From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [104]
Stark grinned. “That sounds like good advice. But like I said, I aint that smart.”
But Preem didnt grin. “One thing, Stark; watch out for Warden. He’s on your side now, because you do him some good. But dont ever trust Warden too much.”
“I never trust anybody too much,” Stark said.
“Okay,” Preem said. “You’re the hotshot. You dont need no advice. . . . You want to shake hands with me?”
Stark looked down at his list. “Sure,” he said.
“How old you think I am?” Preem said as they shook hands.
Stark shook his head. “I dont know.”
“I’m thirty-eight,” Preems grin was bitter. “Look fifty-eight, dont I?”
“Look oldern that,” Stark said, trying to make a joke of it.
Preem opened the doors and the steamy air from the sinks filled the stockroom.
“I wont be over to Choy’s no more,” Preem said, “but I ever see you over to the Post Beergarden, I’ll buy you a brew.”
“Okay, Preem,” Stark said. “So long.”
He watched the tall gaunt figure walk on through the KP room. It stopped once to look at the big built-in icebox. Stark sat down at his homemade desk and picked up the order list. Then he put it down and picked up his pencil. An order list was an important thing. You had to make one out for every day of the year. Three hundred and sixty-five order lists. Three hundred and sixty-six on leap year. Stark tore up his order list and threw it on the floor. Then he got up and looked at the sweating, water-soaked KPs bending over their sinks. He leaned on the door and studied them with reflective eyes set in a face that seemed about to laugh sardonically, or cry wearily, or sneer belligerently.
After a while he went back to his desk and took out a fresh blank. An order list was important, just as important as your menus.
Chapter 14
IT HAD ALL OF it, Prew questioned, begun with the quitting of the Bugle Corps. Everything else had followed naturally from that. It was like a staircase, with each step logically above the last, and that once you were committed to the very bottom step you had obviously to follow, each foot above the other simply, to get to the place where you were going. Because it was plainly the only way to get upstairs; or in this case, get downstairs. This was, he reflected, a staircase going down, each step below the other, the whole parallel column of them stretching down and down, to the point where the parallel lines of the banisters you could not jump over without being injured came together, the point shrouded in the mists of beyond-sight so you could not see it, and which mathematically was not a point at all but only an optical illusion that you never reached. This was the staircase he had entered upon when he had committed himself to the first step and quit the Corps, so he could forget all the subsequent steps (the step of being busted, the step of Violet, the step of not being a punchie, and all the other similar steps) which led down to this present step of no money, of rear rank privacy, of being unable to procure even momentarily (a moment, right now, would be all he needed) a woman when your bowels slid in you suddenly and greasily at the thought of one; led down to this, finally and worstly, present step of suffered scorn. He could forget all these, in looking back and taking stock, and concentrate on the very first step. He had taken that step of his own free will; he knew that then, and now, in ruminating back, he knew it now. But it was, he also knew an own free will that while it allowed him choice had presented only one alternative for him to choose from. If this was so, and he was quite sure that it was so, then that had not really been the first step at all, that quitting of the Corps, and there was no first step anywhere but only another mythical banister-meeting point shading off above him into god knew how long before he was ever born. Yet these steps were not haphazard. They were well built, well proportioned, all of a piece, and solid. They would never fall out from under you. They had been put there, each step a decision that was not a decision, part of a plan that was not a plan, each with its subsequent steps that were not subsequent steps. He saw all this quite clearly, knew it all quite positively, and realized quite surely that he could not have chosen other than he did. It was only that, after a while, not after a dozen steps, not after a hundred steps, not after five hundred steps, but after an infinitely infinite number of steps, the legs that took each single step so easily began to tire.
He pulled his first KP under the new Mess Sergeant two days after Pree