by James Jones
Cpl Bloom, on his bunk, wanting to relax into the dry summer hum that this music was overpowering so he could escape his appetite, waited for someone to shut the dimwit up. Bloom felt indignant. Didnt the halfwit know guys were trying to sleep in here? Even a dimbrain ought to have that much consideration. Bloom did not care for himself, he had all afternoon, but these men were going out on Fatigue, they only had an hour off.
“For the love of God,” he bellowed humorously at the ceiling finally, “stop that goddam racket. These men tryin to get a little sacktime. Aint you got no consideration?”
Friday did not hear. He was entranced by his own ability to make such beautiful sounds. He had gone into his private world where nobody laughed at anybody else.
When he did not stop, Bloom sat up incredulously. Maybe the dummy didnt know who it was had yelled? Or, he thought, maybe having Prewitt around to baby him all the time has made him too big for his britches, maybe?
He didnt have anything against the halfwit, if anything he liked him, he was all right for a dimbrain, but you couldnt let the men see somebody get by with a thing like that, not if you expected them to treat you like a noncom.
Bloom jumped up from his bunk and assumed the necessary indignant rage and charged across the room, remembering to thrust his head forward savagely, and his chin ahead of that, and grabbed the guitar out of Friday’s hands.
“I told you to cut the racket, Wop,” he raged in his close order voice. “That was an order. From a noncom. It applies to Wops, just like other people. If I have to bust this noisebox over your head to back it up, I’m the guy can do it.”
“What?” Friday said, looking up startled from his suddenly empty hands he had been staring at, the sweat of concentration still shining on his forehead. “Whats the matter?”
“I’ll show you whats the matter,” Bloom read him off, remembering to wave the guitar behind him at the room. “These men are trying to rest. They gettin ready to go out to work and they’ll work all afternoon while you and me layin here on our ass. They want rest, I mean to see they get it, see? When a noncom tells you to stop a thing, you’re suppose to stop it, even if you are a Wop.”
“I dint hear you, Bloom,” Friday said. “Dont hurt my git-tar, Bloom. Please be careful of my git-tar.”
“You heard me all right,” Bloom, the defender, roared. “Dont try to tell me you dint hear me, Wop. Everybody heard me.
“No, I dint, Bloom,” Friday pleaded. “Honest, Bloom. Oh, please dont hurt my git-tar, Bloom.”
“I’ll hurt your git-tarbloom,” Bloom, the crusader, bellowed, joyously feeling the just cause that was beginning to carry him away. “I’ll wrap it around your goddam neck. As long as I’m a noncom its my job to see my men get their sacktime they got coming to them, and I mean to do it, see?” He was warming up good. There was still no room for Nazis and Wop Fascisti in this country with their roughshod overriding of the wishes of the majority, at least not yet.
He was just coming to that when a third voice cut in on him from behind, crackling with command.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Bloom,” it said disgustedly. “Shut up. You makin more racket than the kid was with the git-tar.”
Still holding Friday by his shirtfront for further emphasis, Bloom swung around to find himself looking down deep into the flat black Indian eyes of Cpl Choate, old, wise, indifferent, bored. He felt his righteous indignation run down out of him and evaporate into a puny feeble protest that he could not articulate.
The Chief had reared his bulk up to a half sitting position despite the protest of the springs. “Leave go of him and go on back to your fartsack and relax,” he drawled in that tone old noncoms acquire after being bored for years by giving orders that are not argued with.
“Okay, Chief,” Bloom said. He released Friday’s shirtfront and at the same time gave a little push to sit him back down on the bunk. He dropped the guitar down beside him.
“I’m going to let you off this time, Clark,” he said. “But watch your step. You just happen to be lucky I was feeling especially good today, see?”
He turned and went back to his bunk, hearing Chief Choate’s bulk squeak back down sighingly appreciatively. He lay down himself, and put his arms over his eyes and pretended to go to sleep, and the squadroom settled back into its interrupted noontime drowse while Bloom’s arms and legs twitched wild signals to him to let them get up and carry him away.
He could not quiet them or ignore them, but he could refuse their request. He lay, arguing with them but not convincing them, while he listened to Friday Clark steal off quietly out the door past him and downstairs. He belched sourly again.
He heard Fatigue Call gratefully, and half an hour after that, his arm still across his eyes as if in sleep, he listened to the baseball and boxing jockstraps dwindle away in twos and threes to training periods, and then finally at last he was alone. Alone in the squadroom, Bloom lay on his bunk and faced it.
He was Isaac Nathan Bloom. And Isaac Nathan Bloom was a Jew. It did not make any difference that he had made corporal and become a noncom. It did not make any difference that he had won the Regimental middleweight division and become a Schofield Class 1 fighter. He was still Isaac Nathan Bloom. And Isaac Nathan Bloom was still a Jew. It did not matter that he was up next in line for sergeant, that Holmes himself had practically promised it to him. It did not matter that he was the Regimental white hope for the Schofield Division’s middleweight crown, that he had even been picked for it in Big Red’s Hoomalimali Schofield Red Dirt column in the Advertiser. Because after all that, he would still be Isaac Nathan Bloom. And Isaac Nathan Bloom would still be a Jew.
He had done it all, a lot of it things he did not like, because he thought he could change it and prove it did not matter. When he had seen how fighters were respected in the Compny, he had become a fighter. Did they think he liked being a fighter? When he had seen how noncoms were looked up to and liked, he had become a noncom. Did they think he wanted to be a noncom? He had worked hard at it. When he saw that Regimental and Division champions were admired even more than the ordinary fighters, he had set his sight on that—and in less than a year achieved half of it and was well on his way to achieving the other half. When he saw that the higher the noncom the more he was venerated, he determined to gain that too. He was not going to leave them one single loophole they could turn to for escape. It wasnt easy, what he had done was not handed to anybody on a silver platter. But he had stuck to it; because he meant to make them like him, meant to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt to them that there were no such things as Jews.
But in the end it hadnt any of it made any difference. And he knew it never would make any difference. Instead of liking him, the more honors he gained the more they hated him. Facts didnt have anything to do with the stubbornness of those minds; they twisted the facts to suit whatever they already believed in the first place. How could you fight a thing like that?
He had thought it was going to be different, for once, when he enlisted in the Army. But it wasnt ever going to be any different, any place.
Bloom went ahead, a little deeper, and faced the rest of it.
He didnt have what it took. He had never had what it took. Prewitt had whipped him, hands down. He had been kicked out of NCO School point blank, cold turkey. He had been called in and questioned about being a homosexual, to his face: He was suspected as a queer.
It did not matter that the Chaplain had stopped the fight. It did not make any difference that he had still gone in the ring afterward, either. Or that he had won. Prewitt still had whipped him, and they all knew how Prewitt still had whipped him. And they would never let themselves forget it either. A little guy half his size, a natural welter, had whipped him, a natural light-heavy.
It did not matter that it was the queer investigation that had partly caused the NCO School to get down on him. It did not make any difference that he still made corporal anyway, either. Or that he would make sergeant. He had still been kicked
out of NCO School as unfit noncom material, and all of them knew he had still been kicked out of NCO School as unfit noncom material. And that was the thing they would pick out of all of it to remember. One of the three men out of one-hundred-and-seven candidates who had received that singular distinction.
Almost half the company had been called in on that queer investigation. Why was it none of them had been suspected of being queer? Of course that bitch Tommy had spread it all around how Bloom had let him talk him into it that one time. That was Tommy’s meat, that; he loved those. But what about all the others that had tried it, too? What about them? They all tried it sooner or later, if they hung around with them long enough. Familiarity bred laxity, like that Hal guy was always saying. But they found it inconvenient to remember that, the rest of them, when they got together to snicker about Bloom.
How could he know it would backfire like that when he telephoned in the anonymous tip on Prewitt and Tommy after he saw them in the Tavern payday night? He had called from a public booth in a drugstore clear downtown. He had not mentioned it to anybody else. He had been careful not to mention Hal and Maggio to the cops. Because he knew Tommy wouldnt talk. But how could he be expected to know the goddam gook coppers had their rotten stoolpigeons scattered all over? That wasnt his fault, was it?
He had wanted to prove to them a Jew was no different than anybody else. He had meant to make them admit it, for once. But he had failed. Because he had not had what it took.
If he had whipped Prewitt—
If he had graduated high up from NCO School—
If he had not been called in for the queer investigation—
But what was the use?
You could only whistle in the dark about it just so long. You could only kid yourself about it just so long. You could only hope they would forget about it just so long. Eventually it caught up with you, and you had to come back to it again, that you were Isaac Nathan Bloom, and that Isaac Nathan Bloom was a Jew, and that everybody else knew it too. It poured over him like clear cold water, or like molten iron poured from one of the giant crucibles onto the standing men below like he had seen happen once in the steel mills in Gary where he had worked that year—this fact that everybody else knew it too, and he got up off his bunk in the empty squadroom and went to the rifle racks in the center of the big still room. God, what he wouldnt give for a bandolier of clips and run amok and shoot all of the sons of bitches he could get until they finally got him. That was the only way a man got anything in this world.
His should be third from the right on this side. He ran down the serial numbers on the breeches. It was fourth from the right. Just like with every other goddam thing, always just one place off from first, that Isaac Nathan Bloom. He took it out.
It would be a good one on them all right, if he did do it. The CQs would start locking the racks right after drill then, like they were supposed to, instead of waiting until Tattoo.
Memorial to Isaac Nathan Bloom, Yid: They Locked the Rifle Racks at Noon.
He took it back to the bunk with him and sat down with it on his lap. They would be getting the new Mi gas-operated semi-automatics sometime soon. They had been talking about getting them for months now. Like with everything else the Army would be about six months late with it. But they would never find anything to beat the old Springfield, he thought affectionately, looking at it, at the long sleek streamline, very slim but with the potent bulges all in the just exactly right places to give it that pugnaciously forward-looking eager look that marked the Springfield. Beside it, the M1 looked like a fat old man puffing with lack of training. He rubbed his hand pleasurably along the stock. Who was it had told him how they had read someplace that the two most beautiful things ever made in America were the Axhandle and the Clippership? and then said they should have added one more thing: the Springfield ’03 rifle? It was Prewitt! Prewitt, one day when he had first got in the Compny! Even here and now, you couldnt get away from the goddam son of a bitching Prewitt, who was not a Jew, and who shamed you with that big put-on act of his of being perfect. Bloom laid the pregnant heaviness down on the bunk and went to his footlocker.
There were three rounds of live .30 caliber hidden in the tray that he had swiped last range season because he loved to handle the sleek brassy potencies and clink them in his hand. He took one of them out and relocked the lid and held the cartridge up alongside the breech of the rifle on the bunk. So powerful! so beautiful! in its inert foreboding of destruction.
Bloom pushed the cutoff up and opened the bolt and slid the long deadly torpedoshape into the chamber sensuously and locked the bolt and pushed the safety on carefully and sat and looked at the rifle lying innocently silent on his lap.
There were two kinds of Jews. There were the Jews like Sussman, him and his goddam motorcycle, who would rather be Gentiles and therefore smiled queasily and sucked the ass of every Gentile who would drop his pants. And there were the Jews like his old man and his mother, them and their goddam unsalted butter and Kosher meat the Rabbi had to bless before they could eat it, who would rather be Jews than anything else in the world and who never let anybody forget they would rather be Jews than anything else in the world because Jews were God’s Chosen People and always between God’s Chosen People and the Infidel was the Wall that no Gentile ever could climb over. Those were the only two kinds of Jews there were. Take it or leave it. It was a fine choice to present to a man who wanted only to be accepted as a man, according to his individual virtues and vices, but who could never be that, as long as this open advertisement of a nose hung dangling out from his face.
Bloom felt it gingerly with his fingers, still looking at the rifle, wincing a little because it was still a little sore where Prewitt the Aryan had broken it and made it maybe not quite as much a Jewish nose as before, but still leaving it plainly a Jewish nose.
You cant get away from the Bloom nose, Isaac Nathan. You are the locomotive and here is your cowcatcher which precedes you down the dwindling rails of life. You want to be accepted? you want to be respected? you want to be admired? you want to be just plain liked?—tell it to the Bloom nose, Isaac Nathan.
In all the world Bloom could not think of a single person who liked him for himself, for his own personality.
Checking to make sure the safety was still on, he put the muzzle of the rifle in his mouth. He had to put the muzzle far back at the roof of his mouth for the sight cover to get in behind his teeth. It tasted very oily. He reached for the trigger with his thumb, knowing the safety was still on. His thumb would not reach even to the trigger guard. He tried with his index finger, but the tip of it barely reached inside the guard. He strained with his shoulder and arm trying to reach it, just curious was all, but all he could do was just touch the tip of his finger to the concave surface of the trigger.
Thats what I thought, Bloom thought.
He took the muzzle out of his mouth and laid the rifle across his lap and sat and looked at the long sleek deadly thing lying innocently across his knees with the safety catch still on. It was almost unbelievable it could do that.
Bloom leaned down and unlaced his right shoe deliberately, feeling tough and positive. Then he stuck the muzzle against the roof of his mouth again and put his big toe inside the guard. There was no give in the trigger under the pressure of his toe.
He laid the piece across his knees again. The barracks was suddenly tomblike in its emptiness. Bloom wished somebody would come in.
If they did come in, they would only laugh him out of the barracks for a showoff. All his life it seemed he had been laughed out of someplace or other for a showoff who didn’t have the guts to back it up. All his life he had tried to act, to do, to be strong and forceful enough to be able to point to something just once and say I did this, to just once commit one irrevocable act through his own willful motivation. And always, in the end, it was outside influences that governed him and he was blown by chance, by pure happenstance, coincidence, one way or the other, without having anything
to say about it.
He still wished somebody would come in, and break up this silence. He pictured in his mind how they would look if they were to come in too late. He stood off to one side and watched them as they felt a great pity and sorrow that was too late now to help the poor dead thing there. We could have done so much, their tragic faces said, we could have made it so much easier. They would be sorry for the Jewboy, when it was too late. They would not think he was yellow then. Or a queer.
A war was coming, it was already here in Europe. Fighting and death and blood and hate. It was taught to children with their mother’s milk, Bloom thought tragically, and called Christianity and Judaism. Christians were taught to hate Jews; Jews were taught to hate Christians. And in all of it, not anywhere in any part of it, Bloom thought in a perfect ecstasy of sadness, was there one living soul who liked Isaac Nathan Bloom for his own self, for his personality, for his own individual character.