From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [477]
“Easy, baby. Take it easy,” he said to the struggling Rose. “You’ll have a stroke.”
The four Artillerymen moved toward him simultaneously, like a row of cars leaving a stoplight.
Warden shook his head disapprovingly. “Now-now, fellas,” he said.
“Son of a bitching son of a goddam,” Rose was hissing passionately.
Warden gave her a little shove that plumped her against the back wall out of his way, as if she were something that had served its purpose, and moved to meet the four advancing Artillerymen with a sanguinariness so blindingly sudden that it caught them all off balance. His big fist flashed out viciously with the full weight of his moving body behind it and landed on the S/Sgt’s nose with a crunching sound. Ira slid back against the booth in a sitting position, his broken nose bleeding profusely. Warden met the three buddies chest on with a hungry bellow.
Rose, who had bounced off the wall like a fighter off the ropes, was climbing his back, her talons in his neck, her sharp little teeth searching for his ear.
The S/Sgt got up from the floor, shook his head a couple of times, and started back into it again. Stark, who had been watching astonishedly, met him with a measured punch, his thick Mess/Sgt’s arm moving in a blur of speed like the tail-lash of a whip. Ira fell back, feet working fast. His rump hit the booth table and he slid back across it and came to rest with his head propped up by the wall.
Rose, on Warden’s back, unable to find an ear, settled for the back and sank her teeth into his shoulder through shirt, T-shirt, and all. By this time the five of them, the three buddies, Warden, and Rose, were all down on the floor in a churning mass of arms and legs. Warden twitched his back irritably, and Rose was flung off and against the wall, in spite of her three holds.
She came right back, screaming in a high shrill senseless falsetto, and jumped for Warden’s back again with both feet off the floor. A fist belonging to one of the S/Sgt’s friends, flashing out of the writhing mass, met her directly in the forehead and she was knocked back, down, out, and out of the fight.
Charlie Chan, chattering frantically in Chinese, stopped wringing his hands long enough to drag her slack lax body back behind the bar. Then he went back wringing his hands and chattering in Chinese, stooped down behind the bar ready to duck. The large crowd, over which he had been so happy, had melted away. Most of them were standing just outside the open front watching the show.
It was a good show.
Stark was wading into the four scrambling bodies. He pulled out a foreign leg until a back emerged and began beating shattering blows into the kidneys of the unknown back.
From down in the mass a muffled voice raised itself, calling plaintively, “Hey, Ira. Where ya? Comen’n give us a hand.” Warden’s malevolently joyous laugh was a bellow, also strangely muffled. “You’ll need more than just four, friend.”
Ira the S/Sgt, still lying numbly on his table with his head propped against the wall, heard the call and slid down off the table shaking his head and holding his streaming nose. He paused long enough to mumble, “This is getting rough,” to nobody, and then dived back in.
The churning mass on the floor broke up, and Warden rose up like a colossus out of it, grinning silently murderously, blood trickling down out of his mouth onto his CKC shirt and tie. He worked his lips around and spat out two teeth dramatically. The uniform was ruined, both shoulders ripped out of the shirt, one pants leg torn almost off revealing the hairy hard slim column of muscle. Between his feet lay one of the S/Sgt’s buddies, in the same lax condition and as out of action as Miss Rose. Warden stood over him solidly, grinning happily silently, and punching with abandon at every face and belly he could reach.
His punches spun two of them back and away like pebbles flung off a spinning wheel.
Stark grasped the third one, who happened to be Ira the S/Sgt, and swung him sharply and drove a pulverizing punch into his adam’s apple with surgical precision as he turned. Ira s