From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [129]
Maylon Stark, leaning silent against his kitchen wall, looked at his cigaret with a set twisted mouth that looked about to cry, about to laugh, about to sneer. Ashamed. Ashamed of his own good luck that had given him back his purpose and his meaning. Ashamed that this other man had lost his own. He pinched the inoffensive coal between his fingers, relishing the sting, and threw it on the ground with all his strength, throwing with it all the overpowering injustice of the world that he could not stomach nor understand nor explain nor change.
Prewitt lowered the bugle slowly and let the megaphone rest in its swivel. Reluctantly he withdrew his mouthpiece and gave the bugle back to Andy. His lips were pinched and red from the playing.
“Christ,” he said huskily. “Jesus Christ. I need a drink of water. I’m tired. Me and Stark goin to town. Wheres Stark?” and fingering his mouthpiece he went vaguely toward the barracks in the darkness, not proud but innocently unaware as yet of what he had created.
“Boy,” Maggio said as they watched him go. “That guy kin really play a bugle. Whynt he never play? He should ought to be in the Bugle Corps.”
“He was, you jerk,” Andy said scornfully. “He quit. He wouldnt play in this old Corps. He played a Taps at Arlington.”
“Yeah?” Maggio said. He peered after the retreating figure. “Well,” he said. “Well what do you know.”
The three of them stood silent, unable to voice it, watching him go, until Stark who had been listening came over to them.
“Wheres he goin?”
“Lookin for you,” Andy said, “to go to town. Went up toward the porch.”
“Well thanks,” Stark mocked, “I never would of guessed it,” and went to find him.
“Come on, kid,” he said. “Lets go to town. Lets fling a real one.”
Book Three
The Women
Chapter 16
THEY CAME UP the lightless stairs of the New Congress Hotel, very dark now after the brightly lighted, almost deserted Hotel Street outside, feeling their way half-drunkenly carefully. They had just left the small bar in the downstairs part of Wu Fat’s brightly tropically decorated restaurant next door, and now they carried with them, suddenly, all the unmentionable, unspeakable, pride destroying heart shakiness and throat thickness and breath chokiness of men about to mount women, the same attributes displayed so shamelessly by all the male dogs on the Post as they chased down alleys after reluctant bitches, and that they laughed at in the hapless dogs, but that they did not feel like laughing at now, as the disembodied breasts and bellies and long thighs, all of a completely unearthly loveliness, swam through their minds.
All evening (with the foreknowledge of this now goading them into joyness) they had had a fine time, a viciously, pugnaciously, wildly bottle swingingly, fine time; with no fights at all yet, with hardly even any arguments except for the ex-dogface, squawmen taxi drivers who envied them their freedom and so always argued anyway and did not count. Getting out of the Schofield taxi at the big, rambling, palm camouflaged Army-Navy YMCA (with this prospect before them), they had gone immediately at once across the street for the first long drink, the best drink of them all, to the long open-fronted Black Cat Café. The Black Cat was a very successful place, being situated as it was directly across from the Y and the cabstand for all the Pearl Harbor and Schofield cabs. Everybody made for the Black Cat for that first best drink when they got in and stopped there for that last worst drink before going back, so that the Black Cat was always very crowded. And because the Black Cat was very successful and always very crowded both of them disliked it very much and felt it was fattening off their