From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [420]
But that night, while Pete was off visiting some sidekick in the 27th, he looked over the copy of the exam again in his room. And Monday morning, when he went over to Regiment to take it, he sat right down and wrote them off contemptuously. Then he tossed the paper contemptuously on the desk of the 2nd Lt who was acting as timer and walked out, with over half of the two hour time limit still to go, feeling the Lt staring after him incredulously.
It was when he got back to the Orderly Room that morning that Rosenberry handed him the Department Special Order decreeing that the annual fall maneuvers would start on the 20th, two days hence.
He carried Prewitt present on the Morning Report until the morning they left, before he finally picked him up as absent. He had been able to give him an extra week. If there was ever any investigation about Fatso Judson, that ought to cover him. Anyway, it was the best he could do.
The evening before they pulled out, on the strength of a hunch, he went down to the Blue Anchor Cafe on King Street two doors from Mrs Kipfer’s New Congress which had been the Company hangout ever since he got in the outfit, both because it was cheap and because it was two doors from Mrs Kipfer’s—The Blue Chancre, they called it in the Company. There was nobody there tonight; they were all home getting ready to move in the morning. He waited four hours, swilling straight shots with beer chasers, and talking to Rose the Chinese waitress.
Prewitt did not show. Rose said she could not remember that he had been there, not for long time now. But then, Rose wouldnt have told him if he had. She and Charlie Chan the bartender-proprietor knew fully as much about the personal affairs of G Company as its Company Administration ever did. At one time or another Rose had been shacked up with almost every noncom in the Company. Sort of a community wife.
Somehow, he had had a hunch Prewitt might show up down there. He might never come back to the Post, but he wouldnt be able to stay away from news of the Company for ever. So, logically, the Blue Chancre would be the place he would head for. It was only a hunch. He knew it was a wild last-gasp shot in the dark. In the morning they moved out for the beaches and he dropped him for rations and picked him up AWOL on the Morning Report.
Lt Ross, who was having a nervous time with his first maneuvers and did not know Prewitt from his name on the roster, was very angry about it at first. He wanted to court martial him. Warden had to explain to him that Prewitt was probably drunked up lying in somewhere with a wahine and would probably show up at the Hanauma Bay CP in a day or two, before he would accept Warden’s idea of Company Punishment. Lt Ross was trying hard to learn the ways of the Regular Army. He laughed, and relented.
Warden could teach him a lot, he said, if he wanted to, during these next two months before his commission came through.
That was true, Warden agreed, aware that this was only a holding action. If Prewitt didnt come back, it wouldnt mean anything. What he was hoping was that the maneuvers would bring him in. Prewitt would know about the maneuvers; everybody in Hawaii always knew about maneuvers. On an island the size of Wahoo the annual maneuvers were almost as much of a territorial holiday as the Army Field Day in April. Truck convoys moved through town stopping traffic, and details set up machineguns at all the important civic installations, and other details laid road blocks on all the highways, and the bars in town always did a land office business. An old soldier snorts over maneuvers like an old firehorse snorts over a dry-run fire.
Warden went about setting up his CP at Hanauma Bay and waited, wondering why it was he was bothering so much about a common fuckup. Maybe he was losing his touch. He was getting as sentimental as Dynamite