now that Honolulu queers dont get rolled. They never carry money with them. Its too small a place, and theres too many soljers. They’d get rolled every night.”
Andy would not look at him. “Bloom said if it didnt work out to roll him, we could get drinks off him anyway, and carfare home. Whats the difference?”
“He lied to you. Thats the difference. Why would he lie to you? He knows nobody can roll a Honolulu queer. Whynt he tell you the truth? I wouldnt trust no guy that lied to me. Maybe he’s pimpin for this queer. You’re liable to end up gettin made, instead of gettin blowed. Theres somethin about Bloom I dont like.”
“So I should leave him alone, I guess?” Andy said, angrily, not meeting Prew’s eyes. “There aint no queer goin to make me. Who the hell are you to tell me how to run my life? You’re goin to town with Maggio, aint you?”
“Okay,” Prew said. “Suit yourself, buddy.”
“He ast me to go,” Andy said. “I dint ask him. And I’m goin. A guy can rot sittin around this goddam barracks. Cant even play the git-tars with the rain on. Be mad at me if you want to, I’m goin anyway.”
“Hell,” Prew said. “I aint mad at you. I just think you’re dumb, thats all. If you want to pick up a queer, go by yourself.” He sat down on the end of the bench and picked up the deck that Andy had collected up and stacked, and began practicing the old one-handed cut, remembering the time he’d learned it, in a boxcar, on the bum.
It was also on the bum, at the tender age of twelve, that he’d had his first experience with queers, when a fifty-year-old jocker had seduced him in a rolling boxcar. It was more a rape than a seduction, since another man had had to hold him.
He looked up at Andy, his lips drawn back very tight in a grin that was more a snarl, his eyes very flat and far away and glinty. It was also on the bum, at the not so tender age of fifteen, that he’d knocked another jocker off a steep downgrade in Georgia and later read about them finding the dead body and the resulting roundup of free labor for the State that he had escaped.
“You do whatever you want,” he said to Andy thinly. “If the guy turns out to be a jocker and you get pogued, go see the Chaplain. I’ll loan you my card; it aint punched out yet.”
“You tryin to scare me?” Andy scoffed. “Are you goin now?” he said to Friday. “I got to put my civvies on. I’m meetin Bloom in the Dayroom in fifteen minutes.”
“You better listen to him,” Sal Clark said. “You better not go with Bloom.”
“For Chris’ sakes, lay off of me,” Andy said. “A man cant sit on his can in these barracks all his life. Are you goin to the show or aint you?”
“I guess I will go to the show,” Sal Clark said. “I can practice dealin them cards tomorrow. Whynt you borrow a dime, Prew, and come on with me? You only need a dime. I got thirty cents.”
“No thanks, Friday,” Prew said, looking at the seriousness of the long thin olive face and feeling the sense of warmth again. “I promised Angelo I’d wait.”
“Whatever you say,” Sal Clark said. “You have a good time in town.”
“Okay,” Prew said. “Listen, dont you let Bloom talk you into goin queer huntin with him, hear me?”
“Not me,” Sal Clark said solemnly. “I dont like queers. They make me feel funny, they make me scared.”
“If you want to go queer huntin, go by yourself,” Prew said. He watched them leave, then laid out a hand of Sal’s and began to wait. He didnt have to wait long. The other two had not been gone ten minutes before little Angelo came bursting into the latrine, slamming back the doors so hard they banged.
“Well,” Prew said, looking up. “How much did you win?”
“Win?” Maggio said violently. “Win! I won about forty bucks, in one hand. You think that’ll be enough to go to goddam town?”
“Fair,” Prew said dryly. “How much did you lose?”
“Lose? Oh,” Maggio said vehemently. “Lose. I lost forty-seven dollars. Also in one hand, the second hand. God,” he said looking around for something he could throw and finding nothing, took his new-blocked hat and slammed it down on the floor. He kicked it viciously, putting a big muddy dent in the papier-mâché-stiff crown, scooting it across the mucky floor.
“Now look what I did,” he said sorrowfully and went over to the wall to pick it up. “Well,” he said, “whynt you ask me why I didnt quit after I won the forty? Go ahead. Ask me.”
“I dont need to ask you,” Prew said. “I already know why.”
“I thought I could win some more,” Angelo said, insisting on castigating himself since Prew wouldnt do it. “I thought I could win enough for a real trip to town. Maybe two real trips to town. Balls,” he said. “Tes-tickles.” He slammed the muddy, dusty, dented hat back on his head cockeyed and put his knuckles on his hips and looked at Prew. “Oh, balls, balls, balls,” he said.
“Well,” Prew said. “Thats that.” He looked down at the deck in his hands and ripped it suddenly across the middle, tearing the first few top and bottom cards clear in two, bending and ripping the next ones only a little bit, then tossed the scrambled mess up in the air and watched them drift, sideslipping, like autumn leaves, down to the floor. “No ass. Let the goddam latrine detail clean them up in the morning. To hell with it.”
“Andy and your boy Friday go to the show?” Angelo asked hopefully.
“Yeah.”
“He dint give the money to you back?”
“Nope.”
“Damn,” Angelo said. “I save out four bits. If I had a buck I know a game in C Compny I could get in where the takeout’s a buck only.”
“I aint got a cent,” Prew said. “Not a red cent. To hell with it. It’d take you all goddam night to win enough to have a stake to hit the sheds.”
“Thats right,” Angelo said. “You’re right.” He stripped off his raincoat and began taking off his shirt. “To hell with it. I’ll take me fifty cents and go to town and pick me up a queer. At least I’ll get a few drinks and get my gun off. I aint never picked me up a goddam queer, but I guess I can do it if other people can. It hadnt ought to be too goddam hard. I’m sick of it,” he said, “sick of all of it. Sometimes I get so sick of it I want to puke my goddam guts right out on the floor and lay down in it and die.”
Prew was looking at his hands, dangling between his knees. “Sometimes I cant honestly say I blame you a whole hell of a lot,” he said.
“Come on and go with me,” Maggio said. “You can borrow four bits someplace. If we dont make a strike, we’ll hitchhike back.”
“No thanks,” Prew said. “It beats me. I aint in no mood to go to town and whatever fun there was I’d kill it. And anyway, I dont like queers.”
“I got to change my clothes,” Angelo said. “So long. I’ll see you in the goddam morning, if I get back. If I dont, come around to the Stockade and visit me.”
Prew laughed, but it was not a laugh that very many men would recognize. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll bring you up a carton of butts.”
“I’ll take one now,” Maggio said, “on account?” He looked at Prew apologetically. “I forgot all about buying any, Prew, when I had the dough.”
“Sure,” Prew said. “Sure. Here.” He pulled out the crumpled pack and gave him one, took the last one himself, and
threw the crumpled pack in a commode.
“Not if these is your last ones,” Maggio said.
“Fuck it,” Prew said. “I got plenty rollings.”
Maggio nodded, and Prew watched him go; the dwarfed, narrow shouldered, warp-boned heir to a race of city dwellers whose destiny it was to never place their feet upon their earth except for the bottled-in-bond, canned grass of Central Park, whose very lives came out of cans, even to the movies that they tried to pattern their lives after and the beer they drank to forget them; go out toward the squadroom to fumble around in the breathing dark to find his undress uniform for town, the gook shirt and cheap slacks and two-buck shoes.
Prew pushed the twisted cards with his foot and listened to the neverending rain outside and decided he would go down to the Dayroom for a while, since he did not feel like sleeping.
The Dayroom was almost deserted. A couple of men lolled on the cigaret burns and ruptured excelsior of the imitation leather chairs that lined both walls of the narrow room that had been built below the outside porches. The Dayroom was screened-in from about waist high to the ceiling, and the Dayroom orderly had pulled the chairs along the outside wall out to the middle of the floor to keep the rain from wetting them, narrowing the already narrow space between. The men did not look up at him. They went on flipping the pages of the battered comic books they had been scanning.
He stood in the doorway of the pool alcove that was also deserted now at ten o’clock, an hour before Taps, wondering why in hell he had come down here, looking at the deserted pingpong table at the far end which as far as he knew had never had a net and would not be bothered now until next Payday for a blackjack game, looking at the deserted radio at the near end that had been on the blink now since a week before last Payday, looking out through the screens at the rainy street and the railroad beyond and at the tin roofed sheds beyond the railroad, the places where all the money was and that had been going full blast since Payday and now were tapering off in the middle of the month to one game among the few who had been the heavy winners. Life on the Inside was not measured by hours but by Paydays: Last Payday, Next Payday, and then there was the inbetween that lasted very long but never was remembered.
The plywood magazine rack had been pulled in from the outside wall too, and he went over to it and scanned the heavy cardboard covers made to look like leather but which never did, reading the Company’s and Regiment’s designation embossed on the blank rectangle in the center. He took out a stack of them and sat down with them in a chair as far from the dripping water as he could get, and started thumbing through them.
They were all there: Life, with its cross-section pictures of the world and “The March of Time Marches On” air about it; Look, that was so obviously a second-rate imitation that had got on the gravytrain; Argosy and Bluebook, with their adventure stories about lovely ladies with smudged faces and strategically ripped dresses lost in jungles with aviators who protected them from pygmies; Country Gentlemen, with its Buick owning farmers dressed in tweeds; Field & Stream, with its comfortable hunters in sharp looking coats and breeches carrying fine shotguns and smoking pipes; Colliers, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, American, The Ladies’ Home Journal, and The Saturday Evening Post, and all their starving young actresses and producers, who looked wellfed in the drawings, the young mountain men carrying cap and ball rifles and looking very bronzed and masculine, all of them bound together with a running theme of High-, Middle-, and Low-Class Americana on their cover pictures and that overflowed occasionally into a number of the advertisements.
They were all there, subscribed to by the Company, paid for by the Company Fund, provided for the recreation of the men.
And he thumbed through them all, not bothering to read the stories that always bored him with their unreality, looking at the pictures, and the ads.
“There’s a Ford in your future,” they told him. “‘What this country needs . . .’ . . . is a good money-saving motor oil for 25¢.” “This is the Jones family admiring young Johnny Jones, aged 4 days, 6 hours and 23 minutes—through a protective wall of glass at the hospital.” “Let me tell you why Jimmy is doing better in school—he eats Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.” “I like my sleep, says Al Smith—go Pullman.” “Rubber does it better.” (He got a grin from that one.) “NOW! You can own a Cadillac. Only $1345.00.” “The Red Horse is the People’s Choice.” “Give her the American kitchen of her dreams.”
In Harlan when he was a kid, in the outhouse, they had a Sears Roebuck catalog that his mother called “The Wishing Book.
There was one old issue of the Post, battered and rolled and curled and torn and dated back to November 30, 1940, that was a gold mine, a fine opium, with much food for thought.
Its cover, one of those Norman Rockwell paintings of Americana, Prew studied for a long, long time. It showed a young man lying on his topcoat on the ground, strumming on a uke and smoking on a pipe, with his shoeless feet propped on a suitcase that had a thumbing fist and MIAMI painted on it, and the shoes beside it on the ground. It was obvious he was bumming. Maybe, he decided finally, maybe he was a college boy. That must be what it was.
There was a Pall Mall ad in it that he liked. It was painted in bright color and showed some happy soldiers on the range. (There were lots of things about the Army now, in all the magazines, since the peace-time draft.) Three of these were in the prone position firing, and the other two were back on the ready line sitting on green grass, and one of these was holding up two cigarets, a Pall Mall and a short one. He was a very happy looking soldier.
He studied this one quite a while, too, professionally admiring the artist’s observation. The board stiff campaign hats that were definitely Regular Army, pre-draft, were there. The Infantry’s robin’s-egg-blue cord and acorns were on the hats. The old style chrome bayonet and white web sheath with its brown leather tip, the shooting jackets made out of the obsolete CKC blouses and ripped up the back for shoulder room, the sheepskin elbow and shoulder pads with the fleece turned in, the new M1 rifle that had not got to Wahoo yet and that he had only seen in diagrams—they all were there; and the range season with the deep smell of burnt powder and the clinking brassy tubes of cartridges heavy in the hand came back to him as he looked at it. The only thing he could professionally find wrong with it was that none of them had leggins on. Well, maybe they didnt issue leggins now, back in the States. He tore it out, thinking it would look good tacked to the inside of his footlocker top.
The gleaming white tubes of the tailormade cigarets in the picture made him thirsty for a smoke, and he had his hand in his shirt pocket before he remembered he and Angelo had smoked his last two tailormades in the latrine. He folded the picture up and put it in the empty pocket and took the sack of Duke’s Mixture out of the other pocket and rolled one, before he went on reading.
But it was the back cover of that same issue of the Post that really caught him, really took him outside of now. It was a Chesterfield Merry Christmas ad of a young woman holding up a carton of them as she zoomed up over a snowy hill, her skis clear off the ground and shot snow in the air about her feet. She had on red pants with white stripes down the sides that fit her hips and long lined thighs very closely and wrinkled cunningly across the crotch. A red and white striped long sleeved sweater with a white pullover vest over that, as she bent forward slightly, suggested loosely the pendulous breasts underneath. He looked at the photograph quite a while, his eyes working along the shadowed wrinkles, trying vainly to get underneath, before he rolled the old Post up and stuck it back behind the seat, happy with a new idea.
For Christ’s sake, Prewitt, he told himself, here you been looking at these magazines a half an hour without ever going through the cunt-pictures; and he got up to go and get the Ladies’ Home Journals.
There were lots of them, old ones of the Company’s subscription around the Dayroom, because no matter what the Dayroom orderly thew out he always saved the Journals, until they had been worn completely out.
He w
ent through several magazines from front to back, not bothering with the idiotic stories, looking for the ads. Most of them had women in them and these were what he looked for. The colored photographs were the best for reality in picturing the women, but on the other hand they usually put a few more clothes on these than they did the drawings. The small drawn ads in the back, down the outsides of the pages, the ones with the slightly oversized breasts and the collection of fanning wrinkles around the crotch, with the moulded, deep, fleshly look; these were the best.
There was a Mum ad that said “A girl can be too trusting at times!” with the big firm legs and flat belly that no woman ever had, the girl in underwear and a filmy negligee sitting on a stool, shoving a big powder puff up under her arm, and the long underside of her thigh and buttock and that little curve that joined them all hanging pendulously waiting for a hand. It was more than fair, that one.
Then there was a Treeburn’s Facial Soap ad, of a long-lined blonde lying on a beach robe being kissed by a handsome head and shoulder of a man, a painting with a kind of unreal fuzzy outline, she lying there full length, stretched out, turned on one hip, her arms above her head, wearing a bathing suit that looked like a leopard skin, a tight little bra over the small snub breasts and the brief pants wrinkled enticingly across the crotch between the close-together legs. There was the heavy-lidded, full-pouting-lipped look on her face that women get when they really want it bad. This one was a fine one, better than the others, in fact, the best one yet.
And last, of the three best, there was this small one, a shaded drawing of a dame in a sort of T shirt and soft shorts. Duchessa Lazidays, Sleep in ’em Play in ’em Laze in ’em, Duchessa Underwear Corp. and the T shirt fell lightly, swelling under the pressure of the perfect breasts. Shaded half circles and points of light hinted at the rubbery red nipples underneath. The clothes really made no difference; if the artist had left out two dozen lines it would have been a nude. Yet Prew found himself staring and staring, trying vainly to penetrate beneath the plane of the attire to the plane of the figure under it, as if it were three-dimensional. Funny how just a few pencil lines adroitly arranged could suggest the swelling, deep-blooded, pulsating life of a lovely woman.