The Long Take Read online

He went over, dropping his hat on a hook,

  hitching up both pant legs at the knees and sat down,

  shaking out a smoke:

  ‘Hey, how you doing, buddy? It’s been a year, easy . . .’

  ‘Let’s have that drink.’ Billy turned to the bar-keep.

  ‘Two ryes. Water on the side.’

  ‘I went looking for you a few times, eh, but no dice.’

  ‘Ah, well. There’s a lot to do, y’know. Lot of places to go.

  It’s only getting worse out there.

  The cops getting heavy on the street:

  rousting them, tossing their tents, moving them on,

  y’know what I mean? Strong-arm stuff. Orders from above.’

  ‘I saw Velma in the summer. She all right?’

  ‘Not so good,’ he said, looking down. ‘Not so good.

  Nobody’s in any shape, really. No way to live a life.

  You get to be an expert in all sorts down there.

  Scabies, scurvy, dermatitis, fungal infections, bacterial infections,

  Bartonella – that’s everywhere – impetigo,

  and the bad ones – trench foot, leg ulcers, gangrene.

  It’s like being back in the war, I tell ya.’

  He smiled thinly at his empty glass.

  ‘Same again,’ said Walker, tapping the counter, peeling the wrap

  off a pack of Old Golds. ‘And leave the bottle.’

  ‘You still at the Press?’

  ‘Still with them, yeah. Going up the coast for a time . . .

  San Francisco.’

  It still sounded implausible.

  ‘I’m going to write about this. Skid Row.’

  Billy stared at the table. ‘Good luck with that.’

  ‘Say, I been meaning to ask – you ever see coyotes on the streets?’

  His friend looked up.

  ‘Ah, the Tricksters. Like Reynard, Br’er Rabbit, Anansi.

  And fire-bringers, the Indians say. The coyote, and the raven.

  They steal fire and bring it to mankind.

  You better hope they stay away.’

  They went on talking; barely heard the bartender

  twisting open a new bottle –

  like the sound of a chicken’s neck, getting broken.

  ‘And they’re closing off the city with these freeways,

  saying it improves connections,

  shutting down sidewalks to enhance security.

  We’re bordered and policed by concrete.

  For what? The cult of the car.

  To enshrine the unalienable right of all Americans to drive one.

  To build our lives and cities around them.

  But it’s worse.

  They want us to glide from one enclave to another,

  from the apartment building

  to the office block in the Central Business District

  with barely a nod to the security guard.

  We’re back to circling the wagons.

  This is our fear of ‘the other’

  – Indians, blacks, Mexicans, Communists, Muslims, whatever –

  America has to have its monsters,

  so we can zone them, segregate them,

  if possible, shoot them.

  They call this patriotism, Nativism,

  but it’s racialism, pure and simple. And paranoia.

  Now that America’s gone abroad, to fight a war – two wars –

  we’re frightened, frightened that foreigners

  might come over here and do the same to us.’

  He stopped then, and there was a grim smile.

  ‘Bugsy Siegel, Police Chief William Parker, Mickey Cohen,

  Richard Nixon, Jack Dragna, Senator Joseph McCarthy . . .

  Jesus. Christ. Almighty.’

  He looked up at the ceiling.

  Laughed out loud:

  ‘It’s like someone shook the map of America

  and all the crap that wasn’t bolted down

  ended up here, in Los Angeles.’

  He stopped again, and his eyes shifted.

  ‘I don’t know if it’s three years, five years, ten,

  but I’m telling you, friend, this city’s getting ready to blow.’

  *

  That night, in buying stuff at Budget Basket, there was a tremor:

  shoppers down on their hands and knees in the middle of the aisle,

  looking up at the shelves, shaking,

  cans rattling, all by themselves,

  beer bottles, rolling backward and forward on the floor.

  *

  That night he heard a door open, and footsteps on the tiles around the pool, and the clink of ice in a glass on the table next to him.

  But there was no drink, no pool, no door, and no outside, no other’s footsteps than his own as he crossed the room to check it was a dream.

  The night was black through the window. On the dead rails of Angels Flight: the coyote’s eyes were lit like miners’ lamps.

  1951

  A dream of wild-fires, earthquake, tidal waves.

  He wakes and opens his eyes.

  The city is there, stretching to the white horizon.

  He blinks, and the city is gone.

  *

  Daybreak on the 101: mountains on the right,

  the Catalinas far behind, and the Channel Islands – Santa Cruz

  and Santa Rosa – gleaming like flakes of coal in the new sun.

  As the highway straightened north, away from the ocean,

  the view thinned down

  to chicken-dinner shacks, roadhouses, motels,

  the oil fields of Santa Maria.

  The colossal woman in the seat across

  watches her daughter

  running up and down the aisle of the bus –

  glares narrowly at her

  over a root beer and a giant sack of funnel cake.

  Snapping, at last: ‘SPATULA!’ she blares.

  ‘I got two words for you. Be-have.’

  After four hours of this,

  when he finally saw the ocean again at Pismo Beach,

  he knew he’d had enough:

  when they pulled in for a rest-stop at San Luis Obispo

  he took his bag and got out,

  made his way to the turn for Highway 1.

  *

  ‘Don’t normally pick up hitch-hikers, but you’re a soldier, right?’

  He was looking at the duffle bag.

  ‘I was, yeah. How far you heading?’

  ‘Frisco.’

  ‘Same here, eh. Thanks.’

  The coastal fog like battle-smoke, but burning off

  as they drove north, through the morning,

  ocean on one side

  and the black slopes of the canyons on the other, showered

  with the arrow-falls of pale white pampas grass.

  ‘Name’s Ed. Ed Newell.’

  ‘Walker.’

  ‘I need to take a break. Get some coffee.’

  They pulled in at a rest-stop with a beat-up shack

  and the ocean below, and a steep path to the beach.

  The fog had cleared from the heads of the redwoods

  and he could see enormous birds

  hanging in the thermals above the trees.

  ‘Condors,’ Ed told him, ‘Ten-foot wingspan.

  And look. You ever seen the Statue of Liberty?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Ed nodded to the redwoods: ‘Them trees grow taller.’

  They took their sandwiches and coffee down;

  sat on the rocks by the sea.

  The beach was strewn with huge green
cables of kelp

  alive with beach hoppers, rove beetles, roly-polies

  – what they called slaters back home.

  Beyond that, an outcrop of boulders that suddenly shifted

  and there was a snuffling, snoring sound

  as a great stone rose up on the back of another

  with a grunt and a low growling. A roar.

  When you made out one, you saw them all:

  beasts the size of automobiles – elephant seals.

  ‘They’re molting, look.’

  Walker saw that their fur was trailing in ribbons

  like the torn clothes of the men out on the street.

  ‘I’ve seen a lot of seals,’ he said, ‘But nothing like this.

  They must be twenty feet long.’

  ‘I do this trip every week,’ Ed said.

  ‘Always try to stop on this headland.

  Last time I saw sea-otters out there,’ he said, grinning,

  ‘lying on their backs eating abalone.’

  ‘What line of business you in?’

  ‘Oh, y’know. Sales. But I like looking at things, y’see?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Walker smiled. ‘I see.’

  Half an hour down the road, around Point Sur,

  he pulled in hard to the shoulder, and threw open his door.

  ‘Blue whales!’ he shouted, ‘A pair of them . . .’

  They just stood there, then, at the cliff-edge,

  staring so hard their eyes teared up.

  Standing together, wiping their eyes and laughing.

  *

  The smell of the sea; the larks rising in the wind over Dunvegan, tiny banners broken open. The sound of the stream’s fast-running water, on through the high wood. Her soft eyes, her mouth. Those days under the lenient trees, as I lay in the shielings with Annie MacLeod.

  *

  ‘Hey, Walker.’

  ‘Hmn?’

  ‘It’s Monterey. You want to get some proper food?’

  He parked the Mercury right by the harbor,

  and they walked down to the wharf and its forest of masts.

  The nets were out drying, getting mended,

  the decks hosed down, some men already taking a drink.

  There were a few places open, though it was barely six.

  ‘This one’s on me, by the way,’ said Walker,

  seeing a place on the corner, Tarantino’s Seafood.

  ‘How about here?’

  ‘Nah. There’s a real one farther down. Authentic.’

  The Liberty looked the same as all the others:

  checked table-cloths faded by the sun, tin ashtrays, battered chairs.

  They had a plate of oysters, grilled sardines,

  clam chowder in sourdough bowls.

  ‘How’s that?’ said Ed, wiping his mouth.

  ‘Tastes like home.’

  ‘What time you got?’

  ‘Twenty of seven.’

  ‘We better get on the road. Keep the light.’

  *

  They hit the city by nine, with the neon coming on.

  ‘This is Union Square,’ he said, ‘and here’s my hotel.’

  It was like the Biltmore, only smaller, and just one doorman.

  ‘Welcome to the St Francis, sir.’

  ‘Sorry I can’t take you on, Walker. I’m pretty bushed.

  It’s North Beach, right? You can get a cab here.’

  ‘Nah, I’ll walk. Thanks, eh – thanks for everything.’

  ‘No problem. Two blocks that way, then left on Grant.

  Keep walking till you reach the top. Adios!’

  He had an address from Overholt, some alley off Grant,

  above Union, it said, so he started north in a straight line

  through a Chinatown that seemed familiar,

  feeling the land rise under his feet and the air clearing

  till he felt himself climbing, like he was

  on the 3rd Street steps again,

  rising above the city and its lights.

  He recognized the white tower, lit up above him

  on the top of the hill, then gone from sight,

  and next thing he was there, at the right address:

  ringing the doorbell, and the house super giving him his key

  and pointing: ‘Top of the stairs.’

  The room was small – a Murphy bed, a table and a chair –

  but the view made up for it:

  the last red stains of sunset and the bright, rolling lights

  of the city streets like a fairground underneath.

  He pulled out the pint he’d been saving

  and raised it to the window: ‘To San Francisco,’

  he heard himself say: putting the bottle’s

  open mouth to his, and drinking.

  *

  I turned to her in the night, again and again, in some dream, stiffening against her, shined her through and through.

  Lying there afterwards, completed, emptied out, staring at the ceiling hand in hand.

  Her clear blue eyes.

  *

  He found himself misplaced in his bed all night, mislaid.

  His watch said morning, but the window’s light was milky,

  like gauze on the lens,

  and there was nothing to see but fog,

  the occasional rooftop, tree or church spire

  dipping in and out of sight.

  He took a shower, dressed, looked again.

  There was a hole in the weather

  he watched the sun smoke through.

  He was near the top of Telegraph Hill, so he climbed Coit Tower,

  saw the last scarves of fog still caught in the valleys,

  in the deep slots of narrow streets, in the ficus trees,

  and the city was slowly unwrapping itself

  in its gray and gold, with its bridges – lit, dazzling, high-

  wired across the blue panoply of the bay

  and its yachts, the far headlands, the scuttled ship of Alcatraz.

  It was like living in a dune of Bunker Hills,

  with proper weather and a better view;

  the switchback streets like the rides on Coney Island,

  the bay as bright as the Gulf of St Lawrence.

  *

  A postcard of the Golden Gate Bridge, to Annie MacLeod, Dunvegan, Inverness County, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada

  Dear Annie, I told you I would reach the other side and here I am! Not much to report. I have a good job on a newspaper in Los Angeles and they’ve sent me up here for a spell. Weather changeable – just like home, which is good! But much warmer: 70˚! I should have written before, but it’s all been so new. Such a change. I hope you are well, and keeping up with your piano lessons. I think of you often, mostly of the times by Lake Ainslie or up in the meadows that summer, before all this. Before the war. We were so happy. I want to be happy again.

  Please give my regards to your mother and father.

  July, 51

  *

  He walked it, easy, those first weeks: the produce market

  down at Washington and Davis,

  the ferries and wharfs of the Embarcadero;

  the hidden gardens of Telegraph Hill; the Presidio, the park.

  He remembered, now, how he knew that hotel in Union Square,

  Edmond O’Brien stayed there in D.O.A.,

  and why he recognized that bar in Chinatown, Li Po, because

  Orson Welles is chased past its door in The Lady from Shanghai.

  Months later, he finds Bacall’s apartment in Dark Passage,

  high on Montgomery, by the Filbert Steps,

  guarded by hawthorn and
dragon trees.

  *

  The sun wobbles in the water of the bay: lattices of light.The nets of sunlight in the water, the same nets as home.

  August, 51

  *

  He got to work. From the heights to the depths: Howard Street,

  south of Market, between 3rd and 4th,

  a few blocks away from the Chronicle.

  He found a Salvation Army troupe with tambourines

  singing in a semi-circle round a bunch of bums: men oblivious

  to everything but their jugs of wine.

  There’s deep discussion, laughing, hugging,

  then a shower of loose punches, and the Army scattering,

  some solemn gulps of wine

  then more laughs, back-slapping, fumbled rolling of cigarettes.

  Everyone wanted to be somewhere else:

  the Chicago Café, the New York Hotel, the Mars Hotel.

  They panhandled from 3rd to 6th, Tehama to Minna,

  bought their booze at Pete’s Place – 40¢ a jug –

  slept it off in a cot in a flophouse for pretty much the same.

  There was a guy on his own, in his forties maybe:

  no socks; cuffs and collar black with grime, hands

  empty and shaking; famished eyes.

  On his lapel, a Silver Star.

  ‘How you doing, buddy?’

  ‘Could use a little lush.’

  ‘You serve in the war?’

  ‘Yeah. Fought all over, then came back to nothing.

  My girl gone. Job gone. Got played for a chump.’

  He poured the last three fingers from a fifth of white port.

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘I dunno. What year is it?’ He gave a flat laugh. ‘Who cares.

  I was born in ’20.’

  ‘Same year as me, friend.’

  He lowered his eyes like an animal does, losing the fight.

  Walker closed two dollars in the soldier’s hand, shook it and left.

  *

  He learned the city was a place of pockets.

  The Row was small and barely spilled; two blocks either side

  and you wouldn’t even know it was there.

  It was the same with the weather. Constantly changing

  but always local. You went east round a hill

  and it rose ten degrees.

  The west had a different climate, kept its haar, its sea mists –

  it was where the winds came from.

  He took a streetcar to Point Lobos

  to see it, the edge of the ocean, Cliff House,

  looking out over Seal Rocks, the fog

  rolling in like smoke.