From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [115]
“But I like it,” Readall Treadwell said.
“Its the one,” Maggio grinned, “that I’m going to tell them back home is the one I almost married, but shacked up with for a year instead, and left behind me.”
“The Girl I Left Behind Me,” Prew said and began to whistle it sarcastically. But he did not get up and walk away, like he could have.
They were still looking, a little later, when Bloom came in freshly showered from the latrine and leaned down uninvited to look too, standing beside Readall Treadwell across the bed.
The four of them, silently looking, made a momentary still picture that was nowhere apparently dangerous. But Bloom, Prew thought later, was never one to take a backseat for very long, even to a photograph album, if he could help it. Probably he only did it to make known the fact that The Great Bloom had arrived on the scene, since no one had acknowledged it. But in doing what he did he made at least two, and maybe three, enemies that would never again be anything else but enemies. It was a thing Bloom was always doing.
It all happened quite swiftly. One moment there was this apparently peaceful still picture of four men looking at an album. Then the picture shuddered, quaked, broke up in the same way dreams shift, and began to move into a series of apparently disjointed actions, one, two, three, right down the line, like a jerky oldfashioned movie, too blurredly swift to be understood, as these things always were, but hanging over it all that utter-complete-bloody-hell-with-it feeling that only comes when a man has an absolutely bellyfull.
Bloom thrust his hand down between their two heads and pointed out a picture of a petite, olive-skinned, sloe-eyed girl of fifteen who was Angelo’s youngest sister and who was sitting very Hollywoodishly in a bathing suit in the summer Brooklyn sun upon a tile roof ledge still dusted with last winter’s soot, trying to display womanishly the girlish, but very full, young body that she was so proud of because men looked at it, but that obviously was not womanish since obviously she had never tested it out yet and had only the vaguest romantic idea of the womanish uses of it. It was a picture that did not come off very well, but Bloom said delightedly, half teasingly:
“Man, I bet that one’s a hotshot piece of ass to lay,” and laughed complacently at his own great wit.
Prew, who had not known he was there and who knew the girl was Maggio’s sister, and what’s more, knew that Bloom knew this because they all had seen the album many times, felt a chill of momentarily time-stopping shock run down through him. Then a red running fire of hatred, half shame for Bloom, half rage for Bloom, who had done this deliberately, whether kiddingly or not certainly stupidly, but probably kiddingly in his bull-like, patronizing, dominating way, but even kiddingly with a deliberate degrading maliciousness, trampling callously over one of the few respected tabus, the things nobody ever said to anybody else, even in the Army, the fire of hatred making him want to beat the living piss out of such stupidity.
But before he could even raise his head he found he was holding the full weight of the album and Maggio was gone, silently to his wall locker, opening it, then turning around silently and calmly and stepping up to Bloom and bringing down the sawed off pool cue on Bloom’s head with all his strength.
Prew shut the book carefully, thinking that this was it all right, and tossed it two beds down where it would not get mauled and stood up ready. Readall Treadwell had seen Angelo coming and considerately faded out into the aisle to give him room, to give them both room.
“Why, Jesus Christ!” Bloom said above the reverberating crack of the pool cue on his head. “You hit me, you little Wop!”
“You bet your ass,” Maggio said. “With a pool cue. And about to do it again.”
“What?” Bloom said, blinking his eyes now, the stun of the blow that should have felled an ox but did not even dent his massive skull enough to knock him down or even make him dizzy enough to sit down just reaching him now, him not understanding it yet, but beginning to, and his indignation mounting as the understanding grew. “With a pool cue?”
“Thats right,” Maggio said dis