The Long Take Page 15
*
The side of a building fell like a tree.
Then the rest of it just collapsed
in on itself, immediately lost
in a dense cloud of brick-dust;
the delay of the noise and shock-waves.
There was an army there, pulling down everything north of 1st.
Behind the wreckers, the power shovels and clamshell-bucket cranes
were lot-grading to street level;
dump-trucks in convoys, shifting all the earth.
*
We sheltered in a half-ruined house for a few hours, to get chow and some shut-eye. Upstairs, we found a perfect closed room of Murano glass, vitrines of painted miniatures, tiny gold icons. Looking out the window to the courtyard below there was a small girl lying in the shape of a star, in the center of a pool of russet.
Then the Germans found our position there in the southwest of the town, and hit us with 88s and mortar fire. The sound of mortars like gravel on a metal slide; a running tear. Right next to me, young Benjamin took some shrapnel in the throat: his windpipe torn open, so he’s gargling blood and staring at me, fumbling at his neck like he feels his napkin is slipping.
*
The scrape and whine of metal on stone. The drumfire of falling buildings.
*
Things went wrong quickly. We couldn’t seem to get any artillery back-up, and the few Sherbrooke tanks we saw arriving got nailed by 88s. Seemed we’d pushed too deep and got ourselves flanked, so Captain Fraser was told to dig in on high ground in an orchard above Authie. We had three Brownings stripped from Shermans; one remaining tank. We could see the Germans in Franqueville waiting to attack. But they could see us too, or somebody could, and soon enough we had their big guns coming down on our position. We’d dug slit trenches, gun emplacements in under the trees, but there was nowhere to go when the 88s hit: percussive shock-waves like punches, the thunder-shocks under the boots, and we were digging with our helmets, our hands, trying to make holes for our soft, unsafe bodies. The ground up ahead rose heavily, like a wave, and broke on us in dirt and stones.
*
The rubble chutes were constant thunder: from the top stories to the dump trucks, from Hill on up to Grand. Façades of buildings breaking off, snapping like the icing on a cake. The whole thing watched with interest by men looking down from behind the barriers on Bunker Hill Avenue, like it was a newsreel.
*
A soldier walking behind our line, like a sleepwalker, a fence-paling gone right through his chest.
There was a huge hit to the left of my trench; the shock-waves knocked me over on my back and I took all the stones and mud before something the weight of an ammunition pouch landed square on my gut. I couldn’t see through the smoke, but when I reached down I found I was holding something warm and familiar: a human hand.
*
Cranes with caterpillar tracks shuddering over the rubble, pulling down the world.
*
You could see the Panzer Mk IVs coming on with their 75mm guns, and these – we knew – were the SS, the Hitlerjugend. The ping of bullets now, above the shred and crump of shells. Geysers of earth going up around us – brown, gray, occasionally a sudden red. The thrown helmets, wet rags of flesh, the sharp stench of liquid shit you just found with your foot. Next to me, Douglas was shot in the mouth and went down, Sergeant MacPherson was sitting, waving his hands frantically, twisting round, looking for help, mad eyes like a mother with a dead baby; his legs underneath him bent awkwardly, completely still.
Those that could walk were told to withdraw with Lieutenant Veness before the circle closed. Jimmy Millar stood up to go, then snapped shut like a knife and didn’t move again. We pulled back, leaving Captain Fraser and a handful of men. I felt something tug at my shoulder, and the wetness.
*
The lake darkens, and the surface breaks once, to the pull and cheep of an otter reaching shore, and twilight deepens, erasing every tree; then only the birds remain, the long mournful wail of the loons calling to each other, all through the blue of the night.
*
Red told him Dr Green had died.
That he’d been the doctor of Bunker Hill for nearly thirty years,
would only take what you could afford;
paying it himself if he had to.
‘What will Elizabeth do now?’ he said. ‘What will any of us do?’
The Holy Joe across the street is scratching his head, expressionless,
swinging round and pointing:
‘Set the trumpet to thy mouth! The king is cut off.
The king is cut off, as the foam upon the water.’
*
This time Billy wasn’t wearing a Santa Claus hat,
but a leather flying helmet and a necklace of dog tags.
He looked done in.
He raised a hand in what seemed like a greeting
but it was to touch his face lightly,
and he saw then that the hand held something, a tiny penknife,
that he’d drawn it
slight above an eyebrow
making a line of small red beads.
‘Keeps me awake,’ he said.
This close, he could see now
his face was cross-hatched like a wood-engraving.
Billy reached out
and he felt a brush on his cheek
then the smart.
*
My shoulder wasn’t too bad once I patched it up, but I’d got separated from the rest. Thought I’d try to make it back to the house in town with the glass and the icons, the girl in the pool of blood. The streets were full of the dead, and sounds of men running, so I pushed through the first ruined door I found, and climbed what remained of the stairs to the top. Half the roof had gone, but I could see out from three sides, including what looked like the main square, out front – almost empty, with just a handful of civilians getting field-dressed by a medic.
*
Spooked by seeing Billy like that, with all those fucking tags,
he took the Red Car to Venice, to the city’s rim,
the city dying all the way to the sea.
He walked through Windward Avenue, deserted in January
except for rough sleepers and junkies,
through the oil derricks and pumpjacks
and along the canals with their shopping carts, gondolas and trash.
And on, through a thin rain, down to the beach, looking south
to the treatment plants at Marina del Rey:
black cylindrical tanks and sewer-pipes,
working overtime to fill the sea with Kotex,
straggling there like jellyfish,
or glazing the beaches with condoms: all
perished now to circles, frail as honesty.
Nothing on the sand but the sweat of death.
What’s left of a humpback, forty-foot long,
one pectoral fin stretched up like a sail, its grooved runners
a grounded boat, tipped over.
*
Original cities were contained, concentrated social collectives. But Los Angeles is the opposite. Immune to everything but the limits of its host, the city expands at pace – to the edges of its territory: the mountains, its neighbors, the ocean’s verge – an infestation, a carcinoma.
January, 57
*
In the papers next morning: Bogart is dead.
*
Everything on 1st and Olive is emptied,
taped off, ready to be demolished.
Now they’re working south where the ground starts rising there,
busy on the roof of the Union League Building, 2nd & Hill,
across from Hotel Astor.
A pincer movement.
/> *
I must have slept, because I came to with a jump. A lot of shouting below at the back and there’s one of our boys with his hands up. Then the sound of two shots, and he’s down. There was a firefight out front, on the square, with the Germans blazing away at a church. I could see a Canadian stretched out, bleeding from a leg wound, his rifle ten feet away. It looked like Bill Nichol, of all people, and I was pleased to see him moving, trying to get up. I watched as an SS officer went over, picked up Bill’s rifle and stoved in his head with the butt – three, four times – then finished him off with a single round.
*
The whole block on 1st Street, west of Olive, has gone,
and they’re working the other side of the street,
east toward Olive Court and the Gladden.
*
They had numbers on the square now and there were prisoners coming in from all sides, under escort; armored cars, troop carriers, motorbikes with side-cars, and swastika flags going up on what was left of the buildings. I had my Lee–Enfield, with three magazines, a Fairbairn–Sykes fighting knife and, somewhere, a bayonet.
I tried to make out the regiments of the prisoners, and could see some Cameron Highlanders, Sherbrookes, a few Queen’s Own and Winnipeg Rifles, then a row of North Novas, it looked like. Then I spotted Tommy Davidson and John Murrayand maybe six others from C Company, in bad shape but alive, sitting under guard. Some SS men went over, real hitchy, wired-up and shouting something at the men. I saw the prisoners look at each other, slowly taking off their helmets, and then they were all jerking and slumping to the rattle of the submachine guns.
*
The four-ton wrecking ball had opened up one whole flank of the El Moro Hotel, and showed the inside walls of twenty rooms, without floors or ceilings now, each with their different wallpapers, brighter where a picture or a cupboard once had been.
*
The Hitlerjugend, laughing, dragged two of the bodies into the middle of the street – hoping for traffic – and I could hear their giggling drowned out by the rumble of tanks. After the Panzers went through, the villagers were allowed to take the bodies for burial: scraping them off the cobblestones with a shovel. Tommy Davidson, who worked on the coal in Stellarton, Nova Scotia.
*
The ball and giant claw were eating their way through the corner of Hill and 1st, and after El Moro there was the Moore Cliff Hotel – halfway up the hill – clearing the ground of places to live, in exchange for places to park.
Olive Court had disappeared. The entire 100 block on South Olive nearly gone now; just the Gladden Apartments, where Chandler once stayed, still there on the corner, empty.
*
I saw one of the dead boys, I couldn’t tell which; he’d been propped up, an old hat tilted on his head, and what looked like a cigarette packet stuffed in his mouth. Everything below his chin, bright red.
*
The Gladden was pulled down, and that was the whole block gone. A scoop shovel moved across its remains, scraping it up into trucks.
*
There’s a guy at the bar on his own:
Steve, or Sam, he said his name was.
You could tell he was big, even sitting down;
spit of Lawrence Tierney.
Blood through one eye like the twist in a marble.
This old doll at the other end of the counter, the look
of fallen masonry about her: face
a ruin of crumbling plaster, badly painted,
eyebrows halfway up her forehead, her mouth
like it’d been dug out with a knife.
Walker threw back a shot, watching
as the room started filling up.
There was a guy called Stan in the corner
with some mark and a set of cards,
running the old gypsy switch, jazzing the chump.
Some couples were in, and three babes
at the table by the door, all hair and hands, laughter.
Such girls:
you could hardly look at them, they were so bright.
Steve, or Sam, was talking to the bar-keep:
‘I’m nobody’s friend, the man with no place.’
‘Sure, bud. Same again?’
The old dame’s just staring at the bottles behind the bar,
the reflection in the mirror, lifting another gin.
The three by the door were getting louder.
One of the girls says to one of the others:
‘So he’s hitting me up for a loan. Me, without a red cent!’
‘Didn’t he just put a ten-spot down on the Rams to win?’
‘Yes!’ Her voice was going higher, her head moving up and down.
The third – blonde hair cut like a boy – isn’t listening,
she’s just turning around, all smiles.
Sam, or Steve, was pulled tight as a rubber band, getting into a beef
with a couple young punks that end of the counter:
too close for his liking.
He’s getting sore
but they’re too dumb to notice.
They’ll learn, next time,
to be cautious of someone with nothing to lose.
He’s looking straight ahead, through the bottles and the mirror:
going quiet,
like a pan about to boil.
He stood up from his stool, tossing back his whiskey, winced, and
turning to the first guy
dropped him with one punch;
smacked the other’s face onto the bar,
splitting his nose in two,
slung a dollar down and walked out the door.
The only sound was the old girl
fumbling open the clasp of her purse
and throwing up inside.
The blonde’s at his shoulder, suddenly,
with her pixie eyes. ‘Will you buy me a drink?
I’m Lily. I’m a neighbor. I live at the Hillcrest Hotel.’
*
The open cupola of the Seymour Apartments no longer looks out
over the steel frame of the courthouse.
The new concrete of the courthouse
looms over what was once the Seymour, levelled that afternoon.
*
The flush of wind on the sea, the slap of rain-squalls over MacDonald’s Cove. All the snapped trees, jackstrawed in a tangle. Then that quick sun after rain, brighting the gold of the lichen, the new ferns, the water pooling there in the rocks.
*
He walks through ruins. Stained glass, turned wood,
exquisite broken tiles. Finds, in the dust, a chest spilling open
its museum of everything that’s gone.
*
That special drawer in the dresser that Mother called the glory-hole: blunt pencils, tickets, paperclips, perished rubber bands. Milk-teeth, keys, apostle spoons, instruction manuals. Ribbons, receipts, half a school report card, a birthday-cake candle. Three playing cards, four empty envelopes, rosary beads, photographs of strangers. All fallen through the cracks to this limbo of the lost, like all those mornings believing in the tooth fairy or Santa Claus, the years wasted on hoping, the years spent spinning gold back into straw.
*
The Richelieu goes the next afternoon, and then
her beautiful neighbor, the Melrose Hotel.
The wreckers have reached 2nd Street, one block away.
*
I’d seen enough, decided to get out of there that night, clear the town and push north-east: try and reach our lines.
The SS were in festive mood, singing out on the square that was all lit up by the flames from the burning church, and the line ‘Und morgen die ganze Welt’ was shouted again and again. Slipping out the
way I’d come, I was quickly beyond Authie, through backstreets and into the fields – avoiding the Buron road and its occasional headlights, and stumbling on through a muddy darkness lit by a quartered moon. I nearly ran right into a German patrol, so dropped, fast, into what felt like a crater. There was that familiar sweet smell and then that deep and dissipating snore that I knew was a death-rattle. Something was moving, across from me in the dark. Under the brief, dead light of a magnesium flare, I saw the bodies lying there: odd parodies of human beings. Four men in khaki; three gone for sure. One fell open with a touch of my boot. I couldn’t tell with the fourth one, but I found a morphine syrette and gave him a shot. Threw some sulfa powder into the wounds in his leg. When the light came up I could see he was a North Shore and not going to last. I lit a cigarette for him, watched the smoke stream from a hole in his chest. ‘You gotta stay off the Cussy road,’ he was gasping, ‘I saw them killing prisoners, so don’t take any of them. Remember Dieppe.’ He coughed a little blood then and, as if embarrassed to be dying, covered his face and went still.
I heard the wheezing of mortars and could gauge the progress by where the smoke cauliflowered up; making out the lines of engagement now, seeing where the road was. The heat from the morning sun had woken the corpses around me, starting their soft gurgling, the occasional slow hiss.
*
Half the Hill was down with valley fever: shortness of breath,
fatigue, headaches, a rash of red bumps on the legs, night sweats.
They say the building dust was full of spores.
Cistus, pink bougainvillea, night-blooming jasmine,
white hibiscus, azaleas, daylilies, red and yellow oleander.
He walked past all the gardens he knew, just to breathe again.
*
Al had borrowed this old beat-up Pontiac for the day,
filled the back seat with bottles of water, a pack of sandwiches,
and they made their way up to Sunland
to the foothills of the San Gabriels, then on to the trailhead.
The air was already clearing
as they found the sign for Mount Lukens,
at the start of the Stone Canyon Trail.
It was hot, though, even at nine in the morning,