War

Every body played war, me and all my friends, my sister Jo, cousins Janise and Linda, and Frankie’s sister, even Wayne and his friend, even Yudock. Not the hillbillies. We never played with the hillbillies. Not Byron or his brother either, but everybody else, except Fat Georgie and Monica, because they couldn’t get dirty.

All the girls were nurses on one of the flatbeds parked in the truck lot next to Pumpilio’s garage. That was the field hospital.

We fought the Japs or the Germans but usually the Japs because Japs was better to say and my grand mother was German. She was dead but I still didn’t like killing people like her and I didn’t know any Japs and they had slanty eyes and were different so they were easier to kill especially when I got my fifty caliber machine gun an I could kill a lot at one time. It was okay to kill commies too, but you had to play spy to kill them. Indians too, sometimes, but sometimes it was fun to be the Indian.

Getting shot or blown up was the most fun if every body was on the same side fighting the enemy. I charged across the battlefield and get shot. It was hard to be good at getting shot. You ran as fast as you can and then just had to kind of stop doing anything except yelling you were hit and grabbing were you got shot and letting your self go flying at the cinders. Getting blown up was almost the same except you had to jump first before you let yourself go.

Yudock was terrible at it. He stopped running and lay down on the ground and roll around in agony forever. You were supposed to lay there and weakly wave your arm around and moan a little until the girls came and dragged you to the flat be and operated.

Sometime you had to recover enough to help get up on the truck bed but then you got worse and the nurse pinch you digging out the bullet or shrapnel and nurse you back to health and you fell in love with the nurse and she would cry when you went back to the war and she had to kiss you and you had to let her and not wipe it off. Sometimes you died and she put a towel over your head. She didn’t have to kiss you when you died but she had to cross her arms and sort of fall on you and then cry. But then you got cured by a miracle and then went back to the war so you could get shot and dragged back again.

One time the operation was real. Throwing yourself head long onto a cinder covered truck lot can be hazardous. Cinders have some sharp edges. My sister, secretly gleeful at the opportunity, dug a piece out of my forearm with a tweezers while I valiantly tried not to cry. Janise and Linda watched. I had to get kissed by all of them, three Florence Nightingale’s.