From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [387]
He knew when it was Wilhelmina Rise Street because it was so goddam steep. It really winded him. Really getting out of shape any more. Ought to do a little roadwork. Getting old.
There was the two scars he had got the last year at Myer on the fatigue detail when he was working in the attic and fell through the skylight at the Officers’ Gymnasium. The glass cut a line from his left sideburn down to his mouth-corner, and a big gash in his right hip. It was the ony time he ever got to see the inside of the Officers’ Gymnasium. And now you couldnt even see the line on his face except right after he’d shaved.
So many years. So many scars. Where the hell they all go to anyway?
There was the scar he got in the fist fight in Washington, from an uppercut right on the point of the chin, and he went all fuzzy and then he was on the ground, and the other guy was gone, and the scar turned coal black afterwards and he never could understand why unless it was because of his beard but he had another scar in his beard where Koleman’d knocked two teeth through his lower lip when Koleman beat him for the Class I Championship and that one never turned coal black. Maybe when he fell he got dirt in it maybe, the one on his chin.
The lights were on in the house. That was good. That meant he wouldnt have to use his key and he couldnt remember if he’d brought his key or not. You see, he hadnt meant to go over the hill and come up here tonight. He had meant to go right back to the Post. That was what he had meant to do.
He knocked with the brass knocker and Alma opened the door in person, Georgette right behind her.
“Oh my God!” Alma said.
“Jesus Christ!” Georgette said.
“Hello, Baby,” he said; “Hi, Georgette. Long time no see”; and fell in through the door.
Book Five
The Re-enlistment Blues
Chapter 45
THE PAIN DID NOT really start until the next morning. The next morning, of course, it was worse. The stiffness had come by then, and with it the soreness and dull pain of healing that was always worse than the sharp clear pain of getting it. He was a pretty sick boy for a couple of days.
But then pain was a thing he knew about. Pain was like an old friend he had not seen for a long time. He knew how to handle pain. You had to lie down with pain, not draw back away from it. You let yourself sort of move around the outside edge of pain like with cold water until you finally got up your nerve enough to take yourself in hand. Then you took a deep breath and dove in and let yourself sink down in it clear to the bottom. And after you had been down inside pain a while you found that like with cold water it was not nearly as cold as you had thought it was when your muscles were cringing themselves away from the outside edge of it as you moved around it trying to get up your nerve. He knew pain. Pain was like ring-fighting; if you kept going back in there long enough you finally got an instinct for it; you never knew just when it came, or where it came from, but suddenly you discovered you had it and had had it a long time without knowing it. That was the way it was with pain.
Pain was like with a village at the foot of a mountain that had a cathedral built on its shoulder high up over the town and the bells in the cathedral never stopped playing “The Old Rugged Cross.”
He had come to on a divan about five-thirty, rising fighting up out of exhausted sleep with the impression that they had him back in the Stockade and Major Thompson was branding him under the left arm with a large capital P for the killing of Fatso, thinking it was the same as the stencil they used on the fatigue jackets except they were branding him for life with it but every time he tried to jerk away from it the brand only burned that much deeper.
Then he had seen Georgette s