From Here to Eternity

by James Jones

  “A traveling salesman,” he laughed, still sitting there. “For two years I was a traveling salesman, and this heres the first time I ever had to hide in anybody’s closet.”

  Karen stared at the laughing face and hooked quivering brows and pointed ears that were like a satyr’s. The Traveling Salesman, and The Farmer’s Daughter. The Classic Love Story, the Romeo and Juliet, of the American continent. The symbol of the Great American Brand of Humor, and of all the shameful sniggerings and wishful-thinking winks of all the poolroom eunuchs. And suddenly she began to laugh. If the whim had struck this madman he would just as soon have marched right out of the closet naked up behind the boy and hollered boo. In her mind she saw a picture of him doing it and it sent her far off into laughter.

  She sat there on the bed, the sense of shame at nearly being exposed in the act of copulation gone, trying to breathe through all the laughing, trying hard to stop the laughing that was making her begin to cry.

  It was Warden’s turn to stare uncomprehendingly. He uncrossed his legs and took the dresses off his head and got up and went over to her, thinking that somewhere he had judged this whole thing wrong, that Leva had been wrong, that this was something that had never come within his realm of knowledge.

  “There,” he said helplessly. “There. There,” feeling the absurdity, the oppressive impossibility of any human being trying to communicate with and understand another’s mind in a life where nothing was ever what it seemed to be. “Please dont cry,” he said, searching vainly for a word, “I cant stand to see somebody cry.”

  “You dont know what its like,” Karen said, shivering and whimpering like a puppy in the rain. “The two of them. Its more than anyone was made to stand.”

  “Ah,” Warden said, wondering how in hell he had gotten mixed up in this deal in the first place. He put his arm around her. “Its all right. He’s gone. There,” he said. “There.” Her breast, lying in his cupped palm, was warm and soft like a young bird quivering with fearful trustfulness.

  “Dont do that,” she said, pulling irritably away from him. “You dont know. You dont even care. Its nothing to you. A piece of ass. Another pussy to be poked. What is it to you? Leave me alone.”

  “Okay,” he said. He stood up and went to get his pants, feeling almost relieved.

  “What are you doing?” she cried at him frantically.

  “I’m leaving,” Warden said. “Wasnt that what you wanted?”

  “Dont you want me either?”

  Now what the hell, he thought. “Sure,” he said. “Hell yes. I thought you wanted me to leave.”

  “I do,” she said, “if you want to. Go ahead. I dont want to force you into anything. I dont blame you, I dont blame you a bit. Why would you want to stay? Since I’m not even a woman any more.”

  “You’re a woman,” Warden said, looking at her in the thin kimono. “All woman. Take it from me.”

  “Not to anyone but you,” she said. “I’m nothing. I cant even work. Theres nowhere in the world I’m needed.”

  “You’re needed,” Warden said, coming back and sitting down by her. “In this world beautiful women are needed more than any other thing.”

  “Thats what men always say. Needed to be some man’s beautiful whore. But I’m not even that.”

  “You’ve got a nice suntan,” he said, running his hand across her back, hearing the rain outside. “This is the kind of day to be laying on the beach at Kaneohe. It wont be raining there.”

  “I dont like Kaneohe,” Karen said. “Its damn near as public and as crowded as that goddam Waikiki.”

  “Ah,” he said, “but I know a little beach near Blowhole that is private. Nobody knows about it. Nobody ever goes there. You climb down the cliff wall and there is a little inlet with a sand beach, suddenly, firm and smooth and the rock wall towering above you so the cars on the highway pass just above and they never know its there. You feel like you use to feel when you were a kid and hid by yourself in a cave of bushes and watched the others hunting you. You dont even need to wear a bathing suit at this place, and you can get tanned all over.”

  “Will you take me there?” she said.

  “What?” he said. “Sure. Sure, I’ll take you there.”

  “And can we go at night? and swim there in the moonlight and then lie on the little beach? and you love me there where nobody can see us or know that we are there?”

  “Sure. Sure,” he said. “We’ll do all that.”

  “Oh, I’d love to do that,” Karen said, looking at him worshipfully. “Nobody’s ever done anything like that with me. Do you really want to take me?”

  “Sure,” Warden said. “When you want to go?”

  “Next week. Lets go next weekend. I’ll take Dana’s car and meet you someplace in town. We’ll get some sandwiches and take some beer.” She smiled at him radiantly and put her arms around his neck and kissed him.

  “Okay,” Warden said. He returned the kiss, feeling hungrily under his hands the long twin muscles along her spine running from the tiny waist up to the wideness of the shoulders, feeling the searching softness of her lips against him, feeling the twin pressures of her breasts against him, and thinking of the childlike radiance that had been in her face that was so different from the sophisticated hardness that she had worn on it in the kitchen, and wondering what is this anyway? what the hell have you gotten into, Milton, you and your woman’s intuition?

  “Come here,” he said, hoarsely, gently. “Come here, little baby. Come here to me.”

  The great gentleness that was in him, that he was always wanting to bring forward but never could, rose up in him now like a flood, blindingly.

  “Oh,” Karen said. “I never knew it could be like this.”

  Outside the rain thrummed ceaselessly and cascaded ceaselessly from the roof, and in the street the sound of the stiff brooms of afternoon Fatigue grated soothingly, above the rain.

  Chapter 10

  THE APPOINTMENT OF Pvt Bloom to Pfc did not come as a surprise to G Company. It had been expected since late December that the first vacant rating would go to Bloom, who, until he suddenly went out for Company Smokers last year and then followed it up with Regimental and four wins in the Bowl, had only been one of the many other doughy faces peering with forlorn grins out of the Company’s yearly photograph. From a less than mediocre soldier Bloom had vaulted, using the sturdy pole of boxing politics, into the position of being the only private, Pfc or otherwise, whom Old Ike ever called out of the ranks to give Close Order and who was being groomed for Corporal. And the non-jockstrap faction in the perpetual feud was very bitter in its denouncement of the obvious favoritism. Capt Holmes would have been shocked, then hurt, then probably indignant, if he could have known the reaction Bloom’s Pfc had on the majority of the privates in his Company, but only a little of their muttered comments ever reached him, and that only after it had been watered down until it was considered suitable for his ears by those of his men who told him.

  The jockstraps, although none of them had particularly been Bloom’s friends, welcomed him into their fold with much brotherliness and defended him violently. They had to do this in order to perpetuate their doctrine that jockstraps made better leaders, and which had always been their justification against the bitter mutterings of the straight duty privates who could not make a rating.

  Little Maggio, the gambler and ex-shipping clerk for Gimbel’s Basement, was particularly bitter and incensed.

  “If I had knew,” he said to Prewitt, whose bunk was two beds from his own in Chief Choate’s squad, “if I had only knew what this man’s Army had been like. Of all the people in this outfit, they give that vacant Pfc to Bloom. Because he is a punchie.”

  “What did you expect, Angelo?” Prew grinned.

  “He aint even a good soljer, mind you,” Maggio said bitterly. “He’s ony just a punchie. I’m only out of ree-croot drill a month and I’m a better soljer than Bloom is.”

  “Soljerin aint what does it.”

&n
bsp; “But it ought a be. You wait, man. If I ever get out of this Army, you just wait. Draft or no draft, they’ll never get me back.”

  “Balls,” Prew grinned. “You got all the makins of a thirty year man. I can see it on you a block away.”

  “Dont say that,” Maggio said, violently. “I mean it. I like you, but I dont like even you that much. Thirty year man! Not me, buddy. If I’m goin to be a valet, yard man, and general handyman for some fuckin officer, I’m goin to get paid for it, see?”

  “You’ll re-enlist,” Prew said.

  “I’ll re-enlist,” Maggio said chanting the old bugle call parody, “in a pig’s ass hole. If anybody should of had that rating, man, you should of had it. You’re the best soljer in this outfit for my dough. By a hunert million miles.”

  The rainy season’s course of indoor lectures had given Maggio an admiration for Prew as a soldier. His feverish quick-moving eyes had not missed Prew’s competence with the rifle, pistol, BAR and MG and with all their nomenclatures, all old stuff from his previous enlistment. But his admiration for Prew as a soldier had jumped a hundred percent when he found out Prew had been a fighter in the 27th and refused to fight for Holmes. He could not understand it, but with his ingrained championing of the underdog, learned at Gimbel’s and not lessened by the Army, he admired it. He had watched Prew’s soldiering from a distance admiringly, but it was not until he found out about the other thing that he offered open friendship.

  “If you’d of decided to punch for Dynamite you would of got that rating. You can bet your balls you’d got it. And you want to spend thirty years of your life in a deal like this!”

  Prew grinned, and agreed, but he said nothing. There wasnt anything for him to say.

  “Come on,” Maggio said disgustedly. “Lets get a game goin in the latrine. Maybe I can win enough to go to town.”

  “Okay,” Prew said, still grinning, following him. The rainy season had been good to him. The leisurely lectures in the Dayroom and the practical work of field- and detail-stripping and assembling the various pieces on the chilly porches with the sound of rain outside were things he liked, and since they were conducted by a single officer or noncom for the Company as a whole, they gave him respite from the vengeful eye of Old Ike Galovitch who seemed bent on protecting the honor of the Great God Holmes, ever since he first found out that Prew had refused to fight. Also, the ending of the boxing season had relieved the tension he had brought into the Company, temporarily at least.

  The three globed lights in the first floor latrine burned dimly. A GI blanket, Maggio’s, was spread out on the concrete floor between the row of commodes in open stalls on one wall and the urinal trough and washbowls on the other, and the six men sat down around it.

  Maggio, shuffling the cards, looked over at the topless, seatless, commodes in their stalls where three men were sitting with their pants down, and held his nose. “Hey,” he said, “is this a goddam cardroom? or a la-trine? Attensh-HUT! Da-ress Right, DHRESS!”

  The men looked up from their magazines, cursed, and went back to business.

  “Deal the cards, Angelo,” Anderson, the company bugler, said. “Deal the cards.”

  “Sure,” said Salvatore Clark, the apprentice bugler, grinning shyly under his long Italian nose. “Deal them cards, Wop, or I’ll put you down and shove them up you, see?” He laughed then, with rich shy humor, unable to keep to his self-appointed role as tough guy.

  “You wait,” Maggio said. “I’ll deal these cards. I’m stackin these cards.” He held the deck in his open left hand, index finger crooked professionally around the top.

  “You couldnt stack shit with a shovel, Angelo,” Prew said.

  “Listen,” Maggio said. “I learn to deal these cards in Brooklyn, see? on Atlantic Avenue, where anything less then a royal flush never had a chanct.” He riffled the cards from right hand to left, as near as he could come to the delicate card ladder of professional gamblers. He began to deal. The game was stud. And each of them was suddenly alone, engrossed.

  Prew laid the fifty cents in nickels he had borrowed from Pop Karelsen, Sgt of the Weapons Platoon and intellectual friend of Cpl Mazzioli, and who had taken a liking to him when he found out he knew machineguns, on the blanket and winked at Clark.

  “Boy,” said Sal Clark fervently. “How I’d like to make a stake in this game and take it over to O’Hayer’s and make a killing.” It was the hope and dream of all of them. “I’d take that ol’ Honolulu over, I mean. I’d rent me the whole fuckin New Congress Hotel for one whole night, and the ones I couldnt lay I’d have to watch and give advice.” He, who could never get up nerve enough to even go to a whorehouse unless someone was with him, chuckled and grinned shyly at his own deception. “You aint never been to the New Congress, have you Prew? You aint never been to Mrs Kipfer’s, have you?”

  “I aint had the money yet,” Prew said. He looked at Sal, feeling a warmness of protection, and then across at his sidekick Andy who was engrossed sullenly in his cards, and then back at Sal, on whose account it was mainly that he had finally made friends with them.

  Sal Clark with his shy trusting eyes and half-embarrassed grin was like the village idiot boy who is utterly without malice, envy, distrust, or the desire to better himself and so incompetent to maintain himself in our society, and who the prosperous business men, joyously robbing each other every chance they got, fed and clothed and protected tenderly, as if in some metaphysical way he with his undistracted mind might make a plea for them with God, or save them from their consciences. In the same way, Sal Clark was taken care of and respected as the talisman of the Company.

  Anderson had made overtures of friendship to Prew several times, and on Payday after Prew had blown in his pay, he even offered to loan him money, but every time he came around Prew had cut him off, because Andy’s eyes never focused on his face but always on one side or the other, and Prew did not want for friends men who feared him. And it was not until Sal Clark with his wide, deep, uncomprehending doelike eyes had asked him trustingly to be friends that he suddenly saw he could not refuse.

  . . . It happened on one of those warm February nights before the rainy season started when the stars seemed near enough to finger. He had come out of the smoky drunkenness of Choy’s feeling the beer all through him lightly and stopped in the lighted tunnel of the sallyport that funneled the large sounds of the night. Across the quad the lights in the 2nd Battalion were still on and shadowy figures moved across the porches in front of them. The dark quadrangle was sprinkled with the lightning bugs of cigaret butts, clustered around pitchers of beer, glowing as some one dragged and then fading out again.

  From over in the far corner near the bugler’s megaphone came the ringing chords of a guitar and voices raised in four-part harmony. It was rule of thumb harmony, but it was closely knit and it carried clear and sharp across the quad, sounding good. And in the slowly moving harmony he recognized Sal’s twanging nasal, standing out, more hillbilly than any mountain man, although he was a long nosed Wop from Scranton. They were singing Truckdriver’s Blues.

  “Feelin mighty weary, from my head down to my shoes . . . Got to keep a rollin . . . truckdriver’s blues . . . Never did have nothin, got nothin much to lose . . . Got a lowdown feelin . . . truckdriver’s blues.”

  And the utter simplicity of the plaintive lament in Sal Clark’s voice reached out and touched him. He felt his anger and indignation at Warden and this setup dwindling away into a kind of deep perceptive melancholy for which there were no words. It was all in the words of the song, but the words actually said nothing at all; except that a truckdriver was weary and had the blues.

  The music came to him across the now bright, now dull, slowly burning cigaret of each man’s life, telling him its ancient secret of all men, intangible, unfathomable, defying long-winded descriptions, belying intricate cataloguings, simple, complete, asking no more, giving no less, words that said nothing yet said all there was to say. The song of the one-eyed man who had
driven the ox sled through the summer hills in the Kentucky mountains, the song of the Choctaw on his reservation, the song of the man who had laid the rollers for the stones heavy as death to build the glorious monument to the king. In the simple meaningless words he saw himself, and Chief Choate, and Pop Karelsen, and Clark, and Anderson, and Warden, each struggling with a different medium, each man’s path running by its own secret route from the same source to the same inevitable end. And each man knowing as the long line moved as skirmishers through the night woodsey jungle down the hill that all the others were there with him, each hearing the faint rustlings and straining to communicate, each wanting to reach out and share, each wanting to be known, but each unable, as Clark’s whining nasal was unable, to make it known that he was there, and so each forced to face alone whatever it was up ahead, in the unmapped alien enemy’s land, in the darkness.

  Mazzioli and the other clerks who congregated mornings at Choy’s to discuss Art and Life were blind. He knew them, so involved in intricate conversation, so secure in pointless argument, they could not see the thing they sought to grasp lay right before them, all around them, and could be touched only momentarily, but never grasped and held by any sharp dissection. It spoke now from the bottomless shallows of a hillbilly song that in its artless simplicity said everything their four-dollar words could never say, went back to a basic simplicity that gave a sudden flashing picture of all life that could never be explained and an understanding of it that could never be expressed.

  The clerks, the kings, the thinkers; they talked, and with their talking ran the world. The truckdrivers, the pyramid builders, the straight duty men; the ones who could not talk, they built the world out of their very tonguelessness—so the talkers could talk about how to run it, and the ones who built it. And when they had destroyed it with their talking the truckdriver and the straight duty man would build it up again, simply because they were hunting for some way to speak. He could feel it all there in the song, and in Sal Clark’s howling painful nasal noice. “Feelin mighty weary . . . never did have nothin . . . got a lowdown feelin . . . truckdriver’s blues.”