From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [234]
He followed the proceedings during the whole seven weeks it took the law to care for Maggio with the same absorption. An absorption that left The Treatment, that was still going on, running a poor second.
Once during the six weeks before the trial, he bought two cartons of tailormades and walked up to the Stockade to visit him. It was almost two miles, up past the tennis courts, then past the golf course, then past the bridle path sun dappled under the big tall trees and the lathery smell of the Packtrain. He sweated walking in the hot sun and he saw many officers, officers’ wives, and officers’ children. They all looked very tanned and very sportive. The Stockade was a wood building painted white with a green roof and sitting in a cool grove of oaks in the middle of a big flat field on the very edge of the reservation. It looked like a country school house. The tall chain mesh wire fence with the three in-leaning strands of barb wire made it look more like a country school house. The chain mesh wire grids over the windows looked like a country school house, too. At the country school house they would not let him in.
It was not a country school. It was a military establishment. They would not let him leave the tailormades for Angelo either. Each internee was issued one sack of Duke’s Mixture a day, and there would be no supplementary donations from outsiders. Each internee was a soldier, and would share the same as every other internee soldier. He took the tailormades back home with him. He did not see Angelo.
He felt thankful to them though. They could have easily let him leave the tailormades for Angelo and then the MP guards smoked them up themselves. Later on he smoked the cigarets himself. He felt guilty about smoking them. He could have thrown them away but they had cost two-fifty, and what good would it have done, it was an empty gesture. So he smoked them. But he felt guilty.
He felt guilty about Angelo too, that was one reason he had wanted to see him. He felt that what had happened Payday was somehow his fault. Angelo had been playing the queers for quite a while now, he had been coming down to Hal’s place often, and nothing like this had happened before. Only when Kid Prewitt appeared on the scene, like a catalyst poured into a tranquil beaker, did the mixture begin to boil and then explode. Angelo had not been tainted by the queers; it was only when Kid Galahad Prewitt had stepped in looking for the Holy Grail with his moralistic fears and questionings that Angelo had suddenly felt guilty enough, or tainted enough, to do something drastic. There were times when Prewitt felt a special quality in himself, a strange unpleasant quality that seemed to force everyone he touched into making drastic decisions about their own lives, no wonder people did not like to be around him. The idea frightened him deeply, at such times, because he could not understand what it was and because he did not want to do it. Certainly, he did not try to do it. People went along, living their lives as best they could, not gaining much maybe, but not losing greatly either, and all the time, deeply hidden, the one great personal conflict of fear lay dormant and unhidden. Enter Kid Galahad Prewitt. The action precipitates. The conflict of fear rises flapping from the depths like a giant manta ray, looming big and bigger, looming huge, up out of the deep green depths that you can look down into through a water glass and see the anchor cable dwindling in a long arc down into invisibility, up from far below that even, flapping the two wing fins of choice and the ego caught square in the middle. And they had to choose, had to face it, and whichever way they chose they still got hurt. And all the time he did not want to do it, did not know he did it, until afterwards. It always frightened him, thinking this way, it was one of the things he could most of the time keep down, out of his mind, but sometimes it was too hard to keep the mind going in smooth even waves and he had to let it in and the mind started jumping around yawingly as if there were no bottom under the feet and it always frightened him. Maybe there were things in themselves men should not look at, just as there were things in the very deep bottom of the sea that it was better that men did not know about. He felt that was true, sometimes. Life frightened him, sometimes. But there was nothing to do, anyway. Because this special quality was a thing he could not control in himself, that he could not stop. But then when he was going good he knew it was better to face it, that it was always better to face things no matter what it cost anybody. He knew that. He believed it. Only in the bad spells did life frighten him with its unbelievable cruelty, its inconceivable injustice, its incredible pointlessness. He was going through one of the bad spells now, with Angelo in the Stockade waiting trial. He felt he should have been able to stop the little guy from going off the deep end that night, even though it was himself, he felt, who caused it. He should have foreseen it. He should have not left him alone to step to the water to jettison the trunks. He should have pitched into the fight, in spite of what the little guy had yelled. The two of them could have whipped the MPs, clubs and all, and gotten away, back to the Company and safety. He saw a thousand things he should have done, but had not done. He held himself responsible for what happened to Angelo. That was why he wanted to see Angelo so badly, maybe he could explain it to him. But he did not get to see Angelo.
In fact, h