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Waking Up in Sicily
Keith Onstad
Iwoke up that morning to the sound of the Iron Curtain falling all across
Europe. I was in a field behind a low stone wall, and I knew exactly where I
was, but not how I got there. I raised my head from the dust and opened my
eyes as wide as I dared, but I already knew that Jeremy was gone. Gone. Off the
island. Back to the real world. Beneath my body the box of take-out was
smashed flat and the leftover calzones were squashed beyond all recognition.
The bottles at my feet were empty, but when I turned my head I could see a full
bottle leaning against the wall.
We did not know, at first, that Mount Etna had erupted. We saw the
mushroom cloud off in the distance towards the Naval Air Station at Sigonella,
and everyone had a theory. Some thought it was a nuclear accident (although
the official line was that we could "neither confirm nor deny" that there were
nuclear weapons at Sigonella). Some thought one of Qadhafi's terrorists had
finally made it to the big martyr's paradise in the sky. One man thought it was a
test explosion in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. And a few even thought
it might be Mount Etna exploding.
One at a time we slipped back into the barracks to grab our cameras.
We might not have known what caused the sky to darken in such an unnatural
fashion, but we all wanted to record it on film just in case it was the beginning
of the end of the world. After I opened my locker and removed the camera I
reached under the bed (in the new Air Force we don't call them bunks) for a
bottle of Vino Locale. The first thing I discovered upon landing on the island
was the Vino Locale served in most restaurants. A bottle cost less than a dollar.
Most of the girls mixed theirs half and half with Seven-Up to tone down the,
often harsh, flavor that was an acquired taste. Quickly acquired. The alcohol
level ranged somewhere between barely noticeable to kick-you-in-the-ass-and­
knock-you-over-for-a-week, with a tendency towards the latter. The magic of
Vino Locale, however, was that you would never know what you were getting
from bottle to bottle.
..
Back outside I snapped a roll of film that would never develop properly,
and then opened the bottle of wine, lifted it to my lips, and took a long drink
straight from the neck. It was the kick-you-in-the-ass variety, so I made the
requisite "god-damn-that-is-harsh" face before I passed the bottle to Gordon
Bradley, a buck sergeant who worked in the Comm Center and had come in on
the same plane as I did three weeks prior to the eruption. He wiped the mouth
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