From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [19]
“Got two new girls in fresh from the States. One redhead and one brunette. Interested?”
“No,” he said. “I ain’t.”
“You aint?” Leva grinned. “I kind of thought you might want to go along with me tonight. I thought you might feel like it.”
“Go to hell, Niccolo. When I have to pay for it I’ll quit.”
Leva laughed, high up in his nose, making a sound like the spluttering of Diesel exhaust. “Well,” he said, “I just thought. Man, but that Holmes woman is one, aint she?”
“One what?”
“One woman.”
“I’ve seen better,” Warden said indifferently.
“Wonder why a man wants to go lookin for Kanaky maids when he got that at home, and with a bed too.”
“She’s cold,” Warden said. “That’s why. Cold as hell.”
“Yes?” Leva taunted. “I guess thats right. I guess thats why all these guys get tired of her. Anyway, I never seen a piece of ass yet was worth twenty years in Leavenworth.”
“Me neither,” Warden said.
“A man that fools with that stuff’s a sucker to take a chance of gettin his fingers burnt, an officer’s woman.”
“That’s right,” Warden said. “All she’d have to do, if she got caught with you, would be to holler rape and it would be Dear John, thats all she wrote.” He was looking out the door across the quad where Dog Company was toiling through its drill for stoppages. Through the truck entrance at the southeast corner showed the front half of Holmes’s house with two windows in its sidewall. That back window was the bedroom window, he had been in it once when Holmes had been changing uniforms and he had had to have him sign some papers. As he watched now he saw the car stop out in front of it and Karen Holmes climb out and walk, long-leggedly smooth and clean below the skirt, up to the porch and he remembered, now, how the other of the twin beds had looked with the woman’s shoes beneath it.
“Lets fall to on this work,” he reproved Leva. “I got that transfer comin in at nine-thirty. Also, I got a conference with Holmes and one of them goddamned complaining cooks that was scheduled for eight-thirty, but which, since Holmes aint showed up yet, will probly start at nine-thirty and last till eleven. I wont get that transfer out till noon. So if you want help, we better get on the ball.”
“Okay, Chief,” Leva grinned at him. “Anything you say, Chief.”
“And remember,” Warden said, “Mon-sewer O’Hayer says you got to straighten up this mess sometime today.”
“Your face,” Leva said.
“Your mother’s box,” Milt said. “Get to work.”
Chapter 4
MILT WARDEN, IN THE Orderly Room, heard Prewitt come in on the concrete of the ground-level porch. The conference with the complaining cook that had begun late was still in progress, but over and above it he heard the new man’s footsteps and recognized them with that wide angle range tuning of his mind that was never a part of what he happened to be doing. How would it be, he asked himself listening to Holmes’s voice, how would it just be that if some day, just once, you could do a thing without having to listen for new angles that you might use? He did not need to answer. It would be fine. The complaining conference, which had begun with the complainings of this cook and had now progressed to the counter complainings of Capt Holmes, and would wind up with usual pep talk, was a long way from finished yet. This cook, whose name was Willard and who was the most complaining cook of all of them and who was bucking hard to get the rating of Mess/Sgt Preem, had complained excellently about Preem’s drunkenness and inefficiency and of the fact that he, Willard, was doing the work of a Mess/Sgt on the pay of a First Cook. He had complained superlatively, even outdoing all of his own former complaints, but Holmes, to whom Preem was still one of those who had served with him at Bliss, had also surpassed himself, weathering all of it very well and finally coming out in the lead with his own complaints of Willard who was, Holmes felt, not doing a good enough job as Mess/Sgt to earn his First Cook’s pay. Warden was indifferent to the outcome but since now and then he found an opportunity to stick in