From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [313]
The fat man, still standing at attention staring straight ahead crying silently long after Fatso had gone, suddenly collapsed himself down onto his carefully-made drumtight bunk that he would have to tighten again now, and put his head in his hands and began to sob rackingly.
The first man, the one with the foot, had sat down on the floor in his tracks immediately, as soon as Fatso was gone, and taken off his shoe tenderly. Then he just sat, momentarily happy with the relief, like a fat woman just out of her corset, massaging his foot concentratedly, his lips moving silently cursing disgustedly.
The Indiana farmboy didnt do anything, but just stood in the same spot, still staring dreamily at his shelf, as if wondering why no rag had been there, or perhaps still hearing his music.
Prew watched all three of them through the cold hard crystal of his general disgust, wondering with a kind of dispassionate scientific interest just how this would affect them overall, and making a mental note to watch and see.
Within a week the fat man had wangled an angle and got himself assigned to the kitchen as an apprentice cook. Two days later he was a trustee, and moved over to Number One, the east barrack, where the trustees bunked together, and Prew did not see him any more.
The man with the foot limped around for two days before he got his nerve up to go on Sick Call. He was pleased to find, when he finally did, that he was suffering from a broken metatarsal for which the Stockade doc sent him up to the prison ward at the Station Hospital with a report on how a rock had fallen on his foot while at work on the rockpile. He rode off in a recon happily, expecting to spend four or five weeks of vacation in a cast. He was back in four days, very bitterly, in working splints and eventually he ended up in Number Two where he and Prew became quite friendly.
The Indiana farmboy, who had looked the worst, had less trouble than any of them. He stayed in his daze all that day and had to be led out to work and led in to chow. At the rockpile they put his hammer in his hands and he stood in the same spot all day swinging it dreamily while the rest of them, including Prew, more or less tried to keep an eye on him. The next morning he came out of it in a fighting rage and knocked three men down, cursing and yelling, before the ones working nearest him could swarm over him, leaving an arm waving and a leg kicking here and there out of the press, and hold him down and quiet him. After that, he was his same old mild placid uncomplaining self again as if nothing had happened.
That was all there was to it. By that time there were other no less interesting casualties to observe, and by that time Prew had lost that first overwhelming disgust. Perhaps that was what horrified him the most: that he had lost it. He was afraid if he was not very careful he might even get so he did not mind any more. Because try as he would, he could not find anybody to fix the blame on. He felt it would help a lot if he could only find somebody to blame. He hated Major Thompson and Fatso, but that was not the same thing as being able to blame them. He also hated the casualties who let themselves be beaten around like somebody’s burro, and he certainly could not blame them. He hated the Major and Fatso, he analyzed shrewdly, because he feared them; and the casualties because he feared being like them. Both hates were personal. He felt morally obligated to refrain from basing the blame on personal hatreds. He could not even blame the Army. Angelo could blame the Army; Angelo hated the Army. But he didn’t hate the Army, not even now. He remembered what Maureen had told him once; that it was the system that was at fault, blame the system. But he could not even blame the system, because the system was not anything, it was only a kind of accumulation, of everybody, and you could not blame everybody, not unless you wanted the blame to become diluted into a meaningless term, a just nothing. Besides, this system here in this country was the best system the world had ever produced, wasnt it? This system was by far and above the best system anywhere else in the world today. He felt if he did not find somebody to blame pretty soon he would hate everybody.
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