From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [45]
Early Saturday morning Warden came out of the Orderly Room, all spruced up for inspection, to watch Prewitt manicure the porch. He leaned against the doorjamb grinning lovingly, but Prew worked on grudgingly and ignored him. He occupied himself with wondering whether Holmes had engineered this deal because he would not fight, to force him into going out, or whether it was Warden’s own idea for some ungodly reason just because he did not like him.
Sunday Warden came into the kitchen for breakfast around eleven. He was the topkicker and he did not have to eat on schedule like the rest of them. Warden had hotcakes and eggs and sausage; the Company had had hotcakes and bacon, such as it was with Preem sleeping off a hard night in his sack. Warden leaned against the aluminum pastry table with its big utensil rack above it and ate his food with relish, in full view of the sweating KPs. Then he strolled over to the KP room past the huge built-in icebox.
“Well, well,” he said straight-faced, leaning leisurely against the jamb. “If it aint my young friend, Prewitt. How do you like straight duty, Prewitt. Life in a rifle company, ’ey.”
The cooks and other KPs were watching, because The Warden almost never spent a weekend on the Post. They were expecting something big.
“I like it, Top,” Prew grinned, trying to make the grin convincing, looking up from the steaming sink he was bent over, naked to the waist, his dungarees and shoes soaked with sweat and soapy water. “Thats why I transferred,” he said seriously. “Its a great life, this. I find a pearl, I’ll cut you in. Fifty-fifty. If it hadnt of been for you, I wouldnt of had no chance to find it.”
“Well, well,” The Warden said, laughing pleasantly. “Well, well. Thats a friend for you. Thats an honest man. Dynamite had his Preem and Galovitch in Bliss; I had my Prewitt in A Compny. When men have served together, they’ll do anything for each other. I’ll see if I can fix you up with a lot more, since you like it so much, Prewitt.”
He grinned down at the other, his brows hooked up his forehead. Prew always remembered it, later, as having been a look of secret understanding, a glance that swept the cooks, KPs and kitchen, everything aside, leaving only the two pairs of eyes that recognized each other.
He put his hand comfortably around a mug, heavy, handleless, at the bottom of the sink and waited for Warden to go on. But it was almost as if The Warden saw his hand around the mug beneath the water, for he grinned lovingly again and walked away, leaving Prew standing there absurdly with his daredevilish romantic picture of himself rising with the cup in murderous triumph.
But, in spite of Warden’s threat, his name did not come up on the Daily Details sheet again. His second weekend he was free to go to Haleiwa. It was the same curious fact he had noted so many times before, in A Company; Warden was scrupulously fair, in his own eccentric way, he never overstepped his own private, self-constructed line of equity.
He should, he knew, have written Violet a letter, once during the middle of the second week he even thought about it for a minute. But he did not do it. Letters, like long-distance phone calls, could never convince him of the existence of another human far away existing in this same present he existed in. In reality, Violet did not exist until he saw her, then she began again where she had left off before. In-between she existed only in his mind, and how can you write a letter to your own imagination?
He could remember, as a small boy, watching his mother write frequent long letters to different relatives and friends, some of whom he had never seen. It was his mother’s hobby, but even then it had seemed strange to him, in the town of Harlan Kentucky, to write letters to other towns, to people she had not seen for years and probably would never see again. While at any time his father might be caught in a cave-in in the mine and be dead before the answers came. After his mother died that winter of the strike, six letters had come addressed to her. He looked at her name on all the envelopes, the name of her who was already dead still existing on the paper, and then he opened them and read them curiously, and not a one of them had mentioned the fact that she had died. He had thrown them in the stove and burned them. There was a time lag there that seemed to exist in space instead of time, and he could never, after that, account for it.
So he did not write to Violet, because t