From Here to Eternity (40 page)

this." And she was gone then, swiftly, him watching her legging it down the hall twisting and turning through the crowd like a broken field runner. A man reached out an arm and stopped her and she smiled, talked, got irritated and went on. Another Prewitt, Prewitt thought. He went on into number nine then, after that one, feeling the blankness in him slowly filling up with anger, but the anger kept seeping out the bottom where his stomach no longer was. He sat down on the bed. He could not stop seeing the mental picture he had brought with him, and it made him feel all gone inside. He heard her coming back. But by the time he could look up the door was already shut, the unzippered gown on the chair. Then she stopped, looking at him stupidly. "Why you're not even undressed yet!" "I'm not? By god, I'm not, am I?" he stood up. Lorene looked like she was going to cry. "I told you to be undressed when I got back, goddam it. I'm slipping you in ahead of them, just as a favor, and you dont even try to help me any." Prew stood and looked at her. He could not say anything. "Never mind that now," he said. "Let me look at you." "Okay," she said. He handed her the three dollars. She pushed the damp hair back out of the harried eyes, sweat glistening from the flat place between her chubby little breasts. "You know there's a time limit on Payday. Petunia will be knocking any time now." He straightened up, looking at her, a tightness of ache deep in his jaws that ran clear down his spine into his buttocks and knotted his belly sourly. She lay naked on the bed, waiting frenetically, her head bent forward irritably to look at him. "Why dont you come back tomorrow night?" Lorene said. "And stay all night tomorrow?" He could hear this faintly through the skintight space suit of plexiglass he was encased in, sealed in, a perfect example of the Twentieth Century Man doing his calisthenics to keep healthy and not lose his figure, in his airtight, soundproof, loveproof, hateproof, lifeproof plexiglass space suit that was a marvel of modern industrial accomplishment, a masterpiece of modern industrial engineering design, there should be at least two in every home, and then one each for all the little ones, because a Twentieth Century Man looked so silly naked with his shoes and socks still on, a muscle-knotty squirrel divested of its skin but the footpads not cut off yet. But he was goddamned, stinking slucking goddamned, if he would tell her, now, how he could not come back tomorrow because he had had to borrow twenty from the twenty per cent men, also a marvel of modern industrial accomplishment, to come today at all, and that he would not have the dough to come again tomorrow. Besides, he would have to yell too loud to make it heard outside the plexiglass space suit anyway. "You'll have to hurry, honey," Lorene said. "If you dont want to take a raincheck." It was very strange: Robert E Lee Prewitt, the Twentieth Century MAN, who walked upon his mother earth in an up-to-the-minute Twentieth Century PLEXIGLASS SPACE SUIT that industrial techniques produced in such munificent mass abundance that every man woman and child could have one at cost, at less than cost, at nothing actually, because our recent research has so perfected the new process that we can now make the astounding offer of an almost absolute vacuum in our newer models, this modern MAN with so much to be grateful for, with the heritage of the ages in his hands, who could hear his shoes scraping scraping against the gilt-flaking bed frame like one of the higher-priced more accurate metronomes reminding him not to get the clean sheet muddy - this creature was not even HAPPY! Just because he could not get outside his plexiglass space suit, his sanitary all-purpose all-weather space suit, just because he was not known, just because he did know, just because he could not touch another human soul. Then, as if to prove it, there was a big broad knock on the door and Petunia hollered, "All right in there, yawl. Y'time's up, Miss Lorene." "All right," Lorene bawled. "Try," Lorene panted. "Or I'll have to give you a raincheck." Try what for? "To hell with it," he said. He got up and got a handkerchief from his pants and wiped the sweat out of his eyes. "Whats wrong with you tonight?" "I guess I had two too many drinks." He put his pants on. Then he put his shirt on. Then he wiped his face again. He did not have to put his shoes on. "I'm sorry it didnt work, Prew." "Whats to be sorry for? You done your best, dint you? Your professional best." As she handed him the printed card and refund, Lorene looked rather like a girl who has failed to pass her finals and been flunked out. She wanted to redeem her reputation. "Will you be back tomorrow night?" "I dont think so," Prew said, looking at the buck and a half in his hand that would make the car fare for tomorrow night. "Anyway, dont you hold your breath until you see me, lady." He tore the card in two and laid it carefully on the bed. "Give that to some other three-minute man. I aint worried about my virility." "All right, if thats the way you feel." "Thats exactly how I feel." "Okay. Well, I've got to go. Maybe I'll see you sometime." He watched her put the gown on and leave, hoping she would say something else, something more, wanting her to make the overture he could not make. Even in the anger he did not want to destroy it between them. She stopped at the door and looked back at him a second and he knew she was waiting for him to make the overture; But he could not make it. She would have to make it. But she could not make it either. And she left. He finished dressing in the room alone. The room was muggy like before a storm with evaporated sweat, but when he stepped out in the hall it was no better and his eyes and temples pounded with undischarged, unrelieved, too-rich blood. His face was flushed with it, and already he had sweat through the back of his shirt and the ass of his pants. Well, he thought, thats the first time that ever happened to you. You must be changing somehow. Some way or other. He felt very sick and very angry. In the hallway he met Maureen standing in the doorway of her room taking a breather. Somebody had sneaked a bottle in to her and she was half drunk. "Well, look who's here," she bawled. "Hi there, Babyface. Hey, why so glum? Cant you get in to see your own true love?" "You want to go to the room with me?" "Who? Me? Whats wrong with the Holy Princess, Baby-face?" "To hell with her. I'm asking you." "They really keep the Princess on the move, dont they? all the lonesome lovesick joes? God-damn, wish I looked like a virgin. They dont want whores any more, they all want mothers. To protect them. What you need is a wife, Babyface." "Okay, lets get married." Maureen stopped guffawing and looked at him. "Hell, you dont need no wife. What you need is a drink, and you need it bad. I know what you got." "How the hell do you know what I've got? You cant even guess at what I've got." "You got the same thing I get myself, only I get it about two or three times every week fifty-two weeks a year year in year out. Dont try to snow me, Babyface. This is Maureen." "Do you want to go to the room?" Prew said. "Or dont you?" "Goin to the room wont help what you got, Babyface. You take your money to the nearest bar and get yourself drunkern hell. Thats all'll help you, Babyface. I know." "Who the hell're you? Dorothy Dix? I aint asking you for no advice." "Well, I'm givin it to you anyway." "Well, I aint taking it." "Shut up," Maureen said. "I'm doin the talking." "Okay, Dorothy Dix. You tell me all about it." "I am telling you. All you got is a feeling you're locked up in a box thats two sizes too small for you and theres no air in it and you're suffocatin, and all the time outside the box you hear the whole world walking around laughin and having a big, big time. Thats all you got." She looked at him. "Okay," Prew said meekly. "You talk." "Okay then. Hell, I get what you got all the time, and the ony thing'll fix it is to get drunkern hell. I've experimented, see? What you got to do now is to remember that it aint nobody's fault. Its the system. Nobody's to blame." "Thats a pretty hard thing to remember." "Sure. Too hard. Thats why you got to get good and drunk. Because if you dont you'll never remember it, see?" "Okay. I'm going to get drunk," he said. "But on my way out I'm going to say hello to Mrs Kipfer. I'm going to tell her what I think of respectable whores' madams. The mealy-mouthed old bitch." "No you aint. You just leave Mrs Kipfer alone, see? She'll have the goddamn MPs on you quickern you can bat your eye. You want to spend a month in the Shafter stockade? You just go get drunk." "Okay," he said. "Okay. But listen, what the hell can you do? Aint there nothing you can ever do?" "No," Maureen said. "Not ever. Because nobody's to blame. Its the system. Thats what you got to remember, that nobody's to blame." "I wont believe that," he said. He put the three back in his wallet. "But its okay. I know what you mean." "Okay then," Maureen said. "Just take off. I dint take you to raise, did I? I aint got all goddam day." "Go to hell," he grinned. "Next!" Maureen bawled, as he closed the door. He was still grinning when Mrs Kipfer opened the door for him gracefully sweetly, and he managed easily now by just grinning at her and not saying a word. \ Thats what you got to remember: its nobody's fault, its the system, he told himself. What did you expect on Payday? A brass band to meet you? A motorcycle escort? She was just busy, thats all. Would you expect to go in a department store and talk to your girlfriend behind her counter while the customers beat each other to death with nylon hose all around you when the big sale was on? "Thats all it is," he told the stairway. "She's got to earn her living. According to the system. Aint she?" Thats all it is, he told himself. But the hard tight sour knot of indigestible outrage in his belly did not dissolve. I guess she's right then. You got to wash it out with liquor. You got to be drunk enough to be sentimental, before you can believe different. No matter how many times you spiel it. No wonder theres so goddam many alcoholics in this goddam country. In this goddam Twentieth Century. What a name. Lorene. The perfect whore's name: romantic, very high-toned, and very feminine. Lorene the fair, Lorene the square, Lorene the lily maid of Hotel Street. How could you ever of thought that was a lovely, woman's name? he thought biliously. Well, he would go up to the corner to Wu Fat's, thats where. He would go in the downstairs bar and he would drink this thirteen-fifty up and then see how we feel. We'll feel like hell, thats how. All right then, after that he would catch a Kalakaua bus out to Waikiki where Maggio said he was going to be with his queer friend Hal, this Payday night, because it had already taken all his money to pay his debts, and we will look them up. We will drink some more off of them. Hell, if he got drunk enough he might even be able to pick himself up one himself. He had tried everything else. He might as well shoot an angle on this azimuth.

CHAPTER 25

HE DID NOT have to go to Waikiki to find Maggio. Maggio was sitting at the bar of the cocktail lounge of Wu Fat's Restaurant, when he walked in, and Prew stood in the doorway of the Payday pandemonium, wanting suddenly to laugh wildly like a condemned man getting a reprieve, feeling the warmth that Maureen's whiskey could not give him beginning to spread through him now, as he watched the little Wop perched high above the press on the withers of a bar stool like a winning jockey in a crowded paddock smiling benignly down from his precarious perch at the screaming mob, and arguing with the barman in Italian. "Halo, lunsman!" Angelo bawled at him, waving his arm. "Hey, here I am! Over here! This is me!" Prew worked his way slowly over to the stool, feeling himself begin to grin. "Can you breathe?" Angelo said. "No." "Climb up on my shoulders. You can see everything from up here, and still breathe too. Aint this wonerful?" "I thought you was headed for Waikiki tonight." "I am. This here is ony preparation. Would you like a little preparation, lunsman?" "I could do with a little preparation," Prew panted, still elbowing in towards the bar. "Hey, pizon," Angelo called to the barman. "Bring this other pizon some preparation. This pizon is a personal friend of mine. This pizon badly needs preparation." The sweatily grinning barman nodded happily and moved away. "This pizon fought with Garibaldi, too," Angelo howled after him. "He is use to ony the best of service. "I got him trained," he said to Prew. "Me and that pizon both fought for Garibaldi. I'm tellin him about the beautiful statue of Garibaldi the Americans put up in Washington Square." "Where'd you get all the goddam money? If I remember, when I hit you up this afternoon you was supposed to be flat broke." "I was. Honest I was. I happen to run into a guy from Easy Company owed me five from a jawbone latrine game so I settled for two-fifty and call it even. So I could induce a little preparation, before I go out to Waikiki and go to work." "A likely story." "You dont believe me? Look at my eyes. Are those the eyes of a liar? Hey, pizon," he yelled down the bar, "snap up! You ask the pizon," he said, "are those the eyes of a liar. Me and him fought with Garibaldi." "That pizon aint even old enough to have fought with Mussolini, let alone Garibaldi. And you're cock-eyed." "So what? What has them got to do with this? Shut up, here he comes." He nodded at the barman, "This pizon is a pizon," he said loudly to Prew, as the barman set down the drink. "Hi, pizon," Prew said. "You threwn out any more queers lately?" "Oh, no. No, no," the barman said. He spread bis arms to include the jam at the bar. "No queer today. All queer busy like hell Payday. All queer fodder here, see?" "Pizon," Angelo said, "it is a beautiful statue. A statue of an incredible loveliness." The barman shook his sweating head. "Sure like to see him." "How can I describe it to you?" Angelo said, "the loveliness. When I work in Gimbel's Basement I use to put a wreath on this statue ever payday on Sataday, thats how lovely." "Garibaldi," the barman grinned. "Fine man. My grandfather fight with Garibaldi." "There," Angelo said to Prew. "You see?" He turned to the barman and pointed at Prew. "So did this pizon." "When you put on the wreath," Prew said, "did you wash off the pigeon shit, too?" "No," Angelo said. "My assistant did that." "Garibaldi fight for liberty," the barman said. "Thats right, pizon," Angelo nodded. "Shut up," he said to Prew, as the barman moved away. "You want to spoil it? I'm trying to induce this pizon for some preparation on the house." "To hell with that pizon. I got thirteen-fifty we can use for preparation. Induce him with that." "Thats diffrnt," Angelo said. "Why dint you say so?" "All I got to save out is four bits cab fare home is all. If I miss Reveille any more, now, it'll be my ass." "Your bloody ass," Angelo corrected. "Man, you are not kidding either. This Army makes me sick, you know it? Look at Garibaldi. Look at George Washington; and Abraham Lincoln. Look at F D R; and Gary Cooper. Then look at this Army." "Look at General MacArthur," Prew said. "And his son, General MacArthur. Look at old Chief of Staff George C." "Thats right," Angelo said. "Look at the Magna Charta. Look at the Declaration of Independence. Look at the Constitution. Look at the Bill of Rights. Look at the Fourth of July." "Look at Christmas," Prew suggested. "Thats right," Angelo said. "Look at Alexander the Great. Then look at this fuckin Army. Dont talk about it any more. I cant stand it." "Not without inducing some more preparation," Prew said. "Thats it. Now you got it. Whynt you come out to Waikiki with me later on? This thirteen-fifty will not last forever." "Maybe I will, after we induce some more. I never did like queers. Every time I get around them I want to punch them in the head." "Aw, they all right. They just peculiar is all. They maladjusted. Besides, they'll buy you preparation all night long." "You think you could find me one?" Prew said, hesitating, yet knowing all the time that he would go. "Sure. Old Hal'll find one for you. Whynt you come on and go?" Prew was looking around the bar. "I already said I'd go, dint I? Shut up on it. Drop it, for Christ's sake. Matter of fact, I meant to go all along. I was goin out to Waikiki to look you up, after I left here. What is this slop we drinkin anyway?" "Gin and ginger." "A goddam woman's drink. Whynt we get whisky? We got money." "You want whisky, you drink whisky. I'm drinkin this because I got to go to work. I get out to Waikiki I be drinkin champagne cocktails. Hell, thats all I drink out there. Champagne cocktails, buddy." They left Wu Fat's at ten-thirty. Prew still had two dollars left, besides his cab fare home. They decided to take a taxi out. They dodged catty corner across Hotel to the GI taxi stand in front of the Japanese woman-barber shop and fell in at the end of the mob that was jamming the cab stand almost as badly as the other mob had jammed the bar. Everything was jammed, even the Japanee woman-barber shop had a waiting line. "Its a lot of crap," Angelo said drunkenly. "Pay fifty cents a head to ride three miles to Waikiki when you pay the same price to ride thirty-five miles to Schofield. But its better than them goddam buses. Especially Payday. But ever fuckin body robs the soljers." The cab they finally got already had the back seat and the two folding seats filled with Waikiki passengers. They climbed in front with the driver and slammed the door. The driver pulled away expertly quickly to let the cab behind pull in. He eased into the steady traffic, going over to Pauahi Street, moving slowly through the alternating light and dark patches that were bars and whorehouses, on around the block and back to Hotel. Angelo sighed drunkenly. "I might as well brief you now. Its a good thing you aint in uniform," he added. "Oh, yeah? How goddam so? Whats wrong with the uniform? I like the uniform." "But they dont like it," Angelo grinned. "They high-toned friends might get the wrong idea about them and think they was queer, runnin around with uniforms." "Hell, they never use to mind that in Washington or Baltimore." "But them are cities. Honolulu is really a small town. Everybody knows everybody else. I dint know you been out with them before?" "A couple times is all. Me and another guy rolled some rich ones in Washington. They wont go to the law. We carried a GI Irish spud in a GI sock. It worked swell." "Thats sounds okay," Angelo said, grudgingly admiringly. "Back home we used a sock full of sand, but trouble with that is the sock's liable to bust first time you sap him." The cab was moving slowly in the traffic up Hotel Street that was lit up like a carnival. They passed the arcade two doors down from the Army-Navy Y, where a mob was shooting electric eye machineguns at lighted planes or waiting to get their picture taken with their arm drunkenly around the big fitted Japanee hula girl against a canvas backdrop of Diamond Head and palms. Something to Send Home, the sign on the photograph booth said. "But you cant roll them in this town," Angelo said. "They never carry money. Too many dogfaces." "I know all that," Prew said. "You got to play them like a fish, see? Hell," Angelo growled, "the cruisers dont even have to buy you drinks, because the market's glutted. I use to play the cruisers, before I got experience. Its like everything else in this world, you got to pay for what you get. You can pay for it by learning, or you can pay for it with experience once you learnt it, or you can pay for it with friendship. But you got to pay. Thats my philosophy. I read it in some book once." The cab moved at a walking pace past the crowded hotdog stand next door to the Y where a bunch waited to use the dime automatic photograph machine, their mass overflowing onto the already jam-packed sidewalk. Then on past the dark palm studded lawn of the Y itself, with the Black Cat across the street and also overflowing. A number of drunks lay passed out on the Y lawn. "But these tonight aint cruisers," Angelo said. "Tonight is regulars. They carry checkbooks and pay for everything by checks." Prew was looking out the window at the Y. "Payday at the mines." "Thats it. And its really a racket, buddy, I mean. Any more. Us honest queer chasers aint got a chance no more. Half the Compny hang out there at the Tavern any more. You'll see. You'd think the Tavern is a bivouac for George Compny. Harris hangs out out there, and Martuscelli, Knapp goes down, and Dusty Rhodes.. ." "The Scholar?" Prew grinned fuzzily. "Him too?" "Sure. And old Readall Treadwell, and Bull Nair, and Johnson. Bloom and Andy's down together most every night. Christ, I dont know who all. It looks like a Compny convention, out there." "That son of a bitch Andy," Prew said. "I told him to keep away from there, especially if he with Bloom." Angelo shrugged. "They all there anyway. Hell, there aint enough queens to go around, any more. I'm thinkin of organizin a union, by god. Got to pretect us professionals from the steadily encroaching amatoors and scabs." The cab turned the corner out of the light into the dark tunnel of Richards Street between the Von Hamm-Young garage and the Palace Square grounds on the left with the light of King Street ahead of them down at the end of the block. 'Thats me," Prew said. "I'm a scab. You and Petrillo." "Naw. You aint no scab. I'd get you in. Hell, pay your dues myself. You know, they're funny things, queers. This Hal is really a pretty good joe, if he dint hate everything so much. He hates everybody. Everybody but me. I guess he's bitter about being a queen. I spent a lot of time, tryin to figure out what makes them tick. Lots of guy'll tell you if you even talk to them you're queer yourself, that you ought to beat them up all the time. I dont figure like that. I figure those guys just hate them." "I dont like them," Prew said thoughtfully. "But I dont hate them. I just dont like to be around them." He paused. "Its just that they, well for some reason they make me feel ashamed of something." He paused again. "I dont know what of." "I know," Angelo said. "Me too. I spent a lot of time trying to figure it. They all say they was born like that. They say they been that way ever since they can remember." "I wouldnt know," Prew said. The cab driver turned his head slightly and for the first time spoke. "Thats a lot of bull," he said. "Lissen, let me give you joes a tip. I'm a ex-serviceman myself. You steer clear of them queers. You keep runnin around with them long enough and you'll be queer too. Thats what they want. They like to take young guys like you and make them queer too. They get a charge out of that. I hate the bastards. I'd kill every one I seen." He swung the cab viciously out of the tunnel into the light of King Street, turning left past the Post Office and the gilded brown-faced statue of Kamehameha in his feather cape and helmet. The street was very wide here with two bus islands in the middle and the traffic was thinner and the driver speeded up a little. "Yeh, I've heard that," Angelo said to him. "But this guy never tried nothing like that with me." "I hate them," the driver said. "Okay," Prew said. "So you hate them. You go right ahead and hate them, Mack. But dont tell us what we ought to do. We aint tellin you what you ought to do." "Okay," the driver said, "okay. Dont get huffy." "I wonder if they really are born that way?" Angelo said. He was looking out the window tranquilly, held by the quiet peacefulness of the cab' ride that, sitting on the inside and looking out as an observer, divorced them momentarily from the wild bottle-swinging ritual of Payday and helped sober them. Prew felt it too. The big polyhedral square here that held most of the civic buildings was comparatively serene under the unaugmented streetlights, after the frenzy of Hotel Street and the Y. They passed the darkling dim shapes of the Federal Building and the Judiciary Building, the Palace on the left hidden behind its screen of trees, then the Territorial Office Building and Kawaiahao Church on the right as the street began to narrow again, and the Library and then the City Hall on the left, all of them shut up for the night as they ran on out King, into the gradually deepening dark away from town. "1 dont know," Prew said. "I know that on the bum a lot of good guys went queer, though, because they just wasnt any women. Some of the old timers would take the young kids and train them to be ringtails. Thats what I hate. A kid dont know his own mind. Thats what Chief Bugler Houston was - a regular Mister Brown. Thats one reason I got out of the Corps, him and that Angelina of his." "Yeah," the driver said. "And they'll all do you like that, you give them a chance, dont think they wont, the queer bastards." "Where'd you learn to play that bugle?" Angelo asked, "like you do? I never heard no guy could play a goddam bugle like that." "I dont know," Prew said. "I just always could I guess. I always liked it." He was looking out at the sudden deeper darkness that was Thomas Square. "Thats where all the cruisers hang out," the driver said. "I sure like to hear you play it," Angelo said. "Its a shame." "Lets drop it," Prew said. "Lets forget it, what do you say?" "Okay," Angelo said. "If you say so." They lapsed into silence then, the cool tranquillity that was the ride, feeling the driver beside them aching to talk, to advise them, but hating to start it again on his own hook, for fear he would seem anxious to talk about it. They did not give him an opening. They got out in front of the Moana and were suddenly back inside and part of the heated excitement of Payday. "We'll walk down from here," Angelo said. "We dont want to look too well heeled, ridin up to the door in a cab." He stopped on the sidewalk to look back at the driver as he swung out from the