From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [384]
As he felt him going, Prew with his left arm clamped tight against the burn of his side clenched the handle and turned his wrist to bring the blade-edge up, letting the body tear itself off by its own weight bending his wrist slowly like too big a fish straightening out the hook, cutting deep, down across the left side with the ribcase as a guide-edge. He had come down here to kill him. And he did not want to have to stab him on the ground, or cut his throat.
S/Sgt Judson lit on his right shouldertip and rolled on over on his back, his head propped just a little on the brick wall of the building, his eyes already glazing. His right arm was still stretched out as if trying by sheer will to draw the knife back up into it, as if that might change things. He wheezed and managed to put his left hand over his cut belly.
“You’ve killed me. Why’d you want to kill me,” he said, and died. The expression of hurt surprise and wounded reproach and sheer inability to understand stayed on his face like a forgotten suitcase left at the station, and gradually hardened there.
Prew stood looking down at him, still shocked by the reproving question. Around the corner of the alley the two bartenders of the Log Cabin came out together and clinkily locked the door and moved off talking quietly down the brick toward Beretania.
Prew moved then. He closed the knife and wrapped it in his handkerchief and snapped the rubber band around the handkerchief and put the package in his pocket.
His side was bleeding steadily and he took the other handkerchief, the clean one, and wadded it and stuck it inside his shirt and clamped his arm down on it, working hurriedly to catch it before it soaked down through his pants; it had already come through his shirt in spots and the gook shirt had been ripped open where the knife had gone in. But his arm would partly cover that.
Then he moved on out the east end of the alley, walking north away from town. After he had walked two blocks he stepped into another alley and sat down and leaned back against the wall to think it over now. It felt very cozily safe in the alley.
He ought to be somewhere up around Vineyard Street now. This was gook quarters up here above Beretania, tenements, and he didn’t know this part very well. But Vineyard Street, he remembered, ran east quite a ways. It was east that he would have to go.
It was useless to think about going back to Schofield now, cut up like this; they’d have him the first thing in the morning as soon as they found Fatso even if he did manage to get in through the gate. The only thing left to do now was to make it across town to Alma’s. If he could get to Alma’s he would be all right.
His mind was working very clearly, with the same crystal intensity of focus as in the fight, and he grinned at it ruefully. Lock the barn after the horse is stolen. If the son of a bitch could only think as clearly all the time as it did when it had to, we wouldnt never get into these positions where it had to.
He had not even considered the possibility of getting cut up so bad he could not go back to the Post. Any fool ought to of thought of that. He had not thought to bring extra handkerchieves either; dry handkerchieves would have helped to coagulate it faster.
The steady bleeding, slow, but still as inexorably logical and indifferent to plans and wishes as one of Jack Malloy’s Natural Laws, was beginning to soak through the handkerchief in spots and drip down his side again. He shifted the handkerchief again and clamped his arm back down on it and that stopped the dripping, but he still would not be able to climb on a bus or streetcar looking like this with a ripped-open shirt showing spots of blood. It might soak through on the bus where he could not shift it again and his mind coldly flashed him a picture of the consternation he would cause getting up to walk off a brightly lighted city bus. There was nothing in this world as red as blood. Not even Jack Malloy’s archenemies the C