Overland

by Graham Rawle

  “Well, isn’t that why you’re here?”

  “I don’t want just a walk-on part; I want to show that I can act—say some lines.”

  “Go ahead. Say some lines.”

  “Swell. What do I have to say?”

  “Say whatever you like. No one will hear you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Sound is not a matter for consideration in the world I have created.”

  “A silent movie? You gotta be kidding. Nobody goes to see silent movies anymore. It’s bound to be a big flop.”

  “What makes you think this is a movie?”

  “You’ve got scenery, you’ve got costumes, you’ve got props, and you’ve got Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland and James Cagney.”

  George overplayed looking taken aback. “Is that who I’ve got? Wow. That’s quite a line-up. You seem to know a lot about it.”

  “I’ve got eyes.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep. And they see things pretty clearly.”

  George smiled wryly, happy to let her believe what she wanted. She was annoyingly pushy, but there was something about her he liked.

  They strolled together down Main Street. Queenie was quietly taking it all in—the stores, the houses, the trees. It was as if the individual scenic elements were gradually coming together in her mind and for a moment she seemed to relate to the place as a whole, to see the bigger picture.

  “Wow. You’ve got everything here.”

  George looked proudly about, as though seeing Overland through her eyes.

  “Yep. It’s all here. We’ve got a library, a church, a diner …”

  “A diner?”

  “Sure. Want to grab a donut?”

  “I ought to get back.”

  “So what do you do there?” said George. “Secretary or something?”

  “No, I’m a welder.”

  “A welder?”

  “Yeah. Welding. You know—a big electric sizzle that joins bits of metal together.”

  “Men’s work?”

  “Not anymore. Women are doing the men’s jobs now. Didn’t you know? All the men have enlisted; they want to fight for their country. Well, most of them do.”

  He caught the jibe. “Oh, I like to think I’m doing my bit.”

  “Really? But no uniform?”

  “Uniform doesn’t prove anything. You’re in uniform and I bet you’ve never led a marching band.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Can you really twirl that thing?”

  “That would surprise you, wouldn’t it?”

  “Can you?”

  Queenie answered reluctantly. “No.”

  “Why are you dressed like that anyway?”

  Lost for an answer, it suddenly struck her as funny and she laughed. “I don’t know.”

  George laughed too. For the first time Queenie’s guard was down and he found it endearing.

  “I thought I’d choose something that shows off my legs,” she said. “Most people say they’re my best feature.”

  George glanced at Queenie’s legs. She immediately responded by posing like a model, one foot in front of the other.

  “What do you think? Can you use a pair of legs like this?”

  George shook his head. “No, thanks. I’ve already got a pair of my own. They’d only get in the way when I run.”

  Down on the factory floor, Donaldson was interrogating Kay.

  Kay adopted an air of innocence. “I don’t know where she is. I told you, she had a lousy headache so she went to Sick Bay for some aspirin.”

  “I’ve just come from Sick Bay. She ain’t there.”

  “Maybe she went for a walk to get some fresh air.”

  “What are you givin’ me with the ‘fresh air’? You think I’m some kind of chump? I’ve just about had it with you two. First one, then the other. You barely do one job between you. You better buck your ideas up, the both of you, or you’re gonna be out on your cabooses. Savvy?”

  Queenie followed behind George along a narrow sloping walkway, just wide enough for one. The path was lined along each side by a makeshift handrail supported by a series of vertical wooden posts. A sign at the top of the path read, Do not stray from the walkway. The netting will not support your weight. Queenie leaned over the rail, peering down. Signposts such as this prompted her to return to her old, doggedly inquiring self, dismantling the broader Overland picture to scrutinize its individual components.

  “Is this just netting? What’s underneath this bit then?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing? There must be something.”

  “It doesn’t matter what’s underneath.”

  “How high up are we?”

  “We’re on top of the world.”

  “No, I mean in feet and inches.”

  “You’re not a very aesthetic person are you? I bet when you look at a beautiful painting you want to know how much the canvas cost. Your sort always want to take a look round the back of the magician’s cabinet to see how it’s done.”

  “I already did. There’s a secret panel in the back.”

  “Now why would you want to know that? Can’t you see what you’re doing? You’re spoiling a beautiful illusion for yourself.”

  MEANWHILE At the .22 caliber Automatic Rifle Range across the street from the Star Loan Office, where a sign invited the public to learn to shoot like a marksman, a woman in a green plaid coat entered, paid her 25c for seven shots, and with the first of them shot herself in the face. While speculating on the difficulty she would have had reaching the trigger from this position, police noticed that she had removed one of her shoes and concluded that she must have used her toe.

  George was both amused and irritated by the new visitor—the way she asked all the wrong questions, her refusal to see things from the correct perspective. Perhaps every visitor was like this at first, looking at Overland for what it wasn’t rather than what it was. He couldn’t honestly remember; the other Residents had been coming here for long enough to settle into what he considered the appropriate way of thinking. There may have been early niggling questions about the “pointless” street signs or the need for the laundry on the washing lines to be hung up and taken down again every day, but most succumbed to the Overland ethos surprisingly quickly. A handful of the construction workers had been difficult in the beginning: talking about baseball games and news stories from the outside; others complaining about the unavailability of hot food and wanting to know every last detail about the plumbing arrangements. They didn’t stay. Some had felt the need to offer criticism, like those square-thinking army blockheads deeming certain architectural features or botanical embellishments as “unnecessary detail,” as if it were their right to make such decisions. Some folks, George realized, would never “get it.” They wouldn’t make the grade in Overland and they shouldn’t try to be a part of it. Queenie, he thought, just might eventually get it. Her motives for wanting to be a Resident were at present shallow and self-serving, but he could tell from the way she sometimes looked at things that one day she would understand what Overland was all about.

  They had reached Lake Street and were walking up towards the lake itself.

  “All I’m saying,” she said, “is when a guy’s wearing a toupee, you can always see the edge where it joins. That’s what gives it away.”

  George disagreed. “If it’s a good hairpiece there is no edge to see; it blends right in.”

  “Trust me. I can always spot the edge.”

  “On a bad toupee … sure, that’s a cinch. But if it’s a good one, you don’t even know it’s there … because all you’re seeing is hair.”

  Queenie scoffed. “I’ve never been fooled yet.”

  “You don’t think so? How about Fred Astaire or Bing Crosby?”

  “Bing Crosby doesn’t wear a toop.”

  “Doesn’t he?”

  “You’re just making that up.”

  “How would you know?”

  “
I just know. I’d be able to spot the point of transition.”

  “Well, you’re wasting your time looking for the point of transition here. It’s so perfectly merged that even I can’t tell where Overland ends and the rest of the world begins. Sometimes I go home at night only to find that I’m still in Overland, that I haven’t been anywhere at all—I’ve just been hanging out in a different part of town.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “OK. Go ahead.” George threw out his hands. “Show me where the edge is.”

  “That’s different.”

  “No it isn’t. Overland is just one giant toupee sitting on the ugly balding head of Burbank, California. And let me tell you, a toupee is a tricky one to pull off. Making it look like real hair is easy; the difficult part is making it look like the other real hair. That’s the secret: blending the boundaries. Everyone’s looking for that telltale edge.”

  She looked around her, shaking her head. She touched the burlap foliage of a bush. With her toe she scooted back the corner of some green netting that formed a grass verge.

  “It doesn’t look too convincing.”

  “That, Miss Meyer, is because you’re standing right among the follicles. You can’t see the wood for the trees.”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re too close. You see this from a few hundred feet away—it looks exactly like the rest of California. You’d never spot the difference.”

  Queenie spluttered a derisive chuckle. “I think I would.”

  “Go ahead then. Where does it join?”

  Queenie pointed. “There behind that row of trees … where the ground changes color.”

  “Wrong.”

  “You seriously believe these trees look real?”

  “It depends where you are when you’re looking at them. They’re not designed for close-up scrutiny; these are strictly long-shot. What about those trees behind the barn? Do they look real to you or fake?”

  Queenie answered hesitantly. “I guess …”

  “Who do you think made them, me or God?”

  Queenie squinted into the distance. “I can’t tell the difference from here,” she said.

  They walked for a while.

  “Did you see the lake yet?” said George.

  “No, but I heard about it. It’s not a real lake though, is it?”

  “Sure it’s real.”

  “With water in it?”

  “What else are we going to put in a lake? Chicken soup?”

  They dodged the slow-moving traffic to cross the street and stood at the fence looking down at the blue tarp.

  Queenie let out a little snort. “Er, sorry to disappoint you, maestro, but that ain’t real water.”

  George ignored her remark. “You know I’m beginning to think that lake is enchanted.”

  “Enchanted?”

  “Enchanted. Like in a fairy tale.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Gimme a break.”

  “No, no. I’m deadly serious. The other day, there was this—I don’t know how to describe her—Lady of the Lake. She came out of the water. It was like a vision. I thought I must be dreaming.”

  “Maybe you were dreaming—or drunk.”

  “No, she was real.”

  “Well, then she must have been a factory worker, someone poking her nose in for a look-see.”

  “Factory worker? No, she was beautiful.”

  Queenie flounced. “Excuse me. I’m a factory worker.”

  “She was different. Sort of ethereal.”

  “Ethereal? What does ethereal look like when it’s at home?”

  George looked upwards, trying to summon the right words. “Soft, delicate features … porcelain complexion … with flowing dark hair. Like an exotic Eastern goddess … full of oriental mystery.”

  Suddenly it dawned on her. “Oriental? Wait a minute. You mean like a Jap?”

  “Nothing so specific, just like a tropical lotus blossom of loveliness.”

  “Lotus blossom?” She smiled drolly. “Tell me, you hadn’t by any chance been doing a little fishing that day—in your ‘lake’? You didn’t manage to catch any sardines—of the canned variety?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact … I wondered if there might be a connection.”

  “Well, well, well. So you’re Cary Grant? You could have fooled me.”

  “Do you know her?”

  “Sure. She’s this Jap girl, oh, pardon me, ‘person of Japanese ancestry’ who lives in my building. We work in the same section in the factory. She’s no Eastern goddess; she’s a welder.”

  “A welder?” George found this hard to imagine. “Are you sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Kay.”

  “Kay.” He savored the name for a moment. “K-a-y?”

  “Yeah. Yak spelled backwards.”

  “Bring her up here next time you come. I want to meet her properly.”

  “She can’t come up here. She’s not a Resident … like I am. If you want to meet her you’re gonna have to go down there … into the underworld.”

  George shook his head dismissively. “Can’t do that.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just can’t. I can’t go down there.”

  “What’s up? Wanted by the law?”

  “No, nothing like that. It’s just that …”

  “What?”

  George unhooked the Resident’s pin from his own lapel and handed it to Queenie.

  “Here. Give her this. Then bring her up here with you next time.”

  Queenie studied the coveted pin now lying in her palm. She had been wondering how she might get hold of one.

  “Well I guess I could give it to her. Won’t you be needing it?”

  He shook his head. “Not so long as I stay here in Overland.”

  “You’re going to live up here permanently?”

  He shrugged nonchalantly. “It suits me to be here.”

  Queenie looked down at the enamel pin, jiggling it around on the flat of her upturned palm. Slowly, her fingers closed around it.

  SEVENTEEN

  HOWARD FARMER WAS driving his tractor steadily back and forth along the rows of crops in his field. No one in Overland except George, and presumably Howard himself, knew what the crops were supposed to be, or what he was supposed to be doing to them, but this is what he did, day in, day out.

  The tractor trundled steadily from one end of the field to the other, looping about-face to continue back in the other direction—the agricultural equivalent of knitting. It provided a reassuring visual constant in the Overland community, seeming at once both leisurely and industrious.

  Queenie was on her way up to Overland. Today she had come ready for business and was carrying her portfolio. She really needed that fifty dollars.

  She was at the top of the stairs, about to climb the ladder to the trapdoor, when she saw Kay coming up behind her. Alarmed, she stepped down onto the platform, quickly scanning the factory to make sure they were not being watched.

  “What the heck are you doing here?” Queenie hissed. “How did you get past the guard?”

  “He left his post. A call of nature, I think; I saw him heading for the restroom.”

  “Left his post? You’re kidding. So you just walked straight up here?”

  Kay shrugged. “No one was looking so I—”

  “Do you realize how much trouble I’ve been to?”

  “I thought I’d come with you. To Overland.” Kay was carrying her lunch pail, like she was planning a countryside picnic.

  “I can’t take you up there, Kay. I’m not really supposed to be there myself. If I’m with you, people are going to start asking questions. You have to be what they call a Resident. They’ve got tight security.”

  Kay looked crestfallen.

  Queenie touched the pin on her blouse guiltily. “Maybe we can get you on the list. But for now you’d better go back down before you get into trouble.”

  “If you
see the fisherman,” said Kay, “would you give him a message from me?”

  “The fisherman? You mean your Cary Grant guy?”

  She nodded, a little bashful. Queenie was quick to pick up on it.

  “Oh, it’s like that, is it? Eyes meeting across a blue lagoon.”

  “It’s silly. I just …”

  “His name’s Mr Godfrey … and I don’t think he’s much of a fisherman.” She looked at Kay’s face and could see that she was smitten. “OK. Where’s the message?”

  “Oh. I don’t know. Say hello, I guess.”

  “That’s it? Hello?” She was expecting a note, something written down. “OK. I’ll tell him. Now scram before Donaldson sees you.”

  As Queenie began to climb the ladder, Kay made her way down again. But as she neared the foot of the staircase, she saw that the one-armed man had returned to his post; there was no way to get back past him without him seeing her. She froze, feeling exposed and vulnerable. With nowhere on the staircase to hide, she was trapped in limbo, unable to move either up or down.

  Below her on the factory floor, Kay could just make out Donaldson; two soldiers with clipboards were approaching him. She watched anxiously. They looked like military police. One of them said something to Donaldson, but he couldn’t hear above the racket of the heavy factory machinery. He cupped his ear and leaned in. One of the soldiers pointed to something on his clipboard. Donaldson nodded and quickly scanned the factory floor. Identifying his target, he pointed out two Asian women working side by side at a bench on a panel-forming production line. One of the soldiers approached, and beckoned them to accompany him. The women seemed to know what it was all about; there was a look of resignation at being caught. As the soldier led them across the factory floor Donaldson turned away, distancing himself from his treachery.

  Queenie emerged from the Orpheum movie theater in a stately-looking nineteenth-century silk dress edged with lace. According to its label the dress had been made for Deanna Durbin. Underneath her name was the word Countess. It was a little fussy for Queenie’s taste, but its wide, full skirt skimmed over any inconsistencies of form. She’d had her eye on a cute cowgirl outfit—a Western style satin shirt with shimmering silk fringes—but found that in the tight skirt that went with it her tummy stuck out like she’d bust her girdle after an all-you-can-eat buffet. In truth the new bulge was barely noticeable, but this outward physical reminder of the baby’s growing presence, compounded by morning sickness, was creeping her out. She had to find the dough to pay Dr Young.