From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [442]
Ha! What the hell difference did it make? You got all the time in the world. You got years. He had seen members of the Canned Heat Brigade stay on a kick like this for years. But then they were really experts. One old guy, up in Seattle that time, and then he had met him in Indiana sixteen months later—just the same. And they didnt even have whiskey; all they had had was canned heat from Woolworth’s that they had to strain the alcohol out of the paraffin through a handkerchief and then strain the alky through a piece of stale bread.
With a sudden great optimism he suddenly believed that he might even actually break the world’s record. That same record that had remained in America ever since the Gay 90’s and the days of Diamond Jim Brady. There was a lot of history behind that record. They would put his name up on a bronze plaque on all the distilleries in Louisville, a mark for the world to see, that would remain forever a shining target to young hopefuls to shoot at. TO THE MEMORY OF ROBT E LEE PREWITT, HOLDER OF THE WORLD’S RECORD. The same identical championship record, that had been held in unbroken succession in American hands, for the last five or six generations. It was a great country, America; any guy could hold the world’s record, if he was good enough; that was why they always got all the records in America; there wasnt no getting around it it was a great country; and Jesse Owens beat Hitler in the Olympic Games; and they got the biggest oranges and grapefruits in the world. YOU ARE ENTERING MADISONVILLE KENTUCKY, the sign said, THE FINEST TOWN ON EARTH. It was the ony country on the face of the earth that used the shooting gunsling, as distinguished from the carrying gunsling; they had always had the best riflemen; they dint have to take nothing off nobody.
Oh, those goddam bastardly Germans.
He got up quickly and then walked vaguely across to go out on the porch but the blackout curtains were drawn so instead he went into the kitchen, and sat down there.
In the bedroom, behind the carefully locked door that Georgette always locked now every night, Georgette was saying:
“Well, I dont care what you say! Sooner or later something is going to crack. I’m a nervous wreck. He just cant go on like this indefinitely, Alma.”
They both of them knew it, but they did not either one know what to do about it. Because they had both already done everything they could either one think of. And in the end it was Prewitt himself who precipitated the transmogrification.
He found the article in the afternoon paper, on the afternoon of the eighth day. He had been reading the papers regularly again, if you could call running your eyes over the black marks on the white paper “reading,” but this item when he saw it was not black marks but words. It was a small item on a back page that told how on the morning of December 7th the guards at the Schofield Barracks Post Stockade had flung open the gates and turned the prisoners out to go back to their outfits.
The Warden’s remark about his chances—if the Japs or somebody bombed this Rock and they turned all the prisoners loose to go fight—had stuck in his mind like a dart thrown into a whirling board, and now it pulled everything else into a vortex of juxtaposition around it. The Warden had strained to think up the least likely possibility he could think of—and that was just exactly what happened!
It all quite suddenly became very reasonable. He could feel his mind crawling up out of the frozen mud and standing forth to look on the sun. All he had to do was get back to the Company without getting picked up. After he had hunted out the uniform, he got Alma’s .38 Special out of the desk and checked the cartridges in the cylinder and put some extras from the box in his pocket.
The last paragraph of the article had gone on to say that, since they had opened the gates on the 7th, there had been fewer new prisoners committed than during any other eight day period in the Stockade’s history. That was fine; he was all for it; but he was not going to be one of them. Not when all he had to do was get back to the Company. The MPs were not going to pick him up now.
After he had tucked the gun in h