by James Jones
“But you didnt,” Warden said kindly. “Instead you threw her over.”
“I would have,” Stark said.
“Without even givin her a chance to say her side of it,” Warden chided tenderly, aware of Pete still watching them, first one then the other. Well, it ought to take his mind off his troubles. You didnt come by a juicy tidbit like this every day.
“She didnt tell me,” Stark said desperately.
“But you didnt ask her,” Warden said tenderly, determined to leave no loopholes.
“Shut up,” Stark said. “Shut up, shut up.”
“You Southern men,” Warden censured kindly. “You’re all alike. With your drinking and whoring. You’re the worst moralists there are.”
Stark stood up and threw the canteen cup of whiskey at Warden’s gently solicitous face, in the same unthinking reflexive way that a cat that has been pinched will unsheath its claws and strike.
“You think I wont kill him?” Stark screamed at him. “I’ll kill him. I’ll kill him. I’ll chop his fucking head off.”
Warden, who was watching, ducked the cup but Pete, who was a little older, a little drunker, and a little more preoccupied, caught both cup and whiskey in the chest, drenching his shirt.
Stark was gone, out through the flap of the tent.
Warden slumped back on the cot, feeling as completely empty and relaxed as if he had just had orgasm. Except for one thing, one tiny fly in the ointment, it was perfect. He suspected all along they had gone together longer than she said, but all along he had hoped it wasnt true.
“Jesus!” Pete said. “I smell like a goddam brewery.” He daubed at the dripping shirt. “You better go after him, Milt. He’s pretty drunk? He might hurt himself.”
“Okay,” Warden said. He got his rifle from the corner.
Behind him as he went out the music went off and the announcer came back on.
“Lucky Strike green has gone to war,” the announcer said. “Yes, Lucky Strike green has gone to war.”
Outside, the moon had risen further and the grove, the parking space, the whole earth, was a colorless painting done in black and white. He took the path that crossed the blacktop to the kitchen tent.
So they had gone together six whole months at Bliss. That was almost as long as he had gone with her himself. He wondered what it had been like with them. She was much younger then, for one thing. He wondered what she had been like when she was younger. What things had they done? What places had they gone? What things had they laughed at? He wished, suddenly, he could have been present, as an unseen third party, so he could have shared it. He felt that way about everything about her. Not envy so much, not jealousy, as just a tremendous hunger to have shared. Poor old Stark.
In the kitchen tent he found a small cluster of frightened cooks, huddled together like sheep as far away from the meat block as they could get.
“Where’d he go?”
“I dont rightly know,” one of them said. “I dint really feel like asting him. All I know, he come chargin in talking and cussin and got his cleaver and took off.”
He started back toward the supplyroom, thinking he might have gone down on the beach to sleep it off and if he had the best thing was to let him go. He stopped in the middle of the blacktop and looked up it up the hill where it curved up to the highway in the moonlight, but nobody was on it. Stark was not drunk enough to start off to walk to Schofield with his cleaver after Major Holmes.
As he came back up to the supply tent, a figure came flying out of the dark and collided with him.
“Top!” Company Bugler Anderson’s scared voice said huskily. “Is that you, Top?”
“What the hell’re you doin out here. Why aint you in the wagon with the switchboard?”
“Top, Stark’s up there! He’s got his cleaver and he’s tearin it up! He’s bustin everything! He’s ruinin it!”
“Come on!” Warden said. He unslung his rifle and took off up the path.
“He come in cussin and yellin and sayin he’d kill him,” Andy yelled breathlessly behind him. “He kept yellin he’d kill him, he’d kill the son of a bitch. I thought he meant you. Then he says Capt Holmes, he’ll kill Capt Holmes. Capt Holmes aint been around here for months, Top. And he’s a Major. I think he’s went off his nut.”
“Save your breath,” Warden said.
Stark was already gone. But the little popcorn wagon was a shambles. Both spindly homemade tables that served him and Ross for desks had been chopped down into kindling and smashed flat. Of the four chairs not one was left in a suitable condition for sitting. Warden’s field desk, that was still locked, lay on the floor with a great gash in the top. His Art-Metal lockbox had a foot-long dent in it. Papers, and pieces of chopped papers, were scattered everywhere. There were long tearshaped gashes in the thin plywood walls. Only the panel switchboard, luckily, appeared to be untouched.
And in the middle of all this holocaust, lying on the floor, pure white, virgin, unmarked, untouched, like a baby sitting unharmed and indifferent in the middle of a fallen house, was a War Department letter with a sheaf of endorsements stapled on it, Warden’s confirmation of appointment as Second Lieutenant (Infantry) in the Army of the United States.
Warden stood a moment in the doorway and surveyed the wreckage. Then he threw his rifle viciously into the corner and the little wagon rocked on its wheels as the stock of the Star Gauge ’03 burst across the grip.
Andy, who had been raised in the Regular Army where to drop your rifle on the ground at drill was a major sin punishable with no less than two weeks’ extra-duty, gasped audibly and looked at him with open horror.
“Get on that thing,” Warden said thinly, indicating the switchboard, and grinned at him wildly slyly. “Start at the bottom and call every position for a check call to see if they’re all coming through. Then check Battalion and the Message Center. Check every tab.”
“Okay, Top,” Andy said, and got on it.
Warden picked up the two pieces of the rifle contritely, the stock butt dangling limply from the sling. He had had that rifle four years; he had brought it into A Co with him, and taken it out of A Co with him into G. He had nosed out Sgt/Maj O’Bannon for Regimental high score with that rifle. He checked the action lovingly. It was all right. He could get a new stock, but the action could not have been replaced. He laid the two pieces down tenderly by the door, feeling a little better. Then he picked up the offensively unharmed, still virgin, War Department letter with its endorsements and tore it across, then across again, then across a third time, and scattered it over the floor. With the rest of the wreckage.
“They all check in okay, Top,” Andy said from the switchboard.
“Okay. Good. You still got two and a half hours of your shift to do yet. I’m going to bed.”
“Well, what about the Orderly Room? What about the wagon? Aint you going to clean it up any?”
“Let Ross do it,” he said, and got the pieces of his rifle and went out.
Outside, everything was still as death. After a while, after so long a time, there wasnt anything left but to go to bed. You went so long, and did so much, and were done so much, until finally there came a time when there was absolutely nothing anywhere left on earth to do but to go to bed.
Warden put the pieces of the rifle at the foot of his cot and went gratefully to bed.
In the morning they found Stark down on the beach sleeping peacefully in the sand with his tear-stained cheek resting on his trusty cleaver.
Warden, who was up fresh and early, had already taken it up with Lt Ross, who was furious (furious was no word to describe it), before they had even found Stark.
“You cant bust him, Lieutenant. He’s the only man we’ve got who can come anywhere near running the mess at all, with the men scattered all over hell’s half acre like they are.”
“The hell I cant bust him!” Lt Ross said furiously. “I’ll bust him if every manjack in this Company starves to death!”
“Who’ll you get
to run the mess for you?”
“I dont give a damn who runs the mess for me!” Lt Ross said furiously. “Look at this place! My god, Sergeant, I cant let a man get away with a thing like that! We’ll never have any discipline! We’ve got to have discipline!”
“Sure, but we got to have food, too.”
“He can run the mess as a private!” Lt Ross said furiously.
“He wouldnt do it.”
“Then he can be court-martialed for malingering!” Lt Ross hollered furiously.
“You couldnt make that stick. You’re a lawyer, Lieutenant. You know you couldnt make it stick, to court-martial him for refusing to run the mess without the rating.”
“I cant let him get by with this!” Lt Ross said furiously.
“You just dont understand him, Lieutenant. He’s a funny guy. He goes on rampages like this every now and then. He did it once at Hickam Field before you got in the Company. He dont really mean any harm. And he never hurts anybody. He’s just a cook, thats all. Cooks and mess sergeants are just temperamental, thats all. You never saw a good mess sergeant that wasnt half crazy.”
“All right,” Lt Ross said furiously.
“You know you cant run the mess without him, Lieutenant.”
“All right!” Lt Ross said furiously.
“I’m only being realistic, Lieutenant. If we had a man could run the mess, I’d be the first to want him busted. But we havent got a man that can do it.”
“All right!” Lt Ross said furiously.
“Its for the good of the Compny, Lieutenant.”
“I know, I know,” Lt Ross said furiously. “For the good of the Company!”
“Your responsibility is to the Compny as a whole.”
“Okay,” Lt Ross said furiously. “Okay, okay. I know what my responsibility is.”
“Yes, Sir,” Warden said.
With that settled, he informed him of his decision not to accept a commission.
“What!” Lt Ross cried furiously. “But, Jesus Christ!”
“My mind’s made up,” Warden said.
“I wish to hell I’d got my commission in the Coast Guard!” Lt Ross said furiously. “I’ll never understand the fucking Army.”
Chapter 54
HE SAW HER once more before she left. It was a very strange experience.
In the first place, it was a hard thing to arrange. It was not like before the war, when you could put on civvies and go anywhere you wanted simply because you wanted to go there. You could not go anywhere without an official reason now. And you had to have an officially documented explanation. Soldiers were not allowed in civilian clothes. Even to have them was a court-martial offense. And a soldier in uniform running around town in the daytime would be stopped immediately.
The ban on liquor by the Military Government was still in effect then, and the bars were closed down tight. The movies did not run at all. The big hotels had suddenly become very inquisitively careful about their registrations. All the tourists had either gone home, or else were sitting tight in their hotel rooms waiting for the Army to evacuate them. There were no new tourists. Even a car stopped along a road in the daytime was liable to investigation and inspection.
There was not anywhere they could meet. There was nowhere they could go. Even in the daytime.
And at night there was the curfew. At sundown Honolulu crawled quickly into its various holes and died until morning. After dark, nothing moved anywhere, except for the blue headlights of the patrols.
She was at Schofield. She would have to drive down. She could only drive in the daytime. She would have to drive back in the daytime, too. But it was an impossibility for him to get away from the CP in the daytime without being discovered. Even for an hour. And an hour was not long enough.
He could sneak away at night, after the switchboard relief went on. Stark had been sneaking off every night to see his wahine at the Wailupe Naval Radio Station, which was not far away. But Karen, she could not make the trip at night, not without being stopped. She could not even come down before dark and park and wait for him.
The only possible answer was a place, some place, where she could go in the afternoon and wait for him without being noticed, and then stay all night and drive back the next day. The hotels at Waikiki were out. Besides, he was ten or twelve miles from Waikiki out here on the highway, and there were no Motels or Tourist Courts on the highways of Hawaii.
He did not know any people out this way to whom she could go. All the people he knew lived either in Waikiki, or else in downtown Honolulu, which was further. Besides, he was not even sure she would be willing to go that far. To come down and stay all night. Even if he could find a place.
He sweated with it for over a week from the night that he had made the identification of Prewitt’s body. He told himself he meant to have that much, if he never had any of the rest of it.
And finally he went to Stark.
Stark’s wahine was a very beautiful Chinese-Hawaiian girl, the most beautiful blood-mixture type that comes out of Hawaii. She and her husband, a Japanese-Filipino, had one of the little houses in Kuliouou Valley less than two miles from Hanauma Bay. Her husband, who had started out as a mess-attendant in the Navy, was now one of the operators at the Wailupe Station. A very considerable advance in the Navy, for a Filipino.
Rather awkwardly, and not without embarrassment, he asked Stark if he could fix it up with them to let Karen have a room there for one night, so he could see her before she left.
“Sure,” Stark said immediately and without hesitation. “They’ll be glad to.”
“Hadnt you better ask them first?”
“No need to. They’ll do damn near anything I ask them to. I’m helping them to pay off their FHA loan.”
“Okay,” Warden said.
“You let me know what day she’ll be there, and I’ll tell them next time I go over. I’ll show you the way over myself, so you wont get lost.”
“Okay,” Warden said.
He could not call her over the field phone, which made its connection into the public system through the Battalion Message Center, but that part was easy. The next time he had an excuse to go down to Position 17 he made the call from the home of the old couple upon whose small estate the pillboxes had been built, and who had practically adopted all the mea on the position.
The call went through perfect. Karen said immediately and without hesitation that she would come.
It was a very strange experience, in more ways than one.
As Stark brought him up the little side street that ran inland off the highway in the absolute blackness, the stocky Texan stopped and pointed out the house.
“Thats it there,” Stark said. “The beach type bungalow with the corner windows.”
Warden, looking, saw also the intensely familiar old Buick with the well-remembered, long-ago-committed-to-memory license plate.
“You can find your way back all right, cant you?” Stark said.
“Sure.”
“Then I’ll leave you here and go on back.”
“But, aint you comin in?”
“Naw,” Stark said. “I was over last night. And probly will come over again tomorrow night.”
“But she’ll want to thank you.”
“She dont need to thank me.”
“But hell, we’re running you out of your own home, practicly.”
“I’m afraid seein me would embarrass her,” Stark said. “Anyway,” he said, “I dont want to see her. I aint seen her since at least two months before Holmes left the Compny. Why should I see her now?”
“Okay,” Warden said.
“You might—” Stark said, and stopped.
“Might what?”
“Nothing,” Stark said. “I’ll see you,” he said. He walked away into the lightless blackness and became invisible. Warden listened to his quiet footsteps fade away before he went up to the door.
It was a strange experience, in a great many more ways than one.
T
he beautiful, almost-unearthly-lovely, Chinese-Hawaiian girl opened the door for him with brightly luminous eyes. Then the eyes clouded.
“Didnt May-lon come?”
“He had some work to do. He said tell you he’d see you tomorrow.”
“Ahhh,” she said reproachfully, from behind the cloudy eyes. Then she smiled. “Come on in, Sergeant.”
She shut the door behind him and turned back on the lights. Her husband, in his dazzling white shirtsleeves and blue Navy pants beneath the deep mahogany face, was sitting in the dinette with the Japanese-language newspaper.
“Your friend is in there,” the beautiful, almost-unearthly-lovely, Chinese-Hawaiian girl said broodingly, and moved her eyes toward the closed door across the room. “She is very lovely, your friend,” she said.
“Thank you,” Warden said. “And also I want to thank you for what you’ve done for us.”
“It is nothing, Sergeant. Do not speak of it. Everyone has troubles, now.
“John,” the beautiful, almost-unearthly-lovely, Chinese-Hawaiian girl said softly, “come and meet May-lon’s First Sergeant, Mr Warden.”
The husband, in his dazzling white shirtsleeves and blue Navy pants beneath the dark mahogany face, left his Japanese-language daily paper and came and smiled and shook hands warmly.
“But you will want to see your friend,” the beautiful, almost-unearthly-lovely, Chinese-Hawaiian girl said sadly. “Not to stand and talk with us. I will show you.”
It was all strange, and the sense of strangeness colored everything.
Karen was sitting in a big chair by the bed under the floor lamp reading a book, as the girl closed the door behind him softly. She had her legs drawn up against the chair arm in the green skirt tucked tight under her knees. Her small bag that he remembered was sitting on the floor by the dresser. She looked completely secure and at home. She looked at peace.
“Hello, darling,” she smiled.
“Hello,” Warden said. “Hello.” He went to meet her, and she left the book on the chair arm and rose to meet him, in that same funny odd reserved way she had that he had almost forgotten.
He put his arms around her and it was not like touching a foreign object but rather, like touching your own body, the way a man will clasp his own two hands together, in the cold perhaps, to keep them warm, as he has every right to do, without asking anyone’s permission, since they are his hands.
