From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [454]
“If we hadnt had Georgette’s car we’d never have even got down there,” Alma said. “Let alone got back home. The whole town’s a madhouse. Trucks, buses, laundry trucks, private cars, every vehicle that can move.”
“We met a guy at the hospital who’s going to write a book about it,” Georgette said.
“Yes,” Alma said, taking it up. “He’s an assistant Professor of English at the University—”
“I thought he was a newspaper reporter?” Georgette said.
“—No,” Alma said, “an English Professor.—And he was helping to evacuate women and children from the bombed areas; and now he’s helping drive people in to the hospital to give blood.”
“He’s going to talk to everybody who had anything to do with any of it,” Georgette explained. “Then he’s going to put all their stories together in their own words in a book.”
“He’s going to call it Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” Alma said. “That’s what one of the Chaplains at Pearl Harbor said.”
“Or else, Remember Pearl Harbor,” Georgette said. “He dont know which yet. You know, like Remember the Alamo.”
“Or Remember the Maine,” Alma said. “He’s very intelligent.”
“And polite, too,” Georgette said. “He treated us just like anybody else. He said all his life he had wanted to live history, and now he had his wish.”
“A house on Kuhio Street was bombed out,” Alma said.
“And the drugstore on the corner of McCully and King is smashed flat,” Georgette said. “And the man and his wife and two daughters were all killed.”
“Well,” Alma said, “I guess we’d better fix something to eat. I feel a little bit weak.”
“Me too,” Georgette said.
“Do you want some food?” Alma said.
“No,” Prew said.
“You really ought to eat something, Prew,” Georgette said. “You need food, after all that liquor.”
Prew reached out and switched off the radio and then looked at them blackly. “Listen, all I want is for you to lee me alone. You want to eat, go eat. Just lee me alone.”
“Did anything new happen on the radio?” Alma said.
“No,” he said violently. “Its the same old crap over and over.”
“Well, you dont care if we listen to it?” Alma said, “do you? While we fix supper?”
“Its your radio,” Prew said, and got up with his bottle and cocktail glass and went out onto the porch over Palolo Valley and shut the glass doors behind him.
“What are we going to do with him?” Georgette said. “He’s driving me nuts.”
“Oh, he’ll be all right,” Alma said. “Give him a couple of days to get over it. Just ignore him.”
She turned on the radio and went out to the kitchen, and Georgette followed her restlessly.
“Well I just hope you’re right,” she said uneasily, looking out through the glass doors at the black silhouette against the reddening sky. “He gives me the willies.”
“I said he’d be all right,” Alma said sharply. “Just leave him alone. Ignore him. Come on and help me fix supper; we’ll have to put up the blackout curtains in a little bit.”
They fixed coldcut sandwiches with Durkee’s Dressing, of which Alma was very fond, and one of those cellophane bags of chopped salad that were just beginning to come out in the stores with French dressing. They poured glasses of milk and put the Silex hourglass on for a pot of coffee, and then they went to draw the blackout curtains that Alma had fixed to hang open like black drapes in the daytime, back when they had had the practice blackout alerts.
“You’d better come inside,” Alma told him crisply, when she got to the glass doors onto the porch. “We’re putting up the blackout curtains.”
He came in, without saying anything, and went on across the living room and sat down on the divan still holding the nearly empty bottle in his left hand and the cocktail glass in his right.
“Don’t you want to eat something?” Alma said. “I fixed some sandwiches for you.”
“I’m not hungry,” he said.
“I’ve made some for you anyway,” Alma said. “In case you want them later.”
“I’m not hungry,” he said.
“I’ll wrap them in waxed paper so they’ll stay fresh,” Alma said.
Prew poured himself another drink and did not say anything, so she went on back out into the kitchen, after she had drawn and fastened