From Here to Eternity (58 page)

CHAPTER 36

HE WAS NOT a celebrity in the Stockade. Of course, in the Stockade, they could not know about the sensational trial. He fervently hoped they never did know about it. The trial went off all right with all the precision of a well drilled cast doing a well rehearsed play, the trial looked fine, up to the very last minute. The three witnesses told their stories clearly and simply, as if quoting their typescript statements from memory; their stories all jibed. The prosecutor explained with incontestable lucidity the infractions of the AWs that had been committed and the penalty required by the AWs for such infractions. The accused, who had remained silent, was offered his chance to testify and refused. Everything looked rosy, everything was according to Hoyle. Then, at the last moment, with a sort of abortive outrage: against destiny, Lt Culpepper suddenly entered a furious plea of guilty and appeal for clemency on the grounds that all good soldiers were drunkards. There was a startled hush in the court room. The accused could gladly have shot him. But the court rose to the occasion nobly. With all due decorum they had the unorthodox plea written into the record just as if it were proper, then they went right on into the usual 30-second huddle and pronounced the sentence of Three-months-at-hard-labor-plus-Two-thirds-forfeiture-of-pay-for-like-period as if nothing had happened. The accused could have kissed them. He was greatly relieved when he was conducted back to the guardhouse where he did not have to look at Lt Culpepper, to wait for transportation to the Stockade. They came for him Monday afternoon after the trial that morning and signed for him and his two suits of clean fatigues at the desk of the guardhouse and deposited him carefully in the front seat of the recon which one of them drove while the other one sat in the back behind him. He felt life a tackily dressed midget between the well-bucked gleaming six-foot-four-inch splendor of the two of them. They delivered him inside the chainmesh fence of the green-roofed, chainmesh windowed country school house and he listened to the riot-gunned guard at the chainmesh gates close and lock them. The sound had a certain finality, but nobody seemed to think it was anything very unusual or exceptional. The two gleaming giants escorted him inside the country school house as if they did things like this every day. He was still wearing the suntans with tie he had worn at the trial. The first thing the two giants did, inside the door, was to exchange their billies and pistols for unpainted grub hoe handles with the armed sentry who stayed locked inside the weapons room. Then they escorted him to the supplyroom. They still did not say anything to him. The supplyroom was down a long corridor past some doors and turn left past the bulletin board on the left and the barred doors of the three barracks wings on the right, to a cubbyhole on the left. The man in fatigues behind the countertop half door, obviously a trustee, grinned at him unpleasantly. "Welcome to our city," he said happily, as if it overjoyed him to see somebody at least as bad off as himself. "Fix him up," one of the giants snapped, as though it hurt him to expose his own talkativeness. "Yes, sir," beamed the man in fatigues, "yes, sir." He rubbed his hands together in a passable imitation of a hotel manager welcoming a convention. "We have a nice corner room on the tenth floor overlooking the park with a tile bath and plenty of closet space, I'm sure you'll be comfortable there," he said. "I said fix him up," the first giant said. "Cut the comedy. You can bullshit later. Dont get me irritated." The grin on the face of the man in fatigues turned into a snarl that was three quarters whine. "Okay, Hanson, okay, just havin a little fun was all." "Well dont," the first giant said. The second giant did not say anything. The two of them leaned against the wall with their grub hoe handles under their arms like overgrown swagger sticks and smoked silently while the trustee issued Prew toilet articles. The first giant, Hanson, stepped up and silently possessed himself of Prew's wallet, counted the money in it and wrote it down on a slip of paper, put the paper in the wallet and the money in his pocket with a lewd grin at Prew. The second giant came and looked over his shoulder and silently moved his lips, counting the money. The trustee took Prew's two fatigue jackets and exchanged them for two others which had large white capital Ps stencilled across the back. "These heres so you can start right in to work today," the trustee explained happily, "without havin to wait till we paint yours. Then we'll issue yours out to somebody else later, see?" he explained. Spitefully he grinned wider, as if it warmed the cockles of his heart, when Prew stripped off his suntans and turned them in and put on the fatigues. His own had fitted him, as well at least as the sacklike GI denim jackets ever fitted anybody; these, the shirt hit him almost to the knees, the sleeves dangled down over his fingertips, the shoulder seams hung almost to his elbows. "Jeez, thats too bad," the supply trustee grinned happily. "And thats the nearest thing to your size I got on hand. Maybe someday later on we can change them for you, hunh?" "Thats all right," Prew said. "Well," the trustee consoled, "aint no women going to see you anyways for a while, less they officers' wives ride up past the rockpile. And you couldnt never get into them anyway. So dont let it worry you." "Thanks for the tip," Prew said. "I wont." The two giants were grinning above their cigarettes. "May worry you for a little while," the trustee advised. "You may have a little trouble at first. Specially if you're use to gettin yours wet every night. You'll get over it though," he said confidently. "It wont kill you. You'll just think it will." One of the giants snorted. Prew thought of Alma and felt a wave of sickness go down through his belly into his thighs, at the picture of her on the bed in the room three steps up from the tiled living room in the house on the edge of the hill over Palolo Valley. He had not seen her for over two weeks now. Three months was six times two weeks. Fourteen weeks, of not seeing her or knowing where she was or what she was doing with whom. "Also," said the trustee from the height of his superior experience, "you get to wondering what they're doin all this time." "Yeah?" Prew said. The picture of the man lying beside Alma on the bed was a blank (he looked at it closely) a silhouette. It was not Warden. It was not Prewitt, either. As he watched, the blank of the man moved over her. No, he told himself, no, you know she doesnt like sex for sex sake she's -told you that herself hasnt she? Sex for sex sake bores her doesnt it? This is only your own mind tricking you with your own like of sex for sex sake. What she likes is to have you near her, the personality interest, the warmth of the companionship and understanding, the being loved, the not being lonely. He went on naming them. It wasnt working. Three months was too long. Maybe she'd stumble onto somebody else interesting, just for the interest maybe, just to keep herself occupied you know, not to be lonely. Lots of interesting guys around. Lots of them more interesting than you. He hoped Warden would not forget to call her up. At the same time he dreaded the thought of Warden calling her up. A man was only human. And Warden was an attractive man. Big, and husky, and masculine, and - interesting. Memories of what he would lose ran through his mind. Sharp, clear, personal pictures of Alma like candid camera snaps. The pictures ran through his mind like negatives flashed on a screen, ten times life size in magnification, all the most intimate details (every pore, every hair, every wrinkle, of her body that he knew as well as his own, he could suddenly visualize them all perfectly) he stood and watched the pictures. And in each picture moved the same tin blank, the same twodimensional black silhouette, the same black seducer, standing where Prewitt had stood and sitting where Prewitt had sat and lying where Prewitt had lain, taking all of Prewitt's most cherished secrets unto himself. The son of a bitch was using his mind and memories to seduce the woman he loved and he could not stop the black bastard. It was agony. He stood and watched the woman he loved being callously outwitted and seduced by himself. He could feel the panic he had put down that first night in the guardhouse coming back on him. The thing was, she was too easy fooled (he felt) too generous for her own good, just let any lonely unhappy guy come along with a good snow job and she'd let him have it just to make him feel better, maybe. Take him right in. He remembered how easily she had sucked in his loneliness spiel. The fact that his had been true did not make any difference. They all were true. Nobody ever lied about being lonely. But they were all lies too, he knew from himself, because as soon as you started to talk to a woman about your loneliness you werent alone any more, you were like the playwright believing in the hero of his own play, the novelist trying to live his own novels. As soon as you saw the audience was affected you knew you had something to gain and you started to act, to make the truth more convincing. And then the truth wasnt there any more, it had got lost in the shuffle. He felt if he could only talk to her a minute, and warn her. He was terribly afraid suddenly she would/\ not be able to see that the guys who spieled her were lying. After all, she had not seen it with him, had she? Or had she? maybe she had and that was why she kept refusing to marry him? Because she didnt trust him. But, she had to trust him! The panic was getting into him; he could hardly restrain himself from turning to stare at the chainmesh grills locked on the windows. He felt that any second he would fall down on the floor and start screaming and beating his fists on the floor. In front of these three watching him, watching so closely. This had never happened to him before. He had gone without any for longer than three months without hurting any, plenty times. It had never bothered him in the old days on the bum and at Myer. But then he had not had any idea of what it really could be like with a woman, then. It wasn't like this with Violet either. Suddenly, he wondered if Violet had ever felt this way about him. Maybe it was because he loved Alma? But he had thought he loved Violet. Or maybe it was because he was so sure Alma didn't love him. You're crazy, you must stop it, he tried to convince himself desperately, as he went right on straining his eyes to try and recognize the black silhouette, I'll kill him, I'll kill the evil black son of a bitch. "What's the matter?" the trustee grinned solicitously. "Did I say something?" Prew felt his face grinning somewhere. Thank God! he thought. He looked around behind him at the two giants. "What?" his voice said. "You mean to me? Not to me," his voice said, "why?" I made it, I made it, he thought, I have made it. But how will it be at night in the bunk in the dark when they're all asleep and theres nobody around to make your pride work, he thought sickly. The two giants were still grinning appreciatively and he knew he was not fooling any of them. He was not covering it up. He was only just barely saving his pride. They could all see what a goddam lovesick fool he was. Everybody could always see what a goddam lovesick fool he was. Why couldnt he stop being a goddam lovesick fool sometime? other people werent. "Heres your hats, bud," the trustee said. "Dont forget your hats." He passed him two of the GI fatigue hats, brand new with the brims stiff as a board and the thin denim crowns mashed flat in millions of wrinkles, that always looked like rags on your head no matter how sporty you fixed them and that were the main reason every man on the Post owned two campaign hats, one for good and one for fatigue. "Sorry, bud," the trustee grinned relishingly, as if reading his mind again. "But we dont issue no campaign hats here. Guess the QM forgot us on the campaign hats." The two giants laughed out loud. The second giant, the silent one, spoke for the first time. "Campaign hats is for soljers," he said, "not prisoners." Nobody argued with him. Prew tried on one of the hats, farcically. If you can only laugh, if you can only turn it into a joke. Then you'll be all right. For a while. The hat came clear down onto his ears and the brim stood out sharp all around and the crown was tight to his head, a pot, but still wrinkled. "Look just like Clark Gable, bud," the trustee grinned. "Specially you keep it down on the ears." "How can I help but keep it down on the ears," Prew kidded. "Hell, you ought to see some of them, bud," the trustee told him spitefully, as if putting him back in his place for trying to hog into the humor - he thinks I'm playing for their benefit, Prew thought wanting to laugh, he thinks its them, he dont know I'm doing it for my own self, and just barely that - "You aint nothing special, you ought to see the ones that dont fit," the trustee told him. The two giants laughed again. "Howm I doin?" the trustee grinned at them. "Pretty good," the first giant, Hanson, the talkative one, said. "Pretty good, Terry. Lets go, you," he said to Prew. Terry the trustee stuck his head out the halfdoor cautiously and looked up and down the long hall. "Well how about givus a fuckin tailormade then, Hanson," he pleaded anxiously, "pive you joes some laughs, dint I?" The giant Hanson looked cautiously up and down the hall himself. There was nobody in sight. He reached quickly in his shirt pocket and pulled a single tube out of the pack in the pocket and tossed it into the supplyroom door. Terry the trustee scrambled for it on the floor hungrily. Hanson jabbed Prew in the buttocks with the butt of his grub hoe handle. "Okay, Mack," the talkative Hanson said. They all went down the hall toward the barracks wings. "You'll get your ass in trouble someday, Hanson," the silent one said, "doin damfool things like that." "Yeah?" Hanson said. "You wount be the son of a bitch to turn me in, would you, Turniphead?" "Not me," the silent one said. They walked on. "His name's Turnipseed," Hanson explained to Prew. "I wount turn my own mother in," Turnipseed said proudly, after long thought, "much as I hate her guts." "You turned a prisoner in last week," Hanson said, unimpressed. " For smokin tailormades." "Thats business," Turnipseed said. "And he was a fuckup anyway." Apparently the unanswerable had been said. The longwinded conversation died abruptly. The barred double doors to the three barracks wings were wide open. They took him into the first one they came to, the west one. There was nobody in it. It was very long with windows on both sides. The windows were nailed shut. They had chainmesh grids on them. The