by James Jones
He was going now. He was ripe. He’d shot his wad and the anger was gone and he was ready for it. It was like the chess game played over and over out of the textbook, move and countermove, that you both know the winner of beforehand and do not play to win but only for the enjoyment of the style. He was all set up for the kill and Warden had only to pick up the piece and move it on in, to the same square where he had always moved it, and it was Mate.
Warden opened his mouth and then closed it. He sat that way almost a minute. “Well,” he said finally, as surprised as Niccolo, and ran his fingernails tearingly through his hair. Then he remembered Karen had told him that was what was making his hair so thin, and stopped it. He looked at Niccolo blankly, old leatherfaced Niccolo, 40 years old, who was staring at him astonishedly. “Well?” he said again, vaguely.
“Ever other old soljer in the Regmint’ll be a goddam temporary Warrant Officer or Captain,” Leva argued him hopefully, as if there was still some chance the old Warden might yet appear and prove to him how wrong his irrefutable logic was, “when this war’s over. You’ll probly be a full fucking temporary Major. And old plughorse Leva’ll still be the same old First and Fourth.”
“In a pig’s asshole I’ll be a Major!” Warden roared. “You’re the son of a bitch’ll be the goddam Major, Niccolo, you’ll make a goddam good Major.” It stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and they stared at each other startled.
The old Warden roar had come, but it was in the wrong place. And it was not the same old roar. This was more like the roar of a bad-wounded animal, and Leva did not know how to react to it. He felt embarrassed.
“I cant make up your mind for you, Niccolo,” Warden said. “You’ll have to make up your own goddam mind.”
“I already got it made up,” Leva protested. “I had it made up when I come in here.”
“Then stop coming in here expecting me to change it for you. I aint stopping you. You’re right when you say you’ll never get another chance like it again. Go ahead and sign the son of a bitch.”
“It’ll probly take a couple days to go through.”
“Okay, so what? Maybe it’ll take ten days. Maybe it’ll take a full goddam year. So what?”
“It wont take ten days,” Leva said; “it wont take a week. It wont take over two.”
“Well, fuck it,” Warden said. “And how long it takes.”
“I’ll try and get the supplyroom straightened up pretty good for you by then,” Leva said. He sounded hurt, as if somehow The Warden had let him down.
“Okay,” Warden said indifferently. “Thanks.”
“Say, what the hell’s wrong with you?” Leva said.
“Nothing,” Warden said. “Not a damn thing. Whats wrong with you?”
“Nothings wrong with me,” Leva said. “Well,” he said, “well, I’ll see you, Milt,” and paused one last time in the doorway, all vestiges of the old wry cynicism and insolence, even the attempt at them, gone. Niccolo Leva looked suddenly worried and old like an aging man who has been named executor of a will that carries too many responsibilities.
“No,” Warden said, “you wont see me, Niccolo. The only place you would see me would be at Choy’s.”
“Well, whats to keep you from being at Choy’s?”
“I’ll be too busy,” Warden said.
“Oh,” Leva said, seizing it happily. “Too busy workin. Well, what do you want? You want me to stay and work for you on a lousy First and Fourth the rest of my life? Is that what you’re trying to say?”
Warden stared at him reflectively without answering.
“All right then, goddam you,” Leva raged, “if thats what you want.”
“Its no go, Niccolo,” Warden said.
“I’ll tell Gilbert to take his rating,” Leva raged, “and paint it green and—”
“No,” Warden roared. “Goddam you, I said you’d have to make up your own goddam mind. I’m tired of making up everybody’s goddam mind for them. They all come to me and want me to make up their goddam mind for them. From now on they can make up their own goddam mind. I’m sick and tired of it. I’m a first sergeant, not a goddam priest of God, and I’m tired of being drafted in as everybody’s conscience. How would you like to be drafted in as everybody’s conscience?”
“Well Jesus Christ!” Leva said stiffly. “Of all the goddam gall! I dont need nobody’s help for my conscience.”
“Then go,” Warden said. “Or stay. But for Christ’s sake make up your mind.”
“Would you turn down a rating like that?”
“There,” Warden said, “see? Thats what I mean. How the hell do I know?”
“Well,” Leva said, “well, I’ll see you then, Milt,” but this time he said it as a formality.
“Sure,” Warden said, just as formally. “I’ll see you, Niccolo. Good luck with it.”
He watched him cross the quad through the window. It would be Sgt Niccolo Leva now, finally, after twelve years. S/Sgt Leva; after the new TO came out. When the times changed they were thorough. Niccolo Leva, as he went up the walk to M Company under Warden’s eyes, was carrying on his back the burden of an older order that was dwindling fast, carrying it inside for salvage, and Warden felt a rage bloom and balloon in him. If a lying two-faced bastard wants to run out on his friends like that and leave them holding the sack, thats his right, aint it? I dont begrudge him the goddam rating. But I never thought he’d do that, not Niccolo.
Milt Warden felt raped. But it was of something that had not been virginity for a long time now.
That afternoon, without even trying to work on the remaining Bloom papers that had to be done by tomorrow so he could meet Karen, he took off. He went over to Al Chomu’s Kemoo Bar and got drunk with Al and they talked about the old days before Schofield Barracks had become an Induction Center when life had been simple. There did not seem to be many of the old bunch left any more. They got so drunk Al’s wife had to angrily take over the bar for Al; Al wanted to close it up altogether. Al’s wife did not like Warden, and Warden did not find there the summery ecstasy of being alive he had left there with a week ago. Secretly, he felt quite sure Al’s wife had done something to it.
It did not take two days for Leva’s papers to go through. Capt Gilbert put them through that afternoon and they were back the next morning. Apparently old Jake Delbert was not only willing, but more than happy, to do a favor for the 3rd Battalion’s Lt Col Jim Davidson.
It made a fine cataclysm for such a fine summery morning, that was without the summery ecstasy of being alive. Capt Holmes flopped like a chicken without head and appealed to Warden. Warden, still a little hungover, grinned at him foolishly and remained as silent as a stone. While Leva was packing, Jim O’Hayer came in and made formal request to be returned to straight duty. Holmes relieved him without argument. After half an hour sweating over a roster he finally created Champ Wilson supply sergeant and sent the CQ out to the drillfield to corral him. Before noon The Champ was back in the orderly room and flatly quit, and if it meant his rating they could have it. Holmes relieved him without busting him either and put Ike Galovitch in his place. Ike was overjoyed at being chosen for such a responsible position. He would, he said, do his level best for the Captain Holmes; Captain Holmes thanked him gratefully; Ike disappeared into his new castle with proud tears standing in his eyes; Milt Warden watched in stony silence.
He knew he was watching the destruction of the Milt Warden legend. He watched it with the same painful sense of fitting rightness and sweet satisfaction as a boy who has spent weeks building a model airplane watches it crash in flames from the match he has applied to its wings with his own hand just before it took off. When the holocaust was over, he took off for town.
She was very lovely when she picked him up from the shaded bench on the King Street side of Aala Park and he felt no more sexual attraction for her than a man does for his wife on a hot day and it frightened him. He climbed in the car out of the shrill yammering of the Asiatic-crowded grass from across
the shrill yammering Asiatic-flowing sidewalk and flopped back in the seat and lit another cigaret, impressed overwhelmingly with that sense of the end of something which he had had earlier but which had not hit him fully until now when he saw her. He did not even say hello.
Chapter 41
KAREN HOLMES HAD BEEN saving up for this moment for almost a full week. The evening of the same day Milt had called her she had learned, by carefully probing her husband about the new catastrophe of Bloom’s death in his Company, a thing she already had suspected but did not intend to ask about pointblank: that 1st/Sgt Warden had not, as yet been induced to put in his application for the Infantry Officer extension course. In discussing Bloom with her, her husband had been especially bitter on this point since Warden’s mere application, let alone his acceptance for a commission which was a foregone conclusion, would have been a feather in his cap that would more than have offset this new stroke of ill fortune. (A selling point presented to him by his wife some weeks before in connection with the trial of Prewitt, which he had since made his own.) Times certainly had changed, was his bitter comment, when an Officer had to beg an Enlisted Man to become an Officer, and then he refused. All of which philosophizing went impatiently in one of Karen’s ears and out the other, now that she had learned what she wanted; her suspicions were confirmed; she had been taken for a fool; she barely refrained from pouring out the whole story to her husband for his sympathy. She had expected as much since the day Milt had told her it was in the mail and this afternoon on the phone she had more than half-suspected to find he had trumped up the story of Bloom’s suicide as a further effort to get rid of her, now that his conquest was complete. The illogic of this thought was not apparent to her; all she could think of was that during those two weeks of a greater happiness than she had ever known, while she was deliberately refraining from testing her suspicions in order to prove her faith in him, he had been just as deliberately deceiving her. And it was only the fact that he had not lied about Bloom’s suicide, plus the anticipated joy of seeing him squirm when she confronted him, that had brought her downtown this time at all.
Feeling a great singing happiness at the prospect of being near him once more, she had laid out carefully, with an excess of both love and vengeance, the penalty she would inflict down to the smallest lash of the tongue, knowing in the love what would cut him deepest, and determined in the vengeance to cruelly make him drink every last bitter drop before allowing herself to be mollified, and when he climbed in the car with that brilliant-eyed wild look of precariously contained agony and did not even notice her, she knew immediately something was drastically wrong and forgot all about the vengeance, while the love began to fill up with a maternal anxiety for him and a wild unhinged murderous anger at whatever had hurt him, as she shifted the gears coolly and drove on around the Park calmly and out Beretania without saying a word.
They went through the slow-cooking business district and past the dry-baking Punchbowl in silence, Karen driving expertly and Warden smoking bitterly, and on past the Masonic Temple into the tree-leafy shade of the residence section across Punahou where Round Top and Tantalus, unseen but invisibly felt, dominated everything. They were almost out to the University Avenue before he flipped his cigaret away viciously and began to tell her the whole story. He told it clear across Kaimuki, Waialae, and Wailupe. By then they were almost out of town and across the causeway to Koko Head and instead of going on out into the country Karen turned off at Koko Head and drove down in under the grove of kiawe trees and out onto the bluff where the big gravelled parking lot for Hanauma Bay was.
There was a bunch of haole highschool kids, thin-limbed in swimsuits, out there on a picnic and running, yelling up and down the zigzag path down the bluff to the beach where somebody had once blasted out a hundred yards of coral reef to make a swimming place, the boys chasing the girls, and the girls being chased by the boys.
While they watched the kids (who suddenly seemed more alien to both of them than any foreigners could ever have been) he went through it one more time, this time with her asking the questions.
“So-o-o,” he wound it up shruggingly, “the son of a bitch took off and transferred.”
“Wasnt there anything you could do?”
“Sure. I could have talked him out of it again.”
“No you couldnt,” Karen said positively. “Not if you’re the kind of man I’ve always thought you were.”
Warden looked at her disgustedly. “You think not. I’ve done it plenty times before.”
“Then why didnt you do it this time then?” she said triumphantly.
“Why?” he hollered violently. “Because I just wanted to see if the son of a bitch would turn it down on his own, thats why. And of course he didnt.”
“Did you expect him to?”
“Hell no,” he lied. “Do you think I would?”
She did not answer. It had taken a little while for the enormity of it to penetrate in to her.
“Then that means our seeing each other afternoons will have to be postponed almost indefinitely,” she said finally.
Warden grinned at her stiffly, as if that was something he had failed to think of, and yet somehow was expecting.
“Thats about the size of it, yes.”
“And just when we thought we had it all worked out. Oh, Milt! And after you working so hard! Isnt there a thing we can do?”
“I dont know what. Unless you can get away sometimes at night.”
“You know I cant do that.”
“You’re going to do it when I’m an officer, aint you?”
“Yes, but thats different; that will be for good. Who would I get to stay with the boy? that I could trust?”
“Okay, maybe you got some suggestions.”
“If you worked hard, couldnt you do most of the work in the mornings?”
Warden looked bitterly at a panorama of the unbelievable work he had been doing for the past week, wanting to laugh wildly.
“I might, yes. Only this time it aint the work. This time its the mere fact of not being present during duty hours. With a situation like this nobody supposes you’ll get the work done, not even your loving husband can expect that. It’ll take months before it even begins to be straightened out; thats why its so important for everybody to be on hand and put on a big act of trying to help with the emergency. And every man who has to stay will make it his job to check up on the others.”
“Then you couldnt just go ahead and take off anyway. That would ruin all your chances of becoming an officer. And we certainly dont want that.”
“No,” Warden said, “we dont want that. Any more suggestions?”
Karen, watching his face which in adversity had suddenly assumed all the bitterness of a small boy who knows by experience he had no chance to defeat his parents, felt the vengeful cruelty (that she had carried for him as carefully as eggs for seven full days and then lost completely in as many seconds) suddenly blossom again in her, this time aimed at her husband, who had been such a stupid fool as to let things get into this state. That would have to be paid for by the bloody sweat of his whole Company. Or maybe he wasnt so stupid. Not even he could be that stupid. Maybe he had known all along what he was doing. Karen thought she had never seen such a downright deliberately cruel bastard. All right, she thought vengefully, let him just wait, let him just try to cash in on it. With the indignation of an experienced wife who is sure of her control she promised herself firmly that he’d wish he’d never seen the day.
“I dont know the intricacies of your work the way you do,” she said, “but it would seem to me that the best thing and the first would be to get Sgt Galovitch out of that supplyroom as quickly as possible.”
“Apparently you dont know your husband either. The ony way he’ll ever consent to relieving Ike Galovitch now will be after a month, or maybe two, but certainly no less than one, and probly a lot more than two; after he has saved his face, and after Ike has fouled him up enough times personally to make h
im mad.”
“Not when I get hold of him,” said Karen crisply. “Who do you want in the supplyroom in Sgt Galovitch’s place?”
For a moment, with a certified heart-skip, Warden found himself staring fullface at a new 100%-unbeatable method of rejuvenating and running his whole outfit; wanting to kick himself in the ass for not having thought of it before. With a deal like that there would be no limit to what a man could accomplish.
Then he remembered that it was already too late, that Leva had already flown the coop, that he couldnt be touched in M Company even with this wand, and the bottom fell out of it.
“Pete Karelsen,” he said without hesitation, bitterly viewing the fading wings of all the splendid opportunities he had let get past him. “He’s the only one who’s had supply work. And what he’s had was too damn little and too damn many years ago.”
“He certainly will be better than Sgt Galovitch,” Karen told him calmly. “And if he’s all there is he’s what you want. You’re in no position to pick and choose.”
“Sure, he’ll be better. But not enough better.”
“Then thats settled. Sgt Karelsen’s the man. You give me a week,” she said crisply. “Just one week. And Sgt Karelsen will replace Sgt Galovitch in the supplyroom. It mightnt,” she said firmly happily, “even take a week.”
“Either way it will take months.”
“But, darling, thats the best I can do for you. Certainly Sgt Karelsen will be better than Sgt Galovitch in the long view. And thats what we’re looking at, the long view. I thought we were working for something stable and permanent. At the very best, this way we’re living now—even not counting how we have to hide and sneak around like criminals—is only a temporary arrangement.”
“It may have been temporary,” Warden said sourly, “and it may be criminal to you. But for me its been a pretty goddamned nice arrangement. While it lasted.”