From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [74]
Sal Clark with his shy trusting eyes and half-embarrassed grin was like the village idiot boy who is utterly without malice, envy, distrust, or the desire to better himself and so incompetent to maintain himself in our society, and who the prosperous business men, joyously robbing each other every chance they got, fed and clothed and protected tenderly, as if in some metaphysical way he with his undistracted mind might make a plea for them with God, or save them from their consciences. In the same way, Sal Clark was taken care of and respected as the talisman of the Company.
Anderson had made overtures of friendship to Prew several times, and on Payday after Prew had blown in his pay, he even offered to loan him money, but every time he came around Prew had cut him off, because Andy’s eyes never focused on his face but always on one side or the other, and Prew did not want for friends men who feared him. And it was not until Sal Clark with his wide, deep, uncomprehending doelike eyes had asked him trustingly to be friends that he suddenly saw he could not refuse.
. . . It happened on one of those warm February nights before the rainy season started when the stars seemed near enough to finger. He had come out of the smoky drunkenness of Choy’s feeling the beer all through him lightly and stopped in the lighted tunnel of the sallyport that funneled the large sounds of the night. Across the quad the lights in the 2nd Battalion were still on and shadowy figures moved across the porches in front of them. The dark quadrangle was sprinkled with the lightning bugs of cigaret butts, clustered around pitchers of beer, glowing as some one dragged and then fading out again.
From over in the far corner near the bugler’s megaphone came the ringing chords of a guitar and voices raised in four-part harmony. It was rule of thumb harmony, but it was closely knit and it carried clear and sharp across the quad, sounding good. And in the slowly moving harmony he recognized Sal’s twanging nasal, standing out, more hillbilly than any mountain man, although he was a long nosed Wop from Scranton. They were singing Truckdriver’s Blues.
“Feelin mighty weary, from my head down to my shoes . . . Got to keep a rollin . . . truckdriver’s blues . . . Never did have nothin, got nothin much to lose . . . Got a lowdown feelin . . . truckdriver’s blues.”
And the utter simplicity of the plaintive lament in Sal Clark’s voice reached out and touched him. He felt his anger and indignation at Warden and this setup dwindling away into a kind of deep perceptive melancholy for which there were no words. It was all in the words of the song, but the words actually said nothing at all; except that a truckdriver was weary and had the blues.
The music came to him across the now bright, now dull, slowly burning cigaret of each man’s life, telling him its ancient secret of all men, intangible, unfathomable, defying long-winded descriptions, belying intricate cataloguings, simple, complete, asking no more, giving no less, words that said nothing yet said all there was to say. The song of the one-eyed man who had driven the ox sled through the summer hills in the Kentucky mountains, the song of the Choctaw on his reservation, the song of the man who had laid the rollers for the stones heavy as death to build the glorious monument to the king. In the simple meaningless words he saw himself, and Chief Choate, and Pop Karelsen, and Clark, and Anderson, and Warden, each struggling with a different medium, each man’s path running by its own secret route from the same source to the same inevitable end. And each man knowing as the long line moved as skirmishers through the night woodsey jungle down the hill that all the others were there with him, each hearing the faint rustlings and straining to communicate, each wanting to reach out and share, each wanting to be known, but each unable, as Clark’s whining nasal was unable, to make it known that he was there, and so each forced to face alone whatever it was up ahead, in the unmapped alien enemy’s land, in the darkness.