From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [356]
It was he who talked Holmes into sending, with money from the Company Fund, the cablegram by which they learned that Bloom’s parents were not available, instead of the customary letter.
“Dint the Capn want to get the corpse home quickly? Think about the poor mother. Was it her fault her son was a disgrace? Would that make a mother love her son any the less? Surely the mother deserved some consideration. After all, she was a mother. Dint the Capn want to do the right thing by the mother?”
Holmes, being known publicly as a father, had no choice but to succumb; the cablegram came back marked undelivered for the following reasons: ADDRESS UNKNOWN PARTY SAID TO HAVE MOVED FROM CITY; they could not find any letters in Bloom’s footlocker; the case was turned over to the Office of the AG in Washington.
Warden slapped himself on the back. A lucky break.
That saved him at least two weeks, not counting drawnout weary months of correspondence, and he was able to get Bloom in the ground in three days. It was almost a record, except of course for the really old timers who had never laid claim to a family. And if Holmes pestered him with worried recriminations about an AGO inspection for the wasteful misappropriation of company funds which were to be used only for the good of the Company as a whole, well, Holmes had pestered him before, and he had learned to ignore it.
It was those nights, during that wildly oscillating week, when he always went to bed close to midnight with the mind always still bucking like a frightened horse, that in order not to think about how he could be meeting her right now someplace downtown if she wasnt so goddamned conservative and getting raging mad at her, he started toying with the idea of taking the 30-day re-enlistment furlough that he had been postponing ever since he had taken this outfit, over a year. He would lay in bed and plan it all out, how they could swing it, a 30-day idyll, just the two of them.
They would have to get off the Island. He only knew of one place on Oahu where they could possibly swing it, and that one was dubious. But there were plenty other places they could go.
They could go to Kona on the big island; fly Inter-Island to Hilo and hire a U-Drive in Hilo for a month and drive around to Kona by way of Kilauea Crater and the National Park; they could stay at Honaunau (that meant City of Refuge, didnt it? that would be a good place for them to stay: The City of Refuge). They could charter a guide fisherman; off the Kona Coast was one of the best fishing grounds in the Islands. He could see them in his mind, sitting in the cockpit with the rods out in the sockets and the lines drifting deep on the swell, getting burned blacker even than now, with a couple cases of beer in the cooler under the canopy and the Chink handling the boat and cutting the bait so that there was absolutely nothing to do if they didnt want to.
He tried to remember if they had had U-Drive-Its in Hilo when he had been there in ’39 for a furlough at the rest camp.
Or—
If the GI rest camp on Hawaii made the proximity of military personnel too likely, they could take the Inter-Island Steamer to Lihue on Kauai and go on around to Waimea and rent a tourist cabin near the canyon. 95 miles on the Steamer would be a perfect trip for honeymooners, and once there they could spend the mornings riding and shooting, up the canyons, into the mountains, and the afternoons down on Lawai Beach. He had only been there once on a fast three day pass with a tourist dame from the Moana he had met working on the moonlight cruise boat out of the Yacht Basin; they had flown in and flown out and spent all the time down on the beach, but the vivid greenness of the mountains and valleys that kept aloof from civilization