by James Jones
“Oh, Milt,” Karen said. “I dont want to be bait, Milt. I love you, Milt. I want to help you, not hurt you.”
“Listen,” Warden said enthusiastically. “I’ve got a 30-day re-up furlough coming to me that I’ve been putting off ever since I got in this Company. And I’ve got $600 downtown in the bank. You and me are going to take that furlough, to anyplace in the Islands you want to go, and we’re going to have us a time none of them will ever be able to take away from us, war or no war, hell or high water.”
“Oh, Milt,” she said softly, and in the saying of it made him feel finer than he could remember ever having felt in his life, “that would be wonderful. Imagine it, just the two of us, with no hiding and no acts to put on. Wouldnt it be wonderful.”
“It will be wonderful,” he corrected.
“Oh, if we only could.”
“We not only can; we will. Whats to stop us?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing except ourselves.”
“Okay then.”
“Oh, dont you see, Milt? I couldn’t leave for that long. Its a wonderful dream, and I love you for it, but we couldnt do it. I couldnt leave Junior for that long.”
“Why not? You’re going to leave him for good someday,” he said doggedly. “Aint you?”
“Of course I am,” Karen said helplessly, “but thats different. Until I make the break I have a responsibility to him that I cant just shrug off. The poor little devil will have a hard enough time of it as it is, with the life he’s had all picked out for him. I owe him at least that much.
“Oh, Milt, dont you see? Its a dream. We couldnt get by with it. How would I explain my being gone for a whole month? Dana suspects something now, and if—”
“Let him suspect, the son of a bitch. He’s been true to you, hasnt he?”
“But we cant do that. We have to keep it a secret until you’ve gotten a commission and are out of his Company, the whole thing depends on that. Dont you see?”
“I’ve never liked hiding from him,” Warden said stubbornly, “who the hell is he I should hide from him?”
“Its not who he is, its what he is. You know that, Milt. And if I were to be gone for a month just at the same time you took your furlough . . .”
“I know it,” Warden said sullenly. “Its just that sometimes it gets my goat and I get sick of it.”
“Dont you think I get sick of it, too? I’m trying to set it up for us. How could I explain it?”
“You’ve got a cousin living in Lihue, haven’t you?” Warden said, cursing himself for grasping at straws. “Tell him you’re going to take a month with your cousin and have him send your mail there. You Southerners do that all the time. He wouldnt think anything about that.”
“But that would mean taking her in on it!”
“Okay, so what?”
“Milt!!”
“Well? In the game we play you got to utilize everything.”
“You dont know her. I couldnt do that. I just couldnt!”
“All right then, you wouldnt have to,” he said stubbornly, looking with wonder at her who could be so spine-chillingly calculating about that it frightened him. Gag at a gnat and swallow a camel. “Just write her and have her forward your mail. She wouldnt have to know who you were with, or if you were with anybody. Let her think it was a family row. She’d keep her mouth shut if she thought it was a fight with Dana, wouldnt she?”
“Of course she would,” Karen said loyally. “She doesnt like Dana any better than I do. But we couldn’t get by with it, Milt. Dont you see? Not for thirty days. Maybe for ten. I could probably get away for ten days. But not thirty. You could take your furlough and then a week later I could leave and meet you somewhere for ten days and then come home early, before you did.”
Warden was trying to divide his dream down by three. It was a hard job. You couldnt even spend $600 in ten days. He did not answer.
“Oh, Milt,” she said, “dont you see how it is? I’d love it. I’d do anything to have the chance. But not for thirty days, Milt, dont you see? I just cant.”
“I guess thats right,” he said. “I guess it was only a pipe-dream anyway.”
“Oh when?” she said. “Oh, Milt, when? Are we going to have to go on like this forever? Wont we ever be able to do things without being afraid? without having to calculate and scheme and hide out like criminals? When, Milt, when?”
“There now,” Warden said. “There, baby, there now. Ten days is all right. Ten days is fine. It’ll work out, you’ll see,” he said, stroking the back of the small fragile head that always made him feel loutish and clumsily dangerous as if he were handling eggs. “Ten days? Hell,” he said, “ten days is a lifetime. You’ll see.”
“I cant take it like this much longer, Milt,” Karen said muffledly into the big CKC shirt with its male smell, allowing herself the luxury of letting the bars all the way down for once, enjoying for just this moment the eternal degradation of being a woman.
“I cant take it much longer,” she whimpered, tasting it, the eternally caught and held hard in the grasp of some man, the forever humiliated under his improper liberties, the eternally imprisoned under his lead-heavy weight it was impossible to squirm out from under, the forever helpless except for the mercy of him who always takes what he wants without any, and that all women learn instinctively not to expect. “I cant even walk over to the Commissary without feeling all their eyes on the back of my neck. I’ve never been so openly degraded in my whole life,” she said, savoring it. That was all they wanted. That was all any of them wanted. You give them the greatest thing you possess, the most intimate secret, and they—just take it. Well, let them have it. Let them all have some of it. Let them root and rut and rowel, if it was no more important than that why were they all so anxious to keep it away from each other? “I cant take it much longer, Milt,” she whispered.
“There,” Warden said, feeling the blood come up chargingly into his eyes and turn everything red like a mountain twilight, and not knowing why, “there, there. You wont have to, baby. You wont have to take it. Come on,” he said, “lets go down to the beach and have a good hard swim and then go someplace and have a party.” The second it was out he knew he shouldnt have said it.
Karen sat up and stared at him piercingly with eyes like a cat’s, the tears still dribbling out of them.
“It isnt just sex, is it, Milt?” she asked, with the ringing tension of a rockcrystal that too heavy a touch will crack all apart. “It isnt just animal sex, is it? You want more than that, dont you? Theres more to it than that, isnt there, Milt? I know theres more to love than that. Isnt there, Milt?”
Warden held his love up by one corner and inspected it under the magnifying glass of animal sex.
“Isn’t it, Milt?”
“Of course it is. Its a lot more than that.” There was no use trying to argue it, or explain it again. He had wanted her badly, there for a moment; now he didnt care much. You had to work so hard to get it that finally, when you did get it, it was a letdown. The peak, like the first day there at the house, was already passed and the starch was all gone out of you for it.
“If it wasn’t,” Karen said, “you’d never see me again.”
“It’s just a whole hell of a lot more than that,” Warden said. “You just can’t put it into words, is all. Come on, let’s go have that good hard swim down on the beach. Did you know Hanauma Bay was the Company CP when we’re out on Invasion Maneuvers?”
If you couldnt have 30 days, you would settle for ten. If you couldn’t have it when it was right, you would wait until it was right—unless in the waiting it got to be hot for you to handle and then you would take one and crawl off and go back to sleep, just like any of the rest of the married men.
“Come on,” he said, feeling the steam pressure which the fire had generated but not provided with a safety valve, “lets go swim.”
“But dont you have to get back to the Post?” Karen said apprehensively.
“To hell with it.�
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“No,” she insisted, “you cant just do that. You shouldnt even have come down in the first place, you know you shouldnt. And you’ve been away much too long now.”
“I said, to hell with it!” Warden said violently. “Jesus Christ, cant I even take a quick swim? A half hour more wont make any difference.”
“No,” Karen said, quite calmly positive now. “I wont let you do it. No matter how much I would like to. I’m going to drive you back to town, and you’re going to catch a cab right back to the Post.”
“Okay,” Warden said. “Okay. I didn’t want to swim anyway.” It wouldnt have been any good now anyway, neither the good hard swim nor the party he had wanted to have, it was just too much work. He sat back in the seat and let her drive back to town proudly as if she were making a great sacrifice as happily as a Boy Scout doing his good deed for the day. And he sat beside her, smoking almost as viciously, and staring out the windshield almost as moodily, as he had on the way out, but for a different reason.
“You can write me when you find out about the furlough,” she said. “Write it in a plain envelope with no return address and mail it from downtown. Instead of calling me up. Thats not too much to ask, is it?”
“No,” he said. “Thats not too much to ask.”
She insisted on parking on Richards Street down at the corner of the block from the Y until she had seen him in his Schofield Cab. He did not even have a chance to sneak across to the Black Cat for a drink.
Warden sat in the back seat of the cab, between two drunken swabbies just in from Dago who were going sightseeing at Schofield, and watched her drive past him and off down Hotel Street, while the cabbie completed his full load he had been waiting for.
For a long time now Milt Warden had felt that Dana had been secretly laughing at him. Dana could (he almost always called him Dana now in his mind; sleeping with a man’s wife apparently bred intimacy; maybe that was why the Army policy was against it so much, for the EM)—Dana could afford to laugh. Because lately, more and more, Warden had begun to divine out the reason:
She was Dana’s wife. Meaning she was married to him by the Law, had borne him his child, and depended on him for the security and freedom and money she had to have to be able to carry on a love affair with Milt Warden. Money that came in regular every month year after year, not just now and then haphazardly like poker money. Security that Milt Warden could not provide her with for years. Freedom that Milt Warden would never provide her with, as long as Milt Warden loved her.
No wonder Dana could afford to laugh. She might love Milt Warden, but Dana Holmes was the base that she worked out of. If she went out with Milt Warden every afternoon, she was still always religiously home to Dana before nine. It was as if they had a business contract that he could not break.
Dana held all the cards. And with that sanguine beef-eating middleclass assurance, that Warden who had never had it suddenly hated more implacably than ever, Dana knew he held all the cards. All Dana had to do was sit tight and wait, give her her head like you always give a nervous high-spirited mare her head. (You never snaffle a high-spirited mare, gentlemen; and you never set your foot down with a high-spirited wife.)
You just wait, gentlemen. And employ patience, that greatest of all virtues.
Eventually she will get tired of love again bruised and shivering, warm for you in the spasm of her guilt again, to renew her strength once more, before going out on the next adventure. For as long as you silently accusingly keep the hearth waiting for her her sense of obligation and guilt, plus her innate love of warmth, will never let her escape it, gentlemen.
Dana had Society, Respectability, Tradition, Moral judgment, Time, Security (especially Security), and the generations of cuckolded husbands who had provided him with lessons in how to win by employing patience.
Dana Holmes could afford to laugh at Milt Warden who had the audacity to try to defeat this array of heavy artillery with the popgun of Love. Because could you just point out to me once, please, sir, one single time that Love had ever bought anything? In these United States of the United Middle Class of Solid-Fronted United Greater America?
And Milt Warden felt this every time he watched her drive her husband’s battered Buick club coupé back home again.
Probably, Milt Warden thought the many times he watched her drive off down King Street through the traffic, she had come creeping back home often enough in the past that Dana knew the procedure ahead of time in advance.
Probably, Milt Warden thought the many times he watched her taillight disappear into a myriad of other taillights from the corners she had let him out on, she lets him have enough in between times to keep him hanging fire from going all the way and divorcing her.
Maybe, he thought the many times he carried the argument on out to its logical end, she even lets him have some now and then during the big love affairs, if she gauges the wind and finds it going against her. Maybe she’s going home to do it right now.
Certainly Dana would not let her get away with all she’s getting by, not unless he was getting something. Because Milt Warden knew positively that he wouldnt.
Probably, Milt Warden thought the many times he watched her leave him and go on back home, she doesnt really mind it. A woman couldnt live with a man for twelve or fifteen years without at least getting used to it, without its becoming at least less than uncomfortable.
Because Milt Warden thought all of these things, every time he watched her drive the Buick home.
His trouble was when he had admitted to her and to himself that he loved her. That was always the greatest single blunder in this game. That put him in her power as Dana had never been in her power. She could make him do anything now, even become an officer, now that she was sure he did love her. He was no longer a free agent, and as a result the old wild terrible strength that had been the power and pride of Milt Warden was gone.
But he only thought these things when he watched her driving back home. He never seemed to think them when he was with her. When he was with her, he only thought about how fine it was to be in love.
He got home early enough to make out his application for Infantry Officer’s extension course before chow. The remaining Bloom papers were still on his desk and he shoved them out of the way to make out the application. Then he signed it and put it on Holmes’s desk and went back to the Bloom papers and finished them up and sat back in his chair to await chow, and further developments.
Within a week the developments came, and Ike Galovitch was unceremoniously relieved from the supplyroom in favor of now-S/Sgt Pete Karelsen, to whom Dana (—oops; Capt Holmes—) bequeathed the by now more unintelligible snarl and coerced him into taking it by threatening his rating and the solemn promise that as soon as he trained the new featherweight NCO School Graduate Malleaux to take over he could go back to his beloved weapons platoon. Pete refused to speak to Warden for two weeks.
But before that, Capt Holmes had come in in the morning to find the signed application there on his desk and been so overjoyed that he offered his 1st/Sgt a three-day-pass on the spot, in spite of the state of the Company Administration, and when Warden refused it because (as he said) he did not feel he could take off at a time like this when the Company was in such a bad hole, was not only more overjoyed but could barely speak his appreciation and began for the first time in months to carry his topkicker around on a chip. Warden waited until the day after Pete was installed in the supplyroom to ask for his thirty day re-enlistment furlough.
Before such a request even Holmes’s ardent goodwill blanched visibly.
“But my god, Sergeant! Thirty days!” he said, without even clapping his hand to his head. “Its impossible! You know that. I’ll gladly give you a three-day-pass; I told you so; even two consecutive three-day’s. Then you would be able to save up your furlough time without having anything put on the books. But thirty days! my god!” he protested. “At a time like this?”
“Sir, I’ve had it coming to me for over a
year,” Warden bored on implacably. “And I’ve kept on postponing it. If I dont take it now, I’ll never get it. With Sgt Karelsen in the supplyroom we’re as near as we’ll be to an even keel for at least another six months. And if I wait that long I’ll never get it.”
“By the books,” Holmes said flatly, his goodwill receding still further, “you’re not even entitled to it at all, now. You know that yourself, Sergeant. If you let a re-up furlough lapse for over three months its cancelled. You should have taken it then, at the time.”
“By the books, I should have let this outfit go on down the shutes,” Warden said. “The reason I didnt take it was to get this Compny back on its feet, and you know it, Sir.”
“Even so,” Holmes said waveringly. “Thirty days! At a time like this! Its just simply impossible.”
“I postponed it for the good of the Compny,” Warden said doggedly. He knew better than to make it anything as crude as an open threat, that would only have made Holmes refuse out of pride. But the implication was there; and the memory of Leva’s week-old transfer was still fresh. Capt Dynamite Holmes was no longer Jake Delbert’s fair-haired boy.
Dynamite pushed his hat back on his head and sat down at his desk.
“I’ll tell you something, Sergeant,” he said confidentially. “You’re going to be an Officer yourself soon, and it might help you a little about how to get on.
“Sit down,” Dynamite said, “sit down, Sergeant. Hells fire, you’ll be beating me at poker up at the Club within two or three months. Theres no need for us to go on maintaining the formality of Officer and EM.”
Warden sat down gingerly, feeling like a newly successful novelist from the sticks at a literary tea party.
“I dont expect to be in the Regiment very much longer,” Dynamite said expansively, but still confidentially. “Of course, you understand, this mustnt go any further. But I’m expecting to be reassigned to Brigade Headquarters as a Major at the personal order of General Slater, within the next month or two.”
“That’s fine,” Warden heard himself say.
“You may have thought, as so many others have, that I’ve been cutting my own throat around here by getting on the Great White Father’s shitlist,” Dynamite grinned. “Well, theres been a method in my madness. Thats what they dont know. I expect to be taken on as General Slater’s personal aide,” he said extravagantly, and paused.
