From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [51]
“I did. I’ve got almost a full month’s pay as a First-Fourth coming,” he said carefully. “It’ll be enough to get us set up for a month, until you get a job and I get some more dough. With your job and my twenty-one bucks we can live better than you’re livin here. And you dont like it here. Theres no reason for you not to go.” He stopped talking, long enough to get his breath, surprised at how fast he had been talking.
“You didnt believe me, did you?” Violet said, “when I said I couldnt go, when I said why make a showdown. You cant force me, Bobbie. Momma and Poppa would not like it, they wouldnt let me go.”
“Why wouldnt they like it?” he said, trying to keep his voice from going faster. “Because I’m a soljer. Do you care whether I’m a soljer or not? If you do, why the hell did you go with me in the first place? why did you let me come here? They cant keep you by not wanting you to go. How can they keep you?”
“They would be disgraced,” Violet said.
“Oh, balls!” Prew said, letting loose the rein. “If I was a gook beachboy instead of a soljer it’d be all right though.” This was what he knew it would come down to. They’d live like cattle, worse than Harlan miners, but they’d be disgraced if their daughter shacked up with a soldier. They’d let the Big Five shove a cane stalk up their keister, but that was not disgraceful. That wasnt soldiers. The poor, he thought, they are always their own worst enemy.
“Its not as if we were married,” she said softly.
“Married!” Prew was dumbfounded. The picture of Dhom, the G Company duty sergeant, bald and massive and harassed, crossed his eyes, trailed by his fat sloppy Filipino wife and seven half-caste brats; no wonder Dhom was a bully, condemned to spend his life in foreign service like an exile because he had a Filipino wife.
Violet smiled at his consternation. “You see? You dont want to marry me. Look at my side. Some day you will go back to the Mainland. Will you take me with you? You want me to leave my people, and then be left without them or you either? And maybe with a baby?”
“Would your folks like it if you married me?”
“No, but they would like it better than the other. Or this.”
“You mean they’d still be disgraced,” Prew said wryly. “Would you go if I married you?”
“Of course. It would be different then. When you went to the Mainland I would go with you. I would be your wife.”
My wife, he thought. Well, why dont you do it? There was a rising desire in him to do it. Wait a minute, kid. Thats the way they all feel, all the men who finally get married. Like Dhom felt. On one side they see their freedom, and on the other they see a piece of ass right there where they can always get it, without all the bushwhacking buildup, always there handy to be reached, without the months of preparation, or the sluts that are the other alternative. What do you want?
“If I married you and took you with me,” he said cautiously, “there would be no difference. We would both be outcasts. Nobody in the States would associate with us. Anyway, just because I was married to you wouldnt mean I’d have to take you with me. Being married means nothing, to most people it means less than nothing. I know.” Like Dhom, he thought, who married for his piece of ass and after he was hooked she suddenly didnt want to give it to him any more.
“But you still dont want to marry me,” Violet said.
“You goddam right I dont,” he said, his voice rising under the sting and guilt of the truth of what she said. “If I was gonna spend my life in Wahoo it would be different. I’ll be movin all over, goin all the time. I’m a thirty year man. And I aint no officer to have the govmint pay for transportin my lovin wife all over the goddam world. As a private, I wouldnt even get subsistence for you. A guy like me aint got no business bein married. I’m a soljer.”
“Well, you see?” she said. “Why not go on like we are?”
“Because,” he said. “Because once a week just aint enough. I’d rather buy a rubber glove and flog it, see?”
“Theres a war comin in this country. I want to be in on it. I dont want to be held down by nothin that will keep me out of it. Because