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 Hickam 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 motherfucking 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 he’ll 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 in 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 stories 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 Durkee’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 livingroom, 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 till you woke up. Theres tricks to all trades.
But the hardest thing, he re-decided, the text of the sermon I have chosen today, was when you got up there just high enough, and the liquid magic began to warm through you and the low pressure area suddenly dissolved into fair weather and the sun suddenly got brighter and everything took on that new look, bright and clean-looking and sharply outlined in color, like after the world just been washed by a rain.
That was the hardest: to refrain and hold yourself back from going on any higher, no matter how much you want to. That was where they separated the sheep-drunkards from the goat-drunkards. That was where they told the men from the boys.
Prewitt reached for the bottle and glass on the floor happily, proud of his accomplishment and at peace with the whole world. It was time for another dose of your medicine. It was time for another Revival.
What day was this?
Ha! What the hell difference did it make? You got all the time in the world. You got years. He had seen members of the Canned Heat Brigade stay on a kick like this for years. But then they were really experts. One old guy, up in Seattle that time, and then he had met him in Indiana sixteen months later—just the same. And they didnt even have whiskey; all they had had was canned heat from Woolworth’s that they had to strain the alcohol out of the paraffin through a handkerchief and then strain the alky through a piece of stale bread.
With a sudden great optimism he suddenly believed that he might even actually break the world’s record. That same record that had remained in America ever since the Gay 90’s and the days of Diamond Jim Brady. There was a lot of history behind that record. They would put his name up on a bronze plaque on all the distilleries in Louisville, a mark for the world to see, that would remain forever a shining target to young hopefuls to shoot at. TO THE MEMORY OF ROBT E LEE PREWITT, HOLDER OF THE WORLD’S RECORD. The same identical championship record, that had been held in unbroken succession in American hands, for the last five or six generations. It was a great country, America; any guy could hold the world’s record, if he was good enough; that was why they always got all the records in America; there wasnt no getting around it it was a great country; and Jesse Owens beat Hitler in the Olympic Games; and they got the biggest oranges and grapefruits in the world. YOU ARE ENTERING MADISONVILLE KENTUCKY, the sign said, THE FINEST TOWN ON EARTH. It was the ony country on the face of the earth that used the shooting gunsling, as distinguished from the carrying gunsling; they had always had the best riflemen; they dint have to take nothing off nobody.
Oh, those goddam bastardly Germans.
He got up quickly and then walked vaguely across to go out on the porch but the blackout curtains were drawn so instead he went into the kitchen, and sat down there.
In the bedroom, behind the carefully locked door that Georgette always locked now every night, Georgette was saying:
“Well, I dont care what you say! Sooner or later something is going to crack. I’m a nervous wreck. He just cant go on like this indefinitely, Alma.”
They both of them knew it, but they did not either one know what to do about it. Because they had both already done everything they could either one think of. And in the end it was Prewitt himself who precipitated the transmogrification.
He found the article in the afternoon paper, on the afternoon of the eighth day. He had been reading the papers regularly again, if you could call running your eyes over the black marks on the white paper “reading,” but this item when he saw it was not black marks but words. It was a small item on a back page that told how on the morning of December 7th the guards at the Schofield Barracks Post Stockade had flung open the gates and turned the prisoners out to go back to their outfits.
The Warden’s remark about his chances—if the Japs or somebody bombed this Rock and they turned all the prisoners loose to go fight—had stuck in his mind like a dart thrown into a whirling board, and now it pulled everything else into a vortex of juxtaposition around it. The Warden had strained to think up the least likely possibility he could think of—and that was just exactly what happened!
It all quite suddenly became very reasonable. He could feel his mind crawling up out of the frozen mud and standing forth to look on the sun. All he had to do was get back to the Company without getting picked up. After he had hunted out the uniform, he got Alma’s .38 Special out of the desk and checked the cartridges in the cylinder and put some extras from the box in his pocket.
The last paragraph of the article had gone on to say that, since they had opened the gates on the 7th, there had been fewer new prisoners committed than during any other eight day period in the Stockade’s history. That was fine; he was all for it; but he was not going to be one of them. Not when all he had to do was get back to the Company. The MPs were not going to pick him up now.
After he had tucked the gun in his belt, he looked around for anything else of his valuable enough to take with him, because if he never saw this place again it would be too soon. But outside of the civilian clothes they had bought for him, there wasnt anything; except the one finished copy of The Re-enlistment Blues which he folded carefully and stuck in his notebook of book titles and buttoned down carefully into his breast pocket. Then he sat down to wait for them to come home.
And so it was that, when they came home from work on the evening of the eighth day, he was waiting for them eagerly in the living room, holding the afternoon paper impatiently. His eyes, though not what you could strictly call sober, were reasonably clear; and he had shaved, and bathed, and changed his clothes; he had even combed out his hair, which was getting quite long by this time.
They were both so surprised that they were inside the door and already sitting down, before they either one even noticed that the clean clothes he had put on happened to be his uniform. In the starched uniform, his face startlingly clean and shining, he looked boyishly hopeful and eager, beneath the puffiness under his eyes.
“If I’d had an ounce of goddamned sense,” he said happily, as he held out the paper, “I’d of gone back Sunday morning like I had a hunch to. Hell, if I’d gone right on out to the CP at Hanauma Bay I’d of probly got there before they did.”
Alma took the paper, and read it, and handed it on to Georgette.
“If I’d of left then,” he said, “I wouldnt of had any trouble at all getting back. Everything was so confused and so many guys were trying to get back that nobody would have noticed me. Now its going to be harder, but once I get back to the Compny under my own power and report in, I’m all right.”
“I see you’ve got my gun,” Alma said.
Georgette, who had finished reading the article, laid the paper down on the chair and got up without saying anything and went to draw the blackout curtains against the twilight outside.
“I dont think I’ll need it,” Prew said. “Its just a precaution. I’ll bring it back first time I get a pass. Well,” he said, on his way to the door. “I’ll see you all. You better turn out the lights when I go out.”
“But aren’t you going to wait until morning?” Alma said. “Its almost dark now.”
“Wait, hell,” Prewitt said. “The only reason I waited this long was to let you know where I went so you wouldnt wonder what happened to me.”
“Well, that was certainly considerate of you,” Alma said tightly.
“I figured I owed you that much,” he said.
“Yes,” Alma said, “I guess you owe me that much.”
With his hand on the knob he turned back from the door. “Hey, whats the matter? You sound like you think I’m going away for ever. I may get compny punishment for a couple weeks, but soon as they let me have a pass I’ll be back up.”
“No you wont,” Alma said. “Because I wont be here. And neither will Georgette,” she added.
“Why not?”
“Because we’re going back to the States, thats why!” she said wildly.
“When?”
“We’re scheduled for a boat leaving January 6th.”
“Well,” he said, and took his hand off the knob. “How come?”
“Because we’re being evacuated!” Alma said recklessly.
“Well,” he said slowly, “then I’ll try and get back up before then.”
“‘I’ll try and get back up before then,’” she mimicked. “Is that all it means to you? You know god damned well you wont be able to get back up before then.”
“I might,” he said. “What the hell do you want me to do? stay here till you’re ready to leave? I’ve already stayed out over a week now. I stay much longer I wont be able to go back at all.”
“You could at least stay until morning. They’ll have patrols out all night,” she said, her voice beginning to crumble. “And theres a curfew at sundown.”
“They’ll have patrols out all day, too. As far as that goes, it’ll be easier to make it at night.”
“Maybe if you stayed till morning you’d change your mind,” she wept at him, openly and suddenly weeping, nakedly and without preparation in the same way a bullet is suddenly nakedly and without preparation in flight from a gun barrel.
Georgette, who had silently drawn all the blackout curtains, just as silently came down the steps from the glass doors and went up the steps into the kitchen.
“I dont think thats too much to ask,” Alma wept.
“Change my mind about what?” Prew said uncomfortably. “About going back? And what’ll I do when you ship out for the States? Jesus Christ!”
“Maybe I wouldnt go back,” Alma offered weepingly.
“Well, Jesus Christ!” he said fuddledly. His distaste and impatience were both frank in his voice. “I thought you had to go back.”
“No, I dont have to go back!” Alma yelled potently between weepings like an angry face thrust out between bars. “But if you walk out that door I sure as hell will go back!
“What do you want to go back to the Army for?” she cried, getting her breath. “What did the Army ever do for you? besides beat you up, and treat you like scum, and throw you in jail like a criminal? What do you want to go back to that for?”
“What do I want to go back for?” Prewitt said wonderingly. “I’m a soldier.”
“A soldier,” Alma said inarticulately. “A soldier!” Through the fast-drying tears on her face she began to laugh at hint wildly. “A soldier,” she said helplessly. “A Regular. From the Regular Army. A thirty-year-man.”
“Sure,” he said, grinning uncertainly like a man who does not get the joke, “a thirty-year-man.” Then he grinned genuinely. “With only twenty-four years to go.”
“Jesus!” Alma said. “Jesus! Jesus Christ!”
“Will you turn off the lights while I go out?” he said.
“I will,” Georgette said firmly, but gladly, from the steps to the kitchen. She came down then and went over to the switch by the blackout-curtained glass doors, and in the darkness he slipped the night lock and went out and closed the door after him.