From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [397]
Prew moved to meet him silently, saving his breath, wishing momentarily he had been born a different person, wishing something, maybe if Warden had been home, he had meant to talk it over with Warden, wishing he had remembered to buy himself some chewing gum. Then it was gone and he was seeing everything in the finally climaxed focus of the crystal clarity that was like slow motion as if he had been smoking gauge and was nothing like the hectic swiftness of the ring.
It did not last long. It is only in the movies that knife fighters stab and miss and slash and miss and tussle over several city blocks. Figure one offensive thrust and miss, maybe two if you are very lucky. Most knife fighters are counter-punchers.
Behind them as they circled cautiously just beyond arm reach, the Log Cabin disgorged the last of its most insistent customers. Just a few feet around the corner they moved leisurely down the brick toward Beretania.
Fatso slid in a little like a boxer and raised his left hand toward Prew’s face and feinted with his knife outside Prew’s left arm as if he were going to go in over it and in the same movement, as Prew automatically raised his left hand to block, flecked back down and went in under it. The knife burned like dry ice along Prew’s ribs and cut itself into the wide muscle of his back under the armpit. Prew brought his left hand down sharply but it was already too late and the knife streaked off down his side in a comet tail.
If he had not stepped in at the same moment Fatso cut, if he had been gunshy or muscularly reluctant, if he had flinched, the fight would have been all over and it would have been up to Fatso, to go ahead and kill him or not kill him. But the years of boxing carried with them an instinct that no longer required either thought or courage. His knife went into Fatso at the diaphragm, just under the ribs, an automatic counter-punch right-cross to the solar plexus.
They stood that way perhaps a second or two, perhaps five seconds, thigh to thigh, Prew with his lower lip between his teeth pushing and twisting the knifeblade probing in the fat until the haft was buried in it gouging searchingly in the opening, two statues, the only visible movement Fatso’s right arm that was still trailing off down to its full length. When the arm reached full extension and pulled up snap-short, the knife went on, out of it, and clattered tinnily on the brick. Then Fatso started down.
As he felt him going, Prew with his left arm clamped tight against the burn of his side clenched the handle and turned his wrist to bring the blade-edge up, letting the body tear itself off by its own weight bending his wrist slowly like too big a fish straightening out the hook, cutting deep, down across the left side with the ribcase as a guide-edge. He had come down here to kill him. And he did not want to have to stab him on the ground, or cut his throat.
S/Sgt Judson lit on his right shouldertip and rolled on over on his back, his head propped just a little on the brick wall of the building, his eyes already glazing. His right arm was still stretched out as if trying by sheer will to draw the knife back up into it, as if that might change things. He wheezed and managed to put his left hand over his cut belly.
“You’ve killed me. Why’d you want to kill me,” he said, and died. The expression of hurt surprise and wounded reproach and sheer inability to understand stayed on his face like a forgotten suitcase left at the station, and gradually hardened there.
Prew stood looking down at him, still shocked by the reproving question. Around the corner of the alley the two bartenders of the Log Cabin came out together and clinkily locked the door and moved off talking quietly down the brick toward Beretania.
Prew moved then. He closed the knife and wrapped it in his handkerchief and snapped the rubber band around the handkerchief