From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [389]
There are two kinds of grub hoe handles, curved ones and straight ones. The straight ones are longer and heavier than the curved ones. A pick handle is longer and heavier than any ax handle, and a grub hoe handle is longer and heavier than a pick handle. A straight grub hoe handle is about four inches longer than a pick handle and around a pound heavier in weight and can be recognized by the double hump at the head end. The steel head of a grub hoe, which is like the mattock half of a pick-mattock with the pick half left off the other end, fits between these two humps on the handle and makes the grub hoe a fine tool for clearing brushy root-matted ground.
“Did you break Murdock’s arm?” Fatso said.
“Fuck you,” Berry whispered. “You better kill me. If you dont, I’ll kill you. You better kill me.”
They kept them there fifteen minutes. Then they marched them back between the lines of guards to the barrack and turned off the lights. The occasional screams from the gym did not stop however, and there was not much sleep. But in the morning they were got up at 4:45 just the same.
At chow they learned that at one-thirty Blues Berry, unable to urinate and with his ears knocked half loose from his head, had been taken up to the prison ward of the Station Hospital for treatment of a fall from the back of a truck.
He died the next day about noon, “from massive cerebral hemorrhage and internal injuries,” the report was quoted as stating, “probably caused by a fall from a truck traveling at high speed.”
Prew did not tell Jack Malloy what he intended to do until after Berry had died. He knew what he was going to do before Berry died, but he waited till then to tell Malloy.
“I’m going to kill him,” Prew said. “I’m going to wait till I get out of here and then I’m going to hunt him up and kill him. But I’m not going to be stupid like Berry was and go around advertising it. I’ll keep my mouth shut and wait till I get my chance.”
“He needs to be killed,” Malloy said. “He ought to be killed. But it wont do a damned bit of good to kill him.”
“It’ll do me some good,” Prew said. “It’ll do me a lot of good. It may even make me into a man again.”
“You couldn’t kill a man in cold blood,” Malloy said. “Even if you wanted to.”
“I dont aim to kill Fatso in cold blood,” Prew said. “He’ll get an even break. Theres a bar he hangs out at downtown all the time; I’ve heard some of the guys talk about it, and about how he always carries a knife. I’ll kill him with a knife. He’ll have as good a chance at me with his knife as I’ll have at him with mine. Only—he wont kill me; I’ll kill him. And nobody’ll ever know who did it and I’ll go on back home to the Compny and forget it just like you forget other carrion.”
“It wont do any good to kill him,” Malloy said.
“It would have done Berry some good.”
“No it wouldnt. Berry would have got what he got eventually anyway. Berry was slated for it from the day he was born in a shack down on the wrong side of the tracks in Wichita Kansas.”
“Fatso was born on the wrong side of the tracks, too.”
“Sure he was,” Malloy said. “And he might have been Berry, and Berry him, just as easy. You dont understand him. If you want to kill something, kill the things that made Fatso what he is. He doesnt do what he does because it is right or wrong. He doesnt think about right or wrong. He just does what is there to be done.”
“So do I. I’ve always done what is there to be done. But I’ve never done anything like Fatso’s done.”
“Yes, but you have a strong sense of right and wrong. Thats why you got in the Stockade in the first place, same as me. But if you asked Fatso if he thought what he did was right, he would probably look surprised as hell. Then, if you gave him time to think, he would say yes it was right; but he would be saying it simply because he had always been taught that he ought to do what is right. Therefore, in his mind, everything he does must be right. Because he did it. And because he knows