From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [163]
Why dont you, he thought, tie your life to something, Prewitt? To a tree, perhaps. It would save us all a lot of trouble and discomfort.
Maybe Red in the Bugle Corps had the right idea after all. Maybe you cant go along and mind your business any more. Maybe that privilege is restricted to just certain kinds of business. Such as real estate development, politics development, manufacturing, laboring, consuming, and patriotisming. And apparently not going out for boxing is on the Restricted List, for us robots.
A sort of sullen stubbornness of dull rebellion began to rise up in him. He had plans for Payday, and this very serious foolishness might very easily turn out to have an extra KP in it for him on Payday.
All right. If they want to play, well we will play. Hate they like, hate they will get. We can hate as well as the next one. We were pretty good at it once, in our youth. We can bruise and burn and maim and kill and torture, and call it kindliness and thoughtful discipline, just as subtly and intangibly as the next one. We can play the game of hates and call it free enterprise of competition between individual initiatives, too.
That was the only way to handle this. We will hate, and we will be the perfect soldier. We will hate, and we will obey every order perfectly and to the letter. We will hate, and we will not talk back. We will not break a single rule. We will not make a single mistake. We will only hate. Then let them take it and carry it from there. They will have to search hard to find any offense to charge this one with.
He hung on sullen hatefully to that role the rest of the morning. And it worked. They were puzzled. They were perplexed. They were obviously deeply hurt because he hated them, and because he was so perfect as a soldier. Some of them even got angry at him; he had no right to react like that. He was like a damnfool bulldog that has got his teeth into a man simply because the man has beat him, and cannot be swung loose or kicked loose or pulled loose or beaten loose but only made to let go by the cutting of his jaw muscles, which in this case happened to be illegal.
He grinned to himself, tautly and ecstatically, because he knew he had them where it hurt, and because he knew now for sure they could not do him in by Payday, and because for a moment he had wild visions that maybe this might even cure them, next time, and continued to hang on, his only dim hope of any relief at all centered in the coming of the afternoon and fatigue. But as it turned out he got no relief then either. As it turned out, at fatigue, he not only lost the lead he had gained at drill, he went in the hole.
It was his own fault. He was on Ike Galovitch’s home labor detail.
He had had for a long time now the habit of hanging around in the barracks until the last minute before falling out for fatigue. This was so that he would be on the very end of the line, in order to circumvent The Warden’s little game of Break It Off In Prewitt. The last half, or last third, of the Company—depending on the daily demands for fatigue labor that came down from Regiment—was always put to some job of policing in the Company Area and Ike Galovitch, by a standing order to The Warden from Capt Holmes, always had charge of this home use labor section. If Prew was on the end of the line, it was as if he were off limits to The Warden, and he would always get off with this. He would never get the cushy details, like the Officer’s Club detail or the golf course detail, but neither would he get the trash truck or the butcher shop. The Warden could easily have simply reversed the order of the Company and started with the other end, or if he wanted, just have held the worse detail back until the very last, after partitioning off Ike’s labor for home use. But he had learned that Warden would not do that, that