by James Jones
In the orderly room Acting First Sergeant Baldy Dhom, sweating grimly to bend his sausage fingers to a fountain pen, gladly dropped his work and shook hands happily. The new clerk, a Jewboy named Rosenberry, did not offer to shake hands and stared at him with frightened awe.
Rosenberry, he found out somewhere, was a peacetime draftee. He had taken Mazzioli’s place when the new reorganization of Personnel Section had moved Mazzioli and the other Company Clerks to desks in Regiment. Rosenberry was a Pfc. They called him the “forward echelon clerk.” Mazzioli was still Company Clerk but Company Clerks stayed with Regimental HQ in the “rear echelon” now. Mazzioli was a buck sergeant now.
There were new faces besides Rosenberry’s. At chow that night there were more new faces than familiar ones. The company strength had been filling up steadily, but the short timers were still going home. The new faces all stared at him with the same frightened awe as Rosenberry.
After chow he sat on his bunk and worked on his rifle, a brand new Garand M1 with its barrel still full of cosmoline. He worked on it in silence, studying the awkward unwieldy lines that would never become comfortable. In the dim lights the new faces watched him covertly with the same unchanged frightened awe. Chief Choate and all the other new buck/sgt squad leaders and s/sgt platoon-leaders, with the exception of platoon-guide S/Sgt Ike Galovitch, came over and shook hands and slapped him on the back. Apparently The Treatment was off. He was a celebrity. Everybody wanted to know about Maggio. He had promised himself that he would wait nine days.
With Capt Holmes gone and G Co no longer a jockstrap outfit, all the old forces that had caused the trouble were gone now, obsolete, rescinded. They were expecting the new CC any day now. He felt somewhat like a man on a mountainside to whom someone has thrown a rope too late and who watches the now useless rope receding uselessly up into the heights as he falls.
But they did not any of them really seem to matter much anyway, any more. The Stockade was still real. They were not real. Gradually, an intense pinpoint focus of will-effort, like a magnifying glass bending the sun’s rays to the burning of a paper, had built up in him concentratedly. They could not break through the only reality, which was the Stockade, and that he had nine days to wait.
The only time anything came near to breaking through was when Andy and Friday came in from somewhere and saw him and came right over, very glad to see him, and highly conscious of the new faces still watching with frightened awe. They got out the guitars and came back to his bunk familiarly and the new faces began to watch them with frightened awe, too.
Then they brought out their surprise. They had bought an electric guitar on time two months ago, complete with a jackplug attachment and the speaker to plug it in to. It had cost $260, of which there was still $200 yet to pay. They enjoyed showing him the new guitar, and the awed attention they were getting from the frightened draftee faces. He was a celebrity and they were his buddies.
He made himself wait the full nine days. He did not go anywhere. He sat home on his bunk in the squadroom and made no trouble and was silent. He did not even go down to Maunalani Heights to see Miss Alma Schmidt. He did not want anything to disturb the crystal clarity of concentration that kept getting steadily stronger.
The new Company Commander, a 1st/Lt instead of a Captain, arrived and took over. That was on the fifth day. He made them a speech. He was a Jewish lawyer from Chicago with a Reserve Commission earned by four years of ROTC in college. His name was Ross and he had only recently been called to duty. Lt Culpepper, whose father and grandfather had both started out in G Co —th Infantry as shavetails and risen to command the Company and then the Battalion and then the Regiment, was not happy. He had expected a Captain, which would not have been so bad. Lt Culpepper did not think much of Lt Ross as a soldier, but Pvt Robert E Lee Prewitt could not see that it made much difference.
He did not intend to suffer martyrdom if he could help it. He wanted to do more than stay alive, he wanted to spend that life in the Army. He had checked up before he left and six other men would be discharged from the Stockade in the first nine days after he got out. That would, he felt, at least spread the suspicion out a little, even if they neglected to count the hundreds of men who had passed through the Stockade before him. Nine days was a nice round uneven figure that would not appear to be a predetermined period, like say ten days, or one week. And Fatso Judson went down town to the Log Cabin Bar and Grill every night that there was not something special on, such as the midnight training of Blues Berry. So there was no need for hurry on that score.
He bought the knife in an Army-Navy Service Store, the night he went to town. He had figured that out ahead of time deliberately. It was one of those dingy little Jew stores on Hotel Street, exactly like a thousand other dingy little Jew stores that always spring up wherever soldiers live, except that in Hawaii all the Jew stores were run by Chinamen. It sold the same CKCs and did the same tailoring of pants and cutting down of shirts. And it offered the same fare of chevrons, shooter’s medals, garrison caps with patent leather bills and solid brass insignia, brilliantly colored shoulder patches, solid brass whistles, campaign ribbons, solid brass waistbelt buckles, souvenir scarves and pillows, and knives. Even the enforced anonymity of the Army had its compensations.
The knife he picked was one of a row of an identical dozen, lying in the glass case in a jumbled mass of whistles, insignia rings and shoulder patches, brass bound clasp knives with five-inch snap-button blades and walnut handles that terminated in little handguards that the blades passed between in closing. They were SOP equipment. He had owned perhaps a dozen in his life at different times. The Chink probably sold half a dozen every day. He paid for it in small change and took it outside and tried the snap a few times and put it in his pocket and went to look for a drink.
The Log Cabin Bar and Grill was one of those downtown serviceman hangouts with indirect fluorescent lighting where it was safe for tourists to go slumming to see the Army in its natural habitat, very clean and very modern and a shade lower class than Wu Fat’s Chinese Bar and Restaurant. It was set back off Beretania Street, in a business block of stinking grocery markets and sweet-smelling whorehouses, on a small paved alley. A hundred feet inside the Log Cabin the alley, instead of running straight on through the block, made a right angle turn and came out on the side street to the east. Prew, stone cold sober after a dozen drinks, was waiting at the corner of the alley when the Log Cabin closed at one o’clock.
There was no mistaking Fatso when he came out, even in the dimness of the alley. He came out walking with two sailors. Bar acquaintances. No complications there. One of the sailors was telling a joke and Fatso and the other sailor laughed. It was the first time Prew had ever heard S/Sgt Judson laugh.
They were walking away from him toward Beretania, and he stepped out from the corner feeling a crystal clarity of focused attention such as he had known only a few times in his life when he was bugling.
“Hello, Fatso,” he said. The old Stockade nickname would catch him as surely as a rope.
S/Sgt Judson stopped and turned, the sailors stopping with him. He peered back into the dim uneven light that seeped through the closed Venetian blinds of the Log Cabin and lighted the immobile figure of Prewitt dimly.
“Well, look who’s here,” Fatso grinned. “You guys go on,” he told the sailors. “I’ll see you next week. Old buddy a mine back here I use to soljer with.”
“Okay, Jud,” one of the sailors said unevenly. “See you.”
“Thanks,” Prew said, as Fatso came up unhesitantly, unreluctantly, and the sailors moved on down the brick toward Beretania.
“For what?” Fatso grinned. “I dont need no sailors. Now,” he said. “You want to see me about something, Prewitt?”
“Yes,” Prew said. “Lets step around the corner here where we can talk.”
“Okay,” Fatso grinned. “Anything you say.”
He followed around the corner, carrying his arms out a little and just barely
bent the way an old fighter moves when he’s expecting anything.
“How’s it feel to be on the Outside again?” he grinned.
“Bout like I figured it would,” Prew said. Behind them around the corner of the alley he heard the Log Cabin door open and close again and some more late drinkers moved talking down the brick toward Beretania.
“Well?” Fatso grinned. “What was it you wanted to see me about? I aint got all night.”
“This,” Prew said. He pulled the knife out of his pocket and snapped it open, the snick of the sprung blade sounding loudly in the alley. “I cant whip you with my fists, Fatso. I wouldnt want to if I could. I hear you carry a knife. Use it.”
“Maybe I aint got one,” Fatso grinned.
“I hear you awys carry one.”
“Okay. But supposin I dont want to use it?”
“You better use it.”
“Supposin I run?” Fatso grinned.
“I’ll catch you.”
“People might see you. Or, supposin I holler po-lice?”
“They might catch me. But they wount get here quick enough to do you any good.”
“You got it figured all out, aint you?” Fatso grinned.
“I tried to.”
“Well, if thats the way you want it,” Fatso grinned. “Okay.” He put his hand in his pocket, drew the knife and snapped it open, and began to move forward, all in one movement, incredibly fast for a fat man. Behind him the Log Cabin door opened again admitting more late drinkers to the alley. Their voices faded off toward Beretania.
“But I hate to take candy away from babies,” Fatso grinned.
His knife, that was almost identical to Prew’s, was waving back and forth slowly like a snake head, as he came on in in the classic stance of the practiced knife fighter, crouched a little, right arm out a little, blade projecting from across the upturned palm between the thumb and indexfinger, left arm up a little palm open as a guard.
Prew moved to meet him silently, saving his breath, wishing momentarily he had been born a different person, wishing something, maybe if Warden had been home, he had meant to talk it over with Warden, wishing he had remembered to buy himself some chewing gum. Then it was gone and he was seeing everything in the finally climaxed focus of the crystal clarity that was like slow motion as if he had been smoking gauge and was nothing like the hectic swiftness of the ring.
It did not last long. It is only in the movies that knife fighters stab and miss and slash and miss and tussle over several city blocks. Figure one offensive thrust and miss, maybe two if you are very lucky. Most knife fighters are counter-punchers.
Behind them as they circled cautiously just beyond arm reach, the Log Cabin disgorged the last of its most insistent customers. Just a few feet around the corner they moved leisurely down the brick toward Beretania.
Fatso slid in a little like a boxer and raised his left hand toward Prew’s face and feinted with his knife outside Prew’s left arm as if he were going to go in over it and in the same movement, as Prew automatically raised his left hand to block, flecked back down and went in under it. The knife burned like dry ice along Prew’s ribs and cut itself into the wide muscle of his back under the armpit. Prew brought his left hand down sharply but it was already too late and the knife streaked off down his side in a comet tail.
If he had not stepped in at the same moment Fatso cut, if he had been gunshy or muscularly reluctant, if he had flinched, the fight would have been all over and it would have been up to Fatso, to go ahead and kill him or not kill him. But the years of boxing carried with them an instinct that no longer required either thought or courage. His knife went into Fatso at the diaphragm, just under the ribs, an automatic counter-punch right-cross to the solar plexus.
They stood that way perhaps a second or two, perhaps five seconds, thigh to thigh, Prew with his lower lip between his teeth pushing and twisting the knifeblade probing in the fat until the haft was buried in it gouging searchingly in the opening, two statues, the only visible movement Fatso’s right arm that was still trailing off down to its full length. When the arm reached full extension and pulled up snap-short, the knife went on, out of it, and clattered tinnily on the brick. Then Fatso started down.
As he felt him going, Prew with his left arm clamped tight against the burn of his side clenched the handle and turned his wrist to bring the blade-edge up, letting the body tear itself off by its own weight bending his wrist slowly like too big a fish straightening out the hook, cutting deep, down across the left side with the ribcase as a guide-edge. He had come down here to kill him. And he did not want to have to stab him on the ground, or cut his throat.
S/Sgt Judson lit on his right shouldertip and rolled on over on his back, his head propped just a little on the brick wall of the building, his eyes already glazing. His right arm was still stretched out as if trying by sheer will to draw the knife back up into it, as if that might change things. He wheezed and managed to put his left hand over his cut belly.
“You’ve killed me. Why’d you want to kill me,” he said, and died. The expression of hurt surprise and wounded reproach and sheer inability to understand stayed on his face like a forgotten suitcase left at the station, and gradually hardened there.
Prew stood looking down at him, still shocked by the reproving question. Around the corner of the alley the two bartenders of the Log Cabin came out together and clinkily locked the door and moved off talking quietly down the brick toward Beretania.
Prew moved then. He closed the knife and wrapped it in his handkerchief and snapped the rubber band around the handkerchief and put the package in his pocket.
His side was bleeding steadily and he took the other handkerchief, the clean one, and wadded it and stuck it inside his shirt and clamped his arm down on it, working hurriedly to catch it before it soaked down through his pants; it had already come through his shirt in spots and the gook shirt had been ripped open where the knife had gone in. But his arm would partly cover that.
Then he moved on out the east end of the alley, walking north away from town. After he had walked two blocks he stepped into another alley and sat down and leaned back against the wall to think it over now. It felt very cozily safe in the alley.
He ought to be somewhere up around Vineyard Street now. This was gook quarters up here above Beretania, tenements, and he didn’t know this part very well. But Vineyard Street, he remembered, ran east quite a ways. It was east that he would have to go.
It was useless to think about going back to Schofield now, cut up like this; they’d have him the first thing in the morning as soon as they found Fatso even if he did manage to get in through the gate. The only thing left to do now was to make it across town to Alma’s. If he could get to Alma’s he would be all right.
His mind was working very clearly, with the same crystal intensity of focus as in the fight, and he grinned at it ruefully. Lock the barn after the horse is stolen. If the son of a bitch could only think as clearly all the time as it did when it had to, we wouldnt never get into these positions where it had to.
He had not even considered the possibility of getting cut up so bad he could not go back to the Post. Any fool ought to of thought of that. He had not thought to bring extra handkerchieves either; dry handkerchieves would have helped to coagulate it faster.
The steady bleeding, slow, but still as inexorably logical and indifferent to plans and wishes as one of Jack Malloy’s Natural Laws, was beginning to soak through the handkerchief in spots and drip down his side again. He shifted the handkerchief again and clamped his arm back down on it and that stopped the dripping, but he still would not be able to climb on a bus or streetcar looking like this with a ripped-open shirt showing spots of blood. It might soak through on the bus where he could not shift it again and his mind coldly flashed him a picture of the consternation he would cause getting up to walk off a brightly lighted city bus. There was nothing in this world as red as blood. Not even Jack Malloy’s archenemies the Communists wer
e as red as blood. Especially your own blood.
It was probably four miles to Kaimuki from here, then almost another mile up Wilhelmina Rise to Alma’s. And that was as the crow flies. You could add another mile for detours to keep on the side streets that were not lighted bright enough to show like the buses would. That made it about six miles to do, figuring liberally. And he would have to walk it. But if he could get to Alma’s he would be all right.
We want to figure this out right, he told himself, we want to be damn sure, we want all the percentages we can cluster. He might risk a taxi, provided he could find one on the side streets, if he thought he couldnt make it. We’ll keep that for the old ace in the hole. Some of them write to the old folks for coin, thats their old ace in the hole. Others have girls on the old tenderloin, thats their old ace in the hole. They tell you of trips they are going to make, from Frisco down to the South Pole; but their names would be mud, like a chump playing stud, if they lost their old ace in the hole. You’re already getting nuttier than a peach orchard boar, Prewitt. Pretty soon you wont know whether Christ was crucified or died with the screen door flux.
Sitting with his back against the wall of the alley he allowed himself time for one cigaret before starting, thinking it would clot up some if he held quite still. It was the best cigaret he had ever tasted. He smoked it slowly feeling cozily safe in the alley. Then he grinned again. Funny how the little things like a smoke seemed so wonderful and good when you were bad off and you thought if I ever get out of this one I’ll take more time to enjoy the little things. And then you never hardly noticed them when everything was going good in your favor again.
Well, he told himself, I guess we might as well go on and get started. The sooner we get started, you know, the sooner we get there.
It was hard to make himself leave the false security of the alley. He had to remind himself he would have to get moving before it started to stiffen up on him, now while it had not started to hurt bad yet. Already it was beginning to have the nightmarish quality of a dream where you know you will wake up pretty soon, and that was dangerous. You take it easy in dreams because you always know you will always wake up. But this wasnt a dream. This isnt a dream, Prewitt, he reminded himself, this you wont wake up from. And whatever else happened he did not intend to ever go back to the Stockade.