From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [89]
“Well?” he snarled. “What the hell’re you standin around for? Aint you got no work to do?”
“Why I aint doing nothing,” the clerk objected. “Cant a man just stand still? without you jumping on him? for God’s sake?”
“What man?” Warden said. “No. He cant. I cant stand to see people standin still. I’m eccentric. If there aint no work,” he threatened, “maybe I can scare you up some.”
“But I got to go back to Personnel,” protested Mazzioli. “Right away. O’Bannon wants me right back there.”
“Then move. Dont stand there with your finger up your ass,” Warden said, making it sound ominous, but glad momentarily, even in this catastrophe of the transfer, to get out of the almost frightening bottomlessness of Karen Holmes and the abortive swimming party and onto solid ground he knew, even if only in its barrenness. “Why dont you just move in over there, Mazzioli?”
“I wish to hell I could,” the clerk said bitterly, very disappointed because the blowup he expected had not come. “Oh how I wish. What do you think about that transfer, Top?” he needled hopefully. Warden did not answer. “Aint that something?” he asked sympathetically, changing tactics, still hoping. “That letter of the Colonel’s sure got quick action, didnt it?”
But Warden only stared at him silently, and kept on staring, until, completely defeated, he left in confusion, still disappointed. And Milt Warden went bitterly back to work, chewing what few germless grains of comfort he could glean from having seen through Mazzioli’s plot. I wish I could see through Karen Holmes that easy, he thought, I wish I could even see through what will come out of this transfer that easy.
There were times, he felt, Milt Warden never should of made this rating. This rating wasnt worth it. In a profession where fouling up was SOP, this rating had a reputation that stunk, in every noncoms’ club on the Post. To get this rating Milt Warden had taken over a notoriously bogged down outfit no other noncom in the Regiment would touch, and from a notoriously case-hardened old 1st/Sgt who had finally made that thirty-year-long pull up onto the retirement list and didnt have to worry about this any more. You really wanted this rating awful bad, didnt you, you jerk?
He took the letter to his desk to make the necessary notes, feeling the old rage, the rage that always saved him, mounting in him happily, and contemptuously tossed the rest of the pregnant mass of paper stillborn in Mazzioli’s filing basket.
Maybe he was a good man once, this old one, my predecessor, but they had worn him down, in thirty years, like a big knife made thin and fragile, needlelike, from constant honings. All that good steel just rubbed away no one knew where. And him, who had been a rip-roarer in the old days back in China, hanging on by his fingernails the last five years to get that pension, praying the Inspector General’s men would not find him out, and covering up his fear with this Victor McLaglen doing one of his movie soldiers act. That was no way to end. When my time comes they can stick their pension up their ass before I’ll fawn to get it.
But maybe it was all part of the process of getting old, he thought. All the old ones, the tough ones, ended up that way it seemed, Jones imitating Jones, Smith imitating Smith, playing a role they once had lived. And it wasnt only in the Army.
I think you need a drink, he thought, walking to the filing cabinet for the hidden whiskey, a good stiff drink, to make you madder, you who are in danger of becoming Warden imitating Warden, a really good one, you.
Everything, eventually, got old. There are gray hairs in this head too, already. But part of the process of getting old was not this gradual wearing down of a man by the seas of organization, this eating away of the rock a man could have been except for these lapping waves of affectionate regard driven by the wind of fear against the rock that always crumbled, finally—that was not part of getting old, or if it was, then getting old was wrong and