by James Jones
He could feel his hands beginning to sweat and the muscles along the insides of his thighs begin to tremble. That woman was too good to be true, he told himself, no woman ever lived with an ass and tits like that. Maybe that was why it was more appealing than the color photographs. And that curly headed son of a bitch in the painting, getting ready to lay his long blonde on the beach, just as natural, just as easy, taking all that he had there so much for granted. God, he thought, imagine a man that had a woman there, like that, and then taking her for granted.
You better lay off, he told himself, this is no time to be inspecting cunt pictures, not in the middle of the month, and you broke. When it’s too late to even borrow three bucks from the twenty percent men to make a flying trip to Big Sue’s in Wahiawa. You better go back to The Saturday Evening Post, buddy.
He tossed the Journals all aside then, and picked up another Post, feeling in himself the superb strength that was lying useless in his thighs, the heavy power of maleness in his belly, the lightness of the sweating fingertips that had suddenly become so sensitive to every touch.
But the first thing in the Post he saw was another ad, a full page Greyhound Bus Lines spread telling about the Glory of Southern Sun, and in the middle a full length figure of a woman, the round lean lines of her hips staring at you from behind the tiny loosely skirted pants of the two piece bathing suit.
All right, he thought, okay; if thats the way it is; a savagery of anger in him now at the pictures. They print these goddam pictures, and at the same time jail a man for having an eight page book of Toots and Casper, and the women that model for them are shocked if some joe wants to fuck them. They call them “pin-up girls” and think its cute how “our boys,” now that they’re drafted, love to hang them in their wall lockers. And then close up all the whorehouses, every place they can, so our young men will not be contaminated and will not be able to get their nuts off.
He ripped the page out of the Post and wadded it up, crumpling it in his hands until it was only pulpy paper, and threw it across the narrow room into one of the puddles on the floor. He got up and stepped on it hard, grinding it into a sodden mess under his shoe and then stepped back and looked down at it, ashamed because he had destroyed beauty, had taken a living volute woman’s hip and turned it into spitballs.
Climbing the darkened stairs, feeling the maleness in him, the maleness that was denied, hushed, denounced, hedged in, scourged, damned, condemned, and used, feeling the heavy pendulous maleness of the testes in their sac, loaded now to bursting, distended, swinging full bellied as he moved his legs, feeling the excess that overflowed rancidly, burning acidly all through his blood and settling finally in his throat, a thick acidulous phlegm, feeling all that, he wondered if married men ever felt like this. Probably not, because they always had it there where they could reach it. No wonder so many men, offered the continual carrot hung before their nose that they had to pull the loaded wagon for, woke up suddenly to find that they had somehow got married.
You dont want to do it, Prewitt, he told himself. Its kid stuff; its all right for kids, who have never had a taste of what the real is like, who have never had anything else but that. To them its satisfying. You know it wont satisfy you, that it will only make the hunger greater, will only make the other needed more.
But at least it will relieve you. And you’re going to have a stone ache if you dont. And it had its point, he thought, it has its points. I wonder if Maggio really meant that what he said about his fist? or if he was only kidding? I wonder how many of them really do it? like now, in the middle of the month? There’s no way you can ever really know.
Where would you go? There’s not even any place to go for that. Except to bed with a handkerchief. Did you ever go to bed with a handkerchief, friend? Try it, friend, at least you’ll save three dollars. If you had three dollars.
He got his raincoat and his hat off his bed and came back down, feeling the distended ropy tubes inside it that would begin to be painful pretty soon if he didnt do it, but knowing that he could not climb in his bunk with a handkerchief and lie there holding back his breath and being very careful that the springs would not squeak in the breathing stillness of the squadroom; not knowing where to go, but knowing that that was degradation, was shameful, was unbecoming to a man, and suddenly, for no reason, remembering the time in A Company when Red had been taking a siesta, lying naked on his bunk asleep with nothing but a towel across him that had fallen off in the turning of his sleep, and now someone had seen it and had called the others and they had all watched, laughing, as in his sleep, dreaming, the erection had come slowly and inexorably, rising to taunt distention and then spewing forth the fluid meant for woman and that turned rotten in the air. And Red woke seeing them all laughing there, and the shame that was on his face had made Prew turn quickly and walk away, the laughter gone, replaced by hollowness that had made him never mention it again.
It always leaves a hollowness, he told himself, there never is the fullness of satisfaction, the sleepiness. And after you’ve done it, you know you’ll be ashamed.
But at least you’re not crawling secretively into your bunk and looking furtively all around to see if the men around you are asleep first.
He went out through the truck entrance, over past the Chapel, up behind the Boxing Bowl, where he had fought last year, to a place where it was dark and the patrolling MP hardly ever came. It was there, unbuttoning his raincoat, standing in the neverending rain, feeling it on his face like tears, that he did it.
Chapter 12
IT WAS BARELY the middle of March, hardly ten days since Holmes had first brought him the papers, that the transfer of the Fort Kamehameha cook came back, approved, to Warden. For a transfer like that one was, from one branch of service to another, it was an unbelievably short time.
That afternoon that Mazzioli brought the transfer letter over from Regiment, Milt Warden had been sitting at his desk, puzzling over a snapshot Karen Holmes had given him of herself that was before him lying on the papers he had been working on, his cheek sunk on the knuckles of one big fist like a small boy watching a grownup’s movie he could not figure out.
She had given it to him the night of the moonlight swim, as he liked to call it now, grinningly. She had given it to him, without him even asking for it, almost as soon as he had climbed into the car. It was, he thought, almost as if she felt it was expected of her.
She had picked him out a good one, showing her as it did in a white bathing suit that was startling against the black-tanned flesh, reclining on a GI blanket in the sun before one of those pineappley palmtrees in her front yard, he recognized the tree, and wearing sun glasses and reading, and with one leg up a little showing perfectly the long full lines of thigh and calf converging delicately at the narrowness of knee. All the womanness of her shown in it, reached out demanding male attention, as a crowded street of long legged, tanned, high breasted women will catch your eye and pull your head around without your having even thought about it. If that was all there was, he thought again, for the fifteenth time today, just that womanness of this picture done in breathing flesh, it would be all right. But the picture didnt show it all. And he was not, he realized, a boy who is so rapt by the solemn religious joy of his first female flesh that he is blinded to the existence of the woman wearing it, does not even know or need to know that she exists. It would be fine if you were that, he thought, but you are not, and have not been for some time now, nor will you ever be again. You cant ignore the woman and keep all the rest, even for the first two weeks, though perhaps that would have been the best, if you could have done it.
She had picked him up, he remembered, going over it once again, downtown in Honolulu at the Kau Kau Korner drive-in where the tourists hung out in their rented cars, and where they had decided there was the least chance of being seen by anyone they knew. He had wanted to drive them out, since he knew the way, to the secret little beach out near the Blowhole that he had seen so often riding past in truck
s and had thought how it would be such a wonderful place for a man to take a woman, that he had finally climbed down to it once. But she had been afraid to let him drive this car belonging to her husband. He had given her the directions and she had driven, taking wrong turnings twice and getting very nervous, before she got from Kau Kau Korner to Kaimuki and Waialae Avenue that became the Kalanianaole Highway to the Blowhole. Maybe that was what had started it, begun the killing of it, and the way he’d pictured it would be. She’d been two totally different women that day at the house and now this time she seemed to be a third one, unrelated to the other two. They had parked the car up near the Blowhole at a little parkway where there was a concrete marker that said you could see Molokai from here on a clear day, and walked back down. She was, she said, with a kind of frantic effort, “very pleased and happy.” It was all there, the full moon, the small mild surf showing white, the pale sands of the tiny beach set down among the rocks and glowing weirdly in the moonlight, the low wind surfing through the kiawe trees across the highway, and he had brought a bottle and there was a thermos full of coffee and the sandwiches she had brought, and even blankets. It was really all there and very fine, he’d thought, just like he pictured it. She had slipped climbing down the rocks and skinned her arm, and after they had got down she tore her dress, one of her best ones she said, on a snag. They had waded, nude, out into the water, hand in hand, making, he remembered, a fine picture in the moonlight with the water that seemed to run uphill from the beach breathing heavily around their knees. She had gotten chilled and had to go back and wrap up in a blanket. It was then he had given it up altogether, deciding it had been a damn fool thing, his mistake, in the first place. And he had gone back with her, even in the painfulness of feeling so damned foolish, still eager, burning, not feeling any cold at all, and wanting it badly, needing it badly, but how could you have it, as you ought to have it, when you were struggling to keep a blanket over you to keep from chilling her again. That was when he wanted her to take the drink, up to then he had not made an issue of it, though it puzzled him. But she would not drink now at all, any. She had smiled sadly with the great sadness of a Christian martyr who forgives the Romans, and accused herself of how she always messed things up and ruined everything she touched, and how she guessed she just wasnt an outdoor girl, although it had seemed fine when they had talked about it, in the bedroom, back at Schofield, and she really truly thought it would be better if he would get some other woman for it, she wouldnt mind. Driving back to town she said she wanted to be fair and asked him if he wanted to give the picture back now, that she didnt mind, really she wouldnt mind. He had felt guilty then, because he had not asked her for the picture, and because he saw now the whole idea had been stupid in the first place, and had said he wanted to keep the picture very badly, which, he suddenly had realized, he did. It was then, somehow or other, without meaning to, that he had made this other date, for after payday, because, she said, she didnt get much money out of Holmes, and that only after petty squabbling. He had tried then, half heartedly, to get her to take only one small drink, hoping guiltily that if maybe he could get her drunk it would be better, hoping maybe they could go somewhere and get a room, or something, and salvage something. But she would not drink, and she had not fixed an alibi, not figuring to stay away all night, and she would not do it in a car, ever, because, she felt, it was degrading.
He had gone down to Wu Fat’s then, on Hotel Street, in the heart of the whorehouse district, after she had let him out, timidly reminding him of the coming date, and gotten very drunk and then made a studbull roaring raid on Mrs Kipfer’s Hotel New Congress that was intensely satisfying, determined there would be no more dates as far as he was concerned, no matter what he’d told her, and he was still puzzling on it now, with Mazzioli coming in the corridor, wondering what it was had happened and why it had happened anyway and most of all why he could not seem to put his finger on it at all, still completely stumped as he put the snapshot back in his wallet where he kept it hidden behind his SP pass card and could feel smugly conspiratorial every time he flashed his wallet at the MPs at the gate, or took it out in the Orderly Room in front of Dynamite. At least he could understand that much, anyway.
Mazzioli was looking smug and obviously chortling to himself as he handed over the stack of papers that he had hidden the transfer letter in the middle of. He stood around grinning and waiting for the explosion, while Warden leafed impatiently through the four fingers of Memorandums, General and Special Orders, and War Department Circulars he had brought, looking for something that might accidentally turn out to be important.
It was quite a letter. It had gone out through channels, and come back through channels, and picked up another endorsement every place it stopped. Warden, who had been praying fervently some office or other would find some outfit or other overstrength or understrength, looked up at Mazzioli sagely when he found it.
“Well?” he snarled. “What the hell’re you standin around for? Aint you got no work to do?”
“Why I aint doing nothing,” the clerk objected. “Cant a man just stand still? without you jumping on him? for God’s sake?”
“What man?” Warden said. “No. He cant. I cant stand to see people standin still. I’m eccentric. If there aint no work,” he threatened, “maybe I can scare you up some.”
“But I got to go back to Personnel,” protested Mazzioli. “Right away. O’Bannon wants me right back there.”
“Then move. Dont stand there with your finger up your ass,” Warden said, making it sound ominous, but glad momentarily, even in this catastrophe of the transfer, to get out of the almost frightening bottomlessness of Karen Holmes and the abortive swimming party and onto solid ground he knew, even if only in its barrenness. “Why dont you just move in over there, Mazzioli?”
“I wish to hell I could,” the clerk said bitterly, very disappointed because the blowup he expected had not come. “Oh how I wish. What do you think about that transfer, Top?” he needled hopefully. Warden did not answer. “Aint that something?” he asked sympathetically, changing tactics, still hoping. “That letter of the Colonel’s sure got quick action, didnt it?”
But Warden only stared at him silently, and kept on staring, until, completely defeated, he left in confusion, still disappointed. And Milt Warden went bitterly back to work, chewing what few germless grains of comfort he could glean from having seen through Mazzioli’s plot. I wish I could see through Karen Holmes that easy, he thought, I wish I could even see through what will come out of this transfer that easy.
There were times, he felt, Milt Warden never should of made this rating. This rating wasnt worth it. In a profession where fouling up was SOP, this rating had a reputation that stunk, in every noncoms’ club on the Post. To get this rating Milt Warden had taken over a notoriously bogged down outfit no other noncom in the Regiment would touch, and from a notoriously case-hardened old 1st/Sgt who had finally made that thirty-year-long pull up onto the retirement list and didnt have to worry about this any more. You really wanted this rating awful bad, didnt you, you jerk?
He took the letter to his desk to make the necessary notes, feeling the old rage, the rage that always saved him, mounting in him happily, and contemptuously tossed the rest of the pregnant mass of paper stillborn in Mazzioli’s filing basket.
Maybe he was a good man once, this old one, my predecessor, but they had worn him down, in thirty years, like a big knife made thin and fragile, needlelike, from constant honings. All that good steel just rubbed away no one knew where. And him, who had been a rip-roarer in the old days back in China, hanging on by his fingernails the last five years to get that pension, praying the Inspector General’s men would not find him out, and covering up his fear with this Victor McLaglen doing one of his movie soldiers act. That was no way to end. When my time comes they can stick their pension up their ass before I’ll fawn to get it.
But maybe it was all part of the process of getting old, he thought. All the old
ones, the tough ones, ended up that way it seemed, Jones imitating Jones, Smith imitating Smith, playing a role they once had lived. And it wasnt only in the Army.
I think you need a drink, he thought, walking to the filing cabinet for the hidden whiskey, a good stiff drink, to make you madder, you who are in danger of becoming Warden imitating Warden, a really good one, you.
Everything, eventually, got old. There are gray hairs in this head too, already. But part of the process of getting old was not this gradual wearing down of a man by the seas of organization, this eating away of the rock a man could have been except for these lapping waves of affectionate regard driven by the wind of fear against the rock that always crumbled, finally—that was not part of getting old, or if it was, then getting old was wrong and there was no point to any of it and he did not like it at all, and by god I’m not having any.
I think its time we took a break and trimmed up our mustache a little, we want to look pretty for the women, dont we, character? he told himself, and got the paper shears off of Holmes’s desk and went in the closet to the mirror, hearing the fatigue details that were beginning to come in now and Pop Karelsen’s soft very cultured voice going up the stairs.
Looking at the big face staring angrily at him from the glass, the great shearers in the thick-veined hand, feeling the inability to go back to work now after this of the transfer, he wondered if that was what it really was? just getting old? Gimme a place to stand, the old man said, and I will move the world. And all they needed then was a place for him to stand. They were still looking for it.
Looks like you need another drink, he thought, you arent getting mad enough yet apparently. This one this time apparently is going to be more than a one drink job. Personally, I think its more than a two drink job, even. Personally, I think this job is going to be one of those that calls for a workout punching on the heavy bag. Yes, I think thats what it is, he decided, running his tongue over his mustache to see if it was short enough to keep from tickling him and, satisfied, stepped back and raised his arm and tossed the scissors over his shoulder like a rich man giving a bum a dollar, listening happily to the clashing clatter of their fall. There was plenty money in the Company Fund, let them buy some new ones. Let Dynamite take care of it, that was about his speed. He picked them up and laid them, with a full inch of one point broken off, on Holmes’s desk on top the transfer letter, in the box marked Urgent, and went upstairs to corner Karelsen, his punching bag, in the room they shared together off the first floor porch. Pop Karelsen, being one of Mazzioli’s intellectual confreres, but smarter, made the best heavy bag anywheres around. Mazzioli would serve for a light bag, speed workout, but there wasnt enough weight to him to make a heavy bag that developed power.