From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [10]
Everything would probably have gone on like that indefinitely, since he had convinced himself that bugling was nothing, had it not been for that deathbed promise to his mother and for Dixie Wells. And actually it happened after the season was over. Perhaps it was his temperament, but he seemed to have a very close working alliance with irony.
Dixie Wells was a middleweight who loved boxing and lived for boxing. He had enlisted because business was not so good for fighters during the Depression, and because he wanted time to mature his style and season it without being overmatched in some ham and egger, and without having to live on the beans a ham and egger has to eat while he is trying to work up to the big time. He planned to come out of the Army and go right into the upper brackets. A lot of people on the Outside had their eye on him and he was already having fights downtown in Honolulu at the Civic Auditorium.
Dixie liked to work with Prewitt because of the other’s speed and Prewitt learned a lot from Dixie. They worked together often. Dixie was a heavy middle, but then Prewitt was a heavy welter. They are very professional about those things in the Army; they keep every pound that they can squeeze; they always figure a man for ten pounds more than what he weighs in at when they match him; they dry him out and then after he has weighed in they feed him steak and lots of water.
It was Dixie who asked him to work this time, because he had a fight coming up downtown. Also, it was Dixie who wanted to use the six ounce gloves, and they never wore headgear anyway.
Things like that happen more often than any one suspects. Prew knew that, and there was no reason why he should feel guilty. He had known a wizard lightweight at Myer who also had a future. Until he went into a civilian gym half-tight one night and wanted to put them on. They used new gloves, and the man who tied them on forgot to cut the metal tips off the laces. Gloves often come untied. This was like the old kid game of crack the whip, a wrist flick drove the metal into the wizard lightweight’s eye like an arrow into a target. The fluid of his eye ran down over his cheek and he had to buy a glass one, and as a wizard lightweight he was through. Things like that just happen, every now and then.
Prew was set, flat on his feet when he caught Dixie wide with this no more than ordinarily solid cross. Dixie just happened to be standing solid too. Maybe he had heard something. From the way he fell, dead weight, a falling ingot or a sack of meal dropped from the haymow that shudders the barn and bursts its own seams, Prew knew. Dixie lit square on his face and did not roll over. Fighters do not light on their faces any more than judo men. Prew jerked back his hand and stared at it, like a kid who touched the stove. Then he went downstairs to get the Doc.
Dixie Wells was in a coma for a week but he finally came out of it. The only thing was that he was blind. The doctor at the Station Hospital said something about concussion and a fracture, a pressure on or injury to a nerve. Prew went up to see him twice but after the second time he could not go back. The second time they got to talking about fighting and Dixie cried. It was seeing the tears coming out of those eyes that could not see that made him stay away.
Di