From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [317]
“A game!” Prew said.
“Between me and them. They’re tryin to crack me up and I aint going to crack. They can see me, but they’ll never see me saw. I play the game with them and lay there, and take everything they got to give.”
“You make it a game!” Prew said.
“Thats one way. The other way is to remember things out of your life. You remember nice things, pleasant things.”
“I might be able to do that one,” Prew said tightly.
“But they got to be things with no people in them,” Angelo warned him quickly. “And they got to be about things that you dont want.”
“How?” Prew said. “Why is that? I dont get that.”
“Because thats the way the mind works,” Angelo Maggio said. “Dont ask me why it works that way. I dont know. All I know, it does. When you start thinkin about people, then that reminds you of things you done with them or because of them, things you wish you could do again. That brings you and where you are back into it.”
“Yes,” Prew said, remembering Violet Ogure and Alma Schmidt. “I can see that.”
“And when you think about things you want, you already are in it, see? You want those things now, right then. And you cant have them. The main thing is to keep you out of it.”
“Yen,” Prew said. “But how?”
“I think about scenes of Nature,” Angelo Maggio said. “Woods I been in. Trees is awys good. Lakes and mountains you’ve seen. How it is in the fall, with all the colors. The way it is in winter with snow all over everything. I saw an ice storm onct—” he said eagerly and then stopped. “Anyway,” he said sheepishly, “you see what I mean.”
“I see,” Prew said.
“Then,” Angelo said, “when the people begin to come into it, like they awys do, sooner or later, I switch to the game a while, until I can go back where there aint no people in it.”
“What was the longest time you ever did in the Hole?” Prew asked him tightly.
“Six days,” Angelo Maggio grinned proudly out of the bent dented face. “But it was easy. It was nothin. I could do twenty days, or fifty days, just as easy,” he said, “I know I could. Why hell, if they—”
He stopped suddenly, guiltily startled, as if he had almost been trapped into making an admission. As Prew watched, the old wild wary miserly look that Prew had learned to recognize now, came onto his face.
“Never mind,” said Angelo Maggio slyly. “You’ll find out: I’ll tell you all about it later. Right now, the thing to do is to get you in with us.”
“Whatever you say, buddy. This is your show. And you’re running it,” Prew told him tightly. Six days, he thought. “When do we start? You name it.”
“Today,” Angelo said without hesitation. “Any time is okay, but its better to do it quick and then you dont have so much time to stew over it. Do it at chow this noon.”
“Check,” Prew said, and stood looking at him, at the tiny narrow-chested bonyshouldered undernourished frame of him with the thin legs and pipestem arms in the sacklike fatigue suit under the ridiculous looking fatigue hat that shaded the black burning eyes that were looking at him intensely. Six days, he thought, thats 144 hours.
“I got to tell you something,” Angelo told him painfully. He paused. “It was The Malloy made me tell you all about how it is in the Hole,” he confessed. “I wasnt going to tell you. I was just going to let you find it out. Like I did. I guess I was scared you’d back out if you knew ahead of time.”
“What made you think I’d back out?”
“Because,” Angelo Maggio said violently, “I know damn well I’d of back down if I’d of knew what I was going into the first time I got in there.”
Prew laughed. To himself it sounded very nervous. “I feel like a collegekid must feel goin in to take his first big exam,” he explained.
“Probly. Me, I wount know.”
“Me neither. Remind me to ask one some time and see.”
“Theres the whistle,” Angelo said. “Its quittin time.”
“Yeah,” Prew said, “it is, aint it?”
“I see you in three days, old buddy,” Angelo grinned at him, as they moved down, carrying their hammers, towards where the trucks had come up.
“I wonder how our dear friend Corporal Bloom is doing along about n