From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [83]
“I aint got a cent,” Prew said. “Not a red cent. To hell with it. It’d take you all goddam night to win enough to have a stake to hit the sheds.”
“Thats right,” Angelo said. “You’re right.” He stripped off his raincoat and began taking off his shirt. “To hell with it. I’ll take me fifty cents and go to town and pick me up a queer. At least I’ll get a few drinks and get my gun off. I aint never picked me up a goddam queer, but I guess I can do it if other people can. It hadnt ought to be too goddam hard. I’m sick of it,” he said, “sick of all of it. Sometimes I get so sick of it I want to puke my goddam guts right out on the floor and lay down in it and die.”
Prew was looking at his hands, dangling between his knees. “Sometimes I cant honestly say I blame you a whole hell of a lot,” he said.
“Come on and go with me,” Maggio said. “You can borrow four bits someplace. If we dont make a strike, we’ll hitchhike back.”
“No thanks,” Prew said. “It beats me. I aint in no mood to go to town and whatever fun there was I’d kill it. And anyway, I dont like queers.”
“I got to change my clothes,” Angelo said. “So long. I’ll see you in the goddam morning, if I get back. If I dont, come around to the Stockade and visit me.”
Prew laughed, but it was not a laugh that very many men would recognize. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll bring you up a carton of butts.”
“I’ll take one now,” Maggio said, “on account?” He looked at Prew apologetically. “I forgot all about buying any, Prew, when I had the dough.”
“Sure,” Prew said. “Sure. Here.” He pulled out the crumpled pack and gave him one, took the last one himself, and threw the crumpled pack in a commode.
“Not if these is your last ones,” Maggio said.
“Fuck it,” Prew said. “I got plenty rollings.”
Maggio nodded, and Prew watched him go; the dwarfed, narrow shouldered, warp-boned heir to a race of city dwellers whose destiny it was to never place their feet upon their earth except for the bottled-in-bond, canned grass of Central Park, whose very lives came out of cans, even to the movies that they tried to pattern their lives after and the beer they drank to forget them; go out toward the squadroom to fumble around in the breathing dark to find his undress uniform for town, the gook shirt and cheap slacks and two-buck shoes.
Prew pushed the twisted cards with his foot and listened to the neverending rain outside and decided he would go down to the Dayroom for a while, since he did not feel like sleeping.
The Dayroom was almost deserted. A couple of men lolled on the cigaret burns and ruptured excelsior of the imitation leather chairs that lined both walls of the narrow room that had been built below the outside porches. The Dayroom was screened-in from about waist high to the ceiling, and the Dayroom orderly had pulled the chairs along the outside wall out to the middle of the floor to keep the rain from wetting them, narrowing the already narrow space between. The men did not look up at him. They went on flipping the pages of the battered comic books they had been scanning.
He stood in the doorway of the pool alcove that was also deserted now at ten o’clock, an hour before Taps, wondering why in hell he had come down here, looking at the deserted pingpong table at the far end which as far as he knew had never had a net and would not be bothered now until next Payday for a blackjack game, looking at the deserted radio at the near end that had been on the blink now since a week before last Payday, looking out through the screens at the rainy street and the railroad beyond and at the tin roofed sheds beyond the railroad, the places where all the money was and that had been going full blast since Payday and now were tapering off in the middle of the month to one game among the few who had been the heavy winners. Life on the Inside was not measured by hours but by Paydays: Last Payday, Next Payday, and then there was the inbetween that lasted very long but never was remembered.
The plywood magazine rack had been pulled in from the outside wall too, and he went over to it and scanned the hea