From Here to Eternity

by James Jones

  “Well I’ll be damned!” Warden said, as if surprised.

  “The first thing an Officer has to learn is to be able to switch horses often and in midstream without getting his feet wet,” Dynamite smiled. “Of all the things an Officer has to know, that one’s the most important. Its different with Enlisted Men, they can get along without politics. It can help them of course, but its not the prime requisite; they can make good without it. But an Officer cant. Thats the first thing you’ll have to learn.”

  “Yes, Sir,” Warden heard himself say. “Thanks.”

  “Now it wont be for a couple of months,” Dynamite said. “But its as sure as God made little green apples. If you werent becoming an Officer yourself and I hadnt thought it might help you, I wouldnt have told you at all. But when I leave this outfit for Brigade, I’ll put you through for a fourteen day furlough. Hows that?”

  “I’d rather have it now,” Warden said. “And I want the full thirty days. If I didnt have them coming, it’d be different.”

  Dynamite shook his head. “I’m making you a fair proposition, Sergeant,” he said kindly. “More as a brother-in-arms than as a Commanding Officer. If you werent going to become what you’re going to become, I probably wouldnt even do that. Because of that, I’m treating you as an equal.

  “But,” he said friendlily, “thats absolutely the best I can do. I dont give a damn what happens to this outfit any more than you do, but if I put you in for a full thirty-day furlough, with the Company in the state its in, and especially at a time like this, it would only be turned down anyway and be a black mark against both of us. Thats politics. Theres more going on at the present time than meets the eye, Sergeant,” he said slyly with the air of a man who was on the inside.

  Warden watched him narrowly, still feeling uncomfortable to be formally sitting down.

  “Well, what do you say?” Dynamite said kindly. “Fourteen days,” he said. “Two months from today. Its the best any body could do for you, under the circumstances.”

  “Then I’ll take it,” Warden said. You could only push any man just so far. If you squeezed an orange past that certain point you not only got no more juice, but you tore the orange all apart.

  “Fine!” Holmes said. “Its a bargain then. Under the stipulation, of course, that both your furlough and my reassignment go no further than right here and now.”

  “Thats fair enough,” Warden said.

  “Its protection,” Holmes corrected. “Believe me, Sergeant, theres nothing for an Officer like protection.”

  “I believe you,” Warden said sourly.

  “Well,” Holmes said cheerily, “I’ll see you later. I’ve got a little business over at Headquarters.”

  Warden watched him through the window go off across the quad, wondering how many times in how many different circumstances he had watched how many people go off across that quad. If it had not of happened to him he could not have believed it. So that was what it was like, being an Officer? It was like all the big corporation men who sent presents to each other every Christmas and paid for it all out of the Company advertising funds; many wonderful expensive presents for themselves and their wives to stack up under their trees; and it didnt hurt anybody; and still nobody had to pay for it. Of course, the presents were always restricted to each other and each other’s wives.

  What surprised him the most was that it was so easy. One minute you were one thing, then the next minute you were something entirely different and opposite. Just like that. By signing a large sheet of paper.

  Two months, he thought. Two whole months. It looked like Gert Kipfer was going to get some more of his money after all, whether he wanted to spend it or no. That poor bastard Prewitt, up there in the hole. Prewitt and Maggio, two ordinary normal commonplace fuckups, up there in the hole without any. Not heroes, or Robin Hoods, or legendary paladins, but just two common ordinary verynormal fuckups, paying the common verynormal price of not getting any. Tough luck.

  If you couldnt have thirty days, you would settle for ten. If you couldnt have Karen when and how you needed her, you would settle for her when and where you could get her. If you couldnt have a thirty day furlough now, you would settle for a fourteen day one two months from now. Even The Prophet went to the mountain when the mountain refused to come over to him. That was the commonplace ordinary normal way of doing it, even for Prophets, and you were no Carolingian douzeper, you were no Robert of Locksley, you were just a commonplace ordinary verynormal—whatever it was that they called them.

  Chapter 42

  THEY PLAYED A GAME in the Stockade. In the evening after chow the mattress from an empty bunk would be hung on the chain mess grid across the center window in the back wall with strings of knotted shoelaces. Then one man, usually the smallest unless there was a volunteer, would stand with his back against the mattress and the rest would line up at the far end of the aisle according to size with the smallest first and, one at a time, run at the man against the mattress and hit him in the belly with their shoulders like a fullback throwing a checkblock at the end on an offtackle shoot, except that in this case with the mattress behind him there was no place to fall back to and it was up to the belly muscles to protect themselves.

  Since cards dice roulettewheels and coins were not allowed in the Stockade, this game provided the chief recreation of Barrack Number Two in the evenings. It was not played at all in either of the other barracks, but in Number Two no man was allowed the privilege of not participating.

  It was a rough game. But then they were hard men in Number Two, they were the toughest of the tough, they were the cream. If the man at the mattress could stay up there clear through the entire line, he had won the game. As the prize, he got a free run at every man in the line. Not very many got to enjoy the prize. At the time Prew came into Number Two only two men had ever succeeded in staying up. They were Jack Malloy and Blues Berry, the two biggest; bigness helped, in the Stockade; and they were the only two, although Angelo The Wop Maggio had been knocked senseless several times trying it. The first time Prew played he made it up to the last man, which was Jack Malloy, the biggest. Then his belly and knees betrayed him, even though Malloy was the last man and all he had to do was stay on his feet to win, and after Malloy’s run he collapsed weakly and Malloy had to help him back to the commode to vomit, Prew cursing furiously and bubblingly weakly. His feat was considered quite an accomplishment for a little man, but he was not satisfied with it, and before he had been there a week he had managed to stay up past Malloy and win, although he had to drop out and let them go on playing for a while before he recuperated enough to claim his prize and take his free runs at the line.

  Next to The Game, which had no other name, pitching matchbooks at a crack for tomorrow’s ration of Duke’s Mixture was the favorite sport in Number Two. There were other games, such as the one called Can-you-take-it where one man blocks his solar plexus with his left arm and his genitals with his right and allows his opponent to hit him as hard as he can in the belly, each taking turns at hitting until one man has to quit. Also, the old Indian-wrassles had been stolen from the Boy Scouts and given extra teeth to make them interesting. Indian-wrassle-on-the-table, where the two men place their elbows together and lock hands and try to put each other’s arm down, was played by putting lighted cigaret butts behind each man’s hand as added inducement. Indian-wrassle-on-the-floor, where the two men lie on their backs and lock legs and try to throw each other over, was played with pieces of 3/8ths slatting with 1/2-inch wire brads driven through them placed behind each man, and in spite of all the efforts to roll sideways when thrown more than one man wore blue-rimmed punctures in his knees out to work in the mornings. But of all the games, The Game itself, always took first precedence in popularity.

  Jack Malloy had invented it during his first stretch and since then it had become an institution in Number Two. He had gone back to duty and forgotten it, and come back for his second stretch to find it still being played in its original form wi
thout embellishments (which was a compliment in itself), and stayed to take it over again. He played with a live combative sense and indomitable will that, coupled with his physique, was almost impossible to down. When Malloy played, the contest, instead of being a fight for Malloy to stay up, was a fight for all the others to try and put him down. Prew made him go down once, and only once, and felt as if he had accomplished something that was magnificent. If there was anything that Jack Malloy of the gentle smile and dreamer’s eyes was vain of, it was his physique and his prowess with it. He was a big man in the sense in which Chief Choate was big, rather than in the sense that Warden was big, and he was without Chief Choate’s fat-degeneration. And, compared to his intellectual attainments which (to them) were almost mystical, he was proud of his physical prowess in the same way a high school football captain is vain of his swimming and diving. But this was no more strange to them than everything else about him.

  To Number Two, Jack Malloy was an enigma in the same way that all living symbols are enigmas to the men who symbolize them. Prew came to know him pretty well during the time Angelo was in the Hole making his fight, better than any of the others ever got to know him. He came to know him well enough to realize that the sole reason The Malloy let him get behind the curtain shrouding his past was not because Malloy saw him as an equal who would understand, but because to Malloy he was an inferior who openly needed help. The need for help seemed to be the only key that could unlock Jack Malloy.

  It was a bad time for Prew, when Angelo was doing his “30 Days” in the Hole. He had pictured it ahead of time how it would be, with Angelo deciding definitely one night that tomorrow was The Day, and the resulting handclasps and last final conversations and farewells. He had expected to have a chance to say goodby. But when it came, it did not happen that way.

  He had been there a full month with Angelo trying every day to make up his mind to do it, to lay it out and then push it through, and every time something happened to make the little guy postpone again. In spite of his fantastic courage, even Angelo did not quite have the nerve to start it off. It was going to be a bad ordeal, the worst yet, and Angelo knew it, and he could never quite bring himself to make a beginning. When it happened, it came as a surprise to all of them including Angelo, as a result of something clear outside Maggio’s control, and there were no farewells at all.

  The guard Turniphead Turnipseed had taken quite a dislike to Angelo for some obscure private reason, and this dislike had grown until it was an open flagrant heckling every time Turnipseed got near him. This one morning on the rockpile, when Turnipseed was on detail “in the pit” as the guards called the post down in the quarry, which because of the heat and dust was considered the worst detail on the place, Turnipseed, probably through irritation, had ridden Maggio even worse than usual, calling The Wop down every time he stopped his hammer long enough to breathe, reading him off particularly insultingly every time he spoke a word, obviously trying to goad him into something Turnipseed could turn him in for; until finally Turnipseed came clear over to him where a group of them were working, carrying his riotgun cradled in his left arm and slapped him in the face for not stopping talking. Prew was in the group and close enough to Angelo so that he could see the snapping bright black eyes. For the first time since he had known him there was none of that pinpoint-concentrated fury that liberties against his person always brought to the little Italian’s eyes. Maggio’s eyes were cold and calculating, as if he was also realizing at the same moment Prew’s heart skipped with it, that this was it, this was his chance, the situation he had been waiting for and trying to create, and that if he did not take advantage of it now he never would. There was the reluctant look on Angelo’s face of a man faced with a proposition of either doing a thing he would rather have avoided or else admitting to himself once and for all he was a coward.

  As Turnipseed stepped back to observe the effect of his action with a careful eye toward finding something that would merit turning in, Angelo dropped his hammer and went for Turniphead’s throat with his bare hands and an excellent imitation of a gibbering insane scream. It was a greater offense than Turniphead had bargained for. He was caught flat-footed and Angelo had him on the ground choking him before he could move. The group of prisoners, including Prew, all of whom except for two were from Number Two, just stood, still holding their hammers, and watched. Turnipseed managed to beat him loose with the butt of the riotgun and get up, before Maggio came at him again, still screaming insanely, but closer this time, too close for Turniphead to even attempt to use the buckshot, and Turniphead flattened him with the gunbarrel using both hands, thus fulfilling Angelo’s plan and hope to the letter.

  With Maggio unconscious at his feet in the sudden overwhelming silence, Turniphead stood dazed, breathing heavily and rubbing his neck with one hand, and staring at the group of other prisoners who had not moved, and were careful not to move now.

  “Yeah,” he gasped finally. “Go ahead and try something. Just try it.”

  Nobody answered.

  “I wish you would,” Turniphead said hopefully, still rubbing his neck and breathing heavily. “I’d love to shoot one of you cocksuckers. You’d stand right there and let that crazy man choke me to death and not do a goddam thing. A hell of a lot of mercy a guy can expect from a bunch of blood-thirsty wolves like you,” he said accusingly.

  Nobody answered.

  “Couple of you carry him down to the road,” he said, jerking his head behind him without moving his eyes. “The rest of you get the hell back to work. And I mean now.”

  Nobody from Number Two moved, and the two men from Number Three stepped forward quickly reluctantly, as if they had been pushed.

  “Go on, pick him up,” Turniphead said. “He aint dead, worse luck. Hey!” he called up the manmade cliff to the two guards with rifles who had come over and were watching. “Keep an eye out on the rest of this bunch here,” he hollered. “I like to had a goddam mutiny. Go on, you two, pick him up.”

  When they picked him up, Prew saw vaguely the knot beginning to rise from his forehead at the hairline where it had been split and a trickle of blood started down toward his eye. One more medal for Angelo. But his mind had already gone ranging ahead, reviewing the prospect of the thirty days to come, and nothing else could touch him.

  Turniphead followed the temporary stretcherbearers on down and had them leave him by the road and go on back up, before he put in the call from the box on the phonepole. The two guards with rifles up on the cliff were still watching closely and the group went on back to work. The last time Prew saw Angelo Maggio in his life was when the two MPs who had responded to the hurry-up phonecall tossed him, still unconscious, in the back of the 21/2-ton truck and started with him back down the grade.

  It had been a very long time in Robert E Lee Prewitt’s life since any individual had impressed himself upon it as much as Angelo Maggio, if you did not count Jack Malloy and The Warden. But while both of these, each in his totally different way, were superior beings of another grade that moved on another orbit, Angelo Maggio—first American-born generation of Brooklyn immigrant Italian stock, absolute hater of the Army; the total opposite of a mountain boy and thirty-year-man soldier whose white ancestors had come from Scotland and England before the Revolution, and still hated foreigners—Angelo Maggio was more nearly his own kind and caliber and closer to him than the big guns like Malloy and Warden. He left a very large hole.

  That he would never see or hear from him again, once he was discharged, he accepted without question; that was the way it was, in the Army, where alliances are formed out of the stock in hand today. And that he would be discharged, he accepted as unquestionably as the fact that he would not get to see him either before he went in the Black Hole or after, when he was transferred to the Station Hospital nut ward. There were only two alternatives: either Angelo would die in the Black Hole, or else he would be discharged. Knowing Angelo, Prew did not believe he would die in the Hole. But neither the knowledg
e of what was to come, nor the acceptance of it, helped to fill up the hole.

  Prew followed the fortunes of the engagement from the sidelines of Barrack Number Two with an openly frank anxiety that would have embarrassed him at any other time, and it was during those weeks that Jack Malloy without being asked came up and stood behind him.

  Actually, Maggio was not in the Black Hole for thirty days. But outside of that, the plan of battle he had laid out was correct. He had only been in the Hole a few hours over twenty-four days, when they pulled him out and sent him up to the prison ward in the Station Hospital for mental observation. It was the guard Pfc Hanson who kept them informed of the progress of the contest. Hanson was usually the lockup man for Number Two after evening chow, and almost every evening he would pass on what had taken place during the day and the night before. Outside of that, they knew nothing, and Angelo Maggio might as well have passed clear out of existence for all they knew. No word from Maggio himself ever reached them out of the dark depths of the Black Hole.

  Hanson did not know or even guess at the calculated plan behind the action. Hanson really believed Maggio had gone crazy. It did not decrease his admiration for The Wop.

  “You ought to see him,” he would tell them, as he locked the barred doors on the crowd gathered to hear the news. “He’s terrific. You’d have to see it to believe it. Boy, if thats crazy, its a pity there aint more madmen in the world.

  “He’s the first one they’ve had since I’ve been here,” he explained. “I’ve heard them talk about the old ones, but this is the first one I’ve ever really seen. You were here when one of the old ones was in the mill, werent you, Jack?”