Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo

Author:Dalton Trumbo
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Tags: Literary, Fiction, General
ISBN: 9780141189819
Publisher: Penguin Books, Limited
Published: 2009-09-06T10:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

New year's eve. Snow flying in the air wet snow clouds sifting close over Shale City. Everything still with lights glowing inside warm houses. No confetti no champagne bottles no yelling no noise at all. The quietude of new year for ordinary people who worked and were kind and wanted only peace. Happy new year. His father kissing his mother and saying happy new year my dear we've been lucky the kids are healthy I love you happy new year I hope the new one turns out as well as the old.

New year's eve at the bakery with guys saying goddam I'm glad it's over the next one can't be any worse happy new year hell let's go out into the fog and get drunk. Walking out of the bakery on new year's eve with the bins every which-way and the ovens empty and the conveyors stopped and the wrapping machines paralyzed and the dividers still and nobody but the crew going out of a strange silent place with their voices echoing flatly against dead machinery. The guys at the bakery going out to celebrate the new year.

The guys in saloons shoving free ones across the bar and saying happy new year and many more of them kid you been a good customer have one on the house happy new year and the hell with the prohibitionists some day the bastards are going to give us trouble. The girls from the hash houses and the girls from the hotels and the guys swarming out of dirty little apartment bedrooms and music and dancing and smoke and somebody with a ukulele and have another and the feeling of being lonesome that everybody has inside him and people bouncing against you and off you and have another one and a girl passing out at the bar and a fight and happy new year.

Oh god the happy happy new year he had counted three hundred and sixty-five days and now it was new year's eve. It didn't seem like a year. It had gone by like a lifetime when you look back and think of a time so far away that you can't clearly remember what happened yet a time that has gone so quickly it seems only a minute ago it started. Six visits from the nurse each day—thirty days to a month— and now three hundred and sixty-five days. It had gone quickly because he was doing something he was keeping track of time like other people he had sets of figures to remember he controlled a little world of his own lagging behind that on the outside but still nearer to it than before. He had a calendar in which the sun and the moon and the seasons had no place a calendar with thirty days for each month and twelve months in the year and now five extra days to make up the difference with the nurse's next visit to make it new year's morning.

He had been a very busy guy and he had learned a lot.

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