From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [436]
Georgette did not treat him nicer, nor worse. She neither stayed home more often nor went out more often. They all sat around the breakfast nook table in the morning for coffee and talked to each other nicely, and Georgette did not go out early to shop any more like that one time. They were just one big happy family.
It was during that week that he copied down from memory the first verses, and then went on to finish, The Re-enlistment Blues.
Rummaging in the desk for paper, one afternoon, he noticed Alma had taken out all the money that she kept there. She had not touched the gun. She did not lock up the radio-bar either. He was drunk most of the time.
He did not care about the money because he had no place to go and no impetus to go there, but he was glad she did not lock up the radio-bar on him. She did not say a word to him about being drunk. She did not ask him to leave either, because he would obviously have no place to go; they had been over that before.
That was the way it went that week.
Somewhere, either out of her silence and politeness, or else out of his own imagination, he got the idea that she had been planning to marry him all along until this happened. He felt like a man who had got his ring back.
Once or twice they got into heavy arguments over nothing, absolutely nothing, like whether St Louis Heights was 483 feet elevation or 362 feet elevation. They would start with something like that, but before they were finished everything would be dragged in. Your ad; my ad; your ad; my ad. He held his own, in these; it was the silence that got him. And he took a lot of ad points with his old threat of just walking out. It still seemed to work just as good as ever.
Even, he thought, if he didnt have the guts to actually do it.
Chapter 50
MILT WARDEN DID NOT really get up early the morning of the big day. He just had not been to bed.
He had gone around to the Blue Chancre, after Karen had gone home at 9:30, on a vague hunch that Prewitt might be there. Karen had asked him about him again and they had discussed him a long time. Prewitt hadnt been there, but he ran into Old Pete and the Chief; Pete was helping the Chief to celebrate his last night in town before going back into his garrison headquarters at Choy’s. They had already made their bomb run on the whorehouses and dropped their load on Mrs Kipfer’s New Congress. After Charlie Chan closed up the Blue Chancre, the four of them had sat out in the back room and played stud poker for a penny a chip while drinking Charlie’s bar whiskey.
It was always a dull game; Charlie could not play poker for peanuts; but he always let them have the whiskey at regular wholesale prices and if they complained loud enough he would even go in on it and pay a full share, although he drank very little. So they were always willing to suffer his poker playing. They would always overplay a hand to him now and then to keep him from finding out how lousy he was.
When they had drunk as much as they could hold without passing out, it was so late the Schofield cabs had stopped running. They had hired a city cab to take them back because there was nowhere else to go at 6:30 on Sunday morning.
Besides, Stark always had hotcakes-and-eggs and fresh milk on Sundays. There is nothing as good for a hangover as a big meal of hotcakes-and-eggs and fresh milk just before going to bed.
They were too late to eat early chow in the kitchen, and the chow line was already moving slowly past the two griddles. Happily drunkenly undismayed, the three of them bucked the line amid the ripple of curses from the privates, and carried their plates in to eat at the First-Three-Graders’ table at the head of the room.
It was almost like a family party. All the platoon sergeants were there, and Stark was there in his sweated