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

You too? Yea. Them nig-nogs, now, they’re in charge. They got answers. I reckon we’re here for the duration, like. Here till we’re done!”
    Skitch, skitch , the silence said.
    “What do you fig’r?” Welly whispered to Bill. “Fritz or us, who’ll be first?”
    Bill shrugged. “Dunno,” he said. “Corporal said, so, yeah, I figure,” Bill said.
    Skitch, skitch, said the silence.
    “Fig’r we’ll see Ol’ Nick soon? Eh?” Welly laughed.
    Skitch, skitch , said the earth.
    “Yeah. Fig’r.”
    “Nig-nog ain’t talking big, is sure.”
    Bill thought about it. “Well…” Bill started. The darkness suited thinking. “We gotter get there first,” Bill whispered, “that’s a cert. Dig under No Man’s Land, get to th’ Hun’s line, under his trenches. Then our digger niggers rout out a gallery. For the explosives, you know, a nice tight chamber. Then we haul the blasting stuff, bit by bit. Pack it in…”
    “Yeah. That’s us, I reckon… Hauling HE. Packing high explosive?”
    “Reckon.”
    “Don’t fancy that, Bill. Packing explosions like a bloody horse? Ain’t what me ol’ mum raise her lit’le Welly boy for.”
    “Oi! Hshh…” from way, way down in the dark. One of their own.
    “Hishh, yersel’…” Welly whispered back. There was silence for a minute.
    Skitch, skitch, skitch… said the silence.
    “Them Africans,” Welly started.
    “Wha…?”
    “Africaners. They know somefink. I been watching…” Welly snugged up close. Bill felt Welly’s breath in his ear, smelled their supper of boiled spud and thin horse gravy. “Cookin’ somefink for us all, oh you know they are. Why ain’t we seen sun since we come here? Eh? Why ain’t no one else come down for helping since? Saving us for somefink special.” A gentle breeze came from the darkness beyond. “Hsh,” Welly said.
    They lay in silence.
    “Oi,” Welly said. “Bill? Reckon the Huns is got theirs digging their mines, too?”
    “Their what?”
    “Africaners. Well, whoever. I dunno. Who’s digging fer us, Bill? I ain’t never spoke to no diggers. We do the hauling. Them black boys do the telling. Dunno. I never seen no one dig! Must be blokes up there, past them tarps, niggers maybe? Or what?”
    “Shamblers,” Bill said before he thought about it.
    “Eh?”
    “Nothing, Welly. Old Suffolk tales is all.”
    Beyond the gallery’s low opening, the tunnel lights went dim. Then out. Then there was nothing anywhere, except Welly’s breath and his own. Then something else. Something moved in the near distance, a shuffle at the very bottom of Bill’s hearing. The darkness rippled and from the ripples came a…
    What is it? Bill thought. What?
    “Wha…” Welly began. Bill stopped his mouth.
    Suffolk tales remembered: Da’s silent house, Mum’s white, white sheets, him, just a lad, lying abed between sleeping brothers, darkness all ’round, above, below, outside, oozing up from the ground. He knew darkness then, Little Bill did, the dark, so full of hairy things, man-things and bigger things, he knew, than Da, things that breathed and shuffled on hard feet. And Bill, a little lad, pressed his palms against his eyeballs, blotting all out. And with the press, explosions of color bloomed behind his lids. Little Bill knew, he did. The shufflers carried the smell of rotted meat on them, a stink like down where Dad butchered hogs and for two days after. There, between his brothers, Little Bill pressed his hands into his eyes and waited for the shufflers to pass.
    They were there now, shambling the tunnel. Shuffling toward the mine head. Not the same, ’course not, but the same smell of dead flesh oozed from them, those man-things, their black hairs and hard dark feet. Probably. They moved through the same silent explosions of color that danced in his eyes behind his hands. Little Bill once thought the shamblers ate those colors that lived in his eyes. They ate them colors and shat dead pig-meat, made the stinks that