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By Root 2434 0

Prew had sometime or other Sunday night eaten the two sandwiches she had left out, took to making them regularly both before she left for work and before she went to bed. They were always eaten. But when she forgot to make them, which she did several times, nothing in the refrigerator or the cupboards was even so much as touched. He just was not acting even human. He did not shave, and he did not bathe, and he did not even take off his clothes but just flopped down in them on the divan when he slept. He looked like the wrath of God. His hair had not been touched with a comb since she could remember, and his face had gotten puffy and fat-looking with big pouches under the eyes while the rest of him, which had never been heavy, got thinner and thinner. He would wander, bottle in one hand and glass in the other, from the kitchen to the living room to the bedrooms to the porch and sit down blankly in one place for a while only to get up and go someplace else. The thing that had first attracted her to him—a kind of intensity in the face, if she could have expressed it, a sort of deep tragic fire in the eyes—was not there any more; and you could smell him from clear across on the other side of the room.

And he did not seem to be getting any better. Instead, it looked as if he would go on that way indefinitely—until he either wasted away to a shadow and died, or else went completely crazy and went for somebody with a knife.

She could not help remembering what he had done to that guard from the Stockade.

And Georgette was frankly and openly afraid of him, and said so.

Yet, in spite of Georgette, she could not make up her mind to give up hope and let go of him.

“In the first place,” as she expressed it to Georgette, “theres nowhere for him to go, except here. We all know that if he went back to the Army they’d only throw him in the Stockade again, and maybe kill him. And the whole Island is alive with people checking passes and things. This is the only place where he is safe. We couldnt possibly book passage for him back to the States, like we could have before Pearl Harbor, every bit of space is taken for evacuating noncombatants; and the Army controls all the ships because of having to convoy them.

“And besides all that, I just cant give up hope for him somehow.”

“You mean, you dont want him to leave,” Georgette said.

“Of course I dont want him to leave!”

“What’ll become of him when we go back to the Mainland?” Georgette said.

“Well,” Alma said, “maybe I wont go back to the Mainland.”

“You’ve already booked yourself up,” Georgette said, “just like me.”

“Well, I can always turn it down, cant I?” Alma said crossly.

This conversation took place on the evening of the fifth day, in Georgette’s bedroom which Alma had entered through the connecting bath.

Prewitt did not know anything about it. He did not know anything about anything else, either. He was sitting on the divan in the livingroom, with the bottle and glass within easy reach. He got frantic if they werent always where he could see them.

The only thing he knew anything about, or cared anything about, was liquor. There was something supernatural and occult about liquor, the way it warmed through the blood and brightened every thing up. There was something wonderful and holy about it. If you know how to use it.

It was just like with any other religion. You got yourself just so high on it, and then you coasted along on that for a while, and only added another drink when you began to feel it start to taper off and begin rolling downhill toward the hangover. Otherwise, you would bring on the reaction.

It was a delicate balance, with liquor. If you got too high, you passed clear out, or else ended up getting sick; either way you got sobered into the hangover. And if you let it taper off too far, of course, your mind began to thaw out like frozen mud with the sun on it. He had seen a lot of frozen mud in his time: back at Myer; and the winter maneuvers that the whole regiment had gone down into Georgia to the Benning Reservation for; and all the times on the bum, he