From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [250]
Somebody else had gotten out their packs of the always present, large size, poker cards and now there were three or four stud games for matches going on the floor. They all played concentratedly, not talking, and as they played the strain began to fade off of their faces.
Prew gave it up in disgust and sat in on one of the games. Hell, it was all just his imagination probably. He was getting jumpy. He always had an inclination to want to play the leading role. I yam ze great EEtalian actore, I play ze leading role, everybody die.
The players moved over silently to let him in. Nobody contested his presence. This common adversity took precedence over The Treatment. The Treatment would start in again as soon as they got safely home. But for now it was suspended before this narrow escape from the law.
Pvt 1cl Bloom was the second man after Prewitt to be run through the mill. He came into the room and stared blankly at the stud players and then at Maggio and then he went over to the bench along the other wall and sat down by himself. He did not sit in on any of the games. He sat by himself cracking his knuckles and cursing in a low monotone of astonished outrage and affront, the sound going on and on never changing tone as if it were a pure reflex arising from a great misunderstanding. When Moore, the other NCO candidate, came over to sit beside him he got up and moved away by himself again, looking at Moore indignantly for having interrupted his monotone of cursing.
The rest of them played stud for matches concentratedly until the last man had been run through. Then they were herded back out to the trucks by the Shatter MPs wearing only sidearms. Prew turned back for one last look at Angelo at the other end of the room, still sitting between the two big riot-gunned Schofield MPs and also looking outraged, now that this windfall of a vacation he would have to pay for when he got back was over so soon.
The trucks pulled out under the same scrutiny of the pedestrians, different pedestrians probably, but as far as the soldiers in the trucks could see, the same identical pedestrians, still coming from the same docks where the same brass band still played the same song for the same new boatload of tourists. As if by a common command, the men in the trucks all stared back conjointly with such a weary ferocity that the pedestrians got uncomfortable and looked away at something else and tried to appear occupied, thinking that if it did come to a war at least we could put as tough and bloodthirsty an Army in the field as anybody. Then the trucks were out on the open highway, riding over the steep gulches of crumbling crimson rock, past the cane fields, some of them burning in the crisp summer air with great black clouds of smoke, past the mathematical fields of pineapple, back toward Schofield. It was after three o’clock, and under the vast bowl of the cerulean sky everything looked very small and far away and very quiet, as far as the eye could see to the blue smoke of the mountains on both sides.
At the monthly Sex Hygiene Lecture and short arm inspection, a week later, Capt Holmes made a short embarrassed speech about perversion and degeneracy, after the movies showing what syphilis and clap can do to you had been run off. The Chaplain, in his address on the importance of love in the sexual act and the necessity of sexual faithfulness and continence on the part of the male before marriage, did not mention either.
Lorene, Prew thought, listening to both of them. It was such a perfect whore’s name; Lorene. It fitted her so well. It had all the right sounds, the right connotations. It was a much better name than Billy, or Sandra, or Maureen. He was glad she was named Lorene, instead of Agnes or Gladys or Thelma or some other name like that. Lorene was better.
Chapter 29
HE HAD NOT even used up his three trips at $15 ea. before he found out her real name was not Lorene at all, it was Alma.
Apparently, along with all the rest of it, he was to be denied even this meager