Overland

by Graham Rawle

  Effie distractedly straightened her uniform. “Uh-huh.”

  “Not too easy mind.”

  Effie nodded, humoring him. “Uh-huh.”

  “And … let’s see … how about some buttermilk pancakes? Are the pancakes specially light and fluffy?”

  “Pancakes are off today. Sorry.”

  “Oh. Well, that’s OK. I’ll just—”

  “Oh, and you know what? We’re all out of bacon too.”

  “Gee. No bacon, huh? How about the—”

  “Uh-uh. Chickens stopped laying. Must have gotten spooked or something.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad. Poor things.”

  She stared back at him for a moment before pointing to the tray on the counter. “I’ve got donuts,” she said brightly.

  “Ah. Donuts! Now why didn’t I think of that?”

  “And coffee?”

  “Perfect.”

  The guy sitting at the next stool glanced up from his own coffee, snorting a little chuckle. He enjoyed this daily routine as much as George did.

  George took a donut while Effie poured coffee into a paper cup.

  “You oughta eat something proper once in a while,” she said.

  “I would if you ever had anything else on offer.”

  “Can’t live on donuts. No good for your digestion. You need to keep yourself regular.”

  “I’m here three times a day, Eff. Can’t get more regular than that.”

  “Hm. Smart Alec. How about an apple?”

  “Apple?”

  “Sure,” she said. “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”

  He checked the counter. “I didn’t know you had apples.”

  “I don’t. This is one I brought from home.”

  She ducked below the counter, reappearing holding a shiny red apple.

  “Take it. You’ll feel the benefit.”

  “Apple, huh? OK, Effie. You win.”

  George tossed it up into the air, letting it land with a satisfying slap in his palm. He studied the apple, admiring its bright color.

  “I was thinking of putting in an apple orchard behind the library. You think that would look nice—the red against the green of the leaves?”

  Effie rolled her eyes.

  “You know,” he said, “Delacroix loved using red and green.”

  “Della who?”

  “Never mind.”

  Effie’s attention lingered absently on the apple; it was the perfect opportunity for George to practice his sleight of hand. He pretended to snatch it from his open palm while secretly retaining it in the original hand. He showed her his empty hand with a hey presto flourish. He’d gotten pretty good at this maneuver, but Effie must have glimpsed the apple in his hidden hand. She pointed at it with a discerning finger. Palming such a large object was hard—unlike a coin or matchbook, which could be easily ditched in a pocket or up a sleeve.

  Muriel had never been keen on the art of illusion and misdirection. When he was first practising the basic coin vanish he had tried to use her as his audience. Having deftly made the pass, he would offer both fists for her to guess which of them contained the coin, but she would never play along. She thought magic was ‘silly’. By her reckoning, the coin was bound to be in one hand or the other and she frankly didn’t care which.

  He had once seen an amazing trick performed by a magician hired to mingle with guests at one of the MGM parties. With dazzling dexterity, he had vanished a coin from George’s open palm without ever touching it. George neither saw nor felt it go. The magician turned over both of his own hands and tugged back his sleeves one by one to show that the coin was not hidden there. It was the most astonishing thing George had ever seen. Even Muriel was impressed.

  Keen to know the secret, George asked him to perform the trick again so that he might take a closer look, but he wasn’t prepared to do that. I bet you’re using some kind of magnet, aren’t you? George had suggested. There was no evidence of any such device, but it was the only explanation he could think of.

  The magician shook his head slowly, dismissing George’s pitiful line of inquiry.

  “ I haven’t got the coin,” he said. “You saw. I didn’t even touch it.”

  “Where did it go then?”

  “That’s just it. It didn’t go anywhere.”

  George was perplexed.

  The magician explained. “You’re thinking of it all wrong. I didn’t make the coin disappear; I merely made it so that you can’t see it anymore. It’s still there in your hand.”

  It was obviously just a line of patter that went with the trick, but the idea stayed with George for days. From time to time he would find himself fingering the palm of his hand, trying to detect some trace of the vanished coin.

  Though only a short walk from the busy town center, the area surrounding Overland Lake was a secluded haven of calm. George sat enjoying the view from one second he thought he caught a whiff of Muriel’s perfume. He had assumed the Overland air had eradicated his clothes of it completely, but somehow it seemed to linger. He sniffed his sleeve. Nothing. Perhaps he was imagining it.

  George took off his sports coat, folding it neatly and placing it on the ground behind him for a pillow. Satisfied, he lay down and closed his eyes.

  A deep, thrumming drone, at first reassuringly hypnotic, began to pervade the peace. The sound built in intensity to a reverberating roar until the huge dark form of a B-17 bomber suddenly burst through the horizon, like a monster emerging from the depths of the earth. The plane climbed, banking to its left, away from the lake, the sound from its engines opening into a thick, throaty snarl before gradually fading to nothing.

  George sat up, troubled, not by the plane but by something lumpy his head had detected in the improvised pillow. Rummaging through the folds of the fabric for the pocket opening, he produced the apple that Effie had given him. Again he went through the motions of the illusion, trying to figure how he could more convincingly hide it. He would have to practice more in front of a mirror.

  He pulled a switchblade from his pants pocket, pressed the button to release the blade and prepared to cut himself a slice, but as the knife made contact, the apple slipped from his grasp and tumbled towards the lake. Once it reached the water’s edge there was nothing to stop it. George scrambled to his feet, but he was too late. He looked on helplessly as the apple rolled across the smooth rubber-coated surface of the lake, heading towards the drainage aperture at its center where it was sucked into a spiraling rotation of ever decreasing circles before finally disappearing from view.

  FOUR

  INSIDE A VAST factory building, the busy commotion of the construction industry was underway. Some parts were taking a familiar shape—a wing or a section of fuselage—but the majority of the work was carried out on vital but unidentifiable components of a yet-to-be assembled aircraft. Many of the workers were women—dressed in industrial workwear with their hair bundled up in headscarves, some wore thick leather-rimmed safety goggles. Crane operators high in the rafters hoisted sections of skeletal framework over assembly lines of punch presses, lathes, sheet-metal-forming benches. The din was relentless—clanking, popping, screeching drills, buzzing grinders and hissing hydraulics.

  One young woman had squeezed herself into the cramped space inside the shell of a half-completed aircraft wing. Another woman shot rivets through the skin of the wing while she held her bucking bar to flatten out the tail on the inside.

  It was grueling work, but everyone seemed motivated, not just to meet their targets but to exceed them. It was a scene that could have been created for a recruitment propaganda film, but here the workers’ commitment was genuine. A banner stretched high above them reflected their determined spirit: Production—Let’s step it up!

  Through the factory came a small truck loaded with machine parts, driven by a skinny guy wearing a cap with a long peak like a mallard’s bill. He weaved his way between the production lines, spinning his wheel to turn a tight corner into the yard outsid
e. Bathed in a cool blue light filtered from above was a row of parked trucks and forklifts. The driver tootled past them, the contents of his trailer rattling and shaking as the rear wheels shimmied on the uneven ground. He turned sharply again and disappeared round the corner of the building.

  There was a moment of stillness before, out of nowhere, something dropped from high above and exploded with a sudden smack on the ground. Like an asteroid striking an uninhabited part of the earth’s surface, there was no one around to witness the event. The missile was, or at least had until that moment been, an apple. Collision with earth had pulverized its flesh into a pale yellow pulp. As evidence there were scattered seeds and shiny red fragments of skin, its juices still fizzing from the impact.

  FIVE

  QUEENIE HAD BAGGED herself a window seat halfway along the bus. Above her on the luggage rack were the two suitcases, her fur coat and portfolio, the latter now held together with a makeshift luggage strap made from a dress belt. On the vacant seat beside her sat her Royal Stewart tartan box purse with a cut-steel clasp and rope-leather handles. It looked like something for transporting small consignments of Scottish shortbread.

  A magazine lay open across her knees at a feature charting Myrna Loy’s rise to stardom. Inspired by the star’s success story, Queenie unconsciously nodded with quiet determination.

  Queenie had modeled her look on a variety of film stars. Her hair was styled the way Betty Grable might wear it: swept up and perched on top of her head in a neatly coiffed nest of curls. Her lips were full and slick with crimson—influenced by Hedy Lamarr—her eyelashes were darkly mascaraed and she had Garbo-esque eyebrows penciled in high, arched wings. Her skirt, cinched by a wasp-waist patent leather belt, was worn with a white blouse—perky and neat with puffed short sleeves and a low-fronted flounce of frills.

  She touched her hair and ran her finger over her front teeth to check for lipstick. Taking a powder compact from her bag, she flipped open the mirrored lid and held it in front of her, checking first her lips and teeth and then, turning her head this way and that, took in the rest of her face for a general survey. She deftly snapped the lid shut and returned the compact to her bag with the practiced hand of someone who carried out this inspection routine a hundred times a day.

  A man in the seat opposite was ogling her. She attempted to curb his enthusiasm with a dismissive glance, but it didn’t take. He removed his hat and laid it on the vacant seat beside him. Leaning a little in her direction, he gestured at the magazine she was reading.

  “You in the movie business?”

  Queenie didn’t look up. “I’m working on it.”

  “Are you a movie actress?”

  “No, I’m a welder, but like I said, I’m working on it.”

  “You? A welder? Don’t make me laugh.”

  She replied dully: “OK. I’ll try not to.”

  With that, she coolly flicked over a page in her magazine and returned her attention to it. The man was left high and dry.

  On a long, straight road, Kay stood at a bus stop, peering into the distance in anticipation of the bus’s arrival. Up ahead a young man was nailing a piece of paper to a telegraph pole. She watched distractedly. He put the hammer back into his shoulder bag and mounted a motorcycle parked at the roadside. The engine growled into life and the bike dawdled towards her, the rider’s feet hovering above the surface of the road, like training wheels. The bike slowed again, drawing into the curb beside her.

  The man wore thick denim work pants and an open-neck shirt, sleeves rolled high on his tanned, sinewy arms. He dismounted and flipped the kickstand, then approached the telegraph pole beside Kay, pulling his hammer and a flyer from his bag. She stepped aside to allow him clear access to the pole and they exchanged courteous smiles as strangers sometimes do. He grabbed a handful of tacks from his back pocket and quickly secured the flyer. She noticed the seat of his pants was stained with red paint. He returned to his motorcycle, kicked the starter and coasted along to his next port of call.

  Curious, Kay stepped forward to take a look. The flyer announced the sale of a motorcycle, a 1936 Harley Davidson EL—presumably the one he had been riding. Her eye was drawn to the poster displayed above it, this one bigger, sturdier and more emphatic in its proclamation. Heavy block type set the tone: Instructions to All Persons of Japanese Ancestry.

  She had, of course, seen the sign before. It had been posted at various locations across the city and for the past month the announcement had regularly appeared in all the local newspapers. She edged uneasily closer, in the futile hope of discovering some overlooked loophole, some detail that would make her exempt. She anxiously skimmed over the paragraph outlining the exclusion area, her eyes flitting between sections of text.

  The Civil Control Station is equipped to assist the Japanese population … provide temporary residence elsewhere … transport persons and a limited amount of clothing and equipment to their new residence … Evacuees must carry with them on departure for the Assembly Center … bedding and linens (no mattress) for each member of the family … Toilet articles … No pets of any kind … No personal items and no household goods … All persons of Japanese ancestry, whether citizens or non-citizens, will be evacuated from the above area by twelve o’clock noon, Sunday, May 10th, 1942 … Instructions Must Be Observed … The head of the family, or the person in whose name most of the property is held, and each individual living alone, will report to the Civil Control Station to receive further instructions. This must be done between 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. on Tuesday, May 5th, 1942.

  Her stomach churned. The 5th was tomorrow.

  MEANWHILE In the garden of a bungalow on Overland Main Street two limp shirts pegged by their cuffs to a washing line swayed in the breeze like lazy trapeze artists.

  The bus pulled up, so she stopped reading and stood in line. She would pretend, she decided, that she hadn’t seen the notice.

  The door opened and a couple of other passengers boarded. Climbing onto the platform steps after them, she heard the cheerful driver greeting each of them with a hearty “thanking you ma’am,” and “thanking you, sir” as they paid their fares. But when Kay put her coin in the slot, the driver said nothing. He threw the bus into gear and pulled away.

  Though crowded, there were several vacant aisle seats, all occupied by shopping bags, parcels or coats. Kay hovered near one or two of them, hoping that the passengers would reclaim their belongings and give her a place to sit, but all of them ignored her, and the belongings stayed put. Queenie looked up distractedly for a moment and then returned her attention to a feature on why girls fall in love with Robert Taylor. The chatty man in the seat opposite betrayed a chink of weakness by glancing nervously at Kay. Quick to spot the possible opening, she homed in on him.

  “Excuse me. May I sit here?”

  He stared straight ahead, suddenly deaf to her words. She became more insistent.

  “Excuse me. Your hat. Would you mind moving it?”

  The man sitting in the aisle seat in front of Queenie was more forthright.

  “There’s a sign here.” He jabbed at it aggressively with his finger.

  She’d seen the sign before—a personal message to “her people,” presumably erected by the driver. She didn’t need to look.

  “There are no seats at the back of the bus.”

  “Then either stand, or get off and walk.”

  Queenie took an interest in what had been going on and piped up.

  “Hey, sister. Over here.” She moved the tartan purse onto her knees. Kay quickly slipped in beside her. She turned to her savior, hoping to make some connection, but Queenie was already back with her nose in her magazine.

  “Thanks. I only asked him to—”

  Without looking up, Queenie cut her short. “Save it. I heard what you said.”

  After a pause, Kay tried again. “Actually, I’m an American citizen.”

  Queenie was still reading. “Congratulations.”

  The bus continued
on its journey. Kay glanced at Queenie’s magazine. Something caught her interest and she cocked her head a little to read the article over-the-shoulder style. Queenie turned her head to challenge her with an inquiring look. Caught in the act, Kay stared purposefully at the back of the head belonging to the rude passenger in front of her. The wrinkles on his neck suggested a man in his sixties, yet he boasted a surprisingly youthful head of hair. She studied the damp and wispy graying hair at the nape of his neck and compared this with the luxurious thatch of shiny chestnut hair that met it halfway up.

  Queenie had been following Kay’s studious gaze and now their eyes met. Queenie raised her expressive brows and wiggled her scalp back and forth so that her hair seemed to move of its own accord. Kay tittered shyly and her response made Queenie chuckle.

  Queenie glanced out of the window to see where she was, checked herself in the compact mirror once more and then, as the bus slowed, gathered up her belongings and pulled herself to her feet. Kay stepped nimbly aside to let her pass.

  As she moved into the aisle, Queenie raised her elbow and deliberately lurched towards the aggressive man, dragging her handbag clumsily over his hairpiece as she passed. The man collapsed forward in his seat, trying to avoid the assault, but it was too late; the toupee had shifted forward on his head. Queenie followed up with her elbow for good measure.

  “Oh. Pardon me, sir. So sorry.”

  The man, flustered and red-faced, quickly adjusted his wig.

  Queenie smiled sweetly. “My bag, it caught on the … So sorry. I hope I didn’t—”

  The fuming man waved her away.

  She glanced at Kay and wiggled her scalp once more before moving off down the aisle. Kay slipped back into the seat. Delighting in the man’s humiliation, she watched him nervously fingering the back of his head.

  Sliding closer to the window she looked out at the street, suddenly realizing that this too was her stop. She jumped up as the bus pulled in to the curb. Queenie was first to exit as the doors opened, followed by a handful of other passengers who went their separate ways. When Kay alighted, Queenie was already a couple of houses ahead of her. Kay followed at a discreet distance, but Queenie quickly became aware of the footsteps behind her keeping in synch with her own. She turned to confront her stalker.