From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [53]
“Would your folks like it if you married me?”
“No, but they would like it better than the other. Or this.”
“You mean they’d still be disgraced,” Prew said wryly. “Would you go if I married you?”
“Of course. It would be different then. When you went to the Mainland I would go with you. I would be your wife.”
My wife, he thought. Well, why dont you do it? There was a rising desire in him to do it. Wait a minute, kid. Thats the way they all feel, all the men who finally get married. Like Dhom felt. On one side they see their freedom, and on the other they see a piece of ass right there where they can always get it, without all the bushwhacking buildup, always there handy to be reached, without the months of preparation, or the sluts that are the other alternative. What do you want?
“If I married you and took you with me,” he said cautiously, “there would be no difference. We would both be outcasts. Nobody in the States would associate with us. Anyway, just because I was married to you wouldnt mean I’d have to take you with me. Being married means nothing, to most people it means less than nothing. I know.” Like Dhom, he thought, who married for his piece of ass and after he was hooked she suddenly didnt want to give it to him any more.
“But you still dont want to marry me,” Violet said.
“You goddam right I dont,” he said, his voice rising under the sting and guilt of the truth of what she said. “If I was gonna spend my life in Wahoo it would be different. I’ll be movin all over, goin all the time. I’m a thirty year man. And I aint no officer to have the govmint pay for transportin my lovin wife all over the goddam world. As a private, I wouldnt even get subsistence for you. A guy like me aint got no business bein married. I’m a soljer.”
“Well, you see?” she said. “Why not go on like we are?”
“Because,” he said. “Because once a week just aint enough. I’d rather buy a rubber glove and flog it, see?”
“Theres a war comin in this country. I want to be in on it. I dont want to be held down by nothin that will keep me out of it. Because I am a soljer.”
Violet had lain back in her chair and rested her head against the back, her hands dangling, dangling over the ends of the arms of it. She kept on looking at him, curiously, across the chair back. “Well,” she said. “You see?”
Prew stood up and stepped toward her. “Why in hell would I marry you?” he shot down at her. “Have a raft of snot-nosed nigger brats? Be a goddam squawman and work in the goddam pineapple fields the rest of my life? or drive a Schofield taxi? Why the hell do you think I got in the Army? Because I didnt want to sweat my heart and pride out in a goddam coalmine all my life and have a raft of snot-nosed brats who look like niggers in the coaldirt, like my father, and his father, and all the rest of them. What the hell do you dames want? to take the heart out of a man and tie it up in barbed wire and give it to your mother for Mother’s Day? What the hell do you . . .”
There was no hood of ice over his eyes now, like there was when he had been facing Warden, like there was when he had been trying to talk her into it, they were blazing now, with the fire of a strip mine that smoulders and smoulders and finally breaks out in the open for a little while. He took a deep shuddering breath and got hold of himself.
The girl could almost see the white icecap of anger rolling down across his eyes, like the glaciers of the ice age rolled across the earth. She lay back in her chair letting it sweep over her, helpless as convicts being washed down with the firehose, letting the force hit her, yielding instead of fighting it, with a patience born of centuries of stooped backs and dried apple faces.
“I’m sorry, Violet,” Prew said, from behind the ice.
“Its all right,” the girl said.
“I didnt mean to hurt you.”
“Its all right,” she said.
“Its up to you,” he said. “This transfer changes my whole routine of living. It works with a different rhythm,