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By Root 14013 0

lovely enough to make you want to enlist for this happy land, pictures of quaint Wahiawa without the smells, all the places the tourists saw from the outside and thought were lovely and whose attitude these photographs reflected, but that we always saw from the inside (excepting of course: Halekulani, Royal Hawaiian, Moana; Lau Yee Chai’s, Ala Wai Inn) with an entirely different perspective, a perspective not recorded in any photographs since our photographs of the inside were always jokes; clean jokes: a guy with his helmet on grinning in the Company Street, or a guy in full field grinning at the bayonet on the rifle he was holding in the Long Guard Position, or even two or three guys holding beer bottles and their arms around each other’s necks and elaborately crossed legs and grinning in front of a palm tree or the Chapel or the Bowling Bowl; or dirty jokes: like the series of the French-Hawaiian beauty from Big Sue’s in Wahiawa, first in her dress, then in her undies, then in her pants, then in nothing, then in an embarrassing position, a strip tease five in all, one buck for the series or two bits apiece; or perhaps the biggest, grandest joke of all: the Company photograph, with the fond smiling Captain and all his grinning men; but always, always jokes, because all of us always grinned reflexively, instinctively, a joke, if a camera (or even a reporter) popped up anywhere within shouting distance, Prewitt thought, which is why nobody ever knows our inside perspective unless they’ve been there but always see us as Our Simple Boys, and that even if they have they tend to forget because there is nothing anywhere to remind them; and which is why I’m goddamned if I’ll collect recorded jokes about things I do not feel like laughing at. But if I had a bugle and could make recordings I’d remind them, he thought. And, but God, how I’d like to be the one.

“You and your goddam tourist photographs,” he said to Angelo, bitterly, for perhaps the hundredth time.

“Aw dont start that,” Angelo said. “You know thems ony for showing to my folks when I get back home. You know they’ll want to see what Wahoo’s like.”

“But Wahoo aint like that.”

“Sure it aint. But they wont know it. This is what they want to see, not what its like. Here, look at this one,” he said, pointing out a new one, a beautiful Chinese girl in a flowered dress and a beret looking lovingly back over her shoulder, obviously at her lover, and with that blankness, absolutely nothingness, of a beautiful Chinese girl simulating lovingness; a picture every soldier on the post had at least two prints of because they were two-for-a-nickel-in every PX on the Island.

“It kills me,” Prew said. “It knocks me out.”

“But I like it,” Readall Treadwell said.

“Its the one,” Maggio grinned, “that I’m going to tell them back home is the one I almost married, but shacked up with for a year instead, and left behind me.”

“The Girl I Left Behind Me,” Prew said and began to whistle it sarcastically. But he did not get up and walk away, like he could have.

They were still looking, a little later, when Bloom came in freshly showered from the latrine and leaned down uninvited to look too, standing beside Readall Treadwell across the bed.

The four of them, silently looking, made a momentary still picture that was nowhere apparently dangerous. But Bloom, Prew thought later, was never one to take a backseat for very long, even to a photograph album, if he could help it. Probably he only did it to make known the fact that The Great Bloom had arrived on the scene, since no one had acknowledged it. But in doing what he did he made at least two, and maybe three, enemies that would never again be anything else but enemies. It was a thing Bloom was always doing.

It all happened quite swiftly. One moment there was this apparently peaceful still picture of four men looking at an album. Then the picture shuddered, quaked, broke up in the same way dreams shift, and began to move into a series of apparently disjointed actions, one, two, three, right down the line, like a jerky oldfashioned movie,