From Here to Eternity (51 page)

bastard do if he had told him the truth? how it was Holmes in the first place who had given her the dose? Probly take his cleaver and go ramming over to the CP hunting for the Company Commander. Warden lay still and waited, shaking silently and uncontrollably with laughter, and trying to fight off the clouds of mosquitoes that were like packs of baying bloodhounds trying to get at his throat. In the Roman Army they required each dogface to perform his drill bearing a burden twice as heavy as in actual combat. They conquered the world. We ought to win at least that much. Pretty soon Stark came back to the tent. But he had figured that. He could hear the tinkling of glass fragments as the mess sergeant cleaned up the mess, then the bang and rattle as the still cursing Stark threw it all meticulously into the GI trash can and came back out and started to look for him again, this time cunningly quiet. From up on the top of the embankment he could hear them still beating on the guitars ringingly. They were playing blues, old ones one right after another. Saint Louis, Birmingham, Memphis, Truckdriver's, Sharecropper's, Hodcarrier's, 219, Route 66, L&N, Thousandmile, Friday Clark carrying the rhythm base and singing, Anderson roving and ranging up and down and around behind him like a tethered falcon. The dam fools, he giggled fighting the mosquitoes, sit up there and let themselves be eaten up by mosquitoes when they could be in bed asleep. He started to laugh again. Stark was still crashing around in the undergrowth. No son of a bitching Texas gut robber was going to tell Milton Anthony Warden what woman he could go out with and what one he couldnt. If he wanted to go out with Karen Holmes, he was by Christ going to go out with her. He lay happily, laughing, listening to Stark crashing and cursing, and hearing the beating guitars.

CHAPTER 32

"LISTEN to this one," Andy said. "Hit it," Friday said, palming his strings dead. They all stopped talking and casually, in this attentive silence that it was his right as an accomplished craftsman to demand, Andy ran through a chord progression in diminished minors that was the latest addition to the series he had been making up all evening. It rose out of the box like a delicately intricate filigree, then ended falling off on a diminished ninth that seemed to hang, leaving the whole thing suspended weirdly melancholy, a single unit fading off into the upper air like a rising hydrogen balloon. From under it, Andy stared at them indifferently, very boredly wooden-faced, sitting on his legs tucked under him in that way he had when he was playing. In the silence he ran through it again. "Hey, man!" Friday said worshipfully, like the student manager talking to the football captain. "Where'd you drag that one up from?" "Ahh," Andy said lazily. He pulled his mouth down. "Just stumbled onto it." "Play it again," Prew said. Andy played it again, the same way, looking at them bright-eyed but boredly wooden-faced, the same way. And they stopped talking again, as they had learned to always stop whatever they were doing and listen when Andy had been fiddling around and stumbled onto something, listening to this one now fading off the same way as before, seemingly still up in the air unfinished, so that they wanted to say Is that all? yet knowing that was all because this was more finished and complete and said all there was to say, than if it had been ended. He had been doing it all evening, cutting out to experiment and fiddle with something he had stumbled on to, then calling a halt while he played it to them if it satisfied him, or else if he was not satisfied cutting back in and picking it up from Friday, until now finally he had come up with this that was better than any of the others, which were all good, but could still not touch this now with its haunting tragedy that was so obviously tragedy that it became the mocking ironic more heart-breaking travesty of its own heartbreak, so that now he could relax a little on his triumph. "Who's got a cigarette?" Andy said boredly, laying the guitar aside. Friday made haste to hand the great man one. "Man," Slade, the Air Corps boy, said. "Man, thats reet. You talk about blues, man, thats really blues." Andy shrugged. "Gimme a drink." Prew handed him the bottle. "Thats blues," Friday said. "You cant beat blues." "Thats right," Prew said. "We got an idea for our own blues," he told Slade. "An Army blues called The Re-enlistment Blues. Theres Truckdriver's Blues, Sharecropper's Blues, Bricklayer's Blues. We'll make ours a soljer's blues." "Hey," Slade said excitedly. "That sounds fine. Thats a swell idea. You ought to call it Infantry Blues. Christ, I envy you guys." "Well, we aint done it yet," Prew said. "But we're going to," Friday said. "Hey, listen," Slade said eagerly. "Why dont you use what Andy just played for your blues? Thats what you ought to do. That would make a great theme for a blues." "I dont know," Prew said. "We aint quite worked it all out yet." "No, but listen," Slade said enthusiastically. "Could you do that?" he asked Andy eagerly. "You could make a blues out of that, couldnt you?" "Oh, I reckon," Andy said. "I reckon I could do it." "Here," Slade said excitedly, "have a drink." He handed him the bottle. "Make a blues out of it. Finish it up. Repeat the first line with a little variation and then bring it all down to a third line major ending. You know, regular twelve bar blues." "Okay," Andy yawned. He wiped his mouth off with the back of bis hand and handed the bottle back and picked up the guitar and went back into the private sealed communion with the strings. They listened while he fiddled with it. Then he played it for them. It was the same mock-haunting minors, only this time set into the twelve bar blues framework. "You mean like that?" Andy said modestly. He laid the box down again. "Thats it," Slade said excitedly. "Thats a terrific blues. I bet I got five hundred records back home, and over half of them are blues. But there aint a blues I ever heard could touch that blues. And that includes Saint Louis." "Oh, now," Andy said demurely. "It aint that good." "No, I mean it," Slade said. "Hell, man, I'm a blues collector." "You are?" Andy said. "Say, listen," he said, forgetting to be bored, "have you ever heard of a guy named Dajango? Dajango Something." "Sure," Slade said expansively. "Django Reinhardt. The French guitarman. You pronounce it Jango. The D is silent. He's the best." "There!" Andy said to Prew. "You see? You thought I was lyin. You thought I was makin it up." He turned back to Slade excitedly. "You got any of this Django's records?" "No," Slade said. "They're hard to get. All made in France. And very expensive. I've heard a lot of them though. Well what do you know," he said. "So you know old Django?" "Not personally," Andy said. "I know his music. Theres nothing like it in the world." He turned to Prew. "Thought I was kiddin you, dint you?" he said accusingly. "Thought I was ony makin it all up. What do you think now?" Prew had another drink and shrugged defeat. Andy did not even see it. He had already turned back to Slade and launched into his story. Andy only had one story. It was as if it was the only thing in his whole life that had ever happened to him, the only experience that had impressed him strongly enough to provide a story. Prew and Friday had both heard it a thousand times but they listened now as intently as Slade while Andy told it, because it was a good story and they never got tired of hearing it. It was a story of 'Frisco and low hanging drifts of fog, the kind of fog a Middle-Westerner or Southerner half expected a Chinese hatchet man to step out of in front of you as you walked up and down the steep rain-water-running rough-brick-cobbled streets. It was a story of Angel Island, big sister of Alcatraz, the Casual Station in 'Frisco Bay where you waited for the transport that would ship you over. Andy's story brought Angel Island back to all of them: The President Pierce, the little launch that would take you over and deposit you at the foot of Market Street to go on pass; it brought back the Rock with the East Garrison of concrete barracks built in tiers up from the dock, and West Garrison of tar paper and wood where they put the Casuals and that you took the road that wound up through the officers' quarters and then ran fairly level off across the flanks of the hills to get to, the West Garrison, a two mile walk you had to make three times a day for chow, two miles over and two miles back, getting up chilled by the fog at dawn and hungry for coffee with that two mile walk ahead of you before you could eat; it brought back the high steep hills that you were free to climb up through the sparse trees to the timber line of light second- and third-growth woods at the top because the Casual had no duty beyond policing up in the morning and an occasional KP, the Casual was only waiting on a boat and the permanent-party-men at Angel were superior and contemptuous and worked them like niggers on KP, and from the fight timber you could look down across to the gray man-factory the steepwalled soul-assembly-line and shudderingly at the callous grayness decide you wereni: so bad off after all, here where you would walk the gravel road clear around the Island every day, past the Immigration Quarantine Station on the other side where they had the six Germans who had given up off of an injured merchant vessel interned and you could talk to them and give them cigarettes and they seemed human just like you but you never knew how they would have been if the situation was reversed. It was a story of Telegraph Hill, Andy's story. Or was it Knob Hill, in Andy's one and only story. It was a story of steep-streeted Chinatown and the Chinese tonks and tourist nightclubs, and of a green recruit from the Mississippi Valley who looked in awe and wonder. It was a story of the fabulous Eddie Lang, and of the mythical Django the Frenchman the "Greatest Guitarman In The World" whose last name, something German, Andy could never remember. A rich queer had picked Andy up in one of the Chinese nightclubs, a slightly effeminate, very sad, quite rich queer. And learning that Andy was a guitarman, had taken him up to the very expensive and exclusive apartment house that he derided, but still lived in, to hear the "Greatest Guitarman In The World." It was a lovely bachelor apartment, so lovely Andy had felt transported to some unreal other earth, because surely Andy had never seen an earth like this earth before, a place so rich and beautiful and harmonious and clean. It even had a den, and the den even had a bar, and the bar even had pyramids of glasses under colored lights, and the dark wood panelled walls lined from floor to ceiling with books and record albums. Oh, he remembered all of it, every last detail. But when it came to describing for them who had never heard it the poignant fleeting exquisitely delicate melody of that guitar, memory always faltered. There was no way to describe them that. You had to hear that, the steady, swinging, never wavering beat with the two- or three-chord haunting minor riffs at the ends of phrases, each containing the whole feel and pattern of the joyously unhappy tragedy of this earth (and of that other earth). And always over it all the one picked single string of the melody following infallibly the beat, weaving in and out around it with the hard-driven swiftly-run arpeggios, always moving, never hesitating, never getting lost and having to pause to get back on, shifting suddenly from the set light-accent of the melancholy jazz beat to the sharp erratic-explosive gypsy rhythm that cried over life while laughing at it, too fast for the ear to follow, too original for the mind to anticipate, too intricate for the memory to remember. Andy was not a jazzman, but Andy knew guitars. The American Eddie Lang was good, but Django the Frenchman was untouchable, like God. They were all foreign recordings, those of this Django, all made in France or Switzerland. Andy had never heard of him before, and never heard of him again, until Slade. He tried, but the record clerks had never heard of Django, they did not handle foreign recordings, and Andy could not tell them his last name. Just that one night remained, a half-dream half remembered, that he was not even sure any more was real. He had told and retold it so often, elaborating this or that, that he no longer knew where memory stopped and imagination started. He was glad to prove by Slade that it really had existed. The queer said he was a real gypsy, a French gypsy, and he only had three fingers on his left hand, his string hand. Incredible. They had sat almost all night, Andy and the queer, playing them and replaying them, and the queer expanded and began to talk, how he had seen him once in the flesh in a Paris bistro, how Django had quit without giving notice, leaving a thousand francs a week to go off with a third-rate gypsy band that was touring in the South, the Meedee, he called it. The queer thought that was wonderful. The queer did not offer to proposition Andy. Either he forgot all about it in the excitement of the music, or else he wanted to keep his real love and his business separate. It was as if this queer only propositioned men who were too dull and insensitive to appreciate guitar, so he could degrade them for their lack, and himself for associating with them. He had driven Andy down through the fog to the dock to catch the last launch, and in the fog Andy could not even remember where he had been. He tried to find the house again, once later on, when he found he could not buy the records anyplace. But he never could find it. He could not even recognize the street. He was not even sure which hill it was. It was as if street and house had vanished from the earth, and he was pursuing the fading ghost of a long dead dream. He shipped out without ever seeing the man again. That was the end of Andy's story. Nobody said anything for quite a while. "Thats the kind of a story I like," Slade said finally. "That poor lonely queer. All that money and nobody he could talk to." "Queers never have anybody they can talk to," Prew said bitterly, remembering Maggio. "They like it like that. Poor little rich boy," he said bitterly. But still, it was the kind of story Prew liked too, weird and unreasonable and senseless, almost occult, yet with a thread of hope still running always through it that maybe his theory that all men were basically alike, all hunting the same phantasmal mirror, was true. "You dont know where I could find some of them records, do you?" Andy asked. "I wish I did," Slade said. "I wish I could help you. All I know about him is his name," he told them guiltily. "I didnt know it meant so much to you. I lied to you a while ago, I've never even heard any of the records." He looked at them anxiously. Nobody said anything. "Gimme a drink," Andy said finally. "I'm sorry," Slade said. "Listen," he said, "play that blues again, will you?" Andy wiped his mouth and played it. "Jesus," Slade said. "Hey, listen," he said embarrassedly. "Now that you've got the melody for them, why dont you write your blues right now?" "Oh, he'll remember that all right," Prew said. "We can always do it some other time, when we get back in garrison. He wont forget the tune, will you, Andy?" "Oh, I dont know," Andy shrugged disconsolately. "It aint much good anyway, is it?" "No!" Slade said. "No, listen. If you put it off, it'll end up just like your story about Django. A half forgotten memory," he said, "of something you were going to do once, when you were young." They all of them looked at him. "Never put things off," Slade said, almost frantically. "You'll wake up and find them gone." "We aint got no paper nor pencil," Prew said. "I got a notebook and a pencil," Slade said eagerly, getting them out. "Always carry them. To write down thoughts, you know. Come on, lets write it now." "Well, hell," Prew said embarrassedly. "I dont know how to start." "Figure it out," Slade said eagerly. "You can figure anything out. Its about the Army, aint it? Its about re-enlisting. Look," he said. "Start it with the guy getting discharged, paid off J' Andy picked up the guitar and began to play through the minor melody slowly thoughtfully. Slade's almost frantic enthusiasm was catching. He was high and pouring out the energy on them, like Angelo Maggio used to work himself up to when he wanted to win at poker, Prew thought. "Here," he said, "give us your flash so we can see." "You think its all right to have a light?" Slade said. "Sure," Prew said. "Hell. The lootenant and them all had their lights on, dint they?" He trained the light down on the notebook. "How's this for a start?" Prew said.