From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [306]
Chapter 36
HE WAS NOT a celebrity in the Stockade. Of course, in the Stockade, they could not know about the sensational trial. He fervently hoped they never did know about it. The trial went off all right with all the precision of a well drilled cast doing a well rehearsed play, the trial looked fine, up to the very last minute. The three witnesses told their stories clearly and simply, as if quoting their typescript statements from memory; their stories all jibed. The prosecutor explained with incontestable lucidity the infractions of the AWs that had been committed and the penalty required by the AWs for such infractions. The accused, who had remained silent, was offered his chance to testify and refused. Everything looked rosy, everything was according to Hoyle. Then, at the last moment, with a sort of abortive outrage against destiny, Lt Culpepper suddenly entered a furious plea of guilty and appeal for clemency on the grounds that all good soldiers were drunkards. There was a startled hush in the court room. The accused could gladly have shot him. But the court rose to the occasion nobly. With all due decorum they had the unorthodox plea written into the record just as if it were proper, then they went right on into the usual 30-second huddle and pronounced the sentence of Three-months-at-hard-labor-plus-Two-thirds-forfeiture-of-pay-for-like-period as if nothing had happened. The accused could have kissed them.
He was greatly relieved when he was conducted back to the guardhouse where he did not have to look at Lt Culpepper, to wait for transportation to the Stockade.
They came for him Monday afternoon after the trial that morning and signed for him and his two suits of clean fatigues at the desk of the guardhouse and deposited him carefully in the front seat of the recon which one of them drove while the other one sat in the back behind him. He felt life a tackily dressed midget between the well-bucked gleaming six-foot-four-inch splendor of the two of them. They delivered him inside the chainmesh fence of the greenroofed, chainmesh windowed country school house and he listened to the riot-gunned guard at the chainmesh gates close and lock them. The sound had a certain finality, but nobody seemed to think it was anything very unusual or exceptional. The two gleaming giants escorted him inside the country school house as if they did things like this every day. He was still wearing the suntans with tie he had worn at the trial.
The first thing the two giants did, inside the door, was to exchange their billies and pistols for unpainted grub hoe handles with the armed sentry who stayed locked inside the weapons room.
Then they escorted him to the supplyroom. They still did not say anything to him. The supplyroom was down a long corridor past some doors and turn left past the bulletin board on the left and the barred doors of the three barracks wings on the right, to a cubbyhole on the left. The man in fatigues behind the countertop half door, obviously a trustee, grinned at him unpleasantly.
“Welcome to our city,” he said happily, as if it overjoyed him to see somebody at least as bad off as himself.
“Fix him up,” one of the giants snapped, as though it hurt him to expose his own talkativeness.
“Yes, sir,” beamed the man in fatigues, “yes, sir.” He rubbed his hands together in a passable imitation of a hotel manager welcoming a convention. “We have a nice corner room on the tenth floor overlooking the park with a tile bath and plenty of closet space, I’m sure youll be comfortable there,” he said.
“I said fix him up,” the first giant said. “Cut the comedy. You can bullshit later. Dont get me irritated.”
The grin on the face of the man in fatigues turned into a snarl that was three quarters whine. “Okay, Hanson, okay, just havin a little fun was all.”
“Well dont,” the first giant said.
The second giant did not say anything.
The two of them leaned against the wall with their grub hoe handles under their arms like overgrown swagger sticks and smoked silently while the