From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [47]
And as he hunted tor the trunks he told her all about the transfer, why he had been so long in coming.
“Why did you transfer, though, Bobbie?” Violet asked him in the clipped twittering voice that always made him chuckle. She sat on the bed and watched him exchange his shoes and socks for the old canvas fishing sneaks.
The bright air slipped in from the outside through the single window that was like an afterthought, and it washed against the dimness and the funky smell of stale bedclothes. It touched his body coolly and he looked at Violet in her shorts and halter, feeling the old wild surge harden his belly and bring sweat to his palms.
“What?” he said vacantly. “Oh. I didn’t transfer. I was transferred. It was Houston did it, because I spoke my piece.
“Listen,” he said. “Theres nobody home. Lets you and me take one?” Three weeks, feeling the blood behind his eyes, almost a month, it was too long to wait.
“Wait,” she said. “Couldnt you have gone to the officer and asked to stay?”
“Thats right.” Prew jerked his head in a nervous nod, thinking the Army made you need it more, made you hungrier. “I could have. But I couldnt. I couldnt be a brown noser.”
“Well,” Violet said. “Yes. But I would think an argument could be patched up,” she said. “I mean when you had a good job you wanted to keep.”
“It could of been,” he said. “But I dont want any job that bad. Dont you see? There wasnt nothin else to do. Listen,” he said. “Come here. Come over here.”
“Not now,” she told him. She kept on watching him, almost curiously, looking in his face. “It seems a shame to lose such a good job, and lose your rating.”
“It is a shame,” he said. To hell with it, he thought. “Is there any liquor left around this place?”
“Theres still part of that quart you brought last time,” she said. “I havent touched it; it was yours,” she got up proudly. “Its in the kitchen. And I think theres another one, unbroken, you brought a long time ago. You want a drink?”
“Yes,” he said and followed her into the kitchen. “You see,” he explained carefully, “I wont get to come up to see you near as often as I use to now. Also, I’ll only be makin twenty-one a month, so I cant give the dough I did, either.”
Violet nodded. Inscrutably, she did not seem impressed one way or the other. He decided to let it ride a while, there was no use to spoil it now.
“Lets go up to the place on the hill,” he said. “To our place,” he added intimately, and was ashamed because he felt now that he was pleading. Being without any for so long could eat into a man, and the blood was pumping through him richer now, and thicker.
“All right,” she said. The door to the cupboard had no glass in it, but she opened it anyway, to reach for the bottle inside, the absence of the glass embarrassing her. While her arms were up Prew cupped his hands over her breasts from behind her. Violet jerked her arms down irritably and then he spun her, pinning her arms to her sides, and kissed her, she holding the bottle in one hand. In her bare feet she was not quite as tall as he was.
They climbed up through the matted dry grass, Prew carrying the bottle, the sun pleasantly hot on their bare backs. At the top in the little clump of trees they lay down in the matted green and brown of the dead and living grass. They looked almost straight down at the house.
“Its pretty, isnt it,” Prew said.
“No,” disagreed Violet. “Its ugly. Horrible ugly.”
The cluster of shacks lay spread out below them, a nameless community not on the tourists’ maps, looking as if the first strong wind would blow them over. They were, on top of the hill, at the top of a great U where they could look down at the houses curved across the bottom or look straight across at the field of green cane on the other side.
“I lived in a place like this when I was a kid,” Prew said. “Except it was lots bigger. But it was the same,” thinking