From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [179]
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, “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