From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [309]
The two giants laughed out loud. The second giant, the silent one, spoke for the first time.
“Campaign hats is for soljers,” he said, “not prisoners.”
Nobody argued with him. Prew tried on one of the hats, farcically. If you can only laugh, if you can only turn it into a joke. Then you’ll be all right. For a while. The hat came clear down onto his ears and the brim stood out sharp all around and the crown was tight to his head, a pot, but still wrinkled.
“Look just like Clark Gable, bud,” the trustee grinned. “Specially you keep it down on the ears.”
“How can I help but keep it down on the ears,” Prew kidded.
“Hell, you ought to see some of them, bud,” the trustee told him spitefully, as if putting him back in his place for trying to hog into the humor—he thinks I’m playing for their benefit, Prew thought wanting to laugh, he thinks its them, he dont know I’m doing it for my own self, and just barely that—“You aint nothing special, you ought to see the ones that dont fit,” the trustee told him.
The two giants laughed again.
“How’m I doin?” the trustee grinned at them.
“Pretty good,” the first giant, Hanson, the talkative one, said. “Pretty good, Terry. Lets go, you,” he said to Prew.
Terry the trustee stuck his head out the halfdoor cautiously and looked up and down the long hall. “Well how about givus a fuckin tailormade then, Hanson,” he pleaded anxiously. “Give you joes some laughs, dint I?”
The giant Hanson looked cautiously up and down the hall himself. There was nobody in sight. He reached quickly in his shirt pocket and pulled a single tube out of the pack in the pocket and tossed it into the supplyroom door. Terry the trustee scrambled for it on the floor hungrily. Hanson jabbed Prew in the buttocks with the butt of his grub hoe handle.
“Okay, Mack,” the talkative Hanson said.
They all went down the hall toward the barracks wings.
“You’ll get your ass in trouble someday, Hanson,” the silent one said, “doin damfool things like that.”
“Yeah?” Hanson said. “You wount be the son of a bitch to turn me in, would you, Turniphead?”
“Not me,” the silent one said. They walked on.
“His name’s Turnipseed,” Hanson explained to Prew.
“I wount turn my own mother in,” Turnipseed said proudly, after long thought, “much as I hate her guts.”
“You turned a prisoner in last week,” Hanson said, unimpressed. “For smokin tailormades.”
“Thats business,” Turnipseed said. “And he was a fuckup anyway.” Apparently the unanswerable had been said. The longwinded conversation died abruptly.
The barred double doors to the three barracks wings were wide open. They took him into the first one they came to, the west one. There was nobody in it. It was very long with windows on both sides. The windows were nailed shut. They had chainmesh grids on them. The barrack was just wide enough for two rows of double deck bunks down the sides and a six foot aisle in the middle. There were no footlockers or wall lockers, each bunk both upper and lower had a small shelf nailed to the wall at the head. Each shelf was stacked in identically the same way with identically the same items: one suit of fatigues, pants on the bottom; one fatigue hat on top of the jacket; one suit of GI underwear on top of the hat, pants on the bottom; one khaki GI handkerchief on top of the underwear; one pair of rolled socks sitting on top of all of that like an apple on top of a layer cake. On the left side of the shelf the toilet articles: one GI Gillette razor to the front, box open toward the aisle; behind it one GI shaving brush and one GI shaving stick, side by side even with the ends of the razor box; behind them one GI khaki plastic soapbox with bar of soap inside and one GI washcloth folded in fours under it and squared with the soapbox corners.
The two giants lounged smoking, leaning their arms at the armpit on a top bunk like an ordinary man standing up at a bar, while Prew made up his bunk and studied the shelf next to his and arranged his equipment. After he got it arranged he stepped back and looked at it, the not quite double handful of possessions