From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [479]
“You Southern men,” Warden censured kindly. “You’re all alike. With your drinking and whoring. You’re the worst moralists there are.”
Stark stood up and threw the canteen cup of whiskey at Warden’s gently solicitous face, in the same unthinking reflexive way that a cat that has been pinched will unsheath its claws and strike.
“You think I wont kill him?” Stark screamed at him. “I’ll kill him. I’ll kill him. I’ll chop his fucking head off.”
Warden, who was watching, ducked the cup but Pete, who was a little older, a little drunker, and a little more preoccupied, caught both cup and whiskey in the chest, drenching his shirt.
Stark was gone, out through the flap of the tent.
Warden slumped back on the cot, feeling as completely empty and relaxed as if he had just had orgasm. Except for one thing, one tiny fly in the ointment, it was perfect. He suspected all along they had gone together longer than she said, but all along he had hoped it wasnt true.
“Jesus!” Pete said. “I smell like a goddam brewery.” He daubed at the dripping shirt. “You better go after him, Milt. He’s pretty drunk? He might hurt himself.”
“Okay,” Warden said. He got his rifle from the corner.
Behind him as he went out the music went off and the announcer came back on.
“Lucky Strike green has gone to war,” the announcer said. “Yes, Lucky Strike green has gone to war.”
Outside, the moon had risen further and the grove, the parking space, the whole earth, was a colorless painting done in black and white. He took the path that crossed the blacktop to the kitchen tent.
So they had gone together six whole months at Bliss. That was almost as long as he had gone with her himself. He wondered what it had been like with them. She was much younger then, for one thing. He wondered what she had been like when she was younger. What things had they done? What places had they gone? What things had they laughed at? He wished, suddenly, he could have been present, as an unseen third party, so he could have shared it. He felt that way about everything about her. Not envy so much, not jealousy, as just a tremendous hunger to have shared. Poor old Stark.
In the kitchen tent he found a small cluster of frightened cooks, huddled together like sheep as far away from the meat block as they could get.
“Where’d he go?”
“I dont rightly know,” one of them said. “I dint really feel like asting him. All I know, he come chargin in talking and cussin and got his cleaver and took off.”
He started back toward the supplyroom, thinking he might have gone down on the beach to sleep it off and if he had the best thing was to let him go. He stopped in the middle of the blacktop and looked up it up the hill where it curved up to the highway in the moonlight, but nobody was on it. Stark was not drunk enough to start off to walk to Schofield with his cleaver after Major Holmes.
As he came back up to the supply tent, a figure came flying out of the dark and collided with him.
“Top!” Company Bugler Anderson’s scared voice said huskily. “Is that you, Top?”
“What the hell’re you doin out here. Why aint you in the wagon with the switchboard?”
“Top, Stark’s up there! He’s got his cleaver and he’s tearin it up! He’s bustin everything! He’s ruinin it!”
“Come on!” Warden said. He unslung his rifle and took off up the path.
“He come in cussin and yellin and sayin he’d kill him,” Andy yelled breathlessly behind him. “He kept yellin he’d kill him, he’d kill the son of a bitch. I thought he meant you. Then he says Capt Holmes, he’ll kill Capt Holmes. Capt Holmes aint been around here for months, Top. And he’s a Major. I think he’s went off his nut.”
“Save your breath,” Warden said.
Stark was already gone. But the little popcorn wagon was a shambles. Both spindly homemade tables that served him and Ross for desks had been chopped down into kindling and smashed flat. Of the four chairs not one was left in a suitable condition for sitting. Warden’s field desk, that was still locked, lay on the floor with a great gash in the top. His Art-Metal lockbox had a foot-long dent in it.