From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [278]
Chapter 33
WHEN HE REACHED THE gravel, Prew stopped. He could hear Friday still talking to himself eagerly, behind him. Slade had already disappeared out of both sight and sound. Pretty soon Friday would disappear too, if he walked far enough.
He turned north toward the Main Gate on the gravel. The other way south, led past the junk yard where Slade’s relief would be on post. Slade’s relief would challenge him. Then finding it was an EM Slade’s relief would want to pass the time of day. He did not want to talk to anybody. He did not want to make any more new friendships tonight either. He turned north. One new friendship a day was about all any one strong man could take. He walked very slow, so he would not catch up to Slade.
He walked along the road in the darkness. The deep gravel grated under his field shoes. The unreleased energy of the whiskey was fuming up through him like whiffs of laughing gas. He wished he had more whiskey. He would get stinking, rotten, blind. It seemed you could not only not bugle but you could not even write a stinking lousy blues, about the Army.
He had already had the whole next verse in his head, when the Culpepper family had arrived. The next verse was Saturday, and he had had it.
That jail was cold all Sa’day
Standin up on a bench lookin down
He thought as he walked along the road in the darkness.
Through them bars I watched the people
All happy and out on the town
Look like time for me to choose, them Re-enlistment Blues.
—They had stood on the benches of the bull pen on the second floor of the city jail in Richmond Indiana and watched the Saturday night crowds. They had had to stand on the benches because the windows were so high. There were four of them. That time. All booked as vags. They kept them a week, then turned them loose. There had been too many vags for the jail space. That had been in ’35—
It was like with the bugle, you had to do the things yourself before you could put the ring of truth in them, and he had had it all in his head, ready for Slade to write down. None of the rest of them could write that verse because they had never been in jail. Now maybe it would never be written down. He did not have a pencil and paper to write it down now, and if he did have he would not write it down anyway. He would tear the paper up and throw the pencil away. He felt bitterly happy at having denied the world something.
What was the world anyway? but a lot of Culpepper families?
They had you by the balls from the minute you were bornd.
He walked along the deserted gravel road in the darkness, filled with a great rending pity for all the Prewitts of this world, thinking about the blues they had not finished and would not even have begun if it had not been for Slade’s asinine enthusiasm for the Infantry. There was a good one for you. And even then, if Slade had not felt guilty over lying about Django’s records and wanted to do something to square it, he would not probably have bludgeoned them into starting it. There was a better one for you. It was laughable.
The voices of Friday arguing with Friday had disappeared too now, and he was alone m a private world whose radius was ten feet of gravel. That was what he had wanted. Now he did not want it. This world kept pace with him with all the inexorableness of a spotlight following a dancer.
He ran a little ways. He could not outrun it. He could not outrun this world any more than he could outrun the world of Culpepper families.
He slowed down and walked on, wondering if the blues would ever be finished now. Probably not, unless Slade transferred to Schofield to inspire them. Slade could appreciate the Infantry because he was in the Air Corps. He laughed out loud, bitterly happily.
“Halt!”
Prew stopped, and stopped dead. There was not supposed to be a sentry along here. Still, you did not argue with a challenge. Not when it might contain a guard with a loaded pistol.
“Who goes there?” the voice demanded.
Something moved just outside the ten foot gravel world, and