From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [345]
Or—
They could do any of them, it didn’t matter. He still had $600 gambling money in a savings account downtown that he had been hanging on to. They could splurge and spend it all. Christ, he thought happily, Christ. I’m sure glad I thought to start putting half of it away every time I made a killing.
Milt Warden had it bad.
He would lie in the bunk on those nights with his arms under his head and Pete Karelsen snoring nervously across from him, and think about them over and over, planning them, envisioning them down to the small detail relishingly, each with its different facet of this same jewel, until finally it became as if they were things he had done and was remembering instead of something he wanted to do and was imagining, so that he would look back on them and think how fine they had been and that they were something nothing could ever take away from you, because once you had had them.
“Ahh, yes, I have my memories,” his daemon popped up and prodded devilishly. “Whatever happens, I still have my memories.”
But he already knew it was only a dream, and that he was dreaming himself away from and out of reality, but what did it matter as long as you knew what you were doing? He did not expect any of them to come true; he was only dreaming them; they helped put him to sleep. And he had to sleep. If he was going to lick this suicide. And he was licking it . . . .
And he had to sleep, so he could start digging into the mountainous Bloom papers again tomorrow, that were still coming in faster than anybody but Milt Warden could have turned them back out. But Milt Warden was making an inroad on them. Milt Warden was licking them. And who except Milt Warden would even have ever accepted that first gambit? He had it licked already, and if the dreaming helped to lick it, so then what?
Then, less than three days after Bloom was in the ground, just when he was finally making the output of reports match the decreasing intake, a new complication exploded into his orderly room like a grenade, fragmentation.
Niccolo Leva finally made good his threat and transferred into M Company as supply sergeant.
Warden was working on a sworn statement to be signed by both Holmes and himself to the effect that the Deceased had suffered no abuses in his organization, when Niccolo came into the orderly room that morning, his moldy-leather face sheepish under a too-thin coat of the old cynicism, his wry dry jerked-beef frame trying valiantly to retain the old insolence, and told him.
“They’ve got the papers all made out and signed except for my signature. Capt Gilbert stop me yestday on the quad and shown me. Col Davidson has promise him he’s got a absolute face-to-face promise of a green light from old Delbert soon as he puts it through. I never thought old Jake would okay it, Milt, so I never cared.
“But its now or never, Milt. Gilbert put it up to me straight take it or leave it. I cant stall him any more. He’s got another man lined up down in the 21st who’ll take it if I dont.”
Warden, who had to have this report along with three others done and signed and in by noon tomorrow to be finished, looked at it and put it down. “You sure picked a fine time for it.”
“I know it,” Leva said disconsolately.
“The new M1 rifles are in over at S-4. They’ll be out now in a couple days.”
“I know it.”
“The new WD Circular on the new TO goes into effect in less than a week. The QM’s got two boxcars of new chevrons sitting on the siding at the Depot.”
“I know it,” Leva said. “I know all that. Lay off, will you?”
“Lay off!” Warden said. “Jesus Christ, Niccolo!”
“Okay,” Leva said. “All right.”
“I dont suppose it would do any good to ask you to wait three weeks or a m