From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [53]
It was only when he was below the hill that he could end the role and stop, turning to look back, allowing himself to feel the loss.
And it seemed to him then that every human was always looking for himself, in bars, in railway trains, in offices, in mirrors, in love, especially in love, for the self of him that is there, someplace, in every other human. Love was not to give oneself, but find oneself, describe oneself. And that the whole conception had been written wrong. Because the only part of any man that he can ever touch or understand is that part of himself he recognizes in him. And that he is always looking for the way in which he can escape his sealed bee cell and reach the other airtight cells with which he is connected in the waxy comb.
And the only way that he had ever found, the only code, the only language, by which he could speak and be heard by other men, could communicate himself, was with a bugle. If you had a bugle here, he told himself, you could speak to her and be understood, you could play Fatigue Call for her, with its tiredness, its heavy belly going out to sweep somebody else’s streets when it would rather stay at home and sleep, she would understand it then.
But you havent got a bugle, himself said, not here nor any other place. Your tongue has been ripped out. All you got is two bottles, one nearly full, one nearly empty.
And that we cant take through the gate, friend, he told himself, because the MPs will drink it up themself, and that we cant cache along the fence because there are guys who get their whiskey that way, look for it every night. Shall we drink it, friend? I think we’d better. We are much closer, sometimes we can almost see each other, when we’re drunk. Lets go to the tree.
The tree, below the hill, halfway to the intersection, was a gnarled old kiawe tree filling up its little field, where on his trips up here he had gone before to sit, and where the brown bottles of his past trips lay in the grass. He walked to it through the kneehigh matted grass, having to lift his legs high until he got under it where there was the flattened smooth place that he always sat with his back against the roughness of the bark and no one could see him from the road because there are times every man must be alone and in the squadroom there is no aloneness, only loneliness.
The ancient thorny-fingered guardian that all day protected its little patch of virgin grass from the philandering sun’s greedy demanding of that last maidenhead in the field, spread its warped washerwoman’s arms above him now as it had the grass all day, protecting the philandering prodigal now as it had its daughter’s greenness, until he drank his whiskey, thinking some about The Warden and the Company, the jockstrap Company, but mostly about Violet and the fact that a man could never move without finding boxes to pack the curtains and the canned goods. It was all one to the tree, him or the grass, since being female all it needed was a thing it could protect.
He added the two bottles to the others on the grass and caught a ride home, to the crowded loneliness of the barracks—home, to the separateness of the squadroom where there is no solitude—home, with a 13th Field Artillery truck taking swimmers back from Haleiwa, and went, drunk, to bed.
And when the end of the month and Payday came, he took his last pay as a First and Fourth, the money that was to have set Violet up in Wahiawa, and with a fitting sense of irony, blew it in the gambling sheds, determined to start even. He lost it all across the crap table at O’Hayer’s in fifteen minutes, and he did not even keep out enough to buy a bottle or to buy a piece of ass. It made a lovely gesture, and the large bets he faded created quite a furor.
Book Two
The Company
Chapter 9
THE COMING OF the rainy season, in March and in September, was the only index to the changing seasons in Hawaii, the only yardstick of the passing year. And the yardstick smacked down twice as hard upon the fumbling wasteful hands since slyly slipping time applied it only half as often. Each man has six months of memories and visions of all the things left undone, instead of only three, to haunt him.
The rainy season w