So then me and Katz went over to draw the rations, and where we drawed them was from a infantry field kitchen, and it was in a trench about a half mile from where the tree was at. So we ain’t hardly started before he begun some more of his wild talk.
“Damn this thing!” he says. “Damn all of it! How did it ever get started anyway?”
“It won’t be so bad,” I says, “after they send for Foley and give us another man so we can get some sleep.”
“Sleep!” he says. “Ha, ha, ha!”
“Well,” I says, “what else seems to be bothering you?”
“Plenty,” he says. “Them shells, for one thing. Always going off. I got so I jump every time a twig falls off one of them trees on the ground. And another thing: That would be fine, wouldn’t it, to get knocked off right at the end?
“Two weeks!” he keeps on. “After a while only one week. After a while only one day. Then pft! Just like that. Knocked off. And then this.”
“This what?” I says.
“All of it.” And he waves his hand over the whole front, where it was kind of stretched out in front of us. “Yeah, that’s the worst. The rest, that ain’t nothing alongside of that.”
I didn’t have no idea what he meant, but I give a kind of a look around and says: “Oh, I don’t know. It wouldn’t be no bad-looking country if they would fill up them shell holes and leave the grass grow a little.”
“Not by daylight,” he says. “But at night, ha, ha, ha! Listen.” And he stopped still and looked at me with a kind of a crazy look in his eye.
“Listen,” he says. “You know this whole thing is alive? You know it’s alive and it breathes?”
“Well,” I says, “I never noticed it.”
“That’s because you ain’t got that two o’clock watch,” he says. “Oh, my God, when that fog comes down and you can’t hear a thing, and all of a sudden it turns over and breathes! And me up there all alone in that tree—”
“Katz,” I says, “it ain’t a thing the matter with you except you’re blotto from not having no sleep, so—”
“Blotto!” he says. “Yeah, I’m blotto, plenty blotto. But that ain’t all. I’ve been feeling like this a long time, and—”
“And,” I keeps on, “you can damn well snap out of it. Hell,” I says, “you think you’re the only one that’s got it tough?”
And I spoke pretty short, because I was good and tired of listening to him bellyache. So we fixed it up that we would switch that two o’clock watch and I would take it ’stead of him. And at first he didn’t want to, but I made him do it because if it would make him shut up, the two o’clock watch was same to me as any other watch.
And that night when two o’clock come I went up and started the watch. And I wasn’t hardly up there than I seen what he meant, all right. A whole lot of people, they got the idea that on a battle front it’s a hell of a lot of noise going on all the time. And most of the time it is, like shelling in the afternoon when the balloons is up, and machine guns at night when they’re sending up flares to spot raids, and all like of that. But from two o’clock in the morning on to dawn it ain’t nothing so still as a battle front.
Still, I made out all right, because it didn’t mean nothing to me. But then all of a sudden I felt my lips go numb and my heart begun pounding like it would jump out of my throat. I was just looking at my watch, and it was 3:28 and I was getting ready to make my 3:30 entry in the book, when I heared it, just like he said. Maybe you think I’m lying, but I tell you it give kind of a sigh and then went right quiet again. And I was still pretty shaky when he come up to relieve me at four.
“Well,” he says, “you was right.” And he wasn’t wild no more, but stood there looking out at it.
“How you mean?” I says.
“Plenty of them got it tougher than I got it. Foley, for instance.”
“Did they send for him?” I says.
“No,” he says. “He just went.”
He went in the box and lit a cigarette. “You better enter it in the book,” he says. “I took note of the time. It was three twenty-eight.”
NOVEMBER 17, 1929
The Hero
The office of the town commissioners, second floor. Water Witch Fire Engine House. It is an afternoon in May. The members of the board, who are Mr. Hinsch, chairman, and Messrs. Matchett and Oyster, have just returned from lunch after a public hearing which lasted all morning, and are now about to go into executive session, from which, of course, the public is excluded.
Mr. Hinsch: Well, gentlemen, the way I get it, we got to act on this matter of a pension for Scotty Akers, what I mean for his family. And I say let’s not have no more bum argument like we had this morning. It’s too damn hot.
Mr. Matchett: I never seen the beat of them people, a-whooping and a-hollering, and a-carrying on, the way they done.
Mr. Oyster: And it don’t make no difference which way we settle it, we got one side or the other sore as hell at us.
Mr. Hinsch: That’s right. It don’t make no difference what we do, we got ourself in Dutch.
Mr. Matchett: And us only trying to do the right thing.
Mr. Hinsch: It’s this here goddam fight that makes all the trouble.
Mr. Oyster: This here fight makes it bad. Wonder why the hell Scotty couldn’t of been squirting water in the fire when that string-piece beaned him, ’stead of on them Water Witches.
Mr. Matchett: Scotty sure was a caution, thataway.
Mr. Hinsch: How come that fight to get started? I ain’t never got that straight in my head yet.
Mr. Oyster: Scotty started it.
Mr. Matchett: Yep, Scotty started it, just like he always done.
Mr. Oyster: You see, when them Semper Fidelises drives up in their truck, they finds them Water Witches already at the fire. Well, Scotty, he was driving the Semper Fidelises’ truck. And soon as he seen them Water Witches, he hollers out: “Hell, ain’t you got the fire out yet? Get out of the way and let some firemen get to it.”
Mr. Matchett: That’s what Scotty said. I was there and I heard him.
Mr. Hinsch: It’s a wonder Scotty couldn’t of shut up once in a while. I always did say Scotty could of shut his trap and improved hisself.
Mr. Oyster: And with that, them Water Witches turns the hose on the Semper Fidelises. And they had a fight. And right in the middle of it the roof of the house that was on fire falls and a string-piece beans Scotty on the head. And when they pick him up, he’s dead.
Mr. Matchett: And the house burns down.
Mr. Oyster: That’s the hell of it, the house burns down.
Mr. Hinsch: What I say, if them two companies got to have a fight every time they go to a fire, why can’t they put the fire out first and then have the fight coming back?
Mr. Matchett: That’s the way them Eyetalians does when two funerals have a race. They always race coming back from the graveyard. That there is a better way. It stands to reason.
Mr. Oyster: You would think them boys would stop to think that a house costs money. And them trucks costs money, too.
Mr. Hinsch: And here we got all them Semper Fidelises saying the town had ought to pay Scotty’s family a pension, account of him getting beaned like you might say in the line of duty, and all them Water Witches says it’s a hell of a note to sock a pension on the taxpayers, account of Scotty being the one that started the fight. And it don’t make no difference which way we settle it, we got ourself in Dutch.