The Wreckage (20 page)

“You fellows going to join up?” he said. He wiped at the line of perspiration across his upper lip and smiled. “Nothing like a uniform to the ladies, I guarantee.” He shook his square head. “A whiff of overseas and they want to make sure you get a proper send-off. I’m chafed sore.”

After the tavern closed they were invited along to a house party on George Street. Soldiers again and a dozen local girls, the air blue with smoke. A gramophone in a corner was scratching out show tunes. Bottles of Old Sam on a rickety card table. “Bees to honey,” Kent said, indicating the mix of uniforms and young women.

Hours later, Billy-Peter leaned over Wish where he sat in a chair by the gramophone. “It must be close to light,” he said. “The old man will want to be setting for home.”

The girls in the room were just starting to surrender items of clothing, the soldiers had stripped down to their undershirts. It seemed the wrong time to be leaving. But he said, “All right,” and got to his feet to follow Billy-Peter out. They had to step back against the wall at the door to let a handful of arrivals go past them. Wish barely glanced at the newcomers, and he and Billy-Peter were halfway to the harbour before the face of the man with the waxed moustache registered. Hiram Keeping.

He made some lame excuse—he’d left his handkerchief behind, he said—and told Billy-Peter he’d catch him up. Already with it in his head to see about hooking up with Hiram. To stay behind in St. John’s for good.

If they hadn’t happened into that tavern full of soldiers. If Kent hadn’t invited them along to George Street that night. If Hiram hadn’t come through the door at that precise moment. If not for that goddamned moustache. There was no pattern or design to it all that he could make out. But he picked at the patchwork of seams in the fabric until he managed to fall asleep.

By the fourth night he was severely dehydrated and his head was ringing with the lack. The inside of his eyelids felt like sandpaper. He worked his mouth unconsciously, trying to manufacture a little saliva. Could hear the dry-leather sound of Harris and Anstey at the same activity, even when they slept. He dreamt of water in all its forms, rivers and rattling brooks, rain guttering through city streets, lakes and deep black-water ponds on the barrens. He filled his cupped hands and dream glasses and dream tankards, drinking them down one after another and no relief to be had from the exercise. Each time he woke from those dreams he broke down and wept in a low, dry wail that seemed somehow unconnected to him. As if it was the night itself that was keening.

Hunger was a physical strain, a weight he had dragged around for years now and sometimes managed to forget he carried, drunk or asleep. But four days of thirst just about undid him.

Sometime before light Wish woke to find someone crouching outside the cell. He pushed himself up on his elbows. “Who is it?” he said.

“Osano.”

“Water,” he said.
“Mizu.”
He crawled to the bars.
“Mizu.”

Osano shook his head.
“Asa,”
he said.

“Fuck
tomorrow,”
Wish whispered. He tipped his hand to his mouth repeatedly. “A drink.
Mizu.”

“Asa,”
Osano repeated apologetically and he stood up then and left.

They were released after the morning roll call and none of them could manage to stand straight. A distant drone of aircraft passing overhead, American bombers far enough away that no one in the camp even glanced up. Anstey had been delirious through most of the previous night, talking gibberish to himself. Wish and Harris put their arms around him as they crossed the square, the heat of the fever burning through his shirt. They hobbled unsteadily back to the barracks in a hunch, like three decrepit old men. The sound of the explosions reaching them from miles off as the planes dropped their ordnance on targets around Nagasaki.

“The Yanks better get a move on now,” Harris said. “Or we’re done for.”

Wish was still thinking about Osano’s visit. The civilian had managed to parlay his involvement in the moonshining into some influence over the interpreter. Which had been enough to keep them from being killed outright or left to die in the cells. He tried to say something reassuring along those lines to Harris but his tongue was too dry and swollen to form the words.

MERCEDES

T
HEY LEFT THE CROWDS
behind on the downtown streets, walking up past the Battery to Signal Hill. Passed Dead Man’s Pond on the right, the dank smell of standing water just off the road. Trucks filled with soldiers laboured by them occasionally, the men singing drunkenly or shouting as they passed, the truck slowing beside them and the soldiers reaching their hands to offer a ride. But Mercedes preferred to walk.

Church bells had pealed out over the city mid-morning, the ships in the harbour sounding their whistles and sirens, cars driving through the streets with their horns blaring. Hiram closed up his shop and ran outside with only one arm of his coat on and his hat in his hand and he left Mercedes behind when she stopped at the Bashas’ store. The front door was already locked and she went around to the back entrance, let herself into the kitchen, where a celebration was under way. The Basha family and most of the other Lebanese in the city crammed into the space, several huge pots simmering on the stove, a bottle of rum open on the table. Rania hugged Mercedes and kissed her on both cheeks and everyone in the kitchen—men, women and children—stood to take their turn.

They left the house in the afternoon and set off down Prescott toward the waterfront, where thousands of others lined the streets. Flags and bunting were hung from the buildings and people leaned out the open windows above the sidewalks. Long cheers rippled through the crowd, spontaneous renditions of “God Save the King” and the “Ode to Newfoundland.” But Mercedes felt strangely subdued for all the commotion and fuss.

In the early evening she slipped away from the Bashas and wandered up toward the Kirk. At the top of Long’s Hill she caught sight of another gathering on the pavement, traffic backed up in both directions. She walked halfway up the hill before she heard the sound of his trumpet. Easily a thousand people surrounded him to listen. Mercedes had never gotten used to the crowds in St. John’s, the anonymous crush on the streets, the physical intimacy of it. Even walking among so many strangers was an unpleasantness for her. She covered her mouth and nose with her hand to mask the smell of them as she jostled her way toward the open circle of pavement where Johnny Boustani stood.

He wore his uniform but his head was bare. The evening was unusually warm and beads of sweat stood out on his face. He played “If Stars Could Talk” and “Breezing Along with the Breeze,” the crowd raising their hands in the air to applaud between numbers, and he bowed twice without taking the instrument from his lips, already moving into the next song. The concave arch of his spine like a strung bow when he reached for the upper register. He turned slowly as he played, so the music travelled to all points of the compass. He caught sight of Mercedes finally and broke off to drag her into the open space, kissing her full on the mouth as people cheered him on. She could smell alcohol on his breath, which surprised her, she had never known Johnny to take a drink. She backed off quickly, shouting at him to keep playing.

The impromptu concert continued another twenty minutes until two policemen pushed into the centre, waving the crowd on their way to clear the street for traffic. Johnny packed up his trumpet and stood looking at Mercedes. He shrugged awkwardly, embarrassed to have made a spectacle of himself or to be caught drinking or to have kissed her so brazenly.

“I felt like playing,” he said.

“Take me up to Signal Hill, would you?”

It was nearly dusk and as they walked east they had to work against a swelling crowd heading to the railway station to meet members of the 5th Regiment arriving on the night train. People shook Johnny’s hand as they passed, stopped to offer the soldier a snort from a bottle or flask. Mercedes could tell from the reckless way he threw his head back, the way his Adam’s apple pistoned the alcohol down his throat, that Johnny was drunk. But he was her guarantee she’d get access to the Hill.

They found rowdy groups of American soldiers at the foot of Cabot Tower, singing together, laughing. Total strangers embraced them as they arrived, pressing drinks on them. The men slapped Johnny’s back so hard he almost pitched forward onto his face, recovering his feet in time to brace for the next blow. Mercedes stepped out past them all into the dry grass and picked her way down the hill to the Battery standing on a promontory directly above the Narrows.

This had been a favourite walk of hers in the summers, after she’d discovered that Johnny Boustani’s company was enough to satisfy the patrols of military police who might question her presence on the Hill. She’d stayed up here for hours sometimes while Johnny sat in the grass and sang softly to himself, the subterranean thrum of the city drifting up to them from the dark below. Distant traffic, voices shouting in the streets, laughter. Weak stains of light leaking through the hooded headlamps of cars.

She heard footsteps coming through the grass toward her but didn’t turn away from the view.

“Thought I’d find you here,” Johnny said.

“I was sure they’d have the lights back on. Why are they keeping it dark?”

He put an arm over her shoulder to point out the lights near the west end of the harbour. “They’ve got the railway station lit up for the 5th Regiment.”

She’d come up here hoping to see the city shimmering, incandescent, like a creature restored to health after a long, devastating illness. The war in Europe was over. There should have been deck lights blazing on the ships at anchor and lights terraced up the bowl of hills surrounding the harbour, like berries clustered on a bush of darkness. “This must be the only place in the Commonwealth still blacked out,” she said. The disappointment made her chest ache.

“This place is nothing,” Johnny said. “You should see Boston at night. New York.”

“I bet they’re beautiful,” she said softly.

“They are.” He paused. “Though not so much next to you.”

Mercedes eased a step away from him. “How much have you had to drink, Johnny Boustani?”

“Can’t a man have a little fun, Mercedes? The war’s over, for Pete’s sake.”

“It’s not over for everybody,” she said. “Not yet.”

She had been living above Hiram’s shop since the early fall of 1942, in the same rooms Wish had occupied before lighting out for Halifax and then England. She moved in around the same time he was steaming toward the tropics aboard the
Wakefield
. There was something in not knowing where he was headed that made her feel she was losing him, and she took the rooms at Hiram’s to offset that sense. For the comfort of sleeping in the same bed he’d slept in, of sitting in the same chair at the same window while she read his letters, of looking out on a view he knew by heart.

She worked days in the shop to pay her rent, keeping accounts at first and other small matters of paperwork, eventually learning to run a projector, making five dollars in an afternoon showing movies at children’s birthday parties in the merchant homes on Circular Road. She assisted Hiram in taking portrait photographs when he was working in town, although he would never allow her into the darkroom where he developed the prints. It was a converted sewing room, the window blacked out and the doorframe sealed against light from the hall.

“It’s unseemly,” he said, “for a man of my position to be in such close and closed quarters with a girl of your station.”

“What does my station have to do with your quarters?”

“You know how people talk.”

It was the same argument he’d made when she’d proposed renting the rooms. “You aren’t afraid of living alone here?” he’d said. “With me?”

“You’re harmless enough.”

Hiram’s face went dark. “You don’t know a goddamn thing about me, little miss,” he said. “Don’t forget that.”

She knew from Wish that Hiram lost his “nature” to alcohol long ago. His sense of propriety was all show, but she’d hurt his pride. She said, “My father taught me how to look after myself around your kind.”

Hiram’s residence was passed on to him by his parents and was large enough to house a dozen or more in a pinch. Thousands of people had moved to the city since the start of the war for the jobs on the army bases and the docks, and accommodations were nearly impossible to come by. There were those who suggested Hiram’s living alone in the circumstances was somehow unpatriotic, and Mercedes guessed he let her move in partly to blunt that criticism. But he held firm on keeping her out of the darkroom and she was happy to let him have this smaller, symbolic victory.

As he predicted, people talked. She was Hiram’s illegitimate child from some ancient outport affair, come to track down her father. She and Hiram were secretly married. She was pregnant with Hiram’s child. “There’s no imagination to gossip,” Hiram said when he reported the rumours to her. “It’s the same old thing, over and over again.”

She was surprised to discover she enjoyed Hiram’s company, not least because he had an endless supply of anecdotes about the Southern Shore and many of those involved Wish in some way. When he was sober Hiram had little to say about him, as if he was afraid he might contradict some story Wish had already told about himself. But he was rarely sober and never for long.

Hiram’s favourite story about Renews: The first night he showed a movie at Kane’s store he set up the projector and went off to Tom Keating’s after a drink. When he wandered back two hours later, the room was packed with people sitting on the chairs and lobster pots and boxes they’d carted with them for seats. And every last person in the audience sat facing the projector at the back of the room. “Wish too,” Hiram said. “It made sense in a way, I guess, that’s where the
machine
was. That’s where you’d expect it all to happen.”

There was a note of condescension in Hiram’s opinions of everyone and everything from the outports, even when it was admiration he felt. As if he was praising a slightly retarded child.

His one real pleasure besides drink was gambling. He wagered bets on anything he could find a taker for. When the spring ice would block the harbour and how long it would stay. The date of the first snowfall of the year. In March, horse races were run on the ice at Quidi Vidi Lake, the animals who hauled groceries and coal and milk through the city pitted against one another and occasional challengers from the outports. Hiram was rumoured to have won hundreds of dollars on the outcomes. Easy money, he called it. “The Protestants won’t be seen to bet against a Protestant horse, not to save their lives. And the micks are the same. But I got no qualms either way,” he said. After taking a bet from an easy mark he rubbed his palms together and whispered, “The Lord hath delivered him into my hands.”

Mercedes didn’t understand this addiction of his and told him so.

He cocked his head at her. “You’re a gambler,” he said. “Same as myself.”

She could feel her ears go red. “I am
not,”
she said. According to her grandmother, gambling was worse than drinking or dancing.

“You picked your horse,” Hiram told her. “And you put everything you have on him.”

And she recognized what he said as the truth.

He said, “One time out of a hundred, a bet will call you. Rest of the time it’s just guessing, but that one time. It’s like the hand of God settling on you, pointing you this way or that. Any normal person would Jonah and run, for fear of looking a fool if it turns against them. Not me,” he said. “And not you.”

“What happens if you end up looking like a fool?”

“Faith is all we gamblers have going for us.”

She asked Wish to take his shirt off one morning. Just to have a look at him.

This was the day after young Willard Slade’s funeral. Two mornings after Wish had come to find her at the riddle fence, when he’d buried his head under her skirt and held it there like a man trying to drown himself in a bucket of water. She thought he must be drunk to act that way and tried to haul him off her, pulling harder at his hair as she felt something unfamiliar building in the distance, bearing down on her like some tidal wave of the senses, picking up speed and heft as it approached. It felt like a violent thing and she was terrified at first, her right calf seized up in a cramp halfway through the first orgasm of her life and she fell onto him, writhing like some evangelical in a trance.

It was only in the aftermath that she was able to sort it all into manageable categories, parsing the surge of pleasure from the fear, from the knot of pain in her calf that was still aching. She’d lain awake all night then, tormented by the memory of his mouth down there. She couldn’t imagine a soul in the Cove having any truck with the like, and decided it must be a Catholic thing. Her face burning at the thought of anyone in the house knowing she’d allowed it to happen.

“Lie
still,”
Agnes pleaded.

Wish knelt up, shrugging his shoulders free of the suspenders, unbuttoning the shirt. Not a hair on his chest. The hollows behind the collarbone deep enough to hold a tablespoon of water. Pale, puckered nipples like an infant’s. She put her arms around his bare torso and held him, running a hand up and down the pronounced keyboard of his spine. She started at the nape of his neck, at the birthmark, and counted all the way to the tailbone, her fingers slipping under the band of his trousers. Sixteen vertebrae. She repeated the number in her head, to remember it.