Ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa...
Both based on a (very) short story of James Thurber - so short I will post it right here - read it; it's one of the best stories ever written...
"We're going through!" The Commander's voice was like thin ice breaking. He wore
his full-dress uniform, with the heavily braided white cap pulled down rakishly over
one cold gray eye. "We can't make it, sir. It's spoiling for a hurricane, if you ask me."
"I'm not asking you, Lieutenant Berg," said the Commander. "Throw on the power
lights! Rev her up to 8,500! We're going through!" The pounding of the cylinders
increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa. The Commander stared at the
ice forming on the pilot window. He walked over and twisted a row of complicated
dials. "Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!" he shouted. "Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!" repeated
Lieutenant Berg. "Full strength in No. 3 turret!" shouted the Commander. "Full
strength in No. 3 turret!" The crew, bending to their various tasks in the huge, hurtling
eight-engined Navy hydroplane, looked at each other and grinned. "The old man will
get us through" they said to one another. "The Old Man ain't afraid of Hell!" . . .
"Not so fast! You're driving too fast!" said Mrs. Mitty. "What are you driving so
fast for?"
"Hmm?" said Walter Mitty. He looked at his wife, in the seat beside him, with
shocked astonishment. She seemed grossly unfamiliar, like a strange woman who had
yelled at him in a crowd. "You were up to fifty-five," she said. "You know I don't like
to go more than forty. You were up to fifty-five." Walter Mitty drove on toward
Waterbury in silence, the roaring of the SN202 through the worst storm in twenty
years of Navy flying fading in the remote, intimate airways of his mind.
"You're tensed up again," said Mrs. Mitty. "It's one of your days. I wish you'd let
Dr. Renshaw look you over."
Walter Mitty stopped the car in front of the building where his wife went to have
her hair done. "Remember to get those overshoes while I'm having my hair done," she
said. "I don't need overshoes," said Mitty. She put her mirror back into her bag.
"We've been all through that," she said, getting out of the car. "You're not a young
man any longer." He raced the engine a little. "Why don't you wear your gloves?
Have you lost your gloves?" Walter Mitty reached in a pocket and brought out the
gloves. He put them on, but after she had turned and gone into the building and he had
driven on to a red light, he took them off again. "Pick it up, brother!" snapped a cop as
the light changed, and Mitty hastily pulled on his gloves and lurched ahead. He drove
around the streets aimlessly for a time, and then he drove past the hospital on his way
to the parking lot.
. . . "It's the millionaire banker, Wellington McMillan," said the pretty nurse.
"Yes?" said Walter Mitty, removing his gloves slowly. "Who has the case?" "Dr.
Renshaw and Dr. Benbow, but there are two specialists here, Dr. Remington from
New York and Mr. Pritchard-Mitford from London. He flew over." A door opened
down a long, cool corridor and Dr. Renshaw came out. He looked distraught and
haggard. "Hello, Mitty," he said. "We're having the devil's own time with McMillan,
the millionaire banker and close personal friend of Roosevelt. Obstreosis of the ductal
tract. Tertiary. Wish you'd take a look at him." "Glad to," said Mitty.
In the operating room there were whispered introductions: "Dr. Remington, Dr.
Mitty. Mr. Pritchard-Mitford, Dr. Mitty." "I've read your book on streptothricosis,"
said Pritchard-Mitford, shaking hands. "A brilliant performance, sir." "Thank you,"
said Walter Mitty. "Didn't know you were in the States, Mitty," grumbled Remington.
"Coals to Newcastle, bringing Mitford and me up here for a tertiary." "You are very
kind," said Mitty. A huge, complicated machine, connected to the operating table,
with many tubes and wires, began at this moment to go pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.
"The new anesthetizer is giving way!" shouted an intern. "There is no one in the East
who knows how to fix it!" "Quiet, man!" said Mitty, in a low, cool voice. He sprang
to the machine, which was going pocketa-pocketa-queep-pocketa-queep. He began
fingering delicately a row of glistening dials. "Give me a fountain pen!" he snapped.
Someone handed him a fountain pen. He pulled a faulty piston out of the machine and
inserted the pen in its place. "That will hold for ten minutes," he said. "Get on with
the operation." A nurse hurried over and whispered to Renshaw, and Mitty saw the
man turn pale. "Coreopsis has set in," said Renshaw nervously. "If you would take
over, Mitty?" Mitty looked at him and at the craven figure of Benbow, who drank,
and at the grave, uncertain faces of the two great specialists. "If you wish," he said.
They slipped a white gown on him; he adjusted a mask and drew on thin gloves;
nurses handed him shining . . .
"Back it up, Mac! Look out for that Buick!" Walter Mitty jammed on the brakes.
"Wrong lane, Mac," said the parking-lot attendant, looking at Mitty closely. "Gee.
Yeh," muttered Mitty. He began cautiously to back out of the lane marked "Exit
Only." "Leave her sit there," said the attendant. "I'll put her away." Mitty got out of
the car. "Hey, better leave the key." "Oh," said Mitty, handing the man the ignition
key. The attendant vaulted into the car, backed it up with insolent skill, and put it
where it belonged.
They're so damn cocky, thought Walter Mitty, walking along Main Street; they
think they know everything. Once he had tried to take his chains off, outside New
Milford, and he had got them wound around the axles. A man had had to come out in
a wrecking car and unwind them, a young, grinning garageman. Since then Mrs. Mitty
always made him drive to the garage to have the chains taken off. The next time, he
thought, I'll wear my right arm in a sling; they won't grin at me then. I'll have my right
arm in a sling and they'll see I couldn't possibly take the chains off myself. He kicked
at the slush on the sidewalk. "Overshoes," he said to himself, and he began looking
for a shoe store.
When he came out into the street again, with the overshoes in a box under his arm,
Walter Mitty began to wonder what the other thing was his wife had told him to get.
She had told him, twice, before they set out from their house for Waterbury. In a way
he hated these weekly trips to town-he was always getting something wrong. Kleenex,
he thought, Squibb's, razor blades? No. Toothpaste, toothbrush, bicarbonate,
cardorundum, initiative and referendum? He gave it up. But she would remember it.
"Where's the what's-its-name," she would ask. "Don't tell me you forgot the what'sits-
name." A newsboy went by shouting something about the Waterbury trial.
. . . "Perhaps this will refresh your memory." The District Attorney suddenly thrust
a heavy automatic at the quiet figure on the witness stand. "Have you ever seen this
before?" Walter Mitty took the gun and examined it expertly. "This is my Webley-
Vickers 50.80," he said calmly. An excited buzz ran around the courtroom. The Judge
rapped for order. "You are a crack shot with any sort of firearms, I believe?" said the
District Attorney, insinuatingly. "Objection!" shouted Mitty's attorney. "We have
shown that the defendant could not have fired the shot. We have shown that he wore
his right arm in a sling on the night of the fourteenth of July." Walter Mitty raised his
hand briefly and the bickering attorneys were stilled. "With any known make of gun,"
he said evenly, "I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my
left hand." Pandemonium broke loose in the courtroom. A woman's scream rose
above the bedlam and suddenly a lovely, dark-haired girl was in Walter Mitty's arms.
The District Attorney struck at her savagely. Without rising from his chair, Mitty let
the man have it on the point of the chin. "You miserable cur!" . . .
"Puppy biscuit," said Walter Mitty. He stopped walking and the buildings of
Waterbury rose up out of the misty courtroom and surrounded him again. A woman
who was passing laughed. "He said 'Puppy biscuit'," she said to her companion. "That
man said 'Puppy biscuit' to himself." Walter Mitty hurried on. He went into an A&P,
not the first one he came to but a smaller one farther up the street. "I want some
biscuit for small, young dogs," he said to the clerk. "Any special brand, sir?" The
greatest pistol shot in the world thought a moment. "It says 'Puppies Bark for It' on the
box," said Walter Mitty.
His wife would be through at the hairdresser's in fifteen minutes, Mitty saw in
looking at his watch, unless they had trouble drying it; sometimes they had trouble
drying it. She didn't like to get to the hotel first; she would want him to be there
waiting for her as usual. He found a big leather chair in the lobby, facing a window,
and he put the overshoes and the puppy biscuit on the floor beside it. He picked up an
old copy of Liberty and sank down into the chair. "Can Germany Conquer the World
Through the Air?" Walter Mitty looked at the pictures of bombing planes and of
ruined streets.
. . . "The cannonading has got the wind up in young Raleigh, sir," said the sergeant.
Captain Mitty looked up at him through tousled hair. "Get him to bed," he said
wearily. "With the others. I'll fly alone." "But you can't, sir," said the sergeant
anxiously. "It takes two men to handle that bomber and the Archies are pounding hell
out of the air. Von Richtman's circus is between here and Saulier." "Somebody's got
to get that ammunition dump," said Mitty. "I'm going over. Spot of brandy?" He
poured a drink for the sergeant and one for himself. War thundered and whined
around the dugout and battered at the door. There was a rending of wood and splinters
flew through the room. "A bit of a near thing," said Captain Mitty carelessly. "The
box barrage is closing in," said the sergeant. "We only live once, Sergeant," said
Mitty with his faint, fleeting smile. "Or do we?" He poured another brandy and tossed
it off. "I never see a man could hold his brandy like you, sir," said the sergeant.
"Begging your pardon, sir." Captain Mitty stood up and strapped on his huge Webley-
Vickers automatic. "It's forty kilometers through hell, sir," said the sergeant. Mitty
finished one last brandy. "After all," he said softly, "what isn't?" The pounding of the
cannon increased; there was the rat-tat-tatting of machine guns, and from somewhere
came the menacing pocketa-pocketa-pocketa of the new flame-throwers. Walter Mitty
walked to the door of the dugout humming "Apres de Ma Blonde." He turned and
waved to the sergeant. "Cheerio!" he said. . .
Something struck his shoulder. "I've been looking all over this hotel for you," said
Mrs. Mitty. "Why do you have to hide in this old chair? How did you expect me to
find you?" "Things close in," said Walter Mitty vaguely. "What?" Mrs. Mitty said.
"Did you get the what's-its-name? The puppy biscuit? What's in that box?"
"Overshoes," said Mitty. "Couldn't you have put them on in the store?" "I was
thinking," said Walter Mitty. "Does it ever occur to you that I am sometimes
thinking?" She looked at him. "I'm going to take your temperature when I get you
home," she said.
They went out through the revolving doors that made a faintly derisive whistling
sound when you pushed them. It was two blocks to the parking lot. At the drugstore
on the corner she said, "Wait here for me. I forgot something. I won't be a minute."
She was more than a minute. Walter Mitty lighted a cigarette. It began to rain, rain
with sleet in it. He stood up against the wall of the drugstore, smoking . . . He put his
shoulders back and his heels together. "To hell with the handkerchief," said Walter
Mitty scornfully. He took one last drag on his cigarette and snapped it away. Then,
with that faint, fleeting smile playing about his lips, he faced the firing squad; erect
and motionless, proud and disdainful, Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the
last.
