From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [270]
“Promise!” he roared suddenly. “I’ll give you promise, you son of a bitch. You cant talk about the woman I love like that!”
He stepped in happily, putting all of his weight behind it joyously, and hit Stark sitting with folded arms in the camp chair as hard as he could hit him.
The folded arms flailed out sideways as the chair went over backward, shooting Stark out onto the back of his neck on the ground between the meatblock and the utensil chest, already scrambling and kicking to get back up, almost before he hit the ground. He bounced back up like a rubber ball, hoisting himself with his hands on the meatblock and the chest and trying to disentangle his feet from the canvas of the chair, his mouth open roaring inarticulately.
He wrenched the cleaver out of the meatblock and advanced on Warden like a slow thunder storm, his mouth hanging wide open bellowing. Furious, senseless, outraged, his roars filled the tent like gas fills an airtight balloon.
Warden stepped back happily and threw the bottle still hanging from his left hand. Stark ducked without even batting his bulging eyes or closing his mouth, and came on. The bottle crashed and exploded into fragments against the side of the meatblock.
Warden skipped out through the flap and hit running, hearing the cleaver hit the tent wall behind him and tear through it with a sound like a zipper being yanked open. He ran on down the path, a full dead run in the darkness, until he hit a tree branch the height of his forehead and felt his legs go right on running out from under him. Then he was flat on his back on the ground, trying to pull air into the empty paralyzed lungs. He could hear Stark bellowing and cursing and fumbling on the dark ground for his cleaver.
Warden crawled, like a rifleman working in under fire, back in under the bushes behind him off the path. Now you’ve done it, he told himself as soon as he could breathe again, now you’ve cooked it, the only man in the fucking outfit who would even make a cook let alone a good mess sergeant. But he could not stop himself from laughing. He had looked so stupidly surprised, standing there, with the cleaver in his hand and bellowing like a castrated bull.
He lay in the bushes, trying to stifle his laughing, listening to Stark wandering vaguely up and down the paths looking for him, bellowing and cursing and smashing at the branches of trees with his cleaver. He sounded like Old Pete with his teeth out.
“No godam good,” Stark bellowed to the darkness. “Worshn fuggin whoor. Shno fuggin good. Ruinm whole fuggin life. L show im. No godam good for nothin no more. Whersh ee at? Cant even get a hard on thout bein drung. Whert ee go? L kill im. L show im. Sombishes. Whersh ee?”
Warden listened to it fade away, silently shaking with the bottled laughter. What would the drunken bastard do if he had told him the truth? how it was Holmes in the first place who had given her the dose? Probly take his cleaver and go ramming over to the CP hunting for the Company Commander. Warden lay still and waited, shaking silently and uncontrollably with laughter, and trying to fight off the clouds of mosquitoes that were like packs of baying bloodhounds trying to get at his throat. In the Roman Army they required each dogface to perform his drill bearing a burden twice as heavy as in actual combat. They conquered the world. We ought to win at least that much.
Pretty soon Stark came back to the tent. But he had figured that. He could hear the tinkling of glass fragments as the mess sergeant cleaned up the mess, then the bang and rattle as the still cursing Stark threw it all meticulously into the GI trash can and came back out and started to look for him again, this time cunningly quiet.
From up on the top of the embankment he could hear them still beating on the guitars ringingly. They were playing blues, old ones one right after another. Saint Louis, Birmingham, Memphis, Truckdriver’s, Sharecropper’s, Hodcarrier’s, 219, Route 66, L & N, Thousandmile,