by James Jones
“I never mentioned it to you,” Red said. “I saw you fight in the Bowl last year. Me and several thousand other guys. Holmes saw you, too. I’ve been sweatin him out to put the pressure on you, any time.”
“So have I,” Prew said. “I just guess he never found out I was here.”
“He won’t miss it on your Form 20 when you’re in his compny. He’ll want you for his boxing squad.”
“There’s nothin in the ARs says a man has got to jockstrap when he doesnt want to.”
“Come on,” Red taunted. “You think the ARs’ll bother him? when the Great White Father wants to keep that championship? You think he’ll let a fighter who’s got the rep you have just hibernate? in his own company? without fightin for the Regment? just because you decided once you wouldnt fight no more? Even a genius like you cant be that simple.”
“I dont know,” Prew said. “Chief Choate’s in his compny. Chief Choate use to be the heavyweight champ of Panama.”
“Yes,” Red said. “But Chief Choate’s the Great White Father’s fair-haired boy because he’s the best first baseman in the Hawaiian Department. Holmes cant pressure him. But even so, Chief Choate’s been in G Compny four years now, and he’s still a corporal.”
“Well,” Prew said. “If the Chief would transfer out, he could make Staff in any other compny. I guess if it gets too rough I can always transfer out myself.”
“Yeah?” Red said. “You think so? You know who the top kicker of George Co is?”
“Sure,” Prew said. “I know. Warden.”
“Thats right, man,” Red said. “Milton Anthony Warden. Who use to be our Staff in A Compny. The meanest son of a bitch in Schofield Barricks. And who hates you worse than poison.”
“Thats funny,” Prew said slowly. “I never felt that Warden hated me. I dont hate him.”
Red smiled bitterly. “After all the run-ins you’ve had with him? Even you cant be that green.”
“It wasnt him,” Prew said. “It was just that that was what his job was.”
“A man is his job,” Red said. “And now he’s not a Staff; he’s got two rockers and a diamond now. Listen, Prew. Everything’s against you. You’re movin into a game where every card is in the other hand.”
Prew nodded. “I know that,” he said.
“Go up and see the Old Man,” Red pleaded. “Theres still time this morning. I wouldnt steer you wrong. I’ve had to play politics all my life for what I wanted. I can sense the way a thing is going. All you got to do is see The Man, and he will tear them papers up.”
Prew stood up then, and standing, looking down into the anxious face of him who was his friend, he could feel the energy of sincerity that was pouring from Red’s eyes, pouring over him with a firehose concentration whose name was sincerity. And somehow it was a thing that startled him, that it should be there, and that he could see it, pleading with him.
“I cant do it, Red,” he said.
As if for the first time he was really giving up, was actually believing it, Red slumped back in his chair, the concentrated pouring dispersed and dissipated against this wall he did not understand.
“I hate to see you go,” he said.
“I just cant help it, Red,” Prew said.
“Okay,” Red said. “Have it your way, kid. Its your funeral.”
“Thats whats the matter,” Prewitt said.
Red ran his tongue over his teeth slowly, probing. “What do you aim to do about the git-tar, Prew?”
“You keep it. Its half yours anyway. I wont have no use for it,” Prew said.
The other coughed. “I ought at least to pay you for your half. Ony I’m broke right now,” he added, hastily.
Prewitt grinned; this was the Red he knew again. “I’m giving you my half, Red. No strings attached. Whats a matter? Dont you want it?”
“Sure. But?”
“Then keep it. If your conscience hurts you, you can say its payment for helping me to pack.”
“I hate to do that,” Red said.
“Figure it this way,” Prew said. “I’ll come back over now and then. I’m not going Stateside. I’ll come over and use it, every now and then.”
“No, you wont,” Red said. “We both know you wont. When a guy moves, he moves it all. The distance doesnt matter.”
Before this sudden honesty Prew had to look away. Red was right and Prew knew it, and Red knew he knew it. Transferring in the army was comparable to a civilian moving from one city to another. His friends either moved with him or they lost him. Even when he moved from, perhaps, a city that he loved to a city where he was the stranger. The chances for adventure in such moves were vastly overrated by the movies, and both knew it. It was not adventure Prewitt wanted; Red knew that he had no more illusions of adventure.
“The best bugler in the Regment,” Red said helplessly. “He just dont quit and go back to straight duty. They just dont do it.”
“The git-tar’s yours,” Prew said. “I’ll come back and play it now and then though,” he lied. He turned away quickly so he would not have to meet Red’s eyes. “I got to go.”
Red watched him toward the door and humanely did not contradict him. Prew never had been able to lie convincingly.
“Luck to you,” Red called after him. He watched until the screendoor slammed. Then he took his coffeecup over to where Young Choy was sweating industriously at the steamy nickel urn with its spouts and glass tube gauges, wishing it was five o’clock and he could have a beer instead.
Outside in the sallyport Prew donned his campaign hat, adjusting it meticulously, low on the forehead, high in back, cocked just a little bit. Around the band was the robin’s-egg-blue cord and acorns of the Infantry. Stiff as a board with sugar and the hatter’s iron it rode his head, a fresh blocked crown, the proud badge of his profession.
For a moment he stood looking at the lacquered trophycase, feeling the scant breeze the shadowed sallyport collected like a funnel collects rain. Among the other cups and statues in it, holding the place of honor, was the Hawaiian Division traveling trophy that Holmes’s boys had won last year, two golden fighters in a roped ring of gold.
He shrugged, and then he turned and paused, seeing the scene that never failed to touch him, a painting done in solid single tones, the timbre diminishing with the deepening perspective, framed by the entryway of the sallyport. The pale red-dusted green of the earthen square and on it the blue fatigues of Dog Company, and the olive halos. Behind them the screaming whiteness of the Second Battalion barracks; and behind the barracks, rising slowly, the red-and-green striping that was the mathematical fields of pineapple, immaculate as a well-kept tomato patch, a few bent figures indistinct in the distance toiling over them. And then the foothills, rolling higher, in that juicy green that has never starved for water. And then, fulfilling all the rising promise, the black peaks of the Waianae Range, biting a sky that echoed the fatigues, and cut only by the deep V of Kolekole Pass that was like a whore’s evening dress, promising things on the other side. More like a whore’s evening dress because he had been to Waianae and looked with disappointment on the other side.
Along the flanks of the hills his eye picked out the thin tracery of a line that faded out to the South. That was the Honouliuli Trail, the officers went riding there, with their women. You could always find innumerable condoms along the trail, and trees where the idle horses had chewed off bark. Your eyes always hunted for them, hiking, with a vicarious breathlessness that, if it had not been visible in each man’s face, would have shamed you.
Did a pineapple enjoy its life? or did it maybe get sick of being trimmed like seven thousand other pineapples? fed the same fertilizer as seven thousand other pineapples? standing till death did them part in the same rank and file like seven thousand other pineapples? You never knew. But you never saw a pineapple turn itself into a grapefruit, did you?
He stepped down on the sidewalk treading catlike on the balls of his feet the way a fighter treads, hat tilted, clean, immaculate, deci
sive, the picture of a soldier.
Chapter 2
ROBERT E LEE PREWITT had learned to play a guitar long before he ever learned to bugle or to box. He learned it as a boy, and with it he learned a lot of blues songs and laments. In the Kentucky Mountains along the West Virginia Line life led him swiftly to that type of music. And this was long before he ever seriously considered becoming a member of The Profession.
In the Kentucky Mountains along the West Virginia Line guitar playing is not considered the accomplishment it is most places. Every well-bred boy learns to chord a guitar when he is still small enough to hold it like a string bass. The boy Prewitt loved the songs because they gave him something, an understanding, a first hint that pain might not be pointless if you could only turn it into something. The songs stayed with him, but the guitar playing did not give him anything. It left him cold. He had no call for it at all.
He had no call for boxing either. But he was very fast and had an incredible punch, developed by necessity on the bum, before he entered The Profession. People always find those things out. They tend to become manifest. Especially in The Profession where sports are the nourishment of life and boxing is the most manly sport. Beer, in The Profession, is the wine of life.
To tell the truth, he had no call for The Profession. At least not then. As a dissatisfied son of a Harlan County miner he just naturally gravitated toward it, the only profession open to him.
He really had no call for anything until the first time he handled a bugle.
It started as a joke on a battalion beer convention and he only held it and blew a couple of bleats, but he knew at once that this was something different. It was somehow something sacred, the way you sit out at night and watch the stars and your eye consciously spans that distance and you wonder if you’re sitting on an electron that revolves around a proton in a series of infinite universes, and you suddenly see how strange a tree would look to one who had never lived upon the earth.
He had wild visions, for a moment, of having once played a herald’s trumpet for the coronations and of having called the legions to bed down around the smoking campfires in the long blue evenings of old Palestine. It was then he remembered that hint about pointlessness that the blues songs and laments had given him; he knew then that if he could play a bugle the way he thought a bugle he would have found his justification. He even realized, all at once, holding the bugle, the reason why he had ever got into The Profession at all, a problem that had stumped him up till then. That was actually how much it meant to him. He recognized he had a call.
He had heard a lot about The Profession as a boy. He would sit on the railless porch with the men when the long tired, dirty-faced evening rolled down the narrow valley, thankfully blotting out the streets of shacks, and listen to them talk. His Uncle John Turner, tall, rawboned and spare, had run away as a boy and joined The Profession, to find Adventure. He had been a corporal in the Philippine Insurrection.
The boy Prewitt’s father and the others had never been beyond the hills, and in the boy’s mind, already even then bludgeoning instinctively against the propaganda of the walls of slag as the fœtus kicks frantically against the propaganda of the womb, this fact of The Profession gave to Uncle John Turner a distinction no one else could claim.
The tall man would squat on his hams in the little yard—the coal dirt was too thick on all the ground to sit—and in an abortive effort to dispel the taste of what the Encyclopedias call “Black Gold” he would tell them stories that proved conclusively there was a world beyond the slag heaps and these trees whose leaves were always coated black.
Uncle John would tell about the Moro juramentados, how their native Moslem datu would call the single volunteer up before the tribe and anoint him and consecrate him to the heaven he was getting ready to attend and then, practically, bind his balls and pecker with wet rawhide before he ran amok, so that the pain of the contraction of the drying leather would keep him going. That was why, said Uncle John, the Army first adopted the .45. Because six slugs from a .38 Special would not knock a juramentado down. And, in his condition, obviously, you had to knock him down to stop him. The .45 was guaranteed to knock any man off his feet, if it only hit the tip of his little finger, or your money back. And the Army, said Uncle John, had been using it effectively ever since.
The boy Prewitt doubted that about the little finger, but he liked the story. It impressed him with a sense of seeing history made, as did the stories of young Hugh Drum and young John Pershing and the expedition on Mindanao and the trek around the edge of Lake Lanao. They proved the Moros were good men, worthy opponents of his Uncle John. Sometimes when his Uncle John had swilled enough white lightning he would sing the song about the “monkeys have no tails in Zamboanga” that had been his Regimental song. And he would alternate the Philippines with Mexico and stories of an older, much less informal Blackjack and of young Sandy Patch, not yet too great a man to be informal.
But Uncle John always made it plain, especially to the boy, the reason why he had come home in 1916 and stayed in Harlan mining coal all during the World War. Uncle John wanted to be a farmer, and it was probably this that kept him from acquiring that Great, American, Retrospective Spirit of Romance.
It would be nice to think of a grubby miner’s son with a dirt-rimmed mouth possessed of so burning a dream to see the world and help make history, via The Profession, that he refused to have it thwarted. But the sons of Harlan miners cannot afford that greatest luxury of all: Romance; at that time they did not even have a movie house to help them kid themselves. And Uncle John Turner was not the kind of man who’d let his nephew dream of a life of adventure, via The Profession, and have it on his conscience.
It happened quite, quite differently.
When the boy Prewitt was in the seventh grade his mother died of the consumption. There was a big strike on that winter and she died in the middle of it. If she had had her choice, she could have picked a better time. Her husband, who was a striker, was in the county jail with two stab wounds in his chest and a fractured skull. And her brother, Uncle John, was dead, having been shot by several deputies. Years later there was a lament written and sung about that day. They said blood actually ran like rainwater in the gutters of Harlan that day. They gave Uncle John Turner the top billing, a thing he doubtless would have decried with vigor.
The boy Prewitt saw that battle, at least as near as any man can ever come to seeing any battle. The only thing he saw and could remember was his Uncle John. He and two other boys stood in a yard to watch until one of the other boys got hit with a stray bullet, then they ran home and did not watch the rest.
Uncle John had had his .45 and he shot three deputies, two of them as he was going down. He only got to fire three times. The boy was interested in proving the guarantee of the .45, but since all the deputies were hit in the head they would have gone down anyway. Uncle John did not hit any of them on the tip of the little finger.
So when his mother died there was nobody to stop him except his father in the jail, and since his father had beaten him again just two days before the battle he did not figure his father counted either. Having made up his mind, he took the two dollars that was in the grocery jar, telling himself his mother would not need it and it would be good enough for his father and would help to put them square, and he left. The neighbors took up a collection for his mother’s funeral but he did not want to see it.
The disintegration of a family, where the family still has meaning, emotes tragedy in every one. Its consolatory picture is of the surviving member freed to follow his lifelong ambition, a sort of Dick Whittington with a bandanna tied to a stick but no cat. But it was not this with him either, any more than it was the burning dream to see the world and help make history. He had never heard of a Lord Mayor and he had no ambition. The Profession, and the bugle, came much later.
As she was dying his mother made him promise her one thing. “Promise me one thing, Robert,” she wheezed at him. “From your father
you got pride and endurance and I knowed that you would need it. But one of you would have kilt the other if it hatnt of been for me. And now, I wont be standin atween you no more.”
“I’ll promise anything you want, ma, whatever you say for me to promise, whatever it is you say,” the boy, watching her die in front of him, looking at her above his haze of disbelief for signs of immortality, said woodenly.
“A deathbed promise is the most sacred one there is,” she hawked at him from the lungs that were almost, but not quite, filled up yet, “and I want you to make me this promise on my deathbed: Promise me you wont never hurt nobody unless its absolute a must, unless you jist have to do it.”
“I promise you,” he vowed to her, still waiting for the angels to appear. “Are you afraid?” he said.
“Give me your hand on it, boy. It is a deathbed promise, and you’ll never break it.”
“Yes maam,” he said, giving her his hand, drawing it back quickly, afraid to touch the death he saw in her, unable to find anything beautiful or edifying or spiritually uplifting in this return to God. He watched a while longer for signs of immortality. No angels came, however, there was no earthquake, no cataclysm, and it was not until he had thought over often this first death that he had had a part in that he discovered the single uplifting thing about it, that being the fact that in this last great period of fear her thought had been upon his future, rather than her own. He wondered often after that about his own death, how it would come, how it would feel, what it would be like to know that this breath, now, was the last one. It was hard to accept that he, who was the hub of this known universe, would cease to exist, but it was an inevitability and he did not shun it. He only hoped that he would meet it with the same magnificent indifference with which she who had been his mother met it. Because it was there, he felt, that the immortality he had not seen was hidden.
