In the Wolf's Mouth (5 page)

Ed walked with Will towards the station, putting on a flat cap when light rain began to fall from the low unbroken clouds. The dismal, factual light looked to Will like something issued by the War Office. They walked together through the quiet coppice with the dogs snuffling at the ground and there they parted with a firm handshake. Will thought that Ed may have held onto his hand a fraction longer than necessary
and said, ‘Let’s not be silly about this. I’ll probably be back before you know it. There’ll probably be some administrative delays. There generally are.’

Ed put his hands in his pockets and called the dogs. ‘It’s all delays for me.’

Will smiled. ‘Nice for Mother, though.’

Ed hitched an eyebrow, saying nothing, then called the dogs again. They gathered, breathing, at his feet. Will petted them a final time and Ed turned to go, the dogs following after in a wide swirling train. Will watched his brother vanishing and appearing through the trees, slightly hunched, the rain pattering on his cap. Ed was heading home, sinking back into his place. Then Will turned himself and headed towards the station, out into the world and the war, and he was glad to be going.

2

On deck, out of sight, Ray had his notebook open and was trying to concentrate, to collect. It was difficult. The ship’s engines were loud and the wind thumped off the Atlantic making the corners of the pages buzz and blur. Ray became engrossed in that sight. When he was beat, which in the army was most of the time, he found these small impressions dilating in his mind and filling his attention. Often they brought with them forgotten things of his childhood. Back in training, at night, his body tired and tight, twitching into sleep, the blanket he lay under brought back exactly one he’d seen in a cowboy picture when he was small. In the scene, a cowboy placed the blanket over a sleeping boy, a small courageous boy who had followed him out on a journey and now lay in front of a fire. Ray had in his mind the exact weight of the blanket, the rounded, smooth solidity where it was folded over at the top and rested on the boy’s shoulder. Those few seconds of that movie had obviously gone deeply into him. He remembered how he’d imagined himself as that boy after he’d seen it – achieving that perfection of sleep, eyelids perfectly still, the blanket heavy and calm, the fire’s busy, watchful light in all that dark space. Sometimes waking in the Quonset hut he found himself lost in a still earlier time. He
expected to see in front of him his brother’s face puffed out with sleep or the hollow in the back of his neck, his sharp shoulder blades, before he woke up and got mean. Ray remembered waking in a new day and lying there in the peace before his brother was up, hearing his father pissing in the bathroom before leaving for the leather workshop, the husky sound of his sister Monica brushing her hair in the hallway, shouts and early traffic outside, pigeons grumbling on the window ledge, their shadows shifting.

In Ray’s notebook were written his ideas for movies, sometimes whole stories, sometimes single scenes or images, things he’d put in if he were making a movie. On some pages were drawings of exactly what he wanted to see on the screen, profiles of faces against backgrounds, landscapes, men walking between streetcars, between skyscrapers. He didn’t expect he ever could or would be but he loved inventing, was susceptible to deep reveries in which things occurred with the glossy smoothness and sureness of movies. He kept having these ideas, ideas he’d wanted to hang on to. Sometimes he wrote down actors’ names, people with the right mood in their faces for the characters. A while ago he’d bought this particular small notebook with a blue and white hardboard cover and he’d brought it with him to war where he expected many ideas to come to him. He held it open at a blank page beneath the left side of which he could see the ink of his last jottings. There was a complete scenario that he was pleased with, an idea for a picture about a boxer, a scrappy kid from the neighbourhood, maybe one of the tough kids his brother hung around with
on the corners getting into trouble until one day he wandered into a gym and found discipline, focus, ambition. Of course the boxer couldn’t separate himself entirely from his old ways and friends. In the lead-up to the big fight he gets caught up in a robbery and his trainer, an old guy, a real father figure, gives up on him and quits. The boxer almost gives up on himself also and has a wild night on the booze before pulling himself together, going it alone with guts and determination, and winning. Ray hadn’t yet decided if that was it or maybe even better would be that the old trainer is there at the fight, appearing in his corner after a brutal round, and tells him that he hadn’t given up on him but had said so to shake the kid into showing his real spirit and decency.

Ray liked that story because it was so complete, a very satisfying tale of a bad kid turning out to be good and kind. Every scene fell into place as soon as he started thinking about it. He had the entire picture in his head and could run it any time. That was the only place it would ever be. He had no idea how a picture got made and certainly didn’t think that someone like him would get to make one. He just loved the movies. Lots of people did, for sure, but not like him. Ray didn’t think they really got them in the same way. He’d sneak in through a fire escape and sit with his whole soul wide open in the darkness and filling with the characters, the silver and black, the music, the streets, interiors and landscapes, the camera winding its way through the world, seeing things. Other people there, eating and fooling around and puffing the projector beam full with curling smoke,
didn’t seem to get it. They were moved all right and they laughed but the scale of the magic, its possibilities, they didn’t think about that.

The other idea he’d had in his mind recently was a love story but for this he only had a scene, a beginning. He wanted to work out where it would go. All he had was this guy, a Fifth Avenue office type, smalltime and hard-working. Every day he eats his lunch in the same city park, on the same bench. This young secretary appears each day at the next bench, takes her sandwich out of a paper bag and eats it. They start greeting each other, little nods. They sit separately and take quick furtive glances. And one day they say hello and another day the young man plucks up courage and sits on her bench and they talk. Ray could see the girl, her face in the soft light of a close-up: chalk-white skin, sculpted hair, large intimate hopeful shining eyes. The man is handsome but not too handsome, ordinary really. They sit together and sparrows peck around their feet and old ladies with little dogs walk by. All the possibilities of the future surround them, leaning in close. It’s in the way they’re photographed, a hazy brightness, summer light hitting off them. She smiles and turns her head a half-inch and it means the whole world.

That was all he had.

Ray inhaled sharply. The cold ocean air shocked him awake. Now he was in the army, there was a moment of panic when he caught himself sinking into his imagination. He came to and was in actual fact on a warship heading for battle. True and unbelievable.

He’d opened his notebook because he thought he might use it like a journal, to record historic things and make observations about the characters he was meeting. There were plenty that fascinated him. The army had taken him from the cramped, complicated, disorderly world of his Italian neighbourhood and introduced him to the rest of America, to people like George.

Usually Ray kept himself to himself, hiding in the dark, preferring invisibility. He liked to be quiet and think. The army, then, was not a natural place for him. He could be seen all the time. Powerful, watching people shouted at him, making him run and crawl and stand thrusting himself upwards at attention and repeat things after them. Just shouting, ‘Yes, sir!’ was difficult for Ray. Flinging his voice out loud and clear made his heart race. Every day in the army there were terrors to confront. At night he fell fast asleep.

Back home, Ray’s brother was unpredictable and not a pleasant person and much more at home in the neighbourhood than Ray was. He had tough and aimless friends whose attention you did not want to attract. They knew precise ways to twist your skin and take your money from you. They would encircle you and dare you to do something. ‘Dare’ was not the right word – you had to do it or suffer some penalty. They enjoyed themselves. They were street life and that meant they were out there, in places you needed to be. Walking past, Ray could get from his own brother a cold, empty stare, sometimes a kind of malevolent indifference that was the best of it, other times an annihilation, a threat that made him sick to his
stomach. Ray hid from his brother and his friends, in different places and inside himself. Until the draft came and he was taken out of that place and put into one so raw and unfamiliar he started to miss home.

From his assumed position of invisibility, Ray looked out at the other men and found them fascinating. They came from all over, from worlds Ray had never seen. Some of them talked with him and Ray replied as best as he could. But there was something different about George. When George noticed him and spoke to him, Ray didn’t feel frightened. He was the opposite of his brother, the opposite of a bully. George was tall, mellow, a decent Midwesterner, the kind of American they put in propaganda films. He had a round-cheeked face, eyelids that hung at a slight diagonal down to the outer edges of his eyes and a small mouth. His neat ears, exposed by his crew-cut, were sometimes comical, sometimes sad. Gentle and unassuming, his easy way with friendly gestures had a powerful effect on Ray. The first time Ray really noticed this was at the end of an assault course. He crossed the line nauseous with effort. His lungs were a tight burning thickness that he couldn’t get air into. He bent double and drooled onto the ground. When he straightened up again, George winked at him. ‘Nice day for a stroll.’ Nothing clever or out of the ordinary. Just a little humour.

When they played cards together, the slow courtesy of George’s manners made Ray think of the real America that he came from, evenings spent talking softly and watching the sun set from rural porches. It was nice to get a feel of that. Ray thought that if you
put George in a cowboy picture, he would be the store owner who becomes the sheriff when the sheriff is shot, a man who just knows what is right and sticks to that.

In westerns Ray liked the huge skies. His own had been crowded by buildings, ranks of windows and zigzagging fire escapes, pigeons, laundry, faces. In the cowboy pictures the skies were barred with streaks of cloud or brilliantly hot and empty with hungry vultures spiralling through space. Under those skies the strong, simple stories, men moving with their animals.

Closing his buzzing notebook, hushing the pages together and fitting it back into his pocket, Ray squinted up at the sky. Being on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic, no larger sky was possible. A dome, it dropped round to horizon on all sides. Clouds made its colours similar to that of the troopship’s paintwork, sober greys and blues. The ocean churned beneath him. It was easy to think about eternity here, big things of life and death, in this fateful vastness, or if not to think about them at least to say their names. Time. Fate. Courage. Journey.

Ray returned to the noise and smells below decks. Most had stopped vomiting now but odours lingered in pockets, acrid with a tang of burned iron and bleach. When Ray first entered the ship it had reminded him of going down into the subway, that same flickering roar and riveted, heavy, hard-working metal. Ray walked past card games and letter writing, push-ups and smoking and comic book reading to find the boys of his squad. He found half of them together.

A conversation about women. Their shapes, their smells, sweetness and deceit, the variations across nationalities, whores, wives, girls. Women were so exhaustively discussed that Ray felt them almost materialising, wished into existence. Randall was on the subject of freckles, apropos of a girl he knew back home, and what amount of freckles was the right amount. This girl had the perfect number.

Floyd, squatting on his heels, said, ‘Sounds like everybody’d be wanting to fuck her. How many guys are hanging around her now, you reckon? Right now? I bet right now this kid ain’t even vertical.’

Randall leaned back and punched his shoulder.

‘What’s her address?’ Floyd went on. ‘Texas, by the beef cow by the cactus. That it? Maybe if I get a light injury I’ll go pay her a visit.’

Randall put his hand to the side of Floyd’s head and shoved. ‘You’ve got bad morals, boy. No wonder no woman ever touched you.’

Randall was a disappointing Texan. Ray had always imagined them as tall and square, squinting, sun-weathered. Randall had the look of poverty, grey and small. His body was tightly knit, with jerking reflexes. In his bleak wrists and the clever joints of his fingers, Ray saw Randall’s grip on things. Firing at the range, Randall produced the quick rhythmical
chuck-chuck
sound of a well-handled weapon. There were odd nicks like blows of a chisel in Randall’s scalp where the hair didn’t grow. Ray couldn’t remember what it was Randall did back home, probably because he was cagey about it. Most likely he was living on welfare. What he’d tell you was how great a pitcher he was,
how women shed their clothes for him or were devoted sweethearts. That was the army for you. Everyone was at it, being new men, lying freely, old selves left behind with their soft civilian clothes. Not George, though. He was honest, a Christian man who crossed his hands in front of his chest, bowed his head and concentrated when the padre said prayers.

‘You’re making that stuff up. You’ve seen that girl with, like, her boyfriend or something,’ Ray said. George smiled.

‘What are you talking about? Ignorant. Don’t know anything.’

‘So what’s her name?’

‘Daisy.’

‘Daisy?’ Ray laughed, emboldened by the flow of conversation. ‘I knew you was making it up. Daisy is, like, a cow you had or something. Why didn’t you even say something we could believe, Mary-Ellen or Elizabeth-May or something? Daisy.’