When he stopped, so did the footsteps,
so he couldn’t stop: he just had to keep moving.
A few lights still on.
Hall lights shining through the stained-glass windows,
each porch a tiny sunset.
Having finally found a home, a home on the side of a hill
– an acropolis on the brow of the city –
they were pulling it down.
He’s like the faded lettering on buildings, old advertisements
for things you can’t buy, that aren’t made any more:
ghost signs.
*
The coyote was watching.
Tail bushed open – held straight out.
In its eyes, the stolen fire.
*
The house-lights went up, and it was morning.
He needed to find Billy, if they’d let him out of the cooler by now,
so he threw some water on his face and started downtown.
A thick gray smog, the palm trees black
with carbon from the tunnel,
black leaves rotting on the ground: husks scattered
like small boats for the dead.
He had to finish telling Billy what he’d done, back in France.
It was eating him up. Eating him alive.
Hill, Broadway, Spring, Main, the streets almost empty;
4th, 5th, Los Angeles, Wall, the sidewalks lined with men.
*
Was this how it was?
Skid Row, 5th and Pedro,
emerging, riveled and gray,
from his tent of sacks and cardboard,
papery torso like a wasps’ nest,
a wizened man with perfect teeth,
who bares them, shadow-boxing with his little fists,
shouting, ‘I’m Billy Idaho!
I’m as strong as ever!’
*
Or had he been reading under his streetlamp? Eyes always
darting around, checking the bundled men on either side,
scanning the intersections, watching for strangers,
patrol cars, changes in the light.
*
Or bent over, tending to Velma’s impetigo or leg ulcers;
cleaning and drying the wounds of all the broken soldiers.
*
No. It was this: Billy Idaho
in his own shirt of body-lice and scabies,
back to the wall
on his board and blankets,
with his precious books
on the corner of 5th & Pedro,
when they came and set fire to him.
And he just sat there,
in his favorite place on the street,
batting at flames like they’re flies.
Ten minutes
and there was nothing left to see of him but his teeth.
‘Lanciatore says hello,’ one of them had murmured.
They came back to check
and then burned his books,
from which
large flat ashes
were lifting
up into the air.
He stood across the street
where they landed on his skin
like black butterflies.
He kept seeing those last moments
in negative, a blaze of black,
the effigy on the bonfire
sagging in the flames.
All the things in that man’s head:
the things he knew, what he’d seen in his life.
And that body: what it had gone through all these years;
what his hands had done, had learnt to do.
*
He had no idea where he was. He was just walking.
And so why was Pike there – Pike, of all people –
there on the corner, with that grin, and his Zippo, clicking away?
‘Ahhh . . . best smell in the world,’ he said, sniffing theatrically.
‘Barbecued nigger.’
*
‘You have sown the wind . . .
You have transgressed, and trespassed.’
The boy in the blue suit was repeating, soft and low,
‘. . . Transgressed and trespassed. An east wind shall come.
The wind of the Lord shall come up from the wilderness.’
*
He remembered her long fingers, cool at his neck.
Her clean, blue eyes.
*
Where has kindness gone,
and tenderness
and gentle hands
inside this fire,
among these many blades?
The boredom of childhood, out on the island,
those endless days
when nothing happened.
Now he couldn’t keep up – the years
hard-hammering shut behind him.
No one knows where I am, he thought, or what I’m doing.
‘And now,’ he said out loud to the mirror,
‘I can’t make myself reappear.’
He tried to slide the loose half back into place
but it broke off in his hand.
He’d drowned his looks.
His mind:
shot to pieces, now, but every single image still there, complete.
If only he could lose them too; if he could drain them out.
If he could only drain his eyes of all they’d seen.
*
There was a juddering, like a freight train coming through,
and the ceiling light started swinging, gently.
His eyes shivered out of focus at the pile of books, toppling.
He looked down at the water in the basin which was moving.
And then it stopped.
Smoke in the air as he walked up 3rd to the Alta Vista,
along to the Dome. He could see fires up north in the mountains:
orange chains in the dark, like the high ground north of Falaise.
His Fairbairn–Sykes resting in its sheath on his belt
as he made his way down.
Through the fog and smoke, the city below like a sudden beach
in flames: flares of neon wavering in the night’s heat,
winks of light from the parked cars down on Hill and 3rd.
The rumbling roar behind him sounded like the hill collapsing
but it’s the clatter of the Angels Flight reaching dock.
Glassface – Frank – he would get it, he’d understand.
Pushing in and drawing it out, reaching back
to pocket the glimmer.
After all the bullets and shells, there was something so intimate
about stabbing a man.
The ground flinched again, and people staggered slightly, hands out
for balance, looking around for the source.
The blind balloon-seller, outside the Broadway Department Store,
lost his footing and one pink balloon, which drifted away east
through the yellow light down the long channel of 4th Street.
Something was going on, out in that direction, south of City Hall:
sirens, smoke and blowing embers, then flames, jumping
through hot air; ambulances, fire-trucks with ladders.
Above it all, the police helicopter
hanging there like a wasp.
Each temblor set the birds flying in all directions, the people
like civilians under heavy fire, white-eyed, crowding,
moving in fits and starts, staring around them.
He ducked down a service alley, weaving his way
to the E
ast Side, where nobody would care or even notice.
It took an hour to find him, and he looked like he’d been waiting.
He pulled out a pint of rye and Frank had his white port
and they raised their bottles to toast him, their dead friend.
He couldn’t look at Frank – who had tears standing in his eyes,
his mouth moving. He just said to him, ‘I’ve come to confess.’
*
‘We knew a lot after Caen, moving south to Falaise.
There was an abbey the Germans used as a field HQ,
south-east of Authie. You know Panzer Meyer, right?
Yeah: course you do. Kurt Meyer was in charge:
commander of the 12th SS Panzer Division, Hitlerjugend.
That was their name.
They were shooting their prisoners. I saw them doing it.
Turned out they killed twenty Canadians in that place alone.
Twelve were North Novas. I was good friends with six of them:
George McNaughton, Ray Moore, Jimmy Moss,
Hughie MacDonald, Hollis McKeil, sweet Charlie Doucette.
Just lined them up. Back of the heads.’
He took a deep pull on the bottle.
‘So we were after revenge – after Meyer most of all –
and we thought we had him in the pocket, the Falaise Pocket, eh,
but he got away. Only did eight years, y’know.
They let the bastard out in ’54.
They didn’t all get away, though. Oh no. I got one. With this.’
He lifted his shirt to show the Fairbairn–Sykes in his belt.
When he started to talk, his voice went flat,
like it wasn’t his anymore.
*
He looked up, when he was done, and Frank was staring at him,
shaking his head. ‘You see here?’ he said, turning
to expose the tight gray side of his face, all raised
like a puddle of dirty ice. ‘You’re no better than them.’
‘I know,’ he said to the silhouette in the distance.
He’d checked for the SS blood-tattoos, he remembered that: the hot stink there, inside of their left arms. But not the officer, the one with the Iron Cross at his neck. He kept looking into the distance, up into the burning sky. He smelled of French cologne. The edge was blunt by then, or maybe his face was really tough. The skin kept being dragged by the knife, not sliced, so he had to hold it flat, cursing, and work at it with a sawing motion. Where was he? Oh yes. Here. By the end there was so much blood his hands were getting slippery. He hated that: not being in control. Hated it. He cut off the ears. The nose. The lips. He left the eyes, so the German could see what had happened to him. So he would see.
*
In the long light, soldiers still sleep under helmets and the loose summer earth heaped up over them.
* The city closes down, finally. No sound, but the folding of knives.
*
‘You have built temples,
multiplied fenced cities,’ the boy in the blue suit
was speaking so quietly
he could hardly hear,
‘But I will send a fire upon your cities,
and it shall devour your palaces.
The days of visitation are come.
You shall reap the whirlwind.’
*
He heard a short sharp bark, like a struck match,
saw the blank-eyed coyote loping away.
*
Under the orange sky, the mountains are on fire and you can see the lines of flame moving up under the black smoke, the trees candle-topping up the heights, burning the faces off the hills, hear the pop, pop, pop of the propane tanks, the groan of houses falling into flames. The chaparral’s all burnt to ash, and rocks come loose and it all comes landsliding down the sides of the mountains – sheds, cabins, cars, decking, cottonwoods, sycamores, whole houses, propane tanks and boulders the same size, pitching over the traps: the rumble of a bowling alley, the clack of giant castanets, the shearing of metal like mortar-fire, a train going off the tracks – the mountains sliding into Los Angeles. Where the electricity poles were dancing where they stood, dogs running backward and forward, cars rocking on their axles, birds panicking one way, then the other, flying into walls, into each other; inside the buildings, the furniture slithering, things shaken from their shelves, shelves tilting, keeling, units rocking, shaking, toppling over, chairs rolling around on their castors; pylons waggling, settling to a long singing, then rattling like jewelry till they snap, and start to whip and they’re going down in lines, shorting out, like fire-crackers, severed snake-heads, the electric cables jerking, throwing sparks. Houses on the hills imploding, one by one. The aqueducts fracture, freeways buckle and snap; sand-fountains erupting in rows along the beach, the whole Los Angeles basin shaking like a bowl of jello. Palm trees are thrashing, every swimming pool in the city slopping wildly, parks now sudden lakes as the water-mains burst, broken sewer lines bubbling into the street, gas lines rupturing, the church bells going, ringing themselves. The buildings fail, block after block, the old downtown rows of brick-and-mortar just dissolve to dust, the new concrete ones cracking, collapsing, walls folding: glass shivered from its frames, cascading down in sheets. Only the wooden houses survive. Stands of trees go down like skittles. The fires jump the highways, embers sucked through the fire-tunnels of the canyons, feeding on the dry scrub and sagebrush, the gas lines throwing flame a hundred feet into the air. Tree-trunks stand as bent sticks in the fire-bed, the shells of cars slumped on burnt-up wheel-rims. The levelled ruins smoke. After-shocks shudder in waves, knocking out the last of the sirens. The ground opens, swallowing pieces of itself, cracking apart, rising in places to a twenty-foot cliff, and lifts now into two huge moving plates, under which something seems to be breathing.
*
If he could drain his eyes of this. The split world, the world burning. The world, coming to grief.
The marriage of paper and fire. A living thing that crumbled
like a moth, into dust. Into ash. The making of ghosts.
He’d drowned it all. His youth,
the road’s burning coal. The coal-seam fire inside.
But the slate is wiped clean . . . The slate is clean . . .
All sins are confessed, so the slate is clean.
*
Pike was following him, at a distance.
Click. Click. Click.
*
He saw old people dancing in slow-motion, in the scratchy
black-and-white of a ciné-film, moving in their long strathspey,
slow and stately to some silent fiddle and accordion, passing
through each other, through each other’s hands and bodies,
the women turning
under the turning hands, disappearing. Ghosts of one another.
The film sticks; the projector judders to a halt, jams.
The celluloid burning yellow, bubbles; tearing to white.
click
He reached the corner of 5th and Pedro,
posting the knife with a plip through the ribs of a storm-drain,
laid down copies of the Press on the blackened sidewalk,
the one with the last of his bulletins,
then set his duffle bag on top.
Someone offered a cigarette, some pieces of bread,
another passed him a bottle, which he twisted open.
Thunderbird Red. It was the best thing he’d ever tasted.
click
He thought he could hear the weather: the last reel
played on the pipes, the wind in the trees, the sound of deer
running in the high fields.
He looked around at his comrades-in-arm
s, ‘Remember me,’
then closed his eyes.
‘I can stop now,’ he said,
putting his mouth to the mouth of the bottle,
‘I’ll make my city here.’
Credits
PHOTOGRAPHS
Cover:
Hill Street Tunnel looking south from Temple Street on a fogbound night. The double tunnel connected Temple with 1st Street – Howard Maxwell, Los Angeles Times, 12 October 1954.
New York:
The Bowery under the shadows of the 3rd Avenue El, 1940s – Andreas Feininger (Getty Images).
Grand Central Station Sunbeams, 1940s – Underwood Archives.
Los Angeles:
Angels Flight and the 3rd Street Tunnel, looking west from Hill Street, with the 3rd Street steps on either side. The tunnel connected Hill Street and Hope Street – Los Angeles Public Library.
Selling papers on Olive Street – Loomis Dean, LIFE (Getty Images).
San Francisco:
Photograph of Coit Tower and Telegraph Hill, taken through the periscope of the U.S.S. Catfish, a diesel-powered US Navy submarine, passing under the Golden Gate Bridge in 1951.
Turk Street in the Tenderloin, 1950s (OpenSFHistory / wnp14.3613.jpg).
Los Angeles:
Looking east down 2nd Street, dead-ending at Olive Street and the parapet of the 2nd Street Tunnel, with the Mission Apartments on the immediate right – still from vintage footage (https://archive.org/details/ADriveThroughBunkerHillAndDowntownLosAngelesCa.1940s).
The Melrose Hotel, built in 1882 at Grand Avenue, between 1st and 2nd Street, demolished in 1957 – Los Angeles Public Library.
NOTES
p. vii – ‘cos cheum nach gabh tilleadh’: Motto of the North Nova Scotia Highlanders – ‘never a backward step’.
p. 12 – ‘Watching Ride the Pink Horse . . .’: Ride the Pink Horse (1947) Robert Montgomery (released 8 October, 1947).
p. 12 – ‘. . . then Out of the Past’: Out of the Past (1947) Jacques Tourneur (released 13 November, 1947).
p. 16 – ‘in some school round here’: St Paul’s School, Hammersmith (south end of Brook Green; the school moved in 1968, and the buildings in Hammersmith were demolished in 1970), was the General Headquarters of the Home Forces. Montgomery, the Commander-in-Chief, was there from January 1944.
p. 26 – ‘Margaree’: Pronounced with a hard g, as in ‘Margaret’.
The Long Take Page 17