From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [375]
As Turnipseed stepped back to observe the effect of his action with a careful eye toward finding something that would merit turning in, Angelo dropped his hammer and went for Turniphead’s throat with his bare hands and an excellent imitation of a gibbering insane scream. It was a greater offense than Turniphead had bargained for. He was caught flat-footed and Angelo had him on the ground choking him before he could move. The group of prisoners, including Prew, all of whom except for two were from Number Two, just stood, still holding their hammers, and watched. Turnipseed managed to beat him loose with the butt of the riotgun and get up, before Maggio came at him again, still screaming insanely, but closer this time, too close for Turniphead to even attempt to use the buckshot, and Turniphead flattened him with the gunbarrel using both hands, thus fulfilling Angelo’s plan and hope to the letter.
With Maggio unconscious at his feet in the sudden overwhelming silence, Turniphead stood dazed, breathing heavily and rubbing his neck with one hand, and staring at the group of other prisoners who had not moved, and were careful not to move now.
“Yeah,” he gasped finally. “Go ahead and try something. Just try it.”
Nobody answered.
“I wish you would,” Turniphead said hopefully, still rubbing his neck and breathing heavily. “I’d love to shoot one of you cocksuckers. You’d stand right there and let that crazy man choke me to death and not do a goddam thing. A hell of a lot of mercy a guy can expect from a bunch of blood-thirsty wolves like you,” he said accusingly.
Nobody answered.
“Couple of you carry him down to the road,” he said, jerking his head behind him without moving his eyes. “The rest of you get the hell back to work. And I mean now.”
Nobody from Number Two moved, and the two men from Number Three stepped forward quickly reluctantly, as if they had been pushed.
“Go on, pick him up,” Turniphead said. “He aint dead, worse luck. Hey!” he called up the manmade cliff to the two guards with rifles who had come over and were watching. “Keep an eye out on the rest of this bunch here,” he hollered. “I like to had a goddam mutiny. Go on, you two, pick him up.”
When they picked him up, Prew saw vaguely the knot beginning to rise from his forehead at the hairline where it had been split and a trickle of blood started down toward his eye. One more medal for Angelo. But his mind had already gone ranging ahead, reviewing the prospect of the thirty days to come, and nothing else could touch him.
Turniphead followed the temporary stretcherbearers on down and had them leave him by the road and go on back up, before he put in the call from the box on the phonepole. The two guards with rifles up on the cliff were still watching closely and the group went on back to work. The last time Prew saw Angelo Maggio in his life was when the two MPs who had responded to the hurry-up phonecall tossed him, still unconscious, in the back of the 21/2-ton truck and started with him back down the grade.
It had been a very long time in Robert E Lee Prewitt’s life since any individual had impressed himself upon it as much as Angelo Maggio, if you did not count Jack Malloy and The Warden. But while both of these, each in his totally different way, were superior beings of another grade that moved on another orbit, Angelo Maggio—first American-born generation of Brooklyn immigrant Italian stock, absolute hater of the Army; the total opposite of a mountain boy and thirty-year-man soldier whose white ancestors had come from Scotland and England before the Revolution, and still hated foreigners—Angelo Maggio was more nearly his own kind and caliber and closer to him than the big guns like Malloy and Warden. He left a very large hole.
That he would never see or hear from him again, once he was discharged, he accepted without question; that was the