From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [172]
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