From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [50]
“Soljers are only people, just like everybody else,” he insisted.
“I know it,” Violet said. “But you dont understand. So many Nisei girls go out with the soldiers.”
“So what?” he said, remembering the song. Manuelo Boy, my dear boy, no more hila-hila, sister go with a soldier boy, come home any old time.
“All the soldiers want to screw them,” Violet said.
“Well, they go out with civilians, too. Thats what they want. Whats wrong with that?”
“Nothings wrong with it,” she said. “But a wahine girl must be careful. A respectable Nisei girl doesnt go with soldiers.”
“Neither does a respectable white girl,” Prew said, “or any other kind of girl. But they’re no different than the goddam Pfcs. They all want the same goddam thing.”
“I know it,” Violet said. “Dont get mad. Its just the way the people look at the soldiers.”
“Then whynt your folks run me off? or do something? or say something? If they dont like it.”
Violet was surprised. “But they would never do that.”
“But, hell. All the neighbors see me comin here all the time.”
“Yes, but they would never mention it either.”
Prewitt looked over at her lying on her back in the dappled sunlight, and the short tight legs of her shorts.
“How would you like to move out of here?” he asked carefully.
“I’d love it.”
“Well,” he probed, “you may get a chance to soon.”
“Except,” Violet said, “that I wont shack up with you. You know I cant do that.”
“We’re shacked up now,” he said. “The only thing different from all the other shackjobs is that you’re livin with your folks.”
“It makes all the difference,” Violet said. “Theres no use to talk about it. You know I cant do that.”
“Thats right,” Prew said. Life did not begin till Monday morning. It could wait till tomorrow. He rolled over on his back and lay staring up into the incredible blue of the Hawaiian sky. “Look off to the west,” he said. “Theres a storm blowing up in the west. Look at the cloud bank.”
“The clouds are beautiful,” Violet said. “So black. And piling higher and higher one on top of the other, like a cliff wall.”
“Thats a line squall,” Prewitt said. “Thats the first beginning of the rainy season.”
“Our roof leaks,” Violet said. She reached for the bottle.
Prew was watching the racking mass of clouds. “But whynt your folks kick you out. If its like that. Bringing me here,” he asked.
Violet looked surprised. “But I’m their daughter,” she said to him.
“Oh,” he said. “Come on. We mights well go on back down. It’ll rain pretty soon.”
The rainstorm came up quickly after it had hurdled the mountains. By suppertime it was raining hard. Prew sat out on the back porch alone while Violet helped her mother fix the meal. Her father sat in the front room, by himself.
The old folks, that was the way he always thought of them, had come home before the rain, chattering Japanese back at the crowded Model T that let them off and then clattered on down the road to the next house. Five families owned the Ford together, just as the whole community had built and owned the miles of water sluices of weathered wood that stuck up all along the little valley like scaffolding that had been used to make the mountains before the dawn of history.
They had rushed through the house to the back porch where Prew and Violet were sitting, and on out to hoe their tidy truck patch that the water sluices emptied into, before the rainstorm came. Prew watched them, stooped and bent, with faces that looked to have been carved from dried and withered apples and he felt a self-righteous indignation at the entire human race for the life these people lived, these who looked to be Violet’s grandparents or great-grandparents, and yet were not yet forty years of age.
Their garden, laid out in immaculate little squares and triangles, utilizing every inch of ground, of radishes and cabbages and lettuce and taro and a little underwater rice patch, plus a half a dozen foreign vegetables, was their life; and it showed the industry that was in them. They worked on in it until the rain began to fall before they stopped and put their hoes away.