Free Drink for the Thirst to Come by Lawrence Santoro Page A

Welly!” Bill shouted. “This year, home! Come on, let’s inside, out of the air, out of the cold. Let’s us have some warmth.” He steered Welly toward the blacked out salon bar.
    A hundred bodies, a thousand for all Bill and Welly knew, a million survivors and them, gathered, singing in the light of a hundred candles. Welly showed what was left of his teeth. “Horses!” he shouted over the singing. “Horses!”
    Bill laughed with him.
    “Gotter go!” Welly shouted over the song.
    “What?” Bill shouted at his ear.
    Welly made an arc with his hand, pointed to the deck.
    “’ave a piss for me,” Bill said and let him go.
    Much later, someone said someone, one of the Lanc’s he reckoned, had gone over the side and into the briny. “I shouted but over he went and down, like that,” he said with a snap.
    They didn’t stop the boat.
     
    Back then, when Welly and the war still lived, the nigger in the dark took them by their arms and led them. He pointed and slipped away with not a sound. Back in the tunnel and lights, Welly and Bill listened as they walked toward the mine face.
    “What’cher fink ther, Bill?” Welly whispered.
    “Germans is digging toward our line, we’re digging to theirs. First one there gets to blow t’other off the world, is what I think.”
    “‘Th’ German dead’s wot he said. Howzat you fink, Bill?”
    “Who knows what they mean, Welly?” Bill whispered. “Their way of talking, is all, I reckon.”
    Welly snorted. “Yea. All uv us is dead men, eh Bill!” He snorted again.
    Scratch, scratch, scratch, said the darkness overhead.
     
    Bill sat by the road. The sun settled into the earth behind him. His shadow rippled across the field as daylight drained from the sky. From sunup on the boat until now, he’d had a day in France and Belgium. Thirteen years ago, life, the war, all of it, was the narrow strip of land he now stared at in gathering dark.
    “Sun setting in England, too, Welly,” he said.
    No answer but gentle wind. Across the fields toward Messines the grasses rolled, dark shadows chasing light. In the last of the light, the wind settled to earth. Bill closed his eyes and whispered to the night.
     
    Once down, they didn’t leave the mine. Day, night, all the same: day was work.
    “You here. You carry.” The African corporal threw an empty sandbag at Welly, at Bill. The nig-nog marched down the line tossing sacks to the fifty blokes detailed to the dig. White blokes. “Soon dirt gone. When then, we lay big boom. You carry boom stuff. Then Boom.”
    Welly shot Bill a look. “What’s that, mate?” Welly said, cocking his head, his hand to his ear. “Couldn’t quite catch’er ther, Womba…”
    The corporal turned. A low growl came from his chest. He looked far into Welly’s eye, laid a black hand across Welly’s mouth. Welly’s eyes widened, he started to speak, but the corporal pressed his left thumb on Welly’s forehead. Pressed and pressed. The thumb entered Welly’s head. Seemed to. Of course it did not, could not. Then the corporal let him go. Eye to eye, the corporal said, “Some carry. Other some dig. Now, you carry. Sometime… sometime you dig. You hope you not dig.”
    The shiny corporal’s eyes scanned the line of men. They rested on Bill, the eyes, gold and shot through with brown. “Now carry.” He walked away and the men followed.
    “He hurt you?” Bill said.
    Welly spit and wiped his mouth. “Nuh,” he said.
    “What’d he do, then?”
    Welly twitched and wiped his face, touched his head where the corporal’s thumb had pressed. “Dunno. Dunno. He mark me?”
    No mark, none that Bill saw.
    “Ah. I always been a bit touched, eh Bill? Touched! Get it?”
    They kipped, wrapped in wool blankets, huddled in a side gallery.
    “How long you fink, Bill? ’Fore they trick orf this lit’le home o’ ours? Blow it to hell and let us get back up to the real fight?”
    “Dunno.”
    “Nor me. Questions mate. Questions is what I got.