From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [21]
Prew flipped his cigaret at the red and black painted pot and went inside, down the corridor past the Orderly Room to the Dayroom. The dayroom orderly, fugitive from straight duty, sat on one of the motheaten upholstered chairs, boredly scanning a comic book, his mop between his knees. He did not even bother to look up.
Prew stepped back out of the dayroom, feeling very much a stranger, and stood looking at the pooltable in the half light of the alcove, feeling tangibly the new forces here that had begun already to work on him. Thinking about little Maggio and Gimbel’s basement, he grinned and switched on the light, selected a cue and chalked it and broke the rack of balls.
The solid crack of the break in the heavy silence of mid-morning when the company was gone brought a man to the corridor door who stuck in his head. Recognizing Prewitt, he fingered his narrow bristling mustache and the hooked satanic eyebrows quivered like a dog’s nose with a new scent. He tiptoed gracefully, and silently, up to Prewitt’s elbow and his voice boomed out startlingly in the stillness broken only by the clack of pool balls.
“What the hell’re you doin?” he bawled indignantly. “Why aint you out with the compny? Whats your name?”
The bellow had not made Prew jump and now he turned his bent head slowly above the cue. “Prewitt. Transfer from A Compny,” he said. “You know me, Warden.”
The big man was silent, his sudden disconcerting indignation as suddenly and as disconcertingly gone, and ran his fingers through his wildly rumpled hair.
“Oh,” he said, grinning slyly, then dropping the grin as suddenly as it had come. “To see The Man.”
“Thats whats the matter,” Prew said, shooting another ball.
“I remember you,” Warden said darkly. “Little boy bugle. . . . I’ll call you.” Before Prew could answer he was gone.
Prew went on shooting pool, thinking how typical it was of Warden not to order him to stop, any other topkick would have, but Warden did not work that way. He went on shooting, methodically, first one ball and then another, missing only once. The table clean, he racked the balls and hung up his cue, feeling how the thing had gone flat now. He stood looking at the table for a minute and then switched off the light and went out to the porch.
They were still going strong in the Orderly Room. Maggio was still concentratedly peeling spuds. From the kitchen came the moist sounds of someone banging pots and pans around. The irregular clacking of the typewriter in the supplyroom had ceased. He seemed suspended in a void of bodyless activity, while G Company’s morning moved on ponderously and implacably all around him, indifferent to this transfer that was so monumental in his life, and of which he was not a part. He was, it seemed like, standing on a high place where all the highways met and there were signposts to all places, and where the variegated colors of the license plates whizzed by and did not see him standing there and none would stop and pick him up.
The cook, in whites, came out, his face still red. He went into the kitchen slamming the door after first telling Maggio to get the goddam hell out of the road with his goddam can of spuds and things began to move again for Prew.
“What’d I tell you?” Maggio leered at him.
He grinned and flipped his cigaret and exhaled, watching the smoke float into the sun where it suddenly became full-bodied, visible in all its unending swirls. That was G Company, he thought, deceptively simple yet in the light full of hidden complex designs, unending meanings, in which he was entangled now.
Before the cigaret hit the ground Warden bellowed, “All right, Prewi