From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [177]
“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 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