From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [287]
“Sure,” Prew said. “Why not? Lets go.”
“Well,” Bloom said. “What’re you waitin for? You scared or something?” He started for the door, unbuttoning his shirt as he went, and Prew followed him out the door and across the street into the quad where the tents were still pitched from the afternoon. The rest of them crowded happily out the messhall door behind him. From other messhalls and porches around the quad other men were already running, as if they had already known about it before it even happened and had only been passing the time until they could start running. They made a big circle around the two of them where Bloom was still taking off his shirt to expose the enormous milkwhite barrel of his bare chest. Prew took his own shirt off.
They fought for an hour and a half. It was five-thirty and not dark yet when they started. The first bout on the smoker card was to start at eight o’clock, but Bloom was not on till the main event which would not be till ten or ten-thirty, and they were still fighting when the detail from the gym began to set up the corners in the ring in the bandstand on the quad.
The only way to fight Bloom was to box him. Bloom had been more or less in training ever since last December and his belly was as hard as a rock. His head had always been as hard as a rock. If Bloom had not been so gunshy of being hit he could have finished it up quick. As it was, Prew would not have had a ghost of a chance anyway if it had not been for the natural speed he had always had and had developed into a personal style even more so, later at Myer. Even so, it took everything Prew had to keep away from him at all after the first ten minutes, he was so out of shape.
He could hit Bloom almost at will, but even with his punch which had always been remarkable for so light a man he could not even faze Bloom. He hooked Bloom tentatively in the belly several times with his left and gave that up. He decided to work on Bloom’s nose with his left. The first really good left he landed on Bloom’s nose broke it. He could feel it go under his hand, he knew it was broken, but it did not bleed much, just a tiny trickle that stopped soon, and that was all the effect it had. Bloom’s eyes watered badly for about five seconds and his face looked stunned for a moment, but his upper lip did not swell at all. It was like trying to knock out a bull moose with your fists.
Prew kept shooting at the nose but Bloom developed a trick of crouching way down like Arturo Godoy so that the left went way over his head, and then swinging up a whistling roundhouse right. The first two or three times Bloom did it he could have torn Prew apart with a left hook to the belly, but he did not do it, he kept swinging up the roundhouse right. After the first times Prew noticed Bloom moved his left way over to the right side of his face when he ducked, leaving a big hole in the left side of his face. Prew started feinting the left then and stepping in and throwing a straight right, straight down, at the place where the hole should be by then. The first few times he tried it he missed, but the next time he landed under Bloom’s left eye and knew Bloom would have a shiner out of that one but it was a small consolation because this punch did not faze Bloom any either. It was like one man trying to push a car over on its side.
Also, the next time Bloom ducked and he snapped down the right, Bloom bent his head and Prew hit him full force on top of the head and felt one of his knuckles go. It was not broken, only jammed back, but that was enough. Bloom came up out of his crouch grinning broadly. Prew gave up the right then and went back to jabbing his left for the nose and keeping his hurt right hand back for a shot at Bloom’s adam’s apple. That was about all there was left for him to do. It was like walking around a house and trying all the doors and finding them locked and then picking up a rock to break a window and then finding all the windows barred. By this time Prew was getting very tired.
The crowd around them, that was still growing, was having