by James Jones
“Wait,” she said. “Couldnt you have gone to the officer and asked to stay?”
“Thats right.” Prew jerked his head in a nervous nod, thinking the Army made you need it more, made you hungrier. “I could have. But I couldnt. I couldnt be a brown noser.”
“Well,” Violet said. “Yes. But I would think an argument could be patched up,” she said. “I mean when you had a good job you wanted to keep.”
“It could of been,” he said. “But I dont want any job that bad. Dont you see? There wasnt nothin else to do. Listen,” he said. “Come here. Come over here.”
“Not now,” she told him. She kept on watching him, almost curiously, looking in his face. “It seems a shame to lose such a good job, and lose your rating.”
“It is a shame,” he said. To hell with it, he thought. “Is there any liquor left around this place?”
“Theres still part of that quart you brought last time,” she said. “I havent touched it; it was yours,” she got up proudly. “Its in the kitchen. And I think theres another one, unbroken, you brought a long time ago. You want a drink?”
“Yes,” he said and followed her into the kitchen. “You see,” he explained carefully, “I wont get to come up to see you near as often as I use to now. Also, I’ll only be makin twenty-one a month, so I cant give the dough I did, either.”
Violet nodded. Inscrutably, she did not seem impressed one way or the other. He decided to let it ride a while, there was no use to spoil it now.
“Lets go up to the place on the hill,” he said. “To our place,” he added intimately, and was ashamed because he felt now that he was pleading. Being without any for so long could eat into a man, and the blood was pumping through him richer now, and thicker.
“All right,” she said. The door to the cupboard had no glass in it, but she opened it anyway, to reach for the bottle inside, the absence of the glass embarrassing her. While her arms were up Prew cupped his hands over her breasts from behind her. Violet jerked her arms down irritably and then he spun her, pinning her arms to her sides, and kissed her, she holding the bottle in one hand. In her bare feet she was not quite as tall as he was.
They climbed up through the matted dry grass, Prew carrying the bottle, the sun pleasantly hot on their bare backs. At the top in the little clump of trees they lay down in the matted green and brown of the dead and living grass. They looked almost straight down at the house.
“Its pretty, isnt it,” Prew said.
“No,” disagreed Violet. “Its ugly. Horrible ugly.”
The cluster of shacks lay spread out below them, a nameless community not on the tourists’ maps, looking as if the first strong wind would blow them over. They were, on top of the hill, at the top of a great U where they could look down at the houses curved across the bottom or look straight across at the field of green cane on the other side.
“I lived in a place like this when I was a kid,” Prew said. “Except it was lots bigger. But it was the same,” thinking of all the lost forgotten memories that came back now, carrying so much life and emotion, crowding in your mind, and that you never could express to anyone, because they never were connected. A sadness at the loss of them, and at their lack of meaning, came over him.
“Did you like it?” Violet asked.
“No,” he said. “I dint. But I’ve lived in a hell of a lot worse places since.” He rolled over on his back and watched the sun flickering down through the leaves of the trees. He felt the Saturday afternoon on-pass feeling come down and sweep over him, like leaves do in the fall, back home. Life does not begin again till Monday morning, it whispered. If only all of life could be like this, he whispered. If only all of life could be a three-day pass.
That was a pipedream, Prewitt. He took a drink from the bottle and handed it to Violet. She drank, propped on her elbows, staring down at the houses. She drank the straight whiskey the same way he did, as if it were only water.
“Its terrible,” she said, still staring down. “No one should ever have to live in place like this. My Poppa and Momma come here from Hokkaido. Not even this house is theirs.” She handed back the bottle to him and he caught her arm and pulled her over. He kissed her, and for the first time she returned it, putting her hand on his cheek.
“Bobbie,” she said. “Bobbie.”
“Come on,” he said, turning. “Come here.”
But Violet held back, looking at her cheap wrist watch. “Momma and Poppa will be home any time.”
Prew sat up in the grass. “What difference does it make?” he said irritably. “They wont come up here.”
“Its not that, Bobbie. Wait till tonight. At night is the time for that.”
“No,” he said. “Any times the time for that. If you feel like it.”
“Thats just it,” she said. “I dont feel like it. They’ll be coming home.”
“But they know we sleep in the same bed at night.”
“You know how I feel about Momma and Poppa,” Violet said.
“Yes, but they know it,” he said. Then he wondered suddenly if they did. “They must know it?”
“Its different in the afternoon. They’re not home from work yet. And you’re a soldier.” She stopped and reached for the bottle on the grass. “I graduated from Leilehua High School,” she stated.
You never completed the seventh grade, he told himself. He had seen Leilehua High School in Wahiawa. It was only another high school.
“So what if I am a soljer?” he said. “Whats wrong with a goddam soljer? Theres nothin wrong with a soljer, that isnt wrong with anybody else.”
“I know it,” Violet said.
“Soljers are only people, just like everybody else,” he insisted.
“I know it,” Violet said. “But you dont understand. So many Nisei girls go out with the soldiers.”
“So what?” he said, remembering the song. Manuelo Boy, my dear boy, no more hila-hila, sister go with a soldier boy, come home any old time.
“All the soldiers want to screw them,” Violet said.
“Well, they go out with civilians, too. Thats what they want. Whats wrong with that?”
“Nothings wrong with it,” she said. “But a wahine girl must be careful. A respectable Nisei girl doesnt go with soldiers.”
“Neither does a respectable white girl,” Prew said, “or any other kind of girl. But they’re no different than the goddam Pfcs. They all want the same goddam thing.”
“I know it,” Violet said. “Dont get mad. Its just the way the people look at the soldiers.”
“Then whynt your folks run me off? or do something? or say something? If they dont like it.”
Violet was surprised. “But they would never do that.”
“But, hell. All the neighbors see me comin here all the time.”
“Yes, but they would never mention it either.”
Prewitt looked over at her lying on her back in the dappled sunlight, and the short tight legs of her shorts.
“How would you like to move out of here?” he asked carefully.
“I’d love it.”
“Well,” he probed, “you may get a chance to soon.”
“Except,” Violet said, “that I wont shack up with you. You know I cant do that.”
“We’re shacked up now,” he said. “The only thing different from all the other shackjobs is that you’re livin with your folks.”
“It makes all the difference,” Violet said. “Theres no use to talk about it. You know I cant do that.”
“Thats right,” Prew said. Life did not begin till Monday morning. It could wait till tomorrow. He rolled over on his back and lay staring up into the incredible blue of the Hawaiian sky. “Look off to the west,” he said. “Theres a storm blowing up in the west. Look at the cloud bank.”
“The clouds are beautiful,” Violet said. “So black. And piling higher and higher one on top of the other, like a cliff wall.”
“Thats a line squall,” Prewitt said. “Thats the first beginning of the
rainy season.”
“Our roof leaks,” Violet said. She reached for the bottle.
Prew was watching the racking mass of clouds. “But whynt your folks kick you out. If its like that. Bringing me here,” he asked.
Violet looked surprised. “But I’m their daughter,” she said to him.
“Oh,” he said. “Come on. We mights well go on back down. It’ll rain pretty soon.”
The rainstorm came up quickly after it had hurdled the mountains. By suppertime it was raining hard. Prew sat out on the back porch alone while Violet helped her mother fix the meal. Her father sat in the front room, by himself.
The old folks, that was the way he always thought of them, had come home before the rain, chattering Japanese back at the crowded Model T that let them off and then clattered on down the road to the next house. Five families owned the Ford together, just as the whole community had built and owned the miles of water sluices of weathered wood that stuck up all along the little valley like scaffolding that had been used to make the mountains before the dawn of history.
They had rushed through the house to the back porch where Prew and Violet were sitting, and on out to hoe their tidy truck patch that the water sluices emptied into, before the rainstorm came. Prew watched them, stooped and bent, with faces that looked to have been carved from dried and withered apples and he felt a self-righteous indignation at the entire human race for the life these people lived, these who looked to be Violet’s grandparents or great-grandparents, and yet were not yet forty years of age.
Their garden, laid out in immaculate little squares and triangles, utilizing every inch of ground, of radishes and cabbages and lettuce and taro and a little underwater rice patch, plus a half a dozen foreign vegetables, was their life; and it showed the industry that was in them. They worked on in it until the rain began to fall before they stopped and put their hoes away. When they came up on the porch, they neither one spoke to Prew or seemed to know that he was there.
Sitting on the porch alone, listening to them fixing supper, he felt again the indignation he had felt before, the sense of loss and the aloneness, the utter defenselessness that was each man’s lot, sealed up in his bee cell from all the others in the world. But the smell of boiling vegetables and pork reached him from the inside, the aloneness left him for a while. The warm moist smell promised other people lived and were preparing supper.
He listened to the pouring and the thunder rumblings that sounded hollow like they were in a rainbarrel, shared the excitement and the coziness of the buzzing insects that had sought refuge on the porch, and now and then he slapped detachedly at the mosquitoes, making a sharp crack in the pouring buzzing silence. The porch sheltered him from all but the splashes of the drops that hit the floor and their spray touched him with a pleasant chill. And he was secure, because somewhere out beyond the wall of water humanity still existed, and was preparing supper.
Violet called him and he went in, feeling the Army and the strange wild eyes of Warden were very far away, that Monday morning was a bad dream, an age-old racial memory, as cold as the moon and as far away, and sat before the steaming plate of flat-tasting foreign vegetables and chunks of pork, and ate with relish.
After they finished eating, the old man and woman stacked their plates in the sink and padded silently, without a word, into the front room where the garish little altars were, where Prew had never been invited. They had not said a word all through the meal, but he had learned long ago not to try to talk to them. He and Violet sat silently on in the kitchen drinking the aromatic tea, listening to the wind buffet the shack and the rain drumming its nails deafeningly upon the tin corrugated roof. Then he, like Violet, stacked his dishes in the old chipped sink, feeling completely at home here and content. The one thing he lacked was a cup of coffee.
When they went into her bedroom, Violet unconcernedly left the door wide open although they could see directly into the lighted front room. He could see the flickering light reflecting from her gold body as she turned matter-of-factly to him. The matter-of-factness gave him pleasure, a sense of long-lifedness and continuance that a soldier seldom had; but the irritation of the indifferently open door made him afraid he would be seen, shamed him with his own desire.
He woke once in the middle of the night. The storm was gone and the moon shone in brightly through the open window. Violet lay with her back to him, head pillowed on bent elbow. From the stiffness of her body he knew she was not sleeping, and he put his hand on her naked hip and turned her toward him. In the deep curve of her hip and the indented juncture of ball and socket underneath there was an infinite workmanship of jewel-like precision that awed him, and called up in him an understanding that was like a purge and awakened liquid golden flecks within his eyes.
She rolled willingly, unsleepily, and he wondered what she had been thinking of, lying there awake. As he moved over her, he realized again that he did not know her face or name, that here in this act that brings two human fantasies as close as they can ever come, so close that one moves inside the other, he still did not know her, nor she him, nor could they touch each other. To a man who lives his life among the flat hairy angularities of other men, all women are round and soft, and all are inscrutable and strange. The thought passed quickly.
He awoke in the morning on his back, uncovered. The door was still open, and Violet and her mother were moving around in the kitchen. He smothered an impulse to grab up the covers over his nakedness and rose and donned his trunks, feeling deeply shamed, embarrassed by his own pendulous existence which all women hated. The old woman took no notice of him when he entered the kitchen.
After the morning cleaning was done and the old people had padded silently away to visit neighbors, Prew thought the whole thing over and finally, characteristically, just came out with it.
“I want you to move to Wahiawa and shack up with me,” he said bluntly.
Violet sat in her chair on the porch, half-turned toward him, her elbow on the arm, cheek resting on a half closed fist. “Why, Bobbie?” She continued to stare at him curiously, the same curiosity with which she always watched him, as if seeing for the first time the subtle mechanism from which she got her pleasure, and that she had always thought was simple. “You know I cant do that. Why make a showdown of it?”
“Because I wont be able to come up here any more,” he said, “like I used to. Before I transferred. If we lived in Wahiawa, I’d come home every night.”
“What is wrong with living this way?” she asked him, in the same odd tone. “I dont mind if you only come up on weekends. You dont have to come every night like you used to do, before you transferred.”
“Weekends aint enough,” he said. “At least not for me.”
“If you break off with me,” Violet said, “you wont get it even that often, will you? You wont find any woman who will shack up with a private who makes twenty-one dollars.”
“I dont like being around your folks,” Prew said, “they bother me; they dont like me. If we’re goin to be shacked up, we might as well be shacked up. Instead of this half way stuff. Thats the way it is.” He said it flatly, like a man enumerating the faults and values of a new spring coat.
“I’d have to quit my job. I’d have to get another job in Wahiawa. That might be hard, unless I took a job as waitress in a bar, and I cant do that.
“I quit my job in Kahuku,” she said indifferently, “and left a nice home where I was one of the family—to come back here to this rotten place—against my parents’ wishes that I not leave my higher position. I did it so I could be near enough for you to come up every night. I did it because you asked me to.”
“I know you did,” he said, “I know you did. But I didnt know it would be like this.”
“What did you expect?” she said. “You dont make enough to pay for shacking up, Bobbie.”
“I did. I’ve got almost a full month’s pay as a First-Fourth coming,” he said carefully. “It’ll be enough to get us set up for a month,
until you get a job and I get some more dough. With your job and my twenty-one bucks we can live better than you’re livin here. And you dont like it here. Theres no reason for you not to go.” He stopped talking, long enough to get his breath, surprised at how fast he had been talking.
“You didnt believe me, did you?” Violet said, “when I said I couldnt go, when I said why make a showdown. You cant force me, Bobbie. Momma and Poppa would not like it, they wouldnt let me go.”
“Why wouldnt they like it?” he said, trying to keep his voice from going faster. “Because I’m a soljer. Do you care whether I’m a soljer or not? If you do, why the hell did you go with me in the first place? why did you let me come here? They cant keep you by not wanting you to go. How can they keep you?”
“They would be disgraced,” Violet said.
“Oh, balls!” Prew said, letting loose the rein. “If I was a gook beachboy instead of a soljer it’d be all right though.” This was what he knew it would come down to. They’d live like cattle, worse than Harlan miners, but they’d be disgraced if their daughter shacked up with a soldier. They’d let the Big Five shove a cane stalk up their keister, but that was not disgraceful. That wasnt soldiers. The poor, he thought, they are always their own worst enemy.
“Its not as if we were married,” she said softly.
“Married!” Prew was dumbfounded. The picture of Dhom, the G Company duty sergeant, bald and massive and harassed, crossed his eyes, trailed by his fat sloppy Filipino wife and seven half-caste brats; no wonder Dhom was a bully, condemned to spend his life in foreign service like an exile because he had a Filipino wife.
Violet smiled at his consternation. “You see? You dont want to marry me. Look at my side. Some day you will go back to the Mainland. Will you take me with you? You want me to leave my people, and then be left without them or you either? And maybe with a baby?”
“Would your folks like it if you married me?”
“No, but they would like it better than the other. Or this.”
“You mean they’d still be disgraced,” Prew said wryly. “Would you go if I married you?”
