From Here to Eternity (74 page)

thats a lot of stuff, Jack." "No it isnt, its the truth." "I dont see why the hell you should feel that." "Because they were trying to follow what I had been trying to teach them," Malloy said. "Whether you see it or not or believe it or not. The same thing has happened to me all my life. I've tried to teach people things I saw but they always take them wrong and use them wrong. Its because theres something lacking in me. I preach passive resistance and a new kind of God with a new kind of love that understands, but I dont practice it. At least not enough. Sometimes, I dont think I've ever loved anything in my life. "If it hadnt been for me and my talk, neither Angelo nor Berry would have done what they did. Or got what they got. And if I stay here (I've got seven more' months to do, this stretch) the same thing is going to happen to other guys. Its already happened to you. I say resist passively, but you all fight, because I feel fight, even if I say dont fight. I dont want it to happen to anybody else." "I dont think thats true at all," Prew said helplessly, inadequate before the mental task of arguing back. "Well, its true," Malloy said. "And thats why I'm busting out." In the glow of his cigarette Prew saw him grin bitterly gently. "Its a thing," Malloy said, "that apparently happens to guys when they try to do what I've tried to do all my life and lack what it takes. Probably, after I bust out, they'll misunderstand that too and start making a goddam hero out of me for escaping." "How do you figure to do it?" "Thats the easy part," Malloy said. "I could bring enough tools in from the motorpool to cut through these walls easy." "What about the searchlights?" "They'd never even see me." "But what about the electric fence? And the alarm?" "Rubber-handled Klein pliers from the motorpool," Malloy said. "And a long piece of baling wire for each strand, back of where I cut it on both sides, to keep the circuit closed. "But it'll be easier just to go out from the motorpool; theres not a man there that would turn me in or want to stop me. A pair of grease-monkey coveralls to get me down into the Post to my outfit to borrow civilian clothes, and I'm gone." "What about money?" "I dont need money. I've got half a dozen different friends in town who would hide me out long enough to get me out on a Matson liner for the States." "Theres a war coming up soon," Prew said. "I know it. Probably, I'll enlist again Stateside under an assumed name, when it comes up. Thats what I've figured. But I'm finished here, and theres no point in staying. And until the war does come theres some things I want to do - without having it all taken the wrong way so that it hurts the guys that I like." "Take me with you,' Prew said. In the glow of the cigarettes Jack Malloy looked up, startled. Then he grinned what Prew always remembered afterwards as the saddest, gentlest:, bitterest, warmest grin he had ever seen on a human face. "You dont want to go with me, Prew." "Sure I do." "No you dont. What about Fatso?" "Beside going with you, to hell with Fatso." "You dont know what you'd be getting in to. I've been on the run from the Law before." "So have I." "Yes, but not from town to town and sheriff to sheriff. And this time theres about a fifty-fifty chance I'll never get off the Island and back to the States. Theres nothing romantic about it. And it isnt easy." "You said yourself it would be almost as easy to go out of here as it would be to go out through the motorpool," Prew argued. "It would. I dont mean that. I mean afterwards, after we were out. With two men it would be five' hundred per cent harder. We'd have to head for the hills and go down that way in prison clothes, instead of back through the Post. And thats where they'd be looking for us. It would take a week to get down to town safely, we'd have to skirt every house and settlement, then go clear across Honolulu to my friends." "I'd like to go," Prew said. "I know how to travel," Malloy said. "I've done all this before. I know how to go on shipboard like a rich man above suspicion. I know how to dress and act - like ordering dinners, the way to treat stewards and servants, and especially other passengers - a million little things it takes years to learn. You'd give it away the first day." "But I learn fast," Prew said. "Listen, I know I'd be lots of trouble, at first. But I'd more than pay it back later on, in the things you plan to do." Malloy smiled. "You dont know what I'm planning to do." "I got a pretty good idea." "I dont even know myself, Prew." "Okay," Prew said stiffly. "I wont force you. But I would've liked to of gone." "You dont belong with me," Malloy said. "You belong in the Army, What do you want to go with me for?" "I dont know. Because I want to help, I guess." "Help what?" "I dont know. Just help." "Help change the world?" "Maybe. Yeah, I guess thats it." "The little bit you and me might change the world," Malloy smiled, "it wouldnt show up until a hundred years after we were dead. We'd never see it." "But it'd be there." "Maybe not," Malloy said. "Thats why I say you dont belong with me. You got a romantic picture. It would mean years of living too close together, always on the jump. I'm not good at living close to people; I'm better when they're always a little way off. And you'd soon get disillusioned with it. I'm doing what I'm doing for my own self only, not for what it might or might not produce. You know what I told you a while ago was wrong with me? You remember what I told you?" Prew did not answer. It would have sounded stupid and inane to say he did not think there was anything wrong with Malloy. "You dont know me at all," Jack Malloy said. His voice had suddenly taken on the contorted abortive tone of a confessional. "You got a romantic picture of me too, just like all the rest. I've never loved anything enough in my life. Thats whats wrong." "What about the Wobblies? What about America?" 'The Wobblies are gone. Have been for a long time. But I dont think I even loved the Wobblies enough because if I had, I'd of been able to do something. "And America isnt a thing. America is an idea. An idea that everybody has a different definition of. I can love ideas, as long as they're my own, but ideas arent things. I'm the kind of a guy who dont like to get too close to any individual, to see his faults; if I do, it shuts off the love I feel; then I get angry and hate myself for it afterwards; and if I have to stay close to the guy, or the thing, I eventually get to hate him, or it, too. You see, the same things wrong with me thats wrong with everybody else. I preach against it with them, but its true of me, too. Even though I can prove logically that its not." "I dont believe that," Prew said. "Thats not true. You're just tearing yourself down." "Dont like to discover the feet of clay, do you?" Jack Malloy smiled painfully. "If you went with me, you'd discover it soon enough. Because its true. Believe me, its true. But you're different. You love the Army. Really love it. Are a part of it, and belong in it. I've never loved anything enough to belong in it. The things I've loved have always been too phantasmal, too immaterial, too idealistic. I suffer from the same disease I try to diagnose, the same disease thats destroying the world. "Thats the thing that has always dogged my steps haunting me," he said abortively, for all the world like a good Irish Catholic confessing his customary Saturday night infidelity. 'The thing thats always followed and tripped me up, the thing I've always been looking for, still am looking for, and never will find, and know I never will find. I'd give whatever place in heaven I've got coming to have been able to love something as much as you love the Army. "Dont leave it," he said. "Dont ever leave it. When a man has found something he really loves, he must always hang onto it, no matter what happens, whether it loves him or not. And,' he said with an almost religious fervor, "if it finally kills him, he should be grateful to it, for having just had the chance. Because thats the whole secret." Prew did not say anything. He still did not believe him. But how could he argue against a brain like Malloy. "'Because a man loves God,'" Jack Malloy said, his voice coming back up to normal again, "'he must not expect God to love him in return.' At least not according to his limited definition of love." Prew still did not say anything. He did not know what there was for him to say. "I wont say good-by to you," Malloy said, his voice entirely normal now, "because I wont know just when I'm going out. I'll have to wait till the time comes up right. Then I'll recognize it. Thats the only way to work a thing like that. So just forget all about it, and expect to see me till you dont." "It seems like," Prew said contortedly, "it seems like life is made up of saying hello to people we dont like and good-by to people we do." "Thats horse shit," Jack Malloy said. "Sentimental horse shit. Dont ever let me hear you say a thing like that again. You just happen to be going through, a period of the good-bys. Every man has them to go through at different times. Now shut up with that crap. And lets hit the sack." "Okay," Prew said contritely. He squashed out his cigarette in the can and slipped under the blankets. He lay in the bunk in the silence, feeling suddenly a vague presentiment that somehow Jack Malloy with his slick brain had tricked him but he could not put his finger on just how. It was a week before Malloy's opportunity presented itself. Prew saw him every day when they came in from work, and every day he expected not to see him. In spite of all Malloy had told him about forgetting it, every evening he expected not to see him. Then the evening came when he did not see him, and Hanson when he locked up for them told the story of how Jack Malloy had just walked out of the motorpool in a pair of stolen greasemonkey overalls and nobody in the motorpool knew a damn thing about it. Pfc Hanson, whose worship of The Malloy was perhaps exceeded only by that of the late Pvt Blues Berry, was tickled to death. MP patrols were sent out through the pineapple fields and along the Honouliuli Trail; the gate guards down in the Post were alerted; the Wahiawa Patrol and the Shafter MPs downtown were furnished with full particulars and instructions. It was the first time anybody had ever escaped from the Schofield Barracks Post Stockade, except for three men ten years ago who had been brought back in less than twelve hours. But no trace of Jack Malloy was found anywhere. In Number Two, as Malloy had prophesied, they were as proud as party members whose candidate had just been elected as President. Prew sat by himself and wondered wildly if he had not already met the new Messiah of the new faith Malloy had also prophesied. A Messiah who refused a following and preferred to work alone. Met him, and lived alongside of him, and failed to recognize him. After two weeks of a fruitless search, accompanied by as intense an interest inside the Stockade as the outcome of the World Series, Jack Malloy's escape tapered off into old stuff and, like everything else, before the constant pressure of the work like a stone against a steel blade, eroded away into boredom and nothingness. In the Stockade, whatever else happened, you worked. You swung your 16 lb hammer to crush this rock, or you swooped a scoopshovel to load this rock you had already crushed, into the trucks that came. Work without purpose, work without end, work without pride. Your hands blistered, broke, bled, calloused. They corned up like a mailman's feet. By their blisters, you thought wildly, shall ye know them, Lord, when the day of judgment came. And as soon as you busted all of this rock available, the Engineers came in and accommodatingly blasted more slabs of it out of the mountain for you, It was an unlimited mountain. And your muscles ached and toughened. And your mind ached and toughened. And your asshole ached and tightened, when you thought about a woman. You would be a tough, good, dangerous soldier, when you got out of this.

CHAPTER 44

IN ALL, counting the extra time for the trip to the Black Hole and the transfer into Number Two, he served 4 months and 18 days, and G Company was changed. The Warden was gone; on a 14 day furlough. Leva was gone; transferred to M Co and a S/Sgt. Maylon Stark was a S/Sgt, and Lt Culpepper was the Company Commander now. Dynamite Holmes had been reassigned to Brigade HQ with a majority. Holmes had taken S/Sgt Jim O'Hayer with him and O'Hayer was a M/Sgt. They were expecting a new Company Commander, a Captain, to be shipped in any day. It was a different company. He pulled in from the Stockade wearing the same CKC uniform he had worn at the trial. It felt strange and new after 4 months and 18 days of nothing but the outsize Stockade fatigues. The suntans were neither dirtier and more wrinkled, nor cleaner and more pressed. They had hung on a hanger in the Stockade supply room for 4 months and 18 days and except for a faint crease across the knees were just exactly like they had been when he took them off. He could not overcome a feeling of surprise at this. It was the same with everything. He drew his bedding and equipment and his same old foot-locker with all the old familiar personal possessions in it just like he had left them but looking strangely new and unused. They were the same blankets, and the same riflebelt and pack and canteen, but Leva did not issue them to him. They were issued to him by the welcome-grinning S/Sgt Malleaux, the new supply sergeant. From behind Malleaux Pete Karelsen, a S/Sgt too now, and still on SD in the supplyroom, came up grinning to shake hands also. Apparently, he was still a celebrity. They asked him about Maggio. He had promised himself he would wait nine days. In the orderly room Acting First Sergeant Baldy Dhom, sweating grimly to bend his sausage fingers to a fountain pen, gladly dropped his work and shook hands happily. The new clerk, a Jewboy named Rosenberry, did not offer to shake hands and stared at him with frightened awe. Rosenberry, he found out somewhere, was a peacetime draftee. He had taken Mazzioli's place when the new reorganization of Personnel Section had moved Mazzioli and the other Company Clerks to desks in Regiment. Rosenberry was a Pfc. They called him the "forward echelon clerk." Mazzioli was still Company Clerk but Company Clerks stayed with Regimental HQ in the "rear echelon" now. Mazzioli was a buck sergeant now. There were new faces besides Rosenberry's. At chow that night there were more new faces than familiar ones. The company strength had been filling up steadily, but the short timers were still going home. The new faces all stared at him with the same frightened awe as Rosenberry. After chow he sat or his bunk and worked on his rifle, a brand new Garand Ml with its barrel still full of cosmolene. He worked on it in silence, studying the awkward unwieldy lines that would never become comfortable. In the dim lights the new faces watched him covertly with the same unchanged frightened awe. Chief Choate and all the other new buck/sgt squad leaders and s/sgt platoon-leaders, with the exception of platoon-guide S/Sgt Ike Galovitch, came over and shook hands and slapped him on the back. Apparently The Treatment was off. He was a celebrity. Everybody wanted to know about Maggio. He had promised himself that he would wait nine days. With Capt Holmes gone and G Co no longer a jockstrap outfit, all the old forces that had caused the trouble were gone now, obsolete, rescinded. They were expecting the new CC any day now. He felt somewhat like a man on a mountainside to whom someone has thrown a rope too late and who watches the now useless rope receding uselessly up into the heights as he falls. But they did not any of them really seem to matter much anyway, any more. The Stockade was still real. They were not real. Gradually, an intense pinpoint focus of will-effort, like a magnifying glass bending the sun's rays to the burning of a paper, had built up in him concentratedly. They could not break through the only reality, which was the Stockade, and that he had nine days to wait. The only time anything came near to breaking through was when Andy and Friday came in from somewhere and saw him and came right over, very glad to see him, and highly conscious of the new faces still watching with frightened awe. They got out the guitars and came back to his bunk familiarly and the new faces began to watch them with frightened awe, too. Then they brought out their surprise. They had bought an electric guitar on time two months ago, complete with a jackplug attachment and the speaker to plug it in to. It had cost $260, of which there was still $200 yet to pay. They enjoyed showing him the new guitar, and the awed attention they were getting from the frightened draftee faces. He was a celebrity and they were his buddies. He made himself wait the full nine days. He did not go anywhere. He sat home on his bunk in the squadroom and made no trouble and was silent. He did not even go down to Maunalani Heights to see Miss Alma Schmidt. He did not want anything to disturb the crystal clarity of concentration that kept getting steadily stronger. The new Company Commander, a 1st/Lt instead of a Captain, arrived and took over. That was on the fifth day. He made them a speech. He was a Jewish lawyer from Chicago with a Reserve Commission earned by four years of ROTC in college. His name was Ross and he had only recently been called to duty. Lt Culpepper, whose father and grandfather had both started out in G Co - th Infantry as shavetails and risen to command the Company and then the Battalion and then the Regiment, was not happy. He had expected a Captain, which would not have been so bad. Lt Culpepper did not think much of Lt Ross as a soldier, but Pvt Robert E Lee Prewitt could not see that it made much difference. He did not intend to suffer martyrdom if he could help it. He wanted to do more than stay alive, he wanted to spend that life in the Army. He had checked up before he left and six other men would be discharged from the Stockade in the first nine days after he got out. That would, he felt, at least spread the suspicion out a little, even if they neglected to count the hundreds of men who had passed through the Stockade before him. Nine days was a nice round uneven figure that would not appear to be a predetermined period, like say ten days, or one week. And Fatso Judson went down town to the Log Cabin Bar and Grill every night that there was not something special on, such as the midnight training of Blues Berry. So there was no need for hurry on that score. He bought the knife in an Army-Navy Service Store, the night he went to town. He had figured that out ahead of time deliberately. It was one of those dingy little Jew stores on Hotel Street, exactly like a thousand other dingy little Jew stores that always spring up wherever soldiers live, except that in Hawaii all the Jew stores were run by Chinamen. It sold the same CKCs and did the same tailoring of pants and cutting down of shirts. And it offered the same fare of chevrons, shooter's medals, garrison caps with patent leather bills and solid brass insignia, brilliantly colored shoulder patches, solid brass whistles, campaign ribbons, solid brass waistbelt buckles, souvenir scarves and pillows, and knives. Even the enforced anonymity of the Army had its compensations. The knife he picked was one of a row of an identical dozen, lying in the glass case in a jumbled mass of whistles, insignia rings and shoulder patches, brass bound clasp knives with five-inch snap-button blades and walnut handles that terminated in little handguards that the blades passed between in closing. They were SOP equipment. He had owned perhaps a dozen in his life at different times. The Chink probably sold half a dozen every day. He paid for it in small change and took it outside and tried the snap a few times and put it in his pocket and went to look for a drink. The Log Cabin Bar and Grill was one of those downtown serviceman hangouts with indirect fluorescent lighting where it was safe for tourists to go slumming to see the Army in its natural habitat, very clean and very modern and a shade lower class than Wu Fat's Chinese Bar and Restaurant. It was set back off Beretania Street, in a business block of stinking grocery markets and sweet-smelling whorehouses, on a small paved alley. A hundred feet inside the Log Cabin the alley, instead of running straight on through the block, made a right angle turn and came out on the side street to the east. Prew, stone cold sober after a dozen drinks, was waiting at the corner of the alley when the Log Cabin closed at one o'clock. There was no mistaking Fatso when he came out, even in the dimness of the alley. He came out walking with two sailors. Bar acquaintances. No complications there. One of the sailors was telling a joke and Fatso and the other sailor laughed. It was the first time Prew had ever heard S/Sgt Judson laugh. They were walking away from him toward Beretania, and he stepped out from the corner feeling a crystal clarity of focused attention such as he had known only a few times in his life when he was bugling. "Hello, Fatso," he said. The old Stockade nickname would catch him as surely as a rope. S/Sgt Judson stopped and turned, the sailors stopping with him. He peered back into the dim uneven light that seeped through the closed Venetian blinds of the Log Cabin and lighted the immobile figure of Prewitt dimly. "Well, look who's here," Fatso grinned. "You guys go on," he told the sailors. ."I'll see you next week. Old buddy a mine back here I use to soljer with." "Okay, Jud," one of the sailors said unevenly. "See you." "Thanks," Prew said, as Fatso came up unhesitantly, unreluctantly, and the sailors moved on down the brick toward Beretania. "For what?" Fatso grinned. "I dont need no sailors. Now," he said. "You want to see me about something, Prewitt?" "Yes," Prew said. "Lets step around the corner here where we can talk." "Okay," Fatso grinned. "Anything you say." He followed around the corner, carrying his arms out a little and just barely bent the way an old fighter moves when he's expecting anything. "How's it feel to be on the Outside again?" he grinned. "Bout like I figured it would," Prew said. Behind them around the corner of the alley he heard the Log Cabin door open and close again and some more late drinkers moved talking down the brick toward Beretania. "Well?" Fatso grinned. "What was it you wanted to see me about? I aint got all night." "This," Prew said. He pulled the knife out of his pocket and snapped it open, the snick of the sprung blade sounding loudly in the alley. "I cant whip you with my fists, Fatso. I wouldnt want to if I could. I hear you carry a knife. Use it." "Maybe I aint got one," Fatso grinned. "I hear you awys carry one." "Okay. But supposin I dont want to use it?" "You better use it." "Supposin I run?" Fatso grinned. "I'll catch you." "People might see you. Or, supposin I holler po-lice?" "They might catch me. But they wount get here quick enough to do you any good." "You got it figured all out, aint you?" Fatso grinned. "I tried to." "Well, if thats the way you want it," Fatso grinned. "Okay." He put his hand in his pocket, drew the knife and snapped it open, and began to move forward, all in one movement, incredibly fast for a fat man. Behind him the Log Cabin door opened again admitting more late drinkers to the alley. Their voices faded off toward Beretania. "But I hate to take candy away from babies," Fatso grinned. His knife, that was almost identical to Prew's, was waving back and forth slowly like a snake head, as he came on in in the classic stance of the practiced knife fighter, crouched a little, right arm out: a little, blade projecting from across the upturned palm between the thumb and index finger, left arm up a little palm open as a guard. Prew moved to meet him silently, saving his breath, wishing momentarily he had been born a different person, wishing something, maybe if Warden had been home, he had meant to talk it over with Warden, wishing he had remembered to buy himself some chewing gum. Then it was gone and he was seeing everything in the finally climaxed focus of the crystal clarity that was like slow motion as if he had been smoking gauge and was nothing like the hectic swiftness of the ring. It did not last long. It is only in the movies that knife fighters stab and miss and slash and miss and tussle over several city blocks. Figure one offensive thrust and miss, maybe two if you are very lucky. Most knife fighters are counter-punchers. Behind them as they circled cautiously just beyond arm reach, the Log Cabin disgorged the last of its most insistent customers. Just a few feet around the corner they moved leisurely down the brick toward Beretania. Fatso slid in a little like a boxer and raised his left hand toward Prew's face and feinted with his knife outside Prew's left arm as if he were going to go in over it and in the same movement, as Prew automatically raised his left hand to block, flecked back down and went in under it. The knife burned like dry ice along Prew's: ribs and cut itself into the wide muscle of his back under the: armpit. Prew brought his left hand down sharply but it was already too late and the knife streaked off down his side in a comet tail. If he had not stepped in at the same moment Fatso cut, if he had been gunshy or muscularly reluctant, if he had flinched, the fight would have been all over and it would have been up to Fatso, to go ahead and kill him or not kill him. But the years of boxing carried with them an instinct that no longer required either thought or courage. His knife went into Fatso at the diaphragm, just under the ribs, an automatic counterpunch right-cross to the solar plexus. They stood that way perhaps a second or two, perhaps five seconds, thigh to thigh, Prew with his lower lip between his teeth pushing and twisting the knifeblade probing in the fat until the haft was buried in it gouging searchingly in the opening, two statues, the only visible movement Fatso's right arm that was still trailing off down to its full length. When the arm reached full extension and pulled up snap-short, the knife went on, out of it, and clattered tinnily on the brick. Then Fatso started down. As he felt him going, Prew with his left arm clamped tight against the burn of his side clenched the handle and turned his wrist to bring the blade-edge up, letting the body tear itself off by its own weight bending his wrist slowly like too big a fish straightening out the hook, cutting deep, down across the left side with the ribcase as a guide-edge. He had come down here to kill him. And he did not want to have to stab him on the ground, or cut his throat. S/Sgt Judson lit on his right shouldertip and rolled on over on his back, his head propped just a little on the brick wall of the building,