From Here to Eternity (67 page)

the beads of sweat welled under her drawnup knees which seemed to be the only place she ever sweated and trickled down the long skislide of her calves as she thought on detachedly, with that calm objectivity that infuriated him with his own outraged admiration. She would be wearing one of those square-wide-necked prints that were so absolutely female without ever being fluttery or fluffy. Didnt she know what she did to him? She always said she didnt, but he always disbelieved it. She must know. Warden wanted to tear Al Chomu's phone out of the wall and smash it. At that moment he would have gladly emasculated Alexander Graham Bell for inventing this instrument of torture that was emasculating him. "All right," he said, 'all right. I'll see if I cant step it up and get it done in a week. Will that satisfy you? Will that be better?" "It would be wonderful, if you could. But, darling," the cool voice said, carefully using the word darling only as a sophisticated form of address, "it isnt me. Its your party. Dont be angry." "Angry!" he snarled. "Who's angry? I'll have it done in a week," he promised, knowing it was impossible, "and then give the party one week from today, at the same old place. You're invited," he snapped, wanting to hang up on that triumph of abbreviated sarcasm. But he didnt. "Have you got that7" he asked anxiously. "One week. At the same place. The same place, see?" "I have it," the cool calm voice that was still way ahead of him said in the same indifferent tone that had so surely manipulated everything, including him, so logically and objectively that it was coming out exactly as she wanted, and had known it would. "I have it, darling." That same impersonally toned address, which was as near as she would ever let herself come to affection on the phone. On that note he hung up, reluctantly, feeling it was unfinished but knowing it was all he'd get, and went back out to Al Chomu's bar. And they called them the weaker sex! That was prone to crack up and cry at every crisis! Like hell. The women ran this world; and nobody knew it better than a man in love. Sometimes he thought they did it deliberately, all this conspiracy stuff, just to satisfy some ancient racial love of intrigue inherited from the generations of conspiring to play the role of being dominated. The cab driver was still waiting for him outside in that hot bright drowsing summer ecstasy of existence, that Warden had not noticed when he came in but was now aware of intensely, and he honked his horn irritably. But Warden did not go on out until he had had another big drink with Al so as to make sure that when he got back to the Company they would smell it on his breath and not think anything unusual about his having disappeared, which they surely would have if he had come back sober. He stood in the cool cave of the bar against whose big plate window the sun beat vainly and he drank, feeling mad as hell and tough as nails, and wildly ecstatically enjoying the fact that he was Milt Warden and alive, savoring pugnaciously that combative joy that he had lost and had not felt since the battle to get Stark in the kitchen but that now had suddenly come back, while Al Chomu talked on to him about his eldest niece whose picture in white cap and gown was sitting on the back-bar and who was staying on at Stanford for her Master's on the money of all the dogfaces who bought their whiskey at the Kemoo Liquor Store just because it was old Al, Warden wondering half-mindedly if her haole girlfriends at Stanford had ever heard of fat old Al Chomu (or his money) and answering himself that they undoubtedly had not. Clicking fast and sharp and thinking powerfully: What if it was a full month's work? What the hell if it was impossible? If there was one man in the Army who could close out a suicide in a week, that man was Milt Warden. Knowing he would surely have to marry that woman, who could make him feel like this. Then he went out into the summer ecstasy of being alive and radiating powerfully, to the cab whose driver obviously was too blunt to feel it, but who still made him for five bucks, and whom he was careful to have let him off in front of the Post Library from which he walked back into the quad and plunged roaring into the heaving upset that was G Company with' a suicide. From then on it was chaos. Nobody knew anything. In crisis, the Old Army maxim ran, seek refuge in anonymity. Automatically, everyone brought everything to The Warden, who was getting paid to do the work and the deciding. He had to handle every tiniest detail personally, without benefit of clergy, working with the big looseleaf volumes of the ARs at his elbow because he had never done a suicide before either. He drove Mazzioli almost as crazily as he drove himself, expanding explosively, until the clerk who had thought he had suffered everything began to realize he had never even understood the surface meaning of that term and as a defense against such enervating energy languidly started seriously contemplating straight duty with longing for the first time in his career. It was he who talked Holmes into sending, with money from the Company Fund, the cablegram by which they learned that Bloom's parents were not available, instead of the customary letter. "Dint the Capn want to get the corpse home quickly? Think about the poor mother. Was it her fault her son was a disgrace? Would that make a mother love her son any the less? Surely the mother deserved some consideration. After all, she was a mother. Dint the Capn want to do the right thing by the mother?" Holmes, being known publicly as a father, had no choice but to succumb; the cablegram came back marked undelivered for the following reasons: ADDRESS UNKNOWN PARTY SAID TO HAVE MOVED FROM CITY; they could not find any letters in Bloom's footlocker; the case was turned over to the Office of the AG in Washington. Warden slapped himself on the back. A lucky break. That saved him at least two weeks, not counting drawnout weary months of correspondence, and he was able to get Bloom in the ground in three days. It was almost a record, except of course for the really old timers who had never laid claim to a family. And if Holmes pestered him with worried recriminations about an AGO inspection for the wasteful misappropriation of company funds which were to be used only for the good of the Company as a whole, well, Holmes had pestered him before, and he had learned to ignore it. It was those nights, during that wildly oscillating week, when he always went to bed close to midnight with the mind always still bucking like a frightened horse, that in order not to think about how he could be meeting her right now someplace downtown if she wasnt so goddamned conservative and getting raging mad at her, he started toying with the idea of taking the 30-day re-enlistment furlough that he had been postponing ever since he had taken this outfit, over a year. He would lay in bed and plan it all out, how they could swing it, a 30-day idyll, just the two of them. They would have to get off the Island. He only knew of one place on Oahu where they could possibly swing it, and that one was dubious. But there were plenty other places they could go. They could go to Kona on the big island; fly Inter-Island to Hilo and hire a U-Drive in Hilo for a month and drive around to Kona by way of Kilauea Crater and the National Park; they could stay at Honaunau (that meant City of Refuge, didnt it? that would be a good place for them to stay: The City of Refuge). They could charter a guide fisherman; off the Kona Coast was one of the best fishing grounds in the Islands. He could see them in his mind, sitting in the cockpit with the rods out in the sockets and the lines drifting deep on the swell, getting burned blacker even than now, with a couple cases of beer in the cooler under the canopy and the Chink handling the boat and cutting the bail: so that there was absolutely nothing to do if they didnt want to. Or - If she didnt like that outdoor stuff, they could fly to Maui. He had never been there but he had heard them talk about Wailuku as a good place to take a woman, with good hotel-inns that served good food and if there were no U-Drives the organized sight-seeing trips for the tourists if they wanted to get out. But maybe they wouldnt even want to get out. Maybe they would want more to stay in. Or - They could do any of them, it didn't matter. He still had $600 gambling money in a savings account downtown that he had been hanging on to. They could splurge and spend it all. Christ, he thought happily, Christ. I'm sure glad I thought to start putting half of it away every time I made a killing. Milt Warden had it bad. He would lie in the bunk on those nights with his arms under his head and Pete Karelsen snoring nervously across from him, and think about them over and over, planning them, envisioning them down to the small detail relishingly, each with its different facet of this same jewel, until finally it became as if they were things he had done and was remembering instead of something he wanted to do and was imagining, so that he would look back on them and think how fine they had been and that they were something nothing could ever take away from you, because once you had had them. "Ahh, yes, I have my memories," his daemon popped up and prodded devilishly. "Whatever happens, I still have my memories." But he already knew it was only a dream, and that he was dreaming himself away from and out of reality, but what did it matter as long as you knew what you were doing? He did not expect any of them to come true; he was only dreaming them; they helped put him to sleep. And he had to sleep. If he was going to lick this suicide. And he was licking it.... Then, less than three days after Bloom was in the ground, just when he was finally making the output of reports match the decreasing intake, a new complication exploded into his orderly room like a grenade, fragmentation. Niccolo Leva finally made good his threat and transferred into M Company as supply sergeant. Warden was working on a sworn statement to be signed by both Holmes and himself to the effect that the Deceased had suffered no abuses in his organization, when Niccolo came into the orderly room that morning, his moldy-leather face sheepish under a too-thin coat of the old cynicism, his wry dry jerked-beef frame trying valiantly to retain the old insolence, and told him. "They've got the papers all made out and signed except for my signature. Capt Gilbert stop me yestday on the quad and shown me. Col Davidson has promise him he's got a absolute face-to-face promise of a green light from old Delbert soon as he puts it through. I never thought old Jake would okay it, Milt, so I never cared. "But its now or never, Milt. Gilbert put it up to me straight take it or leave it. I cant stall him any more. He's got another man lined up down in the 21st who'll take it if I dont." Warden, who had to have this report along with three others done and signed and in by noon tomorrow to be finished, looked at it and put it down. "You sure picked a fine time for it." "I know it," Leva said disconsolately. "The new Ml rifles are in over at S-4. They'll be out now in a couple days." "I know it." "The new WD Circular on the new TO goes into effect in less than a week. The QM's got two boxcars of new chevrons sitting on the siding at the Depot." "I know it," Leva said. "I know all that. Lay off, will you?" "Lay off!" Warden said. "Jesus Christ, Niccolo!" "Okay," Leva said. "All right." "I dont suppose it would do any good to ask you to wait three weeks or a month?" "What do you think?" "Thats what I thought." "You know thats why Gilbert wants me now, Milt," Leva said unhappily, but stubbornly. "Somebody got to do that work for M Compny too, Milt." "I wish Bloom could of picked a slack month to kill himself," Warden said. "Goddam it," Leva cried indignantly, "if I dont take it, that guy in the 21st will. Thats how Gilbert put it up to me. I either got to shit or get off the pot. And you know when I'll get another chance like that." "A hell of a fine officer, Capt Gilbert," Warden said, gauging it carefully. To make him too mad was just as bad as not making him mad enough. "A hell of a fine officer and gentleman. I wonder did they teach him how to stick it up his brother officers' ass and break it off like that so politely at the Point? or did he just pick it all up by himself?" "Gilbert's got to have a supply man," Niccolo defended. "So has G Compny got to have a supply man." "Yas," Leva said, "but Gilbert's willing to pay his." "So will G Compny be, before long." "Sure," Niccolo grinned at him evilly. "And I know you mean it, Milt. From the bottom of your heart. But I retire in eighteen more years." He was trying hard, trying heroically, but it was obvious his heart wasnt in it. "Well," Warden said, "you know me. I wount be the man to try to hold you back from bettering yourself, Niccolo." "No," Leva said. "No, you sure wouldnt." But the scorn wasnt genuine. "I promised you you'd get the rating, if you'd only stick around long enough. Things like that take a little time. But did you ever know me to go back on a promise, Niccolo?" "No," Leva said reluctantly, "I havent." He made a great effort and marshalled his forces to try and turn the flank. "But times has changed," he said angrily. "Things aint like they was. Time's more important now. We're getting ready to get in this war, Milt. You know that yourself. A thirty-year-man's got to take advantage of his wars; he's ony liable to get one or two. If he gets two he's damn lucky. How many men in the Compny was in the last war? Just one: Pete Karelsen. Wars dont come as easy any more as they did back in the Indian days when ever little skirmish counted as a fullgrown war. And I'm almost forty. I wont get a chance at another one. To end up with a permanent retirement of Master I'll have to be at least a Staff when it starts," he summed up feebly. He was going now. He was ripe. He'd shot his wad and the anger was gone and he was ready for it. It was like the chess game played over and over out of the textbook, move and countermove, that you both know the winner of beforehand and do not play to win but only for the enjoyment of the style. He was all set up for the kill and Warden had only to pick up the piece and move it on in, to the same square where he had always moved it, and it was Mate. Warden opened his mouth and then closed it. He sat that way almost a minute. "Well," he said finally, as surprised as Niccolo, and ran his fingernails tearingly through his hair. Then he remembered Karen had told him that was what was making his hair so thin, and stopped it. He looked at Niccolo blankly, old leatherfaced Niccolo, 40 years old, who was staring at him astonishedly. "Well?" he said again, vaguely. "Ever other old soljer in the Regmint'll be a goddam temporary Warrant
Officer or Captain," Leva argued him hopefully, as if there was still some chance the old Warden might yet appear and prove to him how wrong his irrefutable logic was, "when this war's over. You'll probly be a full fucking temporary Major. And old plughorse Leva'll still be the same old First and Fourth." "In a pig's asshole I'll be a Major!" Warden roared. "You're the son of a bitch'll be the goddam Major, Niccolo, you'll make a goddam good Major." It stopped as suddenly as it had begun, and they stared at each other startled. The old Warden roar had come, but it was in the wrong place. And it was not the same old roar. This was more like the roar of a bad-wounded animal, and Leva did not know how to react to it. He felt embarrassed. "I cant make up your mind for you, Niccolo," Warden said. "You'll have to make up your own goddam mind." "I already got it made up," Leva protested. "I had it made up when I come in here." "Then stop coming in here expecting me to change it for you. I aint stopping you. You're right when you say you'll never get another chance like it again. Go ahead and sign the son of a bitch." "It'll probly take a couple days to go through." "Okay, so what? Maybe it'll take ten days. Maybe it'll take a full goddam year. So what?" "It wont take ten days," Leva said; "it wont take a week. It wont take over two." "Well, fuck it," Warden said. "And how long it takes." "I'll try and get the supplyroom straightened up pretty good for you by then," Leva said. He sounded hurt, as if somehow The Warden had let him down. "Okay," Warden said indifferently. "Thanks." "Say, what the hell's wrong with you?" Leva said. "Nothing," Warden said. "Not a damn thing. Whats wrong with you?" "Nothings wrong with me," Leva said. "Well," he said, "well, I'll see you, Milt," and paused one last time in the doorway, all vestiges of the old wry cynicism and insolence, even the attempt at them, gone. Niccolo Leva looked suddenly worried and old like an aging man who has been named executor of a will that carries too many responsibilities. "No," Warden said, "you wont see me, Niccolo. The only place you would see me would be at Choy's." "Well, whats to keep you from being at Choy's?" "I'll be too busy," Warden said. "Oh," Leva said, seizing it happily. "Too busy workin. Well, what do you want? You want me to stay and work for you on a lousy First and Fourth the rest of my life? Is that what you're trying to say?" Warden stared at him reflectively without answering. "All right then, goddam you," Leva raged, "if thats what you want." "Its no go, Niccolo," Warden said. "I'll tell Gilbert to take his rating," Leva raged, "and paint it green and -" "No," Warden roared. "Goddam you, I said you'd have to make up your own goddam mind. I'm tired of making up everybody's goddam mind for them. They all come to me and want me to make up their goddam mind for them. From now on they can make up their own goddam mind. I'm sick and tired of it. I'm a first sergeant, not a goddam priest of God, and I'm tired of being drafted in as everybody's conscience. How would you like to be drafted in as everybody's conscience?" "Well Jesus Christ!" Leva said stiffly. "Of all the goddam gall! I dont need nobody's help for my conscience." "Then go," Warden said. "Or stay. But for Christ's sake make up your mind." "Would you turn down a rating like that?" "There," Warden said, "see? Thats what I mean. How the hell do I know?" "Well," Leva said, "well, I'll see you then, Milt," but this time he said it as a formality. "Sure," Warden said, just as formally. "I'll see you, Niccolo. Good luck with it." He watched him cross the quad through the window. It would be Sgt Niccolo Leva now, finally, after twelve years. S/Sgt Leva; after the new TO came out. When the times changed they were thorough. Niccolo Leva, as he went up the walk to M Company under Warden's eyes, was carrying on his back the burden of an older order that was dwindling fast, carrying it inside for salvage, and Warden felt a rage bloom and balloon in him. If a lying two-faced bastard wants to run out on his friends like that and leave them holding the sack, thats his right, aint it? I dont begrudge him the goddam rating. But I never thought he'd do that, not Niccolo. Milt Warden felt raped. But it was of something that had not been virginity for a long time now. That afternoon, without even trying to work on the remaining Bloom papers that had to be done by tomorrow so he could meet Karen, he took off. He went over to Al Chomu's Kemoo Bar and got drunk with Al and they talked about the old days before Schofield Barracks had become an Induction Center when life had been simple. There did not seem to be many of the old bunch left any more. They got so drunk Al's wife had to angrily take over the bar for Al; Al wanted to close it up altogether. Al's wife did not like Warden, and Warden did not find there the summery ecstasy of being alive he had left there with a week ago. Secretly, he felt quite sure Al's wife had done something to it. It did not take two days for Leva's papers to go through. Capt Gilbert put them through that afternoon and they were back the next morning. Apparently old Jake Delbert was not only willing, but more than happy, to do a favor for the 3rd Battalion's Lt Col Jim Davidson. It made a fine cataclysm for such a fine summery morning, that was without the summery ecstasy of being alive. Capt Holmes flopped like a chicken without head and appealed to Warden. Warden, still a little hungover, grinned at him foolishly and remained as silent as a stone. While Leva was packing, Jim O'Hayer came in and made formal request to be returned to straight duty. Holmes relieved him without argument. After half an hour sweating over a roster he finally created Champ Wilson supply sergeant and sent the CQ out to the drillfield to corral him. Before noon The Champ was back in the orderly room and flatly quit, and if it meant his rating they could have it. Holmes relieved him without busting him either and put Ike Galovitch in his place. Ike was overjoyed at being chosen for such a responsible position. He would, he said, do his level best for the Captain Holmes; Captain Holmes thanked him gratefully; Ike disappeared into his new castle with proud tears standing in his eyes; Milt Warden watched in stony silence. He knew he was watching the destruction of the Milt Warden legend. He watched it with the same painful sense of fitting rightness and sweet satisfaction as a boy who has spent weeks building a model airplane watches it crash in flames from the match he has applied to its wings with his own hand just before it took off. When the holocaust was over, he took off for town. She was very lovely when she picked him up from the shaded bench on the King Street side of Aala Park and he felt no more sexual attraction for her than a man does for his wife on a hot day and it frightened him. He climbed in the car out of the shrill yammering of the Asiatic-crowded grass from across the shrill yammering Asiatic-flowing sidewalk and flopped back in the seat and lit another cigarette, impressed overwhelmingly with that sense of the end of something which he had had earlier but which had not hit him fully until now when he saw her. He did not even say hello.