From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [95]
“Is these rags all you got?” Warden said distastefully. “They wont even burn, for God’s sake.”
“What do you want?” Pete yelled. “Gold tips?”
“Sure,” Warden grinned. “At least that much.” He lay back on his bunk, the enema completed, and put his arms contentedly behind his head and crossed his feet.
“You’ll never change the Army,” Pete said again. He paused and stood up in his socks and turned around to get his towel, exposing buttocks pocked with the syphilis hip shots he had been taking every two weeks for the past year, looking with his narrow shoulders and pussy hips like a child’s round-bottomed doll that cant be knocked over. In the pause, Warden could feel the epigram that was coming.
“This outfit’s no worse than any other. The Army’s been that way,” Pete said distinctly, the equanimity miraculously recovered, “ever since Benedict Arnold first put the slippery dong to the Point—and got reamed for his pains.”
“Who was Benedict Arnold, Pete?”
“Go to hell,” Pete said. “God Damn You.”
“Now, Pete,” Warden said. “Now, Pete. Now dont get excited now. Keep your equanimity.”
“You think I dont know what it is you’re doing?” Pete yelled. “When you come up here and ride me like you do? You think nobody’s smart but you? You think I’ll go on taking it off you forever, just because you’re the Topkick. But I wont. Someday I’ll move out of here by god, even if I have to move out in the squadroom with the privates.”
Warden looked over at him, almost startled, without moving, a look of actual real hurt coming on his face.
“If you’re such a hotshot,” Pete yelled, “why didnt you transfer Prewitt into my platoon, like I asked you the other day? Why dont you do it now.”
“I want him where he is, Peter, in Galovitch’s platoon, thats why.”
“He’d be an asset, in my Weapons Platoon.”
“He’s an asset where he is.”
“An asset to the Post Stockade, you mean. With what that boy knows about the MGs he’d make a squad leader right off, and as soon as I had an opening I’d make him section leader.”
“Maybe I dont want him to have a rating yet. Maybe I’m tryin to educate him first.”
“And maybe you couldnt get Dynamite to sign an order giving him a rating,” Pete suggested. “Maybe you couldnt even get him to okay putting the kid in my platoon.”
“Maybe I’m training him for bigger things.”
“Like what, for instance?”
“Like taking a correspondence course, and recommending him for a reserve commission,” Warden sneered.
“Why dont you send him to the Army War College while you’re at it?”
“Thats an idea. Maybe I’ll do just that. How do you know how a good mind works?”
“Big-Hearted-Harry. You want to know what I think? I think you’re nuts. Pure plain crazy. Goofy as a loon. Thats what I think. I dont think you know what you mean to do yourself, with anything, least of all Prewitt, or this new transfer.”
Maybe he’s right, Warden thought. Is he right? He’s right all right. Because who does know what they mean to do themself, with anything, anymore, in the world this one’s becoming, when no man can do anything without creating some strange result he never had foreseen—like me just now.
“Thats what I think,” Pete said again.
Warden only stared at him affectionately, grinning slyly, and he went to his footlocker to get his soapbox and his razor, trying to maintain the dignity he had just had but that was fast slipping away from him in the face of Warden’s silent grinning, his body oozing the stale mushy smell of an old man who drinks too much and cannot assimilate the alcohol that in his youth he had thrown off so easily.
But he’s a sharp old bastard. But is that the way Milt Warden will grow old? end up pimping for the Old Army? for a whore that never was? to save his face? His face, Milt thought, aint even savable, without the teeth, caved