From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [257]
“Well?” Stark said solemnly. “What do you say, cookie? You want to sleep. Go on. Turn in. I’ll stay up with this the rest of the night. And you can go on shift tomorrow.”
“I dint say that, Maylon,” the cook explained. “All I said was——”
“Then shut up,” Stark said.
“Okay, Maylon. I was only——”
“I said SHUT UP.”
He turned and looked at Prew without seeing him. He appeared to be looking through him at the wall behind him. “You men want sandwiches, you get sandwiches. Men got to eat,” he said. “They kin kill each other off all day long, but the ones that left still got to eat. Thats one thing a man can always count on,” he said. “As long as they is one man left, he got to eat,” he said thickly.
Nobody said anything.
“Fix these men some sandwiches, you son of a bitch,” Stark said to the wall behind Prewitt.
“Okay, Maylon,” the cook said. “Whatever you say.”
“Then move, you son of a bitch,” Stark said thickly.
“We can fix them, Maylon,” Prew said soothingly. “He dont need to do it.”
“He’s a greaseball,” Stark said to nobody. “He gets paid to fix sandwiches. You want him to fix you sandwiches, he’ll fix you sandwiches.”
“Sure,” the cook said. “I dont mind fixing them.”
“Shut up, you son of a bitch,” Stark said.
“I just as soon do it myself,” Prew said uneasily. “We get us a sandwich and cup a hot coffee and take them up on the embankment with us where we wont bother nobody. Then he can get some sleep.”
“Fuck his sleep,” Stark said. “This is the mess tent. You want to eat in the mess tent, you eat in the mess tent. He say anything I kill the son of a bitch. Need some good cooks for change anyways.”
“We really rather take them up there,” Prew said uneasily.
“Okay,” Stark said. “Going to play the git-tar, hunh?” he said woodenly.
“Yeah,” Prew said, from the stove, putting the meat on.
“Okay,” Stark said thickly. “Go on back to sleep, you worthless bastard.”
“I aint sleepy, Maylon,” the cook said.
“I said go back to sleep,” the doom crack voice said.
“Okay,” the cook said. He lay back down on his table as silently and unobtrusively as possible. Stark did not look at him. He did not look at any of them. He raised his right hand with the bottle in it and unscrewed the cap with his left hand and took a long drink and screwed the cap back and let his arm fall back down dangling outside the chair arm. He did not say another word.
When Prew had them done he handed them around and they poured their coffee nervously in the screaming unbreakable silence that rose like mist from Stark. Then they tiptoed out gladly, like evacuees leaving the ominous stillness before a hurricane that is more frightening than any storm. Prew turned back at the flap to thank him. Stark did not move or look around.
“Men got to eat,” he said gravely, heavily, like an unbeliever trying to convince himself by taking an oath in church.
From the top of the embankment Hickam Field made a glow on the night sky. They were having night flying training every night and the hangars were lit up like empty theaters. Red and blue and green lights winked high overhead from the flying planes, and from around the hive that was the tower. Now and then a searchlight fingered the bellies of the clouds.
A hundred yards inside the road, the B 18s, ultimate and ungrateful purpose of all this regulated life that had been rolled out to give the problem realisticness, squatted like sullen birds in the nest of their revetments, looking like they resented being used as decoys for reality. Far down to the left they could just barely pick out Slade’s relief moving on the road.
“What you think of our mess sergeant?” Prew said, chewing and swallowing ravenously in the clear sharp still air. “I told you he was a good man.”
“He wasnt quite what I expected,” Slade said, cautiously.
“He runs that kitchen like a dictator,” Prew said.
“I could see that,” Slade said.
“Course, he had a couple drinks tonight,” Prew said.
“He didnt seem very happy,” Slade said charily.
“Happy?” Prew said. “He’s the happiest man I know.”
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