From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [66]
“Well I can,” Warden said. “I can do everything for him but wear his goddamned bars. At that I draw the line. But these papers go to Division and he’s got to sign them himself.”
“Then I’d better call the Club,” she said, “hadnt I? That is where he is.”
“Having a drink or two,” Warden said.
“But I’ll be glad to call him for you, Sergeant.”
“To hell with that. I never like to disturb a man drinking. I could use a drink myself right now. Bad.”
“But if its business,” Karen Holmes said.
“Anyway, I dont think you’ll find him at the Club. I got a faint suspicion he went to town with Colonel Delbert,” Warden grinned at her.
Karen Holmes did not answer. She stared at him unsmiling from a cold reflective face that did not know he still was there.
“Well,” he said. “Aint you going to ask me in?”
“Why, yes, Sergeant,” Karen Holmes said. “Come right in.”
She moved then, slowly, as if her joints had got rusty from standing still so long, and stepped back up the single step into the kitchen to let him in. Warden, standing on the porch, caught a flash of female hairflesh, etched ivory as she moved her legs. He followed her in, watching her cutely teetering buttocks in the tight cloth, that was the only word for it: cutely; cutely because femalely, because womanly, roundly without the harsh angularity of maleness that in the barracks could become so sickening, cutely first one up the other down, then the other up and the first down, quiveringly, cutely, as she walked ahead of him.
“What kind of drink do you want, Sergeant?”
“I dont care,” he said. “Any drink’ll do.”
“You dont want a drink,” Karen Holmes said. “You dont really want a drink. What you really want is this,” she said, looking down at her own body and moving her hands out sideways like a sinner at the altar. “Thats what you really want. Isnt it? Thats what you all want. All all of you ever want.”
Warden felt a shiver of fear run down his spine. What the hell is this, Milton? “Yes,” he said. “Thats what I really want. But I’ll take a drink too,” he said.
“All right. But I wont mix it for you. You can mix it yourself or you can drink it straight.” She sat down in a chair beside the enameled kitchen table and looked at him.
“Straight’s all right,” he said.
“The bottle’s there,” she pointed to a cupboard. “Get it yourself. I wont get it for you.” She laid her hand flat on the cool smoothness of the table. “You can have it, Sergeant, but you’ll have to do the work yourself.”
Warden laid the papers on the table and got the bottle from the cupboard, thinking I can match that, baby. “You want one too?” he said. “You just wait,” he said. “You’ll help me.”
“I dont think I want a drink,” Karen Holmes said. Then, “Yes, perhaps I’d better. I’ll probably need it, dont you think?”
“Yes,” he said. “You probly will.” There were glasses on the sink and he took two and poured them both half full, wondering what kind of a woman this one was anyway.
“Here,” he said. “To the end of virginity.”
“I’ll drink to that,” she raised her glass. She made a face from the liquor as she set it down. “You’re taking an awful chance, you know,” she said. “Do you really think its worth it? What if Dana should come home? I’m safe you know: my word is always better than an EM’s word. I’d holler rape and you’d get twenty years, at Leavenworth.”
“He wont,” Warden grinned, repouring in her glass. “I know where he is. He probly wont be home at all tonight. Besides,” he said, looking up from filling his own glass, “I got two buddies from PI at Leavenworth, I’d be among friends.”
“What happened to them?” she asked, drinking what was in her glass, making another face at it.
“They got caught in a buggy with a colonel’s wife by one of MacArthur’s gook boy scouts.”
“Both of them?”
He nodded. “And with the same dame. She picked them up, they said, but they still got twenty years. The gook was the colonel’s orderly. But I’ve heard it said he did it out of jealousy.”
Karen Holmes smiled tolerantly, but she did not laugh. “I think you’re bitter, Sergeant.” She set down her empty glass and lay back in