From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [73]
“If you’d of decided to punch for Dynamite you would of got that rating. You can bet your balls you’d got it. And you want to spend thirty years of your life in a deal like this!”
Prew grinned, and agreed, but he said nothing. There wasnt anything for him to say.
“Come on,” Maggio said disgustedly. “Lets get a game goin in the latrine. Maybe I can win enough to go to town.”
“Okay,” Prew said, still grinning, following him. The rainy season had been good to him. The leisurely lectures in the Dayroom and the practical work of field- and detail-stripping and assembling the various pieces on the chilly porches with the sound of rain outside were things he liked, and since they were conducted by a single officer or noncom for the Company as a whole, they gave him respite from the vengeful eye of Old Ike Galovitch who seemed bent on protecting the honor of the Great God Holmes, ever since he first found out that Prew had refused to fight. Also, the ending of the boxing season had relieved the tension he had brought into the Company, temporarily at least.
The three globed lights in the first floor latrine burned dimly. A GI blanket, Maggio’s, was spread out on the concrete floor between the row of commodes in open stalls on one wall and the urinal trough and washbowls on the other, and the six men sat down around it.
Maggio, shuffling the cards, looked over at the topless, seatless, commodes in their stalls where three men were sitting with their pants down, and held his nose. “Hey,” he said, “is this a goddam cardroom? or a la-trine? Attensh-HUT! Da-ress Right, DHRESS!”
The men looked up from their magazines, cursed, and went back to business.
“Deal the cards, Angelo,” Anderson, the company bugler, said. “Deal the cards.”
“Sure,” said Salvatore Clark, the apprentice bugler, grinning shyly under his long Italian nose. “Deal them cards, Wop, or I’ll put you down and shove them up you, see?” He laughed then, with rich shy humor, unable to keep to his self-appointed role as tough guy.
“You wait,” Maggio said. “I’ll deal these cards. I’m stackin these cards.” He held the deck in his open left hand, index finger crooked professionally around the top.
“You couldnt stack shit with a shovel, Angelo,” Prew said.
“Listen,” Maggio said. “I learn to deal these cards in Brooklyn, see? on Atlantic Avenue, where anything less then a royal flush never had a chanct.” He riffled the cards from right hand to left, as near as he could come to the delicate card ladder of professional gamblers. He began to deal. The game was stud. And each of them was suddenly alone, engrossed.
Prew laid the fifty cents in nickels he had borrowed from Pop Karelsen, Sgt of the Weapons Platoon and intellectual friend of Cpl Mazzioli, and who had taken a liking to him when he found out he knew machineguns, on the blanket and winked at Clark.
“Boy,” said Sal Clark fervently. “How I’d like to make a stake in this game and take it over to O’Hayer’s and make a killing.” It was the hope and dream of all of them. “I’d take that ol’ Honolulu over, I mean. I’d rent me the whole fuckin New Congress Hotel for one whole night, and the ones I couldnt lay I’d have to watch and give advice.” He, who could never get up nerve enough to even go to a whorehouse unless someone was with him, chuckled and grinned shyly at his own deception. “You aint never been to the New Congress, have you Prew? You aint never been to Mrs Kipfer’s, have you?”
“I aint had the money yet,” Prew said. He looked at Sal, feeling a warmness of protection, and then across at his sidekick Andy who was engrossed sullenly in his cards, and then back at Sal, on whose account it was mainly that he had finally made friends