by James Jones
“Two,” Malloy said. “Both of them during my first stretch.”
“Well, this is my first one,” Hanson said, shaking his head again in admiration, “and boy, its really an experience. Its unbelievable, thats all. You cant tell me any man gets guts like that just from going crazy, any more than he can get it from a bottle. Guts like that is born in a guy, he’s either got them or he aint, and thats all.”
“I think I’d agree with you,” Malloy said.
“Its a shame the Army has to part with guts like that,” Hanson said. “Guts like that is what Armies needs the most.”
“I think I’d agree with you on that one too,” Malloy said.
“You goddam right,” Hanson said. “You cant tell me. This is Fatso’s first one, too, you know. Fatso wasnt here when them last ones blew.”
“Thats right,” Malloy said through the doors. “We had an old Master/Sgt then. Fatso didnt come in till after he was retired.”
“Fatso thinks he can beat it,” Hanson said. “He claims he can bring him out of it. He says he’s never seen a man yet, crazy or not, that he couldnt make walk the chalkline if they give him a free hand.”
“Maybe he’ll do it,” Malloy suggested.
“I dont think so,” Hanson said. “Somebody else maybe, but not The Wop. You guys aint seen it like I have. Its out of this world, thats all.”
“He was a good man, all right,” Malloy said.
“He still is,” Hanson said. “Crazy or not.”
“Whats Father Thompson got to say about it?”
“Nothing,” Hanson said. “He’s letting Fatso handle it; except for killing. He’s laid it out flat to Fatso there cant be no killing, or he’ll have Fatso on the inside lookin out. He’s dead set there cant be no killings. But outside of that its up to Fatso. But Fatso’ll never make it. Take it from me.”
They would always have to ply him for the latest details. He wanted to go on telling his amazement and his admiration, and it would take two or three of them interrupting constantly before they could bring him back to the facts of the latest news. Gradually, it evolved itself into a recognizable plan.
When they had brought him in that first day Fatso had revived him personally. He had taken the phonecall from Turniphead and already had the story, and he was eager to get to work to prove his theory. He had taken three guards led by Brownie, Hanson among them, and taken Maggio down to the “gym.” They had given him what Hanson had described as the worst working over he had ever seen a prisoner get. It was the first time since he had been there that they had ever carried a man to the Hole unconscious. Fatso had tried to make The Wop admit he was only acting; Maggio had laughed and babbled and gone right on talking gibberish. The fourth time he went out, after they had already brought him to three times, Fatso gave it up and let them carry him on down.
“He’s crazy, all right,” Hanson told them. “If he wasnt crazy, even The Wop couldnt take it.”
Fatso’s whole plan was based on making him admit he had been acting. He developed a schedule where he came for him at regular intervals to work him over, first every eight hours, then every four, on the theory that the anticipation would break him down. When that failed, he took to coming for him at odd unspecified intervals both day and night, with the idea that that way the anticipation instead of having regular periods of rise and fall would be constant all the time. He was liable to appear for him at midnight, and then come right back fifteen minutes later, or let him go a full twenty-four hours sweating it out. Fatso was a diligent and conscientious workman. He offered him everything from a trusteeship to the reinstatement of his time-off-for-good-behavior that Maggio had lost the first week he was there to an even possible commutation of his sentence, if he would only admit he had been acting. Maggio only laughed or babbled or made faces or talked gibberish. Once he pissed on the floor at Fatso’s feet. Fatso rubbed his face in it. Fatso was convinced The Wop was acting, that all the Section 8s discharged from the Stockade were just good actors. He stopped at nothing short of the application of actual torture devices, to make Maggio admit that he was acting. Every night Hanson came to lock up and tell them that The Wop had not broken. It had developed into a tougher situation than even The Malloy had anticipated, and it was then that Prew first began to develop the hatred for S/Sgt Judson that occupied all his leisure time with plans for murder. If to think murder was as great a crime as committing it, Prewitt would have to have been electrocuted fifty times to make him pay.
Then one night Hanson finally brought them the news that Maggio had been taken out that noon and cleaned up and patched and transferred to the Station Hospital prison ward. Along with this was the news that S/Sgt Judson’s pending T/Sgt rating, which had been an accepted fact for almost two months, had been dropped temporarily. Prew wondered to Malloy if Angelo would ever know it; he hoped he would; but, to be honest, he had to admit he doubted if he ever would.
They got the story of what happened in the prison ward from another prisoner. This prisoner, “Stonewall” Jackson, had gone to the prison ward with a broken leg from a bona-fide fall on the rockpile, long before either Prew or Maggio had come in. He came back to Number Two a month after Maggio had been sent up to the hospital and gave them the first word they had of how Angelo had made out there. They had put him in a private cell, padded for violent cases—all their private cells were padded for violent cases—and when the ward attendants first came near him Maggio had crawled back in the corner and begged them babblingly not to hit him any more. The rest of the time he was there, whenever anyone, psychiatrist, medical doctor, nurse, or ward attendant, approached him, he would cringe away and try to hide in the corner and beg not to be beaten any more. This sudden change of tactics amused everybody, even Prew and Malloy. Jackson had gotten to talk to him just once, after he had been before The Board and his discharge was already certain. He had been very suspicious, but when Jackson proved to him conclusively that he really was from Number Two, he opened up with a grin and asked Jackson to pass on to the boys that he was okay—and that he was on his way out. He was very badly scarred, Jackson said, he looked like a punch-drunk fighter. But he did not, Jackson said, act like one. They had kept him in the prison ward two weeks after he went before The Board. Then they sent him back to the States. The Board recommended a yellow Dishonorable Discharge, Jackson said, on the grounds that soldier was a mental incompetent inherently unable to adjust, this disability being neither service-connected nor service-aggravated, and therefore was mentally unfit for service.
During the weeks Angelo had been in the Hole, and the month of silence before Jackson came back from the hosp to give them word, Jack Malloy had stood at Prewitt’s back like a big brick wall. When it was bad he was always there to talk to, or listen to. Mostly, he talked to Prew. Malloy would spin him yarns for hours, about his own life and past. In those weeks, without realizing it, Prew learned more about him than any of the rest of them had ever learned.
There was a singular quality about Jack Malloy. When he looked at you with his unembarrassed-dreamer’s eyes and talked to you with that soft powerful voice, you began to labor under the delusion that you were the most important person on this, or on any other, planet; and you believed you could do many things you never would have thought you could.
He had been almost everywhere and done almost everything in his 36 years. Among other things, he still walked with a little bit of a seaman’s roll. It set off his physique to perfection and gave him a kingly swagger that in the Stockade was no less than awesome. And there is nothing as romantic to professional soldiers as a civilian sailor. Also, there is a great respect for the printed word in the Army. Jack Malloy had read a tremendous lot. He seemed to have thumbnail biographies on his fingertips of everyone from old John D Rockefeller clear on down to the obscure Philippine Department General, Douglas MacArthur. And he could not talk without quoting books they had never heard of. But he did not even need these accomplishments to cinch his reputation. Jack Malloy wa
s the kind of man who did not have to earn his reputation; it was tendered to him free-gratis by the imagination of every man in the Stockade.
Born the son of a county sheriff in Montana in 1905, he had been 13 in 1917 when his father started jailing the IWWs in earnest. That was what started him off: The Wobblies had taught him to read. He started his reading in his father’s jail with their books they always carried with them. In his gratitude he offered to help them escape from his dad’s jail. When the Wobblies turned down his offer, he learned the first lesson in what was to become his passion for passive resistance.
“They utilized it,” he would tell Prew, “but they didnt use enough of it. They didnt understand the principle. That was their greatest fault, and damn near their only one. But it was enough to make them fail. They believed in militant force. It was written into their covenant. They never fought or killed one-tenth as much as they were accused of, and not one-twentieth as much as their enemies fought and killed them; but the point is they believed in it abstractly, and thats what defeated them: a mistake in abstract logic.
“But they were all great guys just the same. With their courage and intelligence, nothing on earth could have stopped them if they had understood the principle of passive resistance.
“You dont remember the Wobblies. You were too young. Or else not even born yet. There has never been anything like them, before or since. They called themselves materialist-economists, but what they really were was a religion. They were workstiffs and bindlebums like you and me, but they were welded together by a vision we dont possess. It was their vision that made them great. And it was their belief in it that made them powerful. And sing! you never heard anybody sing the way those guys sang! Nobody sings like they did unless its for a religion!”
The sharpest memory of his youth was of bunches of them, ten or twenty at a time, in out of the harvest fields in the fall for one of their free speech fights, sitting in the barred windows of the second floor of the jail singing their songs Joe Hill had written for them, or Ralph Chaplin’s Solidarity Forever, a singing that swelled through the town until nobody could escape it.
“The townspeople would have been better off if they’d have let them go ahead and read the Constitution on the street corners unmolested. Then they would have drifted on.”
When he made up his mind to run away from home, in protest, his father’s prisoners had realistically advised him to arm himself with a certified birth certificate.
“‘Its almost funny, kid,’ one of them told me, ‘how many people will try to accuse you of being an unnaturalized foreigner.’ His name was Bradbury,” Malloy grinned, “the guy who told me that, and his people had fought the French and Indians before the Revolution.”
One of them gave him a copy of Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class and The Little Red Songbook with Joe Hill’s songs, to take with him, and since then he had always carried his quota of new unread books in his pack or bindle or suitcase or seabag, even in the Army. The first book he had bought for himself, with the first money from the first job, was Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, to add to Veblen and Joe Hill, and since that first copy he had worn out ten others. The second thing he bought was his Red Card and his membership dues in the IWW. The rest went for his first real drunk and his first piece of ass. He had not been back home since.
“It was only an excuse,” he said. “I was just waiting for an excuse. My father was too lawful a sheriff, and my mother was too religious a Christian. No kid could beat that combination from the inside. I had already learned, long before I met the Wobblies, how much everybody hated conscientious cops and religious ladies. And above everything else I wanted not to be hated.”
After that, it was the harvest fields and timber camps as a bona-fide IWW with his dues paid up. He was too young for the war and they couldnt get him for that, and he always carried his birth certificate although as often as not they ignored it. He learned to know jails from the prisoners’ side. When they jailed the hundred-and-one on September 28, 1918, he joined the protest and the attempts to raise funds for them. During the two years the principals were in and out of Leavenworth most of his money went for that. He even cut down on the whorehouses. He had never seen or met any of the General Executive Board, but he had learned to worship Bill Haywood, Ralph Chaplin, George Andreytchine, Red Doran, Grover Perry, Charley Ashleigh, Harrison George and the rest—perhaps even more than the old timers who knew them. He worked hard for them, and went on reading. He felt he was being trained for something.
But already the old solidarity was shifting and beginning to break up. The wartime trial and the Leavenworth sentences had broken the back of the IWW. The Communist Revolution that scared the world had succeeded in Russia, and in the Wobblies disagreement over the Communists grew into a dissension and then into open factions. He went on reading; he wanted to be ready. He became a veteran of Centralia Washington, where they castrated first, and then lynched, Wesley Everest and afterwards sentenced seven other Wobblies for 2nd degree murder for having fought back but he was one of the young ones that Old Mike Sheehan helped to get away. He escaped both castration-lynching and trial. He beat his way down into California and joined the longshoremen’s union and went on reading.
Then Haywood and Andreytchine jumped their bail and went to Russia to throw in with the Communists, and that finished it. Chaplin and the others out on bond went back to Leavenworth.
“The funny thing is,” he smiled, “we were the first to adopt the color Red. The Communists stole it from us. That wasnt all they stole from us either.”
Prew, who had sung Casey Jones all his life without ever hearing of Joe Hill and the Wobblies, had already learned enough to know he meant the driving force that was Big Bill Haywood.
“They stole it and threw it away,” he said. “Like kids robbing a candy store of more than they can eat and throwing it away. They killed Bill Haywood.”
After that there were three more years of formality, up and down California from one isolated unit that still made pretense of paying dues to another, always trying to help get the rest of the old by-now-almost-forgotten hundred-and-one out of Leavenworth. In California he studied, and came to love, the memory of Jack London and the old group of Socialists in Frisco, George Sterling, Upton Sinclair, and the rest, whose outfit also had shrivelled down to death; London himself almost as much as he loved Joseph Hillstrom. He went on reading. Then the bottom that had been sliding and sliding finally fell clear out. Some gave up and went to Russia like Haywood; others, like Chaplin, embarked on the philosophy that would eventually lead them to chauvinism. Jack Malloy went on reading, wondering what he was training for, and finally decided to take to the sea. He was nineteen. An era had ended.
He served several years as an AB on South American freighters out of Frisco. He was still looking. He went on reading. It was during that time that he had, for lack of something better, become a disciple of Upton Sinclair’s leftover brand of Socialism that he later rejected. The Sage of Monrovia who lived with posterity eternally in his thoughts was just about the only contestant left in the field, and the 19-year-old disciple-in-search-of-a-Messiah helped distribute the pamphlets on all the ships he worked on at a time when, while it was not against the law, you were through working for that line if the officers ever caught you.
“It taught me two things,” Malloy grinned. “One; you never could succeed with what I wanted to succeed with by using propaganda; logically, in the end, the end will not only not justify the means, it will not even be achieved by them; you cant divide the mass by a common factor that will give you a norm to work by, because while it may be mathematically correct it is false when applied to the individual member. The masses are one thing, the amalgam of individuals is another. And you cannot escape that paradox by leveling them off to a fourth-grade-mind common to all. We were going to have to do better than that; I didnt know what, or how; and I dont know now. But we’ll have to.
“The second thing it taught me
was that you cant live for posterity, especially if you are a prude, because posterity’s morals are always different from your morals. Sinclair is as big a prude about sex as Ralph Chaplin: they’re both married. It hurt them terribly to see us common rank and file patronize whorehouses. When they couldnt convince us, they decided to ignore it. I suspect that both of their revolutionary activities were brought on by a parentally-installed horror of the grossness of the penis and the vulva and a hunger for the Ideal Love. But you cant escape life by rebelling any more than you can escape it by playing blind. You cant take one subject, like economics, and with it escape the problems of all the rest of the subjects, like sex. Eventually, unless you become a liar, you always come back to the one thing you’re running from. And you cant force the individual who makes up your nonexistent masses into anything unless he wants it (the Communists will have to learn that too, someday, or die like Sinclair’s Socialism), and if the men like to get their guns off you’ll have to accept that foundation fact along with all the other foundation facts, one way or another.”
Harry Bridges was just a punk then, in those days. But he kept growing. He grew enough, finally, to drive Jack Malloy along with a lot of others away from their Frisco-South America home-run to trans-oceanic and trans-global berths, and after that Jack Malloy had sailed for ports everywhere from Hamburg to Manila and Shanghai to London. He had worked at every kind of job from bartender to tourist-guide between berths. And he had loved every kind of woman from bony Jap geisha to featherbed German barmaid.
“I’ve never laid a woman that I didnt love. Maybe she made me dislike her afterwards, for some other reason. But at the moment of screwing her, I was in love with her. I offer that as an observed fact, without attempts at explanation or justification. It is a thing that I have found true of most men, if you can get them to talk and admit it.”
Prew, mulling this one over and applying it to himself, was a little shocked to find he had to admit it was true of him too.
