From Here to Eternity (8 page)

CHAPTER 7

PREWITT was sitting on his bunk waiting for chow, playing solitaire to forget the sense of strangeness, when Anderson and Clark, the G Company buglers, came in the big unsympathetic squadroom. He had carted his stuff over from A Company and stowed it, made up the bare mattress into a precisely square-cornered bunk, arranged his uniforms in the wall locker, rolled a neat combat pack and old timer's envelope roll, set his shoes and foot locker on the stand, and he was home. He had put on a clean suit of tailormade blue fatigues and sat down with the cards. In less than half an hour he had accomplished what it would have taken a recruit like Maggio doubtful hours to accomplish, but it had been unpleasant and he did not feel satisfied. It was always unpleasant, moving like this; it always brought home to you the essential rootlessness of yourself and all men like you, always on the move, never really stopping anywhere, never really home. But you could forget anything with solitaire, for a while at least; solitaire was the game of exiles. Prewitt knew the G Company buglers by sight. He put down his cards and watched them cross the squadroom. He had seen and listened to them playing their guitars evenings around the quad; they were much better on the guitars than they were on the bugle.... The instinctive judgment swept him with the air and atmosphere of the Corps and he felt a sudden wave of unbearable homesickness. The smell of the ball diamond bleachers during the morning drill period with the sun shining brightly on the weathered wood. The heavy bleats from the different-pitched bugles, drifting up to the golf course on the wind, rolling metallically into the edge of the woods. The many bugles conflicting, the calls begun in confidence and then left hanging doubtfully unfinished. And now and then the rare well-executed phrase, rising over all, sharp, insistent, catching the moment and the mood and carrying them to distant unseen ears. He felt a hunger for the acrid smell of metal polish that hung about his bugle as he played. Almost enviously he watched the two men pass between the rows of bunks. It was eleven and the Corps had been dismissed. They were through for the day. It was a standing joke in the Corps about the way these two watched the clock. They were always the first to leave the bleachers and sprinted back to the barracks so they could have an hour alone to practice before the Company came in from drill. But bugling meant nothing to them, except as a means to escape straight duty and to get more time to practice on guitars. They wanted to play guitars, but there were no chairs for guitars in the Regimental Band. These two possessed the things that Prewitt valued, but they wanted something else instead. It seemed the very fact they did not want what they had led life to conspire to help them keep it; and he who loved to bugle had to give it up because he loved it. It was not right. Anderson stopped when he saw-Prewitt. He seemed to be debating whether to go on or to go back out. He made up his mind, and passed by without speaking, his deepset eyes sullenly on the floor. Clark stopped when Anderson stopped and looked at his mentor to see what he would do. When Anderson went on he followed, but he could not disregard Prewitt's eyes. He nodded embarrassedly, his long Italian nose almost hiding his shy smile. They dragged out their guitars and began to play furiously, as if by putting their souls into it they could dispel the alien presence. After a while their playing tapered off and finally stopped and they looked in Prewitt's direction. Then they went into a huddle. Listening to them play Prewitt realized for the first time how good they really were. He had never paid much attention to them before but being in their Company suddenly made him aware of them as individuals. Even their faces were subtly changed, were the faces of different men, no longer indistinct. It was a thing he had noted before: how you could live beside a man for years and have no positive picture of him, until you were suddenly thrown into his company to find that he was not just a vague personality but an individual with an individual's life. Anderson and Clark came out of their huddle and put their guitars away. They passed by Prewitt again, without speaking, and went on into the latrine at the end of the porch. They were deliberately avoiding him. Prewitt lit a tailormade cigaret and stared at it impassively, acutely aware of being the stranger. He was sorry they had stopped playing. They played his kind of songs - blues songs, and hillbilly music - the kind of music the ex-bums and field laborers and factory workers who had tried to escape their barren lives by enlisting in the Army understood and always played. Prewitt picked up his cards and started to deal himself a new game when he heard the two guitar players walking back down the porch toward the stairs. "What the hell you think?" part of Anderson's indignant protest came through the open door. "The best goddam bugler in the Regiment for Chrisake!" "Yeah, but he wouldnt.. ." Clark said perplexedly; the rest was only a mumble as they passed beyond the door. Prewitt dropped his cards and threw the cigaret to the floor. He moved swiftly and caught them on the stairs. "Come back here," he said. Anderson's head, amputated by the floor level, turned to face him with consternation, a balloon in suspension. The ominous insistence made his legs carry him back up the stairs before his mind had decided what to do. Clark tagged reluctantly along after his mental guide, without choice. Prewitt wasted no time on preliminaries. "I dont want your goddamned job," he said in a low white voice. "If I'd wanted to bugle I'd of stayed right where I was. Its a cinch I wouldnt come here and cut you out of your stinkin little job." Anderson shifted his feet evasively. "Well," he said uneasily, without meeting Prewitt's eyes, "you're good enough you could get my job any time you wanted." "I know it," Prewitt said. A white wall of anger descended over his eyes like the polar icecap descending over the globe. "But I never check a cinch into nobody - outside of a game. I dont play that way, see? If I wanted the goddam job, I wouldnt sneak in here and cutthroat you out of it." "Okay, Anderson said placatingly. "Okay, Prew. Take it easy." "Dont call me Prew." Clark stood silently by, grinning embarrassedly, his soft eyes widt, looking from one to the other like the spectator at a wreck who watches a man bleed to death because he doesnt know what he should do and fears making a fool of himself. Prewitt had meant to say that Holmes had offered him the job and he had turned it down, but some look in Anderson's eyes touched his mind and made him hold it back. "Nobody likes to do straight duty," Anderson said lamely; you never could tell about a fireball like Prewitt. "I know I aint as good as you are when you played a Taps at Arlington. You could get my job easy, and it wouldnt be a square thing." It ended up in the air as if unfinished. 'I dont want you to get down sick," Prewitt said. "You can quit worrying about it now." "Well... thanks, Prew," Anderson said painfully. "I dont want you to think I ... I mean I didnt.. ." "Go to hell," Prewitt said. "And dont call me Prew. I'm Prewitt to you." He turned on his heel and went back inside. He picked up his cigaret that was still burning on the cement floor and took a deep drag, listening to their slow steps on the stairs. With a sudden movement of bitterness he picked up some of the scattered cards and ripped them across. Then he threw them down on the bed. Unsatisfied, he picked up the rest of the deck and methodically tore each card in two. Might as well; they were no good now anyway. A hell of a fine start; as if he would try to rob them out of a stinking twobit job. He pulled his mouthpiece out of his pocket and sat, hefting it in his hand, running his thumb over the cup. It was a fine mouthpiece; it was undoubtedly the best investment he ever made for thirty bucks of crap money. He wished the weekend would hurry up and come, so he could get out of this screwedup rathole and go up to Haleiwa and see Violet. A lot of guys went around bragging about a shackjob here and a shackjob there. Very few of them were ever lucky enough to have one. They all talked about it, trying to convince each other and themselves of the wonderful women they had - and then they went down to the Service Rooms or the New Congress and had their ashes hauled at three dollars a throw. Prewitt knew how lucky he was to have Violet to shack up with him. He sat; on his bunk, angry and disgusted, waiting for chow, waiting for the weekend. On the way to the PX Clark kept looking at Anderson sideways. Several times he started to speak. "You didnt have no call to think that, Andy," he blurted out finally. "He's a good joe. You can see he's a good joe." "I know it, goddam it," Andy burst out. "For Chrisake, shut up about it. I know he's a good joe." "Okay," Clark said. "Okay. We'll be late for chow." 'To hell with it," Andy said. When the chow whistle blew Prew went down in the thronging crowd that stampeded for the messhall. They swarmed down the stairs and clustered on the porch before the door that would not admit them fast enough, looking like good material for a recruiting poster with their shining laughing faces and clean hands and fatigue blouses splashed with water, for unless you knew them or looked closely you did not see the black high-water mark around their wrists or the line of dust that ran down from their temples past their ears and on their necks. There was much goosing, grabbing of crotches and accusations of "You eat it!" with the hooting laughter. But Prew was outside of all of it. Two or three men whose names he knew spoke to him soberly with great reserve and then turned back to share their laughter with the others. G Company was a single personality formed by many men, but he was not a part of it. Amid the gnash and clash of cutlery on china and the humming conversation he ate in silence, feeling from time to time the many curious eyes inspecting him. After chow they wandered back upstairs by twos and threes, subdued now and with full bellies, the boisterousness caused by the prospect of an hour's recess replaced now by the unpleasant prospect of Fatigue Call and working on full bellies. The scattered horseplay that broke out now died in infancy, bayoneted by the cynical glances of the others. Prew took his plate and got in the line to the kitchen, scraped his slops off in the muggy bucket, dropped his plate and cup into the hectic scrabbling KP's sink where Maggio paused long enough to wink at him, and went back up to his bunk. He lit a cigaret and dropped the match into the coffee can he had hunted up to serve as ashtray and stretched out on the bunk with all the sounds around him. His arm behind his head, and smoking, he saw Chief Choate coming toward him. The huge Indian of full Choctaw blood, slow-spoken, slow-moving, level-eyed, dead-faced - except when in the midst of some athletic battle and then as swift as any panther - sat down on the bunk beside him, with a shy brief grin. They would have shaken hands, under these new circumstances, if it had not been a conventionalism that embarrassed both of them. The sight of Chief's great slow bulk that exuded confidence and calm for a radius of twenty yards about him, wherever he might be, brought back to Prew all the mornings they had sat in Choy's with Red and argued over breakfast. He looked at Chief wishing there was some way to communicate all the memories, to tell him how glad he was to be in his squad, without embarrassing both of them. All last fall, during the football season when Chief Choate was excused from drill, almost every morning, they had, with Red, had their breakfasts together in Choy's restaurant, the two buglers on Special Duty and the big Indian who was excused from drill because it was football season. After he had got to know the bulky moonfaced Choctaw, he had gone religiously to every game and every meet the Indian participated in, which was almost every one, because Wayne Choate jockstrapped the whole year round. Football in the fall where Chief played guard and was the only player on the team who could stand a full sixty minutes of the Army's brand of football; in the winter it was basketball and Chief playing guard again, the third highest scorer in the Regiment; and in the summer baseball, Chief playing, some said, the best first base in the whole of the Army; and track in the spring, where Chief was always good for a 1st or 2nd in the shotput and the javelin and worth a few more points in the dashes. In his youth before he had acquired a GI beer paunch Chief had set a record for the 100 yards in the Philippine Department that still stood unbroken, but that had been some years ago. He had never pulled a single day's fatigue in his four years in the Company, and if he had consented to fight for Holmes he would have been a Staff Sergeant in two weeks. No one knew why he did not transfer to some other company where he could better himself or why he did not fight for Holmes, because he did not talk about his reasons. Instead of bettering himself, he stayed in G Company, a perennial Corporal, and drank himself into a stupor every night in Choy's on beer so that on an average of three times a week he had to have a five-man detail come and get him and cart him home in one of the steel-wheeled machinegun carts. He had a foot locker full of gold medals from PI, Panama, and Puerto Rico upon which he drew for beer money when he was broke, selling them or pawning them to various would-be athletes on the Post, and every time he moved on to a new post left a wastebasket full of athletic citations behind him. His fans and admirers all over Honolulu would have been shocked to see him bleary-eyed every night in Choy's with his enormous gut drum-tight full of unbelievable amounts of beer. Prew watched him now, thinking wonderingly of all these things, and since he could not say the things he wanted to say, waiting for him to speak. "The Top says you're put in my squad," Chief said, in his solemn bearlike way. "So I figured I come over and give you the Story on the outfit." "Okay," Prew said. "Shoot 'em." "Ike Galovitch is the platoon guide." "I've heard a little about him," Prew said, "already." "You'll hear more about him," Chief said with slow solemnity. "He's quite a character. He's acting platoon sergeant now. Wilson is the regular platoon sergeant but he's excused from drill durin fightin season. You wont see much of him till March." "What kind of a guy is this Champ Wilson?" Prew said. "He's all right," Chief said slowly, "if you understand him. He never talks much, nor runs around with anybody. You ever see him fight?" "Yeah," Prew said. "He's tough." "If you seen him fight, you know as much about him