From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [465]
“My mind’s made up,” Warden said.
“I wish to hell I’d got my commission in the Coast Guard!” Lt Ross said furiously. “I’ll never understand the fucking Army.”
Chapter 54
HE SAW HER once more before she left. It was a very strange experience.
In the first place, it was a hard thing to arrange. It was not like before the war, when you could put on civvies and go anywhere you wanted simply because you wanted to go there. You could not go anywhere without an official reason now. And you had to have an officially documented explanation. Soldiers were not allowed in civilian clothes. Even to have them was a court-martial offense. And a soldier in uniform running around town in the daytime would be stopped immediately.
The ban on liquor by the Military Government was still in effect then, and the bars were closed down tight. The movies did not run at all. The big hotels had suddenly become very inquisitively careful about their registrations. All the tourists had either gone home, or else were sitting tight in their hotel rooms waiting for the Army to evacuate them. There were no new tourists. Even a car stopped along a road in the daytime was liable to investigation and inspection.
There was not anywhere they could meet. There was nowhere they could go. Even in the daytime.
And at night there was the curfew. At sundown Honolulu crawled quickly into its various holes and died until morning. After dark, nothing moved anywhere, except for the blue headlights of the patrols.
She was at Schofield. She would have to drive down. She could only drive in the daytime. She would have to drive back in the daytime, too. But it was an impossibility for him to get away from the CP in the daytime without being discovered. Even for an hour. And an hour was not long enough.
He could sneak away at night, after the switchboard relief went on. Stark had been sneaking off every night to see his wahine at the Wailupe Naval Radio Station, which was not far away. But Karen, she could not make the trip at night, not without being stopped. She could not even come down before dark and park and wait for him.
The only possible answer was a place, some place, where she could go in the afternoon and wait for him without being noticed, and then stay all night and drive back the next day. The hotels at Waikiki were out. Besides, he was ten or twelve miles from Waikiki out here on the highway, and there were no Motels or Tourist Courts on the highways of Hawaii.
He did not know any people out this way to whom she could go. All the people he knew lived either in Waikiki, or else in downtown Honolulu, which was further. Besides, he was not even sure she would be willing to go that far. To come down and stay all night. Even if he could find a place.
He sweated with it for over a week from the night that he had made the identification of Prewitt’s body. He told himself he meant to have that much, if he never had any of the rest of it.
And finally he went to Stark.
Stark’s wahine was a very beautiful Chinese-Hawaiian girl, the most beautiful blood-mixture type that comes out of Hawaii. She and her husband, a Japanese-Filipino, had one of the little houses in Kuliouou Valley less than two miles from Hanauma Bay. Her husband, who had started out as a mess-attendant in the Navy, was now one of the operators at the Wailupe Station. A very considerable advance in the Navy, for a Filipino.
Rather awkwardly, and not without embarrassment, he asked Stark if he could fix it up with them to let Karen have a room there for one night, so he could see her before she left.
“Sure,” Stark said immediately and without hesitation. “They’ll be glad to.”
“Hadnt you better ask them first?”
“No need to. They’ll do damn near anything I ask them to. I’m helping them to pay off their FHA loan.”
“Okay,” Warden said.
“You let me know what day she’ll be there, and I’ll tell them next time I go over. I’ll show you the way over myself, so you wont get lost.”
“Okay,” Warden said.
He could not call her over the field phone, which made its connection into the public system through the Battalion Message Center, but that part was easy. The next time he had an excuse to go down to Position 17 he made the call from the home of the old couple upon whose small estate the pillboxes had been built, and who had practically adopted all the mea on the position.
The call went through perfect. Karen said immediately and with