The Long Take Page 2
grill-marked, lined by light.
*
The papers say
‘Keep dogs and cats inside on the Fourth of July’
but nothing about ex-servicemen.
You can’t get tanked enough to block
the fireworks’ whine, their
door-burst slam, the rustling
shiver as they fail, fissling away.
So he watches the endless red, white and blue,
remembering he’s here in the States
not on Juno Beach or Bény-sur-Mer.
Star-rockets burst to their edges
with the sparse bright gold of autumn trees.
He thinks of all those rockets and their cold, thin wooden stems,
five hundred of them
falling back toward him through the night.
*
All there was in Broad Cove was the ceilidh in the church hall, once a month. Every family came. The men fingering their collars, the women patting at their hair. The whiskey and the music loosened both and, soon enough, the children – wide-eyed at the sight of this transfiguration – were led away by the very old. We would twist back to catch the last sight of the grown-ups, laughing.
Their faces in the hall grew redder, eyes brighter, as the strathspeys, slow like waltzes, gave way to hornpipes, jigs – the dances all more furious, till the last reel, and the accordion and fiddle were finally put down.
We’d stand outside in the shadows and wait. There was singing, more laughter, broken glass. Then the fights – the fat, concussive slaps of men on men and the squeals of women – and later, farther off, in under the sugar maples, the loving, which sounded much the same.
*
That time in London, on leave, with a bunch of guys from C Company.3rd Division had been together for a couple years, training all over. Battle drill in the barracks, landing drill around the coast, and up in Rothesay and Fort William we got both. We were primed by the end, especially us: the North Nova Scotia Highlanders. Ready to go.
We’d aimed for Piccadilly, of course, but the lights were all off and there was no statue: just a big green cone-shaped hoarding, advertising Saving Stamps. We wanted to go dancing, but not with those chippies on the street. Not that kind of dancing. We went through a door under a dead neon sign for Gordon’s Gin and got safe underground in a place called Ward’s: Ward’s Irish House, for Guinness and oysters at the long zinc counter. They had some old boys in a corner with fiddles and a bodhrán and it was all like home again, with the jigs and reels and slow airs. We were told about a good dancehall in Hammersmith, so we struggled up the stairs, and took ourselves west.
One of the boys said Monty had his HQ in some school round here, but we only cared about the Palais and the girls, and it was humming inside, that Saturday night, with the band playing swing tunes nice and loud – Miller, Goodman, Louis Jordan – and the girls so pretty and new.
I said I’d walk her home, but she took me down to the river, right under Hammersmith Bridge, along the embankment – just the light of the moon on the water. That’s all.
That’s all I remember.
*
Washing lines
strung between tenements:
the pennants of a black-and-white parade.
*
I think of her all the time, back on the island. Wonder what she’s doing. Keep a piece of oak that I carved at work, worked into a heart. Maybe I’ll send it to her.
Manhattan’s the place for re-invention, mobility, anonymity, where everything is possible. It’s what I came for. Every city street is a stage – every stage, a staging of desire.
July, 47
*
Manhattan’s twin, her strange, beguiling sister, Coney,
best visited at night, rising up from the sea
ablaze, calling men and women down
toward their dreams and terrors, the white fire
of electricity and light, the chance – in the plummet
of the roller-coaster, the dark-ride, the Wonder Wheel –
for them to hold each other, quickly, somewhere out of sight.
Looka! Looka! Looka! Get your tickets here!
Don’t hold back, boys and girls! The ride of your life!
Evenings still hot, but a breeze off the sea
and the smell of French fries, candy, girls’ perfume.
The lights are so beautiful, and he picks out a rhythm
in the screams and laughter, the rumble
of the rides, the metal’s screeling, through the hundred
different fairground tunes, the thousand calls and shouts,
the noise of America at play
with the crush of the Atlantic
breaking under the boardwalk,
steady and slow.
To be young, and in this world. Alive!
What’ya waiting for? C’mon, take a ride!
Only a nickel! You’ll all come out with a smile!
By day, you can see she’s made of pasteboard, held together
by nuts and bolts, metal frames – that the huge clown’s head
is chipped, the painted façades all faded, peeling.
Manhattan’s the same, just better made.
Looka! Looka! Looka! Watch the pretty lights!
See the funny mirrors! Watch the world twist
and bend and slide out of shape!
Alive! – World’s Strangest Freaks – the Smallest Grown Ups
on Earth, Tom Thumb and his Brother, Marian the Headless Girl
from London, Milo the Mule Face Boy, Zip & Pip –
Two Georgia Peaches – the Living Spider Boy,
the Human Ostrich, the Half Man Half Woman – Alive!
Step right up, ladies and gentlemen! Grab a star by the tail!
Take a trip to the moon! Looka! Looka! Looka!
*
The river sweats in its dream.
The balloon on a stick he’d bought from the blind man
has worked its way up to the ceiling.
*
We walked down the choir of the forest carrying the dried-up stalks and pods of bluebells – our summer rattles – on through the opened trees: our ceremonies of light in the green cathedrals.
*
These moons in their hundreds, pinked underneath by the beginnings of daylight, are barrage balloons towed by the boats. Seven thousand in this dawn armada. Ships and the wakes of ships. As if a giant was drawing them on strings, out from the harbor. The Channel so thick with traffic you could cross it on the backs of boats.
*
He’d sleep out on the roof, these nights,
and stare at this city
that’s too big to measure,
has too many windows to watch.
And nobody sees or cares anyway,
so nothing matters.
There’s no more room in this high city:
all human scale is lost.
*
He dreamt of a giant staircase made of sleeping-platforms, each covered in heavy bedding, each holding people too large for the space. Their feet hang in the faces of those below; their blankets spill down; there is rancor, disagreement. Then it all pulls away and we see the stair is open, without banisters, and is hundreds of feet high, going up – and down – as far as the eye can see.
*
He had to get out of this heat:
away from the stink of Fulton Market.
Get uptown at night, on the El – the fast
slatted bridge over moving light and noise,
poles and wires, poles and wires,
people, cars, all swimming underneath –
to the Street, West 52nd:
Jimmy Ryan’s, the Famous Door,<
br />
the Three Deuces, the Spotlight, the Downbeat.
This music he’d never heard: that
hit him like a two-by-four –
Lester Young, Powell and Tatum, Dizzy
and Bird, and his favorites,
Johnny Hodges, Ben Webster, and,
best of all, the Hawk.
*
At night the shadows slant and sharpen. By morning, the city has climbed higher still on its gold ledges of light.
September, 47
*
‘Up there . . .’ he gestured at the bright
jewelry of the towers,
the wasted light of penthouses and suites,
‘. . . are all the girls and all the money.
We’re down where we belong: chasing deals,
eating shadows.’
‘Times Square. Man, that’s the place!
Restaurants, clubs, women, cheap liquor. All-night fun.’
*
He remembered every bar as a battlefield
sodden with carnage,
and the blurred ghosts of drinkers,
their glasses emptying, filling, emptying;
the dirt in each corner, dreams and despair.
Winos, lined along the Roxy Grill:
their faces mottled red and white,
congested, misshapen, like someone had
set each head on fire
and put it out with a baseball bat.
People tried to straighten up at Bickford’s
where the food’s good and cheap
but the last time he went he watched a junky
pin a busboy to the table with a fork.
And the women? Try the Pokerino Palace after hours.
He was walking by two weeks ago and this doll emerged,
face sagging like a fallen hem,
asked if he wanted a hit
off her bottle, or maybe a blow-job –
gazed long at the sidewalk, opened wide
then threw out a gray wing of vomit.
*
‘Went up the Empire State!
At the top they got this thing, this observation deck.
Buddy, you oughtta look at them down there:
milling around, going nowhere,
nowhere to go, no one telling them.’
He stared harder, into the distance.
‘Ants don’t sleep, you know, they just keep moving.’
*
The falcons hunt from their high palisades, stooping on pigeons: a swift gray puff-burst.
Down at the bottom, it’s just dust-devils, butts and bottle-tops spinning round and round.
Is this place a giant turbine, endlessly turning, or just a pointless revving at the lights?
October, 47
*
‘Whiskey.’
‘Y’wan’ a bourbon? It’s on special deal.’
‘Nah – too sweet. Gimme a rye. Double.’
‘Where ya from anyhow?’
‘Cape Breton.’
‘Huh?’
‘It’s in Canada.’
‘You drink rye in Canada?’
‘Yep. Goes good with the seal-liver and the blubber.’
*
In the church hall, slow-dancing with Annie at the Harvest Ball, my dishonor stiff between us like a sword. The stars, when we walked outside. The cool of her hand in mine. Those clean blue eyes.
*
The fear of corridors, elevators, attics, cellars,
windows, doors. Staircases, most of all.
Wading through shadows, black pools,
then a long wedge of light
swinging open at an angle like a curtain
slashed by a knife. The floor tips
and drops away, and the door closes. Ink dark.
White rods slide out of the wall, razor-edged
by shadow, beginning to splay
and take in everything, then
snapping shut. Light locked
in a dark room. This whole city is a trap.
*
‘You one of them Reds? One of them infil-traitors?
Sitting there with your book, listening in.’
Walker looked up from his seat in the corner.
‘Yeah. I’m talking to you, Mac. You a Commie?’
‘Hey, give the guy a break. He’s a regular.’
‘What’s he reading, anyway? Look – I told ya!
Red Harvest, it’s called! That proves it.’
‘Leave it, Joe. He’s not bothering anyone.’
‘Joe?’ Walker smiled. ‘Joe Stalin?’
He caught the swinging fist and pushed it down
onto the table, onto his empty shot-glass –
watching the table fill, and Uncle Joe turn gray.
*
It was dusk. We watched the starlings mass and whirl, then drain from the sky into a single tree. Then she said my name: that living jolt at the strike when you feel the fish, switching away.
Let the sun heat her rock on the island, and let her find a better man than me.
*
The New Dock, Southampton: vessels moored to the jetty, tied to each other, seven or eight deep, stretching three miles back. You had to clamber over them to get to your own. Then guided in convoy through the minefields by green colored lights. The only sound the engines turning. I’d never seen anything as beautiful as this. The whole sea black with ships.
*
In the last splinter of sunlight allowed between the skyscrapers
an old lady is sitting with a book,
moving her chair every quarter of an hour
a little farther down the alleyway.
*
He saw the end of a bar-fight
emptying into the street.
The first plunge jarred on bone
but the second went clean through,
home to the hilt.
Red mists the wall.
The knife is a twisting fish, a bright
torrent, a key
to lift his whole side
up: open him
like a present
laid out in a sheet of blood.
*
‘You fight in the war, buddy?’
‘. . . Er . . . Yes. Yes, I fought.’
‘To save the free world, was it, pal?’
‘Something like that.’
‘The free world thank you?’
‘The French and the Dutch did, eh.’
‘Not us, though? Americans?’
‘Can’t say I’ve noticed.’
‘But then, you’re a Canuck.’
*
Sitting high above the sweep of Broad Cove, watching the sun set over Prince Edward Island, the last light catching the end of the yarrow, the leaves of the loosestrife turning red, and the seals asleep on Margaree Island, the Sea Wolf Island, north of here.
Always closer to the exit than the altar, or so my mother said. And now I have cast myself out: into the wilderness, into this city and its rapids. What enormous energy it takes, to fling yourself out of the nest.
*
The trees by the East River have things
snagged in their lowest branches: clothes,
fish-crates, ropes and sacks, bodies sometimes,
people say, trapped there by the tides, the ice.
*
It’s the wire. They’re caught deep in barbed wire, and can’t get free. Can’t get out of the water and onto the beach. They’re waving their arms and screaming but the landing craft just goes over them, the propellers just cutting them apart.
*
In the snowstorm’s gray,
white and black
the only color is the traffic light:
its green and red
hard to see there at the night’s edge.
Snow blanked the city, melting round the manholes
that plume with steam,
smoke from the engines of Hell.
*
‘That cost me fifteen hundred bucks – same as an automobile –
but it’ll earn itself back in five years.
It’s the future.’
He banged on the side of the small walnut box above the bar
and the picture shivered back into frame.
‘And I’ll tell you this for nothing. It’s the end of the movies.’
*
Ten below, and ice on the inside of the window.
Outside: the noise of dawn, another day beginning
without him. He wakes with one hand in the ashtray,
empty pockets and a buttoned head. Pigeons
riffling their feathers so loud they could be in the room.
All he’s eaten since Friday is a fifth of Green River:
‘The Whiskey Without Regrets’.
The neon sign is pulsing
and there’s something in the corner but he can’t tell what it is.
From his bed and the biscuity sheets
he hears an upstairs neighbor coughing,
smells cockroaches and poison,
sees where a rat’s made a scrimshaw of the baseboard,
trying to get out.
*
In the Old Town bar, off Union Square,
he saw this bald guy in spectacles – staring at him in the mirror –
who turned and said: ‘I don’t see enough books, these days.
Good to find a young man reading. You work the docks?’
‘How did you know?’
‘The hole in your jacket shoulder. From the hook.’
His accent was thick, German-sounding,
curious eyes looming like fish through the glass.
‘What do you do?’
‘I make pictures. Just finishing up here: Mott and Grand,
West Houston. 18th Street today.’
‘Maybe I’ve heard of you?’
He gave out something weird and foreign
with ‘mac’ at the end, and that’s who he was.
‘So, kid, you ever see Brute Force?’
‘Yeah, that Captain Munsey . . . But . . .
you mean Lancaster, right? And De Carlo?’
‘Let’s not forget the lovely Ella Raines . . . Anyway . . .
Yes, well: the two of them are back in this new one. Together.