From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [438]
“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. “