A 3-Letter Word for Herra’s Boy

I was just about to drift off to sleep the other night when my wife said, “What’s that noise?”

I bolted upright.

“What noise?”

“A kind of shish, shish. “

“I don’t hear anything.”

“It’s probably nothing,” she said. “Good night.”

She was asleep in 15 seconds. I sat staring into the darkness, listening. Nothing wakes me more completely than “What’s that noise?” although “I think my water broke” comes close.

Shish, shish.

That time I heard it.

I have an antique sword on a shelf near the bed. I also have a .44-caliber revolver with no firing mechanism that I use as a paper weight.

I reached first for the pistol, but then it occurred to me that if there were an armed burglar downstairs who was normally disinclined toward violence and he saw my pistol, he might start shooting.

All I would be able to do in return is click.

So I grabbed the sword instead, reasoning that if a screaming Latino came running downstairs waving a sword, a burglar might think twice about challenging him in his own casa.

“Where are you going?” my wife asked suddenly when I rose from the bed. She could be sound asleep and still know exactly what I was doing. Wives have uncanny instincts.

When I pass too close to a bar during the day and call home she says, quick as a wink, “You’ve been drinking.”

“Wrong,” I say, always pleased with a small victory.

“Then,” she says, “you passed close to a bar, I’d say somewhere in Santa Monica, at about 3 o’clock in the afternoon and you thought about getting a drink but decided not to, smart boy!”

What a woman.

“I’m going downstairs to kill the burglar,” I said, trying to pull the sword from its scabbard.

“There’s no burglar down there,” she said, reaching for a crossword puzzle book. “I told you that. Now I’m wide awake. Give me a three-letter word for Herra’s son.”

I went downstairs anyhow. A hitch in the Marines taught me that you can’t be too careful. In boot camp we saw movies about what happened to guys who ignored noises.

“He thought it was a bird,” I remember one Marine in a movie saying of his buddy slumped over in a Guadalcanal foxhole, “and it killed him.” A guy in our platoon from Tennessee named Ossie argued after the movie that no damned bird was gonna get him when we went into combat.

I’d say, “You miss the point, Ossie.” I had three years of college and was considered the platoon intellectual. “He wasn’t killed by the bird, he was killed by an enemy soldier whose movements in the night he mistook as those of a bird and consequently took no action against them.”

“Well,” Ossie would say, “no damned Commie could have snuck up on me that way!”

I was going to point out that they weren’t fighting the Commies on Guadalcanal, but since we were bound for Korea in a few weeks, I figured he would learn soon enough who we were fighting then and who we were fighting now.

I reached the living room and stopped to listen, sword at the ready. It felt like my old M-1 with a fixed bayonet. Ossie threw his bayonet away when we reached Pusan. He reasoned that if he didn’t use his, they wouldn’t use theirs.

“Being skewered like a pork chop ain’t my idea of how to die,” Ossie would say. Should I have explained that they don’t skewer pork chops? Naw.

“Is anyone down here?” I whispered.

The shishing sound again.

I tried to zero in on its source, but since my hearing has never been good, that was difficult. “How the hell did you ever get in this outfit?” a D.I. used to say. “You can’t hear worth dog spit and you’re too damned short!”

In war, even the short must serve.

I switched on a light. Our cockateel fluttered suddenly in its cage. I turned sharply, bumped against a cabinet and the sword went clattering across the tile.

“What’s going on down there?” my wife called.

“It’s only the bird,” I called back.

“You killed the bird?”

“Not yet.”

What irony. The Marine thought he’d heard a bird and it was a Japanese soldier. I thought I’d heard an intruder and it was a bird. I went around checking the rest of the house. You can’t be too careful. No damned bird gonna sneak up on me nohow, neither.

“Are we safe?” my wife asked when I crawled into bed again.

“Who knows?” I said mysteriously.

“Did you sneak a drink downstairs?”

No, but I came mighty close to the bar cart when I double-checked the bird.