From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [377]
When they had brought him in that first day Fatso had revived him personally. He had taken the phonecall from Turniphead and already had the story, and he was eager to get to work to prove his theory. He had taken three guards led by Brownie, Hanson among them, and taken Maggio down to the “gym.” They had given him what Hanson had described as the worst working over he had ever seen a prisoner get. It was the first time since he had been there that they had ever carried a man to the Hole unconscious. Fatso had tried to make The Wop admit he was only acting; Maggio had laughed and babbled and gone right on talking gibberish. The fourth time he went out, after they had already brought him to three times, Fatso gave it up and let them carry him on down.
“He’s crazy, all right,” Hanson told them. “If he wasnt crazy, even The Wop couldnt take it.”
Fatso’s whole plan was based on making him admit he had been acting. He developed a schedule where he came for him at regular intervals to work him over, first every eight hours, then every four, on the theory that the anticipation would break him down. When that failed, he took to coming for him at odd unspecified intervals both day and night, with the idea that that way the anticipation instead of having regular periods of rise and fall would be constant all the time. He was liable to appear for him at midnight, and then come right back fifteen minutes later, or let him go a full twenty-four hours sweating it out. Fatso was a diligent and conscientious workman. He offered him everything from a trusteeship to the reinstatement of his time-off-for-good-behavior that Maggio had lost the first week he was there to an even possible commutation of his sentence, if he would only admit he had been acting. Maggio only laughed or babbled or made faces or talked gibberish. Once he pissed on the floor at Fatso’s feet. Fatso rubbed his face in it. Fatso was convinced The Wop was acting, that all the Section 8s discharged from the Stockade were just good actors. He stopped at nothing short of the application of actual torture devices, to make Maggio admit that he was acting. Every night Hanson came to lock up and tell them that The Wop had not broken. It had developed into a tougher situation than even The Malloy had anticipated, and it was then that Prew first began to develop the hatred for S/Sgt Judson that occupied all his leisure time with plans for murder. If to think murder was as great a crime as committing it, Prewitt would have to have been electrocuted fifty times to make him pay.
Then one night Hanson finally brought them the news that Maggio had been taken out that noon and cleaned up and patched and transferred to the Station Hospital prison ward. Along with this was the news that S/Sgt Judson’s pending T/Sgt rating, which had been an accepted fact for almost two months, had been dropped temporarily. Prew wondered to Malloy if Angelo would ever know it; he hoped he would; but, to be honest, he had to admit he doubted if he ever would.
They got the story of what happened in the prison ward from another prisoner. This prisoner, “Stonewall” Jackson, had gone to the prison ward with a broken leg from a bona-fide fall on the rockpile, long before either Prew or Maggio had come in. He came back to Number Two a month after Maggio had been sent up to the hospital and gave them the first word they had of how Angelo had made out there. They had put him in a private cell, padded for violent cases—all their private cells were padded for violent cases—and when the ward attendants first came near him Maggio had crawled back in the corner and begged them babblingly not to hit him any more. The rest of the time he was there, whenever anyone, psychiatrist, medical doctor, nurse, or ward attendant, approached him, he would cringe away and try to hide in the corner and beg not to be beaten any more. This sudden change of tactics amused