by James Jones
But there was another thing that took him off the mysteries, too. He remembered one day for no good reason how Jack Malloy had always talked about Jack London all the time, and how he had worshipped him almost as much as Joe Hill. The only book of Jack London’s he had ever read was The Call of the Wild. So he started Alma to bringing home London and went into him really in earnest.
Although he had to use the dictionary more often with London, he could still seem to read him faster. His writing seemed simpler. One day, when he was along toward the last of them, like John Barleycorn and The Cruise of the Elsinore, he read five in one day. Of them all, he liked Before Adam and The Star Rover the best because for the first time they gave him a clear picture of what Malloy had meant by reincarnation of souls. He thought he could see now, how there could just as easily be an evolution of souls in different bodies, just like there had been an evolution of bodies in different souls from the prehistoric times like Redeye and those, in Before Adam. It seemed to be logical. At least, it did when he was drunk.
Martin Eden, of course, was in a class by itself. He could understand why Malloy worshipped him, after he read Martin Eden. He sat quite a while that afternoon, when he finished Martin Eden, before he started the next one. He had three or four scotch-and-sodas, which he liked better even than plain whiskey now, and he could see in his mind how if he had a little luck, and just a slightly different life, he could have been a writer himself, instead of a bugler. Being a bugler was like being an actor; you had to depend on too many other people just to get a chance to work at it. But a writer, he had it all to himself.
He felt the same way, only much moreso, when he read Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel which Alma just picked up for him on a hunch. When he finished that one he had had five scotch-and-sodas, and he got some pencils and a pad of Alma’s letter stationary and went out on the porch to write the story of Angelo Maggio and the Stockade.
Later on, after writing so hard he forgot to mix himself any more drinks and hence began to get sober, he read it over and tore it up before they came home.
But even then, when he was almost sober, he knew he could have done it, if things had been just a little bit different. That Eugene Gant, in that Thomas Wolfe book, that might have been himself when he was a kid. It was just exactly like him. It was almost weird, as if this Wolfe had looked into his head. How he lay out under the trees in the afternoon with the patches of sunlight and thought about women. How he got up early winter mornings when it was still dark to carry papers. How he wanted to see the nigger whore naked. If you changed it just enough to put it in Harlan Kentucky, it would be him! Christ, what a guy wouldnt give—to have known a fellow like that and been friends.
It was while he was reading Martin Eden that he got the idea to start writing down titles of other books to read, like Martin had done. There were lots of them in London. Most of them he had never heard of. A few he had heard Malloy mention. He wrote down all of them, with the author’s name, in the little notebook he had had Alma buy for him. He would look at the growing list as proudly as if it was a Presidential Citation. Before he was done, he would read them all. The next time he ran into Jack Malloy he would be able to talk back instead of just listen.
He did the same thing with a Thomas Wolfe book that Alma brought home on a hunch, writing them down in his notebook as he came on them. But when he had finished that one he found he had so many titles of books he wanted to read that it would take him at least a year of doing absolutely nothing but reading just to get through them.
It was partly that, the hopelessness of ever reading all of them, that brought the reading jag to its end.
The other thing that helped to end it and break it off short was Alma.
She got up early one morning and cornered him in the kitchen before Georgette was up. He was reading another Thomas Wolfe book, the one where the kid went to New York to become a great writer. He never did get to finish it to find out what happened to him. He was sitting behind the table of the glassed-in breakfast nook and could not get out.
“I want to know what you plan to do?” Alma said after she had got a cup of his coffee that was still heating on the stove.
“Plan to do when?” he said.
“Anytime,” Alma said crisply. “Now. Tomorrow. Next week. Shut that book and listen to me. What are you going to do?”
“Do about what?” he said.
“About the way things are,” she said. “Shut that book and listen to me! I’m getting tired of talking to the front covers of books!”
“Whats wrong with the way things are?”
“Just about everything,” Alma said. “I hardly talk to you from one day to another. You look at me as though you were half asleep—like now. As if you hardly knew who I was. I’m Alma, remember? Maybe you’ve forgotten? It was almost five months since I’d seen you, and then you were hurt.”
“Maybe being hurt got to my brain and made me remember,” he said, trying to be humorous. It did not come off very well.
“You dont expect to go on living here like this indefinitely, do you?” Alma said brittlely. “I think its time you figured out what you plan to do, dont you? Do you plan to go back to the Army? Do you plan to try to live here and get a job? Do you plan to try to get back to the States? Just what do you plan to do?”
Prew tore off a strip of newspaper to mark his place and pushed the book down the table out of reach. “Frankly, I aint planned anything. Does it make any difference?”
“Ugh,” Alma said. “This coffee is horrible.”
“Tastes all right to me,” he said defensively; her complaint of the coffee, like everything else, seemed to be directed at him personally.
“It’s been simmering on the stove so long its as muddy and thick as sorghum molasses,” Alma said. She got up and threw her cup out and emptied the rest and put a new filter paper in the Silex hourglass and put on water for a new pot.
Prew watched her. Her long black hair was still matted from sleeping and the thin print dressing gown had smudges of powder on it. His hand wanted to reach out and pick up the book again, but it was out of reach and he would have had to get up. He did not feel like getting up. That was why he had pushed it out of reach down the table.
She came back and sat down across from him again.
“Well? What do you plan to do?”
“Nothing,” he said, wishing now he had got up for the book. “Why worry about it? I’m doing all right.”
“Yes,” Alma said. “Yes, you are. But in less than a year I’m going back home to the Mainland and home. You’re going to have to figure out something before then.”
“All right,” he said. “I’ll work on it. A year is a long time off yet. Now why the hell dont you lay off of me?”
“You certainly cant go home with me to Oregon,” Alma said coolly, too coolly, “if thats what you’re thinking.”
He had thought about it, sketchily. But he had given it up, even sketchily.
“Did I ask you to go home with you?”
“No,” she said, “but I wouldnt be surprised to find you with your bag already—”
“Then why dont you wait till you’re ask? Before you start tossing refusals around?”
“Because I dont intend to wake up on the boat and find you in the bed.”
“Okay; you wont. Believe me, you wont. Now why dont you relax and wait till that time comes, to worry about me? I said I was doing all right.”
“You sure are,” Alma snorted. “You’ve done nothing for the past three weeks but sit around here in a trance and read books and get drunk and make a big play for Georgette. I’d say you were doing fine.”
“Is that whats been eating you?”
“Maybe you’d like to live on here and just switch over to Georgette, after I leave, and shack up with her?”
He had already thought of that, too. He had, in fact, thought of a lot of things. But it made him mad to hear her say it out loud.
“Maybe thats not s
uch a bad idea at that,” he said.
“Perhaps not,” Alma said coolly, “at first glance. But in the first place, Georgette might not be able to keep this place and support you in the style to which you are getting accustomed. It takes both of us to pay for it. And you’re already beginning to run me in over my budget.”
“We could probly figure something out,” he said.
“And in the second place,” Alma said, “if thats what you’ve got in mind, you can get the hell out now and wait till I’m gone before you come back. Because I dont want to live in the same house with such a bad smell. And—if it comes down to it—I think Georgette would prefer me to living with you.”
“She probly would,” Prew said. “She’s known you longer.”
“I’m quite sure she would,” Alma said. “Completely apart from the fact that I help pay for the house.”
“Okay,” he said, and crawled out from behind the table and got up. “You want me to leave now?”
Alma’s eyes widened perceptibly, and she had to make a big effort to keep from catching her breath. She did not say anything.
Prew watching her in silence, feeling quite proud.
“Where would you go?” Alma said.
“What difference does it make?”
“Oh, be sensible,” Alma said, irately.
Prew grinned, knowing that somehow he had suddenly finally gained the advantage. It was getting to be more and more every day like a tight tennis game: your ad; my ad; your ad; my ad.
“Theres lots of places I could go,” he said, not wanting to lose it again now that he had it. “I could go on the beach. I might even find another whore in the market for a pimp. I might even turn back into the Army; they probly dont know I killed Fatso anyway,” he lied.
The whore part, of course, did not touch her. It never did. “You’d be putting your head in a noose,” she said irritably, “and you know it.”
“I might even ship out on a tramp,” he said, remembering Angelo Maggio, “and go to Mexico and be a cowboy.”
“I didnt mean you had to leave until you’d found someplace to go,” she said irritably. “What do you think I am? You know me better than that. You dont have to leave at all, unless you want to. I want you to stay.”
“You sure as hell act like it.”
“Well,” she said angrily, “its just that it gets under my skin, seeing you sitting around ogling Georgette all the time, knowing you’re figuring your chances of getting in on the inside with her as soon as I’m gone. How do you think that makes me feel?”
“What the hell do you want me to do? Sit around here and be your true love for as long as you feel like staying, and then see you off on the boat when you go home to marry a rich man? You think I like layin around on my ass livin off you so you can throw it up to me every time you get mad at me? What am I suppose to do when you marry the rich guy? go blow my brains out with a broken heart? It seems to me you ask a whole hell of a lot of a man.”
“I don’t think its too much to ask you to prefer me to other women,” Alma said earnestly. “At least as long as I’m here. I know how men are; I ought to. I’m no dewy-eyed virgin Cinderella. I dont expect miracles. But I dont think thats too much to ask.”
“Its pretty hard to prefer a woman when she plainly dont want to sleep with you any more.”
“Its pretty hard to want to sleep with a man who prefers other women,” Alma said. “Especially if he looks at you all the time from a trance as if you’re not even there.”
“Well?” he said. “Do you want me to leave or dont you?”
She was beginning to gain ground again, and he could always get back the ad there. Because she knew he would do it. He might never win the game with it, but it would take a lot of ad points.
“Oh, sit down and be sensible,” Alma said. “No, I dont want you to leave. I already told you that. Do you want me to get down on my knees and beg you?
“But Georgette is my friend,” she said, “and if it came down to sleeping with you or keeping my friendship, I think she’d prefer to keep the friendship. You might remember that, for future reference.”
He sat down. “But she’ll never see you again after you’re gone,” he said, just to let her know he was not giving ground, “and she knows it.”
“After I’m gone,” Alma said, “you can do what you want.”
“Son of a bitch if you dont demand a whole hell of a lot from a man. I’d rather earn my living soljering, its easier. Only I cant,” he said. “Your coffee water’s boiling.”
Alma got up and went to the stove to turn the heat off under the Silex hourglass. Then she stood without saying anything and watched the coffee begin to run back down the spout.
“Oh, Prew, Prew.” She turned around. “Why did you have to do it? Why did you have to kill him? We were getting along so fine. Until you had to do something like that. Why did you have to spoil it?”
He was sitting with his elbows on the table and his fists clasped, looking at them. Not staring. Just looking. As if he were examining a tool to see if it was adequate for the job.
“I’ve always done it,” he said simply, neither gladly nor guiltily, but just simply stating it. “I’ve always spoiled everything I’ve ever touched all my life. Maybe all men do it,” he said, remembering Jack Malloy. “I dont know about that. I know I have. I dont know why, though.”
“Sometimes I dont think I even know you,” Alma said. “Sometimes you’re almost like a complete stranger. When your First Sergeant Warden came down to see me, he said you wouldnt even have had to go to the Stockade. He said you could have gotten off scot free if you’d wanted to.”
Prew looked up quickly. “Has he been down there to see you again? Has he? Answer me, goddam you?”
“No,” Alma said; “that was the first time, when he told me you were in hock. He’s only been there once. Why?”
“I don’t know,” Prew said, relaxing back on his elbows to look at his hands again. “I just wondered.”
“You dont think he’d turn you in, do you?” Alma said. “You cant think that!”
“I dont know,” he said, looking at the tools his hands. “I honestly dont know. I never been able to figure out if he would or he wouldnt.”
“Thats a terrible thing to admit,” Alma said.
“You dont understand,” he said. “Sometimes,” he said simply, “I wish I was back in the Stockade.”
—Angelo Maggio. Jack Malloy. Blues Berry. Francis Murdock. Stonewall Jackson. The long dark evenings of cigaret-lighted conversations. Between them all they had covered every part of the country. Damn near the whole world.—
“In the Stockade it was easy, it was simple. You had somebody over you that you hated and plenty of time to hate them, and plenty of help hating them, and you did what they told you and just hated them, without having to worry about hurting them any because you couldnt have hurt them anyway.”
“After you got out, you didnt even call me up,” Alma said. “You were out nine whole days, without coming up to see me or even calling me up.”
“I was trying to protect you, goddam it!”
She did not laugh. She felt more like you feel with a child. Since he had got well from the knife wound he did not give her the chance to feel like you feel with a child any more.
“Prew, Prew, Prew,” she said and came over to him and pulled his head against her. “Come on,” she said. “Come with me.”
Prew got up and followed her.
She went into the bedroom.
But it was like too many other times, when they had fought, and made up, and then gone warmly to bed. Your ad and my ad, and every day a Millennium. He could not keep himself from remembering how he was not a thirty-year-man any more. Then, after he had remembered it, he re-remembered it. About the only time he was not remembering it any more was when he was reading a book with three or four drinks in him for convincingness.
Alma knew it. They both knew it. The transparent wall of the trance was back
down, and apparently the only way to get under it was to get so mad that the anger cut through it. It was a hell of a way to get close together. They heard Georgette moving around getting up and, afterwards, went back out to the kitchen. Neither one of them cared much about lying in bed, afterwards, any more. They sat in the kitchen and drank the coffee and in the loss of the desire and the superimposed silence they could not break through suddenly felt very old and, in feeling very old, suddenly were much closer and warmer to the other, who was also very old, than they had either one ever felt before in the desire that neither one had any more.
Then Georgette came in friendlily like a big overgrown puppy, but with the big body like most of the heroines in her Book of the Month Club collection and that was covered with only the thin print wrapper whose powder smudges, strangely, instead of being distasteful were rut-and-crotch-sexily enticing.
Alma looked at Prew and then looked away coolly.
Prew tried not to look at Georgette. Even when he talked to her he looked at Alma, or at the stove, or at the tools his hands.
After half an hour of this Georgette got up, looking puzzled and hurt, and went to her room to get dressed. She went out early. She had some shopping to do, she said, and would not be back before two o’clock so she would just go on down to work.
Alma went out early too and ate lunch downtown.
He tried to read after they were gone, but the morning had exploded the myth that was already getting threadbare anyway, and he could not get back inside the book. He could only read it. Even after five or six drinks, he could still only read it. He could not forget to remember how he was not a thirty-year-man any more.
Well, what do you plan to do?
