The Burning Ground

by Adam O'Riordan

  At sea working in the engine room he would often think about his mother’s mother, Baba Spevek, with her low, pendulous breasts and skin that smelled of sweetened dough, telling him about the winters back in Minsk when she was a girl. About how she and her friends, Alena and Aksana, who had an ulcer on the cornea of her right eye that had left it milky and purblind, whose mother let her stay home from school for weeks on end, once snapped the penis off a hog that had frozen solid. His grandmother would sit in the tea room she owned, and where McCauley’s mother sometimes left him when she went off to work when his father was away, a boy with a Scottish name in a world full of Russian women, telling him how they chased one another around cobbled winter streets holding the thin, sparkling wand of the dead hog’s wiener, icicles gathered on its corkscrew glands. He was glad they got away when they did. Baba Spevek’s brother had worked building the sets at the opera in Minsk and his sons had worked there too before the war. He found out after the war in Europe was over that they were all killed, half-starved, just blocks away in a labor camp on Shirokaya Street, the empty opera house piled full of all the things that the Nazis had stolen from them: paintings and pocket watches and whatever else they could get their hands on. He remembered Baba sobbing when the letter arrived from a niece of hers who had survived because, she said, a Nazi soldier had pulled her out of a car on account of her blue eyes and blonde hair. He remembered the letter she sent to Baba, with its strange Cyrillic script. It was the only time he ever saw Baba cry or receive a letter. He was en route to the Pacific but never made it as “Little Boy” and the Enola Gay got there first. His ship had dropped anchor at Long Beach and was given twenty-four-hours’ shore leave. He remembered thinking to himself as he walked out into the sunlight and the sight of the cranes and all the industry of the port with the other ranks that this was where he was going to make his home. That with an American Craftsman cottage, like the ones he’d seen written about in the newspaper, and with a piece of land, a man could start to build a whole world for himself out here.

  After demobilization he decided he would stay in Los Angeles. His first thought was to try and find work in construction but with the GIs just back from the war the market was crowded at the bottom. Lines of men waiting on the street corners every morning just to see if they could get a day’s work picking fruit out in the valley. Before the war had come along and given his life some shape, he had worked a couple of summers helping fix up theater sets on Broadway. His mother’s cousin was a seamstress at the Astor and so she got him the work. Painting and cutting out backdrops mainly, filling in the silhouettes of the parts of the city he’d never been to. They were long days for low pay but when the curtain went up on the first night there was no feeling like it.

  He was sleeping on a mattress on the floor of a furloughed engineer called O’Sullivan in Brentwood and eating breakfast and dinner out of cans when he first got to Los Angeles. He remembered how after they won the war in the Pacific all along the coast it was like a carnival. The bonfires on the beaches, fireworks being let off, quarts of liquor and sickly sweet rum punch being drunk. It was another world. How could he have lived twenty-three years and missed this? He remembered how they were terrified out on the West Coast all through the war that they were going to get bombed to rubble. When Chester Nimitz was out at Midway fighting off Yamamoto’s armada, John Ford made a movie that had them all feeling like it was going on right there in their backyard. He couldn’t say for certain what he was doing those first months in Los Angeles. Drinking too much, he was sure. He remembered several fumbled trysts on beaches at night, and mornings waking up next to women in trailers or backseats of cars, the windows thick with condensation. All in all, he thought, he was just trying to put those years at sea behind him. Working on forgetting. It seemed there was so much to forget back then.

  McCauley’s ship rammed a U-boat once, south of Jan Mayen Island on the return leg of his convoy’s winter route. The signalman spotted the conning tower out in a squall. They had fired off star shells but the rain got in the way and they lost sight of her. A few minutes later she was spotted again and they trained the 4-inch and the pom-pom onto her, and after three depth charges were dropped the U-boat surfaced and that was when they rammed her. He remembered the sound of metal on metal, the deep thud reverberating through the bow of the ship. How after the U-boat keeled over all the guys were out on deck hollering and wailing as if Joe DiMaggio had just hit one out of the park. How they then let her have a few belts of Hotchkiss, for good measure, which is when she rolled and sank down into the sea, stern first. The rain had turned to snow and some of the U-boat’s crew started to surface in the beam of the searchlight. Their faces bloated and waxy, they looked, McCauley thought, like mannequins from a department store window.

  In 1945 there was a union bust-up and all the workers at the studios went out on strike. Eight months they were out on the pickets and McCauley was offered some hours over at Metro working as a carpenter on the sets. McCauley wasn’t in a position to turn it down. He had been getting into quarrels over nothing in particular and had spent a night in the cells due to a brawl with some infantrymen from Texas after drinking with O’Sullivan at a bar in Redondo Beach. He could feel his life starting to run away from him, never sober long enough to make a good decision. When he first started at Metro, he was still living on O’Sullivan’s floor but after four months working every hour of overtime Metro offered and once or twice moonlighting on other sets, he put down a deposit on a Craftsman in Venice. He took pride in his new home, especially the garden. Thirty feet by twelve with a southerly aspect, he began growing lupins and mariposa lilies, and he even planted two palms out front. The house had sat empty all through the war. The day McCauley moved in, he found a paper lantern at the back of the closet in the kitchen. Next to it there was a tiny drum with a symbol inked onto the skin and two black beads threaded on string so that when the handle was twisted from side to side it made a noise. He figured the place must have belonged to one of the families Roosevelt had sent out to the desert when the war in the east began.

  It was not long after McCauley moved into the house in Venice that Adra Fishkin, a man he knew growing up in the Bowery, arrived on his doorstep. Fishkin’s family were from Minsk too. Fishkin had always been a sickly child, rubella then scarlet fever in quick succession before the age of ten. Once when they were young, playing on the street he fell and cut open his leg on a broken beer bottle outside one of the flophouses where you could get a bed for twenty cents. McCauley had taken him back to the rooms his mother shared with her cousin and her family a few blocks away and watched as she boiled a piece of silk thread and sewed up the gash in his leg right there and then on the sofa. Fishkin’s father had ruined his lungs on his way to America. He lived in a room above and sometimes McCauley would see him standing, jaundiced, at the top of the staircase. Fishkin had seen some terrible things with MacArthur out east on the islands where the Japanese wouldn’t give up. He even looked different now, thinner, his shoulders hunched when he walked. More like his father than the boy McCauley remembered from the Bowery.

  Fishkin was en route to New Mexico. Some of the guys from his unit planned on starting a bail-bond business in Alamogordo, and they had promised him a fifth of the company if he could stump up some capital. Fishkin, or Fisher as he had started calling himself, ended up staying with him for the best part of three months; there was always something delaying his leaving, a check that was yet to clear or some issue with the application for a license for the bail-bond business down in Alamogordo. In truth, McCauley remembered, it was nice to have a face from back home out there in California. And when he’d answered the door to him that Saturday afternoon two days after Ascension Day and seen him standing there in his demobilizing suit, his protective instinct from those days in the Bowery had kicked in. The guys he worked with at the studio had all been together before the war, more or less, and he guessed the newbies only reminded them of the ones who didn’t make it bac
k.

  Most evenings when McCauley finished up at Metro, he and Fishkin would sit on the porch, on the two rocking chairs he had found in the yard and fixed the spindles on, playing hands of poker and telling each other stories from the war. Fishkin had a collection of Army-issue V-Discs with Leonard Feather’s All Stars playing numbers that they both liked and these recordings became the soundtrack to their evenings on the porch. Sometimes when they had both drunk enough Kentucky Tavern, they would start to quarrel, throwing down the cards onto the tea chest they played on top of, bickering like an old married couple grown sour in each other’s company. Once McCauley remembered nursing a split lip for a week after they tumbled down the porch steps when Fishkin had taken a swing at him. Few of McCauley’s stories compared to the ones Fishkin told him those nights out on the porch when the liquor had loosened him up enough to talk freely. Even now he carried images from those conversations with Fishkin: the bodies his patrol had come across with their skin burned off and impaled on top of bamboo poles, so badly charred they couldn’t say for sure which side they belonged to. It had taken Fishkin longer to tell McCauley how he had taken a shovel to the skulls of the wounded Japanese infantrymen as they lay prostrate on the ground. It was the sound that stuck with him, the blunt thud of the spade on the backs of their skulls, their flattened black hair. The last story Fishkin told McCauley was a few nights before he left for New Mexico. It was about the time an infantryman in his unit had run his bayonet into the guts of their young sergeant who had lost his mind and whose screaming threatened to give away their position. Another soldier had cradled the sergeant, holding a soiled handkerchief to his mouth, the handkerchief turning a deep crimson as the boy bled out. A horsefly trapped inside the house, batting against the window as Fishkin told the story of the young sergeant and how they had all sworn an oath there and then to tell no one if they ever made it out. Some nights after they had played all the hands they could and drunk all they needed to drink and each gone off to their own bed, he remembered Fishkin screaming himself awake in the room next door as some image from the jungle came rushing back to him.

  One Saturday afternoon a month or so after Fishkin arrived, McCauley took him out to the boardwalk with half a mind on heading up to the Santa Monica Pier where Spade Cooley and his band were putting on a new show, when they saw two girls talking by an ice-cream stand. Fishkin despite his troubles always had a way with the ladies. He once got a date with Betty Rowland, “the Ball of Fire,” after they watched her dance burlesque in West Hollywood a few years before she was convicted of lewd conduct. On the boardwalk that afternoon Fishkin had gone strolling over to the two girls and shouted “Attention!” as if he were a drill sergeant and they were standing on the parade ground. McCauley remembered thinking that he had gone too far. But these girls thought it the funniest thing on God’s earth, and were laughing out loud, which only encouraged Fishkin, who started marching around them, shouting obscenities. The girls were off to Corona Del Mar to meet some friends who were surfing there. A man was giving an acrobatics display on a hobbyhorse a few yards away as they talked, so it was hard to keep their attention focused on him and Fishkin. Eventually they asked them if they wanted to tag along. McCauley remembered Dolores had on a cotton summer dress with roses with green stems appliquéd on it that had faded in the sun. Lips painted red and her hair all pinned up at the back, a few fine strands fallen loose and the breeze moving them around her neck. A pair of silver SolarX sunglasses. Even now sitting in the recreation room he could summon up that first image of Dolores at will. On their first date McCauley took her up to the track at Santa Anita. She ate a grilled filet mignon steak sandwich as if a morsel hadn’t touched her mouth in days. He had turkey with cranberry sauce and shoestring potatoes. They made love that evening quickly, urgently, in the backseat of his car parked in an alleyway three blocks from her parents’ house in Westmont. The same dress she wore that afternoon on the boardwalk hitched up around her waist. Her bare legs fuller, stronger, more muscular than he expected. He remembered how Dolores laughed out loud when he asked if he was her first.

  The Green Room, that was a phrase McCauley associated from those first days with Dolores. That’s what they called it when you were inside the barrel of a wave. Dolores’s friend Patricia was crazy for the guys who did the wave riding. The week he met Dolores on the boardwalk, Patricia had been a runner-up in the competition for Queen of Newport Beach at their Tournament of Lights and before the war she had been one of Earl Carroll’s dancing girls. Her first boyfriend drowned up at Pillar Point Harbor and by all accounts Patricia had been a little unhinged ever since. A real wild woman double feature, Fishkin had christened them after that first day.

  After Dolores and McCauley got together at weekends, they would drive his Oldsmobile to Malibu to watch Patricia’s friends surfing. Sometimes they would hitch a trailer on the back and spend the night up there. That’s how McCauley came to make a board for Bud Morrisey. They were sitting around on the beach one evening by a big fire McCauley had spent the afternoon setting while the guys were out in the water, and he and Bud got talking. McCauley explained that he was in the carpentry business, working over at Metro. Bud told him about this hand-built hollow-wood board he wanted made. “White cedar,” McCauley told him, “that’s what you’ll need.” And when Bud asked if McCauley could do it, he told him it would be an honor. He had watched him out there on the south swells and thought the man was an artist. He had passed a whole afternoon admiring him on a long board coming in on those ankle-high wind-swell waves. He spent weeks on the board for Bud Morrisey, working on it in the evenings after he finished up at Metro, feathered piles of blond shavings growing slowly in the garden. The first few frustrating evenings he was caught up in making the stands and the blocks, screwing the angle brackets into the patio at the back with a masonry bit, but they wouldn’t take so when that didn’t work he ended up filling a five-gallon bucket with sand, which got the job done and just about held the stands in place.

  McCauley remembered on that last day looking at the finished board, not wanting to let the thing go, thinking how beautifully the grain ran the length of the waxed wood and pleased at how good the redwood inlay with Bud’s initials looked. The whole board weighed no more than twenty pounds. McCauley wished he could take it out. But he had never learned to swim. He remembered driving over to Bud’s place with the back windows wound down to accommodate the length. And how he only charged him for the wood. They kept in touch and McCauley gave him a lathe when he set up his own wood shop making boards down in Redondo Beach. A few years ago on Memorial Day McCauley got talking to a kid with a fiberglass board on the boardwalk. The boy was there with his wetsuit rolled down around his waist and his board, with its colored graphics stenciled on, tucked under one arm. McCauley asked him about Joe Quigg, Buzzy Trent, Gard Chapin, Moe Charr, Bob Simmons with the withered arm. But he had never heard of any of those guys and just stared at him and shook his head. They were real giants, McCauley remembered telling the boy.

  McCauley often thought about those classic summers up in Malibu, with Dolores and Patricia and whichever of the boys she was dating at the time. Fishkin tried his luck with Patricia before he left. He had taken her to see Breakfast in Hollywood with Bonita Granville. McCauley loaned him a suit and his second-best tie, with a red and white zigzag running down the front. He remembered Fishkin standing on his porch, and being on his knees with a mouth full of pins pulling in the suit pants so they fitted at the waist. Fishkin got nowhere with Patricia but McCauley heard from Dolores that he promised to send her a postcard every week until she agreed to a second date. The cards kept coming for a couple of years, with misspelled, enigmatic messages and postmarks from all across the United States, then one day they just stopped and no one ever heard from him again. The night skies in Malibu seemed to go on forever and like no night sky McCauley had ever seen, not even up there in the Arctic. McCauley remembered being out on the beach, Dolores and Patricia busying themselv
es flipping over sides of skirt steak and fat sausages. The guys all teasing him for only going into the ocean up to his ankles. McCauley saw it like this: that some people followed baseball but that he followed these guys. He was a fan and unashamed of it too. It wasn’t just the sport those guys knew how to live. They seemed to him to glow out there on the ocean. McCauley often thought back to how when he was there with them the war seemed like another lifetime. As if the boredom and bodies and burned faces in the water all belonged to someone else. When Dolores got sick, eight years ago and three months after they moved into the Senior Housing together, it was stories from those classic summers he would tell her.

  They had only moved on account of the location and were among the youngest couples in the building. It was a choice they had made together having never had children and because of the rate that was available to McCauley as a member of the Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, a membership he had kept up even after he stopped working for the studios and had taken a job teaching woodworking at a community college in his sixties. It just all seemed to make such sense and they both wanted to be back near the ocean. They convinced themselves it would be more like a holiday resort than a retirement home. He still remembered Dolores was so excited to be around young people again down there on the boardwalk. McCauley would sit and tell her stories about those first summers they spent together as they filled her up with chemicals to beat the tumor that was eating at her bones. A tumor they first spotted as a plum-sized lump on the side of her elbow. Dolores had gone on to work as PA to the company’s director at the fabricated metal products firm in Long Beach. He was the son of the man she had begun working for in ’46 and they had always done well by her, including a good health insurance package when the company was bought out by a Taiwanese conglomerate two years before she retired. The stories of those summers up in Malibu were the only thing that made her smile toward the end.