From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [109]
“Willard,” Stark said. “Come heah! Now! This man’s hot as a forty-five shootin downhill,” he said when Willard came up. “Claims you deliberately usin pans to make more work and get him in bad. What about it?”
“If I’m goin to cook right I got to use pans.”
“Dont stall me, Fatstuff,” Stark said.
“Hell,” Willard said. “Do I got to count how many pans I use? So a goldbricking KP who’s afraid to work?”
“What do you want me to do?” Prew said violently. “Grow couple more arms?”
“All I ask,” said Willard dignifiedly, turning on him, “is that you keep the pans washed up, so they’re there, clean, when I need them. In order that I am allowed to cook the kind of food I ought to cook, the kind of food required for men who work hard all day and who need good nourishing food to get their nourishment.”
“Piss on that noise,” Stark said.
“All right,” Willard said, “okay. You asked me. Any time, just any old time, you want my job why . . ?” he left it up in the air.
“Watch out, Fatstuff,” Stark said. “I might take you up on it.”
“All right,” Willard said. “If you think I’m a rat . . ?”
“I think you’re a fat cook,” Stark said, “who cant cook. Because he’s too busy makin sure the KPs respect his rank. What I want you to do is get your ass back there and cook, and quit using so goddam many pans, because I’ll be watching you.”
“All right,” Willard said. “If thats the way you feel about it.” He left them, disdainfully and with great dignity.
“Thats how I feel,” Stark said after him. “He wont bother you no more,” he said to Prew, “or if he does you come tell me about it. But that wont help you get these ones thats already dirty done,” he said, looking at the stacks of pans. “Come on. I’ll help you do them up. I’ll wash and you rinse and wipe.”
He flipped the cigaret end into Prew’s garbage pail and grabbed the spatula and began to scrape one of the worst ones with the deftness and economy of a great kitchen stylist, that Prew could only watch admiringly, feeling warmer inside now than he had felt for a long time.
“This’ll kill Willard,” Stark grinned lopsidedly, “the Mess Sergeant helpin a KP do pots and pans. Back home, when we use to divide our kitchen work up into White and Colored work; pots and pans was Colored work.”
“There wasnt any niggers in my home town,” Prew said, having to work very hard to keep up with Stark the stylist, but feeling very wonderful and friendly and very high, knowing that all the cooks and even the KPs were secretively watching this because Stark sometimes helped the KPs peel the spuds but pots and pans was something else again. “They dint allow them in the town,” he explained, remembering suddenly, for the first time in years, almost angrily, now, fifteen years after, the sign some drunken miners had painted in glaring red and hung up at the station when a nigger stopped to change trains, the sign that then, as a boy, he had only looked at and not minded: “DONT LET THE SUN SET ON YOU IN HARLAN, NIGGER!”
“Well,” Stark said, “I can see that, in a town where theres never been any. Its hard to tell a good one from a bad one unless the family lived in the town a while. And all of them wanderin nigras are bad ones, or else they’d of found themself a white man who treated them right and settled down. In my town they’d been there for generations and we knew them.”
“No,” Prew said. “You dont see what I mean. Once in Richmond, Indiana, on the bum, me and another guy had stole some vegetables and a hunk of meat for a stew. We taken it down to this jungle outside town and there was a bunch already there, one of them a nigger. This guy was going to take it away from us because we were kids and when I wouldnt just give it to him, pulled a knife on me.”
“The nigra?” Stark said. “I’d killed the son of a bitch.”
“No,” Prew said. “Not him. A white guy. The nigger was the one that stopped him. I had got behind a tree and kept circling away from him, still holding on to the food, but I w