by James Jones
At eight the lights were turned off. Each man crawled in his bunk until the flashlight bedcheck had been made. Then they got back up and sat down on the floor again and went on smoking Duke’s Mixture with deep drags that lit up faces redly, and still they went on talking. Smoking Duke’s Mixture was no hardship to them who had grown up on rolled cigarets, and they had no trouble passing the time talking because they did not talk to pass the time but because they just loved to talk. Each man always had more stories with himself as hero than he could tell, and if he told the same story with himself as hero again a week later it was still almost new again by then, and anyway he had always developed it and elaborated it in the same way a writer rewrites a story with himself as hero, so that usually it was not even recognizable. Talking had always been their chief recreation, who could only afford the more expensive amusements like women and whiskey once a month on Payday, and they were experts in their field. When they could have slept, always the best method of time passing as any man who has spent time in the Black Hole knows, they still preferred to sit up and talk and tell stories with themself as hero.
It was almost like the days back on the bum, Prew thought sleepily. No women, no whiskey, no tailormades, no money. If you shut your eyes, you could believe you were back in a jungle on the outskirts of some little jerkwater town, smooth dusty under the trees on the leeward side of a grade that passed the watertank and cut off the wind, sitting around the small fire with a belly full of a good mulligan that you had been assigned the bumming of the carrots for, or maybe the onions, or the spuds. The faces were the same faces, and the voices were the same voices, and the flavor of the talk was the same American flavor.
American faces, he thought sleepily happily with that ecstasy of the martyr that had always been his goal and his destiny, American faces and American voices, weak with all the lustful-hungry greedy-lying American weaknesses, but strong now with the strength bred of necessity which is the only real strength ever, leathery lean hardbitten faces and voices in the old American tradition of the woodsmen and the ground-clearing farmers who also fought bitterly to stay alive. Here is your Army, America, he sleepily wanted to tell Them, here is your strength, that You have made strong by trying to break, and that You will have to depend on in the times that are coming, whether You like it or not, or want to or not, and no matter how much it may hurt Your pride. And here in Number Two was its cream, sifted and resifted and then sifted again, until all the dry rot had been winnowed out, all the soft spots squeezed out, all the rotting gangrene that all the social columnists were so afraid of excised out, so that only the firm hardy remainder of the most absolute of toughness, that would not only hold its own but would triumph, in a whole world of toughness, was all that was left now.
Thank your various Gods for your prisons, You America. Pray to Them hard, to not teach you how to get along without them,—until They have first taught you how to get along without your wars.
And he, Robert E Lee Prewitt, Harlan Kentucky, was one of them, one of these here, in the old hungry tradition, here where there was not one single fat-layered insurance salesman’s face in the new American tradition to be found.
You could not be one of them unless you shared it all with them, and for the first time in a long time he felt sleepily he was back with his own kind again, that he did not have to explain to, because each one of them had the same hard unbroachable sense of ridiculous personal honor that he had never been able to free himself from either.
And it had all been more than worth it, from the moment he had sat down at the mess table and taken that first single bite he had been too scared to taste, and he would start gladly right in on a second round again right now, if it was required to clinch it.
Poor Bloom, he thought sleepily, poor Bloom.
It was only later on, after the others had all finally gone off to sleep, that he was not sleepy any more and began to think of Alma Schmidt whom he had almost believed he had forgotten and, trying The Malloy’s black dot system again here in the bunk and failing miserably, lay for a long time wide awake, and thinking of her.
Everything you swear you will not do you always end by doing, he thought sleepy again now finally. I remember distinctly you swore once you would never lay in your bunk and jackoff, and so now you can add this one to the still growing list. At least this is one degradation Bloom didnt have to suffer.
Or maybe Bloom was in love with someone, too. Maybe that was why he killed himself.
The more he thought about it, sleepily again, the more he was quite positive that that was it, that Bloom had killed himself for love.
Chapter 40
MILTON ANTHONY WARDEN, on the other hand, having been out with Karen Holmes every afternoon since he had closed out Prewitt’s trial, did not speculate on why Bloom killed himself. It was enough for Warden, more than enough, that he had done it. It put the quietus on Milt Warden’s private life as effectively as if the Third Reich had invaded New York City, or the Japanese tried to attack Pearl Harbor in broad daylight, or the Martians captured California.
He had started seeing her in the afternoons after the Hickam problem. They had decided on that as being the best time for her to get away with the least amount of risk. They both felt the need of a plan that would give their deception dailyness and regularity and at the same time still be foolproof. This was, and under it they both had blossomed. The days had arranged themselves into a comfortable pattern that seemed to have been like this always and promised to go on like this forever. If there was work in the afternoons he let Mazzioli do it and to hell with it. It was all routine stuff and he could always straighten it out later and the kid was supposed to be in there to learn. Leva could handle the supplyroom, and he did not have to worry about Stark’s kitchen. He would meet her in town along the bright hot tourist-crowded streets and they would drive her husband’s battered old Buick club coupe around and around the Island, him in trunks and barefooted, her in a legless briefbra-ed swimsuit that was as sensual as her bare pointed toenails, taking every new back road they had not driven, stopping to swim whenever they felt like swimming. They stopped to love whenever he felt like loving, although Karen felt he was inclined to stop too often and insisted that while sometimes she liked it it had no place in her love and she could have done as well, or better, without any of that which was such a vulgar way of proving your love; but still she did not try to dissuade him from stopping, and those afternoons, like all the rest of the time he spent with Karen Holmes, seemed to elongate themselves into infinity like a backward telescope until nothing else existed. If there was anything lacking that kept them from being absolute perfection, it was that her husband’s Buick was not a convertible.
There were no stormy sessions, not a single argument, because they had already settled it between them (the day they came back together hungrily after the two weeks at Hickam Field) that Milt would put in for officer’s extension course. They settled it in the following manner:
Karen made it plain that she would never ask it of him. He then volunteered it. Karen said no, understanding and sympathizing with the way he felt about Officers, she could not ask or expect it of him, that he was not to do it on her account, ever, even if it meant her losing him. Whereupon Milt insisted he would too do it, and do it on her account, and only on her account, and nothing she could say would deter him. She cried, and he almost cried, and that was how they left it. He did not do anything about putting in the application.
When she asked him about it later on, he told her it was already in the mail (he would have told her a lot worse things than that, to keep those afternoons) and made a mental note to make it out and have Holmes sign it and get it in the mail tomorrow, but he did not get around to it. It would have been easy, because after they decided it she had started working on Holmes some at home and Holmes had started urging him to put in for it, but he could not get around to it. He did not intend to undertake a course of stupid lessons that might interfere with those afternoon
s, those hot bright swim-cool afternoons, that seemed to be more dream than reality and that he wanted to go on like that forever. The future was too vague of an investment to risk all the capital he had. Let the future look out for itself, like everybody else. It was of age, wasnt it? To hell with the future, as long as these afternoons go on like this forever.
And for a while, after he had cleared up Prewitt’s trial, it almost looked as if they would. He could even believe it, that they would.
There were things that were beginning increasingly to come up—like next week every rifle in the Company less ten had to be turned in for the new M1 Garands that had finally come in and were sitting over at S-4 waiting to be issued, and that Leva would need help with. There was the crisp new War Department Circular that had just come out authorizing for the first of next month the much-rumored new TO which would make S/Sgts out of mess and supply and raise all field NCOs one grade; that would necessitate a whole flock of Company Orders and Service Records entries, not counting the wholesale salvage of old chevrons that he would also be expected to take care of for O’Hayer.
Did they think that exchange of chrome bayonets for black ones back in March had just been somebody’s whim? He had warned Holmes. He had prophesied to O’Hayer. Now it was coming true. Barely four months later. You could hear the grinding of the Government changing gears. And as usual, G Company’s pants were down.
But if these things were threats, so had Prewitt’s trial been a threat, and he had handled that. Without missing one single afternoon.
If the Government was getting ready for a war in July of 1941, that was not the same as being in one. That it was bound to come eventually did not mean it would be here tomorrow. It would take something pretty big, before the country would be willing to get in; and all the rifles in the world did not make a war-Army until you had talked the people into shooting them.
And that part, Milt Warden figured carefully, would come slow. And therefore the other changes, geared to that main wheel, would also be slow. The actual work required in the orderly room of G Company—th Infantry would not be so much. He could handle that part easy. If there was going to be any trouble at all, the heart of it would be O’Hayer and the supplyroom.
Well, Leva would just have to handle the supplyroom. Leva had handled it before, in as bad or worse than this, and while it might be years off yet it did something to a man to see the future run up to, and stop at, the blank wall of a war. It made him aware that he had better get all he was going to get out of his life now, and it made him want his afternoons.
Figuring it all like that, carefully foreseeing and apportioning everything, even the war whose inevitability he had already accepted three years ago, Milt Warden was not going to be caught off balance. He could still go on juggling his two lives, even if now he did have to do it on a tightrope. If Milt Warden had his back to the wall, at least Milt Warden knew it. And if there was one thing in the world that had never let Milt Warden down, it was Milt Warden.
What he could not foresee, of course, was that some stupid ass in his outfit would kill himself. And even if he could have foreseen it, it would not have helped. Court-martials he could handle, from memory blindfolded, court-martials he had done by the bushel. But a suicide was something else again, he had never had a suicide before, and the Army disliked suicides, especially now, at this time. It disliked them even worse than murders, and it required that an almost infinite number of reports be made out to prove the fault was not the Army’s.
In addition, there was all the usual death work: the personal effects that would have to be sorted and according to policy carefully screened for all pornography before they could be packaged up for shipment home, the letters to the parents he would have to write for Holmes, the equipment of the Deceased to be turned in and itemized so the shortages could be checked and subtracted from the Final Payroll that would be paid to the parents of the Deceased, the closing out of personnel files and the Service Record, the arranging of the details of the military funeral.
The very least the son of a bitch might have done, Milt Warden felt, was make it look like an accident by jumping off the Pali. At least then he would have been remembered with affection.
That afternoon, after the OD had been called in to make the corpse official, he managed to get away long enough to call her. He caught a Post cab over to the Kemoo Liquor Store that perched like a mushroom on the edge of the Wahiawa Reservoir across the highway from the gate, and, knowing its Chinese proprietor from his bachelor days, used his private phone in the back. He got her just as she was leaving for town to meet him.
Her first reaction was one of anger. Male operators were no less prone to gossip than the female ones, especially if they were EM and the subject was an Officer. The Signal Corps operators on the Post knew every number in the Officers’ Quarters by heart. They had always avoided using the phone as much as possible, and when they did they resorted to a sort of secret language in which everything stood for something else.
She was less angry when she learned that he had called from Kemoo, which had to go back through the Wahiawa civilian circuit before it could reach the Post, but even so she made him hang up and wait until she could go out somewhere and call him back. It was just one more of the little things about being in love with a married woman that you had not envisioned when you started it.
He waited, of course—having a couple of quick nervous drinks with Al Chomu who wondered unnervously where he had been for so long—until she called him back from a booth in the main PX.
It was hard trying to explain what had happened because the secret language had never made allowances for suicides or for Isaac Nathan Bloom. When he finally got it across, he could hear her become suddenly cool and fully collected, almost in mid-word in that wholly admirable but almost frightening way she had, as she realized it was really an emergency. The anger disappeared, replaced by an absolutely cold-bloodedly calculating calmness that never failed to put his much-prided realism to utter shame.
“Well, what are we going to do?” the muffled unreal phone voice that never sounded human asked him coolly. “Have you thought about what to do?”
“Yes. This new job will take almost a full month of my time. I’m afraid I’ll have to postpone the party. Will your brother have to be going to the Mainland on business again soon?” he said carefully.
Translated, that meant would Dana Holmes be going to a stag.
“You know how his business is,” the cool voice answered. “He never knows just when he’ll have to go. He hasnt had to go for some time now, so they’re liable to be calling him. But of course,” the cool voice said carefully, “you know it all depends on just when his superiors get in a new shipment, and have enough material on hand to need him.”
He had to stop a second to translate this, and it made him mad; all this childish conspiracy; it was damn near as bad as being in the Elks or the Masons. What she meant was that while Holmes had not been to a stag recently, and so would probably go to one soon, still she could not say with accuracy when he would go. She was refusing to use that as a time for meeting him.
“I do not want to postpone the party,” Warden said savagely.
“Neither do I. But of course,” the cool voice reminded him, sounding incredibly unbelievably indifferent, “my brother’s daily work here never amounts to enough to keep him from making it.”
That would mean his usual evenings at the Club for poker and bar-flying, or wherever the hell it was he went, could not be counted on to give her a chance to get away.
“Then maybe we could make it some night, some evening maybe, before he has to leave. You know how much I’d hate to have him miss it,” he grinned into the blind funnel furiously, unable to resist the opportunity. Her coolness that he admired so much was making him madder than the conspiracy business.
“No,” the cool voice that was not Karen said unsmilingly, “I’m afraid that would be impossible.”
“Then the only other thing
I know is just to have the party some night when he’s gone on his next trip. We’ll have to give the party,” he repeated, anxious that she not misunderstand, “the party, you understand, we’ll—“
“I understand,” the voice reproved him warningly.
“—we’ll have to make the party some night when your brother’s gone, and he’ll just have to miss it,” he finished doggedly angrily, to prove she need not have been so afraid he would make a slip.
“If you could have it some afternoon,” the cool voice said, “while he’s still here.”
“I told you,” he said, trying to rein in the exasperation, “I told you I wouldn’t be able to make it in the afternoon. You dont understand. This work just has to be done.”
“Then I think,” the cool voice said very logically, “that the best thing is just to postpone it, until you get your work done, dont you?”
“But its liable to take a whole month,” he told the blind unfeeling funnel. It was easy for her, she wouldnt care if they carried on their love affair entirely by correspondence. She would probably prefer it.
“I think the best thing is to plan to have it sometime soon,” he insisted, “even if it is the next time your brother’s on a trip.” That meant have it the next time there was a stag. He felt it was obscure. “You understand?” he said carefully. “Even if he is off on a trip?”