From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [173]
Turp let him have the twenty, finally, after a pause in his Southern Ku Klux Klan brand of humor, a pause in which white lines of suspicion pinched in upon his mouth and cut down through his laughter while he attempted to divine all the thousand ways this seemingly open man might be trying to crook him, oh, he looked honest enough, but you never can tell, and Turp Thornhill knew a thing or two, Turp Thornhill knew better than to trust a man’s looks, Turp Thornhill was like Diogenes, he had never seen an honest man, and he never would. After insulting him, ridiculing him, suspicioning him, torturing him by letting on he could not afford to loan it, Turp generously let him have the whole twenty dollars he had asked for, at twenty per cent, and warned him narrowly not to try to pull some wise shenanigan when it come time to pay it back.
Prew, as he dressed for town with the twenty in his pocket, felt the degradation of Turp’s foul breath still on him that a shower would not wash off and wondered which was worse, to be poked by Turp’s foul breathing Mississippi nose or to be sprayed with Ike Galovitch’s foul smelling Slavic spit. This was sure turning out to be some outfit. A fine home, this outfit. He was also wondering, as he dressed, at the humiliations men will suffer for a woman that they will not suffer for any other thing, even for their politics.
Chapter 21
MILT WARDEN, AS HE debated checking out of this game himself, was thinking somewhat the same thing, just as wonderingly, but about a different woman.
Perhaps it was because he was meeting Karen Holmes downtown tonight at the Moana, he thought, but every time he looked up from his cards his eyes focused themselves on the battered husky face of Maylon Stark with a kind of shocked disbelief like a man looking at his own arm blown off and lying in his slit trench. It was outrageous, this face, and what was worse it was ruining his game. Because he could not stop looking at it. Two out of the last three hands he’d lost he should have won except that his eyes were staring themselves at this face whose eyes and lips had also caressed the nude self-induced-trance that was like death and that was Karen Holmes when being loved, and that he, Milt Warden, remembered clearly. That undoubtedly Stark remembers clearly too, he thought. Because there was no doubt he had, goddam it. No doubt at all. Any way you turn it. It was not wishful thinking because Stark had not mentioned it again since that first time; Stark was not the artistic type who can imagine things into reality, worse luck. And obviously Stark had not mentioned it to anybody else or it would have got around, clear around, by now; but then Stark was not a bragger either, who needed ego building. No, he thought scrotum-sickeningly, no doubt at all, you cant explain it away, and the worst of that is that it points the finger at the up to now preposterous stories of her and Champ Wilson, and that goddamned perverted Henderson, and even possibly O’Hayer. He looked at O’Hayer. But she said, “I never knew it could be like this”; he remembered distinctly she had said, “I never knew it could be like this.”
“Check me out,” he said to the dealer, “so’s I can get in a goddam game where theres some action. And theres ninety-seven dollars in silver. I counted it already.”
The dealer grinned. “You dont mind if I count it too, do you, Milt?”
“Hell no. I just wanted you to know I counted it.”
The dealer laughed, heartily.
“Take this too