From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [99]
“You think thats what she does?” Warden said. “Holmes’s wife, I mean?”
“Hell yes. Why should she of fucked me down there at Bliss? a buckass private in the rear rank, who didnt even have no dough to spend on her?”
“You really fucked her?” Warden asked, then felt ashamed, because he used that word which was a good word, one of the best words, strong and powerful and coming straight from life into the language, like all the best words come; but still a word that was also private, intimate, a word to be whispered at the right time and in the right ear, but not a word he should have used, here and now, with Stark.
“You think I’d lie to you about it?”
“I don’t see why you should,” Warden said, and shrugged. “What the hell?” he said. “Its nothing to me. Maybe I can get some of it myself, sometime.”
“If you’re smart,” Stark said, “you’ll leave it alone. She’s nothin but a topflight bitch. She’s coldern hardern any whore I ever saw.” His face was adamant, convincing.
“Here,” Warden said. “Have another drink. Dont let it get you down, for Christ sake.”
Stark took the bottle without looking at it. “I done seen too many of these rich women. They worse than queers. And I dont like them.”
“Neither do I,” Warden said. If she had as many . . . Leva had said, she’d be a porcupine, he thought, listening to Stark’s voice going on to something else and his own voice answering. And they’re both smart boys, he thought, they know their way around, they aint punk kids.
But how can you, with your past experience, take anybody else’s judgement? you who’ve seen so many of the sure ones proved so wrong so many times? Conviction and intensity are not the coin of truth, they alone can never buy it. You take one man’s word, because he knows, and then you find the next man tells you just the opposite just as surely, and he knows too. Leva’s only giving you hearsay, he’s had no personal experience with her. And Stark was five years younger then, a mere nineteen, a kid, when he had his experience with her. That must have been an experience, he thought, that must really have been quite an experience, to make him talk the way he does now, five years later. Remember he was a juicy green young kid serving his first hitch.
But would the woman who went on the moonlight swimming party have done that? would she have laid for half the EM at Bliss? What do you say? I dont know. Yes, you dont know; and here are two men who do know. But can you trust their judgment? No, you cant. You cant accept what they know, and you dont know. Where does that leave you?
He wanted to take the bottle and rise up and smash it down on this talking, jawbone wagging skull, flatten it out on the floor until the jawbone jutted out of the pancaked matter and ceased wagging. Not because of what Stark had told him, and not because he’d laid this woman he himself had laid (you shy away from the Word, dont you?), no not because of that; he felt almost a curious friendliness and comradeship for him because of that, like two men who use the same toothbrush. Did two men ever use the same toothbrush? No, he wanted to flatten out this wagging skull with this bottle simply because it happened to be here, and he, absurdly, for no reason, felt the need of smashing something. Because what right have you to be mad at Stark because she laid for him? or for all the EM on the Post at Bliss, for that matter?
“. . . I think we can make it work,” Stark was saying. “We got all the cards.”
“Right.” Warden caught the shuttle in midpassage and returned it to his footlocker. “You wont see me around after this, Maylon,” he said. Might as well call him by his first name, he’s practically your brother, it looks as though you’ve got a lot of brothers. “Bring your troubles to the Orderly Room,” he said, listening to the tones of his own voice carefully. “You’ll h