From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [258]
“I’ll buy that,” Slade said eagerly and relievedly. “I’m a blues man.”
“Then Andy’s your boy,” Friday said. “He’ll be here soon.”
The truck turned off its lights as soon as it turned in off the road, and then they could hear the low gear grinding in through the gap. A little cluster of lights formed around a central blackness, and all moved off bobbing toward the kitchen.
“I thought you said it was a blackout,” Slade said.
“Thats the lieutenant,” Prew said.
“Oh,” Slade said.
One of the lights came away from the tent, looking tiny and alone now by itself, and started up the path. It became Andy, carrying the other guitar.
“Was Stark in the kitchen?” Prew said.
“Yeah,” Andy said.
“Did he have a bottle?”
“Hell no. At least it wasnt showing. He was sound asleep. At least his eyes was shut.”
“He aint so drunk,” Prew said.
“Neither am I,” Andy said. “But look what I got.” He opened his shirt and pulled a bottle out of it.
“Hey,” Friday said. “Where’d you get it?”
“Oh, I got angles,” Andy said.
“Come on,” Prew said. “Where’d you get it?”
“I dint get it,” Andy grinned. “The Warden got hold of it some someplace. I bought it off of him. That sumbitch could find whiskey on a desert island. He come over with them in the truck, drunkern hell.”
“Dint the lieutenant say anything?”
“Hell, you know the lootenant never says nothing to The Warden. About nothing.”
“Who’s The Warden,” Slade said.
“The first sergeant,” Prew said. “Name’s Warden.” He introduced Slade to Andy and appropriated the bottle for the Air Corps man.
“Thats them now,” Andy said, pointing to the lights coming from the tent and starting off to make the rounds of the posts. “Theres only three. I guess The Warden aint with them.”
“Well, we got at least an hour yet,” Prew said.
“Gimme the pitch,” Andy said to Friday.
“Gimme the bottle,” Prew said to Andy. “Here, Slade. You want a nuther drink?”
“Christ,” Slade said happily. “Christ. You fellers really have the life.”
“You think so?” Prew said. “It aint so bad, is it?
“I wonder what The Warden come over for,” he said.
Chapter 31
MILT WARDEN DID NOT exactly know just what he was doing over here himself. He had left the CP on drunken impulse with the first outgoing vehicle, because he did not like the CP and because he was tired of looking at Capt Holmes’s increasingly less aristocratic and more moon-like face. And he had found himself in this godforsaken mosquito infested hole with young Lt Culpepper. Looking at Lt Culpepper, Milt Warden could not make up his mind which was worse.
Back at the CP he had felt for some time that Capt Holmes had been secretly laughing at him, as if Holmes knew some terribly amusing private joke on him. Milt Warden had not wanted to fall in love with Capt Holmes’s wife, all he had meant to do was to get even with Capt Holmes for being a goddamned officer. The other part had slipped up on him, and recently he had acquired a ridiculous but increasingly insistent tendency to hold Capt Holmes personally responsible. If the son of a bitch had only taken care of his own wife like any decent man ought to, none of this would ever happened. And Milt Warden, instead of being deeply in love, would still be able to enjoy life.
Milt Warden had seen Karen Holmes twice more since Payday. The first time they spent the night in the Moana again. The second time they had spent the night in the Alexander Young downtown, on the theory that it was best to keep moving around. Both times had ended in a big argument over what they were going to decide to do about it. Both of them agreed they could not go on like this. Both of them agreed they could not stop being in love. Finally, Karen advanced the solution that Milt should take one of the extension courses that had come into prominence with the peacetime draft and become an officer.
If he was an officer, she said, he would automatically be shipped back to the States to a new command where none of the EM knew him, and she could follow. If he was an of