From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [52]
Violet had lain back in her chair and rested her head against the back, her hands dangling, dangling over the ends of the arms of it. She kept on looking at him, curiously, across the chair back. “Well,” she said. “You see?”
Prew stood up and stepped toward her. “Why in hell would I marry you?” he shot down at her. “Have a raft of snot-nosed nigger brats? Be a goddam squawman and work in the goddam pineapple fields the rest of my life? or drive a Schofield taxi? Why the hell do you think I got in the Army? Because I didnt want to sweat my heart and pride out in a goddam coalmine all my life and have a raft of snot-nosed brats who look like niggers in the coaldirt, like my father, and his father, and all the rest of them. What the hell do you dames want? to take the heart out of a man and tie it up in barbed wire and give it to your mother for Mother’s Day? What the hell do you . . .”
There was no hood of ice over his eyes now, like there was when he had been facing Warden, like there was when he had been trying to talk her into it, they were blazing now, with the fire of a strip mine that smoulders and smoulders and finally breaks out in the open for a little while. He took a deep shuddering breath and got hold of himself.
The girl could almost see the white icecap of anger rolling down across his eyes, like the glaciers of the ice age rolled across the earth. She lay back in her chair letting it sweep over her, helpless as convicts being washed down with the firehose, letting the force hit her, yielding instead of fighting it, with a patience born of centuries of stooped backs and dried apple faces.
“I’m sorry, Violet,” Prew said, from behind the ice.
“Its all right,” the girl said.
“I didnt mean to hurt you.”
“Its all right,” she said.
“Its up to you,” he said. “This transfer changes my whole routine of living. It works with a different rhythm, like a new song. They aint at all alike, the old song and the new.
“This is the last time I’m comin up. You can either move or not, its okay. When a man changes his life, he has to change it all. He cant keep nothin that reminds him of the old life, or it doesnt work. If I kept comin up here, I’d get dissatisfied with this transfer and I’d try to change it. I dont aim to do that, or let anybody know I want to do it.
“So its up to you,” he said.
“I cant go, Bobbie,” the girl said, not moving, no change in her voice, still from the chair as she had been before.
“Okay,” he said. “Then I’ll be leavin. I’ve seen lots of guys shacked up in Wahiawa. They have a good time. Them and their wahines have parties together and go out together, movies and bars. All like that. The girls aint alone. Not any more,” he said, “than any human being is always alone.”
“What happens to them when the soldiers leave?” she said. Her eyes were looking off at the hilltop trees.
“I dont know. And I dont give a good goddam. They probly git other soljers. I’ll be leavin.”
When he came back out he carried the sneaks and the whiskey, the nearly full one and the nearly empty one, rolled up in the trunks, all the things he had owned here, all that he was taking with him. The little that they were, they had been deposited here as security for a pass of entrance, collateral for the loan of a life that existed off the Post, and in taking them away he had revoked his claim.
Violet was still sitting in the same unchanged position, and he made himself grin at her, drawing his lips back tautly across his teeth. But the girl did not see it, or notice him. He walked down the steps and around the corner of the house.
Her voice followed him around the corner. “Goodby, Bobbie.”
Prew grinned again. “Aloha nui oe,” he called back, playing the role out to the end, with a strong sense of the dramatic.
As he crested the little hill he did not look back, but he could feel through the back of his neck that she was standing in the door, leaning against the jamb, one hand propped against the other side as if barring the door to a salesman. He walked on toward the intersection, never looking back, seeing in his mind the fine tragic picture his figure disappearing down the hill must make, as if it were himself standing back there in the door. And the strange thing was he had never loved her more than at this moment, because at that moment she had become himself.
But thats not love, he thought, thats not what she wants, nor what any of them want, they do