From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [178]
“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