The Long Take Page 16

  and the climb was stony and hard, so they found excuses to stop.

  ‘This is nothing like the high ground I’m used to.’

  Al knew these mountains, had walked them for years:

  ‘I guess this is pretty different.

  We’re, what, fifteen hundred miles south?

  Mostly chaparral up here in the Gabriels, the whole region,

  it’s all that survives the heat and the wildfires:

  yucca, manzanita, ceanothus, chamise,

  deerweed, scrub oak, sagebrush, yerba santa.

  The only big trees we’ll see are Californian live oaks, Douglas firs.

  Now, if you can find any soil in among all those rocks,

  feel what it’s like.’

  He bent and picked up a handful and it was a powder,

  dry as crushed leaves.

  ‘That’s why these mountains burn. That’s the fuse.’

  They got to the top of Mount Lukens around noon,

  Los Angeles stretched below in its heavy haze.

  Al shaded his eyes from the sun:

  ‘You can see why the Indians called this “The Land of Smoke” –

  looks like it’s already on fire.’

  Walker had seen things like this before: battlefields, cities destroyed.

  There was the glinting twist of the river-bed, City Hall of course,

  and then south to the port, and Catalina Island;

  he could make out the top of Bunker Hill,

  Chavez Ravine maybe, that was all.

  Soon it would just be the dead river and City Hall.

  ‘No Indians now, eh,’ he muttered, ‘Except on Skid Row.’

  He was hot from the climb, but felt

  he could breathe now, in the free air,

  up above it all, and see more clearly: the city

  tied up below in its meshwork of highways and roads.

  They had lunch in the shade of some boulders.

  ‘You see these mountains around us?

  They’re sitting on fault lines that’ve been shifting

  and slipping for centuries, grinding them up.

  Under this mantle of chaparral and scrub

  the rock’s already shattered:

  it’s like gravel in a paper bag.

  When the chaparral burns in the fire season

  all these mountains will be ready to go.

  The debris flow will be unbelievable: like glaciers calving.

  If we get a real earthquake, the Big One,

  with the Santa Ana fire-winds blowing:

  that, my friend, will be it.

  The city’ll burn, right back down to the sand.’

  *

  From the trench I was in, it sounded like the rush and splash of water over rocks, but it was the crush of flames, raging, snapping at old wood and the grenier was collapsing with a last parched roar, and the rippling spray of sparks and smoke. A red river, pouring itself out into a gray hearth.

  *

  The winds were in from the north-east, hot and dry;

  a yellow cast to the light.

  He felt that mood on the street, that tension, the stillness

  just before the riot.

  His sight was wrong. There was a shiver and slip

  out of the corner of his eye. The running dark.

  *

  You had to look people in the eye during combat, to check they understood an order; that they were fully engaged, committed to carrying it out.

  The same with the men who were dying: the soldier with his jaw blown half-off, trying to hold it in place.

  The men you killed. You had to look them in the eye too: see the life dimming there as they died.

  *

  The old lady on the stair where he lived

  was standing in her doorway, looking around.

  ‘Alfredo – he gone.’

  She showed him the inside of the shoebox:

  just a coin of carrot and some scat.

  Stared up, imploring: ‘Where he go? Where he go?’

  *

  I got back to our lines, having seen the disintegrating bodies in the ditches, guys hit by heavy guns, filleted by the shock. And what the SS had done on the road: lines of men with head-shots.

  I was sent east through a wood to link up with some other North Novas. There, hanging from a tree, was a German: dancing all wrong.

  *

  The treetops are swaying, but there’s no wind.

  *

  Pike was always in a movie, the cameras always rolling;

  he sweeps his hair from his eyes:

  long shot, close-up, man of the moment –

  roving reporter; editor in waiting.

  *

  Birds broke from the trees, in every direction.

  *

  ‘Yeah-yeah-yeah,’ was his machine-gun way of saying:

  Look, I know all this. I’m a busy man.

  *

  Outside on the line, a white shirt on a wire hanger begins to dance.

  *

  Pike carried a pen with him

  wherever he went – in his mouth

  or behind his nonchalant ear or

  clicking at his side as he strolled down the corridor

  – just to show he was ready,

  always, for important editing.

  *

  The wind had set a tinkling going through the telephone wires,

  but there was no wind.

  *

  The city is held in balance: always unfinished, always being demolished. If the construction and destruction ever stopped, the city would fail.

  City Hall is a black obelisk in first light, till the sun finds a purchase on the face of the stone and light peels open one side.

  A bedroom door, coming ajar.

  The rasp of a dagger being drawn.

  November, 57

  *

  He stayed in for New Year, as always,

  watching the fire through a bottle;

  walking out, after everything was done.

  Wading through shadows, now,

  the streets possessed by ghosts.

  Cities are a kind of war, he thought:

  sometimes very far away then, quickly, very close.

  The smell of smoke and cordite,

  the blackened, empty shells of rockets cooling on the stones,

  the trash of a thousand street-parties, the spent bodies. It was like

  swimming through canals of broken glass.

  A tunnel under a hill: stretching on forever to an unblinking eye,

  bright and blind.

  Then the shadows tightened and closed to lamp-black

  with that whir: the granular

  sheathing of a camera’s leaf-shutter.

  The way the dark

  looked like it was being worked at

  with multiple blades of light,

  carving out pieces of the frame to silhouettes

  of scalpel, cleaver, scythe, then

  clicked off

  and started again

  with a splash of white

  across the brick of a wall,

  a skewer, or thorn through the packed darkness

  and it’s moving down, sudden, under him

  and he can make out the light of a door opening:

  a false floor, scaffold hatch, a dead-drop

  falling away.

  *

  Red was there, in his place on the corner

  by the drugstore, 3rd and Grand.

  ‘Elizabeth Green just died.

  Y’know, Dr Green’s widow?

  Sweet lady. Very sad. They’ll pull down t
heir house, I guess,

  now they’re both gone.’

  ‘Well, it’s what Mayor Poulson talks about, isn’t it,

  one of those “little illegal hovels” attracting crime and squalor.

  And, anyway, we really need another parking lot.’

  Red took a deep breath, shook his head:

  ‘Three blocks of downtown went last year.

  They’re not stopping, y’know?

  The Hill, between Temple and 2nd; it’s all cleared now.’

  He looked north.

  ‘I guess we’re next.’

  *

  The scent of wisteria in the air, which he traced

  down Bunker Hill Avenue to number 325, the Castle.

  Must have been planted when the house was built,

  eighty years ago, this beauty: trunk like a tree now,

  the whole southern side, cascading violet-blue.

  *

  Down 3rd to Main: houses boarded up, stores

  with their windows soaped over, signs saying CLOSING OUT SALE.

  Breaks in the street where buildings had been,

  being cleared for parking lots.

  On the East Side, the beat cops were out, their authority

  swinging on their belts in leather holsters,

  whirling their night-sticks like propellers, moving in pairs

  through the desolation, the shanty town of rags and cardboard,

  shaking down dealers, beating the tar out of any trouble.

  He saw Glassface on the corner of Boyd and Los Angeles,

  rolling a smoke by the shut-down pawnbroker’s.

  ‘Hello, Frank. I’m Walker, friend of Billy’s.’

  Frank studied him for a moment. ‘Yes, I remember.’ He smiled:

  ‘We got the 12th SS in common, don’t we?’

  An old woman scuffed past, crusted sores at her mouth,

  feet in blue plastic bags.

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘I’ll level with you. Billy’s been out on the street too long.

  He’s shot to hell. Got bounced from the Panama with all his books.

  That’s bad enough, but he owes some people some money

  and they’re gonna take him for the gold in his teeth.’

  ‘Where is he? Usual place, eh?’

  ‘Nah, the cops ran him in for his own safety.

  He’s in the tank for a couple nights.

  Say, could you use a coffee?’

  ‘The 12th SS killed a whole bunch of prisoners, right? Canadians?’

  ‘180 at least, they think. Hard to tell, y’know.

  All straight after the breakout from Juno; three, four days.

  All of them prisoners of war.’

  ‘We ran into them straight after that. In Falaise.

  Reckon they were popped on bennies, y’know: antsy,

  mad eyes; some even frothing at the mouth. They never slept.’

  ‘How could they sleep? I saw some of what they did.

  Heard the rest years later. They deserve anything they got.’

  ‘I see what they did every day,’ Frank closed his eyes,

  ‘Just wish I could get even.’

  Walker looked down, as if he’d dropped something:

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘I got one of them.’

  *

  He dreamt he was back in Broad Cove, in the church hall, on ceilidh night – that, one by one, the uniformed men stepped out of the shadows: ten, twenty, a hundred, a thousand; standing there till the dark closed over everything but their held-out hands.

  *

  ‘Hello, Lily. Can I get you a drink?’

  In daylight she looked like a damaged bird

  in her little black-and-white dress;

  you could see the hunger-traces, the lines of trouble

  fret-marked on each wrist.

  You could picture her as a young girl,

  cutting out the imperfections on her arms and legs

  with a razorblade,

  so in this long sunlit Hill Street bar they flashed,

  those dull flat scars, like slubs in silk.

  ‘Sure. I’d like a gin sling please. A nice big one.’

  He thought he saw Gitana in the crowd, but she’d be in Boardner’s

  or Scandia or the Formosa by now, collecting celebrities

  in her little book: remembering everything, manipulating

  everything. Knowing nothing.

  Some guy leant over and muttered in his ear:

  ‘Don’t tangle with that broad, fella. I’m tellin’ ya.

  She’s a hot number, sure, a straight knockout,

  but she’ll do you like a .30-30.’

  ‘What did he say to you?’

  ‘Ah – don’t know. Couldn’t hear.’

  ‘He’s a sleazebag. A schmo, that guy, I tell you, a real schmo.’

  ‘Okay, okay, don’t blow a fuse!’

  ‘Feeblo . . .’

  ‘Here’s your drink, Lily.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She gave herself an anxious little hug,

  lifted her chin, then looked him in the eye, went back to talking

  in that sleepy way he liked.

  ‘I’m sorry. It’s my nerves. You’re a regular guy; a helluva guy,

  whatever your name is . . .’ She giggled, ‘A real dreamboat.’

  ‘Let’s drink to that,’ he smiled. ‘Keeping ourselves afloat.’

  *

  Under the opened trees, the night’s colander of stars, the wave reached deep into itself – shook with a rattling sound, and withdrew, leaving gifts on the long shore.

  *

  The hooked nets, the scuffles of desire.

  Ridden by lust, and then being rid of it:

  the shallow urgency, interminable regret.

  *

  Strange smooth things beached here: a pelvis of tree-root, panels of wooden fish-crates from Mallaig, Kirkwall, Bantry Bay, a lead-lined box encased in leather, glass floats in blue and green. They lay, listening there to the night waves, the slow chafe of the ocean breaking.

  *

  He thought she was asleep

  but she turned over in the bed

  and he could hear her voice,

  see her eyes, bright:

  ‘Hey . . . hey, I got this . . . you know, I got this ticking noise . . .’

  ‘Yeah, okay.’

  ‘No, really . . .’

  ‘Good night.’

  ‘. . . this ticking noise in my head . . .’

  *

  He woke suddenly and turned around, but the door of the dream had closed behind him. Scrabbling at the surface he could find no handle, no handhold, to let him back in to his childhood, to the bar at the end of the world.

  *

  No sign of Overholt at the Press

  so he handed Miss Briggs his last bulletin on the homeless,

  then went to the bar on 2nd and Spring

  to look for Sherwood and Rennert.

  Through the cigarette smoke he could see them,

  sitting in their favorite booth, and there was Pike

  who’d watched him walk in

  and had set it going – what he’d planned as a smile – playing now

  round his mouth, like a fly around a wound.

  He had his pen in one hand, and was snapping the end of it

  in and out, in and out: click, click, click.

  So he kept on walking,

  straight past the booth and out the side door.

  *

  He went to Cole’s, saw a face he knew

  through the crowd at the bar.

&nb
sp; Black curls and glancing eyes, Gitana, the Mexican,

  with her cigarette and glass as always, ready for her close-up,

  but jowled, and huge.

  A caricature of before, she looked like nothing on earth.

  Hank Quinlan in a skirt.

  There was no part of her

  you could have touched that wasn’t fat.

  Her forehead perhaps.

  He turned on his heel and left.

  Two bars without a drink.

  He stopped at the first dive where he could hear the bright tink

  of music, a gulping beat when the door swung open.

  He ducked in, under the sign:

  the neon sizzling like a nest of crickets.

  There was room at the counter, so he pulled up a stool,

  called for a rye and looked around.

  A lit box sat up on a shelf above the bar

  with black fish-shapes stalled there,

  drifting, darting sometimes, in its gray,

  which he realized, after a while,

  was a television ball-game.

  Next to it, an advertisement for Lucky Lager:

  It’s Lucky When You Live in California.

  ‘Same again.’

  He was trying to pace himself, but it wasn’t working

  and he wasn’t feeling too lucky.

  ‘Get a load of them two honeys! Some build on that blonde, ay?’

  ‘Yeah, a real dish. The brunette, though! Like my meat dark . . .’

  They were just two jerks with a load on,

  but he couldn’t stop himself; he looked over.

  Let the first one see he was looking.

  ‘What’s griping you?’ the kid says, with his chin out.

  ‘You’re crowding your luck, sonny,’

  taking out his Fairbairn–Sykes and laying it gently on one knee.

  ‘If you want to hang on to that little cock of yours

  I’d leave now, quietly, out that door.’

  A few more whiskeys and he felt his shadow catching up

  so he steadied himself to leave; saw an old man

  right in front of him doing a strange, stiff shuffle,

  shifting his weight from foot to foot,

  not knowing where to put his hands, as if he’d discovered

  the pockets of his jacket were still sewn up.

  Then he sees it’s himself, in a mirror.

  Outside, the ground slewed under him,

  yawing and dropping

  like he’d stepped down into a canoe.

  There was a blur of neon as he fell,

  headlong, into his own shadow,

  a shadow the length and breadth of him.

  The city was watching. He got up. Walked.