From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [349]
“They all know it, dont they?” Prew said.
“You cant have a secret in a place like this.”
“Wont they talk?”
“No. They wont.”
“You didnt try to talk him out of it,” he asked Jack Malloy.
“No,” Jack Malloy said, his face still closed, “I didnt.”
“Neither did I,” Prew said.
“There are some things,” Jack Malloy said, his face still closed, “it doesnt do any good to try to talk a man out of.”
“Lets go on back,” Prew said.
“Okay,” Jack Malloy said, his face still closed.
Angelo was sitting on Prew’s bunk and Prew crawled in under the deliciousness of the blanket again. Then, and only then, Blues Berry and the others began to drift back down again. They were tough men in Number Two, they were the toughest of the tough, they were the cream.
During the rest of the time before Lights Out they sat around on the chairless floor smoking Duke’s Mixture and now and then a hoarded filched tailormade, or leaned standing back against the bed ends, or maybe half-lying on a shaded bottom bunk, and they talked. There were no cards or checkers, no Monopoly boards, no Mah-Jong sets. But they never ran out of plenty to talk about. Most of them had bummed across the country at least once, before they finally enlisted. Most of the younger ones had grown up in the CCCs during the Depression, and graduated into the Army from there. Without exception they had all spent time on the bum. They had worked in North Carolina paper mills, cut timber up in Washington, maybe tried a shift of raising cukes in southern Florida, worked in the Indiana mines, poured steel in Pennsylvania, followed the wheat harvest in Kansas and the fruit harvest in California, loaded cargoes on the docks in Frisco and Dago and Seattle and N.O. La., helped spud in wells in Texas. They were men who knew their country, and in spite of that still loved it. A generation before them men just like them had tried to change it and been defeated. These now did not have the others’ organization. These now did not go for organization. These now were members of a still newer race jerked loose from ties by the Depression and set to a drifting that had ended finally in the Army as the last port of call where they went through one more sifting process and came here, to the Stockade, to be sifted down once again into Number Two.
At eight the lights were turned off. Each man crawled in his bunk until the flashlight bedcheck had been made. Then they got back up and sat down on the floor again and went on smoking Duke’s Mixture with deep drags that lit up faces redly, and still they went on talking. Smoking Duke’s Mixture was no hardship to them who had grown up on rolled cigarets, and they had no trouble passing the time talking because they did not talk to pass the time but because they just loved to talk. Each man always had more stories with himself as hero than he could tell, and if he told the same story with himself as hero again a week later it was still almost new again by then, and anyway he had always developed it and elaborated it in the same way a writer rewrites a story with himself as hero, so that usually it was not even recognizable. Talking had always been their chief recreation, who could only afford the more expensive amusements like women and whiskey once a month on Payday, and they were experts in their field. When they could have slept, always the best method of time passing as any man who has spent time in the Black Hole knows, they still preferred to sit up and talk and tell stories with themself as hero.
It was almost like the days back on the bum, Prew thought sleepily. No women, no whiskey, no tailormades, no money. If you shut your eyes, you could believe you were back in a jungle on the outskirts of some little jerkwater town, smooth dusty under the trees on the leeward side of a grade that passed the watertank and cut off the wind, sitting around the small fire with a belly full of a good mulligan that you had been assigned the bumming of the carrots for, or maybe