From Here to Eternity

by James Jones

  After that, neither one of them said anything to him or tried to stop him. It was not an exaggeration to say that there was murder staring at them out of his red-rimmed eyes.

  “And as long as they put me in their fuckin hogpen of a Stockade, I’ll never go back,” he said ferociously. “You nor nobody else.”

  They did not contest this either. So the three of them sat that way, in silence, listening to the reports come in over the radio, until hunger for the breakfast nobody had had drove them out to the kitchen, and Prew finished off the bottle he was working on and started another. He would not leave the radio to eat. When they brought him food he refused it. He stayed in front of the radio on the footstool, drinking cocktail glasses of whiskey and weeping and nothing could budge him.

  “Our young men have paid dearly,” the radio said, “for the lesson the nation has learned this day. But they have paid fairly, and squarely, without fear and without complaint and without bitterness at the high cost. Hired to be ready to fight and die for us, our Regular Army and Regular Navy have this day upheld the faith and confidence we have always placed in them, have proved their right to the esteem we have always had for them.”

  “I was asleep,” Prew said dully, “sound asleep. I dint even wake up.”

  They had hoped he would drink himself into a stupor and pass out, so they could put him to bed. The wildness in him made them uneasy to even be in the same room with him. But he did not pass out, and he did not drink himself into a stupor. He was apparently in one of those moods when a man can just go on drinking indefinitely, after he reaches a certain point, without ever getting any drunker but only getting wilder and wilder. He stayed there in front of the radio on the footstool, first weeping and then glaring blackly.

  Early in the afternoon the radio gave a repeat call of Dr. Pinkerton’s request for volunteer blood donors to report immediately to Queen’s Hospital. More to get out of the heavy-bellying atmosphere of the house than anything else, away from the ominous electricity with which the wild dynamo in front of the radio was charging the air, both Georgette and Alma decided to go down and give blood.

  “I’m going too!” the dynamo hollered, and lurched up from the footstool.

  “You cant go, Prew,” Alma said uneasily. “Be sensible. You’re so drunk right now you cant even stand up. Besides, everyone’ll probably have to show some kind of identification. And you know what that would mean for you.”

  “Cant even give any blood,” he said dismally, and lurched back down onto the footstool.

  “You stay here and listen to the radio,” Alma said soothingly. “We’ll be back in a little bit. Then you can tell us all thats happened.”

  Prew did not say anything. He did not even look up again from the radio as they went to get dressed.

  “I’ve got to get out of here!” Alma said. “I can’t breathe.”

  “Do you think he’ll be all right?” Georgette whispered. “I didnt realize!”

  “Of course he’ll be all right,” Alma said firmly. “He just feels guilty and he’s upset and a little drunk. He’ll get over it by tomorrow.”

  “Maybe he ought to go back anyway?” Georgette suggested.

  “If he went back, they’d only put him in the Stockade again, wouldnt they?” Alma said.

  “Thats true,” Georgette said.

  “Well, dont talk silly,” Alma said.

  He was still sitting there when they came back out. The radio was droning on with staccato tenseness. Something else about Wheeler Field. He did not look up or say anything, and Alma shook her head warningly at Georgette and they went on out and left him sitting there.

  He was still sitting there two hours later when they came home, looking as if he hadnt moved a muscle since they had left, except that the bottle in his left hand was well down toward being empty. The radio was still going.

  If anything, he seemed soberer, with that intent crystal sobriety that comes to a heavy drinker after a long, intense, concentrated consumption of liquor. But the heavy crackling tension in the air of the house, like low-hanging clouds roiling and rubbing together before an electrical storm, seemed—after the excitement of all the traffic and the bright indifferent Sunday sunlight outdoors—to be even more oppressive than when they had left.

  “Well, we had quite a foray,” Alma said brightly into the bleakness.

  “We sure did,” Georgette said.

  “If we hadnt had Georgette’s car we’d never have even got down there,” Alma said. “Let alone got back home. The whole town’s a madhouse. Trucks, buses, laundry trucks, private cars, every vehicle that can move.”

  “We met a guy at the hospital who’s going to write a book about it,” Georgette said.

  “Yes,” Alma said, taking it up. “He’s an assistant Professor of English at the University—”

  “I thought he was a newspaper reporter?” Georgette said.

  “—No,” Alma said, “an English Professor.—And he was helping to evacuate women and children from the bombed areas; and now he’s helping drive people in to the hospital to give blood.”

  “He’s going to talk to everybody who had anything to do with any of it,” Georgette explained. “Then he’s going to put all their stories together in their own words in a book.”

  “He’s going to call it Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” Alma said. “That’s what one of the Chaplains at Pearl Harbor said.”

  “Or else, Remember Pearl Harbor,” Georgette said. “He dont know which yet. You know, like Remember the Alamo.”

  “Or Remember the Maine,” Alma said. “He’s very intelligent.”

  “And polite, too,” Georgette said. “He treated us just like anybody else. He said all his life he had wanted to live history, and now he had his wish.”

  “A house on Kuhio Street was bombed out,” Alma said.

  “And the drugstore on the corner of McCully and King is smashed flat,” Georgette said. “And the man and his wife and two daughters were all killed.”

  “Well,” Alma said, “I guess we’d better fix something to eat. I feel a little bit weak.”

  “Me too,” Georgette said.

  “Do you want some food?” Alma said.

  “No,” Prew said.

  “You really ought to eat something, Prew,” Georgette said. “You need food, after all that liquor.”

  Prew reached out and switched off the radio and then looked at them blackly. “Listen, all I want is for you to lee me alone. You want to eat, go eat. Just lee me alone.”

  “Did anything new happen on the radio?” Alma said.

  “No,” he said violently. “Its the same old crap over and over.”

  “Well, you dont care if we listen to it?” Alma said, “do you? While we fix supper?”

  “Its your radio,” Prew said, and got up with his bottle and cocktail glass and went out onto the porch over Palolo Valley and shut the glass doors behind him.

  “What are we going to do with him?” Georgette said. “He’s driving me nuts.”

  “Oh, he’ll be all right,” Alma said. “Give him a couple of days to get over it. Just ignore him.”

  She turned on the radio and went out to the kitchen, and Georgette followed her restlessly.

  “Well I just hope you’re right,” she said uneasily, looking out through the glass doors at the black silhouette against the reddening sky. “He gives me the willies.”

  “I said he’d be all right,” Alma said sharply. “Just leave him alone. Ignore him. Come on and help me fix supper; we’ll have to put up the blackout curtains in a little bit.”

  They fixed coldcut sandwiches with Durkee’s Dressing, of which Alma was very fond, and one of those cellophane bags of chopped salad that were just beginning to come out in the stores with French dressing. They poured glasses of milk and put the Silex hourglass on for a pot of coffee, and then they went to draw the blackout curtains that Alma had fixed to hang open like black drapes in the daytime, back when they had had the practice
blackout alerts.

  “You’d better come inside,” Alma told him crisply, when she got to the glass doors onto the porch. “We’re putting up the blackout curtains.”

  He came in, without saying anything, and went on across the living room and sat down on the divan still holding the nearly empty bottle in his left hand and the cocktail glass in his right.

  “Don’t you want to eat something?” Alma said. “I fixed some sandwiches for you.”

  “I’m not hungry,” he said.

  “I’ve made some for you anyway,” Alma said. “In case you want them later.”

  “I’m not hungry,” he said.

  “I’ll wrap them in waxed paper so they’ll stay fresh,” Alma said.

  Prew poured himself another drink and did not say anything, so she went on back out into the kitchen, after she had drawn and fastened the blackout curtains over the glass doors.

  When they came back out with their coffee after they had eaten, he was still on the divan. He had opened a new bottle. In all, he drank over two full fifths of Georgette’s scotch whiskey in that one day. The first bottle had been a little over half full, and he had finished that one, and the whole second bottle, and half of the third.

  They sat for a while and tried to listen to the radio, but the reports were repetitious now, and the obdurate presence sitting silently on the divan finally drove them to bed and they left him sitting there, not drunk and not sober, not happy and not unhappy, not conscious and not unconscious.

  He stayed that way for eight days, never what you could really call drunk, but certainly never anywhere near sober, and always with a bottle of Georgette’s expensive scotch in one hand and a glass in the other. He did not talk at all except to say “Yes” or “No”, mostly “No”, when confronted with a direct question, and he never ate anything when they were there. It was like living in the same house with a dead person.

  When they got up Monday morning, he was asleep on the divan in his clothes. The bottle and glass were sitting on the floor beside him. The two sandwiches Alma had wrapped in waxed paper and left in the kitchen were gone. Neither one of them went to work that day.

  Honolulu tapered off quickly from the first great rush of emotion in the next several days. The radio began to have musical programs and commercials again, and outside of the soldiers putting up barbed wire on Waikiki Beach and the helmeted sentries outside the vital installations such as the radio stations and the governor’s mansion, and the few wrecked buildings such as the Kuhio Street house and the drugstore at McCully and King, the city did not seem to be greatly changed by the metamorphosis of having passed through the crucible.

  Apparently businessmen were keeping a stiff upper lip and the Provost Marshal’s office was advising business as usual, because Mrs Kipfer phoned the house on the third day and told Alma to report for work at ten in the morning next day, rather than the old time of three in the afternoon. Georgette’s boss at the Ritz Rooms phoned her later with identical instructions. Because of the sundown curfew instituted by the Martial Law, after which no person without an authorized pass was allowed abroad, all business had to be transacted during the hours of daylight.

  Business, it turned out, had fallen off drastically at both Mrs Kipfer’s and the Ritz. And apparently this was true all over. The Army and Navy were not yet issuing passes to their personnel, and the girls ended up by playing rummy and casino for most of their working hours. A number of them were already securing themselves passage home on one of the ships being used to evacuate Officers’ and Enlisted Men’s wives and children back to the mainland.

  Mrs Kipfer had, however, received information that passes—on a strict rotation plan—would be issued to both Army and Navy personnel within a short time. But at the present time about the only business the New Congress Hotel had was when the small parties of brass came down, in the afternoons now, instead of at night as they used to.

  There was another thing too, about which Mrs Kipfer worried to Alma considerably, and that was that she had received reliable information to the effect that both Stateside and in the Islands pressure was being brought to bear upon the Armed Services to close down the whorehouses. The pressure was coming from Washington, Mrs Kipfer was told, where a number of female constituents who had sons in the Services were creating quite a rumpus and threatening not to re-elect their representatives to the Congress unless something was done.

  But in spite of these handicaps Mrs Kipfer, with a tremendous burst of patriotism and a singular devotion to duty, swore she would stick to her post just as long as she by god could and would do her bit toward the Total Victory, just as long as she had a single girl left to command. (And she seldom cursed.)

  Alma, because Prew had sometime or other Sunday night eaten the two sandwiches she had left out, took to making them regularly both before she left for work and before she went to bed. They were always eaten. But when she forgot to make them, which she did several times, nothing in the refrigerator or the cupboards was even so much as touched. He just was not acting even human. He did not shave, and he did not bathe, and he did not even take off his clothes but just flopped down in them on the divan when he slept. He looked like the wrath of God. His hair had not been touched with a comb since she could remember, and his face had gotten puffy and fat-looking with big pouches under the eyes while the rest of him, which had never been heavy, got thinner and thinner. He would wander, bottle in one hand and glass in the other, from the kitchen to the living room to the bedrooms to the porch and sit down blankly in one place for a while only to get up and go someplace else. The thing that had first attracted her to him—a kind of intensity in the face, if she could have expressed it, a sort of deep tragic fire in the eyes—was not there any more; and you could smell him from clear across on the other side of the room.

  And he did not seem to be getting any better. Instead, it looked as if he would go on that way indefinitely—until he either wasted away to a shadow and died, or else went completely crazy and went for somebody with a knife.

  She could not help remembering what he had done to that guard from the Stockade.

  And Georgette was frankly and openly afraid of him, and said so.

  Yet, in spite of Georgette, she could not make up her mind to give up hope and let go of him.

  “In the first place,” as she expressed it to Georgette, “theres nowhere for him to go, except here. We all know that if he went back to the Army they’d only throw him in the Stockade again, and maybe kill him. And the whole Island is alive with people checking passes and things. This is the only place where he is safe. We couldnt possibly book passage for him back to the States, like we could have before Pearl Harbor, every bit of space is taken for evacuating noncombatants; and the Army controls all the ships because of having to convoy them.

  “And besides all that, I just cant give up hope for him somehow.”

  “You mean, you dont want him to leave,” Georgette said.

  “Of course I dont want him to leave!”

  “What’ll become of him when we go back to the Mainland?” Georgette said.

  “Well,” Alma said, “maybe I wont go back to the Mainland.”

  “You’ve already booked yourself up,” Georgette said, “just like me.”

  “Well, I can always turn it down, cant I?” Alma said crossly.

  This conversation took place on the evening of the fifth day, in Georgette’s bedroom which Alma had entered through the connecting bath.

  Prewitt did not know anything about it. He did not know anything about anything else, either. He was sitting on the divan in the livingroom, with the bottle and glass within easy reach. He got frantic if they werent always where he could see them.

  The only thing he knew anything about, or cared anything about, was liquor. There was something supernatural and occult about liquor, the way it warmed through the blood and brightened every thing up. There was something wonderful and holy about it. If you know how to use it.

  It was
just like with any other religion. You got yourself just so high on it, and then you coasted along on that for a while, and only added another drink when you began to feel it start to taper off and begin rolling downhill toward the hangover. Otherwise, you would bring on the reaction.

  It was a delicate balance, with liquor. If you got too high, you passed clear out, or else ended up getting sick; either way you got sobered into the hangover. And if you let it taper off too far, of course, your mind began to thaw out like frozen mud with the sun on it. He had seen a lot of frozen mud in his time: back at Myer; and the winter maneuvers that the whole regiment had gone down into Georgia to the Benning Reservation for; and all the times on the bum, he had seen mud frozen so hard in Montana and the Dakotas that it cut the soles of your shoes like a lava flow. But mud, when the sun hit it and it began to soften, that was the worst mud of all. It would mire you down then. That was the mud we must never get into.

  It was a very delicate balance. Almost a mathematical problem. It took a great deal of concentration, and a whole hell of a lot of energy, just to stay up on the tightrope. Because when you got just high enough, you always wanted to go higher because it was so wonderful. That was what took the will power; not to go higher. It required concentration, and study, and energy, and will power, and a great deal of thought; to really be a really successful drunkard. Anybody could be a half-assed drunkard. But to be a real drunkard . . .

  And they all talked about drunkards and spinelessness, all the books you read, that John Barleycorn now of London’s, that was all pure crap and the truth was not in it. It seemed like any of them, all of them, that ever write about drunkards, they always use the words drunkard and spinelessness as synonymous. They just didnt know, that was all. They were ony showin up their own ignorance. They’ve never really worked hard at drunkenness—or else they have tried and failed and therefore feel a great need to run drunkenness down and prove to the world that drunkenness is really nothing, that any half-assed fool can do it.

  But a half-assed fool couldnt do it, any more than a half-assed fool could do anything, and do it well. Of course, if you had all the qualities of greatness already anyway, then you could be a great drunkard—but then you would have been great at anything else you did, too. To be a great drunkard required a great deal of concentration, and energy, and study, and will p—— . . . . . . .