by James Jones
There was that same loving look on both their faces again, more pronounced now, of an almost unbelievable happy tenderness.
“You gals sure treat your invalids right,” he grinned at them. “How about a cigaret now?”
Alma lit it for him. It tasted wonderful, better than the one in the alley, because now he could relax with it. He dragged the smoke deep into his lungs and it seemed to ease the stiff sore fire of indignant protest from his side, even though it hurt to breathe that deep.
It hurt also, considerably, when they had helped him back down; and that, he reminded himself, is only today. Wait till tomorrow. And then wait till the second day which will be even worse. But it didnt hurt nearly so much as the big gesture of sitting up by himself. Well, okay, to hell with the gestures, he thought, letting himself sink back down into the luxurious will-less irresponsibility that is the nicest thing about being bad sick.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m all right now. You gals might as well go on back to bed.”
“We’ve stayed up this long,” Alma smiled happily. “We might as well stay up the rest of the night.”
“You dont get any more chances to doctor invalids than I get chances to be sick, do you?” he grinned.
“Now you just go back to sleep,” she said bossily. “Try not to talk. Try to rest.”
“But dont you want to hear all about the big fight?”
“We’ll read about it in the paper tomorrow,” Georgette said.
“Okay, doc,” he grinned.
“Do you think you can sleep all right?” Alma said.
“Sure,” he said. “Sleep like a top.”
“I’ll give you a sedative if you want.”
“Wont even need it.” And he had lain and watched them as they turned off all the lights but the night light on the end-table and then go back to their chairs in the gloom, Alma to the armchair this time and Georgette to the chaise-longue.
The radio-bar was still in the corner of the sunken tile floor by the steps to the kitchen and the record-player was still on the little table by the record-cabinet and the three steps still went up to the glass doors that opened out onto the fairy-tale porch over Palolo Valley. He could hear their breathings there in the dark room, positive, comforting, reassuring, as he tried to get comfortable with the soreness. In a way, it was a good bit like coming home from someplace. And he did not care much if he couldnt sleep. He was more than content to just lie and look at all of it. Hell, it was almost like being a regular civilian. And he had lain like that for a long time without disturbing either one of them.
But he did not feel nearly so chipper next morning, when he awoke to the stiffness and soreness that is always worse the next day. Alma and Georgette were already up and had gone out for the steak and studied the paper. There was nothing in the paper. He did not have any appetite but they fed him the steak anyway, Georgette holding him up while Alma cut it and forked it into his mouth like a farmer forking hay into a mow, and every hour or so they made him drink a cup of the beef bouillon that, as Georgette had prophesied, he was already sick at the thought of.
Alma phoned in to Mrs Kipfer and asked for, and got, three days off. Mrs Kipfer did not believe she was menstruating, and Alma knew she did not believe it. But it was the time-honored excuse of her business, that the favorites could get by with, just like the dead-grandmother-furlough in the Army, that the favorites could always get away with; nobody was expected to believe it.
They settled down to taking care of the invalid. They made him stay on the divan until almost evening, before they moved him in on Alma’s bed, and they absolutely refused to change the tight bandage until at least the second day. He did not turn down the sedatives this time.
It was in the paper the second day. They had searched for and found it before he woke up. After they fed him his breakfast of liver and onions, they showed it to him. Right then, he would not have cared enough to have looked for it. He hardly bothered himself to read it when they held it up in front of him.
He had expected to see it in 60-point banner headlines spread over the whole front page, with his name as the hunted killer just below it in 20-point; instead, it was on page 4 almost down at the bottom with a bannerhead of 12-point and not quite two inches of type that was a marvel of brevity and said, in effect, that another soldier had been found dead in another alley of a knife wound, that his name was S/Sgt James R Judson, that he had been in the Army 10 years and came from Breathitt County Kentucky, that he had been Chief Guard at the Schofield Barracks Post Stockade and because of this it was believed that he had been murdered by some vengeance-crazed ex-prisoner for some fancied wrong, possibly by a recently escaped convict whose apprehension was expected by the Army at any moment named Pvt John J Malloy. The deceased, it said, had been unarmed and was apparently not expecting to be attacked as there was a look of complete surprise still on his face. No witness could be found. The employees of the Log Cabin Bar and Grill near which the body was found remembered the deceased who had patronized them that evening but could not say when he had left or with whom.
He had a hard time coming back up out of the pain of his sorely stiffening side that almost had him giggling again now, to concentrate his mind on it. But he was able to glean two or three things. Apparently nobody, neither the two sailors who had not come forward nor the bartenders who had been called forward, wanted any part in it, for one. And apparently someone had found the body before the Law did and acquired themselves a good knife, for another. And, after figuring quite a while, he came up with the startling discovery that the recently escaped convict named Pvt John J Malloy must be Jack Malloy and that, for lack of anything better, they were going to pin it on him for a while, for the public at least.
And this brought him to the thing he had been searching his mind for all the time he was reading it but had not been able to quite catch up with: that this was only a newspaper article for the public in general. And newspapers had a notorious reputation, even amongst us illiterates in the Regular Army, he thought gigglingly, of writing only what was thought to be the best for the public at the moment without hampering or hamstringing their more important purpose too terribly much with the truth. It might not any of it be true at all since it was in a newspaper, and maybe they only wrote it in hopes that Prewitt the murderer would tip his hand and give himself up with the expectation of getting off with no more than a charge of AWOL. It might be, he thought laughingly craftily, they were only laying for him and waiting.
And as for them ever catching up with Pvt John J Malloy—he had to laugh outright, even though it hurt his sore side. Nobody but a goddam stupid fool would ever believe a newspaper article anyway.
“It don’t look too awful bad,” Georgette offered, finally.
“Yeah,” he grinned at them slyly, “but how I know this aint just a spiel to make me feel safe enough to show my hand?”
“That’s just it,” Georgette said. “You don’t.”
“Did anyone see you at all?” Alma asked.
“He came out of the Log Cabin with two sailors. I know they saw me, but I dont know if they saw me well enough to recognize me because it was dark and they were 30 or 40 yards away.”
“Well anyway,” Alma said hopefully, “they haven’t shown up yet. It looks like they don’t want to get mixed up in it either way.”
“Yeah,” he said, “—if you can believe this newspaper article. The cops may have them down to headquarters right now, for all I know.”
“Amen,” Georgette said fervently.
“Even if I was to go back after I was all healed up,” he said, “they’d still get me for an AWOL. And with my record, that’d mean at least six months. I aint going to put no more time in no more Stockades, even for an AWOL.”
“After hearing you talk about Stockades,” Georgette grinned. “I cant say I blame you a whole hell of a lot.”
“Well,” Alma said, “we better get out of here and let him rest, whatever happens. How does it feel now?�
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“Okay,” he said, “a little sore.” He could feel himself grinning sillily like he always did when he was in pain and he had to choke back a hunger to laugh.
“I’ll give you another sedative, if you want,” Alma said.
“I dont much like them things,” he grinned sillily.
“They cant hurt you any.”
“I couldn’t sleep anyway,” he grinned sillily. “Whynt you save them for tonight.”
“That would be the best idea,” Georgette said.
“I hate to see you in such pain,” Alma said nervously.
“Hell, this aint nothin,” he grinned sillily. “Lemme tell you about the time I broke my arm on the bum and dint have no dough to go to a doctor.”
“Come on,” Georgette said. “Lets get out of here and leave him alone.”
He watched them go out and then lay back with it, wanting to laugh again. He moved his slitted eyelids a little and watched the kaleidoscope play of distorted light fragments against his eyeballs for a while, they were unending variations that were never quite the same twice and he could watch their shiftings for hours. Then after a while the pictures started coming up in his brain and he shut his eyes all the way and lay, letting the half-formed images rise, watching the stories they acted out, curious to see what would happen in the end, like with a mystery movie. It was the way it is just before sleep, and while you knew you could not sleep now, you could stay like this for hours at a time, if you knew how, watching the stories that were just as good—were even better than—movies, because these stories were not subjected to any Hays Office, and if you wanted a movie with naked women you could have it, all you had to do was think it. There was one he played with a long time that had as its jumping off place the last time they had fed him when Georgette held him up and he wondered, as he went on absorbedly watching the movie, why he had never noticed Georgette at the Ritz Rooms, he had been to the Ritz Rooms quite a few times before he got in the Company.
Alma gave him three sedatives that night, but in the morning he knew it had made the top of the grade and was starting down hill finally. He could tell because he wanted to get out of bed. It took all his will power to get himself up stiffly onto his feet, and the sore stiffness in his side protested indignantly, but the thing was, not so much that he could, but that in spite of the hurt he still wanted to do it. He knew it was on the downgrade then.
He navigated the three steps down to the living room shakily, and found that Alma had moved a sheet and pillow onto the divan and was sleeping there where she could hear him if he called. He had assumed she was sleeping with Georgette in the other bedroom, and it hit him hard. So hard that tears came into his eyes and he remembered, again, suddenly, how much he loved her, and went over and sat down and kissed her and put his hand on her breast solid-soft under the silk pajamas.
She woke immediately, and was as immediately angrily horrified to find him out of the bed. She not only insisted he go back to bed but insisted on helping him.
“Come on,” he grinned from the bed, “lie down here for a while. Its a lot more comfortable than out there.”
“No,” she said irrefragably, more shocked than angry. “Absolutely not. You know what’ll happen if I do, and you’re in no condition for any parties.”
“What the hell,” he said, “sure I am. Its my side thats sore,” he grinned. “If I lay on my back and dont have to do any of the work, I be as good as I ever was.”
“No,” she said angrily, she was always angry at him afterwards, whether it reached the plane of action or not, as if he had deliberately degraded her. “You need to save your strength.”
He could have argued that one, but it was useless to argue once it was gone, argument only drove it further away, he knew from experience you could not arouse whatever it was by argument and the best he would get would only be the ice statue again all locked up inside, and the ice statue wasnt worth even the argument let alone the energy, so he did not argue; instead he lay in the bed while she went out to fix breakfast, feeling a hot fever all over that had absolutely nothing to do with the sore side and that greatly colored the mental movies until they had nothing to do with love at all, this fever that burned up all the meat (called Love) and left only the bare bones (called whatever it was the Hays Office called it, Rut maybe, Lust probably, raw hot bloody Lust) that were the skeleton under the meat of every man’s love no matter how much they denied it, and that could be satisfied anywhere anyway anywho (although the women always stoutly refused to believe this and were therefore the Board Founders and Charter Designers of the whorehouse male and female that they decried), but that he could not get up and go satisfy now, so he just lay in the bed with the burning hot fever that had nothing to do with his sore side, and listened to her fix breakfast.
That afternoon they finally changed the tight bandage and put on a looser. The compress was incorporated into the scab by the coagulation so they left it on. They took it off two days later, amid much cursing and sweating, and exposed the lumpy corrugated wet pink new scar tissue beginning to fill in at the edges and bottom, before they put on a new one. But that time the ice statue, because of his increasing insistence which he had sworn he would not voice but still had voiced anyway, had suffered him once.
They kept him in the bed for a week. They even changed the sheets with him in it, pushing the slack of the clean sheet up against him on one side and having him roll over onto it while they pulled the slack out the other side and tucked it in in the accepted hospitalnurse manner. And on the faces of both, the brilliant crystal-hard Georgette, and the opaque thoughtful absolute-realist Alma, was the some beaming lambency like on some painter’s St Anne and Madonna cuddling St John and Jesus, the same smile of the first day that he had never seen on either of them before then: maternal, solicitous, very happy, infinitely protective, such a bottomless flood of maternal tenderness that it threatened to engulf him forever and drown him in the soft bosoms of matriarchy. He was surprised at them, two such self-avowed realists, they were not even ashamed of it enough to try to hide it. Their motives were openly obvious. Two whores who finally found something to mother. A guy could write a book about it, he thought bitterly, call it From Hair to Maternity. It would probly be a very long book. Whores did not produce as fast as rabbits. At first he had abandoned himself to this joyous nursing gratefully, but now he forgot all about enjoying being sick and struggled against it, suddenly afraid it was so powerful they would end up making an invalid for life out of him.
He did not, of course, stay in bed all afternoon and evening while they were both gone to work. As soon as they were out of the house he got up and dressed himself in the civie slacks they had washed the blood out of for him and put on one of the new T-shirts they had bought for him to take the place of the ruined shirt they had burned for him, and practiced walking up and down and around the house they had made into a hideout for him, so as to keep from making a goddam permanent cripple out of him. He knew enough to know that when it had reached this stage of mending it was better to use it than to lie there in the bed and let it atrophy like they wanted him to. He did not intend to let himself be turned into an invalid for life just because their frustrated maternal instincts needed something to baby.
It was nice there in the house by himself. At first he had trouble getting into the clothes, but every day he made himself do it and it made it noticeably that much easier the next day, and by the second week (when they allowed him to get out of bed—after being openly surprised at how well he managed—and helped him into the dressing gown they had bought him after much discussion of styles and colors) he could get out of the dressing gown and into the clothes almost as easily as if he had never been cut at all, after they left for work.
He would mix himself a good stiff drink (they did not let him have any liquor, when they were home) and go out and sit on the porch in the afternoon sun (they did not allow him outside on account of catching a cold, when they were home) and maybe read a litt
le in one of their books (Georgette belonged to the Book of the Month Club, “just for the hell of it,” she grinned, “after all, I do live on Maunalani Heights, and the books look good in the livingroom even if I dont read them”) and get himself pleasantly three-fourths tight and watch the sunset. He was always in bed asleep when they got home from work, so they did not find out about it until the end of the second week when Alma came home half-tight from work one night and came in and fell on his bed maulingly, forgetting all about his sore side, and smelled the liquor on his breath and came to herself and gave him all kinds of hell for drinking.
That let the secret out of the bag, so he got up and showed them both how well he got around and how easily he dressed himself. They did not like it, but they both accepted the inevitable, Alma a little more reluctantly than Georgette. They watched him go through his act with a kind of hurt look on their faces, like a mother whose son has come home so drunk and with such an easily readable address of the local whorehouse sticking out of his pocket that she finally has to admit, even to herself, that he is, at last, grown up. They did not say much; and congratulated him, half-heartedly; and after that the restrictions were off and it was all right.
But even then he still liked it better when he was there by himself. He would look around at everything and think how there was all the time in the world, no Reveille to be back for tomorrow, no weekend pass that would have to end again Monday morning, no place to go and no specified time to go there in. He lived perpetually in the old on-pass feeling of life did not begin again till Monday morning except now there was no Monday morning to worry about. He would play through the records, and run through all the books, and go around feeling the furnishings, and feel the tile floor and the Jap mats on the porch with his bare feet, and in the evening he would make his own evening meal himself in the shining white kitchen where he knew just exactly where everything was. All the books with their brightly colored jackets (Georgette had been in the Book of the Month Club three years and she always took every book, plus all the dividends) were very pretty in the recessed bookcase over the divan. The record albums were fine clean parallel lines of gold print on black in the mahogany cabinet. And there was all the time in the world. And there was the bar, the lovely big well-stocked bar, where you can make yourself a drink whenever you want, he would think happily, mixing himself a scotch-and-soda that he was finally beginning to like the taste of now. And all the time in the world. It was, all of it, as near to being a full-fledged 24-carat civilian as any thirty-year-man ever could get.
