From Here to Eternity: The Restored Edition

by James Jones

  “A man might as well be dead,” Bloom said tentatively out loud.

  In the empty squadroom no one contradicted him.

  He picked the rifle up again and placed the muzzle in his mouth again, uncomfortably, because it was very awkward. He held the rifle up with his extended left arm, the muzzle with his right. As an afterthought he set the butt on the concrete floor. These ’03s had a hell of a kick. His hand would not reach the safety and he had to take the muzzle out of his mouth again. His hand did not want to release the safety.

  You’re a queer, Bloom thought bitterly, a monster. Lets face it all, while we’re facing. You did it, and you liked it, and that makes you a queer. And everybody knows you are a queer. You dont deserve to live.

  His hand released the safety. He put the muzzle back in his mouth and placed his bare big toe inside the guard against the trigger. A man’s bare foot was an ugly, sickening, repulsive thing. He pulled the trigger.

  In the prolonged sustained roar during the split second left him, Bloom felt as if somebody had stepped up behind him and grasped his chin and the base of his skull and lifted with both hands like a weightlifter doing a snatch lift. They kept lifting and lifting, his head was going higher and higher.

  I dint mean it! he tried to yell. I take it back! I was ony kiddin! I was just showin off!

  Then, as his head continued on up through the ceiling, he knew it wasnt any good. He had always wanted to commit an irrevocable act, and he had finally done it, only to find out it was the wrong one. He knew a great many things that he wished he had time to say. He could explain so much. There were so many steaks to be eaten, so many whores to be laid, so much beer to be drunk. Dont forget the steaks and whores and beer, boys, he wanted to yell, dont ever forget that.

  What a silly thing to do, he thought. What a goddam silly thing to do. You wont even be there to watch their faces.

  Bloom died.

  It was Friday Clark who found him, technically. Friday was standing on the ground floor porch doing nothing when the shot shattered out through the screens and across the quad, and he had a straight path to the stairs. He beat Niccolo Leva, who had to turn the corner of the supplyroom, to them by almost a second and that made him the first man. The Warden, coming on a dead run from the orderly room, was right behind them. Behind The Warden streamed the rest of them, the kitchen force, the KPs, the fatigue details working in the Company yard, everybody from the Company who was within running distance, all charging up the stairs together, before the buildings around the quad had quit playing catch with the echo of the shot as it died away.

  Bloom was lying back across his bunk in that peculiarly lifeless position dead people get into, with the top of his head gone and the rifle on the floor and the one pastywhite bare foot dangling down ridiculously. There was a large blot of blood and phlegmy matter on the ceiling around the hole where the bullet had gone on through. It was still Bloom’s face, but it looked as if all the bones had been taken out from behind it, like one of those cured headhunter’s heads you could see in the curio shop windows downtown on Hotel Street.

  “Jesus Christ!” Niccolo Leva protested, and headed right on out the other door for the latrine, without stopping.

  Nobody else said anything. Several men pushed through the still growing crowd in the doorway and on the porch and followed Leva. The rest of them just stood, as it slowly dawned on them, looking like embarrassed plumbers who had blundered into the wrong bathroom.

  Friday Clark, watching the remains of the man who had so recently had him by the collar, wondered why he did not get sick himself. It surprised him. He would of thought if anybody would get sick it would be him. He felt a little proud that he did not get sick.

  “All right,” The Warden said finally in a kind of frustrated choke. “Outside, you men. Theres nothing you can do here. Get back to work.”

  When nobody moved or answered, he swung on them blazing, almost gratefully. “Hear what I goddam said?” he roared. “Outside! You’ve all seen it now. Everybody’s had a good look now. Now get the goddam hell outside! And dont anybody touch anything till we’ve got the OD over here from the guardhouse.”

  The crowd responded with a reluctant milling movement that took nobody noplace. There was a look of indignant protest and impotent outrage on all their faces. Not at The Warden, but at Bloom. They looked as if they had just offered their last glass of cold beer to a man on a hot day, only to have it turned down and thrown in their face.

  “He dint have no goddam right to do a goddam thing like that,” somebody said inarticulately vaguely.

  “Not in the goddam squadroom,” somebody else said.

  They all looked like if The Warden had not been there holding them at bay they would have swarmed on Bloom, dead or not, and beaten him with their fists for having reminded them of this thing they spent the best years of their lives trying to forget.

  “But it took a lot of guts though,” Friday Clark said, feeling vaguely that he must tell them something. “It took a lot of guts though, to do it. I wouldnt—”

  The Warden cut in on him. “Okay,” he said, his voice crackling with suppression, “you men want to hang around you might as well make yourselves useful. Couple of you get some buckets and mops and a stepladder from the supplyroom. Somebody else go up on the roof and see if the bullet went on through, and if it did get some paper and tar from Leva and patch the goddam thing.”

  There was a chorus of indignant protests from the crowd and it began to break up suddenly and move toward the stairs.

  “I aint goin to clean up after no son of a bitch that shoots hisself,” somebody said.

  “Yeah, let him clean it up himself, the son of a bitch, he done it,” somebody else said.

  There was a general half-wild laugh.

  “Come back here,” The Warden ordered briskly. “Lets go. The holiday is over.”

  The crowd evaporated swiftly and was gone, just as Niccolo Leva came back in from the latrine, looking pale. “Christ, what a mess. I got to sleep in here tonight.” He looked at the ceiling. “Just a couple hours ago I was issuin him a brand new pair of field shoes,” he said helplessly.

  “What do you suppose he wanted to do it for?” Friday asked, feeling vaguely ashamed like he used to feel when the littler kids at home messed their pants.

  “Christ, how the hell do I know?” The Warden bellowed. “Sometimes I feel like doin it myself, in this fucking outfit. Niccolo,” he said, “after the OD’s been here, you get some men and have them clean this up.”

  “I’ll do it,” Friday Clark said. “I dont mind doin it.”

  “It’ll need more than one man,” The Warden said grimly. “You go with Leva.”

  “Okay, Top,” Friday said admiringly.

  “I wonder what he wanted to do it for,” he said wonderingly, on the stairs. “He had everything to live for. He was middleweight champion and a corporal and due to make sergeant, he had everything. I wonder what would make a guy like that want to do a thing like that.”

  “For Christ’s sake, shut up!” said Niccolo Leva savagely.

  “It took a lot of guts,” Friday Clark said, feeling he had to explain it to him, sensing vaguely there was something about Bloom he ought to say. “I wouldnt have that much guts.”

  Wait’ll old Prew hears about this, he thought.

  Chapter 39

  PREW DID NOT HEAR about it until he came out of the Black Hole three days later. That was the day they were burying Bloom. It is very hard to communicate with anyone in the Black Hole, which is called Solitary Confinement officially. “Black Hole” is only a descriptive slang term created by prisoners. College professors call it an “Americanism,” a descriptive slang term created by college professors.

  He came out at 1840 hours, right after evening chow, shaky from loss of food and blinded by the dazzling brilliance of the bare 40-watt bulbs, just seven and one half hours more than three days from the moment he had sat down at the mess table and taken the first bite o
f food for appearances’ sake and banged on his plate with his fork in one hand and his heart squeezed up into his ears. He was a different man than when he had gone in, and he was very surprised to find the world basically unchanged.

  It had not turned out to be nearly as bad as he had thought it would be. He came out of it feeling he had been tested and not found wanting, he was almost as proud of it as he was of the Taps he had once played at Arlington; but it was not any of it nearly as bad as he had thought it would be. That was one of the virtues of being a pessimist: nothing was ever as bad as you thought it would be.

  They served dinner chow, just like breakfast chow, and supper chow, to one barrack at a time in the Stockade. This was because the messhall was small. Because the daily schedule in the Stockade was large, it only allowed half an hour per meal (plenty of time plenty of time, a half hour, Maj Thompson said, for any man to eat in). There being three barracks, each barrack had to eat in ten minutes. Actually, in practice, it did not quite amount to ten minutes. It amounted to five minutes. After you subtracted the time spent forming, and coming and going, and getting seated and served. Many prisoners felt this was not enough time. But then nobody had ever tried to accuse the Stockade of being a pleasure resort. They ran things on a hard, fast schedule in the Stockade.

  Prew, according to The Malloy’s instructions via Angelo Maggio, had had two choices: He could either eat real fast and ask for seconds, in which case he would be forced to eat two more platefuls and then dosed with castor oil; or, he could eat just a little and then gripe about the poor food, in which case he would be forced to eat two more platefuls and then dosed with castor oil. He had, beforehand, objectively, chosen the second alternative on the theory that it would mean one less plateful of food in his stomach for the castor oil to work on.

  He was still working on the second plateful when Barrack Number Two filed in (they always served Barrack #1, the trustees, first and Barrack #2, the recalcitrants, last in the Stockade) and sat down to eat ignoring him and he picked out Angelo Maggio and Blue Berry and the big man with the soft vague eyes of an unabashed dreamer whom he had never seen before but who could only be Jack Malloy, but he clamped down on the feeling of happiness and relief and did not look at them because he had been warned of that, too.

  S/Sgt Judson administered the castor oil to him personally, after he had seen to it that he ate the two platefuls. Fatso’s method of administering castor oil was to grab the seated man by the hair and pull his head back and put the bottle between his lips against the clenched teeth while two other guards held him and then have a third guard hold his nose. With Prew, they did not have to hold the nose; he kept The Malloy’s instructions firmly in the front of his mind all the time and swallowed dutifully all the castor oil Fatso offered him, which was all the castor oil in the pint bottle. Even later, when they took him down to the “gym,” he kept The Malloy’s instructions firmly in the front of his mind. While all this was going on, Barrack Number Two ate on indifferently stolidly.

  In the “gym,” a small bare room down at the other end of the T corridor from the barrack wings, where the guards took the boys to give them their workouts, Fatso asked him how his gut felt. He answered truthfully that he felt a little sick to the stomach, whereupon Fatso hit him in the sick stomach with his fist, and Prew gratefully vomited a large part of the commingled castor oil and food onto the floor. While he was cleaning it up with the bucket and mop rags provided for this purpose, he was kicked down into it face first several times but this did not really hurt any. Then they stood him up against one of the bare walls and Fatso, assisted by Turnipseed and Pfc Hanson both of whom had been on shift in the messhall, gave him his workout, relieving each other whenever they got tired. The only time they actually used a grub hoe handle on him was the last time Fatso told him to get up off the floor and he couldnt and Fatso gave him the grub hoe handle across the shins, splitting open one of those old footlocker scars, and he got up. But outside of that, the only other battlewound he got was a small cut from Fatso’s GI signet ring of the Army’s spread Eagle, under his right eye which was closed by the time they took him out of the gymnasium and led him down to the Black Hole. In general, they refrained from hitting him in the face and he could see that The Malloy’s instructions were valid when he remembered Angelo’s face.

  There were moments when it was difficult to keep from getting angry and saying something nasty or doing something regrettable, as The Malloy via Angelo Maggio had warned him it would be, but he kept reminding himself over and over how it was him who had asked for this in the first place not them, to get into Number Two, and that in the second place they were not enjoying it in the third place, as Fatso told him, any more than he was, and that worked.

  “This is hurtin us worse than it is you,” Fatso told him.

  The Black Hole was beyond the gym at the end of the right arm of the T. You went down a short flight of steps. There were four cells in a row on one side. They were all empty. They threw him into the first one. There was a small barred hole at the very top of the door that he could reach with his hand but not see out of, and at the back end of the bunk of iron pipes was a #10 can for a latrine. When they brought the bread and water three times a day they shoved it in through a sliding steel panel in the bottom of the door. The cup was heavy cast iron so he could not break it. He thought it was all very professional.

  It was the Black Hole he had been scared of more than anything else because he knew he could not do The Malloy’s system any more than Angelo could, and when he had first heard the footsteps receding and then the closing of the trapdoor to the stairs he had had a bad moment. With the door shut it was very quiet. All he could hear was the measured dispassionate blows of his own coldblooded heart that did not seem to give a damn what was happening to him. That, and the more or less regular sigh of his breathing. He had not realized how much noise a human body made in just staying alive and it scared him because it seemed such an unstable way to preserve something as important as life. He began to be afraid that the noise, which irritated him and kept him awake, would suddenly, for no reason, stop.

  He remembered what Angelo had said about utilizing that first sense of relief, but he did not feel any relief, and he was afraid to let himself doze off for fear the noises would stop if he quit listening to them.

  By evening, when they brought his first meal, he had changed his mind and decided he might as well give The Malloy’s system a trial after all. He had thought the guard bringing the meal was Fatso coming to take him out because the three days were over. When he found it was only the guard bringing the first meal, he knew definitely he must try The Malloy’s system. He remembered not to eat the bread but he drank the water.

  The funny thing was it did not seem hard at all, when he tried it. The only way he could ever explain it to himself afterwards was that he had been very worn out and had not had a very tight hold on his mind. His mind had kept slipping away from him. At first he had a little trouble concentrating on the black spot and pushing the thoughts aside, but they seemed to be very weak thoughts, and finally they just stopped altogether and the black spot got very large and his mind went off somewhere into it. He could feel it going away, clear off out of him, but he was not scared at all, he was very objective. He remembered pushing away the thought that he ought to be scared. Then the last thought he pushed away was the thought that he was surprised how easy it was and that he could not see why Angelo had thought it so hard. Then he was gone.

  He did not see any light, like The Malloy. It was more as if there were two of him, and one of him went off and away from the other of him. He could look back and see the other of him there on the bunk, and he did not know any more which of him was him. There was a kind of cord that looked like it was made out of jism connecting the two of him and he knew from somewhere, but unconcernedly this time, that if that cord ever got broken he was dead. Then he went further on into the still growing black spot and could not see the other of him down ther
e on the bunk any more.

  But wherever he went there was always his end of the jism cord stretching away in the ballooning black distance back to the other of him back there, it was not weird at all, it was all very natural, he went many places, and he could understand many things that had always upset him and bothered him, it was as if for the first time he had gone off the world like a spaceship and could really see all of it, and grasp the reason for all of it, and realize how all of it each had its own private point and that nothing was ever ever wasted, which surprised him, and that more than anything else it was like a small boy going to school every day, maybe he did not want to go but he had to go anyway, and if he does not learn one lesson one day it still isnt wasted because the wasted day helps him learn it that much quicker the next day and while certain of the upperclassmen may believe the lessons taught in the lower grades are not only stupid and wasteful but actively harmful and would even pass resolutions against them, still they would never have been upperclassmen themselves if they had not first gone through the grade school, which was just one more lesson to learn, and anyway the principal didnt pay any attention to their resolutions, even though they were his valedictorians, and this reassured him and he felt the sense of peace and contentment he had always felt he was about to feel, but never quite had, when he was having one of his drunken moments of almost-but-not-quite-reaching-it, because now he could see clearly that each one received only just what he wanted and secretly asked to receive, no more no less, and the secret to the combination on the lock of the understanding was all in the different qualities of the wanting, which depended on how long you had been going to school, which required time, much much time, time that could not even be measured as time, not at least as he measured time, so it was useless to worry and hurry for time, and that if all men killed the things they loved it was only because they loved them so hard, while if all the Beloveds killed the things that loved them that was only because they wanted so bad to be loved so much more, and it was terribly much harder to reach what you loved, especially if you really truly loved whatever it was, the harder you loved the harder to reach, he could see it all clearly.