Tunnels

                                                         Ryan Smith

Curiousity got the better of me, so one day after school I stopped to talk to Wayne.

            Wayne was the janitor at my high school, and was a Vietnam veteran. He had done other things and been other places since then, moving to Canada fifteen years before I met him, but he may as well have still had his dog tags around his neck.                                                                         Wayne was eternally clad in old jeans and a t-shirt covered by a beat-up flannel jacket. He always looked like he had just stepped out of a garage, oil and grease caked under his fingernails, and he smelled like an oil-soaked rag. I had never seen him clean shaven.

            “So, what did you do there?” I leant against the wall in the long hallway. Wayne bent over his folded arms which rested on the end of his mop handle.

            “Well, I originally was supposed to be a helicopter mechanic. Those Bell Huey buckets they flew then were always havin’ fuckin’ problems. But, because I was so small they made me a tunnel rat.”

            My feet squeaked on the newly waxed floor as I shifted against the wall.

            “Tunnel rats were mostly Chicano guys, little guys, but I happened to fit the bill. The Viet Cong had all those tunnels right? Well, us tunnel rats went in there with a knife in our teeth.”