From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [54]
There was never any cold to suffer in the winter in Hawaii. But neither was there any persimmon-flavored air of fall’s October, nor any sudden awakening to the warmth and quickened thighs of spring’s young April. The only time there was ever any cosmic change, in Hawaii, was in the rainy season and so its change was always welcomed by the ones who could remember winter. All, that is, except the tourists.
It did not come all at once, the rainy season. There was the usual feeble storm or two in waning February, like a man who feebly kicks and struggles just before he dies, but bringing promise and a breath of chill, saying there was water near, hold on a while. Then the early storms gave up, after the thirsty earth had taken all the moisture in them, and they ran away before the onslaught of the sun which dried the mud to dust again, leaving only a caked cracked memory that crumbled underneath the round-toed bluntness of the GI shoes.
But in early March the times between the rains got shorter and the rains themselves got longer, until finally there were no times between, but only rain, of which the earth would avidly drink its fill and then, like a man dehydrated in the desert who can’t keep from drinking too much, vomit all the rest it could not assimilate, down the streets and down the hills, along the flumes and irrigation ditches that webbed the carmine earth of the plateau and now were torrential rivers. Until at last the whole earth and everybody on it, like a honeymooning bride, begged for thirst again.
It was then that Schofield moved indoors. Field problems were replaced by lectures on the various armament nomenclatures in the Dayrooms, Close Order and Extended Order were made to step down for dry-run target exercises on the porches and for the hoary venerated triggersqueeze. All, in their monotony, having to compete with the exciting luxury of being under shelter while the rain beat down outside.
Drill in the mornings was great fun, because great novelty, in the rainy season. But in the afternoons grinning greedy Fatigue, like a gambler’s pimp, went on seducing relentlessly, just the same as always, even though the recreations of the officers, the golf and tennis and the riding, ceased.
Raincoats, of two kinds—the rubberized kind that absorbed the water like a blotter, and the slicker kind that shed both air and water until the wearer was so bathed in sweat he might as well have worn the other kind, appeared from out of hiding in the combat packs hung on each bed foot. And on those evenings when the rain would cease long enough for men to go back to their restless midnight walks the newly issued gadgets called “field jackets” would appear upon the streets and roads with gratitude instead of the contempt all innovations suffer in the army, gratitude against the chill that made so many hunger after apples, the same chill that made them all desert the bigness of the airy squadrooms in the evening for the smaller Dayrooms and the illusion of warmth that comes from many bodies close together.
And now, in the rainy season, when the groups of men moved in on the roofed over Boxing Bowl behind the old Post Chapel, coming from all over, radial spokes about a hub, they carried blankets, both to spread out on the cold concrete that brings down the piles and to wrap around them. And perhaps a hidden pint for extra warmth, if they had been able to sneak it in without the MPs getting wise. And here in Hawaii’s autumnal March, under the roof of Schofield’s Boxing Bowl where two nameless ciphers fought each other in the ring, football, apples, and October and all the thousand little towns across the nation with their little highschool football teams hovered low above the Bowl, brought momentarily alive again by an illusion.
With three Smoke