Hey Tommy!  3

Jim Larwill

Canadian Shield Chapbooks III
Text Box: Hey Tommy I can see you now sitting below the window tap tap taping the dead mike, and you figure they've found you, it is only a matter of time until the mortars get you. But you don't give up, do you Tommy? You look across the room and leaning in a corner there is a hoe and next to it on the wall, hanging on a peg there is an Italian hat, a black jacket, and a white muffler. Hey Tommy! Are you dancing now, moving around campfire buffalo skin draped over your wolf warrior back; clouds, prairie fire smoke; foot steps, thunder flash moving in circles across a morning sky? That day the German's watched a crazy Italian peasant, one who had gone mad from destruction of his home, as he ran from his Text Box: house to his chicken coop, where he inspected it for damage. He then hoed up and down his field, at one point bending down to tie his shoe lace, and after taking the time to finished hoeing all his field on his way back to the house he stopped to do a little dance. Hey Tommy after fixing the telephone line you got two more tanks that day, and if you had been caught in those cloths they would have shot you on the spot. Hey Tommy, just before going back into the house did you really have to do that little dance? Did you really have to jump up and kick the dust? Did you really need to shake your mocking fists at both sides of the battle lines drawing even more attention to yourself as the Canadian side of the lines tried not to laugh so loud that the Germans would hear your comrade’s howls? . Hey Tommy! Because you were a Canadian the King of a fading Empire pinned a medal on to your chest, and because you were a Canadian Parachutist serving in the joint US Text Box: Canada Special Services Core - The Devil's Brigade - you got the American Silver Star. Even Free French Partisans recommended you for the Croix de Guerre. Once, fifteen miles behind German lines with one private to keep you company, you came across a squad of Free French encircled by Germans. When it was over the Free French officer couldn't believe it. "Where is zhe rest of your company?" You pointed at the private standing next to you, and you smiled that half cocked smile. "Mon Dieu. I thought zhere was a least fifty of you!" The retreating remnants of the tattered German Platoon reported at least a hundred. Hey Tommy, you always claimed you never got the Victoria Cross because you were an Indian, and I suspect, if you had been an American you would have become a movie star, your story -- the legend of a trickster coyote. Text Box: Hey Tommy! Are you dancing now, moving around campfire buffalo skin draped over your wolf warrior back; clouds, prairie fire smoke; foot steps, thunder flash moving in circles across a morning sky? Buffalo herds were wiped out as part of a government policy to destroy the economic base of a people and a culture. When the buffalo were gone packs of hungry prairie wolves (not coyotes) circled the Free Whisky Trade forts. The Wolvers were called wolvers because they put out poisoned meat for the wolves. The normally cautious and aware wolves ate the meat because they were starving and too hungry to notice the almond taste of poison. Behind the packs of wolves came the bands of prairie peoples – the Wolvers gave them whisky and into the absence of physical space and a starving poisoned culture came coyotes to hunt rabbits and ground squirrels. Text Box: Hey Tommy! You were in Anzio, February 1944, when you volunteered to weave your way right up to the enemy lines, the Germans were holding you down with Royal Tiger tanks, blasting away then moving position before your antitank gunners could get the range, so you wiggled up eighteen hundred yards, telephone wire hidden behind you, all the way up to with in two hundred yards of the enemy line, where you took cover in the burnt out shell of a house, choosing this because months ago, both sides stopped using obvious cover in the no-man's-land between the lines, and nobody would be crazy enough to use a house as blatant as this one sitting right under the German noses. The morning of the first day, right next to you a Tiger crashed through the trees, you pin- pointed it for the gunners, and it was gone. A few hours later another one was knocked out with your telephoned co-ordinates. Then on the second day a mortar shell whistled over the house and your line went dead.