“Afternoon, Artie.”
Deep breath in.
“Nice day today.”
And exhale.
Nice day, Artie always says, when there’s nothing in his satchel for Borys Gretasson and his wife. Nice day today, Borys. As if no news is good news. As if hope thrives in not knowing. Nice fuckin’ day.
“Might be cloudy tomorrow. You never can tell.”
“Too right,” Artie says, doffing that fuckin’ invisible hat. “You never can tell.”
Inside, Borys stops on his way down the hall and looks into the kids’ room. The girls aren’t there, but their mess is. Scraps of coloured-on papers litter Euri’s cot. Her collection of hair ribbons rainbow down the sheet to pool on the floor. Stuffed socks with button eyes are lined up on the little one’s foam mattress, stitched mouths whispering into stitched ears. He picks up stray nighties, undershirts, spare tights, and school pinafores. Folds them. Puts them dirty into the dresser drawer, next to a pair of Peytr’s old jeans. The pants are cold to the touch, damp with chill. Borys shoves them to the back of the drawer. Too small for the boy now, he thinks. Too big for the girls.
Tomorrow, he thinks, I’ll do laundry.
Alone in his own bedroom, he takes off his shoes. Puts them into their box, slides it under his bed. He replaces the wedge hat on its shelf, hangs his tie. Returns the cufflinks to the breast pocket, unbuttons and hangs his shirt. Lines the pant-legs up by their pleats, drapes them over a padded rung. He leaves socks and unders on. Covers them with standard-issue overalls. Acid-washed denim with a big spoked wheel sewn in red felt on his back. Press-studs aligned in single file from gut to gullet. Long sleeves, snap-cuffed. Pants long enough to tuck into short work boots. He snaps and tucks and laces and hoods. Deep breath in. Inhales the call of Jeanie’s stew to his breakfast and her dinner. He takes up his cane. Clunk-thunk. Clunk-thunk. Clunk-thunk. And exhales.
It takes Borys over an hour to walk to the Wheels ‘n’ Heels, though it’s less than a mile from his house. With only one bending knee, he can’t ride a velo. Taking a train isn’t an option. The closest station abuts a minefield; getting tickets could literally cost an arm and a leg. Their car died when Peyt was a baby and Borys still doesn’t see much point resurrecting it. And he refuses to waste hard-earned coin on fuckin’ mules or that piece of shit twice-a-day bus. Jean once offered to buy him a chair with that first payment she got from the gov’t—said she’d even push him to work every day—but Borys won’t have it. He simply will not have it.
So he walks the distance each evening, lungs bellowing, hips swivelling and jerking, blisters swelling and popping on his stump. He avoids the covered walkways linking minor and major thoroughfares, avoids the underpasses and overpasses, avoids the tunnels worming farther and deeper into the outskirts of town. Crowded and hot, stinking of piss and damp and week-old goat’s cheese, these shortcuts end up adding a bad half hour to his trip. He hates the jostle of bodies cramped in underground spaces, the maelstrom of wordwinds flitting and touching, the dead insinuating air. Instead, he takes the sidewalks when he can, the open road when he can’t. He likes hearing field crickets buzzing to each other in code. Likes to pretend they’re actually crickets.
Slowing to ease the chafe of his brace, Borys passes the hospital, tastes iodine breezes wafting from its screened windows, antiseptics and sickness and grief. Passes the local magistrate’s office, the young minister’s name emblazoned in dark green up the beige side of the two-storey building. Passes housing trust blocks hunkered beside upstanding clapboard townhouses. Passes an empty park, its benches removed, its pond half-drained and reeking with fermented leaves and wormwater. A different reek follows him past the veterans’ lodge—burnt weed, weak booze, and stale stories—and settles in front of the borough of refugees’ tents that never seems to get any smaller.
Even here, on the outskirts, five minutes from work, he doesn’t pick up the pace. He doesn’t avert his eyes, doesn’t block his nose against the tang of foreign-spiced air, the steam of canvas and open latrines and desperation. He meets whatever pathetic gazes seek his, sees Peytr in the youngest, the weakest, most pitiful glances. He maintains a measured clunk-thunk, clunk-thunk, clunk-thunk. Looking forward as well as behind.
He walks as he did when he was barely older than Peyt, a stately, disciplined, left right left. He walks ’til his hip is throbbing. Walks for the pain and to forget what caused it. And when he passes the grogger, when he’s almost at the W&H, he walks and walks and walks to remember.
This, he tells himself, all of this, the nurses and pensioners and guttersnipes, the boiling stews and overflowing trash cans and empty gas tanks, the garish posters calling men to duty, the artists with enough talent—enough bright paint!—to make such posters, the flickering electricity and flickering wordwinds, the night market vendors with their cheap plastics and cheap veg and cheap grey juju, the street cleaners with their shushing brooms, the old ladies and young, the children growing and gone, this, all of this, this thriving bleeding shit-stinking life, is what he lost his leg to uphold.
He would’ve given the other one too, if they’d let him. But a scant month on the front was sufficient, they’d said. Go on home, they’d said. You’ve done all you can. A month and a leg is enough. So they said, all those years ago, so they still say. Every night, no matter how fast or how slow his pace, they dog him on his way to work.
Borys keeps walking. Always reaching the Wheels & Heels before its whistle blows the nightshift inside.
Peytr used to tell tales about the factory where Borys works.
“It’s a champion horse stable,” he’d say one day, and “It’s a thirty-car garage” the next. Without fail, baby Zaya would clap her pudgy hands, not understanding much more than Peyt’s smile. The oboe timbre of his voice. The honey coating his ’wind. The enthusiasm of his lies. Slightly more discerning, Euri chewed the ends of her frizzy brown braids as she listened. Peanut nose wrinkling. Eyelids slitting. Ideas leapfrogged her crooked part while Peytr spun his stories, mind hopping from dis-to belief. From the next room, more often than not, the Miller kid egged Peytr on. Silent, Dake’s wordwind flashed secret embellishments behind the girls’ backs, riddled with spelling errors and stupidity. As always, Peyt embraced the other boy’s thoughts. His fine falsehoods fell to pieces under the crudeness of Daken’s details.
Borys watched from the doorway, or the settee, or the kitchen table. He’d look to the children, look to Jean, and wonder how he’d ever come to live with all these happy little fools and liars.
Granted, Peytr’s fabrications weren’t all that far off.
The Wheels ‘n’ Heels factory is two main buildings: Forming and Finishing. The latter a concrete shoebox, single-storied, with twelve blue stable doors perforating its length on one side; the former, behind it, a repurposed hangar, three open storeys of corrugated iron and breeze blocks and tin. On its curved, once-retractable roof, rust weeps from blackened skylights—what Peyt used to say looked like blood dribbling from punched-out teeth. And, oh, how the boy’d cackle whenever he said it, cackle like a little speckled hen.
Borys goes to Finishing first, punches in before the nightshift whistle wails a third time. He grabs a welding mask, mesh gloves and reinforced hood from his locker. Fills his canteen at the fountain outside the change room. Stencilled signs shout on the walls, bold letters and arrows pointing to exits, sharp-angled symbols for Dangerous Substances, colourful dots for air raid shelter locations, reminders to Wear Protective Gear At All Times. Borys pockets a spare pair of earplugs then makes his way through the chaos of Finishing.
Bisecting the room, two fifty-metre tables are the only straight lines in sight. On the left, semicircular workstations are scattered around vats of oil, tubs of mineral spirits, and deep, bubbling black oxide baths. Round racks of wheel-rims form ragged queues around them, waiting to be laced with spokes. Conveyor belts snake through the space, around tables and desks, carrying near-finished pieces to assembly and as
sembled pieces to delivery on the far right. Behind stacks of boxes, fitting tables, and shrink-wrap machines, a huge map dominates the wall, drawn on the white paint with charcoal and ink. At first, curves and squiggles and crosshatched lines were simply there as a guide, sketching out delivery zones and warehouses. Lately, pushpins and flags have been added, a few at a time, dotting the city. Plastic stars, fake carnations, little tinfoil swans. Bottle caps and faded tickets. Pictures. Thumbprints. Markers pinpointing where family members have been lost to the greys. The boss added three of his own last year.
In his locker, Borys keeps a glass bauble for Peyt.
He heads for the back door, avoiding eye contact and conversation. Perched on tall stools or sitting in wheelchairs, dozens of workers hunch over tables and cluttered desks, all within arm’s reach of the slow-moving belts. With a rhythmic click of magnet against steel, practised fingers thread spokes onto rims. Wheels are trued by hand and machine before being sent to the paraplegics, who all place bets before racing new chairs down the aisles.
Fuckin’ idiots, Borys thinks, deking around them as the guys hoot and holler through their safety checks. Laughing their born-crippled arses off. They have no idea what it’s like. Leaving. Being away for months, a year, years. Getting back home to find your wife’s a stranger, if you find her there at all.
Trolleys full of prosthetic legs and feet barricade the back door. Files rasp, metal on metal, as workers grate rough edges from the limbs Forming popped from moulds that afternoon. Chisels and spikes and small hooked gougers scrape details into ankles and toes, littering the floor with iron filings. Buckles clatter against metal shins, metal knees, metal thighs as they’re fitted with braces, then clunked onto conveyors.
A moment’s quiet as Borys crosses the gravel yard to Forming. Inside, furnaces and hearths suffuse the foundry with orange heat. Able-bodied men work bellows, grunting with each pull and push. The rest, like Borys, crew metal presses and benders, or crank great slag-filled ladles on winches for pouring. The air is thick with steam and sweat. The clank of boilers, kettledrums, and hydraulics. The whirr of oiled turbines. The clatter of ball bearings and rigs and pulleys. Molten metal glows into moulds. Extruded aluminium is cast into hollow, pliable bars, which Borys spends his nights coiling and cutting into rims.
He nods to Jerry, a huge troll of a man, double peg-legger, who works the bender next to his own. Jerry nods back, practised hands guiding metal bars along the rounding track.
“That there’ll be my station one day,” Peytr used to say, the evenings he followed Borys to the factory. Evenings when Jean was off getting brainwashed, leaving fuckin’ Ann Miller to watch the kids. Peyt was so small, he wasn’t much in the way. Like the rest of them, he wore helmet and mask, so was safe enough. He’d fetch water for the lads or lug iron ingots, pretending he’d the muscles for heavy lifting. But after a few minutes, chest fluttering in and out, he’d hoist himself onto a table between the benders. Scrawny legs swinging nonstop beneath him. Catching his breath while chattering away, shouting to be heard over the din. “When I’m metalled like you, Da. I’ll work that bender right there.”
And the stupid kid was so bloody proud at the prospect, he seemed to take Borys’s shaking for laughter. Peyt would join in, giggling like a girl, before turning to talk Jer’s ear off.
Take pride where you can, Borys thought then, secretly agreeing his son’s future was like to be spent in a foundry. Few other options for a kid like him. The ink was weak as water when they’d written Peyt’s name in the birth register, a sure sign the boy would be likewise, or so Borys once thought.
But he’s proved us wrong, hasn’t he? Young Peyt. Brash, speckled hen. Gone for two years now. A soldier. On the front. Two full years. Twenty-four months. At war. Fighting. Making a difference.
Having an effect.
Meanwhile, it’s eight hours of coiling and cutting for Borys. Plus two overtime to help buy more seedlings for the garden. Ten hours a night, watching metal curve round and round. Off at five, five-thirty. Off to the grogger for an after-work pint with Jerry. Off home afterwards, where the older kids are off to war, the younger long off to sleep. Ann Miller off her nut. And Jean … off.
Lights off. Uniform off.
Round and round.
####
During his own tour of duty, Borys had sent his parents messages every second day. No holding back. They’d be worried, he’d thought. They’d want to know everything. That the bunkers were rotten. That the mess tent doubled as a stable, so the food smelled and tasted like shit. That the other guys in his platoon weren’t soldiers, just boys. Like him. Just regular boys.
He remembers sending one letter in particular. Remembers composing it in his mind. Remembers imbuing it with colours and smells. The scent of fighting. Sulphur, sweat, and grime. The salt of hidden tears. The piss-stench of not knowing where the enemy is.
It’s like they’re not even there, he’d said. But you know they’re out there. They must be out there. They have to be. The roadsides are riddled with traps. We’re bombarded from above, from below, from who-knows-where. Our guys go missing. They’re returned with no eyes, no ’winds. If they’re returned at all. Each time we go out on point, we all come back looking more pale and more grey, more like them. They’re turning us into old men, Ma. Least it feels like it. They’re turning us grey.
Borys knew the message reeked of woollen blankets. The yellow urge to burrow into them each morning, to just give up and be a coward, fine, let other guys be heroes, go ahead and let them fight round and round, while he just stayed in his bunk and slept. He kept in the sour undertone of getting up anyway. The off-milk whiff of putting up a brave front. He kept it all in, every last detail, and sent the messages, humiliating or otherwise, because his parents worried. Because they’d be glad to hear his words, to smell these stinks of his being alive.
Now the Pigeon appears at the end of the street.
Borys straightens his tie, pinches his cufflinks. He imagines news of Peytr’s insubordination. Inevitable, he thinks. The boy’s a dreamer. The boy can never sit still. He pictures Peyt’s body, mangled and word-eaten by a grey landmine. Sentences blasting away his limbs, gnawing nerves and tendons, the way they did, once, his own. Borys scratches the inverted phrases burnt into his thigh, his forearm, his hand. Feels the shine of the scar tissue, the way it pulls his skin off-kilter, making it hard for him to straighten, permanently propping him up with a cane. As Artie approaches, Borys stands at attention. Doesn’t shift, though his false leg pinches, though it chafes the raw curses on his quad. He imagines the boy in sad shape. Sad, sad shape. Too sad to send a message. Even a single line.
Still fighting would suffice.
Still here.
Would it be so hard for Peyt to send a note? If not to him, then to Jean? Or the girls? Euri and the little one? Don’t tell Da, but I think I might never be home… . A line? The food is shit but the fighting is good… . A few words? The end is in sight… . Can’t he just lie, the way Borys did to his own parents, every second day for a month?
Would that be so hard?
“Afternoon, Borys,” says the Pigeon. Pace measured, not slowing. Imaginary hat tipping.
“Afternoon, Artie.”
“Nice day today.”
“If you say so,” Borys replies.
At Wheels ‘n’ Heels, most injuries happen in the tired-out black of night. Scaldings, staplings, stabbings, severings. The foreman usually hires amputees and gimps—no chance they’ll be redrafted, and they know the products firsthand—but he’d rather avoid wasting good metal shoring up limbs lost to daydreams and exhaustion. Two hours before end-of-shift, he sends a few new Finishers around with mugs of black grog, bowls of hot oats, and sticks of jerky for the foundry men. Full bellies are quiet bellies, the foreman says. At the first hint of the trolley’s clattering across the gravel courtyard outside, Jerry cuts the bender’s power. Signals Borys to do the same. Borys waits for the aluminium to quit coiling, ta
kes the four-stack from the machine before switching it off. Then he rummages through the top drawer of his toolkit, sifting through all the misshapen knives, forks and spoons he fucked up trying to make Peyt a decent set to take on campaign. He digs ’til he finds the best ones he forged—the ones he’ll send as replacements just as soon as the boy says he needs them.
“Got word from Chass this morning,” Jerry says, thumping his lid on the table. A thick, curly beard bushes down to the third snap of his coveralls. Freed, his wordwind springs like dreadlocks from matted brown hair. Never revealing much the man wouldn’t say aloud. “Spent the past fortnight shovelling dirt, he says. And he’s had a gutful by the sounds of it. Says, ‘I never signed up to wield a fuckin’ shovel, Da… . Never filled so many fuckin’ sandbags in my whole life!’”
“You don’t say.” Borys lifts his visor, but keeps his helm and hood on. Swings a leg over the low bench and sits facing Jerry. Concentrating on his hands, he unthreads the spoon from its ring. Tries to sound nonchalant. “Where’s he stationed? With the local lads …?”
Jerry cranes his neck, squints into the orange gloom to catch sight of the newbs with their grog-trolleys. “Don’t rightly know. Somewhere on the western front, I think. Near the stadium? Someplace there’s a fuckload of dirt needs shovelling at any rate. Chass’s got to be a bit round-about on the specifics. Y’know, in case the Pigeon gets waylaid. Suppose Peyt’s just as sketchy with the details, though, isn’t he.”
“Yeah,” Borys says. “He doesn’t give much away.”
Jerry nods, half-hearted. Distracted by the arrival of steaming bowls and salted meat.
Listen to me, Borys wants to say. He wants to pull Jerry’s greasy beard, yank until the older man’s eyes bulge to attention. “Jer,” he says. Fuckin’ listen to me. “Jerry.”
“You want oats, B?”
“Yeah. But Jer—”
“Make that three oats,” Jerry says, slapping the serving kid’s ’wind when it unspools a length of oinks. “And an extra jar of grog.”
Lament for the Afterlife Page 5