From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [437]
“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.