From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [382]
He bought the knife in an Army-Navy Service Store, the night he went to town. He had figured that out ahead of time deliberately. It was one of those dingy little Jew stores on Hotel Street, exactly like a thousand other dingy little Jew stores that always spring up wherever soldiers live, except that in Hawaii all the Jew stores were run by Chinamen. It sold the same CKCs and did the same tailoring of pants and cutting down of shirts. And it offered the same fare of chevrons, shooter’s medals, garrison caps with patent leather bills and solid brass insignia, brilliantly colored shoulder patches, solid brass whistles, campaign ribbons, solid brass waistbelt buckles, souvenir scarves and pillows, and knives. Even the enforced anonymity of the Army had its compensations.
The knife he picked was one of a row of an identical dozen, lying in the glass case in a jumbled mass of whistles, insignia rings and shoulder patches, brass bound clasp knives with five-inch snap-button blades and walnut handles that terminated in little handguards that the blades passed between in closing. They were SOP equipment. He had owned perhaps a dozen in his life at different times. The Chink probably sold half a dozen every day. He paid for it in small change and took it outside and tried the snap a few times and put it in his pocket and went to look for a drink.
The Log Cabin Bar and Grill was one of those downtown serviceman hangouts with indirect fluorescent lighting where it was safe for tourists to go slumming to see the Army in its natural habitat, very clean and very modern and a shade lower class than Wu Fat’s Chinese Bar and Restaurant. It was set back off Beretania Street, in a business block of stinking grocery markets and sweet-smelling whorehouses, on a small paved alley. A hundred feet inside the Log Cabin the alley, instead of running straight on through the block, made a right angle turn and came out on the side street to the east. Prew, stone cold sober after a dozen drinks, was waiting at the corner of the alley when the Log Cabin closed at one o’clock.
There was no mistaking Fatso when he came out, even in the dimness of the alley. He came out walking with two sailors. Bar acquaintances. No complications there. One of the sailors was telling a joke and Fatso and the other sailor laughed. It was the first time Prew had ever heard S/Sgt Judson laugh.
They were walking away from him toward Beretania, and he stepped out from the corner feeling a crystal clarity of focused attention such as he had known only a few times in his life when he was bugling.
“Hello, Fatso,” he said. The old Stockade nickname would catch him as surely as a rope.
S/Sgt Judson stopped and turned, the sailors stopping with him. He peered back into the dim uneven light that seeped through the closed Venetian blinds of the Log Cabin and lighted the immobile figure of Prewitt dimly.
“Well, look who’s here,” Fatso grinned. “You guys go on,” he told the sailors. “I’ll see you next week. Old buddy a mine back here I use to soljer with.”
“Okay, Jud,” one of the sailors said unevenly. “See you.”
“Thanks,” Prew said, as Fatso came up unhesitantly, unreluctantly, and the sailors moved on down the brick toward Beretania.
“For what?” Fatso grinned. “I dont need no sailors. Now,” he said. “You want to see me about something