From Here to Eternity (80 page)

lighthouse out on the Point and the one solid rock, and the Engineers across the highway with the pneumatic drills, digging and blasting into the cliff wall where the highway demolition would be. Makapuu Head was the most crucial spot in the Company sector. If an enemy landed at Kaneohe, there were only two roads he could take into Honolulu without going clear around the whole island, the Pali road that came down Nuuanu Avenue into town, and Kalanianaole Highway at Makapuu Head. The majority of Pete Karelsen's weapons platoon, under Pete, formed the nucleus of the Makapuu Head complement because they were the best machinegunners in the Company, and there was another whole platoon of riflemen to protect them because they were precious. But now both machinegunners and riflemen worked together side by side with the Barco drills and shovels like a nigger labor battalion. At Makapuu it was definitely not a wonderful time. Gradually, as the work on one position after another was completed, and Makapuu still made no headway into the one solid rock, more and more men were shifted out there to help cut with Barco drills the one solid rock. Until finally the whole Company was out there, working in eight-hour shifts, around the clock 24 hours a day. A kind of frenzied ecstasy for work got into everybody, particularly the night shifts for some reason, and specially after The Warden made it his headquarters and took to operating a Barco while lashing sarcastically at everybody in a voice: that drowned even the stuttering one-cylinder engines. The cooks stayed up all night in shifts voluntarily, to keep them supplied with hot sandwiches and coffee. Even the clerks and cooks took their turns at working the Barcos; Mazzioli, when he came down from Schofield for a couple of days to look around, put on his unfaded fatigues he had hardly worn in a year and displayed his surprisingly good physique naked to the waist on a Barco and it turned out much to everybody's surprise that his old man had been a sandhog on the Holland Tunnel job in New York. It was inexplicable, the whole thing. The men who had been out there from the start wrapped handkerchieves proudly around bleeding blisters and laughed uproariously as the blisters on the hands of the new men began to break. Maybe somebody would even sing the old soldier's parody of Chow Call. We've built a million kitchens, For the cooks to burn our beans; We've walked a hundred million miles, We've cleaned out camp latrines. If we ever get to heaven, the angels all will yell: Take a front seat, Men of Schofield, You've done your hitch in hell. It turned out to be even more fun than wahines and whiskey, which was fun. Even The Warden's wild driving leadership could not account for it, It was the thing that makes Infantry Companies Infantry Companies, and gives old men who were once soldjers the sentimentality with which to tell stories that bore their grandchildren. A Barco drill has no trigger like an air hammer and it is twice as heavy because its one-cylinder gasoline engine is built right onto the barrel. When they picked it up to move it to a new spot, they had to pick up the whole vibrating bucking mass, bracing it against a thigh to even hold it, because if you turn it off it takes five minutes to start it again with the spring plunger and you have to move it every minute or so. And the only place on a Barco that you can touch without getting burned, except for the grips, is the gas tank under the handles, and after half an hour of bracing the gas tank against your thigh your fatigue pants leg is scorched rusty brown and all the hair is worn off and burned off your leg. Compared to an air hammer a Barco is an antiquated monstrosity, and if you had asked any of the men who complained because they didn't have air hammers (and all of them did) to trade the Barcos in for them, they would have snorted and said they didnt need air hammers like the goddam Engineers. It was as if they liked burning the hair off their legs, and shaking their back teeth loose when they moved them, and wearing the skin on their hands down to raw meat. It was as if they used them and hated them and loved them and would not have had anything else. It was as if they had never had so much fun in their lives. And across the road the Engineers with their pneumatic drills digging the demolition listened to them sing and watched them enviously, and they knew the Engineers watched them and laughed and sang even more loudly. Until finally even some of the Engineers, after they got off their own shifts, came over to help. And in a month it -was done, and they laid the brace-steel and poured the concrete themselves for the roofs, and went back to Schofield and garrison soldiering, some of them with a new disease that made it feel like the veins in the shoulders and elbows and wrists were swollen and aching while their fingers and hands and finally their whole arms got tingly numb, a disease that every time they did any work with their hands they would wake up with in the middle of the night and get up and shake their arms back awake while the veins in their joints kept aching a long time afterwards so that they had to go out to the latrine for a Piss Call and smoke a cigarette while they let the aching subside so they could go back to bed, but a disease that they never went on sick call with because they had never even heard of it and did not know it was a disease. The date was November 28th, 1941.

CHAPTER 48

IT WAS during that same six weeks of grace, from the 16th of October to the 28th of November, while the Company was out in the field sweating their butts off and would have sacrificed a left arm to trade places with him, that Robert E Lee Prewitt began to realize just how necessary being a thirty-yearman was. If you wanted to enjoy being on pass. It kept coming into Prewitt's mind more and more frequently how he was not a thirty-year-man any more. He was still pretty sick when the maneuvers started. At least, his side was still sore enough for him to get up in the middle of the night and sit and smoke in the wooden-armed occasional chair by the bed, when the irritated tossing for sleep in the bed got too frustrating. He had learned that trick at Myer the first time his nose had been broken; the sitting up and not trying to sleep always relaxed you enough so you could doze in the chair. But by the time the red forces had made their landing, he was much better. Enough better to discover that the secret of at least 50% of the enjoyment of a pass seemed to be the disagreeable knowledge: that soon it would end and you would have to go back. He knew about the maneuvers, all right. Both girls brought the news home with them from work two full days before the maneuvers even got started. Then there were the newspaper articles that mentioned them and used them, just like last year and every year since the European war started, as a springboard for editorials about the world situation and the possibility of being drawn into war. He read them all. He had taken to reading both newspapers thoroughly, by then. He did not particularly believe what the newspapers said (excluding the sports page and the comics). What they said did not even interest him; it consumed two hours every morning. It put off his enjoyment of the radio-bar and the record-player and the porch over Palolo Valley for as long as he could make the, newspapers last. The enjoyment of the radio-bar and the record-player and the rest of the furnishings had thinned with the knowledge that he was not going to leave them. He did not enjoy having his own key any more because he never left the house so he could use it. Except at sunset, the porch over Palolo Valley showed exactly the same view all day long, everyday, including Sundays, even when he was drunk. All he had left was the newspapers. Both girls would always still be asleep when he got up, and he would make his own coffee and breakfast and then go into a huddle with the papers on the breakfast-nook table in the midst of the crumbs. Usually, he could make them last until the girls got up at noon, if he worked the crossword. Then he would have coffee with them again. With the Sunday papers, which lasted until three or four in the afternoon, he felt like a veritable rich man. The newspapers did not say anything at all about the construction of the beach position emplacements after maneuvers ended. So he did not know about that until he finally went down to see Rose and Charlie Chan at the Blue Chancre. But the newspapers did give him an idea. He went on a reading jag. It was the second real reading jag in his life. The first had been when he was laid up in the hospital at Myer getting over the clap that the rich girl had given him. They had had a good, though small, library at the Myer hospital and he had read his way through almost all of it with a dictionary at his elbow mainly because there hadnt been anything else in the GU ward to do. Reading, he found, was like with pain, or a delicate appetite; you minced your way around the outside tasting this dish and that and getting more and more irritable. And nothing suited you, until you had made up your mind to promise yourself you would read every word on every page. Once you got yourself started and into it you werent irritable any more and it was kind of fun, in a way.. He did that with every book in Georgette's Book of the Month Club collection, even the bad ones that did not sound true to life, at least not as he had become acquainted with life. But he was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt since obviously he had not known every kind of life (like, the life of the rich, say) any anyway, if you just shut off part of your mind from asking acerbic questions about this and that and limited yourself to just the words you read in through your eyes, you could almost believe all of them, even the worst ones. Besides, it was a good way to pass the time. Much better than newspapers. And it did not give you a hangover. He read night and day like that,for over two weeks. If the girls got up at noon, or came home from work at 2 AM, they would find him curled up in a book with the dictionary and a drink at his elbow. He had found that three or four drinks made many of them much more believable. He would be so engrossed that the girls never got more than a grunt for an answer. Alma didnt like it. She would try to talk to him and when he would only grunt and go on reading she would usually end up by going off and sitting in silence on the other side of the room. Sometimes she would play records loudly. Alma very rarely played records. He ran through Georgette's collection midway in the second week and proceeded to get stinking drunk. There was not another book in the house. He had averaged two, and even three, books a day; without giving any thought to the fact that his stockpile was beginning to run low. He got very drunk. It was while he was very drunk that it suddenly hit him how much Georgette looked like most of the heroines in her Book of the Month Club collection. When Alma came home from work and found him passed out on the throwrug in front of the divan, she blew her top that had been accumulating since he first went on this reading jag. They had quite a scene and ended up with a compromise. If she would get him books at the library, he would lay off the liquor - at least to the point of getting wall-eyed. Neither she nor Georgette had a card, but she took one out and started bringing them home to him. Most of the ones she brought were mystery stories. Being a murderer himself, he was interested in finding out more about it as far as it concerned murderers themselves, and he read a lot of them but nowhere in none of them - not even in Raymond Chandler, whom he liked best of all - could he find anything that even remotely resembled his own feelings as a murderer, and finally he got tired of looking. But there was another thing that'took him off the mysteries, too. He remembered one day for no good reason how Jack Malloy had always talked about Jack London all the time, and how he had worshipped him almost as much as Joe Hill. The only book of Jack London's he had ever read was The Call of the Wild. So he started Alma to bringing home London and went into him really in earnest. Although he had to use the dictionary more often with London, he could still seem to read him faster. His writing seemed simpler. One day, when he was along toward the last of them, like John Barleycorn and The Cruise of the Elsinore, he read five in one day. Of them all, he liked Before Adam and The Star Rover the best because for the first time they gave him a clear picture of what Malloy had meant by reincarnation of souls. He thought he could see now, how there could just as easily be an evolution of souls in different bodies, just like there had been an evolution of bodies in different souls from the prehistoric times like Redeye and those, in Before Adam. It seemed to be logical. At least, it did when he was drunk. It was while he was reading Martin Eden that he got the idea to start writing down titles of other books to read, like Martin had done. There were lots of them in London. Most of them he had never heard of. A few he had heard Malloy mention. He wrote down all of them, with the author's name, in the little notebook he.had had Alma buy for him. He would look at the growing list as proudly as if it was a Presidential Citation. Before he was done, he would read them all. The next time he ran into Jack Malloy he would be able to talk back instead of just listen. He did the same thing with a Thomas Wolfe book that Alma brought home on a hunch, writing them down in his notebook as he came on them. But when he had finished that one he found he had so many titles of books he wanted to read that it would take him at least a year of doing absolutely nothing but reading just to get through them. It was partly that, the hopelessness of ever reading all of them, that brought the reading jag to its end. The other thing that helped to end it and break it off short was Alma. She got up early one morning and cornered him in the kitchen before Georgette was up. He was reading another Thomas Wolfe book, the one where the kid went to New York to become a great writer. He never did get to finish it to find out what happened to him. He was sitting behind the table of the glassed-in breakfast nook and could not get out. "I want to know what you plan to do?" Alma said after she had got a cup of his coffee that was still heating on the stove. "Plan to do when?" he said. "Anytime," Alma said crisply. "Now. Tomorrow. Next week. Shut that book and listen to me. What are you going to do?" "Do about what?" he said. "About the way things are," she said. "Shut that book and listen to me! I'm getting tired of talking to the front covers of books!" "Whats wrong with the way things are?" "Just about everything," Alma said. "I hardly talk to you from one day to another. You look at me as though you were half asleep - like now. As if you hardly knew who I was. I'm Alma, remember? Maybe you've forgotten? It was almost five months since I'd seen you, and then you were hurt." "Maybe being hurt got to my brain and made me remember," he said, trying to be humorous. It did not come off very well. "You dont expect to go on living here like this indefinitely, do you?" Alma said brittlely. "I think its time you figured out what you plan to do, dont you? Do you plan to go back to the Army? Do you plan to try to live here and get a job? Do you plan to try to get back to the States? Just what do you plan to do?" Prew tore off a strip of newspaper to mark his place and pushed the book down the table out of reach. "Frankly, I aint planned anything. Does it make any difference?" "Ugh," Alma said. "This coffee is horrible." "Tastes all right to me," he said defensively; her complaint of the coffee, like everything else, seemed to be directed at him personally. "It's been simmering on the stove so long its as muddy and thick as sorghum molasses," Alma said. She got up and threw her cup out and emptied the rest and put a new filter paper in the Silex hourglass and put on water for a new pot. Prew watched her. Her long black hair was still matted from sleeping and the thin print dressing gown had smudges of powder on it. His hand wanted to reach out and pick up the book again, but it was out of reach and he would have had to get up. He did not feel like getting up. That was why he had pushed it out of reach down the table. She came back and sat down across from him again. "Well? What do you plan to do?" "Nothing," he said, wishing now he had got up for the book. "Why worry about it? I'm doing all right." "Yes," Alma said. "Yes, you are. But in less than a year I'm going back home to the Mainland and home. You're going to have to figure out something before then." "All right," he said. "I'll work on it. A year is a long time off yet. Now why the hell dont you lay off of me?" "You certainly cant go home with me to Oregon," Alma said coolly, too coolly, "if thats what you're thinking." He had thought about it, sketchily. But he had given it up, even sketchily. "Did I ask you to go home with you?" "No," she said, "but I wouldnt be surprised to find you with your bag already -" "Then why dont you wait till you're ask? Before you start tossing refusals around?" "Because I dont intend to wake up on the boat and find you in the bed." "Okay; you wont. Believe me, you wont. Now why dont you relax and wait till that time comes, to worry about me? I said I was doing all right." "You sure are," Alma snorted. "You've done nothing for the past three weeks but sit around here in a trance and read books and get drunk and make a big play for Georgette. I'd say you were doing fine." "Is that whats been eating you?" "Maybe you'd like to live on here and just switch over to Georgette, after I leave, and shack up with her?" He had already thought of that, too. He had, in fact, thought of a lot of things. But it made him mad to hear her say it out loud. "Maybe thats not such a bad idea at that," he said. "Perhaps not," Alma said coolly, "at first glance. But in the first place, Georgette might not be able to keep this place and support you in the style to which you are getting accustomed. It takes both of us to pay for it. And you're already beginning to run me in over my budget." "We could probly figure something out," he said. "And in the second place," Alma said, "if thats what you've got in mind, you can get the hell out now and wait till I'm gone before you come back. Because I dont want to live in the same house with such a bad smell. And - if it comes down to it - I think Georgette would prefer me to living with you." "She probly would," Prew said. "She's known you longer." "I'm quite sure she would," Alma said. "Completely apart from the fact that I help pay for the house." "Okay," he said, and crawled out from behind the table and got up. "You want me to leave now?" Alma's eyes widened perceptibly, and she had to make a big effort to keep from catching her breath. She did not say anything. Prew watching her in silence, feeling quite proud. "Where would you go?" Alma said. "What difference does it make?" "Oh, be sensible," Alma said, irately. Prew grinned, knowing that somehow he had suddenly finally gained the advantage. It was getting to be more and more every day like a tight tennis game: your ad; my ad; your ad; my ad. "Theres lots of places I could go," he said, not wanting to lose it again now that he had it. "I could go on the beach. I might even find another whore in the market for a pimp. I might even turn back into the Army; they probly dont know I killed Fatso anyway," he lied. The whore part, of course, did not touch her. It never did. "You'd be putting your head in a noose," she said irritably, "and you know it." "I might even ship out on a tramp," he said, remembering Angelo Maggio, "and go to Mexico and be a cowboy." "I didnt mean you had to leave until you'd found someplace to go," she said irritably. "What do you think I am? You know me better than that. You dont have to leave at all, unless you want to. I want you to stay." "You sure as hell act like it." "Well," she said angrily, "its just that ft gets under my skin, seeing you sitting around ogling Georgette all the time, knowing you're figuring your chances of
getting in on the inside with her as soon as I'm gone. How do you think that makes me feel?" "What the hell do you want me to do? Sit around here and be your true love for as long as you feel like staying, and then see you off on the boat when you go home to marry a rich man? You think I like layin around on my ass livin off you so you can throw it up to me every time you get mad at me? What am I suppose to do when you marry the rich guy? go blow my brains out with a broken heart? It seems to me you ask a whole hell of a lot of a man." "I don't think its too much to ask you to prefer me to other women," Alma said earnestly. "At least as long as I'm here. I know how men are; I ought to. I'm no dewy-eyed virgin Cinderella. I dont expect miracles. But I dont think thats too much to ask." "Its pretty hard to prefer a woman when she plainly dont want to sleep with you any more." "Its pretty hard to want to sleep with a man who prefers other women," Alma said. "Especially if he looks at you all the time from a trance as if you're not even there." "Well?" he said. "Do you want me to leave or dont you?" She was beginning to gain ground again, and he could always get back the ad there. Because she knew he would do it. He might never win the game with it, but it would take a lot of ad points. "Oh, sit down and be sensible," Alma said. "No, I dont want you to leave. I already told you that. Do you want me to get down on my knees and beg you? "But Georgette is my friend," she said, "and if it came down to sleeping with you or keeping my friendship, I think she'd prefer to keep the friendship. You might remember that, for future reference." He sat down. "But she'll never see you again after you're gone," he said, just to let her know he was not giving ground, "and she knows it." "After I'm gone," Alma said, "you can do what you want." "Son of a bitch if you dont demand a whole hell of a lot from a man. I'd rather earn my living soljering, its easier. Only I cant," he said. "Your coffee water's boiling." Alma got up and went to the stove to turn the heat off under the Silex hourglass. Then she stood without saying anything and watched the coffee begin to run back down the spout. "Oh, Prew, Prew." She turned around. "Why did you have to do it? Why did you have to kill him? We were getting along so fine. Until you had to do something like that. Why did you have to spoil it?" He was sitting with his elbows on the table and his fists clasped, looking at them. Not staring. Just looking. As if he were examining a tool to see if it was adequate for the job. "I've always done it," he said simply, neither gladly nor guiltily, but just simply stating it. "I've always spoiled everything I've ever touched all my life. Maybe all men do it," he said, remembering Jack Malloy. "I dont know about that. I know I have. I dont know why, though." "Sometimes I dont think I even know you," Alma said. "Sometimes you're almost like a complete stranger. When your First Sergeant Warden came down to see me, he said you wouldnt even have had to go to the Stockade. He said you could have gotten off scot free if you'd wanted to." Prew looked up quickly. "Has he been down there to see you again? Has he? Answer me, goddam you?" "No," Alma said; "that was the first time, when he told me you were in hock. He's only been there once. Why?" "I don't know," Prew said, relaxing back on his elbows to look at his hands again. "I just wondered." "You dont think he'd turn you in, do you?" Alma said. "You cant think that!" "I dont know," he said, looking at the tools his hands. "I honestly dont know. I never been able to figure out if he would or he wouldnt." "Thats a terrible thing to admit," Alma said. "You dont understand," he said. "Sometimes," he said simply, "I wish I was back in the Stockade." - Angelo Maggio. Jack Malloy. Blues Berry. Francis Murdock. Stonewall Jackson. The long dark evenings of cigarette-lighted conversations. Between them all they had covered every part of the country. Damn near the whole world. "In the Stockade it was easy, it was simple. You had somebody over you that you hated and plenty of time to hate them, and plenty of help hating them, and you did what they told you and just hated them, without having to worry about hurting them any because you couldnt have hurt them anyway." "After you got out, you didnt even call me up," Alma said. "You were out nine whole days, without coming up to see me or even calling me up." "I was trying to protect you, goddam it!" She did not laugh. She felt more like you feel with a child. Since he had got well from the knife wound he did not give her the chance to feel like you feel with a child any more. "Prew, Prew, Prew," she said and came over to him and pulled his head against her. "Come on," she said. "Come with me." Prew got up and followed her. She went into the bedroom. But it was like too many other times, when they had fought, and made up, and then gone warmly to bed. Your ad arid my ad, and every day a Millennium. He could not keep himself from remembering how he was not a thirty-year-man any more. Then, after he had remembered it, he re-remembered it. About the only time he was not remembering it any more was when he was reading a book with three or four drinks in him for convincingness. Alma knew it. They both knew it. The transparent wall of the trance was back down, and apparently the only way to get under it was to get so mad that the anger cut through it. It was a hell of a way to gel close together. They heard Georgette moving around getting up and, afterwards, went back out to the kitchen. Neither one of them cared much about lying in bed, afterwards, any more. They sat in the kitchen and drank the coffee and in the loss of the desire and the superimposed silence they could not break through suddenly felt very old and, in feeling very old, suddenly were much closer and warmer to the other, who was also very old, than they had either one ever felt before in the desire that neither one had any more. Then Georgette came in friendlily like a big overgrown puppy, but with the big body like most of the heroines in her Book of the Month Club collection and that was covered with only the thin print wrapper whose powder smudges, strangely, instead of being distasteful were rut-and-crotch-sexily enticing. Alma looked at Prew and then looked away coolly. Prew tried not to look at Georgette. Even when he talked to her he looked at Alma, or at the stove, or at the tools his hands. After half an hour of this Georgette got up, looking puzzled and hurt, and went to her room to get dressed. She went out early. She had some shopping to do, she said, and would not be back before two o'clock so she would just go on down to work. Alma went out early too and ate lunch downtown. He tried to read after they were gone, but the morning had exploded the myth that was already getting threadbare anyway, and he could not get back inside the book. He could only read it. Even after five or six drinks, he could still only read it. He could not forget to remember how he was not a thirty-yearman any more. Well, what do you plan to do? Alma had a .38 Police Special Smith&Wesson which one of the local cops had given her for a present that she kept loaded in a drawer of the desk along with a box of cartridges, and he took it. Whatever else, he did not intend to ever go back to no Stockade no more. Go back to the old Stockade, with Angelo and The Malloy and Blues and the rest of them all there like they had been before - yes. But he was not going back to any new Stockade, where they were all gone and there was doubtless a new Fatso Judson, and everything else was changed, except perhaps Major Thompson. He removed the old cartridges that had probably been in it for years and reloaded it with new ones from the box and put some more of them in his pocket. Then he helped himself to the money that Alma also kept in the desk, and walked down the hill to Kaimuki and caught a Beretania streetcar to town to pay a visit to Rose and Charlie Chan at the Blue Chancre. It was wonderful to be outdoors again in sunlight and air. His side was still a little stiff but it did not hurt him to walk. He had to wear a jacket because of the .38 Special stuck in his belt, but it was light tropical worsted (Alma and Georgette had bought it along with the slacks and dressing gown) and it had saddle-stitched lapels and he did not mind it even in the sun because he felt very ritzy in it. He got off the bus a couple blocks up and sauntered down past the alleyway that ran back to the Log Cabin Bar&Grill. It looked just the same as it always had. There was nobody in the Blue Chancre when he went in. A few sailors drinking beer and trying to make time with Rose who was strictly an Army girl. But nobody from the Company. He sat at the bar and drank whiskey-sodas, so he would not get drunk enough to get noticed and get picked up, and talked to Charlie. G Company was all out at Makapuu Head building pillboxes, Charlie told him, that was why there was nobody there. Hadnt been nobody here since before the maneuvers started. Place velly dead. Rose came over and sat down by him after a while and asked grinningly how he liked being a civilian now? It scared him at first, or rather startled him, but he told himself he should of known they would know it, and they both laughed and seemed to think it was big joke and wanted to know how long he planned stay vacation? Nobody mentioned Fatso Judson. He sat and talked to them about the free life of a civilian quite a while. He did not know just exactly what he had expected. He had expected to find some of the Company there, for one thing. He did not know about the beach positions. He knew it was reckless to show up down there, but he did not expect anyone from the Company would turn him in, unless it would be Ike Galovitch. And Old Ike never went to the Blue Chancre. He found out from Rose that Old Ike had been busted. It must have happened the day after he left, he figured. And Rose told him about how Warden was up for a commission which, if he had heard it during the nine days he waited for Fatso, had failed to register. The new Company Commander, Rose said, maybe turning out not be such bad joe after all, look like. The more they talked the more homesick he got. He had to watch himself carefully not to get drunk. He bet they were having a rough time out at Makapuu, building pillboxes in that rock. But the roughness, strangely, instead of making him glad he was out of it, excited him and made him want to get in on it. He stayed until 9:30 or 10:00 o'clock, eating Charlie's hamburgers cooked out back that were at least one-third cereal, with plenty of onion and mustard, to keep the liquor from getting into him, and telling himself it was the best food he had had in weeks. There were plenty sailors at the six booths and four tables, but almost no soldiers. Hardly any soldier coming town now any more, Charlie said. Rose's latest shackjob, a S/Sgt of Field Artillery, came in; and Rose, with her Chinese eyes and Portagoose nose and mouth and the startling eye-arrestingly beautiful waggling waggling take-a-hold-of-me bottom that seemed to be distinctively peculiar to Portagoose-Chinese girls also, left Prew at the counter and spent her time between beer calls in a booth with the S/Sgt. Charlie could not talking about anything but how this pillbox job luin the blisness, not like old maneuvels use to be, be plenty glad when him oveh. It was just before he left that Rose happened to remember how The Warden had been in asking for him, just before maneuvers, the very night before, in fact. She thought it was big joke. What he want them tell The Warden? if he come back? They both wanted to know. "Tell him I been here," he said immediately. "Tell him I miss him, I cant hardly stay away from his beautiful face. Tell him I'm lookin for him, too," he added, "and if he wants to see me, this is the best place to look." They both nodded. They did not look surprised. They were used to screwball soldiers. Him Army. Awys think screwy, Army guys. He got home around twelve. He had ridden the streetcar again, going home, instead of a taxi. Maybe it was because he felt more like a free man, sitting in the streetcar with all those people, people who could come and go when they pleased without feeling funny every time they passed a cop on a corner. He put the pistol away in the desk drawer, and put the rest of the shells back in the box. He was already in bed asleep when Georgette and Alma got home at two-thirty.