From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [55]
And that we cant take through the gate, friend, he told himself, because the MPs will drink it up themself, and that we cant cache along the fence because there are guys who get their whiskey that way, look for it every night. Shall we drink it, friend? I think we’d better. We are much closer, sometimes we can almost see each other, when we’re drunk. Lets go to the tree.
The tree, below the hill, halfway to the intersection, was a gnarled old kiawe tree filling up its little field, where on his trips up here he had gone before to sit, and where the brown bottles of his past trips lay in the grass. He walked to it through the kneehigh matted grass, having to lift his legs high until he got under it where there was the flattened smooth place that he always sat with his back against the roughness of the bark and no one could see him from the road because there are times every man must be alone and in the squadroom there is no aloneness, only loneliness.
The ancient thorny-fingered guardian that all day protected its little patch of virgin grass from the philandering sun’s greedy demanding of that last maidenhead in the field, spread its warped washerwoman’s arms above him now as it had the grass all day, protecting the philandering prodigal now as it had its daughter’s greenness, until he drank his whiskey, thinking some about The Warden and the Company, the jockstrap Company, but mostly about Violet and the fact that a man could never move without finding boxes to pack the curtains and the canned goods. It was all one to the tree, him or the grass, since being female all it needed was a thing it could protect.
He added the two bottles to the others on the grass and caught a ride home, to the crowded loneliness of the barracks—home, to the separateness of the squadroom where there is no solitude—home, with a 13th Field Artillery truck taking swimmers back from Haleiwa, and went, drunk, to bed.
And when the end of the month and Payday came, he took his last pay as a First and Fourth, the money that was to have set Violet up in Wahiawa, and with a fitting sense of irony, blew it in the gambling sheds, determined to start even. He lost it all across the crap table at O’Hayer’s in fifteen minutes, and he did not even keep out enough to buy a bottle or to buy a piece of ass. It made a lovely gesture, and the large bets he faded created quite a furor.
Book Two
The Company
Chapter 9
THE COMING OF the rainy season, in March and in September, was the only index to the changing seasons in Hawaii, the only yardstick of the passing year. And the yardstick smacked down twice as hard upon the fumbling wasteful hands since slyly slipping time applied it only half as often. Each man has six months of memories and visions of all the things left undone, instead of only three, to haunt him.
The rainy season was the nearest thing to winter in Hawaii. Perhaps, in the winter months, the sky would be a little duller, more hazy and less blue, and the sun not quite so dazzling. But winter in Hawaii was never more different from summer than was our late September. The temperature remained the same, and the lack of winter in the great red plateau of pineapples where Schofield Barracks lay was the same in winter as in summer.
There was never any cold to suffer in the winter in Hawaii. But neither was there any persimmon-flavored air of fall’s October, nor any sudden awakening to the warmth and quickened thighs of spring’s young April. The only time there was ever any cosmic change, in Hawaii, was in the rainy season and so its change was always welcomed by the ones who could remember winter. All, that is, except the tourists.
It did not come all at once, the rainy season. There was the usual feeble storm or two in waning February, like a man who feebly kicks and struggles just before he dies, but bringing promise and a breath of chill, saying there was water near, hold on a while. Then the early storms gave up, after the thirsty earth had taken all the moisture