From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [336]
“A man might as well be dead,” Bloom said tentatively out loud.
In the empty squadroom no one contradicted him.
He picked the rifle up again and placed the muzzle in his mouth again, uncomfortably, because it was very awkward. He held the rifle up with his extended left arm, the muzzle with his right. As an afterthought he set the butt on the concrete floor. These ’03s had a hell of a kick. His hand would not reach the safety and he had to take the muzzle out of his mouth again. His hand did not want to release the safety.
You’re a queer, Bloom thought bitterly, a monster. Lets face it all, while we’re facing. You did it, and you liked it, and that makes you a queer. And everybody knows you are a queer. You dont deserve to live.
His hand released the safety. He put the muzzle back in his mouth and placed his bare big toe inside the guard against the trigger. A man’s bare foot was an ugly, sickening, repulsive thing. He pulled the trigger.
In the prolonged sustained roar during the split second left him, Bloom felt as if somebody had stepped up behind him and grasped his chin and the base of his skull and lifted with both hands like a weightlifter doing a snatch lift. They kept lifting and lifting, his head was going higher and higher.
I dint mean it! he tried to yell. I take it back! I was ony kiddin! I was just showin off!
Then, as his head continued on up through the ceiling, he knew it wasnt any good. He had always wanted to commit an irrevocable act, and he had finally done it, only to find out it was the wrong one. He knew a great many things that he wished he had time to say. He could explain so much. There were so many steaks to be eaten, so many whores to be laid, so much beer to be drunk. Dont forget the steaks and whores and beer, boys, he wanted to yell, dont ever forget that.
What a silly thing to do, he thought. What a goddam silly thing to do. You wont even be there to watch their faces.
Bloom died.
It was Friday Clark who found him, technically. Friday was standing on the ground floor porch doing nothing when the shot shattered out through the screens and across the quad, and he had a straight path to the stairs. He beat Niccolo Leva, who had to turn the corner of the supplyroom, to them by almost a second and that made him the first man. The Warden, coming on a dead run from the orderly room, was right behind them. Behind The Warden streamed the rest of them, the kitchen force, the KPs, the fatigue details working in the Company yard, everybody from the Company who was within running distance, all charging up the stairs together, before the buildings around the quad had quit playing catch with the echo of the shot as it died away.
Bloom was lying back across his bunk in that peculiarly lifeless position dead people get into, with the top of his head gone and the rifle on the floor and the one pastywhite bare foot dangling down ridiculously. There was a large blot of blood and phlegmy matter on the ceiling around the hole where the bullet had gone on through. It was still Bloom’s face, but it looked as if all the bones had been taken out from behind it, like one of those cured headhunter’s heads you could see in the curio shop windows downtown on Hotel Street.
“Jesus Christ!” Niccolo Leva protested, and headed right on out the other door for the latrine, without stopping.
Nobody else said anything. Several men pushed through the still growing crowd in the doorway and on the porch and followed Leva. The rest of them just stood, as it slowly dawned on them, looking like embarrassed plumbers who had blundered into the wrong bathroom.
Friday Clark,