From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [334]
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