From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [271]
The dam fools, he giggled fighting the mosquitoes, sit up there and let themselves be eaten up by mosquitoes when they could be in bed asleep. He started to laugh again. Stark was still crashing around in the undergrowth.
No son of a bitching Texas gut robber was going to tell Milton Anthony Warden what woman he could go out with and what one he couldnt. If he wanted to go out with Karen Holmes, he was by Christ going to go out with her.
He lay happily, laughing, listening to Stark crashing and cursing, and hearing the beating guitars.
Chapter 32
“LISTEN TO THIS ONE,” Andy said.
“Hit it,” Friday said, palming his strings dead.
They all stopped talking and casually, in this attentive silence that it was his right as an accomplished craftsman to demand, Andy ran through a chord progression in diminished minors that was the latest addition to the series he had been making up all evening.
It rose out of the box like a delicately intricate filigree, then ended falling off on a diminished ninth that seemed to hang, leaving the whole thing suspended weirdly melancholy, a single unit fading off into the upper air like a rising hydrogen balloon.
From under it, Andy stared at them indifferently, very boredly wooden-faced, sitting on his legs tucked under him in that way he had when he was playing. In the silence he ran through it again.
“Hey, man!” Friday said worshipfully, like the student manager talking to the football captain. “Where’d you drag that one up from?”
“Ahh,” Andy said lazily. He pulled his mouth down. “Just stumbled onto it.”
“Play it again,” Prew said.
Andy played it again, the same way, looking at them bright-eyed but boredly wooden-faced, the same way. And they stopped talking again, as they had learned to always stop whatever they were doing and listen when Andy had been fiddling around and stumbled onto something, listening to this one now fading off the same way as before, seemingly still up in the air unfinished, so that they wanted to say Is that all? yet knowing that was all because this was more finished and complete and said all there was to say, than if it had been ended. He had been doing it all evening, cutting out to experiment and fiddle with something he had stumbled on to, then calling a halt while he played it to them if it satisfied him, or else if he was not satisfied cutting back in and picking it up from Friday, until now finally he had come up with this that was better than any of the others, which were all good, but could still not touch this now with its haunting tragedy that was so obviously tragedy that it became the mocking ironic more heartbreaking travesty of its own heartbreak, so that now he could relax a little on his triumph.
“Who’s got a cigaret?” Andy said boredly, laying the guitar aside. Friday made haste to hand the great man one.
“Man,” Slade, the Air Corps boy, said. “Man, thats reet. You talk about blues, man, thats really blues.”
Andy shrugged. “Gimme a drink.” Prew handed him the bottle.
“Thats blues,” Friday said. “You cant beat blues.”
“Thats right,” Prew said. “We got an idea for our own blues,” he told Slade. “An Army blues called The Re-enlistment Blues. Theres Truckdriver’s Blues, Sharecropper’s Blues, Bricklayer’s Blues. We’ll make ours a soljer’s blues.”
“Hey,” Slade said excitedly. “That sounds fine. Thats a swell idea. You ought to call it Infantry Blues. Christ, I envy you guys.”
“Well, we aint done it yet,” Prew said.
“But we’re going to,” Friday said.
“Hey, listen,” Slade said eagerly. “Why dont you use what Andy just played for your blues? Thats what you ought to do. That would make a great theme for a blues.”
“I dont know,” Prew said. “We aint quite worked it all out yet.”
“No, but listen,” Slade said enthusiastically. “Could you do that?” he asked Andy eagerly. “You could make a blues out of that, couldnt you?”
“Oh, I reckon,” Andy said. “I reckon I could do it.”
“Here,” Slade said excitedly,