When the time comes, they will hear the voice of the Turtle.
So I'll wait, and sooner or later I'll know. I don't believe it's a question anymore of calling them or not calling them.
Only a question of when.
February 20th, 1985
The fire at the Black Spot.
'A perfect example of how the Chamber of Commerce will try to rewrite history, Mike,' old Albert Carson would have told me, probably cackling as he said it. 'They'll try, and sometimes they almost succeed . . . but the old people remember how things really went. They always remember. And sometimes they'll tell you, if you ask them right.'
There are people who have lived in Derry for twenty years and don't know that there was once a 'special' barracks for noncoms at the old Derry Army Air Corps Base, a barracks that was a good half a mile from the rest of the base — and in the middle of February, with the
temperature standing right around zero and a forty-mile –an-hour wind howling across those flat runways and whopping the wind-chill factor down to something you could hardly believe, that extra half a mile became something that could give you frost-freeze or frostbite, or maybe even kill you.
The other seven barracks had oil heat, storm windows, and insulation. They were toasty and cozy. The 'special' barracks, which housed the twenty-seven men of Company E, was heated by a balky old wood furnace. Supplies of wood for it were catch-as-catch-can. The only insulation was the deep bank of pine and spruce boughs the men laid around the outside. One of the men promoted a complete set of storm windows for the place one day, but the twenty-seven inmates of the 'special' barracks were detailed up to Bangor that same day to help with some work at the base up there, and when they came back that night, tired and cold, all of those windows had been broken. Every one.
This was in 1930, when half of America's air force still consisted of biplanes. In Washington, Billy Mitchell had been courtmartialed and demoted to flying a desk because his gadfly insistence on trying to build a more modern air force had finally irritated his elders enough for them to slap him down hard. Not long after, he would resign.
So there was precious little flying that went on at the Derry base, in spite of its three runways (one of which was actually paved). Most of the soldiering that went on there was of the make-work variety.
One of the Company E soldiers who returned to Derry after his service tour came to an end in 1937 was my dad. He told me this story:
'One day in the spring of 1930 — this was about six months before the fire at the Black Spot — I was coming back with four of my buddies from a three-day pass we had spent down in Boston.
'When we come through the gate there was this big old boy standing just inside the checkpoint, leaning on a shovel and picking the seat of his suntans out of his ass. A sergeant from someplace down south. Carroty-red hair. Bad teeth. Pimples. Not much more than an ape without the body hair, if you know what I mean. There were a lot of them like that in the army during the Depression.
'So here we come, four young guys back from leave, all of us still feeling fine, and we could see in his eyes that he was just looking for something to bust us with. So we snapped him salutes as if he was General Black Jack Pershing himself. I guess we might have been all right, but it was one fine late-April day, sun shining down, and I had to shoot off my lip. "A good afternoon to you, Sergeant Wilson, sir," said I, and he landed on me with both feet.
' "Did I give you any permission to speak to me?" he asks.
'"Nawsir," I say.
'He looks around at the rest of them — Trevor Dawson, Carl Roone, and Henr y Whitsun, who was killed in the fire that fall — and he says to them, "This here smart nigger is in hack with me. If the rest of you jigaboos don't want to join him in one hardworking dirty bitch of an afternoon, you get over to your barracks, stow your gear, and get your asses over to the OD. You understand?"
'Well, they got going, and Wilson hollers, "Doubletime, you fuckers! Lemme see the soles of your eighty-fucking-nines!"
'So they doubletimed off, and Wilson took me over to one of the equipment sheds and he got me a spade. He took me out into the big field that used to be just about where the Northeast Airlines Airbus terminal stands today. And he looks at me, kind of grinning, and he points at the ground and he says, "You see that hole there, nigger?"
'There was no hole there, but I figured it was best for me to agree with whatever he said, so I looked down at the ground where he was pointing and said I sure did see it. So then he
busted me one in the nose and knocked me over and there I wa s on the ground with blood running down over the last fresh shirt I had.
'"You don't see it because some bigmouth jig bastard filled it up!" he shouted at me, and he had two big blotches of color on his cheeks. But he was grinning, too, and you could tell he was enjoying himself. "So what you do, Mr A Good Afternoon To You, what you do is you get the dirt out of my hole. Doubletime!"
'So I dug for most two hours, and pretty soon I was in that hole up to my chin. The last couple of feet was clay, and by the time I finished I was standing in water up to my ankles and my shoes were soaked right through.
'"Get out of there, Hanlon," Sergeant Wilson said. He was sitting there on the grass, smoking a cigarette. He didn't offer me any help. I was dirt and muck from top to bottom, not to mention the blood drying on the blouse of my suntans. He stood up and walked over. He pointed at the hole.
'"What do you see there, nigger?" he asked me.
'"Your hole, Sergeant Wilson," says I.
'"Yeah, well, I decided I don't want it," he says. "I don't want no hole dug by a nigger. Put my dirt back in, Private Hanlon."
'So I filled it back in and by the time I was done the sun was going down and it was getting cold. He comes over and looks at it after I finished patting down the last of the dirt with the flat of the spade.
'"Now what do you see there, nigger?" he asks.
'"Bunch of dirt, sir," I said, and he hit me again. My God, Mikey, I came this close to just bouncing up off 'n the ground and split ting his head open with the edge of that shovel. But if I'd done that, I never would have looked at the sky again, except through a set of bars. Still, there were times when I almost think it would have been worth it. I managed to hold my peace somehow, though.
'"That ain't a bunch of dirt, you stupid coontail night-fighter!" he screams at me, the spit flying off'n his lips. "That's MY HOLE, and you best get the dirt out of it right now! Doubletime!"
'So I dug the dirt out of his hole and then I filled it in again, and then he asks me why I went and filled in his hole just when he was getting ready to take a crap in it. So I dug it out again and he drops his pants and hangs his skinny-shanks cracker redneck ass over the hole and he grins up at me while he's doing his business and says, "How you doin, Hanlon?"
'"I am doing just fine, sir," I says right back, because I had decided I wasn't going to give up until I fell unconscious or dropped dead. I had my dander up.
'"Well, I aim to fix that," he says. "To start with, you better just fill that hole in, Private Hanlon. And I want to see some life. You're slowin down."
'So I got her filled in again and I could see by the way he was grinning that he was only warming up. But just then this friend of his came humping across the field with a gas lantern and told him there'd been a surprise inspection and Wilson was in hack for having missed it. My friends covered for me and I was okay, but Wilson's friends — if that's what he called them — couldn't be bothered.