From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [337]
Prew thought, a little sickly, of the little book The Man Without a Country that his mother used to read to him so often, and how the stern patriotic judge condemned the man to live on a warship where no one could ever mention home to him the rest of his whole life, and how he had always felt that pinpoint of pleased righteous anger at seeing the traitor get what he deserved.
“And thats the story,” Angelo said, “and thats the way she is.”
“I’m for it then,” Prew said.
“Are you?” Angelo asked him anxiously. “You really are? Thats one reason I wanted to tell you, because I knew if you heard me out and you were still for it, then I know it was all right, it wasnt wrong.”
“I’m for it,” Prew said.
“Okay,” Angelo said. “Then thats all. Lets go on back.”
Prew watched him go. Thin, narrowshouldered, bowlegged, the toothpick arms moving with the swagger, one of the newer race of cliff dwellers he thought again, who had no use for muscles: for legs to walk take the subway; for arms to climb use the elevator; for back to lift hire a stiffleg derrick. A minor casualty of his 20th Century culture and civilization. Go to Mexico and be a cowboy! Even his country’s history screwed him.
Maybe if his father had been a watchmaker, or an auto mechanic, or a pipefitter, so that he might have inherited a trade he could love, then he would not have had to love democracy so much. If he had only found some undangerous channel that would have let him utilize the talent for honesty and belief in democracy that the unwise foolish virgins who taught Social Science in the public schools had fostered in him.
If he had only been born a millionaire’s son. Then he would have been all right.
The trouble with Angelo Maggio, the serious trouble, the dangerous trouble, the inconsiderate unreasonable insoluble frightening trouble, was Angelo Maggio had not been born a Culpepper.
“They all know it, dont they?” Prew said.
“You cant have a secret in a place like this.”
“Wont they talk?”
“No. They wont.”
“You didnt try to talk him out of it,” he asked Jack Malloy.
“No,” Jack Malloy said, his face still closed, “I didnt.”
“Neither did I,” Prew said.
“There are some things,” Jack Malloy said, his face still closed, “it doesnt do any good to try to talk a man out of.”
“Lets go on back,” Prew said.
“Okay,” Jack Malloy said, his face still closed.
Angelo was sitting on Prew’s bunk and Prew crawled in under the deliciousness of the blanket again. Then, and only then, Blues Berry and the others began to drift back down again. They were tough men in Number Two, they were the toughest of the tough, they were the cream.
During the rest of the time before Lights Out they sat around on the chairless floor smoking Duke’s Mixture and now and then a hoarded filched tailormade, or leaned standing back against the bed ends, or maybe half-lying on a shaded bottom bunk, and they talked. There were no cards or checkers, no Monopoly boards, no Mah-Jong sets. But they never ran out of plenty to talk about. Most of them had bummed across the country at least once, before they finally enlisted. Most of the younger ones had grown up in the CCCs during the Depression, and graduated into the Army from there. Without exception they had all spent time on the bum. They had worked in North Carolina paper mills, cut timber up in Washington, maybe tried a shift of raising cukes in southern Florida, worked in the Indiana mines, poured steel in Pennsylvania, followed the wheat harvest in Kansas and the fruit harvest in California, loaded cargoes on the docks in Frisco and Dago and Seattle and N.O. La., helped spud in wells in Texas. They were men who knew their country, and in spite of that still loved it. A generation before them men just like them had tried to change it and been defeated. These now did not have the others’ organization. These now did not go for organization. These now were members of a still newer rac