From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [174]
“Okay, boss,” the dealer, who was a buck sergeant, said. He shoved Warden’s bills over to him to keep the piles separate and then shoved O’Hayer’s into the drawer that was already full of the red chips and silver he had cut the game for, for O’Hayer.
“It’ll be here when you get back, Jim,” the dealer promised faithfully proudly, and Warden watched him bland-eyedly neatly palm a tenspot off the pile as he continued the deal with his left hand, sliding the cards off with his thumb, then bring his right hand back to the deal still palming the folded ten, and then after the round was completed reach his right hand into his shirt pocket for a cigaret.
Warden looked at O’Hayer who was standing stretching after hanging his expensive eyeshade on a nail behind him and lit a cigaret himself and grinning, held the match for the buck sergeant dealer who did not grin back now but looked through him flat-eyedly across the match flame as he lit up.
Warden laughed and flipped the match away and then followed O’Hayer outside and the two of them stood breathing in the fresh air and smoking, O’Hayer silent and somehow sealed mathematically within himself as he stared indifferently at the thinly rusted over railroad rails.
Warden, who had meant to go on to the barracks, stood watching him and smoking, thinking this was as good a time as any to try and get the usual needle in through this thick skin, but wanting to just see if he couldnt make the automatic calculator speak first for once.
“Kitchen must be getting along pretty well now with Preem gone,” O’Hayer said finally; it was an indifferent offering to the abstract status of First Sergeant; you got the impression if it was anybody else he would not have been bothered speaking; still, he had spoken.
“Yeah,” Warden said, silently congratulating Warden. “I wish the rest of the compny administration was getting along so good.”
“Oh?” O’Hayer said coolly. “Mazzioli been giving you some trouble lately?”
Warden grinned. “Who else? And how are you coming? How you making out with the new bayonet issue?”
“Oh, that.” O’Hayer lifted his head and the cold eyes left their contemplation of the rails to study Warden. “Coming along fine, Top. I’ve given Leva instructions how to do it. If I remember, he’s got about half the chrome bayonets exchanged for the black ones now and the excess chrome ones turned in to ordnance. Its only a question of time,” he said.
“How much time?”
“Time,” O’Hayer said easily. “Just time. Leva’s got a lot of stuff to do, you know. You trying to tell me I’m taking too much time?”
“Oh, no,” Warden said. “The rest of the battalion only got their exchange completed and their chrome turned in about two weeks ago. You’re about on schedule.”
“You know, Top,” O’Hayer said, “you get too excited over little things, Top.”
“You dont get excited enough, Jim,” Warden said. He was feeling again, as he always felt with O’Hayer, that dispassionate itching to step in suddenly and knock him down, not from dislike, just to see if there wasnt some emotion in among the tumblers. Someday I’ll do it, he told himself. Someday I’ll quit thinking about it and do it, and then they can bust me, and I will go happily back to being a rear rank Rudy with no troubles and nothing to do but get drunk and lug around a rifle and be happy. Someday I will.
“It never pays to get excited,” O’Hayer explained. “You’re liable to forget little things, Top. Important things. In the excitement.”
“You mean like the connections between Regiment and the sheds? Or like the small opinions of Captain Holmes that are always, though, important?”
“Well, I didnt mean that,” O’Hayer said. He grinned. It was a tightening of the cheeks that pulled the mouth corners up and showed the teeth. “But since you mention it, I guess that would be a good example.”
“If you’re tryin to scare me it not only wont work its ridiculous,” Warden said. “I pray every night that by next Payday I’ll be drawin thirty doll