From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [494]
Charlie Chan, chattering frantically in Chinese, stopped wringing his hands long enough to drag her slack lax body back behind the bar. Then he went back wringing his hands and chattering in Chinese, stooped down behind the bar ready to duck. The large crowd, over which he had been so happy, had melted away. Most of them were standing just outside the open front watching the show.
It was a good show.
Stark was wading into the four scrambling bodies. He pulled out a foreign leg until a back emerged and began beating shattering blows into the kidneys of the unknown back.
From down in the mass a muffled voice raised itself, calling plaintively, “Hey, Ira. Where ya? Comen’n give us a hand.” Warden’s malevolently joyous laugh was a bellow, also strangely muffled. “You’ll need more than just four, friend.”
Ira the S/Sgt, still lying numbly on his table with his head propped against the wall, heard the call and slid down off the table shaking his head and holding his streaming nose. He paused long enough to mumble, “This is getting rough,” to nobody, and then dived back in.
The churning mass on the floor broke up, and Warden rose up like a colossus out of it, grinning silently murderously, blood trickling down out of his mouth onto his CKC shirt and tie. He worked his lips around and spat out two teeth dramatically. The uniform was ruined, both shoulders ripped out of the shirt, one pants leg torn almost off revealing the hairy hard slim column of muscle. Between his feet lay one of the S/Sgt’s buddies, in the same lax condition and as out of action as Miss Rose. Warden stood over him solidly, grinning happily silently, and punching with abandon at every face and belly he could reach.
His punches spun two of them back and away like pebbles flung off a spinning wheel.
Stark grasped the third one, who happened to be Ira the S/Sgt, and swung him sharply and drove a pulverizing punch into his adam’s apple with surgical precision as he turned. Ira staggered back wildly into a booth and sat down, choking in terrible pain, and gave up.
Of the other two, whom Warden had spun back out of range, one sat down apathetically in the booth with Ira. The second one, who had come up against the bar, grabbed a beer bottle and smashed it on the rail and ran past Stark at Warden with it, like a dagger, cursing sobbingly under his breathing. The smashing of the bottle brought a reproving murmur from the audience, but none of them moved to stop him.
Warden, still grinning sanguinarily, waited for him, his hands out before him like a wrestler, ready to grab if he got the chance.
But as the man ran past Stark at the bar, Stark stuck his foot out delicately and blasély. The running knifer crashed to the floor, still trying to reach Warden with his bottle.
Warden stepped back and let him hit the floor and then stepped up again and kicked him carefully in the head.
It had lasted perhaps six minutes.
But already, from down the street, shrilled the urgent and ever-alert whistles of the MPs getting nearer.
Charlie Chan, who was still wringing his hands, began to cry. Tears streamed down his face. “Now blingee goddam MP. Was so fine day. Now luin blisniss. Closem up tight.”
“Here they come, Texan,” Warden said, laughing witlessly. “Come on. I know a place.”
He jerked loose the rest of the hanging pants leg and stepped out of it, and then they were shoving and elbowing out through the still-gathering crowd. They ran down the block toward River Street, Warden still laughing riotously, away from the approaching urgent whistles.
“That Rose,” Stark laughed breathlessly. “She really fell for you, buddy. Next time you go back there you better wear your groin cup or she wont even let you wait till she gets you home, before she rapes you.”
“Thats why I aint figuring on ever going back,” Warden laughed. “Come on, this way.”
He turned left into the alley in the middle