Maclean

by Allan Donaldson

  He glanced ahead. He had a couple of dozen more ties to go before he reached the centre span of the bridge with its waist-high steel trusses. The unprotected sheer drop off the sides of the two end spans always made him nervous, as if somehow it had the power to call to some hidden assassin inside himself who would draw him over to the edge and down. As he approached the centre span, he began counting down what he guessed to be the remaining ties. Sixteen. Fourteen. Twelve.

  Suddenly, without so much as a preliminary flutter, a flock of pigeons burst upwards from their perches underneath the bridge and wheeled around him, their wings almost brushing his face. He threw up one arm, and his heel came down in the space between the ties. He fought to keep his balance, found it, and at the same instant heard the ticking of the rails that signaled an approaching train. He looked up and saw the smoke billowing up above the coal sheds along the curve off the end of the bridge. The train whistled, sounding almost on top of him already. It would have whistled twice already for crossings further up, and he hadn’t heard either one, still lost in his furious calculations about how to replace his stolen money.

  That’s how it always happened, one day when they were thinking about something else and their head stayed up at a gap between the sandbags and the sniper was waiting with the gap in his sights, supernaturally alert and infinitely patient.

  He stood frozen. He didn’t have time to get back off the bridge before the train got to him. All he could do was try to make the centre span. Fighting his panic, still keeping to the middle between the rails away from the drop over the side, trying to put his feet down solidly on the ties, taking just one at a time now, short and quick, he made his way. Eight. Seven. Six. Jesus. The engine appeared around the end of the coal shed, coming fast. It blew again, and the sound nearly took him off his feet. He reached the centre span and got out from between the rails, imagining himself at the last second catching his foot sideways between the ties and being held there. He wouldn’t have been the first person to have been killed on that bridge, taking a short cut to town and eternity or oblivion or wherever.

  He took hold of the steel plating of the truss and edged his way a little further along. He had made six more feet before the engine came up to him and blew again, a long blast, full-whistle, that kept up as the engine passed, engulfing him in escaping steam and a tornado of sound, the whistle, the pounding wheels, the thunder and hiss of the driving pistons. His head knew that he was safe, as safe as if he were a mile away, but his body didn’t know that. His body had memories, and he was shivering like an animal under the battering weight of the noise.

  “Jesus. Jesus,” the boy beside him kept shouting. “Make them stop. Make them stop.”

  “Keep down, you god-damned fool! Keep down!”

  He looked up, at the water falling through the sluice gates silently, at the traffic going back and forth on the other bridge silently, at the people leaning calmly on the rails talking to each other, as if they were in another world from him here bent over the edge of the truss, terrified, shivering, the wheels pounding relentlessly beside him, shaking the bridge under his feet.

  The earth shook. The earth shook and erupted and stank of explosive, and the almost naked body of a man, spilling blood and guts, its legs blown to tatters, came tumbling end over end down over the parados.

  He looked across his shoulder and saw that there were only three more cars and the caboose. He let his breath flow out and watched them come with the kind of limp indifference that was always the first feeling when the terror was over. As the caboose passed, the conductor of the train in his little box on top looked down at him without any change of expression or any sign to him at all, as if he were nothing more than a dead rat or a piece of dog shit beside the track.

  Does God look down on all this? God is dead. A shell full of mustard gas got him while he was having a glass of wine and a loaf of bread beside the Menin Road. It was all in the division paper last week. The Maple Leaf Rag. Didn’t you read it? When you’ve been triaged, Maclean, and you’re lying on your back looking up at the ceiling of the dead tent, you won’t be so god-damned smart.

  He straightened up. Overhead against the fading blue of the evening sky, the pigeons were wheeling and swooping. At the top of Main Street, the clock began striking seven.

  He sat on the corner of the porch of the Farmer’s Store to get his wind back, not giving a damn about the farmers who stood around the door, their talk momentarily stilled as they looked at him in their squint-eyed, farmerly way. Fuck them. He wasn’t drunk. He had never been more sober in his life. But his ears were ringing, and there was a dull, regular throbbing in his head as if a second heart were beating in there.

  After the first war ended and before the second one started, they used to call him in every year or so for a medical examination. They told him it was to look after his health. More likely, they were looking for some excess of well-being that would give them an excuse for stopping his pension. The last few times he went, they told him he had high blood pressure. Strokes, they said. Heart attacks. Don’t excite yourself, they said. I used up all my excitement a long time ago, he said.

  He tried to think through some plan of what to do. Jim’s stable would still be open. He could go back and tell him what happened to his money and ask him for more, just this once, maybe as a loan or an advance on another morning’s work, and Jim would look at him with his head cocked to one side the way he did, and he would give him the money, but he wouldn’t for one second believe the money had been stolen, and he would never give him money again nor even let him go through the make-believe of earning it. No, he thought, not worth it.

  He crossed the street into an alley that brought him out onto Main Street.

  The sidewalks were full. More people than ever. Country people, their business done, standing around talking and looking. Town people shopping for a few more things for Sunday dinner. Young bucks sitting with their elbows out the windows of cars, watching the girls. Girls parading in two’s and three’s, acting indifferent but waiting for the right ones to ask them to a dance somewhere. Soldiers from the armoury, Zombies mostly. Other soldiers home on leave sporting their little GS badges for the girls. A few Americans, smooth and smug, looking like bellboys in their serge uniforms, giving the Canadians a wide berth.

  Half way down the hill, the Salvation Army band was playing away, a little circle of a dozen brass instruments with tambourine and big bass drum, serenading with the word of the Lord. Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? Rattle Rattle Boom Boom. Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? Onward, Joe Soap’s Army. Marching along singing, a little column of fox-faced Cockneys. Until a few weeks before, they would never have fired a rifle in their lives, and they still couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with it. Not that it was going to make much difference. Rattle Rattle Boom Boom.

  He threaded his way up the street. The liquor store was closed and dark, and as he passed, he saw himself reflected in the window, shabby and insubstantial among the crowd of people, insubstantial also, as if they were all already ghosts and this was already the long-dead past it would one day become.

  At the top of the hill, he crossed the street from the post office and hoisted himself backwards up onto the concrete retaining wall of the lawn in front of the library and sat leaning forward, his elbows on his knees. Across Main Street a trickle of people still passed in and out of the post office. Behind him, two middle-aged women descended the steps of the library, turned, and passed him with averted eyes, one of them carrying cradled in her arms a copy of Gone with the Wind, the title much faded on the scuffed spine. I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind. Not so.

  He sat on one side, Cynthia on the other, of the long oak table with its piles of magazines lined neatly down the centre. The National Geographic. The Illustrated London News. Punch. The Saturday Evening Post. In the middle of the table, a small sign said SILENC
E. A late afternoon in late winter, an afternoon not long before the crash. They were supposed to be looking up information on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” for Mr. Raymond’s class the next day, and they were pretending to consult the questions in their notebooks. She was a tall, angular girl with very dark hair, very dark eyes, not pretty but good-looking in her own way all the same, a quiet girl, a reader.

  Twice he had sneaked away to go to the Anglican Church with her and sat near the back in the pews that were nobody’s in particular. His mother’s relatives, Anglicans all, sat in their particular pews near the front. Morning sunlight falling through the stained glass windows. Rich woodwork. Leather-bound prayer books. The slow, prescribed ritual. Mr. Raymond in his choir robes marching solemnly in procession behind the cross.

  You men there! You men there! What are you doing in this place? Get out where you belong. This is not a public house.

  She was one of the students standing in the hall the day he had gone back to get his books. He had pretended not to notice her. Afterwards, before he went overseas, he saw her sometimes on the street, but always in time to turn off some other way. Then, while he was overseas, she married and moved away.

  From an alley beside the town hall, Jimmy McIninch stepped out onto the street and looked up and down as if he were all ready to slip back into the alley, like a groundhog on top of a rock pile checking a field for foxes or dogs. Except that Jimmy looked more like a fox than a groundhog. He caught sight of Maclean and sidled across the street.

  “So what’s up?” he asked when he had got himself up onto the wall.

  “Nothing,” Maclean said. “Nothing much.”

  “You ain’t seen Willie Campbell or Junior Tedley?”

  “No,” Maclean said.

  “Junior’s been tellin’ everybody that the five of us ganged up on Willie and that Willie’s gonna find us one by one and beat the shit out of us.”

  “Fuck him,” Maclean said.

  “Better stay out of his way, all the same.”

  “I never touched the son of a whore,” Maclean said. “If you see Junior again, tell him that if Willie lays a finger on any of us, we’ll set Ginger on him, and this time we won’t pull him off.”

  “Well,” Jimmy said, “it’s a hard, old world, now ain’t it?”

  “It’s that,” Maclean said. “Truth is, I’m in sort of a fix. I need a quarter bad. Fifty cents if I could get it.”

  “I ain’t got a thing,” Jimmy said. “Just a dime, that’s all. What d’ya need it for?”

  Maclean hesitated.

  “My mother’s birthday tomorrow,” he said, “and I always get her something. I worked at Jim Gartley’s this morning and made some money, but somebody stole it down at the house. Every cent I earned.”

  “Jesus,” Jimmy said. “That’s terrible. Now who’d do a thing like that?”

  “I think I know, but I’d rather not say.”

  “Bill Kayton might help ya out,” Jimmy said. “But I ain’t seen him since this afternoon. What about Leveret? He usually has sumpin’ in his pocket even when he says he don’t.”

  “Probably he does,” Maclean said. “But he’s never very quick to part with it.”

  “True,” Jimmy said. “But it don’t do no harm to ask. I think he goes to the Legion Saturday nights and plays cards and sets around.”

  “I used to see him there,” Maclean said. “But I don’t go there much lately.”

  He looked up at the town clock. A quarter to eight. He thought about Leveret and the Legion Hall.

  Shit, he said to himself.

  10

  THE LOUNGE IN the Legion Hall was almost full, a low uproar of talk broken into every few seconds by outbursts of laughter. The old guys telling each other lies about the war. Some soldiers home on leave. A few Zombies from the garrison in the armoury. They weren’t too popular with some people, and there had been talk about throwing them out, but no one had got up to doing it yet. And some of the boys even said, good for them, what fucking good did going over there ever do for us.

  As he stood near the door looking around for Leveret, he could see the eyes turning towards him, just a pair or two at first, then more turning to see what the others had found to look at. Fuck them, he thought, I’ve got as much right to be here as anybody and more than most.

  Leveret was sitting on the far side of the room with an old artilleryman named Pickle. (“Must have killed all kinds of Germans, but I never seen one ‘til the war was almost over and this big bunch of prisoners come marchin’ by us one day.”) Leveret was one of the last to notice Maclean, and when he did, he nodded to him in his grandest manner like the mayor acknowledging a deferential tip of the cap from the town dog-catcher. The Black Rock was one thing, but this here was another.

  Maclean nodded back, not too much, not too little, a circumspect kind of nod that he could move either way from.

  He straightened himself up and made his way along the side of the room to the counter, trying to look like a man who came in every day. He hated to do it, but he put down the money for a glass of Moosehead. He didn’t like beer much, but it was the cheapest thing he could buy, and it would be his ticket to sitting down with Leveret and Pickle without having them worry first thing that he had come to bum the price of a drink.

  Leveret and Pickle both had glasses of whiskey. Bad stuff. And expensive. But Pickle was an electrician and always had plenty of money. Maclean remembered Pickle from just after the war as a handsome man, but his hair was going now, and there were long bags under his eyes, and since his wife died a couple of years ago, he seemed sometimes even when you were talking to him to be away somewhere else, like a man with a mortal wound.

  “Evenin’, Pinky,” he said as Maclean sat down. “How ya been?”

  Leveret nodded again, this time, in spite of Maclean’s beer, more suspicious than magisterial.

  “Pretty good,” Maclean said.

  “I hear you boys had a little dust-up this afternoon,” Pickle said.

  “Nothing special,” Maclean said.

  “Jimmy told me,” Leveret said, “that Willie Campbell’s been goin’ around utterin’ threats.”

  “Willie Campbell’s always uttering threats,” Maclean said. “I wouldn’t worry about it if I was you.”

  He wouldn’t need to worry, Maclean thought, because Willie would have sense enough to know that if he went after him or Bill Kayton, he would get himself arrested, and Thurcott would throw him in the jug for a month. And Willie wouldn’t go after Ginger because Ginger would probably beat the shit out of him again. It would be himself and Jimmy that Willie would be after because nobody would give a shit what happened to them. Not the law anyway.

  “A man can be arrested for utterin’ threats,” Leveret said.

  “Is that a fact?” Pickle said.

  “In fact,” Leveret said, “he might get more time in jail for utterin’ threats than if he just walked up and gave somebody a punch.”

  “Well, well,” Pickle said. “I never understood the law.”

  So Leveret went on to tell him.

  Every once in a while, he would turn to Maclean and ask, “Ain’t that so?” and Maclean would say, “That’s right, all right.”

  Otherwise he sipped his beer and calculated. He didn’t know Pickle hardly at all compared to Leveret, but Pickle was a good-hearted soul with more money than Leveret ever thought of, and Maclean began to think that by himself, away from Leveret where he wouldn’t have to worry about being thought a soft touch, he would be good for half a dollar. He started willing Leveret to get up and go to the can, but he had a bladder like a Saharan camel, and when he had set Pickle straight about the law, he went on to tell him about the war.

  “The reason them there Germans invaded Russia,” he told Pickle, “is
that three or four hundred years ago, the Russians—they was called the moguls in them days—invaded Germany on horseback and burned their houses all down and run off with their women, and the Germans never forgot.”

  “Is that a fact?” Pickle said.

  Since Leveret still showed no signs of moving off and giving him a chance alone with Pickle, Maclean realized that time was running out before the stores closed. He had wasted his money on a god-damned beer he didn’t want, and he decided he was just going to have to take whatever chance there was with the two of them together. So edging his way into it as best he could, keeping his voice up just enough to make its way across the table through the uproar, he told them his story about working at Jim Gartley’s to get the money for his mother’s present and taking it home and hiding it and coming back after they had been at the Black Rock to find it stolen.

  Leveret and Pickle both listened with interest at first. Then they began looking down at the table and up at the ceiling and around the room, and Maclean could see that they didn’t believe a god-damned word he was saying. They were thinking that even if he had worked at Jim Gartley’s stable and earned the money, what had happened was that he had drunk it up.

  When he had finished, neither of them even asked him who he thought might have stolen it.

  “Well, now,” Leveret said, “that is a bad fix.”

  Maclean had hoped that he wouldn’t have to ask outright at all—that just the story would be enough for Pickle anyway to say, “Now look here, I’ll lend you a little until your cheque comes in.” And if Leveret hadn’t been there, Maclean was sure that Pickle would have gone ahead and given him something, if only a quarter. Maclean was so mad at Leveret that he could hardly sit in the chair. Now, even if he did go ahead and ask, he could see that he wasn’t going to get anything, not even from Pickle.