From Here to Eternity (32 page)

strength of your approach, and then if you waited till the other's peak was past, then logically you would have it made, but was it worth it? Hell no, it wasnt worth it, not when you might crimp your own concatenation, what was it to you if some damned son of a bitching stupid fool of an antediluvian got himself beheaded by a progressive world by going around in a dream world and trying to live up to a romantic, backward ideal of individual integrity? You could go doing things for a jerk like that forever, and never help him any. It was never worth it, but it would really be a feather in your cap if you could pull it off again now, this time. That would be worth a try, just for the hell of it. If he was doing this, it was not because it was his responsibility to knock himself out taking care of headless chickens who refuse to become modern and grow a head, it was just for the fun of seeing if he could pull it off, not for no stupid ass who still believed in probity. "Too bad you got to lose a welterweight like that," The Warden said indifferently, after The Man had brooded on the door a while in silence. He took the sheets out of the machine and began to rearrange the carbons for the second page. "What?" The Man said, looking up. "What do you mean?". "Well, he'll still be in hock when Compny Smokers comes up, wont he?" The Warden said indifferently. "To hell with the Company Smokers," The Man said. "All right," he said. "Make it a Summary then." "But I already got this typed up," The Warden said. "Then change it, Sergeant," The Man said. "Would you let your laziness make a difference of five months in the Stockade to a man?" "Jesus Christ," The Warden said. He tore the papers up and went to get some blank ones. "These Kentucky mountain hardheads cause a man more trouble than a regiment of niggers. Might as well leave it as a Special for all the good a break will do a man like that." "He needs to be taught a lesson," said The Man. "He sure as hell does," The Warden said fervently. "The only trouble with them guys, they never learn. I've seen too many of them go into the hockshop, and all they make is work. They aint out two weeks before they're right back in again. They had rather let you kill them, than admit they're wrong. No more sense than a goddam GI mule. About the time you get him groomed up for Regimental next December, he'll pull some hair brained deal and get himself right back in hock, just to get even with you. I seen too many of them mountain boys. They're a threat to the freedom of this whole country." "I dont give a goddam what he does," The Man yelled, sitting up. "Fuck the Regimentals, and fuck the fucking championship. I dont have to stand for insolence like that. I dont have to take it. I'm an officer in this Army, not a boiler orderly." The red outrage of affront was back in his face. He glared at The Warden. The Warden waited, timing it exactly to the color in the face, before he empathetically told The Man what The Man was thinking. "You dont mean that, Captain," The Warden said softly, in horror. "You're just mad. You wouldnt say a thing like that, if you werent mad. You dont want to take a chance on losing your championship next winter, just for being mad." "Mad!" The Man said. "Mad? Mad, he says. Jesus H Christ, Sergeant!" He rubbed his hands over his face, tentatively feeling of the congestion. "All right," he said. "I guess you're right. Theres no sense in losing your head and going off half cocked and cutting off your nose to spite your face. Maybe he didnt even mean any disrespect at all." The Man sighed. "Have you started on those new forms yet?" "Not yet, Sir," The Warden said. "Then put them back," said The Man. "I guess." "Well at least give him a good stiff company punishment," The Warden said. "Ha," The Man said vehemently. "If I wasnt the boxing coach of this outfit, I'd give him something," he said. "He's getting off damned easy. Okay, you enter it in the Company Punishment Book, will you? Three weeks restriction to quarters. I'm going home now. Home," he said, as if to himself. "Call him in tomorrow and I'll talk to him and initial the book." "All right, Sir," The Warden said. "If you think thats the way to handle it." He got the stiff leather-bound Company Punishment Book out of his desk and opened it up and got his pen. The Man smiled at him wearily and left, and he closed the book and put it away again and stepped to the window to watch the Captain cross the quad through the lengthening evening shadows, going home. In a way he almost felt sorry for him, any more. But then he asked for everything he got. The next day when Holmes asked for the book he got it out and opened it. Then he discovered the page was still blank. Shamefacedly he explained how he had had to do some other things. He had forgotten it. The Man was on his way to the Club, he was in a hurry. He told The Warden to have it ready for him tomorrow. "Yes, Sir," The Warden told him. "I'll do it right away." He got his pen out. The Man left. He put his pen away. The next day even Holmes had forgotten all about it, under the stress of more recent things. It was not, The Warden considered carefully, that he gave a good goddam whether the punk got three weeks' restrictions or not. The fact was, three weeks' restriction would probably do Prewitt some good. Especially since, as Stark had told him, the kid had gone dippy over this snooty whore at Mrs Kipfer's. Three weeks at home for Prewitt would be just about long enough to get him over it. The Warden was sorry now that he had posed this condition on himself that he get Prewitt off scot free or it did not count. He did not feel sorry for him. Prewitt asked for everything he got. Falling for a hard nosed whore at Mrs Kipfer's. That was just about that punk's goddam speed. Prewitt not only asked for everything he got, he begged for it on bended knee. The Warden snorted disagreeably. Prewitt was relieved to find Holmes was not around when they got back the second time. Paluso was relieved too. He released Prewitt quickly and took off for the PX, to be out of sight. Neither one of them understood that it was over. Prew limped upstairs and unmade the pack and put the stuff away and showered and changed to clean clothes and stretched out on his bunk, and waited for the OD or the Sergeant of the Guard. When they had not come for him by chowtime, he knew then they were not coming. He had been waiting for an hour and a half. When the chow whistle blew, he knew something had interposed itself between himself and fate. The only possible answer was The Warden, who had seen fit to take a hand for one of those obscure screwy reasons of his own. I dont know what the hell business it is of his, he thought angrily, as he limped downstairs for chow. Why cant he keep his big nose out of things? After chow, he stretched out on his bunk again, laying the tiredness of his legs out heavily on the blankets. That was when Maggio came over and congratulated him. "Man, I'm proud of you," said Angelo. "I ony wish I had of been there to see it. Thats all. If it wasnt for that son of a English-butchering bitch Galovitch, I would of been there too. But I'm still proud of you, man. Just the same." "Yeah," Prew said wearily. He was still trying to grasp where he had got off. He had not only offered them the chance to give him extra duty Payday, which he still might get, he had also given the best opportunity they could have asked for to send him to the Stockade, express. In spite of all the great resolutions about being the perfect soldier and the high plans to make them do all the work. And this, mind you, he told himself, not after a month, not after a week, not even after two days of The Treatment - but on the afternoon of the very first day. It was not, he realized, going to' be as easy as it looked. There were apparently hidden subtleties to The Treatment. Apparently it had been devised to gear itself to human nature more cunningly than hi had suspected. And he had either woefully underestimated their ability to apply it, or else which was worse, grossly overestimated his own strength of will to fight it. The Treatment, apparently, concentrated all its power on a man's strongest point - his pride in himself as a man. Could it be that that was also his weakest point? Remembering it, a kind of terror at his own utter inadequacy overwhelmed him, overwhelmed even the fear he had of the Stockade when he was not keeping himself pumped full of outrage. He fell out for drill next day a sadder but a wiser man. He had given up entirely the idea of curing them or teaching them a lesson. He no longer hoped for or expected instantaneous victory. When The Treatment started right where it had left off yesterday, and he went right back into the role of perfect soldier, he was only fighting a holding action, and under the slow smouldering silence of the self-generated hate that was his one defense was only the thought of Lorene and Payday, wanning through him like a good stiff drink, a fire at which he could warm himself against this heat of hatred that was slowly freezing him.

CHAPTER 20

You knock off drill at ten o'clock on Payday. You shower, shave, brush your teeth again, dress carefully in your best inspection uniform, being careful to knot the suntan tie just right. Then, dressed, you work hard on your fingernails before you finally go outside to stand around in the sun in the company yard and wait for them to begin the paying off, being very careful all the time of the knot in the tie and of the fingernails, since all company paying officers have their little idiosyncrasies of personal inspection even if Payday is not a regular inspection day. With some it was the shoes, with others the crease of the pants, with others the haircut. With Capt Holmes it was the knot in the tie and the fingernails and while if these did not satisfy him he did not redline you or anything like that, still you got a rigorous telling off and had to fall out to the end of the line. You stand around in little groups on Payday and talk about it excitedly and about the half holiday it is, groups that cant stay still and break up and re-form with parts of other groups into new groups, continually shifting, not able to stand still, except for the twenty per cent men who are already waiting like vultures at the kitchen door where you must emerge. Until then finally you see the guard bugler go up to the megaphone in the quad in the brilliant morning sunshine (more brilliant, oddly, than on any other morning) and sound Pay Call. "Pay day," the bugler says to you, "pay day. What you go na do with a drunk en sol jer? Pay day?" "Pay day," the bugle answers you, "pay day. Put him in the guard house till he's so ber. Pay day. P-a-y.. d-a-y." Then the shifting excitement grows much stronger (oh, the bugler plays a responsible part, a traditional, emotional, important part, a part heavy with the past, with all the past centuries of soldiering) and you see The Warden carrying a GI blanket from the orderly room to the messhall and Mazzioli following him with the Payroll like a lord chamberlain carrying the Great Seal and then the shining-booted Dynamite carrying the black satchel and grinning beneficently. It takes them quite a while to get set up, move the tables, spread the blanket, count the silver out and lay the greenbacks out in sheaves, get the jawbone list of PX checks and show checks ready for The Warden to collect, but already you begin to form the line, by rank, noncoms first, then Pfcs and Pvts in one group together, the men within each group lining up for once without argument or pushing, alphabetically. Then, finally, they begin to pay and you can see the line moving very slowly up ahead of you, until you stand in the doorway of the dim messhall yourself while the man in front of you gets paid, until they call your last name and you answer with your first name, middle initial and serial number and step up to Dynamite and salute, standing stiffly while he looks you over and you show your fingernails and he, satisfied, pays you off, tossing you one of his pat jokes like, "Save enough back to go to town on" or "Dont drink all this up in one place." Oh, he is a soldier, Dynamite, a soldier of the old school, Dynamite. And then holding this money (less laundry, less insurance, less allotment if any, less the $1 to the Company Fund) that it took you all month to earn and that they are giving you the rest of this day off to spend, you move down the long blanket covered table to The Warden who collects for PX checks and show checks you have drawn during the month and that you really did not mean to draw at all (promised yourself, last Payday, you would not draw, this month) but drew somehow anyway when they came out on the 10th and the 20th. Then out through the kitchen to the porch where the heavy capital of the financial wizards of twenty per cent men like Jim O'Hayer and Turp Thornhill and, to a lesser extent that is really only a hobby, Champ Wilson, takes its toll also from the dwindling pile. Payday. It is truly an occasion, even the feud between you and the jockstraps is in eclipse when its Payday. In the long, low ceilinged shadiness of the squadroom with the sun very bright outside men are stripping off the suntans feverishly and pulling on the civilians and you know there will not be very many for chow this noon, practically none tonight except for losing gamblers. Out of his $30.00, after the debts were paid, Prew had exactly $12.00 and two dimes. This, which would not even buy Lorene for one all night session, he blessed and genuflected over and took over to O'Hayer's. The sheds, across the street from the dayroom and jerry-built on the strip of worn near-bald earth between the street and the narrow gauge Post railroad, were already going full blast. The quarter-ton maintenance trucks had been moved to the regimental motor park, the big spools of phone wire were neatly stacked outside, the 37mm anti-tank guns (some the old short-barrelled steel-wheeled that were familiar, some the new long-barrelled rubber-tired looking strange and foreign like the pictures of the German arms in Life Magazine) had been rolled out and covered up with tarps, and the spielers hired for a buck an hour called unceasingly like circus barkers from before each shed to "Come inside, boys. Poker, blackjack, craps, chuckaluck, all inside. Test that luck, boys." In O'Hayer's all five lima-bean-shaped blackjack tables were working full capacity. Under the green shaded lights green visored dealers called the cards in monotonous low voices against the hum. Both dice tables were crowded three deep with players, and the three poker tables that were dealing only stud today to take care of more players had no seats open. Standing in the door he thought how by the middle of the month all this money would have sifted down into the hands of a few heavy winners who would be at this table where O'Hayer sat playing now, one of his hired help dealing. They would be winners from all over, from as far away as Hickam and Fort Kam and Shafter and Fort Ruger. They would make this the biggest game on the Inland Post, if not on the whole Rock. The thought made his belly flutter, how he might with luck be one of them. He had done it once before, but only once, at Myer. And the resolution to win just enough for town and quit grew dim and wavered and, but for his stiff determination bolstered by the picture of Lorene, would have fled entirely. He worked methodically with small bets for two hours at a blackjack table (deliberately monotonously, deliberately uninspired) to run his twelve bucks up to the twenty which was the take-out at the poker tables. Then he moved over to the one where O'Hayer was to wait for an open seat, which would never be long on Payday when most of the players were just small fry like himself with a table stake wanting to bite into the big boys' capital. They were constantly going broke and dropping out. He waited without excitement, promising himself faithfully that if he won two hands he'd quit, because two wins in this game would give him plenty for tonight with enough left over for a good weekend (today was Thursday) or Saturday night and Sunday night (and maybe Sunday day, if she said okay, maybe at the beach with her) with Lorene. Just two wins". He had it all figured out. The round green felt.with a bite cut out for the dealer's seat was strewn with piles of halfdollars and cartwheels and the red plastic two-bit chips for ante-ing. They caught and threw back sardonically the greenglass-shaded light, vividly red and silver against the soft light-absorbing felt. He could see The Warden and Stark among the players. Jim O'Hayer sat relaxed with a rakish, expensive green visor cocked over the coldly rigidly mathematical eyes, constantly rolling two cartwheels one over the other with a click that ate into the nerves. It was Stark, his hat tipped low over his eyes, who finally pushed back his four legged mess stool and gave himself the coup de grace: "Seat open." "You aint quittin?" O'Hayer said softly. "Not for long," Stark said, looking at him reflectively. "Just till I borry some money." "See you then," O'Hayer grinned. "Good luck with it." "Well now thank you, Jim," Stark said. Stark, some kibitzer whispered, had in the last hour dropped the whole $600 he had managed to build up since ten o'clock. Stark stared at him and he subsided, and Stark elbowed slowly out through the press, still looking reflective. Prew slid onto the empty $600 seat wondering darkly if this was an omen and pushed his little ten and two fives over to the dealer as unobtrusively as possible. The money boys kept the takeout low on Payday, so you could get in, but they stared at your twenty bucks contemptuously, when you did. He got back a stack of 15 cartwheels, 6 halves, and 8 of the plastic chips and fingering them did not any longer mind the contempt because the old familiar alchemy, the best drug of them all against this life, spread over him as he flipped a red chip in there with the others. His heart was beating faster with louder, more emphatic thumps, echoing in his ears. The gambler's flush was spreading across his face, making it feverish. The bottom of his belly dropped away from under him leaving him standing on the edge of which the world stopped moving. Here, he thought, just here, and only here, held in these pieces of pasteboard being tossed facedown around the table, governed by whatever Laws or fickle Goddess moved them, here lay infinity and the secret of all life and death, what the scientists were seeking, here under your hand if you could only grasp it, penetrate the unreadability. You may shortly win $1000. You may more shortly be completely broke. And any man who could just only learn to understand the reason why would be shaking hands with God. They were playing table stakes and in front of the winners lay thick piles of greenbacks weighted down with silver. The sight of all this crisp green paper that was so important in this life swept him with a greediness to take these crinkly good smelling pieces of paper to himself, not for what they would buy but for their lovely selves. All this was contained in the slow, measured, inexorable dropping of the cards, like time beating slowly but irresistibly in the ears of an old man. Around the table twice, twice ten cards, once down, once up. Somebody's watch beat loudly. And the known familiar faces took on new characteristics and became strange. The bright light cast strange shadows down from the impassive brows and noses, making of each man an eyeless harelip. He did not know these men. That was not Warden there or O'Hayer there, only a pair of bodyless hands moving the top card under the holecard for a secret look, only an armless hand clicking a stack of halves down one on top the other, then lifting all and clicking them down again, and again, perpetually, with measured thoughtfulness. An unreasoning thrill passed down his spine, and all the unpleasantness his life had become in the last two months fell away from him, dead, forgotten. The first hand was a big one. He had hoped for a small one, his $20 would not go far in this game. But the cards were high, and the betting heavy. He had jacks backed up and by the third round he was all in, for the side pot his twenty shared, unable because this was table stakes to go into his pocket for more money if he had it which he did not. The pot he could win was shoved to one side and the betting went on in the center, and all he could do was sit and sweat it out. On the fourth card O'Hayer caught the ace to match his holecard that all of them knew he had because Jim O'Hayer never stayed for fun. He raised fifteen. Prew's belly sagged and he looked at his jacks ruefully and was very glad he was all in for the pot. But on the last card he caught another jack, making a pair showing. He felt his heart skip a beat and cursed silently because he was all in for the pot. There was nearly a hundred and fifty in his pot. O'Hayer won the other, the smaller pot. Warden looked at O'Hayer and then at him and snorted his disgust. Prew grinned, dragging in his pot, and reminded himself that if he won the next one he would quit and check out and Warden could really snort then. He didnt need to win the next one. What he had from the first was plenty. But he had promised himself two hands, not one, so he stayed in. But he did not win the second hand, Warden won it, and he had dropped $40 which left him only about a hundred and now he felt he needed the second win before he dropped out so he stayed in. But he did not win the third hand either, or the fourth, nor did he win the fifth. He dropped clear down to less than $50, before he finally won another one. Raking in the money he sighed off the tenseness that had grown in him in ratio to the shrinking of his capital; he had begun to believe he would never win another one. But now though he had a real backlog to work from. The second win put him up to over two hundred. Two hundred was plenty capital. And he began to play careful, weighing each bet. He played shirtfront poker, enjoying it immensely, completely lost in loving it, in matching his brain against the disembodied brains against him. It was true poker, hard monotonous unthrilling, and he truly loved it, and played steadily, losing only a little, dropping out often, winning a small one now and then, playing now against the time when he would win that really big one and check out. He knew of course all the time that it could not go on indefinitely this way; $200 was no reserve to put up against the capital in this game, but then all he wanted was just one more big win like the first two, one that would be bigger because now he had more money, one he could quit on and check out for good. If he had won the first two like he promised he would have quit then but he hadnt won them he had only won one and now he wanted this last one the one to quit on, before he finally got caught. But before the big win he was just waiting for to quit on came they caught him, they caught him good. He had tens backed up, a good hand. On the fourth card he drew another. On the same card Warden paired kings showing. Warden checked to the tens. Prew was cautious, they were not trying to play dirty poker in this game but with this much on the table anything went. Warden might have trips and he was not being sucked in, he was not that green. When the bet had checked clear around to him he raised lightly, very lightly, just a touch, a feeler, a protection bet he could afford to abandon and lose. Three men dropped out right away. Only O'Hayer and Warden called, finally. O'Hayer obviously had an ace paired to his holecard and was willing to pay for the chance to catch the third. O'Hayer was a percentage man, twenty percentage man, O'Hayer. And Warden who thought quite a while before he called looked at his holecard twice and then he almost didnt call, so he had no trips. On the last card O'Hayer