From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [48]
And behind the house was the chicken coop, a miniature of its shanty self, where conceited hens stalked complacently about peering beadily this way and that, crooning their smug song of the Sacred Vessel, and squirting their droppings in the grass with the righteousness of saints. The sour odor of their house and clan pervaded the whole place. And forever after the smell of chickens brought to Prew’s mind a vivid picture of Violet and of her life.
Her bedroom alongside the kitchen was perpetually cluttered. The covers on the peeling gilt iron bed were always rumpled, and clothes were always draped across the bedfoot and the single chair. There was spilled powder on the homemade dresser, but in one corner there was a closet, made of two by fours for frame and hung with a lushly green and riotously flowered material made especially for Hawaii. Violet had fixed it up herself, to carry all the heavy hope of someday something better.
Prew stripped off his gook shirt and slacks and, naked, hunted through the clutter for his trunks, moving with the ease of long association. The clutter did not bother him; kicking shoes aside and tossing clothes from chair to bed, he was more at home in this flimsy shack than Violet was.
The cluster of shacks, growing up the hills on both sides of the road, might have been his home in Harlan, except for the absence of the soot and coaldust. The back porch with its rusty pump, the chipped sink with its zinc pail and granite dipper, it all was of the fabric of his life, and he moved through the thick air of this poverty with the ease that only a man who has been intimate with it can have.
And as he hunted tor the trunks he told her all about the transfer, why he had been so long in coming.
“Why did you transfer, though, Bobbie?” Violet asked him in the clipped twittering voice that always made him chuckle. She sat on the bed and watched him exchange his shoes and socks for the old canvas fishing sneaks.
The bright air slipped in from the outside through the single window that was like an afterthought, and it washed against the dimness and the funky smell of stale bedclothes. It touched his body coolly and he looked at Violet in her shorts and halter, feeling the old wild surge harden his belly and bring sweat to his palms.
“What?” he said vacantly. “Oh. I didn’t transfer. I was transferred. It was Houston did it, because I spoke my piece.
“Listen,” he said. “Theres nobody home. Lets you and me take one?” Three weeks, feeling the blood behind his eyes, almost a month, it was too long to wait.
“Wait,” she said. “Couldnt you have gone to the officer and asked to stay?”
“Thats right.” Prew jerked his head in a nervous nod, thinking the Army made you need it more, made you hungrier. “I could have. But I couldnt. I couldnt be a brown noser.”
“Well,” Violet said. “Yes. But I would think an argument could be patched up,” she said. “I mean when you had a good job you wanted to keep.”
“It could of been,” he said. “But I dont want any job that bad. Dont you see? There wasnt nothin else to do. Listen,” he said. “Come here. Come over here.”
“Not now,” she told him. She kept on watching him, almost curiously, looking in his face. “It seems a shame to lose such a good job, and lose your rating.”
“It is a shame,” he said. To hell with it, he thought. “Is there any liquor left around this place?”
“Theres still part of that quart you brought last time,” she said. “I havent touched it; it was yours,” she got up proudly. “Its in the kitchen. And I think theres another one, unbroken, you brought a long time ago. You want a drink?”
“Yes,” he said and followed her into the kitchen. “You see,” he explained carefully, “I wont get to come up to see you near as often as I use to now. Also, I’ll only be makin twenty-one a month, so I cant give the dough I did, either.”
Violet nodded. Inscrutably, she did not seem impressed one way or the other. He decided to let it