From Here to Eternity (33 page)

missed his ace and dropped out, indifferently. O'Hayer could always afford to drop out indifferently. Warden with his kings still high checked it to Prew, and Prew felt a salve of relief grease over him for sure now Warden had no trips. Warden had two pair and hoped the kings would nose him out since O'Hayer had two bullets. Well, if he wanted to see them he could by god pay for seeing them, like everybody else, and Prew bet twenty-five, figuring to milk the last drop out of him, figuring he had this one cinched, figuring The Warden for his lousy pair to brace his kings. It was a legitimate bet; Warden had checked his kings twice when they were high. Warden raised him sixty dollars. Looking at Warden's malignant grin he knew then he was caught, really hooked, right through the bag. By three big kings. Outsmarted. Sucked in like a green kid. The first time somebody checked a cinch into him. His belly flopped over sickeningly with disbelief and he made as if to drop out, but he knew he had to call. There was too much of his money in this pot, which was a big one, to chance a bluff. And The Warden knew just how high to raise without raising too high to get a call. The hand cost him two hundred even, he had about forty dollars left. He pushed the stool back, and got up then. "Seat open." Warden's eyebrows quivered, then hooked up pixishly. "I hated to do that to you, kid. I really did. If I dint need the money so goddam bad I'd by god give it back." The table laughed all around. "Ah, you keep it," Prew said. "You won it, Top, its yours. Check me out," he said to the dealer, thinking why dint you drop out you son of a bitch after that second win like you promised, thinking this is not an original lament. "Whats wrong, kid?" Warden said. "You look positively unwell." "Just hungry. Missed noon chow." Warden winked at Stark who had only just come back. "Too late to catch chow now. You better stick around? Win some of this back? Forty, fifty bucks aint much take home pay." "Enough," Prew said. "For what I need." Why didnt he let it go? why did he have to rub it in? The son of a bitching bastard whoring bastard. "Yeah, but you want a bottle too, dont you? Hell, we all friends here, just a friendly game for pastime. Aint that right, Jim?" Prew could see his eyes clenching into rays of wrinkles as he looked at the gambler. "Sure," O'Hayer said indifferently. "Long as you got the money to be friendly. Deal the cards." Warden laughed softly, as if to himself. "You see?" he said to Prew. "No cutthroat. No hardtack. The take out's only twenty." "Beats me," Prew said. He started to add, "I've got a widowed mother," but nobody would have heard it. The cards were already riffling off the deck. As he moved back Stark goosed him warmly in the ribs and winked, and slipped into the seat. "Heres fifty," Stark said to the dealer. Outside the air free of smoke and the moisture of exhaled breath smote Prew like cold water and he inhaled deeply, suddenly awake again, then let it out, trying to let out with it the weary tired unrest that was urging him to go back. He could not escape the belief that he had just lost $200 of his own hard-earned money to that bastard Warden. Come on, cut it out, he told himself, you didnt lose a cent, you're twenty to the good, you got enough for tonight, lets me and you walk from this place. The air had wakened him and he saw clearly that this was no personal feud, this was a poker game, and you cant break them all, eventually they'll break you. He walked around the sheds and down to the sidewalk. Then he walked across the street. He even got so far his hand was on the doorknob of the dayroom door and the door half open. Before he finally decided to quit kidding himself and slammed the door angrily and turned around and went irritably back to O'Hayer's. "Well look who's here," Warden grinned. "I thought we'd be seeing you. Is there a seat open? Somebody get up and give this old gambler a seat." "Aw can it," Prew said savagely and slipped into the seat of another loser who was checking out and grinning unhappily at The Warden with the look of a man who wants to do the right thing and be a good sport but finds it hard. "Come on, come on," Prew said. "Whats holding things up? Lets get this show on the road." "Man!" The Warden said. "You sound like you're itchin for a great big lick." "I am. Look out for yourself. I'm hot. First jack bets." But he was not hot. and knew it, he was only savagely irritated, and there is a difference and it took him just fifteen minutes and three hands to lose the forty dollars, as he had known he would. Where before he had played happily, lost in loving it, savoring every second, now he played with dogged irritation, not giving a damn, angered by even the time it took to deal. You dont win at poker playing that way, and he stood up feeling a welcome sense of release that came with being broke and able to quit now. "Now I can go home and go to bed. And sleep." "What!" The Warden said. "At three o'clock in the afternoon?" "Sure," Prew said. Was it only three o'clock? He had thought they'd played Tattoo already. "Why not?" he said. The Warden snorted his disgust. "Punks wont never listen to me. I told you you should of quit when you was ahead. But would you listen? A lot you listen." "Forgot," Prew said. "Forgot all about it. Hows for loanin me a hundred, and I'll remember." It got a laugh around the table. "Sorry kid. You know I'm behind myself." "Hell. And I thought you was winnin." It got another laugh, and he felt better, but he remembered it did not put money back in his pocket. He elbowed his way out. "What you want to awys be pickin on the kid for, First?" he heard Stark say behind him. "Pick on him?" Warden said indignantly. "Whatever give you that idea?" "He dont need you to pick on him," the K Co topkick, a bald fat man with drinker's hollowed eyes, said. "From what I hear." "Thats right," Stark said. "He doin all right by himself." Warden snorted then. "He can take it. He's a punchy. 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 hawk-nosed 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. "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 bony 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 outfit. 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, "1 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 toq, 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 explain 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. "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." O'Hayer was looking at him thoughtfully, the tumblers making little clickings as they moved, still unemotionally, calculating. "I like it where I am," O'Hayer said, finally. "I see no reason to change my status, not from what you've told me. He might even end up by wanting me to pull drill with the Company, if he carried me surplus for straight duty. I like being the supply." "You wont when Leva transfers, Jim." "Maybe he wont transfer." "He will." "Maybe not," O'Hayer said again, making a veiled threat of it, as if he knew more than he was telling. "Okay," Warden said. Well, he thought, it didnt work. He flipped his cigaret down at the rails in the bed below and watched the feeble glow, that was like a lightbulb in the daytime, splash in the gathering dusk. He turned and walked away, grinning to himself happily. He spoke back over his shoulder just before he rounded the corner of the shed to O'Hayer who was still watching unemotionally. "You know, Jim," he said, "I really use to believe this stuff that you were one of those rare things, a human being truly without feeling. One of those that things come to naturally because they never mind risking coldbloodedly, or even losing coldbloodedly, what they have. Romantic, hey?" As he rounded the corner O'Hayer was still looking at him, still unemotionally, all the tumblers still apparently still working. Well, so what if it didnt work. Maybe Dynamite really would have done it for him, Big Jim meant a lot to Dynamite and not just as a punchie, maybe Dynamite really would have carried him as surplus, who knows? You never knew. Dynamite could hardly bust him. But then Dynamite might also have transferred him. To HQ Company maybe where he would have to work. Or maybe Dynamite would only have clamped down on him in supply and made him work some here, although Christ knows what he could do without going to a supply school first. Well, maybe Dynamite might have sent him to supply school. Dynamite could have done any of these, if O'Hayer asked him to be relieved, like you hoped he would. So maybe old tumblers-in the-head really did figure it out right. Maybe he wasnt scared. But it was entirely possible Dynamite would have carried him as surplus though, he reminded himself. Entirely possible. And he preferred to believe Dynamite would have, and that old tumblers hadnt figured it out but was only scared to take a chance on losing his soft deal, just like us common mortals. Maybe Dynamite wouldnt have carried him as surplus, but Warden preferred to believe it the other way. It made him happy to believe it the other way. He went on over to the barracks happily, believing it, to shower and change his clothes and go to town and have some drinks someplace or maybe just wander around happily downtown, not out at Waikiki but downtown, among the bars and shooting galleries and whorehouses, while he waited for time to meet Karen Holmes at the Moana in Waikiki. His T-shirt and shirt both were sweated clear through from the gambling and he stopped on the stairs and raised his arm and put his nose to his armpit happily and inhaled the mineral-salts male smell of himself, feeling his chest expanding infinitely with maleness, feeling from inside himself the hard columnar beauty of his thighs and the slim thickly muscled beauty of his waist and loins; he was Milt Warden and he was meeting Karen Holmes in town tonight. But then suddenly, the eyes inside his mind that were not his eyes focused themselves, as his eyes had done, on the husky battered face of Maylon Stark and he straightened up with his nostrils sickened and smashed his fist against the wall, punching stiff-wristed, solid-forearmed as a fighter punches, at the place where Maylon Stark's husky battered face was amorphously hanging and let the numbed hand fall contemptuously at his side and went on upstairs, to shower and change his clothes and go to town to meet Karen Holmes at the Moana. t Pete Karelsen was in their room, sitting on his bunk staring crumple-mouthed at the full set of grinning teeth in his open palm. He laid them down on the table quickly. "What the hell happen to your hand?" he wanted to know eagerly. "You been in a fight again?" "What the hell happen to your goddam teeth?" Warden said contemptuously. "You been in a goddam messhall again?" "Okay," Pete said offendedly. "Be wise. I was only intrested in your hand." "Okay," Warden said. "Be hurt. I was only intrested in your goddam teeth," and went on looking at his own hated face in the mirror, unbuttoning the thick chenille of his shirt, pulling it up savagely out of his pants. "All the time making cracks," Pete said. "All the time needling somebody. I merely ask you a simple friendly question. You dont have to go casting aspersions. You dont have to go being snotty." Warden went on looking in the mirror without answering and finished unbuttoning his shirt and took it off and dropped it on the bed. He unbuckled his belt in silence. "What are you doing?" Pete said conversationally. "Getting ready to go to town?" "No. I'm getting ready to go over to Choy's, thats why I'm changing into civilians." "Okay. Go to hell." "I'm going over to Choy's and get drunker'n hell." "I been thinkin of doing that myself," Pete said. "Somehow or other I dont feel much like going to town today. You know," he said, looking stealthily at the teeth on the table, "its really the same old thing, over and over, when you think about it. And what does it get you in the end, going to town? A hangover, is all. I'm getting bored with it," he said. He stole another look at the teeth. "I'm getting any more so I dont much care I go to town or not. Ever. I'd even ruther go to Choy's." "All right," Warden