From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [183]
“All right,” Warden said, turning away from the mirror. He picked his shirt back up and put it on again and started buttoning it. “Lets go. What the hellar you waitin on?”
“You mean to Choy’s? Really?”
“Sure. Why not? Like you say, why go to town?”
“I thought you were snowing me,” Pete said. He got up grinning toothlessly and picked the teeth up from the table and leered at them. “Hunh,” he said and put them back. “To hell with you. Come on, Milt.”
They went out through the deserted squadroom, Warden unbuttoning his pants and stuffing the shirt tail down into them and buttoning them back up again and tying the tie, Pete walking and talking newly animatedly.
“We’ll get a case of cans,” he said. “Maybe we’ll sit out in the kitchen this time. I dont like to sit out front on Payday, with all them young punks yelling around. Or maybe we’ll get four or five pitchers instead, take them outside on the green. Maybe that would be better?
“After we get teed up,” Pete said as they reached the stairs. “After we’re properly soused, maybe we’ll go over to Big Sue’s in Wahiawa and take one, hey? And come right back. For the hell of it. Wait a minute,” he said. “I better go back and get my teeth.”
Warden stopped silently. He lit a cigaret and leaned back against the porch banister and crossed his feet and folded his arms, and was suddenly a statue frozen into a perpetual granite immobility, the top half of him a cut black paper silhouette fixed against the deepening dusk outside the screens. He stood so in suspended animation, divorced from life.
When Pete came back he spoke, without moving, the cigaret a hobbling red point that was the only breathing live thing about him.
“The trouble with you, Pete,” the voice that did not seem to come from him but from the cigaret said savagely, “is you cant see any further than that douchebag nose of yours. You concern yourself with the petty details of life in order not to think, like whether or not to wear them goddam teeth of yours if you think a cunt is gunna see you—just like the goddam housewives in my brother’s parish with their makeup when they’re going to confession. While the whole damn world is rocketing to hell you got to go back and get your fucking teeth. Whynt you go get in the goddam church and hold hands with the padre and pray for peace, you’re at about that age now, and you’re suffering from the same disease that afflicts the rest of the human race.”
Pete stood stricken motionless in the act of putting in his teeth, transfixed by the sudden sanguinariness of the attack, his mouth open and his thumbs still inside with the teeth, staring at this two dimensional statue cut from tin.
“Its because of you theres Nazis in Germany,” the voice that was not Warden sermonized him. “Its because of you there’ll be Fascism in this country someday. After we have got in and pulled the chestnuts out again for the rest of the world and won this war for England. And you sit around with Mazzioli and the rest of the commendable clerks and discuss. Any subject, just discuss. Whynt you get up a regular Tuesday Literary Club like the Irish ladies in me brother’s parish. Intellectuals!”
The statue moved out of frozen mobility into a dead run for the stairs, his feet flickering down them like a boxer’s feet skipping rope.
“Come on, you stupid boob,” Warden bawled. “What the hellar you waitin for?”
Pete finished the interrupted teeth insertion and champed his jaws to settle them in and followed silently, shaking his head confoundedly.
“And what the hell do you do?” Pete said indignantly, half running to keep up with