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little Sandie squeal with his tray of lugworms. We found them while we were showing Gayle the privy, giving her the full guided tour, like it was the Alamo. Sandie peeping out from behind Lois, daring herself to go and take a close-up look at the worms, and John holding up a basket, shape of a pickle, but six foot high.
    You ever sin one big as this?’ he said, giving Lois a knowing smile, and she roared.
    ‘See,’ she said, when we were driving home, via Brakey, looking for something that might be a beet shed, ‘see, they catch different kinds, depending on the time of year. And sometimes they use nets and traps, and sometimes they use … like a spear, and just catch them one at a time, and sometimes, on a good night, they might catch twenty pounds of them, just in one of those baskets, and the big traps are called grigs but the little ones are called hoileys, and … what else … ?’
    ‘Tune in same time next week,’ Audrey said, ‘for the Wonderful World of Eel Fishing presented by Lois Moon.’
    ‘I understand this right?’ Vern said. ‘You drove out there, guzzling gas, took half the commissary and a bottle of good liquor too, and she wasn't even home?’
    I said, ‘Yeah. Must have put fifteen mile on the clock. Jeez, you're starting to sound like Ed Gillis. He's got radar-tracking on Betty.’
    ‘Know what's good for you, you'll stay outta Ed and Betty's business,’ he said. ‘Know what's good for you, you'll quit running round, fraternising with a bunch of breeds. Hell, Peg, why can't you stay home and make a pie once in a while?’
    ‘Hell is a bad word,’ Crystal said. ‘Also jeez. Miss Boyle says.’
    ‘Vern,’ I told him, ‘I can make pie and go visiting.’
    I'll say this about Vern. Sometimes pie was all it took.
    ‘Honey,’ he said to Crystal, ‘you tell Miss Boyle welcome to the free world, thanks to folks like your daddy, and you can say any goddamn words you please.’
    ‘You don't tell Miss Boyle no such thing,’-. I said to her when I was tucking her in, ‘and you know what? Mommy's gonna get you a princess dressing table, all pink and pretty.’
    I was thinking I'd get Miss Homemaker of America to give me a hand. Betty always seemed to have a hundred ideas how to turn a prefab cabin into what she called ‘a gracious and lovely home’. I figured, if I kept Vern sweet, smartened up the quarters, made the occasional pie, I'd be able get off base once in a while without getting the third degree. Get away from the whine of the jets and the rattling of the windows. Now I'd got the hang of driving on the wrong side of the road, and handling that funny money of theirs, I was starting to enjoy going out there.
    Crystal said, ‘Mommy? Do I have to have a princess dressing table? Can I get roller skates instead?’

10
    I fell and busted my collar bone, coming outta the PX where the kids had been skidding around, polishing the ice. They strapped me up, till the bone knit, which good as put me in the slammer for a while. Couldn't drive, couldn't hardly pull up my own shorts. Couldn't stop Betty Gillis running in and out performing acts of neighbourly kindness. Vern ate all the soup she brung in. That man was a walking Disposall. I just lived on codeine and Pepsi and prayed next time he got orders it'd be for Ramey, Puerto Rico.
    ‘You rest up now,’ Betty said. ‘I'll take care of things. You're in the best place. You seen what kinda weather we got today?’
    They called it a Fen Blow. Looked like a sandstorm to me. A sandstorm on the far side of the moon.
    ‘Just when you thought it couldn't get worse,’ Lois said. ‘Here, open nice and wide and I'll steady the gun in your mouth. Hell, no. Let me go first. You can make your own arrangements. I got Herb at home and you'll never guess what he's doing.’
    Herb loved chopping wood.
    Thirty-six hours they didn't fly a single sortie, because of the Blow, and Vern was like a bear with a boil on his backside, driving out to the facility