Читать книгу The Magnetic Girl - Jessica Handler - Страница 9
ОглавлениеWILL WAS NINETEEN THE FIRST TIME HE GAMBLED. Almost all the soldiers did, waiting for a skirmish. Short on pay, Bill Lee and Harmony played every chance they could. They bet buttons or stones when they had to, laying out IOUs worn and bent at the edges like a tomcat’s ear as collateral for the day when the paymaster’s leather folder would be full.
“Seven,” Bill Lee said.
Will watched them play.
He had been sitting on a stump, cleaning his Winchester with a cotton rag. His grey wool cap lay on a different rag he kept for the purpose of protecting the hat’s rim from dirt. His blond hair was filthy. He hadn’t had a decent wash in a long time. His scalp itched.
“Can’t make seven on your come-out throw,” Harmony scolded Bill Lee.
“Go on and watch me, asshole,” Bill Lee said. His heels were in the dirt, the dice curled in his fingers. Bill Lee always seemed to watch everything closely, as if the world held a secret code that he would find if he peered close enough. He’d have made a lousy devotee: Will had known him to bird-whistle a warning call when he saw movement in a distant tree line.
Bill Lee shook his loose fist and rolled two dice onto a plank. The ivory squares, yellowed like old molars, rattled across the surface, the first one rolling head over heels and landing with the four side up. The second die followed, a lagging twin, until it stopped near the raw edge of the plank. Three up. Seven.
“Owes me again,” Bill Lee said, not bothering to look at Harmony. Bill Lee took a cone of notepaper from somewhere in his jacket, unrolled it, and jotted a note with a pencil stub. “Asshole,” Harmony said.
Will finished cleaning his rifle. Needing something to do while he studied the craps game, he had cleaned it twice. He set the weapon down beside his hat and wiped his greasy palms on his trousers, stiff with sweat and smoke.
“Y’all interested in showing a man the game?” Will inquired. “Not much for gambling, but I figure I might could play and keep busy.”
Bill Lee and Harmony, each in a throwing crouch level to Will’s knees, looked up at him, a silent duet. Although they’d been side by side for months, the men formally introduced themselves.
“Harmony Any Last Name’s as Good as Another, Knoxville, Tennessee.” Harmony was red-headed, thin, and hard-muscled like a whip.
Will shook Harmony No Last Name’s hand. The fellow held on an extra second, a salesman’s grip.
“William Hurst, Tennessee,” he answered, turning to Bill Lee.
“William Lee Borden. My ma calls me Billy, but I spell it like two names.” He grinned in an ear-to-ear little boy’s smile, a beam of sunlight. Like Will, he was blond, but had stayed nearly a tow head although he looked to be near thirty. His eyebrows were white-blond, and his lashes, too. Bill Lee had a roll of fat around his waist even after months in camp, and Will wondered if the man hadn’t stashed some chow in his rucksack and secretly nibbled away on jerky or chunks of dried apple when no one was looking. Will’s stomach pinched.
“Set down here and we’ll get a game on. Learn while you earn.” Bill Lee patted the plank beside him.
Will knelt, and Harmony put the dice in Will’s outstretched palm. Cupping his hand around the dice put Will in mind of the trick his mother had taught him. Fold your right thumb into your right palm so it can’t be seen. Bend your left thumb so the nail touches your left pointer finger. Now press the back of your right thumb against your left nail, turn your hands around, pull them apart real quick, and presto! A thumb split in half!
For an entire afternoon, Bill Lee and Harmony taught Will the game. Roll like this, light, like you’re letting a baby bird fly loose from your hand. Feel the dice under the tips of your fingers as you warm them in your hand: imagine they’re a lady’s titty. Look at him blush. He don’t know what that feels like! You’ve thought about it, for sure. When they’re ready to go you’ll know it, don’t think about it, just feel it—sling ‘em out there on the wood, easy does it. Don’t look away, watch how they fall.
Will’s childhood attempts at prestidigitation came back, but he’d never been effortless. He had craved the attention, the winning and walking away with the secrets, the money, and the power. He’d never had the knack to master the trick itself. He lacked his mother’s patience.
The three men played until it was too dark to see. Bill Lee could have gone for his lamp, but by then chow seemed the wise choice. Harmony leaned the plank upright against a dogwood tree and pocketed his dice.
“I need to eat, if you’d call that shit food, pardon me,” Harmony answered. He made a show of rubbing his almost concave middle. His hip bones pushed sharp edges against his trousers.
Like a father teasing a child, Bill Lee reached down and ruffled Will’s hair.
“We’ll pick it up tomorrow. Looks like we still ain’t going nowhere.”
Bill Lee and Harmony headed into the dark together, one of them hawking and spitting on the ground. Will smoothed his hair down, then flexed his fingers before he took three flat pebbles from his pocket. Practice makes perfect.
The three of them played craps for a week. No orders came to move camp. Cannon fire shuddered in the hills. Refugees rolled by in a line of carts coming from one settlement, going to another. Children waved at the soldiers, who waved back. The soldiers with children at home went to their tents afterward, writing letters or staring at the grime of their canvas tents. Someone shod a horse. Someone else sewed torn trousers. They expected to pack up within a few days. In the meantime, Will’s throw got lighter and faster. Once in a while, he won a game, but his IOUs piled up quickly under the fist-sized chunk of stone by Harmony’s rucksack.
While they played, Harmony tried to preach his beliefs to Will.
“The human body is made up of fluids,” Harmony began one afternoon, watching Bill Lee prepare to roll the dice.
“Fluids you piss out,” Bill Lee muttered.
Harmony, entranced with speaking his catechism to Will, ignored him.
“We have tides in us, rolling like the ocean. Magnetism is its name. Magnetic fluids.”
“Seven,” Bill Lee said, a risky come-out. He shook the dice and looked heavenward. Bringing his gaze back down to earth, Bill Lee threw. Harmony was silent for the throw.
The dice landed six and six up. No seven.
Will held out his hand for the cubes. Harmony started up again.
“The motion of the planets pulls our internal tide like the ocean’s tide. The planets pull on our fluids, and our nerves react. It’s science and nature combined.”
“You yap this shit all the time,” Bill Lee said. “You’re getting on my nerves, and that’s my nature.” He worked this like a variety amusement act.
“The body has its poles, oppositional. Fluid goes back and forth evenly if a man’s in balance.” Harmony stopped and looked at Will, who had not yet thrown.
“You ever been sick?”
Of course he’d been sick. Who the hell hadn’t?
“What kind of sick?”
“In the head,” Bill Lee said. He was drawing in the dirt with a stick, figure eights and waves.
“I’ve had the grippe, I’ve had stomach trouble, I had an infected finger one time got drained and cauterized. I’ve been . . . ” Will stopped himself here, still surprised by his reticence. Ten years had passed since his mother’s failures.
“What. Been what?” Bill Lee was interested. Harmony said nothing, patient.
“Morose. I’ve been morose,” Will said. He’d slipped up and given Harmony precisely what he needed. Will could have kicked himself. “That’s a sickness,” Harmony said. “All these illnesses,” he pressed down hard on the word, making “ill” weigh more than the next two syllables—“are natural magnetic fluids out of balance in your body. Your magnetism was disturbed, and you were out of alignment with the planets.”
“Roll the damn dice,” Bill Lee said.
Will looked at his hand, surprised to find the dice still there. He hadn’t shaken or rolled or given a thought to what he’d call to try and take Bill Lee’s money. They were playing for actual dollars today. Confederate money wasn’t worth much, but the idea of it was better than buttons. Time passing without him knowing irritated him. Always had.
“So how did I get better, then?” Will asked. “Planets come down and make me well? According to my ma they did, but she wasn’t one to allow a doctor.” That was more than enough said.
“Somebody went and put some money on the doctor. I’ll bet he had a damn fine horse and lived in a mighty nice house.” Bill Lee surrendered to the conversation.
“Your fluids got balanced,” Harmony said, serious as a preacher. “You’re a lucky man. Some people need help with that, but you can do it alone, it seems. Some got it, some don’t. People who’ve got it strong have been known to kill a rabbit just by laying their hands on the animal. Magnetism comes through them and kills the thing right where it sits.”
“Sounds like an easy way to get dinner,” Bill Lee said.
Will rolled the dice around in his hand. What was that riddle, what’s lighter, a pound of lead or a pound of feathers? A trick you had to think about. A pound of feathers would have to be so much bigger than a pound of lead. Everything you thought you knew could be an illusion, until you applied reason. The bones of a bird are hollow. The shimmer over a flame is a gas.
“I have the gift of observation,” Will said, giving in to the litany he’d been raised with. “It’s the way to heal and to lead our lives. We spend our infancy and childhood observing. A babe does nothing but observe and learn from what he sees. Where’s Mama? Mama is the first planet around which the baby revolves. Our gift of observation, even if we are not sighted but can touch and smell and hear, allows us to make men of ourselves. That’s nature, as planets and tides are nature. Observation of our nature—our magnetic fluids conducted by our nerves from electrical pole to pole in our bodies—is the natural path to righteousness.”
Harmony would be gaping, he knew, but Will wouldn’t let himself look. Bill Lee? Same, most likely.
His mother had taught him this, and she was dead, and she had been dead since he was a boy. He’d quit fantasizing about her alive somewhere, having merely run off to avoid what she called the death-like appearance. Her patients came to her looking that way, she said. And she cured them, one or two uncertain visitors in a month at first, then twice that many in a day, every day. Even Sunday. You want to thank God for your pain, she would tell them on those days. God’s given you a message and brought you here.
There had been an earthquake when she was a baby, she’d told him once. All the world shaking as if Cerberus, the dog of hell, held our planet in his mouth. And look what came of it. Nature’s magnetic fluids scattered and sprayed and came to rest in her, bringing with them the gift for healing.
Her health diminished until she died. That was the simple explanation in this real world. She didn’t go to Summerland, the afterlife from whence her spirit voices came. Her trembling hand on an acolyte’s cheek, her distorted vision gazing into a devotee’s future (the wardrobe door shaken by his father’s hand hidden behind, the curtains blowing on cue by his own paper fan waving from where he crouched beneath the sill outdoors) led to retirement from the hands-on trade, but the relief of human suffering remained her focus. Once bedridden, she put her talents to the page, producing a guidebook for those who would follow in her footsteps.
The book was all he had left of her, and if he tried, he could hear her voice when he read the words. From expression comes splendor, she’d written. Hardly, he answered back. What splendor is there in abandoning the house in town, or a father dried up and useless without his wife, or sitting out here, day in and day out with nothing to do and nothing waiting at home?
She excluded the idea of defeat from the book. Will had never seen the acolyte spurned by a lover and come to his mother to heal her heart. He only heard the rumors afterward: how his father had cleaned the bloodstains from their parlor floor, how his mother buried the knife the woman used to try and excise her own heart.
“All people will ultimately reveal themselves as fools,” his mother said.
Will crouched and warmed the dice in his palm, calming his thoughts. Sunlight was warm on his back. Sounds of the world around him vanished: no bird songs, no throat clearing from Bill Lee or Harmony. He slipped inside himself, at one with the rhythm of his own breathing and his heartbeat. An image of two double-spotted dice floated into his vision, a stereopticon card overlaying the real view of the planed pine board neatly placed in the black dirt.
A planet’s brightness or its position in the night sky told his father when to plant and when to harvest, if a winter would be cold or mild. Electricity was an experiment in Europe, a factor in the telegraph, but not a magnetic liquid surging through a body. Will made no plan. He exhaled the word “four” in a whisper that he didn’t hear but knew he had said aloud. Then he threw, and his dice came up three and one. He rolled again with more precision than he had the day before. Two and two. Bill Lee whistled approvingly. Harmony nodded.
Maybe his mother applauded him from somewhere in the ether. Maybe she waggled her fingers, and the Mesmerism she claimed moved his dice into a winning figure. Will rocked back on his heels, and the outside world opened up to him again. A catbird chirped a series of quick sounds, and somewhere distant, a horse whinnied. Will stood.
“Gentlemen, you finally owe me.”
Harmony clapped Will on the shoulder.
“Congratulations, my friend, and welcome. Welcome to a new world, where poverty and the life of the lesser man is no more, where money is yours for the taking.”
INTELLIGENCE HAD COME IN saying that Union troops were headed in from the West. Within a day, the cannon fire was audible. Will, Bill Lee, Harmony, and their fellow infantrymen waited for the order to charge. Bill Lee treated the pending skirmish like a bad joke. The big man dug trenches like a thresher, working his own and more than thirty feet of others’ until, without warning, he pitched his spade toward the horizon. The implement flew like a spear, raining dirt as it went, and Bill Lee stormed off to his tent.
“Fuck it,” he said. “When they come, I’ll be in here. I’ve been waiting so long I’ll kill a dozen of them with my bare hands. I don’t need a damn gopher hole.”
Harmony worked a trench crew, untroubled, cleared roadways through the brush for wagons, caissons, and, he told Will, ambulances. “We’ll see plenty of meat wagons, Mr. Force of Will,” he said. “Look around you at the regiments coming in. We’re going to see the elephant, alright, and it’s about damn time.”
The elephant was battle; a huge, lumbering thing you couldn’t see around once it was in front of you. Will fully intended to see battle and emerge unscathed but for some romantic, painless scar, and vigorous tales unsuitable for mixed company. Months of relentless busywork, waiting, moving camp, and more of the same had worn the fight out of him. Add to that the weeks of playing craps, and he was nothing more than a homeless man weighted with debt.
A trickle of sweat at the back of his neck rolled into his collar, taunting him to wipe it away. A cannon boomed, and the stink of gunpowder clung to the morning dew. When the cry to “charge” came from down the line, he wanted to vomit, but like a machine, like Harmony, Bill Lee, and a sea of men, Will ran forward. As if choreographed to a musical score, men fell ahead of him and behind. A man tumbled from his squealing horse and landed on Will, knocking him into the dirt. Will struggled to rise, pushing the man’s weight away just enough to get to his knees. The man’s face had been blown off: only a dark beard sticky with blood and an eyeball loose as a toy on a string marked it as a face. Will retched and ran, struggling to hold his rifle.
He tried to spot Harmony in the churning mass of men around him, but everyone had become the same man. The earth had opened into a pit filled with writhing bodies. Men and horses raced into the vortex. The air itself was blue with smoke, and blood caked Will’s arms and hands, and he could do nothing but run and shoot wildly, aiming his rifle at the fragments of sky that appeared through rafts of smoke.
Running blindly, Will somehow doubled back toward a road. There, away from the line of artillery, he saw the ambulances Harmony had teased him about. Will was soaked with blood. He could certainly pass for someone critically wounded. An ambulance could carry him to a field hospital, to a town, to somewhere not here.
Running toward salvation, he tripped over a root, wrenching his ankle and tumbling face-first into a wet burlap sack. Pushing himself up on his elbows, Will saw he had fallen into an artilleryman’s jacket, the grey humped and torn over the body of a young man, dead but still warm. Will collapsed across the newly dead stranger, the man who would save his life.
When the attendants came for the dead soldier and the scattered wounded and dying around him, the blood that Will had smeared on his own flesh had gone tacky and dry. The late afternoon air smelled like iron filings and buzzed with sated flies. The attendants hurried in their work, although the fighting had moved on. With one man holding arms and another legs they hoisted corpses into the ambulance. Like relay racers, they tended to the wounded, wrapping tourniquets where they could, applying clean rags to the oozing caves that had been stomachs or thighs, then carrying the moaning men on litters to a second wagon. Grown men sobbed and called for their mothers and wives. Will called for no one. An ambulance attendant crouched over him and told him he’d be all right. They were taking him to a field hospital. Will assessed the medic through one eye; about his age, and earnest. Even in a sea of blood, the fellow shone with the bright light of doing good works. Will laid it on thick, biting his lip nearly through and wincing as he nodded thanks. When the attendant moved to lift him onto a litter, Will’s deficit of injury nearly gave him away. He’d forgotten to cry out. The suspicion in the attendant’s eyes brought Will back to the gamble, and he put all his weight on his twisted ankle, screaming in pain as he allowed himself to fall again in the dirt.
Will slumped into the ambulance as the attendants loaded two, three, and a fourth moaning, blood-soaked comrades around him like so many cobs in a corn-crib. When the ambulance jolted and began its rattle down the road, overtaking the dead-wagon, Will unwound a relatively clean bandage from a man who looked dead. He held the cloth over his mouth and nose, filtering the stench. Rolling along the path that Harmony had helped cut, Will closed his eyes and dreamed of a city’s streets, and of debt’s dead weight shed from his back.
