From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [123]
“Okay, come on. I wonder what happened to our friend Bloom tonight,” Prew said, walking out to the quad. “I aint seen him.”
“I aint seen him around,” Angelo said. “He probly went to town. To see his queer. I see him all a time down to the Waikiki Tavern when I go down to see mine. He’s got himself a steady now, ony his aint got the money mine has got.”
“Maybe he dont want the money.”
“Maybe not. Maybe he’s after a shoulder to cry on. The son of a bitch.”
They met the others in the darkness of the quad, Friday eagerly dragging the two guitars, and after Andy finished Lights Out they sat on the back steps of the kitchen, playing the blues, but softly in the darkness so a crowd would not gather now when they did not want a crowd but only the privacy of their own communion. Around the quadrangle the CQs one by one flipped the lights off in the squadrooms. Stark came out from the messhall and sat on the curbing smoking and leaning back against the building, gladly listening but sullenly not speaking, even a solitary word, and staring off across Headquarters building as if he were trying to see Texas. Maggio hunched up on the bottom step like some organgrinder’s hairless monkey with his round shoulders, listening as intently as Stark to this music that was foreign to his hometown Brooklyn.
“You know what,” he said after a while, “them blues songs sounds like jazz instead of hillbilly, way you play them. Slow jazz, real nigger jazz, like they play in the joints on 52nd Street.”
Prew stopped playing and Friday’s guitar gradually stopped too. “They are in a way,” Prew said. “Theres nobody can tell where hillbilly leaves off and jazz begins. They shade into each other. Me and Andy’s got an idea for writing our own blues that will be our private special blues. We been talkin’ about it, goin to do it someday.”
“Sure we are,” Friday said. “Gonna call them The Re-enlistment Blues. Theres Truckdriver’s Blues and Sharecropper’s Blues, but no Army blues, see?”
Stark sat silent, listening to the rising, falling conversation as they went on playing, listening to it all but taking part in none of it, only smoking silently and communing with some bitter silence in himself.
“That was no way to play Tattoo,” Prew said to Andy, with the indisputable air of an expert. “Tattoo wants to be staccato. Short, and snappy. You dont waste a second on the long notes. Tattoo is urgent. You’re telling them to get them goddam lights out and you dont want argument. So it has to be precise and fast, without slurring the notes. And yet a little sad underneath, because you hate to have to do it.”
“We cant all be good,” Andy said. “I’m a git-tar player. You stick to the bugle and I’ll stick to the git-tar.”
“Okay,” Prew said. “Here.” He handed over the new guitar that was not very new any more but was still Andy’s private guitar.
Andy took it and picked up the melody from Friday, still watching Prew’s face in the darkness.
“You wanta take my Taps?” he offered. “You can take them tonight if you want.”
Prew thought it over. “You sure you dont care?”
“Naw. I aint no bugler, I’m a guitarman, like I said. Go ahead and take them. I never could play them anyway.”
“Okay. Gimme the horn. Heres your mouthpiece. I got mine with me. Just happened to have it.”
He took the tarnished guard bugle and rubbed at it a little, held it in his lap then, as they sat on in the cool darkness, playing softly and talking a little, but mostly listening, Stark not talking any but only listening, gladly but sullenly. Once a couple of men wandering by stopped to listen for a minute, caught by the haunting hope without hope that sang out in the set blues rhythm. But the silent Stark was alert. He flipped his cigaret viciously out into the street, at them, the falling coal shattering at their feet and showering sparks. It was as if an unseen hand had pushed them away and they went on, but they were strangely lifted.
At five of eleven they stopped and all got up, the four of them walking out to the megaphone in the corner, leaving Stark