by James Jones
“I aint tellin you,” Warden said, “you’re tellin me.”
“The only reason she aint picked you yet is because you’re new here.”
“I been here eight months now,” he said. “That ought to be long enough.”
Leva shook his head. “She cant take no chances. Them others, all but O’Hayer, was at Bliss with Holmes. Wilson, Henderson, and Kling. About the only one of them from Bliss she hasnt picked is old Ike Galovitch, who is too old. She . . .” He stopped, hearing the Orderly Room door slam again. “Now she’ll goddam well be in here,” he said. “Four bucks it costs me. Every time she comes here. If you dont get me that rating so I can get some of it, I’ll be in debt to the twenty percent men.”
“To hell with her,” Warden said. “We got work to do,” listening to her footsteps in the corridor and then on the porch and then before him at the door.
“Where is the First Sergeant,” Mrs Holmes demanded, coming in.
“I’m the First Sergeant, Maam,” Warden bawled, putting in his voice that sudden vehemence that always was so startling, like a thunderclap in a cloudless sky, and that he had developed purposely, ever since he’d been a noncom.
“Oh,” the woman said. “Yes, of course. How are you, Sergeant?”
“What can I do for you, Mrs Holmes?” Warden said, not getting up from his stool.
“Oh, you know who I am then?”
“Why shouldnt I, Maam, I’ve seen you often enough.” Warden looked her slowly up and down, making his light blue eyes wide under the bushy brows and black hair, putting into them the secret, unsayable challenge.
“I’m looking for my husband,” Mrs Holmes said, emphasizing it a little. She smiled thinly at him and waited.
Warden stared at her unsmiling and waited too.
“Do you know where he is?” she asked, finally.
“No, Maam. I dont,” Warden said, and waited again.
“Has he been in this morning?” Mrs Holmes stared back at him now, with the coldest eyes he had ever met in any woman.
“You mean before now, Maam?” Warden raised his heavy brows. “Before eight-thirty?” Leva, working at his desk, was grinning. When Warden said them, the Army’s rigidly enforced titles of respect had quite a different meaning from the one the ARs intended them to have.
“He said he was coming over here,” Mrs Holmes said.
“Well now, Maam.” He changed his tactics now and stood up, effusively polite. “He usually does come here, sooner or later. There is some work here for him to do, now and then. He’ll probably be in this morning, some time. I’ll tell him you want him, if I can catch him. Or I can leave a message if you want.”
Smiling, he opened the countertop and stepped out suddenly into the tiny counterspace with her. Involuntarily Mrs Holmes backed out onto the porch. Warden followed her, ignoring the grinning Leva.
“He was to pick up some things for me,” Mrs Holmes said. This was the first time, to her, the first sergeant had ever been more than a lifeless stageprop in the melodrama of her husband’s life. It disconcerted her.
The little boy was still trying to chin himself on the pipe no higher than his waist.
“Junior!” Mrs Holmes shrilled. “Stop that! Get back in the car! And I thought,” she said to Warden in a normal tone, “that he might have purchased them and left them for me.”
Warden grinned, broadly. She would never have used that word purchased unless he had got beneath her skin. He watched her eyes go slightly out of focus as she understood the grin. But she brought them right back in again and tried to stare him down. He decided she had guts.
Karen Holmes was suddenly aware of the impish twist of the eyebrows on his wide face, like a small boy who has pulled a fast one. She saw his sleeves, turned back, exposing black silky hairs on the thick wrists and muscled forearms. In the tight shirt the round bunches of muscle bulged at the tips of his shoulders, and they rippled tautly as he moved. These things, too, she had never seen in him before.
“Well, Maam,” he said politely, simultaneously aware of her awareness and his grin widening and squeezing up against his eyes to give his face a slyness, “we can sure take a look in the Orderly Room, seef your things is there. He just might of come in and gone out while I was in the Supply Room working.”
She followed him inside, although she had just come from there herself.
“Well,” he said, surprised. “They aint here.”
“I wonder where he could be,” she said irritably, half to herself. At the mention of her husband a tight unpleasant little frown cut her forehead with twin lines above her nose.
Warden waited deliberately, timing it exactly. Then he slipped it to her. “Well, Maam, if I know the Capn, him and Colonel Delbert is already up at the Club, having a few snorts, discussing the servant problem.”
Mrs Holmes turned her cold eyes on him slowly, as if he were a slide beneath a microscope. Her scrutiny knew nothing at all about Col Delbert’s stags he held up at the Club, or about his partiality to Kanaka maids.
But Warden, watching her, thought he could detect a fine faint gleam, almost of amusement behind her eyes.
“Thank you very much for your trouble, Sergeant,” she said coolly, from a very great distance. She turned and left.
“Thats quite all right, Maam,” he called cheerily. “Any time that I can help. Any time at all.”
He strolled out onto the porch to watch her climb in and drive off. In spite of her efforts a long smooth flash of thigh winked at him and he grinned.
Leva was still sitting at his desk when he went back in the Supply Room. “You been down to Mrs Kipfer’s lately, Milt?” he grinned.
“No,” Warden said. “I ain’t. How’s the dear lady gettin along?”
“Got two new girls in fresh from the States. One redhead and one brunette. Interested?”
“No,” he said. “I ain’t.”
“You aint?” Leva grinned. “I kind of thought you might want to go along with me tonight. I thought you might feel like it.”
“Go to hell, Niccolo. When I have to pay for it I’ll quit.”
Leva laughed, high up in his nose, making a sound like the spluttering of Diesel exhaust. “Well,” he said, “I just thought. Man, but that Holmes woman is one, aint she?”
“One what?”
“One woman.”
“I’ve seen better,” Warden said indifferently.
“Wonder why a man wants to go lookin for Kanaky maids when he got that at home, and with a bed too.”
“She’s cold,” Warden said. “That’s why. Cold as hell.”
“Yes?” Leva taunted. “I guess thats right. I guess thats why all these guys get tired of her. Anyway, I never seen a piece of ass yet was worth twenty years in Leavenworth.”
“Me neither,” Warden said.
“A man that fools with that stuff’s a sucker to take a chance of gettin his fingers burnt, an officer’s woman.”
“That’s right,” Warden said. “All she’d have to do, if she got caught with you, would be to holler rape and it would be Dear John, thats all she wrote.” He was looking out the door across the quad where Dog Company was toiling through its drill for stoppages. Through the truck entrance at the southeast corner showed the front half of Holmes’s house with two windows in its sidewall. That back window was the bedroom window, he had been in it once when Holmes had been changing uniforms and he had had to have him sign some papers. As he watched now he saw the car stop out in front of it and Karen Holmes climb out and walk, long-leggedly smooth and clean below the skirt, up to the porch and he remembered, now, how the other of the twin beds had looked with the woman’s shoes beneath it.
“Lets fall to on this work,” he reproved Leva. “I got that transfer comin in at nine-thirty. Also, I got a conference with Holmes and one of them goddamned complaining cooks that was scheduled for eight-thirty, but which, since Holmes aint showed up yet, will probly start at nine-thirty and last till eleven. I wont get that transfer ou
t till noon. So if you want help, we better get on the ball.”
“Okay, Chief,” Leva grinned at him. “Anything you say, Chief.”
“And remember,” Warden said, “Mon-sewer O’Hayer says you got to straighten up this mess sometime today.”
“Your face,” Leva said.
“Your mother’s box,” Milt said. “Get to work.”
Chapter 4
MILT WARDEN, IN THE Orderly Room, heard Prewitt come in on the concrete of the ground-level porch. The conference with the complaining cook that had begun late was still in progress, but over and above it he heard the new man’s footsteps and recognized them with that wide angle range tuning of his mind that was never a part of what he happened to be doing. How would it be, he asked himself listening to Holmes’s voice, how would it just be that if some day, just once, you could do a thing without having to listen for new angles that you might use? He did not need to answer. It would be fine. The complaining conference, which had begun with the complainings of this cook and had now progressed to the counter complainings of Capt Holmes, and would wind up with usual pep talk, was a long way from finished yet. This cook, whose name was Willard and who was the most complaining cook of all of them and who was bucking hard to get the rating of Mess/Sgt Preem, had complained excellently about Preem’s drunkenness and inefficiency and of the fact that he, Willard, was doing the work of a Mess/Sgt on the pay of a First Cook. He had complained superlatively, even outdoing all of his own former complaints, but Holmes, to whom Preem was still one of those who had served with him at Bliss, had also surpassed himself, weathering all of it very well and finally coming out in the lead with his own complaints of Willard who was, Holmes felt, not doing a good enough job as Mess/Sgt to earn his First Cook’s pay. Warden was indifferent to the outcome but since now and then he found an opportunity to stick in complaints about both Preem, whom he wanted busted, and Willard, whom he did not want to replace him, he had remained attentive, hoping always for some chance to break it up and end it so he could get on to this transfer and then be free to go back to helping Leva, who was just about the only good man in the outfit and whose loss would be a blow from which the Company Administration never would recover.
The monotonic buzzing of the voices carried outside to Prewitt on the porch and he sat down in one of the backless chairs and leaned against the wall, prepared to wait, fingering the mouthpiece in his pocket that was his own and that he always carried with him. He had bought it back in Myer with a crapgame winnings and it was the mouthpiece he had used to play the Taps at Arlington. Pulling it out now and looking into the ruby bell as if it were a crystal ball brought that day back to him. The President himself had been there, with all his aides and guards, leaning on the arm of one of them. There had been a colored bugler who played the echo to his own Taps from the stand. The Negro was a better bugler, but because he was not white he had been stationed in the hills to play the echo. It should have been himself who played the echo. Thinking about it all, he put the beauty back in his pocket and folded his arms across his chest, still waiting.
From the G Company supplyroom came the sound of a spasmodically clicking typewriter, and before the kitchen screen-door, sitting in the sun, was a KP peeling spuds, stopping now and then to slap at the flies buzzing around his head. Prew watched him, feeling all around him that sunny buzzing inarticulateness that is nine-thirty in the morning on a duty day.
“Wonderful day, ain’t it?” the KP, a tiny curly-headed Italian with narrow bony shoulders jutting from his undershirt, said to him. Scowling, he speared another spud ferociously and raised it, triumphantly, like a caught fish from the dirty water of the number 18 kettle.
“Yeah,” Prew said.
“Fine way to pass the time,” the KP said, motioning with the speared spud before he went to peeling it. “Good for the mind. You the new transfer?”
“Thats whats the matter,” Prew, who had never liked Italians, said.
“Ha,” the KP said. “You picked a helluva outfit to get into, friend, thats all.” Peeling automatically, he scratched his hairless chin on one naked shoulder.
“I didnt pick it.”
“Unless,” the KP said, ignoring the answer, “you happen to be a jockstrap. Any kind of a jockstrap, just any kind, but preferably a punchie. If you’re a punchie you picked the right place and I’ll be salutin you for a corporal in six days.”
“I aint no jockstrap,” Prew said.
“Then I pity you, friend,” said the KP fervently. “Thats all. I pity you. My name’s Maggio and as you can see I aint no jockstrap neither. But I’m a spudpeeler though. I’m one helluva hotshot spudpeeler. I’m the best spudpeeler in Schofield Barricks, T.H. I got a medal.”
“What part of Brooklyn you come from?” Prew grinned.
The dark intent eyes under the hairy brows flared up as if Prew had lighted candles in a dim cathedral. “Atlantic Avenue. You know Brooklyn?”
“No. I was never there. But I had a buddy at Myer was from Brooklyn.”
The candles were snuffed out. “Oh,” Maggio said. Then with the air of a man who has nothing more to lose he asked cautiously, “Whats his name?”
“Smith,” Prew said. “Jimmy Smith.”
“Jesus Christ!” Maggio said and crossed himself with the patented potato scraper. “Smith, no less. I’ll kiss your ass in Macy’s window at high noon on Sataday if I ever heard of a Smith in Brooklyn.”
Prew laughed. “That was his name.”
“Yeah?” Maggio said, scowling at a new spud. “Thats fine. Now I knew a Jew named Hodenpyl onct. I thought you knew Brooklyn.” He subsided into silence, muttering, “Jimmy Smith. From Brooklyn. My bleeding back.”
Prew, grinning, lit a cigaret, listening to the buzzing from the Orderly Room suddenly raise itself an octave.
“Hear that?” Maggio said. He stabbed his scraper at the window. “Thats what you’re lettin yourself into, friend. You better, if you’re smart, turn right around and let yourself back out.”
“I cant,” Prew said. “I was transferred by request.”
“Oh,” Maggio said sagely. “Another fuckup. Like me. Well, friend, I feel for you,” he said bitterly, “but from my position I cant quite reach you.”
“Whats going on in there?”
“Oh, nothin unusual. Happens all a time. ‘The Warden’ and ‘Dynamite’ is just givin Willard a ass eatin, thats all. Not a thing unusual. Willard just happens to be on shift today. After they get through with him he’ll take it out on me.
“Willard is a schmuck amingia, he wouldnt make a good KP in any other outfit. Here he’s a First Cook because they cant get any other cooks to transfer in. This is because Preem is passed out on his fartsack full a vanilla extrack all a time.”
“Sounds like a wonderful outfit to transfer into,” Prew said to him.
“Ah,” Maggio scowled, “it is. You’ll love it, friend, just simply love it. Specially if you was a jockstrap. I been out of ree-croot drill six weeks and already I wish I’m back in Gimbel’s basement as a shipping clerk.” Dolefully he shook his head. “If somebody had of told me that six months ago I’d of told him to take it and stick it.”
He put his arm down in the kettle and fished around and brought up one last spud. “Dont mind me, friend. I’m just bitter. What I need is a trip to Mrs Kipfer’s and a good juicy stinking piece of ass, then I be all right for a nuther week.”
“You play cards?” he said suddenly. “Like to diddle up the cubes? Poker? blackjack? cut high card? roll high dice or low dice? anything you like?”
“You sound like a spotter for O’Hayer’s shed,” Prew grinned. “Sure, I like them all.”
“I was for a while, but their hours is too long,” Maggio said. “You got any money?”
“Some,” Prew said.
“Then I’ll be around tonight,” Maggio said, his dark eyes glowing. “We’ll have a little private game. That is, if I can find this joe in F Compny who owes me three.”
�
�There aint enough money in two-handed games,” Prew said.
“Oh, yes, there is,” Maggio said, “if you happen to be broke and need a piece of ass.” He inspected the fresh dark spots on Prew’s sleeves where his stripes had been. “Wait’ll you begin to draw your twenty-one a month, brother.”
He stood up and stretched and scratched his tangled mop. “Leave me give you a tip, friend. Theys a war goin on here. And I can tell you who will win the friggin thing. If you’re smart you’ll learn to jockstrap, and learn quick, and get on the gravytrain, if you want to be a successful soljer. I was smart, I’d of joined the CYO when I was young and learned to be a good jockstrap myself, instead of playing pee pool. Then I would of been on Dynamite’s good list instead of on his shitlist. If only I’d of listened to my dear sainted mother,” he said. “Balls to spuds. This is the Army, they can give it back to Custer.” Mumbling something about more spuds he disappeared into the kitchen, a gnarled disillusioned gnome who had been cheated of Valhalla.
Prew flipped his cigaret at the red and black painted pot and went inside, down the corridor past the Orderly Room to the Dayroom. The dayroom orderly, fugitive from straight duty, sat on one of the motheaten upholstered chairs, boredly scanning a comic book, his mop between his knees. He did not even bother to look up.
Prew stepped back out of the dayroom, feeling very much a stranger, and stood looking at the pooltable in the half light of the alcove, feeling tangibly the new forces here that had begun already to work on him. Thinking about little Maggio and Gimbel’s basement, he grinned and switched on the light, selected a cue and chalked it and broke the rack of balls.
The solid crack of the break in the heavy silence of mid-morning when the company was gone brought a man to the corridor door who stuck in his head. Recognizing Prewitt, he fingered his narrow bristling mustache and the hooked satanic eyebrows quivered like a dog’s nose with a new scent. He tiptoed gracefully, and silently, up to Prewitt’s elbow and his voice boomed out startlingly in the stillness broken only by the clack of pool balls.