by James Jones
“Christ!” Stark said reverently. “What an ass!”
“Amen,” Warden said tranquilly. He pursed his lips and ran his tongue over his mustache mellowly. He could feel the old cloudy belligerence of drunkenness rising up through his chest into his head soothingly, like a deep breath of camphor. Everything had that startling clarity of forgotten things being seen again.
“Are you happy?” Stark said.
“Sure I’m happy.”
“Man this is the life,” Stark said pointedly. “I wouldnt trade this life for nothing. Would you?”
“No,” Warden said. “Stark,” he said, “you know whats wrong with you? You’re a Texan, and you aint go no sense of humor.”
“I got a sense of humor.”
“Sure you have. Everybody has. But yours aint the right kind. Its too thick. Like blackstrap. You cant distinguish pride from a sense of humor. A proud man without the right kind of sense of humor beats himself to death before he’s thirty. Now take me. I got a real sense of humor. Thats why I can make a guy like you do anything I want him to.”
“You cant make me do nothing I dont want to,” Stark declared.
“I cant, hunh?” Warden said slyly. “You want to bet?”
“Sure, I’ll bet.”
Warden turned back to his drink, grinning slyly. Then he straightened up. “Hey, Rose!”
Rose came back up to the bar frowning. “Goddam Warden, what you want now?”
“Another shot of rye, Rose baby. Thats what I want. Fill my glass.”
“The man will fill your glass. Charlie fill it.”
“To hell with him. I want you to fill it, Rose.”
“Hokay. But you costing me. You want another beer too?”
Warden looked at his bottle. “Yeah. Throw that out. Gimme cold one.”
“You more trouble than I’m worth,” Rose smiled.
“You think so? Whats your boy friend’s name, Rose?”
“You go to hell.”
“What outfit’s he in?”
“I said you go to hell.”
“You know why I like for you to fill my glass, Rose? Its because I like to watch you walk away afterwards. You got a lovely bottom, Rose.”
“I’m married,” Rose said with dignity, meaning she was shacked up. But she was flattered.
“Whats your boy friend’s name?”
“Goddam it,” Rose exploded. “You shut up and go to hell.”
“My name is Berny,” the Artillery S/Sgt said, coming over from the booth. He was almost as big a man as Warden. “Sgt Ira Berny. 8th Field Artillery. Anything else you want to know, Sergeant?”
“Well,” Warden said thoughtfully. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-four next June,” the S/Sgt said. “Anything else?”
“You got a very lovely shackjob for so young a man.”
“And I aim to keep her,” the S/Sgt said. “Anything else?”
“Yes. Would you be so kind as to have a drink with me and my friend here?” Warden said.
“Sure.”
“Rose honey,” Warden said, “pour him one.”
“Whiskey,” the S/Sgt said.
Rose poured it. Warden paid her. The S/Sgt tossed it off. “Well, be seein you,” Warden said in dismissal, and turned back to Stark, his back toward them. “Have a good time.” He began to talk to Stark.
They stood a moment, caught up short. Then they both went back to the booth. In the booth they began to talk to each other violently, and the three buddies listening.
“What the hell you doin?” Stark said. “Tryin’ to start a fight?”
“I never start fights.”
“But I suppose you finish them,” Stark said.
“No. I dont even finish them.”
“Shall we take him now?”
“Take who where?” Warden said.
“Yore buddy, the S/Sgt.”
“What are you talking about?” Warden demanded. “Oh, I forgot. You’re a Texan. Hey, Texan,” he said “I hear you’re a hotshot rifle shooter. Is that right?”
“I know the front end from the back,” Stark said.
“How’d you like to shoot with me, Texan? Make a little sidebet. Say about a hundred bucks.”
Stark reached in his pocket. “Even money?”
Warden grinned.
“Any time you say,” Stark said. He extracted a ten and three ones from the fold of bills and tossed the rest of it on the bar. “One hundred bucks. Any old time you say.”
The roll was mostly fives and ones and it looked very big lying loose on the bar folded once.
Warden bent to look at it. “Well, well, if the Texan aint gone and collected himself a great big pile of dough. Hows it feel to be rich, Texan?”
“Theres a shootin gallery right up the street,” Stark said. “Or we can go over to Mom’s gallery on Hotel Street. Get there in five minutes.”
“You’d have a better chance there than you would out on the Range.”
“Do you want to bet? or dont you?” Stark demanded. “Put up or shut up.”
“You’re a sucker, Texan; dint I tell you I could make you do anything I want? Why, I could even make you go over there and fight that whole bunch of Artillerymen, if I wanted to. Dont you know I can outshoot you hands down? Put your money in your pocket like a good little boy. There aint three men on this Rock can outshoot me, and you know it.”
“You cant make me do nothin I dont already want to do,” Stark insisted.
Warden tapped his temple with his second finger. “Brains, Texan. Brains and a sense of humor. Why you could be an Officer in three months, with me guidin you.”
“Who the hell wants to be an Officer?” Stark exclaimed indignantly. “You dont have to insult me. I can take care of myself, Firs Sarnt. I get along.”
“Now thats just where you’re wrong, Texan. Thats what I’m tryin to teach you. Its results that count. You dont have to lose your pride if you dont want to. You could be an Officer easy as not.”
“Dont do me no favors.”
“You still want to shoot with me, Texan?”
“Anytime you say.”
“Okay,” Warden grinned slyly. “We’ll go over to Mom’s and shoot ten rounds at a card, a hundred bucks even money. Let Mom hold the stakes. Here.” He tossed the dampened fold of bills in front of Stark contemptuously. “Put this in your pocket, or you wont have it long around here.”
Stark folded it back in with his ten and three ones and stuffed the loose sheaf back into his pants pocket. While he was occupied with this, Rose walked past the corner of the bar again where they sat, to fill another order, her beautiful bottom trembling enticingly with each step.
Warden swung suddenly on his stool as she passed and reached out and pinched one of the soft checks lightly. Rose stopped in midstride and turned, swinging her open palm. Warden caught her wrist easily, in his left hand, without even moving. She swung her right at his face, arched into a claw, the long bloodred nails like talons. Warden, grinning, caught it just as easily, in his right hand, and held her, his hands crossed in front of him, just holding her and grinning seditiously.
Unable to jerk loose, Rose delivered a vicious kick at his privates on the edge of the stool. Warden turned his right knee in gracefully, with such ease that it seemed effortless, and caught her shin on his knee. Then he rose from the stool on his left leg, pushing it between her legs, and the struggling cursing girl was off balance and powerless. Warden held her easily, letting her struggle.
“Take it easy, baby,” he grinned contentedly. “I wont hurt you. You’re a woman after my own heart, but dont get me all excited. I’m liable to lay you right here on the floor.”
Rose’s lips writhed back in a snarl and she spat at him explosively. Warden weaved to the left like a boxer, and except for a fine spray, the gob of spittle missed him and hit Stark square in the center of the shirt.
The whole thing had happened so swiftly that Stark had hardly looked up from putting away his roll.
“Goddam bastard son of a whore goddam,” Rose hissed fervently. “Fucking cocksucker bastard goddam.”
Rose’s boy friend and his buddies were already on their feet.
“Hey, thats no way to treat a lady,” the boy friend said.
“Yeah,” one of the buddies said. “Leave go of the lady.”
Warden looked at them, his eyes wide in mock amazement. “What? So she can hit me? Dont be silly, friend.”
“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 staggered back wildly into a booth and sat down, choking in terrible pain, and gave up.
Of the other two, whom Warden had spun back out of range, one sat down apathetically in the booth with Ira. The second one, who had come up against the bar, grabbed a beer bottle and smashed it on the rail and ran past Stark at Warden with it, like a dagger, cursing sobbingly under his breathing. The smashing of the bottle brought a reproving murmur from the audience, but none of them moved to stop him.
Warden, still grinning sanguinarily, waited for him, his hands out before him like a wrestler, ready to grab if he got the chance.
But as the man ran past Stark at the bar, Stark stuck his foot out delicately and blasély. The running knifer crashed to the floor, still trying to reach Warden with his bottle.
Warden stepped back and let him hit the floor and then stepped up again and kicked him carefully in the head.
It had lasted perhaps six minutes.
But already, from down the street, shrilled the urgent and ever-alert whistles of the MPs getting nearer.
Charlie Chan, who was still wringing his hands, began to cry. Tears streamed down his face. “Now blingee goddam MP. Was so fine day. Now luin blisniss. Closem up tight.”
“Here they come, Texan,” Warden said, laughing witlessly. “Come on. I know a place.”
He jerked loose the rest of the hanging pants leg and stepped out of it, and then they were shoving and elbowing out through the still-gathering crowd. They ran down the block toward River Street, Warden still laughing riotously, away from the approaching urgent whistles.
“That Rose,” Stark laughed breathlessly. “She really fell for you, buddy. Next time you go back there you better wear your groin cup or she wont even let you wait till she gets you home, before she rapes you.”
“Thats why I aint figuring on ever going back,” Warden laughed. “Come on, this way.”
He turned left into the alley in the middle of the block, still laughing brainlessly happily. It was the same alley where he had stood and talked to Prewitt that night before they went across the street for a drink, the last time he had seen him. He thought of it momentarily, running, and ran on.
“This’ll be the first place they’ll look for us,” Stark said.
“Never you mind. Come on. I know where I’m going.”
Halfway through the alley Warden called, “This way!” and turned left again up the middle of the block, back the way they had come. They passed the back door of the Blue Chancre. Then he ran left over the cinders to the back of the next building where there was a fire escape and began to mount. Stark followed him up and crouching, hearing the urgent whistles down below in the babble, they ran lightly over three or four roofs before Warden stopped.
“Lets see,” he said. “I think this is the one. Yes, its this one here.” He leaned across the three foot chasm of shadows and rapped sharply on a window of the next building. He waited impatiently, then rapped again.
From up here, on the third story roof, they could see the roofs of the whole town below Beretania down the hill, sloping away toward the harbor at the foot of Nuuanu. In the bright sunshine glinting on the deep blue of the water down there, out beyond the upright finger of the Aloha Tower and in the Sand Island channel, a ship was pulling out. One of the Matson liners; the Lurline, it looked like.
Involuntarily surprised, both of them stood and watched it. The big ship slid on, silently and pitilessly, as resistless and impossible to stop as a birthday or a moving clock. The bow was already out of sight behind one of the big bank buildings. They watched it until the whole s
hip, foot by foot silently, had slid behind it and on out of sight.
“Well,” Stark said raspingly, “are we goin in this goddam place, or aint we?”
Warden swung around and looked at him, his eyes wide and violent, as if he had not known he was there. As if Stark had slipped up on him and he had not known he was there. He looked at him that way a moment, widely, violently, silently. Then he turned to the window and rapped again.
“Who is it?” a woman’s voice said this time.
“Let us in, Gert,” Warden laughed. “The MPs is after us.”
The woman opened the window. “Who is that?”
“Its Milt. Why dont you wash your windows? Come on, get out of the way.”
He stepped from the parapet down across to the window sill and squeezed through. Stark took one more look down at the empty blue bay and then followed him.
They were in a long empty hallway, ending in a big barred metal door. The woman was tall and narrow-faced, of about forty-five or fifty. She wore a beautiful evening gown with a corsage of gardenias at her throat.
“Mrs Kipfer!” Stark said disbelievingly. “Well, shoot me for a Jap.”
“Why, Maylon Stark!” Mrs Kipfer said. “I know this one,” she frowned at Warden. “But I never thought I’d see you coming in the back door.”
Warden laughed uproariously. “Why, Sgt Stark is the hero and savior of the evening, Gert. If it hadnt been for Sgt Stark here and his quick thinking, yours truly might have even got hurt. Who knows? maybe left for dead in one of these rotting Honolulu alleys through which we so elusively eluded the strong arm of the Law and claimed sanctuary in your Church of All Souls.”
“It appears to me you’re hurt anyway.” She stepped closer and inspected his mouth primly, with the efficient reproving air of a trained nurse.
“Oh, Milt! You’ve lost two of your teeth! What a shame. And for what. All for some silly brawl with no purpose but entertainment. When are you going to grow up?”
“I’ll have you know I was defending the cause of chivalry,” Warden grinned at her charmingly. “I was protecting that fairest of all the sexes, the female.” He bowed to her. Warm golden glints in his eyes shone down at her laughingly. “Besides, the Army’ll buy me new ones.”