From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [234]
There wasnt any hurry now, it was all luck now. No telling where he might have gone. A peaceful drunken fatalism filled him. Somewhere the MPs were hunting in pairs like hawks, but it might take a couple hours yet to find him.
He wiped the pebble off drunkenly carefully, taking his own sweet time in the stillness, feeling happily the stillness, and spit on one side of it and flipped it like you flip a coin. Just like you use to do when you was a kid, he thought.
Hell, the little bastard might even come back to Hal’s. Hal would let him in, of course. Then Prewitt would be looking for him when he was back safe at Hal’s.
Wet was Kalakaua. Dry was the Canal. He hunted for the pebble in the darkness with a lighted match. The wet side was up.
Okay.
He turned left on the main drag, back toward the Tavern, feeling like a hunter in the forest. Down the long blocks of the wide slightly curving street no thing moved. The street car tracks stretched away. Every other street light was turned off. Not a car, not a bus, no people, no life. His footfalls sounded very loud. He got off the sidewalk and walked on the grass.
He stopped to listen then, once, but he remembered Angelo was bare footed. And wearing trunks, no less!
The MPs were tough babies down here. These were from Shafter and Department Hq. All big boys, like the Schofield bunch, and always in pairs treading heavily in the GI shoes and tight whitewashed leggins. At Schofield the MP Company that covered the Post and Wahiawa and the road down under the two columns of tall trees alongside the reservoir, they had men just as big, and just as tough, but Prew knew several of them. So to him they were more human, somehow. He had come over on the boat with several, all good joes then, until they put on the white-washed leggins. Up at Schofield, in a pinch, he had a forty-sixty chance of meeting one of the guys he knew, who could be talked into giving him a break. Down here he knew none of them. And Angelo out drunk bare footed in trunks! He began to laugh out loud tumultuously. The loud sound of his own voice stopped him.
He hunted carefully along Kalakaua, stopping to look in darkened yards and on the benches set on the sidewalk corners, and under them. Man, are you lucky you are not a big man. You might have been a fucking MP yourself. The Provost Marshal didnt take no for an answer when he looked them over as they came down the gangplank off the boat. When The Man picked the biggest for his very very own, they were his and thats all she wrote. He remembered one big guy of six foot four who had been signalled out just ahead of him. The only thing saved that guy was he was in the Air Corps, and was the Provost Marshall pissed off over that one!
He hunted for what seemed an eternity, expecting arms with brassards to grab him any minute from behind. And if they did, well it was dear john, thats all. Those boys knew how to work you over, and they did not have to hide the marks like the civilian cops. He passed Lewers Street, looking on both sides. Then, passing Royal Hawaiian Street he saw, or thought he saw, a shadow move across silent way up in front of him. He crossed Kalakaua and slipped into the edge of the Royal grounds and stalked it. When he got up to Seaside Street, where the Royal Hawaiian Hotel driveway went in off Kalakaua, he could see a figure wearing trunks sitting calmly on a sidewalk bench in front of the Royal grounds.
“Hey, Maggio,” he called.
The figure did not move.
He