From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [40]
“You didnt have no call to think that, Andy,” he blurted out finally. “He’s a good joe. You can see he’s a good joe.”
“I know it, goddam it,” Andy burst out. “For Chrisake, shut up about it. I know he’s a good joe.”
“Okay,” Clark said. “Okay. We’ll be late for chow.”
“To hell with it,” Andy said.
When the chow whistle blew Prew went down in the thronging crowd that stampeded for the messhall. They swarmed down the stairs and clustered on the porch before the door that would not admit them fast enough, looking like good material for a recruiting poster with their shining laughing faces and clean hands and fatigue blouses splashed with water, for unless you knew them or looked closely you did not see the black high-water mark around their wrists or the line of dust that ran down from their temples past their ears and on their necks. There was much goosing, grabbing of crotches and accusations of “You eat it!” with the hooting laughter. But Prew was outside of all of it.
Two or three men whose names he knew spoke to him soberly with great reserve and then turned back to share their laughter with the others. G Company was a single personality formed by many men, but he was not a part of it. Amid the gnash and clash of cutlery on china and the humming conversation he ate in silence, feeling from time to time the many curious eyes inspecting him.
After chow they wandered back upstairs by twos and threes, subdued now and with full bellies, the boisterousness caused by the prospect of an hour’s recess replaced now by the unpleasant prospect of Fatigue Call and working on full bellies. The scattered horseplay that broke out now died in infancy, bayoneted by the cynical glances of the others.
Prew took his plate and got in the line to the kitchen, scraped his slops off in the muggy bucket, dropped his plate and cup into the hectic scrabbling KP’s sink where Maggio paused long enough to wink at him, and went back up to his bunk. He lit a cigaret and dropped the match into the coffee can he had hunted up to serve as ashtray and stretched out on the bunk with all the sounds around him. His arm behind his head, and smoking, he saw Chief Choate coming toward him.
The huge Indian of full Choctaw blood, slow-spoken, slow-moving, level-eyed, dead-faced—except when in the midst of some athletic battle and then as swift as any panther—sat down on the bunk beside him, with a shy brief grin. They would have shaken hands, under these new circumstances, if it had not been a conventionalism that embarrassed both of them.
The sight of Chief’s great slow bulk that exuded confidence and calm for a radius of twenty yards about him, wherever he might be, brought back to Prew all the mornings they had sat in Choy’s with Red and argued over breakfast. He looked at Chief wishing there was some way to communicate all the memories, to tell him how glad he was to be in his squad, without embarrassing both of them.
All last fall, during the football season when Chief Choate was excused from drill, almost every morning, they had, with Red, had their breakfasts together in Choy’s restaurant, the two buglers on Special Duty and the big Indian who was excused from drill because it was football season. After he had got to know the bulky moonfaced Choctaw, he had gone religiously to every game and every meet the Indian participated in, which was almost every one, because Wayne Choate jockstrapped the whole year round. Football in the fall where Chief played guard and was the only player on the team who could stand a full sixty minutes of the Army’s brand of football; in the winter it was basketball and Chief playing guard again, the third highest scorer in the Regiment; and in the summer baseball, Chief playing, some said, the best first base in the whole of the Army; and track in the spring, where Chief was always good for a 1st or 2nd in the shotput and the javelin and worth a few more points in the dashes. In his youth before he had acquired a GI beer paunch Chief had set a record for the 100 yards in the