From Here to Eternity: The Restored Edition

by James Jones

  “Thats right,” Stark said. “He doin all right by himself.”

  Warden snorted then. “He can take it. He’s a punchie. He’s use to bein hit. Some of them even like it.”

  “If I was him,” the K Co topkick said, “I’d transfer the hell out of there.”

  “Thats all you know,” Warden said. “He cant. Dynamite wont let him.”

  “Come on,” Jim O’Hayer’s voice said nasally. “Is this a sewing circle or a card game? King is high, king bets.”

  “Bet five,” Warden said. “You know, thats what I like about you, Jim. Your overwhelming sense of human compassion,” he said quizzically. In his mind Prew could see the eyes clenching themselves into those somehow ominous rays of wrinkles.

  He let the shaky door swing shut behind him, cutting off the talk, wishing he could find it in him to hate that bitchery Warden but he couldnt, and remembering suddenly he had not even in his passion thought to get a sandwich and coffee from O’Hayer’s free lunch for the players. But he would not go back in there now.

  He could also remember, suddenly, a lot of other things he had meant to do with part of that money before he risked it. He needed shaving cream and a new bore brush and a new Blizt rag and he had wanted to stock up some tailormades. It was lucky he had a carton of Duke’s still stashed away.

  Because you are through, Prewitt, he told himself, your wad is shot, your roll is gone, you’re through till next month now, and there will be no Lorene for you this month. By next month she may have retired and gone back to the States already.

  He jammed his hands in his pockets savagely and found some change, a small pile of dimes and nickels, and brought it out and looked at it, wondering what it was good for. It was enough to get into a small change game in the latrine, but the hopelessness of ever running that little bit back up to two hundred and sixty bucks hit him and he threw it down into the railroad bed viciously and with satisfaction watched it spread like shot but glinting silver, then heard with satisfaction the clink of it hitting the rails. He turned back to the barracks. Lorene, or no Lorene, poker or no poker, you are not borrowing any money at no twenty percent thats for sure. You aint borrowed any twenty percent money since you been on this rock and you aint starting now, school keeps or not.

  He found Turp Thornhill in his own shed next to O’Hayer’s. Because there was nothing in O’Hayer, even at twenty percent, when he was playing. Turp was neither playing nor dealing. He was moving from dice table to blackjack table to poker table back to dice table, perpetually and nervously, checking up as usual on his dealers to see they were not cheating him.

  The tall chinless hawknosed Mississippi peckerwood possessed all the disgusting traits of a backward people with few of the compensating good. But he did loan money, even though he lived an eternal gimlet-eyed suspicion, a grasping pinch-mouthed servile pride in being “just what he was, by god, and no hifalutin airs, take it or leave it.” He had earned the management of his gambling shed by being in the same company 17 years and ass-kissing his superiors every minute of that time, and now he was in position to compensate for it with a sadistic cruelty toward anyone he calculated he could dominate. In short, he had much in common with the Congressional politicians from his native state, and would have glorified in their re-election and their policies, except that he had never heard of any of them, even Rankin.

  “Haw,” Turp hawked, when Prew called him over to one side and hit him up for twenty. He doubled up his long thin frame and prodded the other slyly. “Haw,” he hollered, loud enough for everybody in the humming shed to hear, “so Prewitt the Hard’s a finally givin in, ’ey? Got his guts all riled over wantin a little, ’ey? So he decide to come around and see ole daddy Turp that aint good enuf for him to talk to ’cept on Payday to borry some money, ’ey? Well, it comes to all on us, boy, it comes to all on us.”

  He got his wallet out, but did not open it yet, he was not through yet.

  “Where you aim to go? The Service? The Ritz? The Pacific? The New Senator? The New Congress Mrs Kipfer runs? I know em all, boy, hell I support em. Listen, now, boy. Let me give you a little tip. Ers a new job over to the Ritz. Not so hot on looks but boys! will she work you over. Hunh? What you say? Kind of gits ye, dont it? Like to have a little bit a that stuff? wunt ye? ’ey? Hows about er, ’ey?”

  A number of the players were looking at them now and laughing. Turp grinned back at them smugly, relishing his audience, not wanting to lose it, not just yet.

  Prew was still silent but his face was reddening in spite of himself. He cursed silently at his face for reddening.

  Turp laughed again, winking at his audience, get this now, this going to be a good one now, just get this. His long bony nose poked into Prewitt’s face with each bob of nervous laughter. The grin pulled up the long corners of his chinless mouth making his face into a series of sharp prying Vs. The subdued murky eyes popped into bright intensity like bursting flares, filled with obscene curiosity and insulting laughter. Turp was at his best before an audience, get this now.

  “Haw,” Turp hawked, winking at his audience. “Why hell, boy, if you’d do it with her her way, you wunt have to borry no money. She’d give it to ye for nuthin, and probly be willin to take you to raise in the bargain. Hows about that, ’ey?”

  The audience roared. Old Turp was in form. Even the dice stopped rattling.

  “I hear thats what she likes,” Turp hawed. “Hows about it, ’ey? Man never knows till he tried it. Maybe he been missin somethin all his life. I hear them boys out in Hollywood make a lot of money that a way. Man awys use a leetle money, caint e? Might even get to like it, who knows?

  “Haw, look at im. He blushin. Look at im, boys. Laws, I do declare he blushin. You really want to borry some money now, Prewitt? Or you jist pullin my leg now? Maybe you wont need it now.”

  Prew stayed silent but he was having trouble with it. He had to keep shut, if he aimed to get the money. And Turp had money. Turp made money. He had been running a shed from G Company when O’Hayer was just an upstart. But O’Hayer’s rise had been meteoric and he had topped them all. For this Turp hated and feared the gambler with a sly long-nosed implacability. Yet strangely, he took the small sums he made from his loans and the large sums he made from his shed and lost them all across O’Hayer’s poker table along in the middle of the month. After Payday gambling rush was over and his own shed was closed down, he would sit in on the winners’ game, betting wildly, cursing with nervous excitability, losing steadily. It was as if the sterile contamination of his own spavined Mississippi land had gotten like clap into his blood and made even himself an object of his own ingrown suspicious hatred, so that he frantically threw away every cent he could pick up, in order to keep Turp from cheating Thornhill. And in the end the hated O’Hayer, cool and mathematical and impersonal, always collected the profits of Turp’s shed in addition to his own.

  Turp let him have the twenty, finally, after a pause in his Southern Ku Klux Klan brand of humor, a pause in which white lines of suspicion pinched in upon his mouth and cut down through his laughter while he attempted to divine all the thousand ways this seemingly open man might be trying to crook him, oh, he looked honest enough, but you never can tell, and Turp Thornhill knew a thing or two, Turp Thornhill knew better than to trust a man’s looks, Turp Thornhill was like Diogenes, he had never seen an honest man, and he never would. After insulting him, ridiculing him, suspicioning him, torturing him by letting on he could not afford to loan it, Turp generously let him have the whole twenty dollars he had asked for, at twenty per cent, and warned him narrowly not to try to pull some wise shenanigan when it come time to pay it back.

  Prew, as he dressed for town with the twenty in his pocket, felt the degradation of Turp’s foul breath still on him that a shower would not wash off and wondered which was worse, to be poked by Turp’s foul breathing Mississippi nose or to be sprayed with Ike Galovitch’s foul smelling Slavic spit. This was sure turning out to be some outfit. A fine home, this ou
tfit. He was also wondering, as he dressed, at the humiliations men will suffer for a woman that they will not suffer for any other thing, even for their politics.

  Chapter 21

  MILT WARDEN, AS HE debated checking out of this game himself, was thinking somewhat the same thing, just as wonderingly, but about a different woman.

  Perhaps it was because he was meeting Karen Holmes downtown tonight at the Moana, he thought, but every time he looked up from his cards his eyes focused themselves on the battered husky face of Maylon Stark with a kind of shocked disbelief like a man looking at his own arm blown off and lying in his slit trench. It was outrageous, this face, and what was worse it was ruining his game. Because he could not stop looking at it. Two out of the last three hands he’d lost he should have won except that his eyes were staring themselves at this face whose eyes and lips had also caressed the nude self-induced-trance that was like death and that was Karen Holmes when being loved, and that he, Milt Warden, remembered clearly. That undoubtedly Stark remembers clearly too, he thought. Because there was no doubt he had, goddam it. No doubt at all. Any way you turn it. It was not wishful thinking because Stark had not mentioned it again since that first time; Stark was not the artistic type who can imagine things into reality, worse luck. And obviously Stark had not mentioned it to anybody else or it would have got around, clear around, by now; but then Stark was not a bragger either, who needed ego building. No, he thought scrotum-sickeningly, no doubt at all, you cant explain it away, and the worst of that is that it points the finger at the up to now preposterous stories of her and Champ Wilson, and that goddamned perverted Henderson, and even possibly O’Hayer. He looked at O’Hayer. But she said, “I never knew it could be like this”; he remembered distinctly she had said, “I never knew it could be like this.”

  “Check me out,” he said to the dealer, “so’s I can get in a goddam game where theres some action. And theres ninety-seven dollars in silver. I counted it already.”

  The dealer grinned. “You dont mind if I count it too, do you, Milt?”

  “Hell no. I just wanted you to know I counted it.”

  The dealer laughed, heartily.

  “Take this too,” Jim O’Hayer yawned. “I’m going to knock off for a little break myself and see how things are going. Just shove this in the drawer with the rest and I’ll take it back out later.”

  “Okay, boss,” the dealer, who was a buck sergeant, said. He shoved Warden’s bills over to him to keep the piles separate and then shoved O’Hayer’s into the drawer that was already full of the red chips and silver he had cut the game for, for O’Hayer.

  “It’ll be here when you get back, Jim,” the dealer promised faithfully proudly, and Warden watched him bland-eyedly neatly palm a tenspot off the pile as he continued the deal with his left hand, sliding the cards off with his thumb, then bring his right hand back to the deal still palming the folded ten, and then after the round was completed reach his right hand into his shirt pocket for a cigaret.

  Warden looked at O’Hayer who was standing stretching after hanging his expensive eyeshade on a nail behind him and lit a cigaret himself and grinning, held the match for the buck sergeant dealer who did not grin back now but looked through him flat-eyedly across the match flame as he lit up.

  Warden laughed and flipped the match away and then followed O’Hayer outside and the two of them stood breathing in the fresh air and smoking, O’Hayer silent and somehow sealed mathematically within himself as he stared indifferently at the thinly rusted over railroad rails.

  Warden, who had meant to go on to the barracks, stood watching him and smoking, thinking this was as good a time as any to try and get the usual needle in through this thick skin, but wanting to just see if he couldnt make the automatic calculator speak first for once.

  “Kitchen must be getting along pretty well now with Preem gone,” O’Hayer said finally; it was an indifferent offering to the abstract status of First Sergeant; you got the impression if it was anybody else he would not have been bothered speaking; still, he had spoken.

  “Yeah,” Warden said, silently congratulating Warden. “I wish the rest of the compny administration was getting along so good.”

  “Oh?” O’Hayer said coolly. “Mazzioli been giving you some trouble lately?”

  Warden grinned. “Who else? And how are you coming? How you making out with the new bayonet issue?”

  “Oh, that.” O’Hayer lifted his head and the cold eyes left their contemplation of the rails to study Warden. “Coming along fine, Top. I’ve given Leva instructions how to do it. If I remember, he’s got about half the chrome bayonets exchanged for the black ones now and the excess chrome ones turned in to ordnance. Its only a question of time,” he said.

  “How much time?”

  “Time,” O’Hayer said easily. “Just time. Leva’s got a lot of stuff to do, you know. You trying to tell me I’m taking too much time?”

  “Oh, no,” Warden said. “The rest of the battalion only got their exchange completed and their chrome turned in about two weeks ago. You’re about on schedule.”

  “You know, Top,” O’Hayer said, “you get too excited over little things, Top.”

  “You dont get excited enough, Jim,” Warden said. He was feeling again, as he always felt with O’Hayer, that dispassionate itching to step in suddenly and knock him down, not from dislike, just to see if there wasnt some emotion in among the tumblers. Someday I’ll do it, he told himself. Someday I’ll quit thinking about it and do it, and then they can bust me, and I will go happily back to being a rear rank Rudy with no troubles and nothing to do but get drunk and lug around a rifle and be happy. Someday I will.

  “It never pays to get excited,” O’Hayer explained. “You’re liable to forget little things, Top. Important things. In the excitement.”

  “You mean like the connections between Regiment and the sheds? Or like the small opinions of Captain Holmes that are always, though, important?”

  “Well, I didnt mean that,” O’Hayer said. He grinned. It was a tightening of the cheeks that pulled the mouth corners up and showed the teeth. “But since you mention it, I guess that would be a good example.”

  “If you’re tryin to scare me it not only wont work its ridiculous,” Warden said. “I pray every night that by next Payday I’ll be drawin thirty dollars.”

  “Sure. All us noncoms got heavy responsibilities,” O’Hayer said sympathetically. “Look at me,” he waved his hand behind him at the shed.

  What was the use? Warden asked himself. You cant talk with him. Only way you can ever talk with him is blow your top and get mad like you did over the clothing issue, and even that dont do you any good. You might as well quit fencing.

  “Listen, Jim,” he said. “Theres going to be a lot more stuff coming up soon like this change of chrome bayonets for black. We’ll be getting the new M1 rifles pretty soon, and they are experimenting with a new style helmet at Benning now. We’re getting ready to get into this war and from now on there will be all kinds of changes, not only in equipment but in administration. I’m going to have my hands full with the orderly room and the records, from now on. I wont be able to handle the supply.”

  “Me and Leva are handling it,” O’Hayer said, still untouched. “I aint had any complaints from anybody about how we’re handling it. Except from you. I think me and Leva are doing a pretty good job of handling it. Dont you, Top?”

  Ah, Warden thought. He held the hypo up to the light then and squirted the needle, just to make sure, just to see that it was working right.

  “What would you do,” he asked, “if Leva transferred out of this company?”

  O’Hayer laughed. It was like with his smile. “Now you’re trying to scare me, Top. You know Dynamite would never okay Leva’s transfer. I’m ashamed of you, stooping to such tricks.”

  “But what if the transfer came down from Regiment, from Colonel Delbert?” Warden grinned.

  “Why, Dynamite would just take it back to him and e
xplain the facts of life to him, thats all. You know that, Top.”

  “No I dont,” Warden grinned. “And apparently you dont know Dynamite, not if you think he’s going to jeopardize his chance of getting that majority he’s bucking for by arguing with The Great White Father.”

  O’Hayer looked at him coolly, Warden could almost see the tumblers moving.

  “People aint mathematics,” Warden grinned, savoring the coming epigram; it was one he’d had in mothballs for a long long time, looking for a place to use; Pete Karelsen would turn green at this one.

  “People aint mathematics, Jim. If they was, you and Einstein would of fought it out a long time ago, to see who rules the world.”

  “That’s good,” O’Hayer said coldly. “You ought to tell that one to Pete.”

  “Leva,” Warden grinned complacently, “has been talking it up with M Company, Jim. They want him for supply sergeant. All he has to do is transfer and the rating’s his. And M Co’s CC wants him so bad he taken it up with the 3rd Battalion Commander, who is not a Captain but a Lieutenant Colonel, a Lieutenant Colonel who has taken it up with Delbert, Jim.”

  “Thanks for the tip,” O’Hayer said. “I’ll work on it.”

  “Its no tip,” Warden grinned. You’re enjoying this, aint you, he thought. What a prick. “If it hadnt already gone too far for you and Dynamite to stop it, I never would of told you, Jim. Leva’s a good man. I’m a prick, but I aint that big a one.

  “Its only a question of time, Jim,” he grinned.

  O’Hayer did not say anything.

  “So this is no tip. This is a favor I’m asking you. A personal favor. Will you ask Dynamite to relieve you from supply? You can tell him you’re bored with it and get him to carry you surplus for straight duty, and let me give Leva that rating? As a personal favor to me. You lose nothing; I get to keep Leva.”

  “You know how The Man feels about surplus noncoms,” O’Hayer said. “Theres no use asking him that. He thinks its a reflection on his soldiering, to carry a noncom surplus.”