Once the lights are out, I’m to creep out and meet Winchell and Karl at the pond. How Winchell will extract Karl from the coils of the East Wing, I have no idea, but if it’s not a problem for him, it’s not a problem for me. I’m to bring the weapons and as much tinfoil as I can to deflect radio waves. Not that, as far as I know, tinfoil will have any effect, nor am I likely to find any to speak of in the kitchen or on the farm. But who am I, Sandy Grey, to question at a time like this? It’s all or nothing. What have I got to lose but torture by insulin and the rest of my life with my parents? Rise up, as Winchell would say, and lose your chains.
When the lights wink out, the helpers are asleep. Their snores rumble through the house. I gather my few belongings and slip out of my room. It’s not hard to avoid the creaking stairs—I’ve had plenty of practice. I ease my way down. Outside, men call quietly back and forth as a patrol begins to search for the source of the electrical outage. There’s no anxiety; they’re not worried. No Jap planes or submarines have been sighted. We’re not on alert. The searchlights sleep. Electric lights twinkle merrily beyond the wall. It’s merely darkness; we’re in a state of nature here. The gibbous moon slopes its way west—I’ll be heading northwest, and can use it as a guide.
I’m standing at the kitchen window, stuffing bread and cheese into the top of the rucksack I’m carrying and watching for the moment when I can slip out the door and behind the flashlight-equipped patrols, when a hand grips the back of my shoulder.
“Can’t sleep, Sandy? What’s the matter? Guilty conscience?” I spin round, and let the rucksack slide from my hand behind my back. It’s Pete Cooper in his briefs and T-shirt. He’s a grey shimmering ghost in front of me. Also shimmering, poking out from under his arm, is the long barrel of the rifle. He pushes me away from the window and peers out himself. I note, with some relief, that the white towel is not around his neck.
“That’s right, Pete. I’ve got a lot on my mind.”
“I just bet you have, you little bastard.” He’s turned to face me, and moved a step closer. His breath is a witch’s brew of tobacco and beer. He sees the flinch of my nostrils and moves even nearer, the foul odour of his person washes over me. In the wisp of moonlight that is our illumination, thin strands of his fringe of hair move independently, as if by thought, or by the current of the deep lost sea in which he swims.
“I’ve seen what you’ve written about me. You don’t have a chance against me, you little squirt. You’re dead, Sandy. You’re fucking dead.” He steps away and raises the gun.
“How are you going to explain this, Pete?”
“I caught you trying to escape. You’re a known criminal. I’m just doing my job.”
Every now and then we’re given the gift of clarity, and I have it now. Just as the essence of night is to hide, the essence of Pete Cooper is to destroy: He’s a negative force, it’s nothing personal; the hatred that possesses him is transcendental. Perhaps more than anyone in my life, he’s responsible for teaching me what I need to know. In this moment of understanding, I see him as perfect of his kind. Perhaps, even, I love him.
“Did you ever think, Pete, that you and I are part of one mind?”
He gapes at me, the rifle barrel wavers then steadies, his finger tightens on the trigger, but in that instant a large rock smashes through the window and strikes him down, and the bullet ploughs harmlessly into the ceiling.
“What’s the use of a fucking gun if you don’t fucking use it!” Winchell’s low brow and long ears poke through the hole in the glass. I pick up the rucksack in which I’ve stowed the revolvers and everything else I need. Pete is down for the count; blood swells from a long gash in his scalp. “He got the drop on me, Winchell,” I say.
“Fucking amateurs.” The head withdraws.
When I meet up with him outside, he pulls me into the shadows of some trees. We wait, stifling our breathing, until a soldier has walked briskly by. No one’s paid any attention to the disturbance. Perhaps they think it’s a signal? Then we’re on the move. We skulk through the cut hay fields along dark furrows to pillowy hay stacks; we zig and zag the long way through brush near the perimeter wall, then cut back from the west, across the marsh and to the pond. Kosho’s pond, where Karl waits, hunched over, in the bamboo stand. He’s too skinny and his shoulders won’t straighten even when he tries. When I greet him with a hand on the arm, he lefts his heavy head and I catch the glint of his glasses.
So it is that the threads join.
—
All the East Wing Russians are dead, but Winchell was able to tell the last of them—Kudikov—that the tide is beginning to turn against the Germans at Stalingrad. He knows this through his Spanish Civil War comrades who get the information straight from the horse’s mouth, that is, from the Party that gets it direct from someone who knows someone who knows Stalin. Who knows if the “source” can be trusted? But are you going to give bad news to a dying man? I have the Russians’ letters with me, wrapped in oilskin and tucked in an inside jacket pocket. I bring them out and take Karl’s arm with my other hand. Many dancing lights are beginning to converge on the swamp.
“We’d better go,” Winchell says.
“You really headed to Russia, Winchell?”
“You bet, Sandy.”
“Then you’d better take these.” I hand over the letters.
It’s a terrible thing to know that a tragedy is unfolding in front of you, and yet be unable to stop it. Personal tragedies are one thing—they’re a dime a dozen in a place like this—but it’s a whole other level to watch the world break up as you stand by helplessly. This is what’s on Winchell’s mind and what he talks about endlessly as we tramp the terrain. There’s the Spanish campaign he’s lived through—the grenade launchers sounding like birds as the Canadians crossed the Ebro in boats and on pontoons; they swam the mules and arrived at the encampment as the fascists were about to say Mass; and then a shell exploded in Winchell’s group killing all except him. He crawled away and found a cave where he hid until the barrage lifted, then he went up a hill where he was hit in the arm by a bullet and couldn’t lift his rifle. He could do nothing but lie there in the dry red earth. The smell of blood was everywhere; and anyway his Russian rifle had jammed.
“Thanks for the encouragement, Winchell,” I say. I’m puffing and out of breath. Moving Karl is like hauling logs.
“You’d better get the guns out, Sandy,” Winchell says.
We stagger on a little farther and I stop tugging on Karl’s arm. We’re on a ledge on one of the rocky hillocks that rise out of the marsh to form the ridge near the wall. Dry moss crumbles under our feet as I push Karl down to sit in the deeper shadows of a scraggle of stunted oak. I open the pack and hand the weapons to Winchell.
“Did you kill anyone in Spain?”
“I hope to Christ so, Sandy! What kind of fucking soldier would I be if I didn’t!” Then he’s on to the subject of Stalingrad—which is where he’s planning to go—and we’re edging forward again, trying not to pop up like sitting ducks on the skyline. There’s the occasional burst of gunfire as some fool in a patrol in the swamp lets off a burst at the waterfowl that start up in panic to get out of his way.
I’m moving Karl up the last of the slope, and I’m thinking about Georgina and whether I can reach her in time to help her with whatever she needs help with. Each breath could be my last. Each second of life beneath the starry sky means I’m born again. Time—this time—is a spider’s web of spectacular beauty. Me and Karl and Winchell—we’re like raindrops trembling in its threads. We’re not caught: This is only an instant of arrest in something more general: rain as it falls from the clouds to earth—like that—and the cycle renewed. I glance at the low half-fist of moon. Where did I, Sandy Grey, begin? Where did I come from? Is it a dream of that home—who knows, maybe the moon?—my true home that I’ve been chasing all my life? The puzzle and the longing and the lack inside me, is it simply what I’m made of, and nothing to do with my parents? Am I the
alien, the substitute, fallen out of the sky of nothingness to which all returns?
Well—as Ron would say, and I wonder if he’s one of them out there now, after us, under arms—these are not abnormal thoughts in the face of death. Your life flashes by: Alan Macaulay’s did; everyone’s does. There’s no stopping it.
Winchell rattles on: The city’s been smashed to smithereens; the Russians have thousands of men with no rifles and those who do have weapons possess no ammunition and the reinforcements have no maps—they don’t know the city’s blitzed terrain and the memory of streets is lost to all but archaeologists, or maybe to a new ice age or to experienced veterans like himself…. But even so, Winchell asserts, they’ll hold off the Germans when the tanks approach from two sides and fire at pointblank range and the Russian Maxims are blown up and they can’t see one another for smoke and dust.
We’re at the wall now. There’s a ping into the stone above my head and I shove Karl over and fall on top of him. Winchell squashes in next to us. I look up at the drunken stagger of trees—but it’s only me pitched aside on a tilt, and maybe the roaring of the hunt. For a moment I think myself into the safety of the Chinese quarters, and imagine I’m lying quietly on a wooden bunk, puzzling out the characters scrawled on the wall next to me. Wall scratchings, messages to the future—which has turned out, sadly, to be only me, Sandy Grey. The building’s made of stone, and concrete and wood. It will stand forever. Long after I’m bone fragments, like the makings of my father’s plaster.
Winchell’s still mumbling: The Germans appear next from behind their tanks and throw grenades in front of them, and the Russians catch them and throw them back. They can hear the enemy soldiers’ breath and footsteps but they can’t see them in the smoke; they fire at the sound.
Karl’s sweat has soaked through his shirt. He’s not said a word, and his eyes, when I catch their glint as he lies beneath me, are closed mouths—they say nothing. I lift my head: Barbed wire, broken glass and electric wire defend the top of the wall. How did we imagine we’d get over it? Is there a handy glider and a launching platform nearby, or are we to leap over, like Bob, with vaulting poles? But we have not trained for this moment! Beyond and below where we lie in our little stack against the wall—it’s a mountain from this point of view, with its implacable force that seems to reach sky high—I can see that emergency lighting now illuminates the asylum. Newly unmuzzled artillery points from behind the parapet. I recall my flight from the roof: What dreams Karl and I had had—we’d removed window bars, climbed to the roof, found a hidey hole, and in there, like gods, we’d fashioned our creation. I’d followed that one as far as it would go.
A truck screeches into the farmyard. Doors slam, dogs bay: We hear the crackle and shout of more men arming themselves with fury. They’ll have found Pete by now. If he’s conscious we’re condemned; if he’s dead, we’re dead.
Flames blaze from the farmhouse roof. “Christ, Winchell, the balloon’s really gone up now!”
“You and Karl take off, Sandy!” Winchell’s stuffing ammunition by the handful into his pockets. “You both better get the fuck out of here now!” His fingers jab at the fine scrawl of the deer trail that mirrors, so delicately, the base line of the wall. He’s on his knees, he pushes the revolvers into the waistband of his trousers. I coax Karl onto his knees and we begin to crawl. More pings smack the wall near us, then Winchell scoots away downhill and northward, returning fire as he runs—he’s fast, he leaps and bounds over the rough ground; he flops, as if nothing can get through that tough skin, into a nest of brambles. I glimpse—I swear to God I glimpse—Pete Cooper’s face on the other side of one of those marsh guns: He’s a chalk inflatable of skin and bandages rising up from the reeds.
By the time we come to the blown-out section of the wall, and Bob holds out his hands to pull us through the hole, Winchell is hunkered down hundreds of feet away on level upland, drenching our pursuers with gunfire.
At the end of time, my father said, there will be two kinds: the lost and the saved. The lost are damned to hell, the saved rejoice in heaven. At the last judgment, the dead will arise: The sheep will be parted from the goats, and those that are saved—the sheep, I suppose—will be those who fed the hungry, gave the thirsty a drink, took in the stranger, clothed the naked, visited the sick…. We cannot know which we are ahead of time—for what we see now we see through a glass darkly—but I know, in the deepest hidden part of myself, that Winchell, who has set us free, is one of the saved.
Bob’s lean young body is cocooned in black leather: His white face candles the dark; he’s chewing gum like there’s no tomorrow. “Where’s the Winch?” he says. I thrust Karl in his direction.
“Back there. He’s holding them off.” More tat-tat-tatting shots ring out.
“Jesus Christ!” Bob says. “What’ve you gone and done, set off a war?”
He starts up the motorbike, I lever Karl onto the seat behind him and wrap his arms around Bob’s waist. “Hold on tight, Karl!” Karl does, but he also turns his head and leans his cheek against my body a moment. Through my clothing I feel a pulse, a thread of intelligence in his skin. Something, someone in there, is still alive.
Bob revs the engine, I straighten Karl up, leap back and start running in the opposite direction down the far side of the ridge.
When I was a boy, I could run for miles. I’d head out from the house, some angry words or fashioned cruelty at my heels, and I’d outrun those knives. Out across the farm fields, over the cattle bridge where Heather and I once played, along paths, through dirt and grass, across the railway tracks, deep into the network of farm roads where, at night, only rabbits and deer travelled: I’d run right here, sweat washing me clean, on the road that is now under my feet. It curves into a triangle of low-lying fields, then climbs steeply into the hills.
This section of the hills is surprisingly clear of bush. My feet kick up gravel. I cut away onto another trail, heading northwest. The moon’s adrift over the woods, like a small barrage balloon fading into the inlet.
I slow down a little, anxious not to lose the way. After some hesitation, I single out the landmark of poplars at a dark farmhouse lower down, and I pick up speed; the cedars and firs spiral around me, the crowns and flames of trees send their energy upward; the lower branches have dropped away under shade. Light and light only can draw them away from the earth to the stars and whatever lies beyond them; as if the darkness needs their green. My heart pounds in pieces, its separate give and take of pulse.
Sandy! This is what you were made for!
The runner runs because he must. The prisoner is obliged to escape. The child loves the mother who gives him birth. I run, shadowed by the swish and swoop of an owl and the hanging froth of tree moss. The earth is dry, the leaves under my feet snap and crinkle. Everything has its cause and its effect, even the shallow pockets of soil that prevent the conifer forest from closing in; and I’ve found the trail that hems the lake.
I stop and splash cool water over my hands and face. The lake—seen from above, or on the map—makes the shape of a dove, its beak pointed straight to Georgina’s. This is as far as I’ve ever been. When I was a boy, at the end of my run, I’d jump in, rinse the sweat and salt from my body here, then turn back towards home. When I arrived, they’d say nothing, there’d be nothing in their faces.
My fingers trail in the water’s silk. When I plunge my arm deeper, a swirl of cold circulates its tendrils over my skin.
A nest of cabins inhabits the north end of the lake. I skirt these and search for the path of which Georgina has told me. She and her sister used to walk here from their house on the inlet when it was too cold to swim in the sea. I’ve tried to imagine Georgina as a girl, but I can’t. She sprang forth, for me, on the Brentwood, a fully formed woman. The trail unravels just where she said it would, a finger of moonlight along a rib. Swordfern and maiden fern gently waft the night air as I travel through the lush green of this hidden world. And my mother comes to mind: How it m
ust have been when as an infant, I was held in her arms and breathed in the scent of her milk. When I was as I was before; when she was as she was, before she became resentful and hardened. I no longer believe she was two women, as I’d thought for so long, but just one human being, saddened and broken by life with my father, also only a single, solitary person. It’s as if a record of this truth has been pressed deep inside me, its evidence beyond erasure, waiting for the right moment, the right amount of effort and darkness and transport, for it to resound in my memory. Now here it is.
The earth grows softer, piled deep with pine needles and moss; I’ve covered some distance and all the noise of battle has been left behind. I try not to think about what might have happened to Winchell. In that brief final glimpse of him, I’d seen him pull a red scarf from his pocket and tie it round his bicep…. I skid down a creek bank and into water. I stand still for a moment, then allow the pull of the current downstream to take me knee-deep into the flow. My feet test the way round boulders and over slippery crystallized igneous rock: I’m following the shaping of glaciers, as all the land, the lakes and the inlet towards which I’m heading have been carved by ice. In the bushes along the banks, small animals such as mice and salamanders rustle as they negotiate pathways through the twisted stems and glossy leaves of Oregon grape and salal, their progress parallel to mine. My heart thumps with fear and gladness because of this and of nothing more than that I, Sandy Grey, am still alive.
I’m doing fine. The single buttock of the moon has dropped from sight. I remember Winchell saying, “I’m the guy who gets to stand at attention with his hands covering his dick going Jesus, Mary and Joseph; the one who climbs from a shit-hole of a childhood to the shit-hole of Spain; from the scented crap-hole of the West Wing to the bloody dung pit of the East—that’s why I’m the guy who has to go to Russia to fight.” So I don’t believe it, I don’t believe they’ll get him: He’ll never give up.
What It Takes to Be Human Page 29