by James Jones
Then a few minutes later somebody opened the door and shook him and he came back reluctantly, because he felt if he had only had a minute more just a few seconds more he could have gotten it absolutely clear in words of one syllable to bring back with him and lay it all out in black and white, and then he opened his eyes and saw it was S/Sgt Judson.
“Hello, Fatso,” he grinned sillily, noticing that his voice hardly had enough wind to bring it up out of his chest, and wondering why they had come back so soon for. Behind Fatso, he heard somebody gasp.
S/Sgt Judson without any change of expression slapped him hard across the face experiencedly with a grub-hoe-handle-calloused palm, the way a mother deftly but bored by long practice slaps her small boy, but he did not even feel it.
“Tough guy,” Fatso said expressionlessly, “another tough guy. How would you like about three more days of it, hunh, tough guy?”
Prew giggled weakly. “You cant snow me, Sergeant. What do you mean three more days. You think I dont know I’ve only pulled one day yet? Yes, I think I’d like three more days of it, I was having a wonderful dream. Lets make it six more days,” he giggled: “then we add up the whole nine days to make the full 72 hours. Hows that?”
“Hard sister,” Fatso said without any change of expressionlessness, and slapped him again. “Rough monkey. Come on, wake up, rough monkey.”
Then they were hoisting him up and taking him out and he realized the three days truly were over after all. On the way out his foot kicked itself against the nine slices of bread on the floor that proved it. Man, was that a good one on him.
“Yuh,” Fatso said unheatedly, “I seen em, rough monkey. But if you think you can get yourself out of the Hole any quicker by goin out on a hunger strike, we know that one too. We let you go hungry. You notice you done your full three days you notice,” Fatso said proudly. “Plus four hours because I was too busy at the moment to get to you—and you’ll do the same every time. I had my way, you’d go right back in now for three more. Hunger strikes dont scare nobody here, rough monkey.”
From Fatso, a speech that long amounted to an oration. Must of impressed him, Prew thought happily as they propped him up against the wall and threw his clothes at him.
“You dont need to pull at stuff neither,” Fatso said. “You can stand up.”
He leaned against the wall grinning sillily while he put his clothes on, noticing for the first time that it was Pfc Hanson again with Fatso this time, Pfc Hanson alone, and realizing dimly that it must therefore have been Pfc Hanson who had gasped. I made Pfc Hanson gasp, he thought proudly. Hanson was grinning at him proudly, fully as proudly as Angelo Maggio grinned at him a few minutes later when they shoved him in through the door of Number Two Barrack. They both grinned at him as though he had at last fulfilled all the promise they had seen in him.
His stuff had already been moved into Number Two for him and the men in Number Two had gotten together and fixed it all up for him. Even his bunk was made up for him. They were proud men in Number Two. They were the toughest of the tough. They were the cream. They wore their barracks number like a medal of honor and guarded its bestowal as jealously as any Masonic Lodge or midwestern Country Club ever guarded theirs. They could not fight back and win, so they were very strict with their great pride in losing, and they were so meticulous that when they did take a man in it was an occasion and they went all the way. All Prew had to do tomorrow to be ready for inspection was to remake his bunk in the morning.
Angelo sat on the side of the bunk and proudly did all the honors. Blues Berry came over a while, and then the others came over too, one or two at a time, to listen to Prew tell the story. The last man to come over, after the others had settled back down and gone back to sitting around on the chairless floor smoking and talking, was the big man with the soft, penetrating, unabashed-dreamer’s eyes, who had been sitting three bunks away taking all of it in.
Prew lay on top his new bunk, deliciously wrapped in a blanket, and acknowledged all the introductions and compliments, deliciously savoring his great sense of accomplishment. There was a satisfaction that came from having borne pain that nothing else could ever quite equal, even though the pain was philosophically pointless and never affected anything but the nervous system. Physical pain made its own justification. That must be your Indian forebearers talking, he thought. Except, he thought, that Angelo Maggio from Atlantic Avenue Brooklyn sure dont have no Indian blood, thats for sure. But he felt he could understand Angelo much better now.
In between all the introductions and coming and goings Angelo told him about Bloom, complete with all the gory details. Angelo had the whole entire story. The Stockade grapevine had had it the evening of the day it happened, just six hours after Prew had gone in the Hole. Apparently the Stockade grapevine had everything the evening of the day it happened, although nobody could say exactly just how this was accomplished. The Stockade grapevine more often than not had things before the guards themselves had them; one of Blues Berry’s greatest delights was to pass on to the guards tidbits of Post gossip they had not had yet.
The reaction in the Stockade had been pretty much the same as it had in the Company. There were several other men from the Regiment in the Stockade besides Prew and Angelo, and all of them knew Bloom. The rest, if they did not know him personally, had all seen him fight last year in the Bowl. They went around with the same indignant look on their faces and the same outraged tone in their voices; if anything, this open slap in the face to everything that good soldiers stood for was even more of an affront to them than it was to G Company. Just because they were in the Stockade, their faces and voices implied, did not mean they had turned up their nose with contempt and sneered at all Bloom’s advantages; if they had had Bloom’s advantages, their faces and voices implied, they would not have been in the Stockade in the first place and they certainly would not be dead by their own gun in the second place. They had all been very angry about it, in the Stockade.
To Prew, hearing Angelo tell it, it was like something that had happened in another country. He had a hard time making himself visualize it.
“You say he put the muzzle in his mouth and pulled the trigger with his big toe?”
“Thats right,” Angelo said indignantly.
“And it took off the whole top of his head and plastered it up on the ceiling.”
“Yep,” Angelo said complacently. “Made a hole three inches across. Ony I dont guess he figure on that probly.”
“And they going to bury him here you say.”
“Thats right. In the old sojer’s graveyard. Nobody can find out where his folks is.”
“Thats a hell of a place to be buried.”
“Man, you aint just kidding,” Angelo said fervidly.
“You ever been up there? Its up back of the Packtrain. I’ve played Taps there.”
“I never been there, and whats more I dont never mean to go there. Neither feetfirst nor even dickfirst,” Angelo said perfervidly.
“Theres some big pine trees. One row. Along the far side. I wonder who’ll play Bloom’s Taps?”
“Some punk, probly,” Angelo said. “I wonder what makes pine trees like that so lonesome?”
“Every dogface deserves to have at least one good Taps. At his funeral.”
“Well, maybe he’ll be lucky. Maybe he’ll draw a good one.”
Bloom was already buried, had been buried ever since two-thirty that afternoon; they both knew that. But it was as if they had agreed tacitly not to speak of it in the past tense.
“I’d play him a Taps,” Prew said, angrily because he had promised himself he would not mention that and it had slipped itself out anyway, “I’d play him a real Taps. Every dogsoljer deserves that,” he said lamely, trying to explain it away.
“Aww, hell,” Angelo said embarrassedly, with far too much understanding. “Hell, he’s dead, aint he? What difference does it make?”
“You dont understand,” Prew said furiously. What it was, he told hims
elf, was he still could not visualize it. He felt he should be able to visualize it. But the last picture he had of Bloom was of a tremendous undammable vitality heading off across the quad for the gym to get ready to go into the ring while he himself stared after it incredulously and exhaustedly.
“I wonder what the hell made him do it?” he said wonderingly, conscious of so overpowering a will to live in himself.
“My personal opinion,” Angelo said sagaciously, “is that he was afraid he had gone queer.”
“Hell, Bloom was no queer.”
“I know it.”
“If I ever saw a not-queer, it was Bloom.”
“I know it,” Angelo said.
“Well then, what the hell?”
“Theres a difference,” Angelo said, “between being queer and thinking you’re queer.”
“I wanted to go over and see him after that fight,” Prew confessed. “Tell him I dint fight him because he was Jewish or anything like that personal. I was going to tell him the next day,” he said. “But they picked me up that night,” he said.
“Hell, he dint shoot hisself over you whippin him, if thats what you thinkin.”
“I didnt whip him.”
“All right. Over you fightin him then. A long time ago old Hal said Bloom would kill hisself someday, remember?”
“I just barely broke even with him. If anything, he whipped me.”
“Hal said he was ‘dropping down the ladder rung by rung.’ I guess ats a quotation from some poem. He was a pretty smart boy, old Hal,” Angelo said grudgingly. “The son of a bitch.”
“Not so smart,” Prew said, remembering the forty dollars he had finally spent on the seduction of Alma. “I’d hate to think I had anything to do with it.”
“Oh, balls,” Angelo said disgustedly.
“Well,” Prew said, “I would.”
They sat silent, looking at each other, neither one of them able to put their finger on just exactly what it was Bloom’s death made them feel.
“Its funny,” Angelo said, trying reluctantly. “How a guy dies and then he’s gone and isnt there any more. Even if you dont like him. All the things he’s done in his life, and been, all gone just like that.”
“Yeah,” Prew said. “But I cant see what the hell made him do it.”
That was when the last man, the big man with the odd dreaming eyes, came over and sat down on the bunk with them. Without seeming to try to, he drew to himself all the available attention and interest in the same way a magnet collects iron filings, and for this they both looked up at him gratefully.
“Every man has the right to kill himself,” the big man said gently, appropriating the subject as if there was no question to his right to it. “Its the only absolute inviolable right a man does have, the only act he can commit which nobody else has a sayso in, the one irrevocable deed he can execute without outside influence. The old Anglo-Saxon term of ‘freedom’ came from that: ‘free’ and ‘doom,’ with the idea that every man always had that last final resort that nobody could take away from him, if he wanted to avail himself of it.
“But like everything else,” the big man said gently, “it has its price, too: its price is its own absoluteness and irrevocableness and inviolableness. ‘Doom’ is the only thing thats ever ‘free,’ citizens,” the big man said, as if speaking out of some very sure personal source not open to them.
“I’d hate to believe that,” Prew said distastefully.
“I dont see why,” the big man said tranquilly. “If its the truth. And anyway, maybe you’re right: Maybe even that isnt free.”
“I didnt mean that,” Prew said.
“I know what you meant,” the big man said. He stopped and smiled at them. The subject he had appropriated seemed to have been pretty well covered.
“Except for one thing,” Angelo said worriedly. “Even for us guys, here, dont you think its wrong?”
“You’re a Catholic,” the big man grinned gently.
“Not a good one.”
“But still a Catholic.”
“Okay, so I’m a Catholic,” Angelo said belligerently. “Somebody else is a Methodist. So what does that prove?”
“Nothing. But I wasnt talking about the moral right. I was talking about the physical right, the fact, the opportunity. No laws or preachments or physical restraints can take away the concrete physical right, if a man wants to do it. But you, being a Catholic, or a follower of any other religion, immediately transposed the physical right into a moral right.”
“But is it right?” Angelo insisted. “Or is it wrong?”
“Its all how you look at it. Would you say the early Christian martyrs committed suicide?”
“No.”
“Of course not. You’re a Catholic. But they didnt have to go into the arena, did they?”
Angelo frowned. “No, they didnt have to. But they did have to. Besides, somebody else killed them.”
“But they knew what they were getting into. They were accepting death of their own free will, werent they?”
“Yes, but—”
“Isnt that suicide?”
“Well, in a way, yes,” Angelo frowned. “But they had a reason.”
“Sure. They had a reason. Either they were too proud to back down; or else they figured they’d get a free ticket to Heaven. Do you think Bloom shot himself just to see how it’d feel? And what difference does it make who pulled the trigger?”
Angelo frowned again. “None, I guess. When you put it that way.”
“Well, would you say the Christian martyrs were wrong?”
“Of course not.”
“Then it must all depend on the circumstances, whether suicide’s right or wrong.”
“But the Christian martyrs were different than Bloom. Or me.”
“Only in the fact that they did it in mass formation for an impersonal ideal, whereas Bloom did it for a purely personal reason that nobody will ever know. And you cant say it was wrong until you know that personal reason.
“Now what you should of asked,” the big man grinned gently, “was is it immoral?”
“Yeah, thats it,” Angelo said, “thats what I meant. Well, is it?”
“Of course,” the big man grinned. “Everybody knows its immoral. To the Romans it was very immoral, what the Christian martyrs did, it was cowardly, and a running away, and immoral. Theres no doubt that suicide, especially mass suicide, is immoral. Because every human society teaches that its immoral. Even in Japan and Russia suicide is only moral when you’re in disgrace with the government; but any other brand is just as immoral as here. How long would a society’s framework hold up if every time there was a Depression all the ones without jobs marched on Washington or London or Moscow and committed suicide on the Capitol lawn? A couple deals like that and there wouldnt be any labor market left. The Russians and Japs, who have utilized it, know that better than anybody.”
“But hell,” Angelo said, “that would be crazy.”
“Sure,” the big man grinned, “but thats just what your Christian martyrs did, citizen.”
“Yeah,” Angelo said thoughtfully, “thats right. But times was differnt then,” he said.
“You mean the people then didnt want to live as bad as the people do now.”
“Yeah. I guess thats it. Sure thats it. We got more to live for now.”
“Movies,” the big man said without smiling, gently, almost lovingly. “Automobiles. Trains, buses, airplanes, niteclubs, bars; sports, educations, businesses. Radios,” the big man said gently.
“Yeah,” Angelo said. “All that. It wont be long till we got television. They dint have none of that stuff.”
“Would you say a man in a Nazi concentration camp had the right to commit suicide?”
“Hell yes.”
“Then why not a man in an American corporation?”
“But thas differnt. He aint bein tortured.”
“You think not? And why not a man in the American Army? Why not a man in the Stockade? Why n
ot any man anywhere, anytime, if he is being tortured?
“Everybody talks about freedom, citizens,” the big man said gently, seeming to draw upon that very sure source of personal knowldege again, “but they dont really want it. Half of them wants it but the other half dont. What they really want is to maintain an illusion of freedom in front of their wives and business associates. Its a satisfactory compromise, and as long as they can have that they can get along without the other which is more expensive. The only trouble is, every man who declares himself free to his friends has to make a slave out of his wife and employees to keep up the illusion and prove it; the wife to be free in front of her bridgeclub has to command her Help, Husband, and Heirs. It resolves itself into a battle; whoever wins, the other one loses. For every general in this world there have to be 6,000 privates.
“Thats why,” he smiled at them, “I wouldnt stop any man from committing suicide. If he came up and asked to borrow my gun, I’d give it to him. Because he is either serious or else trying to maintain that illusion of freedom. If he was serious I’d want him to have it; if he was play-acting I’d want to call him.”
“Thats one way to look at it,” Prew said, somehow carried along into agreement in spite of himself, carried by those long-range-vision eyes and that absolute-tender voice.
“In our world, citizens,” the big man said gently, “theres only one way a man can have freedom, and that is to die for it, and after he’s died for it it dont do him any good. Thats the whole problem, citizens. In a nutshell.”
“This is Jack Malloy,” Angelo said proudly, as if introducing his personal friend the Nizam of Hyderabad, the richest man in the world. “Wait’ll you hear some of the real conversations we have in here.”