Oh, was that right? Then how come he couldn't move?

Virgil heard men screaming.

He heard a man moaning, calling for his mother. He heard a voice fairly close by saying, "I can't move my legs." And a voice saying, "I can't see. Will somebody help me? I can't see."

The screaming and moaning went on and on, not close by but somewhere else in the room or ward or wherever he was.

A hand touched his face, moved back and forth in front of his eyes. A woman's voice without an accent said, "Can you hear me?"

She wasn't one of the nurses; they talked in Spanish or had accents. He wanted to ask her what she thought he was doing, sleeping with his eyes open?

The woman's voice said to somebody else, "There is so little we can do."

A man's voice said, "Miss Barton?" and then said something to her Virgil couldn't make out.

The woman's voice said, "I've been able to identify only twelve so far. Many are so horribly burned." Virgil heard her sigh. "And the rest-I'm told as many as two hundred are still in the ship."

Virgil was sure he wasn't burned or he'd feel it. He heard the woman say she'd been in the provinces distributing food to the reconcentrados, Cubans the dons locked up in camps to starve to death. The woman sounded kind of old. Then, close to him, he heard her say, "Dear, can you tell me your name?"

He was Private Virgil Webster, a seagoing marine off the USS Maine, but for some reason couldn't form the words to tell her. He wanted to. Christ, yes. Virgil Webster. Home: Okmulgee, Indian Territory. Left there to become a fighting marine. Look at my tattoos. Semper Fi on one arm, with the Marine Corps insignia. In Memory of Mother on the other, though it didn't mean his ma was dead, he just liked the looks of it, the flower and the gravestone cross. But somebody better tell her he wasn't dead either, else she'd see a newspaper or hear about the Maine and be worried to death. His ma was part northern Cheyenne.