From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [151]
“Oh,” said the voice, “there are lots of us who have enlisted.”
“And lots who re-enlist,” Prew said. “Lots who end up thirty year men.”
“Not necessarily. There are some, but not nearly as many as you think. Lots of them, like me, figure it all out beforehand. Get in for one hitch and clean up and then get out. Lots of them do that.”
“Is that what you aim to do?”
“You dont think I mean to do this all my life? For fun? In another year I’ll be back home, with a pile of bills big enough to choke a steer. And then I will be all set, for life.”
“But what about home?” he asked the voice, sleepily, wonderingly, not sure yet that this was a dream he dreamed and had not really heard at all. “What will the people back home say?”
“They will say nothing. Because they will know nothing. In my home town, where my mother still lives—on the money that I send her—I am a private secretary to a big, big shot in the Hawaii sugar trade. I am a hometown waitress who went to night school and developed herself and became a private secretary who is saving her money to come home and take care of her poor invalided mother.”
“But what if you get caught?” he asked this dream.
“How can I get caught? In the little town in Oregon where I come from nobody but the very rich even venture out as far as Seattle. When I come home wearing all my demure conservative private secretary’s clothes and retire, on the modest ‘nestegg’ I will have, who is to doubt I am and was just what I say I am?”
“Nobody, I guess. But why? How did you ever get hold of the idea?”
“I had a boyfriend,” the apparition said. “I was a waitress, working in the local chain drugstore. He was from one of the richest families in town. Old story, with no new twists. I didnt get knocked up, nothing like that. He just married the girl his parents thought was suitable for his position, after two years of sleeping with me.”
“Too bad,” he murmured to it. Was that the whiskey that was loosening him up so, all through his arms and legs? “Too bad. Rotten.”
“It does make a pretty story, doesnt it?” the voice smiled. “Maybe they could make a movie from it.”
“They did,” he said. “Ten thousand of them.”
“But not with the ending this one has. This one does not end with the heroine still devoted, with the heroine going to work for them as maid in their new home, taking care of their children for them, just to be near her beloved, like was in this lovely movie, The Hollow of Intention.”
“No,” he said. “Life aint like that, not very often. Not at all in the sections of life I’ve seen.”
“Nor in any other sections of it. No it certainly is not. I left town after the marriage and went to Seattle, as a waitress. There was a bigtime pimp use to come in the store, all the girls pointed him out to me. It wasnt very hard to interest him into making a pass, the hard part was in letting him lay me and making him think I liked it. So that I could work him then, when he thought I loved him, into doing what he meant to do all along. Only, I fixed it so I got sent here, instead of Panama or Mexico; because he loved me, you see, and I loved him. He didnt know that every night after he left my place I’d get up and go and puke my guts out.”
“Lorene,” he said, “Lorene,” and he was not sure if he was dreaming this, or saying it out loud. “You’ve got a lot of guts, Lorene. I’m proud of you, Lorene. I understand you now, Lorene, and I am proud of you, no matter what any other bastard says.”
“Guts,” the voice said. “Guts are nothing. Guts are only good for what you can make them bring you.”
“You sound hard, Lorene.”
“If prestige, position, money are what the good men need from their wives, why I will get them. The only way they can be got. With money.
“And after I go home with a stocking full of bills, after I build the new home for my mother and myself, after I join the Country