From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [361]
Next to The Game, which had no other name, pitching matchbooks at a crack for tomorrow’s ration of Duke’s Mixture was the favorite sport in Number Two. There were other games, such as the one called Can-you-take-it where one man blocks his solar plexus with his left arm and his genitals with his right and allows his opponent to hit him as hard as he can in the belly, each taking turns at hitting until one man has to quit. Also, the old Indian-wrassles had been stolen from the Boy Scouts and given extra teeth to make them interesting. Indian-wrassle-on-the-table, where the two men place their elbows together and lock hands and try to put each other’s arm down, was played by putting lighted cigaret butts behind each man’s hand as added inducement. Indian-wrassle-on-the-floor, where the two men lie on their backs and lock legs and try to throw each other over, was played with pieces of 3/8ths slatting with 1/2-inch wire brads driven through them placed behind each man, and in spite of all the efforts to roll sideways when thrown more than one man wore blue-rimmed punctures in his knees out to work in the mornings. But of all the games, The Game itself, always took first precedence in popularity.
Jack Malloy had invented it during his first stretch and since then it had become an institution in Number Two. He had gone back to duty and forgotten it, and come back for his second stretch to find it still being played in its original form without embellishments (which was a compliment in itself), and stayed to take it over again. He played with a live combative sense and indomitable will that, coupled with his physique, was almost impossible to down. When Malloy played, the contest, instead of being a fight for Malloy to stay up, was a fight for all the others to try and put him down. Prew made him go down once, and only once, and felt as if he had accomplished something that was magnificent. If there was anything that Jack Malloy of the gentle smile and dreamer’s eyes was vain of, it was his physique and his prowess with it. He was a big man in the sense in which Chief Choate was big, rather than in the sense that Warden was big, and he was without Chief Choate’s fat-degeneration. And, compared to his intellectual attainments which (to them) were almost mystical, he was proud of his physical prowess in the same way a high school football captain is vain of his swimming and diving. But this was no more strange to them than everything else about him.
To Number Two, Jack Malloy was an enigma in the same way that all living symbols are enigmas to the men who symbolize them. Prew came to know him pretty well during the time Angelo was in the Hole making his fight, better than any of the others ever got to know him. He came to know him well enough to realize that the sole reason The Malloy let him get behind the curtain shrouding his past was not because Malloy saw him as an equal who would understand, but because to Malloy he was an inferior who openly needed help. The need for help seemed to be the only key that could unlock Jack Malloy.
It was a bad time for Prew, when Angelo was doing his “30 Days” in the Hole. He had pictured it ahead of time how it would be, with Angelo deciding definitely one night that tomorrow was The Day, and the resulting handclasps and last final conversations and farewells. He had expected to have a chance to say goodby. But when it came, it did not happen that way.
He had been there a full month with Angelo trying every day to make up his mind to do it, to lay it out and then push it through, and every time something happened to make the little guy postpone again. In spite of his fantastic courage, even Angelo did not quite have the nerve to start it off. It was going to be a bad ordeal, the worst yet, and Angelo knew it, and he could never quite bring himself to make a beginning. When it happened, it came as a surprise to all of them including Angelo, as a result of something clear outside Maggio’s control, and