From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [203]
Then he remembered he could not get a transfer out of this outfit.
All right, so he couldnt get a transfer. So what? What did that mean? Not a goddam. All this will have blown over in a year from now. She plans to go on working for another year anyway, dont she? By then you will be due to ship back home, back to the States, in a year from now, by this time next year, in 1942. He knocked on the steel door happily loudly, seeing it all in his mind suddenly, how it would be then, some sturdy little permanent post that drowsed along from day to day, like Jefferson Barracks or Fort Riley, with solid brick barracks and new-cut grass and well kept walks under the long afternoon shadows of big old oak trees that had been standing in the same place since before George Armstrong Custer had his hair cut by the Sioux, that would be the kind of place to re-enlist for, where the NCO quarters were brick too and not this jerry-built ship lath they have here, and where you can take her right into a community and a little society that the married noncoms made and maintained for themselves alone. Didnt all the old timers like Pete Karelsen always say whores made the best wives? Whores knew how to appreciate the little things, didnt they say, after they’ve been down and out. Lots of old timers married whores. Look at Baldy Dhom, his wife was a whore in Manila. No, lets not look at Dhom, his wife is a gook, she dont count, thats you if you had married Violet. But you dont want to marry Violet, you want to marry Lorene. And if comfort and security is what she wants, what better place is there to find it than in some little out of the way permanent post that has been the same for sixty-nine years, and will be the same for sixty more?
Why, hell. She could marry him now, today, and still go on working for a year, she planned to do that anyway, what did he care? Respectability had done him a lot of goddam good in his time, hadnt it? Respectability and fifteen cents will get you a beer. Respectability and its matronly advocates who were trying to hide their own youth when they too had been alive, because being alive was always a little obscene, you always made people uncomfortable to be with you when you were alive. Well, up yours, ladies, thats all.
“Why, Prew!”
Mrs Kipfer gracefully admitted him.
“I certainly didnt expect to see you again so soon. This is a surprise.”
“Hows business?” he grinned as the thick sawdusty circus-day atmosphere broke over him in waves. Mrs Kipfer was looking slightly harassed. Not that it had wilted her corsage, just that the International Sterling lady had been candid cameraed during a receiving line, or been caught presiding over a difficult dinner for some drunken guest her husband had brought home.
“Isnt it awful though?” she said.
With both waiting rooms full, men moving laughing up and down the hall, the two jukeboxes having a perpetual battle of music, sweating girls slamming doors, spike heels jarring the floor, it looked like a defense plant assembly line in full swing. There was a strong smell of mingled perfumes in the tobacco cloud and a male voice was half drunkenly competing with the jukebox in the second waiting room and from far down the hall a harried voice yelled, “Towels!”
“One might easily,” Mrs Kipfer said wearily, “mistake us for the Republican convention in Philadelphia, mightnt they?”
“Or even the American Legion National Convention in Detroit,” Prew said.
“Oh, no, not that!”
“Towels!”
Mrs Kipfer winced. “Petunia. Josette needs towels. In number seven.”
“Hokay.” The great black roll of flowing fat moved off indifferently. Indifferent even to the wisp of cap and tiny apron she had been afflicted with.
“And see if anyone else needs any.” Mrs Kipfer b