The Long Take Page 14

  Then who walks in but Janie from Salaries, y’know? –

  tight sweaters and big maracas – and I goes:

  “Hey, baby, you look fine . . .”

  And she’s just there, hands on hips, staring daggers.

  “C’mon, doll, what say you an’ me blow? Know what I mean?”

  She’s getting in a wax now, starts mouthing off.

  I make to leave and she really flips, tearing into me:

  “You got some nerve: standing me up last time,

  turning up sauced the week before that. My birthday too.

  And now I hear you were seen out in O’Riley’s on Main

  with that floozy from Sales – Irene Kirchner, for Pete’s sake.

  That’s it. You and me are all washed up, see? Kaput.”

  I get myself slapped an’ everything. Twice.

  The gangsters in the corner, they’re cracking up at this,

  just pissing their pants and calling out stuff.

  But I’ve just seen a black-and-white pull up outside, you know,

  so I go over and I’m calling them chuckleheads, morons, dumbfucks,

  then make a break for it – these things, it’s all in the timing

  cause they’re scrambling over themselves and piling after me,

  this gorilla with a blackjack, couple of bozos slipping on the knucks –

  and I open the door onto 6th and say, sweet as you like:

  “Evening, officers.”

  And they look at me, then look at the goon squad,

  and they’re pushing past,

  pulling out their shills and laying into them.’

  Rennert closed his eyes and smiled. ‘That was a riot, I tell you.

  One for the book.’

  *

  Kiss Me Deadly was what it was called, the one being shot that time

  round back of the Sunshine, and the director –

  the fat guy with glasses – was Aldrich, Robert Aldrich.

  It wasn’t just the locations he recognized, this was a movie

  about now – that lethal combination of curiosity and greed.

  ‘First you find a little thread,’ the girl says.

  ‘The little thread leads you to a string.

  And the string leads you to a rope.

  And from the rope you hang by the neck.’

  The reviews said the lead-lined ‘whatsit’ they were all chasing

  was the Bomb, but he thought it was all about desire:

  those desires that will kill or cure us; insatiable, jealous children

  fighting over Pandora’s jack-in-the-box.

  When we want everything and give back nothing

  the otherworld will be unlocked, and our whole world taken away.

  *

  He hadn’t seen Billy in months, so he went down the East Side;

  found him on 5th and Pedro.

  He was standing with the one they called Glassface:

  half his head disfigured

  with a tight, marbled burn,

  like his face had melted

  all down one side, then frozen.

  He’d seen it happen in France, tank guys on fire,

  but this was how it looked if you lived.

  ‘Name’s Frank,’ he said, in a whispery voice,

  eyes slightly jumpy.

  ‘Walker. You in the war, right?’

  ‘3rd Armored. The Falaise Pocket.’

  ‘You got caught in a tank, eh?’

  ‘I got caught by the 12th SS, Hitlerjugend.

  They did this with a trench lighter, trying to get me to talk.’

  Billy was standing over him with a cup of water.

  ‘You okay? It was like you passed out . . .’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, sorry.’ He looked around, but Frank had gone.

  ‘Rough story, that – I don’t blame you.’

  ‘No. That’s not it,’ he was up on one elbow,

  ‘They were the ones, Billy, the ones that killed my friends,

  other North Novas, boys from C Company,

  prisoners they just shot in the head,

  or bayoneted, or dragged into the street to be run over by tanks.

  I saw some of it, managed to get away, heard the rest after.

  I got one of them.’ He stood up, brushed himself down.

  ‘Gotta go. I’m sorry, Billy. Now you know.’

  *

  The Fourth of July. Gun salutes, fireworks. Red, white and blue.

  *

  Everything in the world opened up behind us. Ships firing a hundred-odd rockets at a time. Woosh! Woosh! Woosh! Woosh! streaming toward the shore, which was on fire. Each flight of rockets sounding like a great sheet being torn apart. Cruisers firing over the destroyers, battleships firing over the cruisers and destroyers and the rocket-ships – all the noise in the world.

  I remember looking around thinking: thinking about that hole in the water that’s waiting for me.

  Checked my rifle again; felt for my watch, compass, grenade, all waterproofed tight in knotted rubbers. We knew the 8th Brigade would already be there on the beach, and we were the next wave behind them following through. The German planes came over and the bullets were raking the hull like hail on a tin roof and we took a hit and the boxes in back of the LST broke open, and out came a spill of white wooden crosses. Grim laughs about that from the boys: how the top brass planned for everything.

  I’d always wanted to see France, but not like this. Not this way.

  And then, through the smoke, the beach ahead like a sudden city.

  *

  In the midday heat, City Hall looked like itself

  reflected in water, glimmering a little

  in the waves rising off the asphalt.

  A block ahead, the road’s flame wobbled into a man, walking,

  feet sinking into the black, wading through a puddle of sunlight.

  Ninety degrees.

  The arches of the Hill Street Tunnel have gone,

  along with the hill where he saw Criss Cross doubling

  and shimmering onto film. Through the emptiness,

  the shapes of men waver in the heat, trembling flames that slide,

  slow and quivering, long into their own dark pools.

  A hundred degrees.

  *

  An LBV, and the sea around it, ablaze with a fuel fire. The sunk turrets of swimming tanks – the DD Shermans – like battle-green islands. On either side, wrecked boats of the 8th, capsized, blown open; bodies floating face-down in the sea, nudging each other, their hair moving in the water. Men halfway up the beach in peculiar, broken-doll positions. The tide coming in on a soldier impaled on a German tripod, his guts stringing out around him like a kilt. Others hung on the wire where the weight of their waterlogged packs had dragged and held them close down into the sand. All these men: waiting so long, to die so fast.

  *

  The news on the wire, from Mississippi:

  a boy kidnapped from his uncle’s house,

  beaten and tortured and shot in the head, then

  dropped from a bridge, with a seventy-pound piece of metal

  tied to his neck with a barbed-wire collar,

  into the Tallahatchie River.

  Emmett Till, fourteen years old, black.

  *

  Coming ashore and soldiers in front of me were just slumping down like they needed a rest. Abrupt trees of smoke and fire. Wounds in the marram, wounds in the sand. The corporal at my shoulder ran forward, fell, got up, ran forward and dropped dead – just like a rabbit. We tried to keep moving, tried not to look at the kids strung up on the lines.

  *

  Sherwood had picked up something on the LAPD channel,


  so he swung the Studebaker across town onto South Central,

  way down to 17th, right under the Santa Monica Freeway, the 10,

  just empty lots and nothing.

  Nothing but a traffic cop pulled in and looking ashen.

  They went past him,

  under the drumming roar of the freeway and saw it, as if they’d

  turned a corner and found a whipping-post, still wet.

  The head looked strange – with a flap gaping in the side

  like pants with the fly open –

  and it was way too big for the body, which seemed flattened.

  You couldn’t even tell what color he was. If it even was a man.

  They’d beaten the blood out of him.

  Rennert said he looked like a sock.

  *

  Arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up

  her seat on the bus for a white passenger –

  Rosa Parks was the news in December. ‘I thought of Emmett Till,’

  she said, ‘And I just couldn’t go back.’

  *

  With high tide and the mass of men and equipment, the Nan White beach had shrunk to twenty-five yards. All I recognized from the aerial photographs was the big half-timbered Norman house, all shot to hell. Taken by the Queen’s Own and the Fort Garry Horse a few hours before, the beach was a clearing station now for what was left of them: their wounded on one side, most with that red ‘M’ on their foreheads, for morphine. Farther off, under blankets, the dead stretched out in lines.

  *

  Every time he went down the East Side there were more:

  Ten blocks of makeshift shelters, tarp and plastic sheets hung

  over two-by-fours, men lined up beside them, backs to the walls.

  *

  There was a minute’s silence in the Press

  for the anniversary of Pearl Harbor.

  And there was Pike at the water-cooler, looking at his nails;

  looking at his watch.

  *

  He saw a falling star, that night, through the smog.

  He dreamt of his mother, picking him up

  as a baby and carrying him through all the years

  to lay him down here in his grave.

  *

  He met up with Red and Al when he could,

  over Christmas. They hated that time, being alone,

  so they talked about anything else,

  whether Eisenhower was well enough to run again,

  what they thought would happen to Bunker Hill,

  but mostly they talked about war.

  *

  He walked through the city on Christmas Day,

  making an inventory of loss: buildings gone,

  replaced by parking lots; the buildings scheduled, cordoned off.

  *

  Building and demolition seem to happen here within the span of a human life – so citizens can either watch their own mortal decline, or see themselves outliving their cities.

  This is why I miss the island. Nature. We love nature because it dies, and then comes back to life. A resurrection we can believe in.

  December, 55

  *

  Once Hill Street’s hill was re-graded to nothing,

  north of 1st Street started falling fast.

  They were levelling two blocks between Hill and Grand

  for a courthouse;

  he could hear the demolition sometimes, inside his room,

  taste the dust.

  The heating pipes began knocking; leaves

  flitted along the floor, but it was January

  so they couldn’t be leaves,

  and were big enough to be rats, but his eyes were wrong:

  so ruined now

  he would see things, all the time.

  The palms outside were black or yellow; nothing’s green.

  The arms of the geranium, pale, almost transparent,

  stretching out to the light.

  But there’s a bird on a branch, and it’s calling.

  A bleb in the window-glass

  jumps the image

  and he sees Annie walking up the 3rd Street steps,

  but it’s just some other woman.

  The bird has gone from the branch

  but he reconstructs it from its after-image,

  what he remembers of its song.

  *

  Naked soldiers dead on the beach, clothes blown off by an anti-tank mine. I was staring at their crew-cuts washed flat by each wave, then the hairs springing back up. As if they were still alive.

  *

  There was one other person in the laundromat that evening

  and this man was just gazing, straight ahead

  at the wall of machines.

  Then he leant forward,

  and pointed at the turning clothes, then sniggered to himself

  and sat back.

  A few minutes later he pulled his chair over, his hands out,

  touching the glass of the hot porthole in avid wonder,

  watching the moving colors like it’s the first television,

  breathing, ‘Look! Look!’

  *

  One of the tanks off east to Red beach was in flames, then exploded, and a blown-off hatch-door was suddenly bowling along the sand toward us like a hoop.

  *

  He was getting his paper from Red when he saw her,

  looking twenty years older,

  holding on to the Lucky Strike sign like the rail of a roller-coaster.

  They helped her to a seat inside the drugstore,

  and Mr Mellon gave her a pill with some water.

  ‘She’s not sick,’ he said later, ‘She’s homeless.

  The CRA just cordoned her street.’

  Somebody was ranting on the corner by the Lovejoy:

  ‘Set the trumpet to thy mouth. He shall come as an eagle

  against the house of the Lord.’ He paused to mop his face,

  eyes fixed: ‘Set the trumpet to thy mouth!

  Pour out your wrath upon them like water.’

  *

  ‘Get off the beach!’ the Beach Master kept shouting through his loudhailer: ‘Keep between the white tapes! Get off my fucking beach!’

  On the narrow streets of Bernières, above the landings, there was a crush of tanks, vehicles, bicycles, lines of impatient men, usually stuck behind something broken-down. The weird half-tanks: the Priests, the Crabs and Crocodiles. The locals coming out to greet us with flowers, kisses, calvados. The Glengarries and the Highland Light alongside us, all of us keeping it tight in our squads and platoons. I’d never been with so many people shuffling forward. Bedlam. I hadn’t seen the New York subway at rush-hour then, but it was the same.

  We got free of it and started moving south to the assembly point at Bény-sur-Mer, clearing as we went. A Fort Garry Sherman took out a pillbox with a shell going straight through the slit. We all cheered. When we got there, there was nothing left but blood and mince. The solid shot had just ricocheted inside, round and round.

  *

  On 4th and Spring, he saw what remained of the Hotel Angelus

  and the Bank of Italy next door. The hotel’s whole front side

  had come away, so it was like looking into a doll’s house,

  seven stories high. The wrecking ball was sinking into the brick

  and opening up a room at a time, their intimacies exposed.

  He could see an ornate roll-top bath, held – rocking

  on an edge by its pipework,

  a flight of stairs going nowhere, a door

  swinging over a sheer drop.

  They had hoses playing on the wreckage to ke
ep down the dust

  but the air was thick with it,

  from the hidden spaces behind walls and ceilings.

  He could see part of the basement

  under the shattered floor of the great reception hall,

  as if a secret panel had been slid aside, revealing

  the long white maple lanes of a bowling alley.

  *

  The sights we saw: cattle lying dead and bloated in the fields, legs in the air; a Panzer tank, brewed up inside, crew done like a Sunday roast; the white horse that suddenly appeared, bolting along the lane, eyes swiveling in panic.

  *

  Doors open. Crabapple, ceanothus, flowering apricot on the way

  through the streets of the Hill, downtown to sit on benches

  around the edge of Pershing Square, admiring the new fountains,

  reading, talking, in this huge waiting-room,

  moving round its clock-face with the sun.

  *

  The land is closed: by snow all winter, then by the summer trees. We are hidden from sight all year by white or green. The river – coined with light, intricate with the nymphs of the mayfly – is a bed of coiled silver, springs and movements, an escapement of minnows on the face of the water; the long shadows of trout lying like clock-hands under the stones.

  *

  Pike’s ambition was pulling at him like a spring,

  winding him in and – with a click – letting him go.

  He was really something: a success, always;

  anything less was someone else’s fault.

  On top of it all, right at the top. The top of his game.

  *

  I remembered the red knot, on their way north in May, how the whole flock pivots and banks, a coin in the air, like a crowd of people turning to look up, brown heads lifting to white.

  *

  The blade-sign reading MASON – HOME OF MEXICAN FILMS

  was being levered off the brick, but this was once

  the Mason Opera House, where Isadora Duncan danced

  in front of fifteen hundred, according to the old guy watching,

  and Sarah Bernhardt played – what? – forty, fifty years ago.

  As the sign came free of the wall and fell

  he turned, and walked away.

  *

  Aiming for the airport, Carpiquet, we’d cleared Villons, moving south – riding in carriers behind the Stuart tanks. We captured Buron before noon, then moved on Authie, half a mile away. Then it all turned. We took casualties under heavy mortar and machine-gun fire. I was standing in a group of five men and everyone but me was ripped to shit. Rounds whining off concrete with a puff of dust: bullets smacked against walls, plugging thickly into the mud; the thump of shells; a run of slates slithering down; the snicker of rifles.