From Here to Eternity (84 page)

Colonel's jeep could not worm through between them. The yards filled up with troops until even the Colonel's adjutants and messengers could not work through them. There was much swearing and sweaty disgust. The Regiment moved as a unit. And in the G Co orderly room, Warden chortled to himself smugly, as he worked. Once, when Lt Ross had gone to the supply room, Maylon Stark stuck his head in at the door. "The kitchen truck's loaded and ready to roll." "Right," Warden said, without looking up. "I want you to know I think you done a hell of a swell job," Stark said reluctantly strangledly. "It'll be two hours, anyway, before any other kitchen in this outfit is ready; and some of them probably have to stay behind to get loaded and come down later." "You done a good job yourself," Warden said, still not looking up. "It wasnt me," Stark said. "It was you. And I just want you to know I think you done a hell of a job." "Okay," Warden said, "thanks," and went on working without looking up. He rode down in the jeep at the head of the Company's convoy with Lt Ross, Weary Russell driving. There was terrific traffic. The roads were alive with trucks and taxis as far as the eye could see, bumper to bumper. The trucks were taking them down, to beach positions; the taxis were taking them up, to Schofield, where their outfits would already be gone. Recons and jeeps slithered in and out among the long lines of trucks, but the big two-and-a-halfs could only lumber on, a few feet at a time, stopping when the truck in front stopped in back of the truck in front of him, waiting to move on until the truck in front of them moved on a little in back of the truck in front of him. The trucks had been stripped of their tarps and one man with his BAR or machinegun mounted over the cab rode standing on the truckbed wall. Helmeted heads were poked above the naked ribs watching the sky like visitors inspecting the dinosaur's skeleton in the Smithsonian Institute. In the jeep, riding up and down haranguing on the road shoulder alongside the Company's column, Warden saw them all, a lot of times. Their faces were changed and they did not look the same any more. It was somewhat the same look as Stark had had in the messhall, only the drunkenness was evaporating out of it leaving only the hard set of the dry plaster. Out here on the highway, lost among hundreds of other outfits, the idea was not only clearer but bigger, much bigger, than back at your home barracks in your own quad. Chief Choate, riding with a BAR up, looked down at him from above his truck cab and Warden looked back. They had all left everything behind, civilian clothes, garrison shoes and uniforms, campaign hat collections, insignia collections, photograph albums, private papers. To hell with all that. This was war. We wont need that. They brought nothing but the skeletal field living equipment, and the only man who packed in anything comfortable to bring with him was Pete Karelsen. Pete had been in France. Gradually, foot by foot, the trucks moved on down toward Honolulu and whatever waited on the beaches. Up till now it had been a day off, it had been fun. Pearl Harbor, when they passed it, was a shambles. Wheeler Field had been bad, but Pearl Harbor numbed the brain. Pearl Harbor made a queasiness in the testicles. Wheeler Field was set back quite a ways from the road, but parts of Pearl Harbor were right on the highway. Up till then it had been a big lark, a picnic; they had fired from the roofs and been fired at from the planes and the cooks had served them coffee and sandwiches and the: supply detail had brought them up ammo and they had got two or three planes and only one man in the whole Regiment had been hit (with a .50 caliber in the fleshy part of his calf, didnt even hit a bone, he walked up to the dispensary by himself), and he was getting himself a big Purple Heart. Almost everybody had a bottle and they all had been half-drunk anyway when it started and it had all been a sort of super-range-season with live targets to shoot at. The most exciting kind: Men. But now the bottles were fast wearing off and there was no immediate prospect of getting any more and there were no live targets to shoot at. Now they were thinking. Why, it might be months - even years - before they could get hold of a bottle again! This was a big war. As the trucks passed through the new, Married NCO Quarters that had been added onto Pearl Harbor recently, women and children and an occasional old man standing in the yards cheered them. The troops rode on through in silence, staring at them dully. Going through the back streets of town, all along the route, men, women and children stood on porches fences cartops and roofs and cheered them roundly. They waved Winnie Churchill's V-for-Victory sign at them, and held their thumbs up in the air. Young girls threw them kisses. Mothers of young girls, with tears in their eyes, urged their daughters to throw them more kisses. The troops, looking wistfully at all this ripe young stuff running around loose that they could not get into, and remembering the old days when civilian girls were not allowed - and did not desire - to speak to soldiers on the street in broad daylight let alone at night in a bar, gave them back the old one-finger salute of the clenched fist jabbing the stiff middle finger into the air. They returned Winnie Churchill's V-for victory sign with an even older one of their own, in which the fist is clenched, and the middle finger and thumb are extended and pinched repeatedly together. The ecstatic civilians, who did not know that this last was the Old Army sign for the female, or that the first meant "Fuck you!" cheered them even more roundly and the troops, for the first time since they'd left Schofield, grinned a little bit at each other, slyly, and redoubled with their saluting. From Waikiki on east, the trucks in the Company's convoy began to peel off to deliver the various three- and four-man details each with its noncom to their various beach positions. By the time they reached the rise up over the Koko Head saddle where the road turned off down to the CP at Hanauma Bay, there were only four trucks left. The two for Position 28 at Makapuu Head, one for the CP personnel and Position 27, and the kitchen truck. The first two, the CP truck and the kitchen truck, pulled off onto the side road and stopped and the last two bound for Makapuu went on, then, past them. They had all had their big day with the civilians, which most of them had waited from two to five years for, and now they were preparing to pay for it. Among the troops in the trucks there was a certain high fervor of defense and patriotism that exploded into a weak feeble cheer in the heavy perpetual wind, as they passed Lt Ross and The Warden who had climbed out of the jeep on the road-shoulder to watch them go past. A few fists were shaken in the air up between the bare truck ribs and Friday Clark, current-rifleman and ex-apprentice-Company-bugler, shook a wildly promising two-finger V-for-Victory sign at Lt Ross from over the tailgate of the last truck as they pulled on away. This general patriotic enthusiasm lasted about three days. Lt Ross, standing beside his jeep to watch his men go off to possible maiming and death, certainly off to a war that would last a long time, looked at Friday sadly and without acknowledgment from across a great gulf of years pity and superior knowledge, his eyes set in a powerful emotion, a look of great age and fearful responsibility on his face. 1st/Sgt Warden, standing beside his Company Commander and watching his face, wanted to boot his Company Commander hard in the ass. It was perhaps the stringing of the barbed wire, more than anything else, that ate into the patriotism of the troops in the next few days. The men who had acquired the new unknown disease of aching veins in their arm joints from the building of these positions now found it coming back on them doubly powerfully from putting up barbed wire to protect these positions. So that even when they were not pulling guard at night, they couldn't sleep anyway. The stringing of the barbed wire, after the first day, was an even more powerful astringent to the patiotism than their getting crummy with no prospect of a shower, or their getting itchy with beard and no prospect of a shave, or their having to sleep on the rocks with nothing but a single shelterhalf and two blankets over them when it rained. Actually, this war that had started out so well Sunday morning and given them such high hopes of the future, was turning out to be nothing more than an extended maneuvers. With the single difference that this showed no prospects of ending. It was five days before things were organized enough to allow the sending of a detail back to Schofield for the rest of their stuff, that they had not thought they'd need, and the Company's quota of pyramidal tents. But even these didnt do the men at Makapuu any good since out there there werent any trees to set'them up under. Warden, armed with the request list of each man which altogether covered an entire pad of legal-size scratch paper, led the detail of three trucks. Pete Karelsen, who was the only man in the Company who had been anywhere near comfortable in the five days, was his second-in-command. They pulled into the quad with their three trucks to find another outfit already moved into the barracks and the footlockers and wall lockers of G company thoroughly rifled. Their lists were useless. Peter Karelsen, again, had been practically the only man in the Company who had bothered to lock either his foot-locker or wall locker that Sunday morning./\ But even Pete's extra set of false teeth, which had been out on the table, were gone. And, of course, none of the new tenants they talked to knew a damn thing about it. Warden's records and player were gone, also his $120 Brooks Bros. suit, saddle-stitched Forstmann jacket, and the white dinner jacket and tux pants he had bought but never worn yet, together with all of his uniforms. Also, the brand new $260 electric guitar, still less than half paid for, that Andy and Friday had bought while Prew was in the Stockade, was gone too, speaker jackplug and all. If it had not been for 1st/Sgt Dedrick of A Company, who was about his size and had remembered to lock his wall locker, he would not have even been able to scare up two whole field uniforms. Just about the only thing that had been left untouched were the folded pyramidal tents in the supply room. By the end of the seventh day, when they had got the tents back downtown and distributed out to the positions and set up ready to occupy, every man on the Company roster - including the two men serving time in the Stockade who had been released with the rest of the prisoners - had shown up and reported for duty. With the single exception of Prewitt.

CHAPTER 51

PREWITT slept through the entire attack. He had gotten even drunker than usual the night before while the girls were at work because Saturday night is always supposed to be holiday. He did not even find out there had been an attack, until the insistently dynamic voice from the radio talking on and on tensely finally beat a hole through the thick, very dry, dehydrated hangover in his mouth that, even while still asleep, he knew was there and did not want to wake up to. He sat up on the divan in his shorts, (since he had moved out on the divan he had taken to sleeping in shorts for the sake of modesty,) and saw them both crouching before the radio in their dressing gowns tensely. "I was just going to call you!" Alma said excitedly. "Call me for what?" The strongest thought in the dry eye-ache that was his mind was to head immediately to the kitchen for water. "... but the damage inflicted upon Pearl Harbor itself was by far the most serious," the radio said. "Hardly a building appears to be left standing undamaged. At least one of the battleships that were resting in harbor is sunk to the shallow bottom with its superstructure awash in the still flaming oil-covered waters. Most of the high altitude bombers were concentrated there and upon Hicham Field right across the channel. Next to Pearl Harbor itself, Hickam Field appears to have suffered the worst damage." "Its Webley Edwards," Georgette said. "He's broadcasting back to the Mainland," Alma said. "Either a very large bomb, or else a torpedo," the radio said, "was dropped into the main messhall of the new Hickam Field barracks where four hundred of our unsuspecting airmen were seated at breakfast." Prew knew what it was by this time, but he was having a very hard time getting it through the mud of his head. He could not get it out of his head that it was the Germans; even later on after he had learned it was the Japs, he still could not get it out of his head that it had been the Germans. They must have developed some totally new kind of bomber, that Would be able to fly that far nonstop, even with a base on the east coast of Asia. Because they never could have gotten a carrier task force out into the Pacific past the British navy. What a hell of a time to be caught short with a hangover! Water would never help a hangover like this; the only thing would help a hangover like this was a couple of stiff drinks, and even that wouldn't be quick enough. "Wheres my pants?" he said, getting up in his shorts. A violent throb passed through his head like a concussion,' and he headed across the room toward them and the bar in the top of the radio. "They're right there on the chair," Alma said. "What do you think you're doing?" "No, not those. My uniform pants," he said, opening the bar over their heads and pouring a stiff shot of scotch into one of the long-stemmed cocktail glasses. "I've got a uniform around here someplace:. Where is it?" He downed the shot, shuddering; but he could tell it was going to help. "What are you going to do!" Alma demanded, inarticulately wildly. "What are you doing!" "Going to put enough liquor in me so I can see past this hangover and then get the hell back to the Post. What the hell do you think?" he said, pouring another one and downing it. "There is no denying that our Navy has suffered a great defeat," the radio said. "Perhaps the greatest defeat in its history. It would ..." "But you cant do that!" Alma said frantically. "You cant go back!" "Why the hell cant I? You nuts?" "... but through it all," the radio said, "through the hours of darkness and ignoble defeat, there remains a great shining light that shall forever be an example to all Americans;.. ." "Because they're still looking for you!" Alma said hysterically. "For a murder rap! You dont think they'll dismiss a murder rap against you! Even on account of two wars." He had already poured the third drink, and his head was clearing some. The warm electric glow of the nerve-ends was beginning to dry out the sodden cells. He went on and downed the drink anyway. "I forgotten all about that," he said. "... and that is the courage and heroism of our fighting men," the radio said, "who, in the face of death and overwhelming odds, caught by surprise and without adequate equipage, stuck to their guns and fought back valiantly with all the greatness of spirit that has always been the hallmark of the United States Army and Navy." "Is he talking about the US Army and Navy?" Georgette grinned to nobody in particular. "Well, you better remember it," Alma said, a little more calmly. "If you go back now, they'll only throw you in the Stockade, and then try you for murder. War or no war. That wont be helping to win the war any." Still holding the bottle in one hand and the glass in the other, he sat down on the footstool between them in front of the radio, looking like he had been rabbit-punched by a judo man. "I forgotten all about that," he said dully. "Clean forgotten all about it." "Well, you better think about it," Alma said. "By their quiet heroism under fire," the radio said, "their devotion to duty no matter how trivial, and their silent uncomplaining bravery as they lie wounded and dying - even now, as I speak these words to you - in the hospitals and dressing stations, they are setting an example of faith and service and stoic heroism that we civilians here in Hawaii who have witnessed it will remember for a long long time. They are creating a legend, these men, these boys - and most of them are just that: boys - a legend of Democracy that will for long and long remain unequalled and unsurpassed, and that will strike fear into the hearts of the enemies of freedom." "By God!" Georgette exclaimed suddenly and excitedly, "the yellow little bastards'll learn they cant do that to us and get by with it." "I was asleep," Prew said dully. "I dint even wake up." "Neither did we," Georgette said excitedly. "We didnt even know about it. I just happened to turn the radio on." "And I was asleep," Prew said. "Sound asleep." He poured another drink from the bottle in his left hand into the glass in his right hand and swallowed it off. His head was completely clear now; his head was clear as a bell. "Those goddam fuckin Germans!" he said. "What Germans?" Georgette said. "Them," he said, pointing with the glass to the radio. "I have stood in the wards of Tripler General, the Army's new modern hospital here," the radio said, "and watched them bringing them in, some in full uniform, some in their underwear, some in nothing at all, all of them horribly wounded, horribly burned." "What about Schofield?" Prew demanded rigidly. "What did he say about Schofield?" "Nothing," Georgette said. "Aint even mentioned it. Wheeler Field was bombed, and Bellows Field, and the Kaneohe Naval Air Base, and the Marine Base at Ewa. And Hickam and Pearl Harbor; they got the worst." "But what about Schofield?" Prew said. "What about Schofield, goddam it?" "He hasnt even mentioned it, Prew," Alma said soothingly. "Not a tall?" "She told you no," Alma said. "Then they must not of bombed it," he said relievedly. "He would of mentioned it. They probly only strafed it a little. Thats what they would do," he said. "They would be after the airfields. Thats what they'd be after. Of course they wouldnt bomb Schofield." "Tripler General is a large hospital," the radio said, "equipped with every convenience and every modern device of medical science, but it was not designed to handle such an inconceivable catastrophe as this. There is not room for even a small percentage of the casualties I saw brought in, some of them already dead and dying on their improvised stretchers in the halls and corridors simply because there was neither the room nor the trained personnel to take care of their numbers. Yet nowhere in the whole hospital was there so much as a single whimper of pain, a single complaint. Here and there some terribly mangled lad of nineteen or twenty, his hair and eyebrows and lashes burned completely off, would say to the doctors when they got to him: 'Take care of my buddy here first, Doc; he's hurt lots worse than I am.' But all else was silence. An accusative silence. An angry silence." "The dirty bastards," Prew said dully. He was weeping. "Oh, the dirty bastards. Those babyraping dirty German bastards." He reached up with the hand holding the bottle and wiped off his nose with the back of his hand and poured another drink from the bottle into the glass. "It was the Japs," Georgette said. 'The Japs. The dirty yellow-bellied little Japs. They sneaked in without warning and made a cowardly attack while their decoys was still in Washington crying peace." "It has been," the radio said, "a tremendously uplifting spiritual experience to me, to see the manliness with which these boys are enduring their sufferings, it has richened and deepened my faith in a form of government that can produce heroes like these, not in tens and twenties, but in hundreds and thousands, and I only wish I could have taken every American citizen into the wards of Tripler General with me, to see what I have seen." "Is that Webley Edwards?" Prew said, weeping. "We think so," Alma said. "It must be," Georgette said. "It sounds like him." "Well, he's a great guy," Prew said. He gulped down his drink and refilled the glass. "A great guy, thats all." "You'd better lay off that liquor a little," Alma said uneasily. "Its still early yet." "Early?" Prew said. "Early! Oh, those dirty bastardly Germans. What the hell difference," he hollered, and paused, "does it make? If I get drunk, I cant go back, can I? What the hell difference, I'd like to know? Lets all get drunk. "Oh," he said. "Oh, goddam them, goddam them." "The total extent of the damage," the radio said, "is of course entirely unknown at the present time, and will probably be unknown for some time. Because an emergency exists, and to facilitate coordination and cooperation of all agencies, General Short has declared the Territory to be under Martial Law." "I'll tell you something," Prew wept, pouring another drink, "there aint no murder rap" against me." "There isnt?" Alma said. "There aint no murder rap against anybody. Warden told me, and he wouldnt lie." 'Then you can go back," Alma said. "But," she said, "if you went back wouldnt they still put you in the Stockade for being AWOL?" "Thats just it!" he said. "Now I cant go back anyway. Because I wont go back to no Stockade, see? If I went back, I'd get at least a Summary, and maybe a Special. But they'll never send me back to that Stockade. Never! see?" "If only you could go back without going to the Stockade," Alma said. "But you cant. And you wouldnt help the war any in the Stockade." She put her hand on his arm. "Please lay off the liquor, Prew. Let me have the bottle." "Git away from me!" he said, jerking his arm loose. "I'll knock you on your goddam ass. Git away! and stay away! from me. Lee me alone." He poured himself another cocktail glass full of whiskey and looked at her belligerently. After that, neither one of them said anything to him or tried to stop him. It was not an exaggeration to say that there was murder staring at them out of his red-rimmed eyes. "And as long as they put me in their fuckin hogpen of a Stockade, I'll never go back," he said ferociously. "You nor nobody else." They did not contest this either. So the three of them sat that way, in silence, listening to the reports come in over the radio, until hunger for the breakfast nobody had had drove them out to the kitchen, and Prew finished off the bottle he was working on and started another. He would not leave the radio to eat. When they brought him food he refused it. He stayed in front of the radio on the footstool, drinking cocktail glasses of whiskey and weeping and nothing could budge him. "Our young men have paid dearly," the radio said, "for the lesson the nation has learned this day. But they have paid fairly, and squarely, without fear and without complaint and without bitterness at the high cost. Hired to be ready to fight and die for us, our Regular Army and Regular Navy have this day upheld the faith and confidence we have always placed in them, have proved their right to the esteem we have always had for them." "I was asleep," Prew said dully, "sound asleep. I dint even wake up." They had hoped he would drink himself into a stupor and pass out, so they could put him to bed. The wildness in him made them uneasy to even be in the same room with him. But he did not pass out, and he did not drink himself into a stupor. He was apparently in one of those moods when a man can just go on drinking indefinitely, after he reaches a certain point, without ever getting any drunker but only getting wilder and wilder. He stayed there in front of the radio on the footstool, first weeping and then glaring blackly. Early in the afternoon the radio gave a repeat call of Dr. Pinkerton's request for volunteer blood donors to report immediately to Queen's Hospital. More to get out of the heavy-bellying atmosphere of the house than anything else, away from the ominous electricity with which the wild dynamo in front of the radio was charging the air, both Georgette and Alma decided to go down and give blood. "I'm going too!" the dynamo hollered, and lurched up from the footstool. "You cant go, Prew," Alma said uneasily. "Be sensible. You're so drunk right now you cant even stand up. Besides, everyone'll probably have to show some kind of identification. And you know what that would mean for you." "Cant even give any blood," he said dismally, and lurched back down onto the footstool. "You stay here and listen to the radio," Alma said soothingly. "We'll be back ia a little bit. Then you can tell us all thats happened." Prew did not say anything. He did not even look up again from the radio as they went to get dressed. "I've got to get out of here!" Alma said. "I can't breathe." "Do you think he'll be all right?" Georgette whispered. "I didnt realize!" "Of course he'll be all right," Alma said firmly. "He just feels guilty and he's upset and a little drunk. He'll get over it by tomorrow." "Maybe he ought to go back anyway?" Georgette suggested. "If he went back, they'd only put him in the Stockade again, wouldnt they?" Alma said. "Thats true," Georgette said. "Well, dont talk silly," Alma said. He was still sitting there when they came back out. The radio was droning on with staccato tenseness. Something else about Wheeler Field. He did not look up or say anything, and Alma shook her head warningly at Georgette and they went on out and left him sitting there. He was still sitting there two hours later when they came home, looking as if he hadnt moved a muscle since they had left, except that the bottle in his left hand was well down toward being empty. The radio was still going. If anything, he seemed soberer, with that intent crystal sobriety that comes to a heavy drinker after a long,
intense, concentrated consumption of liquor. But the heavy crackling tension in the air of the house, like low-hanging clouds roiling and rubbing together before an electrical storm, seemed - after the excitement of all the traffic and the bright indifferent Sunday sunlight outdoors - to be even more oppressive than when they had left. "Well, we had quite a foray," Alma said brightly into the bleakness. "We sure did," Georgette said. "If we hadnt had Georgette's car we'd never have even got down there," Alma said. "Let alone got back home. The whole town's a madhouse. Trucks, buses, laundry trucks, private cars, every vehicle that can move." "We met a guy at the hospital who's going to write a book about it," Georgette said. "Yes," Alma said, taking it up. "He's an assistant Professor of English at the University -" "I thought he was a newspaper reporter?" Georgette said. "- No," Alma said, "an English Professor. - And he was helping to evacuate women and children from the bombed areas; and.now he's helping drive people in to the hospital to give blood." "He's going to talk to everybody who had anything to do with any of it," Georgette explained. "Then he's going to put all their stores together in their own words in a book." "He's going to call it Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition," Alma said. "That's what one of the Chaplains at Pearl Harbor said." "Or else, Remember Pearl Harbor," Georgette said. "He dont know which yet. You know, like Remember the Alamo." "Or Remember the Maine," Alma said. "He's very intelligent." "And polite, too," Georgette said. "He treated us just like anybody else. He said all his life he had wanted to live history, and now he had his wish." "A house on Kuhio Street was bombed out," Alma said. "And the drugstore on the corner of McCully and King is smashed flat," Georgette said. "And the man and his wife and two daughters were all killed." "Well," Alma said, "I guess we'd better fix something to eat. I feel a little bit weak." "Me too," Georgette said. "Do you want some food?" Alma said. "No," Prew said. "You really ought to eat something, Prew," Georgette said. "You need food, after all that liquor." Prew reached out and switched off the radio and then looked at them blackly. "Listen, all I want is for you to lee me alone. You want to eat, go eat. Just lee me alone." "Did anything new happen on the radio?" Alma said. "No," he said violently. "Its the same old crap over and over." "Well, you dont care if we listen to it?" Alma said, "do you? While we fix supper?" "Its your radio," Prew said, and got up with his bottle and cocktail glass and went out onto the porch over Palolo Valley and shut the glass doors behind him. "What are we going to do with him?" Georgette said. "He's driving me nuts." "Oh, he'll be all right," Alma said. "Give him a couple of days to get over it. Just ignore him." She turned on the radio and went out to the kitchen, and Georgette followed her restlessly. "Well I just hope you're right," she said uneasily, looking out through the glass doors at the black silhouette against the reddening sky. "He gives me the willies." "I said he'd be all right," Alma said sharply. "Just leave him alone. Ignore him. Come on and help me fix supper; we'll have to put up the blackout curtains in a little bit." They fixed coldcut sandwiches with purkee's Dressing, of which Alma was very fond, and one of those cellophane bags of chopped salad that were just beginning to come out in the stores with French dressing. They poured glasses of milk and put the Silex hourglass on for a pot of coffee, and then they went to draw the blackout curtains that Alma had fixed to hang open like black drapes in the daytime, back when they had had the practice blackout alerts. "You'd better come inside," Alma told him crisply, when she got to the glass doors onto the porch. "We're putting up the blackout curtains." He came in, without saying anything, and went on across the living room and sat down on the divan still holding the nearly empty bottle in his left hand and the cocktail glass in his right. "Don't you want to eat something?" Alma said. "I fixed some sandwiches for you." "I'm not hungry," he said. "I've made some for you anyway," Alma said. "In case you want them later." "I'm not hungry," he said. "I'll wrap them in waxed paper so they'll stay fresh," Alma said. Prew poured himself another drink and did not say anything, so she went on back out into the kitchen, after she had drawn and fastened the blackout curtains over the glass doors. When they came back out with their coffee after they had eaten, he was still on the divan. He had opened a new bottle. In all, he drank over two full fifths of Georgette's scotch whiskey in that one day. The first bottle had been a little over half full, and he had finished that one, and the whole second bottle, and half of the third. They sat for a while and tried to listen to the radio, but the reports were repetitious now, and the obdurate presence sitting silently on the divan finally drove them to bed and they left him sitting there, not drunk and not sober, not happy and not unhappy, not conscious and not. unconscious. He stayed that way for eight days, never what you could really call drunk, but certainly never anywhere near sober, and always with a bottle of Georgette's expensive scotch in one hand and a glass in the other. He did not talk at all except to say "Yes" or "No", mostly "No", when confronted with a direct question, and he never ate anything when they were there. It was like living in the same house with a dead person. When they got up Monday morning, he was asleep on the divan in his clothes. The bottle and glass were sitting on the floor beside him. The two sandwiches Alma had wrapped in waxed paper and left in the kitchen were gone. Neither one of them went to work that day. Honolulu tapered off quickly from the first great rush of emotion in the next several days. The radio began to have musical programs and commercials again, and outside of the soldiers putting up barbed wire on Waikiki Beach and the helmeted sentries outside the vital installations such as the radio stations and the governor's mansion, and the few wrecked buildings such as the Kuhio Street house and the drugstore at McCully and King, the city did not seem to be greatly changed by the metamorphosis of having passed through the crucible. Apparently businessmen were keeping a stiff upper lip and the Provost Marshal's office was advising business as usual, because Mrs Kipfer phoned the house on the third day and told Alma to report for work at ten in the morning next day, rather than the old time of three in the afternoon. Georgette's boss at the Ritz Rooms phoned her later with identical instructions. Because of the sundown curfew instituted by the Martial Law, after which no person without an authorized pass was allowed abroad, all business had to be transacted during the hours of daylight. Business, it turned out, had fallen off drastically at both Mrs Kipfer's and the Ritz. And apparently this was true all over. The Army and Navy were not yet issuing passes to their personnel, and the girls ended up by playing rummy and casino for most of their working hours. A number of them were already securing themselves passage home on one of the ships being used to evacuate Officers' and Enlisted Men's wives and children back to the mainland. Mrs. Kipfer had, however, received information that passes - on a strict rotation plan - would be issued to both Army and Navy personnel within a short time. But at the present time about the only business the New Congress Hotel had was when the small parties of brass came down, in the afternoons now, instead of at night as they used to. There was another thing too, about which Mrs Kipfer worried to Alma considerably, and that was that she had received reliable information to the effect that both Stateside and in the Islands pressure was being brought to bear upon the Armed Services to close down the whorehouses. The pressure was coming from Washington, Mrs Kipfer was told, where a number of female constituents who had sons in the Services were creating quite a rumpus and threatening not to re-elect their representatives to the Congress unless something was done. But in spite of these handicaps Mrs Kipfer, with a tremendous burst of patriotism and a singular devotion to duty, swore she would stick to her post just as long as she by god could and would do her bit toward the Total Victory, just as long as she had a single girl left to command. (And she seldom cursed.) Alma, because Prew had sometime or other Sunday night eaten the two sandwiches she had left out, took to making them regularly both before she left for work and before she went to bed. They were always eaten. But when she forgot to make them, which she did several times, nothing in the refrigerator or the cupboards was even so much as touched. He just was not acting even human. He did not shave, and he did not bathe, and he did not even take off his clothes but just flopped down in them on the divan when he slept. He looked like the wrath of God. His hair had not been touched with a comb since she could remember, and his face had gotten puffy and fat-looking with big pouches under the eyes while the rest of him, which had never been heavy, got thinner and thinner. He would wander, bottle in one hand and glass in the other, from the kitchen to the living room to the bedrooms to the porch and sit down blankly in one place for a while only to get up and go someplace else. The thing that had first attracted her to him - a kind of intensity in the face, if she could have expressed it, a sort of deep tragic fire in the eyes - was not there any more; and you could smell him from clear across on the other side of the room. And he did not seem to be getting any better. Instead, it looked as if he would go on that way indefinitely - until he either wasted away to a shadow and died, or else went completely crazy and went for somebody with a knife. She could not help remembering what he had done to that guard from the Stockade. And Georgette was frankly and openly afraid of him, and said so. Yet, in spite of Georgette, she could not make up her mind to give up hope and let go of him. "In the first place," as she expressed it to Georgette, "theres nowhere for him to go, except here. We all know that if he went back to the Army they'd only throw him in the Stockade again, and maybe kill him. And the whole Island is alive with people checking passes and things. This is the only place where he is safe. We couldnt possibly book passage for him back to the States, like we could have before Pearl Harbor, every bit of space is taken for evacuating noncombatants; and the Army controls all the ships because of having to convoy them. "And besides all that, I just cant give up hope for him somehow." "You mean, you dont want him to leave," Georgette said. "Of course I dont want him to leave!" "What'll become of him when we go back to the Mainland?" Georgette said. "Well," Alma said, "maybe I wont go back to the Mainland." "You've already booked yourself up," Georgette said, "just like me." "Well, I can always turn it down, cant I?" Alma said crossly. This conversation took place on the evening of the fifth day, in Georgette's bedroom which Alma had entered through the connecting bath. Prewitt did not know anything about it. He did not know anything about anything else, either. He was sitting on the divan in the living room, with the bottle and glass within easy reach. He got frantic if they werent always where he could see them. The only thing he knew anything about, or cared anything about, was liquor. There was something supernatural and occult about liquor, the way it warmed through the blood and brightened every thing up. There was something wonderful and holy about it. If you know how to use it. It was just like with any other religion. You got yourself just so high on it, and then you coasted along on that for a while, and only added another drink when you began to feel it start to taper off and begin rolling downhill toward the hangover. Otherwise, you would bring on the reaction. It was a delicate balance, with liquor. If you got too high, you passed clear out, or else ended up getting sick; either way you got sobered into the hangover. And if you let it taper off too far, of course, your mind began to thaw out like frozen mud with the sun on it. He had seen a lot of frozen mud in his time: back at Myer; and the winter maneuvers that the whole regiment had gone down into Georgia to the Benning Reservation for; and all the times on the bum, he had seen mud frozen so hard in Montana and the Dakotas that it cut the soles of your shoes like a lava flow. But mud, when the sun hit it and it began to soften, that was the worst mud of all. It would mire you down then. That was the mud we must never get into. It was a very delicate balance. Almost a mathematical problem. It took a great deal of concentration, and a whole hell of a lot of energy, just to stay up on the tightrope. Because when you got just high enough, you always wanted to go higher because it was so wonderful. That was what took the will power; not to go higher. It required concentration, and study, and energy, and will power, and a great deal of thought; to really be a really successful drunkard. Anybody could be a half-assed drunkard. But to be a real drunkard... And they all talked about drunkards and spinelessness, all the books you read, that John Barleycorn now of London's, that was all pure crap and the truth was not in it. It seemed like any of them, all of them, that ever write about drunkards, they always use the words drunkard and spinelessness as synonymous. They just didnt know, that was all. They were ony showin up their own ignorance. They've never really worked hard at drunkenness - or else they have tried and failed and therefore feel a great need to run drunkenness down and prove to the world that drunkenness is really nothing, that any half-assed fool can do it. But a half-assed fool couldnt do it, any more than a half-assed fool could do anything, and do it well. Of course, if you had all the qualities of greatness already anyway, then you could be a great drunkard - but then you would have been great at anything else you did, too. To be a great drunkard required a great deal of concentration, and energy, and study, and will p--... The hardest thing, outside of not letting yourself go off too high when you get up there, was the first twenty minutes or so in the morning after you wake up. Before the first drink really takes hold. But you could outsmart that one by sleeping twice a day for four hours, instead of once a day for eight hours. By doing it that way you could still get the necessary sleep to maintain your health, and at the same time a couple extra drinks just before you hit the sack would last over