From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [262]
He lay in the bushes, trying to stifle his laughing, listening to Stark wandering vaguely up and down the paths looking for him, bellowing and cursing and smashing at the branches of trees with his cleaver. He sounded like Old Pete with his teeth out.
“No godam good,” Stark bellowed to the darkness. “Worshn fuggin whoor. Shno fuggin good. Ruinm whole fuggin life. L show im. No godam good for nothin no more. Whersh ee at? Cant even get a hard on thout bein drung. Whert ee go? L kill im. L show im. Sombishes. Whersh ee?”
Warden listened to it fade away, silently shaking with the bottled laughter. What would the drunken bastard do if he had told him the truth? how it was Holmes in the first place who had given her the dose? Probly take his cleaver and go ramming over to the CP hunting for the Company Commander. Warden lay still and waited, shaking silently and uncontrollably with laughter, and trying to fight off the clouds of mosquitoes that were like packs of baying bloodhounds trying to get at his throat. In the Roman Army they required each dogface to perform his drill bearing a burden twice as heavy as in actual combat. They conquered the world. We ought to win at least that much.
Pretty soon Stark came back to the tent. But he had figured that. He could hear the tinkling of glass fragments as the mess sergeant cleaned up the mess, then the bang and rattle as the still cursing Stark threw it all meticulously into the GI trash can and came back out and started to look for him again, this time cunningly quiet.
From up on the top of the embankment he could hear them still beating on the guitars ringingly. They were playing blues, old ones one right after another. Saint Louis, Birmingham, Memphis, Truckdriver’s, Sharecropper’s, Hodcarrier’s, 219, Route 66, L & N, Thousandmile, Friday Clark carrying the rhythm base and singing, Anderson roving and ranging up and down and around behind him like a tethered falcon.
The dam fools, he giggled fighting the mosquitoes, sit up there and let themselves be eaten up by mosquitoes when they could be in bed asleep. He started to laugh again. Stark was still crashing around in the undergrowth.
No son of a bitching Texas gut robber was going to tell Milton Anthony Warden what woman he could go out with and what one he couldnt. If he wanted to go out with Karen Holmes, he was by Christ going to go out with her.
He lay happily, laughing, listening to Stark crashing and cursing, and hearing the beating guitars.
Chapter 32
“LISTEN TO THIS ONE,” Andy said.
“Hit it,” Friday said, palming his strings dead.
They all stopped talking and casually, in this attentive silence that it was his right as an accomplished craftsman to demand, Andy ran through a chord progression in diminished minors that was the latest addition to the series he had been making up all evening.
It rose out of the box like a delicately intricate filigree, then ended falling off on a diminished ninth that seemed to hang, leaving the whole thing suspended weirdly melancholy, a single unit fading off into the upper air like a rising hydrogen balloon.
From under it, Andy stared at them indifferently, very boredly wooden-faced, sitting on his legs tucked under him in that way he had when he was playing. In the silence he ran through it again.
“Hey, man!” Friday said worshipfully, like the student manager talking to the football captain. “Where’d you drag that one up from?”
“Ahh,” Andy said lazily. He pulled his mouth down. “Just stumbled onto it.”
“Play it again,” Prew said.
Andy played it again, the same way, looking at them bright-eyed but boredly wooden-faced, the same way. And they stopped talking again, as they had learned to always stop whatever they were doing and listen when Andy had been fiddling around and stumbled onto something, listening to this one now fading off the same way as before, seemingly still up in the air unfinished, so that they wanted to say Is that all? yet knowing that was all because this was more finished and complete and said all there was to say, than if it had been ended. He had been doing it all evening, cutting out to experiment and fiddle with something he had stumbled on to, then calling a halt while he played it to them if it satisfied him, or else if he was not satisfied cutting back in and picking it up from Friday, until now finally he had come up with this that was better than any of the others, which were all good, but could still not touch this now with its haunting tragedy that was so obviously tragedy that it became the mocking ironic more heartbreaking travesty of its own heartbreak, so that now he could relax a little on his triumph.
“Who’s got a cigaret?” Andy said bor