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 of 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 there 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.
Then a few minutes later somebody opened the door and shook him and he came back reluctantly, because he felt if he had only had a minute more just a few seconds more he could have gotten it absolutely clear in words of one syllable to bring back with him and lay it all out in black and white, and then he opened his eyes and saw it was S/Sgt Judson.
“Hello, Fatso,” he grinned sillily, noticing that his voice hardly had enough wind to bring it up out of his chest, and wondering why they had come back so soon for. Behind Fatso, he heard somebody gasp.
S/Sgt Judson without any change of expression slapped him hard across the face experiencedly with a grub-hoe-handle-calloused palm, the way a mother deftly but bored by long practice slaps her small boy, but he did not even feel it.
“Tough guy,” Fatso said expressionlessly, “another tough guy. How would you like about three more days of it, hunh, tough guy?”
Prew giggled weakly. “You cant snow me, Sergeant. What do you mean three more days. You think I dont know I’ve only pulled one day yet? Yes, I think I’d like three more days of it, I was having a wonderful dream. Lets make it six more days,” he giggled: “then we add up the whole nine days to make the full 72 hours. Hows that?”
“Hard sister,” Fatso said without any change of expressionlessness, and slapped him again. “Rough monkey. Come on, wake up, rough monkey.”
Then they were hoisting him up and taking him out and he realized the three days truly were over after all. On the way out his foot kicked itself against the nine slices of bread on the floor that proved it. Man, was that a good one on him.
“Yuh,” Fatso said unheatedly, “I seen em, rough monkey. But if you think you can get yourself out of the Hole any quicker by goin out on a hunger strike, we know that one too. We let you go hungry. You notice you done your full three days you notice,” Fatso said proudly. “Plus four hours because I was too busy at the moment to get to you—and you’ll do the same every time. I had my way, you’d go right back in now for three more. Hunger strikes dont scare nobody here, rough monkey.”
From Fatso, a speech that long amounted to an oration. Must of impressed him, Prew thought happily as they propped him up against the wall and threw his clothes at him.
“You dont need to pull at stuff neither,” Fatso said. “You can stand up.”
He leaned against the wall grinning sillily while he put his clothes on, noticing for the first time that it was Pfc Hanson again with Fatso this time, Pfc Hanson alone, and realizing dimly that it must therefore have been Pfc Hanson who had gasped. I made Pfc Hanson gasp, he thought proudly. Hanson was grinning at him proudly, fully as proudly as Angelo Maggio grinned at him a few minutes later when they shoved him in through the door of Number Two Barrack. They both grinned at him as though he had at last fulfilled all the promise they had seen in him.
His stuff had already been moved into Number Two for him and the men in Number Two had gotten together and fixed it all up for him. Even his bunk was made up for him. They were proud men in Number Two. They were the toughest of the tough. They were the cream. They wore their barracks number like a medal of honor and guarded its bestowal as jealously as any Masonic Lodge or midwestern Country Club ever guarded theirs. They could not fight back and win, so they were very strict with their great pride in losing, and they were so meticulous that when they did take a man in it was an occasion and they went all the way. All Prew had to do tomorrow to be ready for inspection was to remake his bunk in the morning.
Angelo sat on the side of the bunk and proudly did all the honors. Blues Berry came over a while, and then the others came over too, one or two at a time, to listen to Prew tell the story. The last man to come over, after the others had settled back down and gone back to sitting around on the chairless floor smoking and talking, was the big man with the soft, penetrating, unabashed-dreamer’s eyes, who had been sitting three bunks away taking all of it in.
Prew lay on top his new bunk, deliciously wrapped in a blanket, and acknowledged all the introductions and compliments, deliciously savoring his great sense of accomplishment. There was a satisfaction that came from having borne pain that nothing else could ever quite equal, even though the pain was philosophically pointless and never affected anything but the nervous system. Physical pain made its own justification. That must be your Indian forebearers talking, he thought. Except, he thought, that Angelo Maggio from Atlantic Avenue Brooklyn sure dont have no Indian blood, thats for sure. But he felt he could understand Angelo much better now.
In between all the introductions and coming and goings Angelo told him about Bloom, complete with all the gory details. Angelo had the whole entire story. The Stockade grapevine had had it the evening of the day it happened, just six hours after Prew had gone in the Hole. Apparently the Stockade grapevine had everything the evening of the day it happened, although nobody could say exactly just how this was accomplished. The Stockade grapevine more often than not had things before the guards themselves had them; one of Blues Berry’s greatest delights was to pass on to the guards tidbits of Post gossip they had not had yet.
The reaction in the Stockade had been pretty much the same as it had in the Company. There were several other men from the Regiment in the Stockade besides Prew and Angelo, and all of them knew Bloom. The rest, if they did not know him personally, had all seen him fight last year in the Bowl. They went around with the same indignant look on their faces and the same outraged tone in their voices; if anything, this open slap in the face to everything that good soldiers stood for was even more of an affront to them than it was to G Company. Just because they were in the Stockade, their faces and voices implied, did not mean they had turned up their nose with contempt and sneered at all Bloom’s advantages; if they had had Bloom’s advantages, their faces and voices implied, they would not have been in the Stockade in the first place and they certainly would not be dead by their own gun in the second place. They had all been very angry about it, in the Stockade.
To Prew, hearing Angelo tell it, it was like something that had happened in another country. He had a hard time making himself visualize it.
“You say he put the muzzle in his mouth and pulled the trigger with his big toe?”
“Thats right,” Angelo said indignantly.
“And it took off the whole top of his head and plastered it up on the ceiling.”
“Yep,” Angelo said complacently. “Made a hole three inches across. Ony I dont guess he figure on that probly.”
“And they going to bury him here you say.”
“Thats right. In the old sojer’s graveyard. Nobody can find out where his folks is.”
“Thats a hell of a place to be buried.”
“Man, you aint just kidding,” Angelo said fervidly.
“You ever been up there? Its up back of the Packtrain. I’ve played Taps there.”
“I never been there, and whats more I dont never mean to go there. Neither feetfirst nor even dickfirst,” Angelo said perfervidly.
“Theres some big pine trees. One row. Along the far side. I wonder who’ll play Bloom’s Taps?”
“Some punk, probly,” Angelo said. “I wonder what makes pine trees like that so lonesome?”
“Every dogface deserves to have at least one good Taps. At his funeral.”
“Well, maybe he’ll be lucky. Maybe he’ll draw a good one.”
Bloom was already buried, had been buried ever since two-thirty that afternoon; they both knew that. But it was as if they had agreed tacitly not to speak of it in the past tense.
“I’d play him a Taps,” Prew said, angrily because he had promised himself he would not mention that and it had slipped itself out anyway, “I’d play him a real Taps. Every dogsoljer deserves that,” he said lamely, trying to explain it away.
“Aww, hell,” Angelo said embarrassedly, with far too much understanding. “Hell, he’s dead, aint he? What difference does it make?”
“You dont understand,” Prew said furiously. What it was, he told himself, was he still could not visualize it. He felt he should be able to visualize it. But the last picture he had of Bloom was of a tremendous undammable vitality heading off across the quad for the gym to get ready to go into the ring while he himself stared after it incredulously and exhaustedly.
“I wonder what the hell made him do it?” he said wonderingly, conscious of so overpowering a will to live in himself.
“My personal opinion,” Angelo said sagaciously, “is that he was afraid he had gone queer.”
“Hell, Bloom was no queer.”
“I know it.”
“If I ever saw a not-queer, it was Bloom.”
“I know it,” Angelo said.
“Well then, what the hell?”
“Theres a difference,” Angelo said, “between being queer and thinking you’re queer.”
“I wanted to go over and see him after that fight,” Prew confessed. “Tell him I dint fight him because he was Jewish or anything like that personal. I was going to tell him the next day,” he said. “But they picked me up that night,” he said.
“Hell, he dint shoot hisself over you whippin him, if thats what you thinkin.”
“I didnt whip him.”
“All right. Over you fightin him then. A long time ago old Hal said Bloom would kill hisself someday, remember?”
“I just barely broke even with him. If anything, he whipped me.”
“Hal said he was ‘dropping down the ladder rung by rung.’ I guess ats a quotation from some poem. He was a pretty smart boy, old Hal,” Angelo said grudgingly. “The son of a bitch.”
“Not so smart,” Prew said, remembering the forty dollars he had finally spent on the seduction of Alma. “I’d hate to think I had anything to do with it.”
“Oh, balls,” Angelo said disgustedly.
“Well,” Prew said, “I would.”
They sat silent, looking at each other, neither one of them able to put their finger on just exactly what it was Bloom’s death made them feel.
“Its funny,” Angelo said, trying reluctantly. “How a guy dies and then he’s gone and isnt there any more. Even if you dont like him. All the things he’s done in his life, and been, all gone just like that.”
“Yeah,” Prew said. “But I cant see what the hell made him do it.”
That was when the last man, the big man with the odd dreaming eyes, came over and sat down on the bunk with them. Without seeming to try to, he drew to himself all the available attention and interest in the same way a magnet collects iron filings, and for this they both looked up at him gratefully.
“Every man has the right to kill himself,” the big man said gently, appropriating the subject as if there was no question to his right to it. “Its the only absolute inviolable right a man does have, the only act he can commit which nobody else has a sayso in, the one irrevocable deed he can execute without outside influence. The old Anglo-Saxon term of ‘freedom’ came from that: ‘free’ and ‘doom,’ with the idea that every man always had that last final resort that nobody could take away from him, if he wanted to avail himself of it.
“But like everything else,” the big man said gently, “it has its price, too: its price is its own absoluteness and irrevocableness and inviolableness. ‘Doom’ is the only thing thats ever ‘free,’ citizens,” the big man said, as if speaking out of some very sure personal source not open to them.
“I’d hate to believe that,” Prew said distastefully.
“I dont see why,” the big man said tranquilly. “If its the truth. And anyway, maybe you’re right: Maybe even that isnt free.”
“I didnt mean that,” Prew said.
“I know what you meant,” the big man said. He stopped and smiled at them. The subject he had appropriated seemed to have been pretty well covered.
“Except for one thing,” Angelo said worriedly. “Even for us guys, here, dont you think its wrong?”
“You’re a Catholic,” the big man grinned gently.
“Not a good one.”
“But still a Catholic.”
“Okay, so I’m a Catholic,” Angelo said belligerently. “Somebody else is a Methodist. So what does that prove?”
“Nothing. But I wasnt talking about the moral right. I was talking about the physical right, the fact, the opportunity. No laws or preachments or physical restraints can take away the concrete physical right, if a man wants to do it. But you, being a Catholic, or a follower of any other religion, immediately transposed the physical right into a moral right.”
“But is it right?” Angelo insisted. “Or is it wrong?”
“Its all how you look at it. Would you say the early Christian martyrs committed suicide?”
“No.”
“Of course not. You’re a Catholic. But they didnt have to go into the arena, did they?”
Angelo frowned. “No, they didnt have to. But they did have to. Besides, somebody else killed them.”
“But they knew what they were getting into. They were accepting death of their own free will, werent they?”
“Yes, but—”
“Isnt that suicide?”
“Well, in a way, yes,” Angelo frowned. “But they had a reason.”
“Sure. They had a reason. Either they were too proud to back down; or else they figured they’d get a free ticket to Heaven. Do you think Bloom shot himself just to see how it’d feel? And what difference does it make who pulled the trigger?”
Angelo frowned again. “None, I guess. When you put it that way.”
“Well, would you say the Christian martyrs were wrong?”
“Of course not.”
“Then it must all depend on the circumstances, whether suicide’s right or wrong.”
“But the Christian martyrs were different than Bloom. Or me.”
“Only in the fact that they did it in mass formation for an impersonal ideal, whereas Bloom did it for a purely personal reason that nobody will ever know. And you cant say it was wrong until you know that personal reason.
“Now what you should of asked,” the big man grinned gently, “was is it immoral?”
“Yeah, thats it,” Angelo said, “thats what I meant. Well, is it?”
“Of course,” the big man grinned. “Everybody knows its immoral. To the Romans it was very immoral, what the Christian martyrs did, it was cowardly, and a running away, and immoral. Theres no doubt that suicide, especially mass suicide, is immoral. Because every human society teaches that its immoral. Even in Japan and Russia suicide is only moral when you’re in disgrace with the government; but any other brand is just as immoral as here. How long would a society’s framework hold up if every time there was a Depression all the ones without jobs marched on Washington or London or Moscow and committed suicide on the Capitol lawn? A couple deals like that and there wouldnt be any labor market left. The Russians and Japs, who have utilized it, know that better than anybody.”
“But hell,” Angelo said, “that would be crazy.”
“Sure,” the big man grinned, “but thats just what your Christian martyrs did, citizen.”
“Yeah,” Angelo said thoughtfully, “thats right. But times was differnt then,” he said.
“You mean the people then didnt want to live as bad as the people do now.”
“Yeah. I guess thats it. Sure thats it. We got more to live for now.”
“Movies,” the big man said without smiling, gently, almost lovingly. “Automobiles. Trains, buses, airplanes, niteclubs, bars; sports, educations, businesses. Radios,” the big man said gently.
“Yeah,” Angelo said. “All that. It wont be long till we got television. They dint have none of that stuff.”
“Would you say a man in a Nazi concentration camp had the right to commit suicide?”
“Hell yes.”
“Then why not a man in an American corporation?”
“But thas differnt. He aint bein tortured.”
“You think not? And why not a man in the American Army? Why not a man in the Stockade? Why not any man anywhere, anytime, if he is being tortured?
“Everybody talks about freedom, citizens,” the big man said gently, seeming to draw upon that very sure source of personal knowldege again, “but they dont really want it. Half of them wants it but the other half dont. What they really want is to maintain an illusion of freedom in front of their wives and business associates. Its a satisfactory compromise, and as long as they can have that they can get along without the other which is more expensive. The only trouble is, every man who declares himself free to his friends has to make a slave out of his wife and employees to keep up the illusion and prove it; the wife to be free in front of her bridgeclub has to command her Help, Husband, and Heirs. It resolves itself into a battle; whoever wins, the other one loses. For every general in this world there have to be 6,000 privates.
“Thats why,” he smiled at them, “I wouldnt stop any man from committing suicide. If he came up and asked to borrow my gun, I’d give it to him. Because he is either serious or else trying to maintain that illusion of freedom. If he was serious I’d want him to have it; if he was play-acting I’d want to call him.”
“Thats one way to look at it,” Prew said, somehow carried along into agreement in spite of himself, carried by those long-range-vision eyes and that absolute-tender voice.
“In our world, citizens,” the big man said gently, “theres only one way a man can have freedom, and that is to die for it, and after he’s died for it it dont do him any good. Thats the whole problem, citizens. In a nutshell.”
“This is Jack Malloy,” Angelo said proudly, as if introducing his personal friend the Nizam of Hyderabad, the richest man in the world. “Wait’ll you hear some of the real conversations we have in here.”
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Prew said, feeling tongue-tied and shy. Looking at those soft vague unabashed-dreamer’s eyes he could see why an arch-cynic like Blues Berry could make such a fatuous remark about The Malloy’s big-baby heart.
“I’ve heard a lot about you, too,” Jack Malloy said warmly, sticking out a paw like a ham. “I want to shake your hand, citizen. Out of all the drafthorses in this stable, you’re the only one who ever listened to what I told them to do and did it, exactly,” he said raising his voice.
Without turning either his trunk or his head, he seemed suddenly to be staring behind him at the rest of Number Two sprawled out talking on the chairless floor. He was not looking at them but they all lowered their eyes and inspected their cigarets, the conversations seemed to stop dead in the air.
Jack Malloy ruthlessly let the silence ring on for almost a full minute. Then he turned back, or seemed to turn back, because he was still looking at Prew, and winked down at Prew, a quick deliberate but absolutely impersonal wink that was as if he did not even see Prew at all but was only fulfilling a social ritual like a host who gives a big dinner party for a prospective customer so he can sell him.
“If I had twelve men;” he said loudly, “an even dozen, citizen; who would do like you did, I could have Father Thompson and Fatso both in the nut ward in three months as permanent boobyhatch material.
“Of course,” he said, “there would be two more just like them the next day and we would have to start over again, but the Toughest Jail in the US Army would soon become also the Toughest Assignment in the US Army. And if we sent enough of them along after Father Thompson and Fatso, eventually they would have to close up this shop in despair and let us all go home.”
The ever-present thirty-year-man that was always there in Prewitt wondered if he meant home to their outfits or home to civilian life, but somehow he did not feel like asking.
Jack Malloy let the silence ring on for another minute. He had said it all loudly, and nobody said anything this time either. There seemed to be a general feeling that he could do just exactly what he said.
There was another feeling, too, Prew noted, here in Number Two. It was a feeling that had not been in Number Three. The only way he could describe it was that it was a feeling that you could say anything loudly, absolutely anything, loudly. It was a good feeling.
“Have a smoke, citizen,” Jack Malloy said, lowering his voice back to normal, and offering him from a full pack of tailormades. It was like a signal and the men on the floor who had been chastened began to smoke and talk again.
“Hey,” Prew said, embarrassedly, “tailormades. Thanks.”
“I got plenty more,” Jack Malloy said. “Any time you want one. If this little son of a bitch,” he nodded at Angelo, “with all the pure unadulterated guts he’s got, would follow my advice half as well as you did, he could have pulled off his plot and been out of here a month ago.”
“Thats all right,” Angelo countered, taking the offered cigaret, “you just wait. I can do it anyway. I know I can.”
Prew watched his eyes go a little crazy again, hungrily, like they always did at the mention of his great secret plan, but this time his eyes did not get the murderous suspicion in them that they always got out on the rockpile.
“I’m just biding my time,” he said craftily. “I can do it all right. Dont worry about that.”
“Sure you can,” Jack Malloy said gently. “Sure you can, citizen. But you could do it a whole lot easier, and save yourself a whole lot of nasty bumps, if you’d listen to me.”
“I listen to you,” Angelo said violently. “More than once’ve I listen to you. And I’ve tried it. Not ony Passive Resistance, but the other in the Hole. I just cant do it, Jack. Either one.”
“The citizen here did it,” Jack Malloy nodded at Prew, “he did both of them.”
“I still dont know how though,” Prew put in.
“That doesnt matter,” Jack Malloy said. “I dont know either. You still did them.”
“Okay, so maybe he can do them,” Angelo said hotly. “For him thats fine. For me thats from nothing. What a use for me keep on trying I cant do them?”
“None,” Jack Malloy said, in the same gently tender tone that his voice never seemed to get out of, even when he spoke loudly. “Thats why I told you to stop. But you could do it—if you only believed you could strong enough, so that you didnt knock yourself out trying so hard.”
“That tells me a lot,” Angelo said. “That tells me a hell of a lot. Maybe Prew can do it. Well, I told you he was your kind of a guy. But nobody else around here has ever been able to do them.”
“That doesnt mean they cant do them,” Jack Malloy said. “The same thing is in every man’s mind. My mind’s no different than your mind, citizen.”
It was a habit of his, Prew found out later, he never called anybody anything but citizen. Once, the story went, he had even called Major Thompson citizen a couple times. It had earned him four extra days in the Hole. Prew wondered why he did things like that, and then all the time told everybody else not to?
“Like hell it aint differnt,” Angelo grinned. “I had your mind, I wount never of been in this fucking place in the first place.”
“You had my mind,” Jack Malloy grinned ruefully, one of those rare flashing grins of his, always rueful, that were different from his smile which never quite reached clear up into the vague unlistening eyes, “you had my mind, citizen, you’d been in here a hell of lot sooner than you were.”
“I guess thats no lie,” Angelo grinned with a great pride in the big man.
“How about this big secret plot?” Prew asked them. “What the hell is this great plan anyway? I’ve been killing myself with curiosity for a week now, wondering about it.”
“Let him tell you,” Jack Malloy deferred gently.
Apparently Prew had addressed the question to Malloy instinctively, although he did not know why because it was Angelo’s idea.
“Its his plan,” Jack Malloy said. “It was his idea, he thought of it, and he deserves the telling of it.”
And Prew thought suddenly that he had never seen such tenderness, in man or woman, as was in Jack Malloy’s eyes looking at Angelo Maggio. It was worth it, he thought exultantly, it was more than worth it, it was worth ten days in the Hole, to be here with these men.
“Come on down here then,” Angelo said, his eyes gone cunning and miserly again. He got up and started down toward the other end where the two commodes were.
“You can tell it here, citizen,” Jack Malloy tried to dissuade him gently.
“Nosir,” Angelo grinned at them crafty-eyed. “Nosiree.”
“Maybe Prew dont feel like getting up,” Jack Malloy suggested gently.
“Then he’ll have to wait,” Angelo said emphatically, and started to come back. “I tell it at all, I tell it down there, where nobody is.”
“I feel okay,” Prew said, and got up and the two of them followed the little guy down. And it was sitting on the closed commodes, with Jack Malloy leaning against the iron sink, that Angelo Maggio unfolded his big secret plan, his great dream.
The rest of the barrack, led by Blues Berry, drifted unobtrusively down toward the far end with their conversations, like healthy people tactfully humoring an invalid. Prew looked at Malloy, then swung his eyes back to Maggio quickly.
“I’ve only told it to Berry and The Malloy,” Angelo explained insistently. “Nobody else knows about it, not a single soul.”
Prew looked at Malloy; Malloy’s face was closed.
“Aint that right, Jack?” Angelo said anxiously.
“Thats right, citizen,” Jack Malloy said gently.
“If they did,” Angelo said fiercely, “I’d kill the cocksuckers, see? Even in here see? Some of these guys find out about it, they liable as not to try it first. And half the chances of success depends on it bein the first guy who tries it. After the first time it wouldnt work. Father Thompson aint no fool. Neither’s Fatso. And I’m the guy who thought of it so I got the right to be the first guy to try it.
“Aint that right, Jack?” he said anxiously.
“That’s right,” Jack Malloy said, his face still closed.
“Well,” Angelo said, “here it is.” He interrupted himself. “You see I’m right,” he said, “Jack says I’m right; you want to try it later, after me, thats okay, although I wouldnt guarantee it, but I got the right to have the first shot.”
“The truth is,” Jack Malloy said, “nobody else has got the guts to try it.”
“Dont kid yourself,” Angelo snarled.
“I’m not,” Jack Malloy said. “They havent the guts because nobody wants out as bad as you do.”
“Dont you believe it,” Angelo said. “I aint takin no chances.” He turned to Prew. “But you see how it is, dont you, Prew?”
“I see,” Prew said.
“Okay. Well heres the deal. Any man who goes in the Hole and stays there 21 days is automatically sent up to the nutward in the Station Hospital and given a Section 8. I never heard of it happening yet, but thats the rule.”
“I’ve heard of it happening,” Jack Malloy interrupted gently. “It happened twice during my first trip. Thats why I like the plan. The idea is, you see, that any man who gets violent in the Stockade—I mean homicidally violent—is too far gone to salvage. I mean, really off his nut. They put him in the Hole to cool him off, but if he doesnt cool off in 21 days (some say 30 days), then they figure its the McCoy and he’s not acting and they Section 8 him. Thats happened twice I know of, during my first trip. But those two guys were really off their nut. The citizen here,” he nodded at Angelo, “proposes to fool them.”
“Thats it,” Angelo said eagerly. “I’m going to flip my lid out on the rockpile and go for the guard with a hammer, see?”
“Aint he hable to shoot you?” Prew said.
“Yeah, but I got to chance that. Thats the ony really dangerous part to it. What I figure is, if I go for him, instead of away from him, toward the woods, he wont shoot; he’ll ony bean me with his riot gun. I figure to fix it as easy as I can for him to bean me. I aint going to really ever hit him, see? just make him think I am.”
“They’ll work you over pretty good, wont they?” Prew said.
“Sure,” Angelo said earnestly, “but what the hell? They wont be getting any cherry. They cant make it any worse than they have already. All they can do is make it last longer, way I figure. And after so long a time you kind of blank out on them anyway, see?”
“Yeah,” Prew said, “I see.”
“I got everything to gain, and all I got to lose is a little more scalp. And the Black Hole part is the least of my worries. I can do that standin on my head, see? 21 days?” he snapped them away with his fingers.
Prew watched him blow it away like milkweed, and thought about it hollowly; 21 days of it, maybe 30 Malloy said, 21 days of bread and water, 21 days of silence, 21 days of blindness; three weeks maybe a month, in the Black Hole.
“A man couldnt pull that trick of yours for that long, could he?” he asked Jack Malloy, “even if he knew how.”
“I dont know,” Jack Malloy said. “I’ve read where its been done for longer. But I wouldnt want to try it.”
“I can cut it,” Angelo said. “With a butterknife. And I dont need The Malloy’s trick to do it.”
“It’ll mean a DD, wont it?” Prew said.
“I dont know,” Angelo said. “And frankly, I dont give a good goddam. I aint never going to work in Gimbel’s Basement no more anyway. What I need with an Honorable? Besides, Jack says they give blue ones with Sections 8s sometimes.”
“Not if the man comes from the Stockade, do they?” Prew said. “Way I understand, any man Section 8ed out of the Stockade automatically gets a yellow discharge.”
“Not always,” Jack Malloy said gently, his face still closed. “I think it all depends on the circumstances and how much of a convincing act the man can put on for them.”
“Thats not how I heard it,” Prew said.
“Well, its a cinch he aint going to get a white discharge,” Angelo grinned tautly, “so what the hell’s the difference? Yellow or blue? Who wants to be a goddam citizen of this goddam country anyway? I’ll go to Mexico. Dont even have to do that. All you lose is the right to vote and pay taxes. Who the hell wants to vote anyway? You cant vote in the Army, can you? Anyway, whoever the hell a man does vote for anyway, its always all the same: They all of them get together ahead of time and figure it out and make their trades and put in the men they want anyway.”
“You cant get a job,” Prew said.
“Who the hell wants a job? They all the same goddam thing. Gimbel’s Basement. You work for some big outfit that takes all the money and gives you just barely enough to live on and punch a timeclock all your life and kiss the boss’s ass for a job you never liked. Who wants that? Not Maggio. I’ll go to Mexico,” he said. “I’ll go to Mexico and be a cowboy or something,” he said wildly.
“I dont know why I’m arguing with you,” Prew said. “Its your deal, and if you’ve figured all that into it, what the hell? I’m for you, Angelo.”
“You think I’m crazy, dont you?” Angelo grinned at him.
“Hell no. Its just that I hate to think of losing my citizenship. I guess I just like this country.”
“I like it too,” Angelo said. “I love this country. Much as you or anybody, and you know it.”
“I know it,” Prew said.
“But I still hate this country. You love the Army. But I dont love the Army. This country’s Army is why I hate this country. What did this country ever do for me? Gimme a right to vote for men I cant elect? You can have it. Gimme a right to work at a job I hate? You can have that too. Then tell me I’m a Citizen of the greatest richest country on earth, if I dont believe it look at Park Avenue. Carnival prizes. All carnival prizes. Pay fifty cents a throw and get a plasterparis bust of Washington—if you win. A man can just stand so much from anything, no matter how much he loves the thing.”
“I’ll buy that,” Prew said.
“Well, I’ve stood all I can stand—if I can get myself out of standing any more of it. They aint going to drive this soldier to any goddam suicide. And they aint going to drive this soldier into growing a brown nose. They shouldnt teach their immigrants’ kids all about democracy unless they mean to let them have a little of it, it ony makes for trouble. Me and the United States is disassociating our alliance as of right now, until the United States can find time to read its own textbooks a little.”
Prew thought, a little sickly, of the little book The Man Without a Country that his mother used to read to him so often, and how the stern patriotic judge condemned the man to live on a warship where no one could ever mention home to him the rest of his whole life, and how he had always felt that pinpoint of pleased righteous anger at seeing the traitor get what he deserved.
“And thats the story,” Angelo said, “and thats the way she is.”
“I’m for it then,” Prew said.
“Are you?” Angelo asked him anxiously. “You really are? Thats one reason I wanted to tell you, because I knew if you heard me out and you were still for it, then I know it was all right, it wasnt wrong.”
“I’m for it,” Prew said.
“Okay,” Angelo said. “Then thats all. Lets go on back.”
Prew watched him go. Thin, narrowshouldered, bowlegged, the toothpick arms moving with the swagger, one of the newer race of cliff dwellers he thought again, who had no use for muscles: for legs to walk take the subway; for arms to climb use the elevator; for back to lift hire a stiffleg derrick. A minor casualty of his 20th Century culture and civilization. Go to Mexico and be a cowboy! Even his country’s history screwed him.
Maybe if his father had been a watchmaker, or an auto mechanic, or a pipefitter, so that he might have inherited a trade he could love, then he would not have had to love democracy so much. If he had only found some undangerous channel that would have let him utilize the talent for honesty and belief in democracy that the unwise foolish virgins who taught Social Science in the public schools had fostered in him.
If he had only been born a millionaire’s son. Then he would have been all right.
The trouble with Angelo Maggio, the serious trouble, the dangerous trouble, the inconsiderate unreasonable insoluble frightening trouble, was Angelo Maggio had not been born a Culpepper.
“They all know it, dont they?” Prew said.
“You cant have a secret in a place like this.”
“Wont they talk?”
“No. They wont.”
“You didnt try to talk him out of it,” he asked Jack Malloy.
“No,” Jack Malloy said, his face still closed, “I didnt.”
“Neither did I,” Prew said.
“There are some things,” Jack Malloy said, his face still closed, “it doesnt do any good to try to talk a man out of.”
“Lets go on back,” Prew said.
“Okay,” Jack Malloy said, his face still closed.
Angelo was sitting on Prew’s bunk and Prew crawled in under the deliciousness of the blanket again. Then, and only then, Blues Berry and the others began to drift back down again. They were tough men in Number Two, they were the toughest of the tough, they were the cream.
During the rest of the time before Lights Out they sat around on the chairless floor smoking Duke’s Mixture and now and then a hoarded filched tailormade, or leaned standing back against the bed ends, or maybe half-lying on a shaded bottom bunk, and they talked. There were no cards or checkers, no Monopoly boards, no Mah-Jong sets. But they never ran out of plenty to talk about. Most of them had bummed across the country at least once, before they finally enlisted. Most of the younger ones had grown up in the CCCs during the Depression, and graduated into the Army from there. Without exception they had all spent time on the bum. They had worked in North Carolina paper mills, cut timber up in Washington, maybe tried a shift of raising cukes in southern Florida, worked in the Indiana mines, poured steel in Pennsylvania, followed the wheat harvest in Kansas and the fruit harvest in California, loaded cargoes on the docks in Frisco and Dago and Seattle and N.O. La., helped spud in wells in Texas. They were men who knew their country, and in spite of that still loved it. A generation before them men just like them had tried to change it and been defeated. These now did not have the others’ organization. These now did not go for organization. These now were members of a still newer race jerked loose from ties by the Depression and set to a drifting that had ended finally in the Army as the last port of call where they went through one more sifting process and came here, to the Stockade, to be sifted down once again into Number Two.
At eight the lights were turned off. Each man crawled in his bunk until the flashlight bedcheck had been made. Then they got back up and sat down on the floor again and went on smoking Duke’s Mixture with deep drags that lit up faces redly, and still they went on talking. Smoking Duke’s Mixture was no hardship to them who had grown up on rolled cigarets, and they had no trouble passing the time talking because they did not talk to pass the time but because they just loved to talk. Each man always had more stories with himself as hero than he could tell, and if he told the same story with himself as hero again a week later it was still almost new again by then, and anyway he had always developed it and elaborated it in the same way a writer rewrites a story with himself as hero, so that usually it was not even recognizable. Talking had always been their chief recreation, who could only afford the more expensive amusements like women and whiskey once a month on Payday, and they were experts in their field. When they could have slept, always the best method of time passing as any man who has spent time in the Black Hole knows, they still preferred to sit up and talk and tell stories with themself as hero.
It was almost like the days back on the bum, Prew thought sleepily. No women, no whiskey, no tailormades, no money. If you shut your eyes, you could believe you were back in a jungle on the outskirts of some little jerkwater town, smooth dusty under the trees on the leeward side of a grade that passed the watertank and cut off the wind, sitting around the small fire with a belly full of a good mulligan that you had been assigned the bumming of the carrots for, or maybe the onions, or the spuds. The faces were the same faces, and the voices were the same voices, and the flavor of the talk was the same American flavor.
American faces, he thought sleepily happily with that ecstasy of the martyr that had always been his goal and his destiny, American faces and American voices, weak with all the lustful-hungry greedy-lying American weaknesses, but strong now with the strength bred of necessity which is the only real strength ever, leathery lean hardbitten faces and voices in the old American tradition of the woodsmen and the ground-clearing farmers who also fought bitterly to stay alive. Here is your Army, America, he sleepily wanted to tell Them, here is your strength, that You have made strong by trying to break, and that You will have to depend on in the times that are coming, whether You like it or not, or want to or not, and no matter how much it may hurt Your pride. And here in Number Two was its cream, sifted and resifted and then sifted again, until all the dry rot had been winnowed out, all the soft spots squeezed out, all the rotting gangrene that all the social columnists were so afraid of excised out, so that only the firm hardy remainder of the most absolute of toughness, that would not only hold its own but would triumph, in a whole world of toughness, was all that was left now.
Thank your various Gods for your prisons, You America. Pray to Them hard, to not teach you how to get along without them,—until They have first taught you how to get along without your wars.
And he, Robert E Lee Prewitt, Harlan Kentucky, was one of them, one of these here, in the old hungry tradition, here where there was not one single fat-layered insurance salesman’s face in the new American tradition to be found.
You could not be one of them unless you shared it all with them, and for the first time in a long time he felt sleepily he was back with his own kind again, that he did not have to explain to, because each one of them had the same hard unbroachable sense of ridiculous personal honor that he had never been able to free himself from either.
And it had all been more than worth it, from the moment he had sat down at the mess table and taken that first single bite he had been too scared to taste, and he would start gladly right in on a second round again right now, if it was required to clinch it.
Poor Bloom, he thought sleepily, poor Bloom.
It was only later on, after the others had all finally gone off to sleep, that he was not sleepy any more and began to think of Alma Schmidt whom he had almost believed he had forgotten and, trying The Malloy’s black dot system again here in the bunk and failing miserably, lay for a long time wide awake, and thinking of her.
Everything you swear you will not do you always end by doing, he thought sleepy again now finally. I remember distinctly you swore once you would never lay in your bunk and jackoff, and so now you can add this one to the still growing list. At least this is one degradation Bloom didnt have to suffer.
Or maybe Bloom was in love with someone, too. Maybe that was why he killed himself.
The more he thought about it, sleepily again, the more he was quite positive that that was it, that Bloom had killed himself for love.