Great Circle

by Maggie Shipstead

  Zip rolled her eyes. “Of course I want to really see things.”

  “Then say that,” said Ruth.

  Zip and Sylvie sunbathed on the prow and wrote letters. Ruth, in dungarees, enlisted Marian to help her paint the ship’s railings. The crew, amused, handed over brushes and buckets of paint and then smoked and loitered and watched, commentating among themselves in Swedish until Ruth grabbed them by the arms and forcibly set them to work. On the warmest day, all four of the pilots stripped down and jumped overboard, Sylvie in a swimsuit she’d been smart enough to bring and the rest in their underwear. They held hands, but the water ripped their fingers loose. Marian, kicking up to the surface, fought back a horror she couldn’t explain at the dark steel wall of the ship’s hull underwater.

  The convoy, sixteen ships, left without fanfare one evening, steaming east. The first night, the crewman with the best English came around to issue a reminder about the blackout. He stood in the doorway of their cabin, blushing and looking at the ceiling rather than at the women lounging in their bunks, Sylvie tying up her hair in rags, Zip painting her toenails. He pointed at the curtains over the blacked out window and said, “Always keep close. And better this”—he gestured at the cabin door—“open, always, because a torpedo comes, then the whole ship”—he made a motion with his hands like he was wringing out a towel—“and then maybe is like”—he overlapped one flat hand with the other, pressed them together.

  “Gets stuck?” said Zip.

  “Yes.” He nodded gratefully. “Stuck. If you are inside, then—” He shook his head.

  “We’re probably not getting out anyway, but thanks for the thought,” Ruth said from behind her book.

  The crewman nodded. “Sleep with clothes on, yes, for fast—” He whistled and sliced a hand upward, nodded again, and left.

  When the others wanted to turn out the light, Marian and Ruth went out on deck. If there was a moon, it was hidden behind clouds. In the darkness they could hear the engines of other ships all around but saw nothing. A few times Marian thought she made out a hulking shadow-shape off to starboard, but always it dissolved and reappeared elsewhere, a trick of her eyes. “I don’t like the idea of being stuck in the cabin,” she said to Ruth. “Getting blown up would be one thing, but being trapped and living long enough to know you’re trapped—I don’t like it.”

  “Me neither,” said Ruth. “But there’s a sense that if you’re meant to survive, you survive. And if you’re not, you don’t.”

  “Easy to say while we’re nice and alive and standing next to a lifeboat.”

  “I think we ought to hone our fatalism. Really, what’s the difference between taking your chances on a ship and flying?”

  “Flying you have some control over.”

  “Not as much as we like to think.”

  The second day, fog closed in and stayed for the rest of the voyage. On the eighth night, they slept at anchor, and in the morning, they passed into Bristol Channel. As the ship neared the harbor, Marian and Ruth stood at the rail, watching the upended prows and funnels of bombed ships loom out of the fog at strange angles, blackened and half sunk, sharpening from vague phantoms into ruined hulks and fading away again.

  * * *

  —

  London was blackness against the taxi windows. On the train from Bristol a steward had come around as the evening faded and closed the curtains. The lights inside the train were dim and blue, as were the lights in the station, and once they were outside, it seemed as though Britain had disappeared entirely.

  Marian was crammed in one taxi with Ruth and Sylvie and their handbags and train cases. The larger luggage rode behind with Zip in another. The driver slowed, making a turn, and something greenish white slid by outside, glowing: a conical apparition with two orbiting moons.

  “What was that?” Sylvie said.

  “A ghost!” said Ruth.

  “Don’t say that,” said Sylvie.

  “Only a copper,” said the driver. “They paint their capes and gloves with phosphorescence.”

  Peering out, Marian began to see the blackness was less total than it had first seemed. Downward-angled slits in the covers on the taxi’s headlights allowed a faint glow out onto the road, and here and there the white-painted bumpers of other cars came and went. Traffic signals, reduced to small floating crosses of red or green, hung in the dark. When they stopped at one, Marian could make out the passing shapes of pedestrians and a handsome set of steps leading to a jumble of rubble. “It’s the underworld out there, isn’t it?” said Ruth. “The kingdom of the shades.”

  “Get yourself some white gloves, that’s my advice,” said the driver. “Some bit of white to wave around is what you want for hailing taxis.”

  “Or for hailing the boatman,” Ruth said. “To take us across the River Styx.”

  “Don’t be spooky,” said Sylvie. “I’m afraid of the dark.”

  “If you’d been here for the Blitz,” the driver said, “you’d know there’s worse things than dark.” He stopped short behind a bus that had loomed up suddenly and cliff-like, a large white circle painted on its blunt end.

  “Like what?” said Sylvie.

  “Sylvie,” warned Ruth.

  “Like fire,” said the driver.

  The lobby of the hotel was a bubble of noise and light, crisscrossed by uniforms, insulated from the darkness by a shell of sandbags and heavy curtains. There was a note from Jackie Cochran, wishing them welcome and saying she would meet them for breakfast. Sylvie and Zip had a double on the fifth floor, and Ruth and Marian were on the sixth in singles with a shared bathroom.

  Marian, lying fully dressed on the bed, realized she hadn’t been able to close a door behind herself, to be fully alone anywhere other than in the toilet, since Montreal. She shut her eyes and pressed her hands against them. Auroras traveled across her lids. Behind the door, running water and gentle splashes signaled that Ruth was taking a bath. A memory of the woman in the hotel in Cordova came to Marian, but she pushed the thought away. She got up and turned out the light, slid in between the window and its heavy velvet curtain. In the time since they’d arrived, the thick cloud had broken apart into gliding silver rafts. A bright half-moon hung high over the blacked-out city. Beyond the ink spill she knew to be Hyde Park, roofs and chimneys and towers rambled into the distance, moonlight glinting off them as though off ice on mountaintops.

  Missoula

  August 1942

  Not long after Marian arrived in London

  Caleb was sitting on a stump he used for chopping wood. Jamie, standing behind him, lifted the same heavy scissors Caleb had used on Marian’s hair long ago and cut off his braid. The long severed black weight of it flopped dead and glossy in Jamie’s fist. “What should I do with this?” he said.

  “Keep it as a memento.”

  Jamie dropped the braid in Caleb’s lap. “No, thanks. It’s all yours.” He did his best to snip the rest short. “It’s a little patchy.”

  Caleb ran a hand over his scalp. “I’m sure the army won’t mind finishing the job.”

  “Poetic justice for the way Marian used to look.”

  “I never said I was any good at cutting hair. I was just the only one who’d do it.”

  “Do you hear from her?”

  “No.”

  Something in Caleb’s voice precluded further questions. Jamie said, “She’s in London.”

  “Good for her.”

  Speculatively, Jamie snipped at a bit of hair behind Caleb’s ear and winced at the result. He said, “Are you still seeing the teacher?”

  “No. I couldn’t quite get to the slippers and pipe.”

  Jamie thought Caleb might be using some kind of euphemism. “What does that mean?”

  “It means I can’t be tamed, Jamie-boy.” Caleb slapped the severed braid against his thigh. When he spoke aga
in, he was more serious. “It’s better this way—no one to say goodbye to.”

  Caleb had written Jamie to say he was enlisting, and Jamie had come from Oregon to see him off. The paperwork was already signed; Caleb would leave when they told him to. Soon. The recruiters had been very interested in his experience as a hunting guide, he said. He’d told them he was twenty-six, not thirty.

  Jamie still didn’t know what he would do.

  Marian had visited him in early April on her way to New York. He’d told her about seeing Sarah Fahey in Seattle. “She said she wished she could fight. Easy enough to say.”

  “It is frustrating not to be allowed to really do anything,” Marian said.

  “Yes, I know. I do know that. She also said we all must be brave. I’m not interested in bravery for its own sake, but this war…” He trailed off.

  “Yes,” Marian said. “I know.”

  “What should I do?” He looked at her fearfully.

  “What I’d like is for you to live in peace and be safe. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter what you do. You going to war won’t tip the balance. Can’t you get a job painting recruitment posters or something?”

  “That seems like a cop-out, convincing other people to go and die.”

  “I doubt you’d personally convince anyone, no matter how good an artist you are.”

  “You take risks. You’re brave.”

  “It’s not the same,” she’d said. “I really want a chance to fly those planes. Not that I don’t want to pitch in—I do—but I’m not doing it purely on principle. There’s something I want in it, whereas you just want to live harmlessly, and the war means abandoning that. Anyway, the ATA might not even take me.”

  “They’ll take you,” Jamie had said.

  * * *

  —

  After the haircut, when he and Caleb were deep into a bottle, Jamie said, “What would happen if I couldn’t do it?”

  “Do what?” Caleb was lying on his back on the cot in his cabin, one arm under his head. Jamie sat in the rocking chair. The windows were open to the warm night.

  “Fight.”

  “You’d probably die. But you’ll die anyway, someday.”

  “Come on.”

  “You might not know until you’re in the thick of it.”

  “Then it’ll be too late.”

  “I think probably most guys can’t really fight. They’re just there. Adding numbers. You could get a job where you don’t have to shoot at anyone, you know. There are lots of other jobs.”

  “Everyone keeps saying that. Marian thinks I should make propaganda.”

  “You could be a cook or something like that.”

  Besides Berit’s scissors, Caleb had claimed Wallace’s ancient gramophone after the house was sold, and he heaved up and went to it. Choosing a record, he set it in place, cranked the machine, dropped the needle.

  Debussy. After the first few notes, Jamie remembered being a child peering through the banister while, below, Wallace and friends argued about art. “Do they let you choose?”

  Caleb sat on the cot, cross-legged, and lit a cigarette. “Probably not. Have you ever killed anything? A bird, even?”

  “Spiders and flies. Fish.”

  “What if tomorrow we went after elk? I’d take you. The rut’s just starting. It’s interesting out there.”

  In hopes that Caleb would not see how abhorrent he found the idea, Jamie studied the bottom of his cup, sluiced the whiskey around. “It seems wasteful to kill something just to prove to myself that I can.”

  “All these city hunters I take out there, that’s what they’re doing. But the truth is, there are too many elk and deer now that the wolves and grizzlies are mostly gone—”

  “Thanks to you,” Jamie put in.

  “—and they starve.”

  “I’m not sure it’s a good test,” Jamie said. “If you don’t kill the elk, it’s not as though the elk will kill you.”

  Caleb drained his cup and set it aside. “It’s easier to kill an elk than a man, Jamie. But you don’t have to do either.”

  “Right, I could just embrace being a coward.”

  Caleb met his eye. “You’re not a coward.”

  Jamie wanted to ask Caleb whether he’d killed Barclay Macqueen. But what difference did it make? And there were people Jamie had wanted to kill: that boy who’d been torturing the dog, Mr. Fahey, Barclay. He had it in him, the urge. “All right. Let’s go tomorrow.”

  He didn’t sleep well. The whiskey had set the cabin and the sound of the crickets spinning slowly around him, and he lay on Caleb’s floor at the center of the sickening swirl and thought yet again about Sarah Fahey’s letter. It had arrived in July, long after Marian had come and gone.

  Dear Jamie,

  I hope you don’t mind that I’ve written—I got your address from the museum. We parted on imperfect terms, and I feel regret about our conversation. I still believe it is not enough to do nothing, but now that more time has passed, I’ve come to believe it is unconscionable to persuade people who abhor violence, as I think you do, to commit it. I want no part of such a process, even though I understand this war requires numbers above all else. Which brings me to my purpose in writing: I have heard of an opportunity. All branches of the armed forces are seeking artists to document the war. A family friend who’s high up in the navy told me about it, as of course we know many artists, and I mentioned you. My understanding is that you would complete the necessary training to earn your commission and be sent to combat areas but would not be expected to fight. There would be risks, of course, but, if you want, I would be happy to connect you with the relevant people.

  I hope you and your sister are well. My brother, Irving, is an officer on a destroyer in the Pacific, and Lewis has joined as a medic. I miss them both horribly.

  Sarah

  * * *

  —

  Jamie hadn’t told Caleb about the letter or mentioned it when he wrote to Marian for fear they would tell him this opportunity, as Sarah had put it, was a perfect solution to his dilemma. Nor had he replied to Sarah. He could not disagree with her implication that being a military artist would nominally fulfill his duty, but still he bristled. She didn’t think he could hack it. Millions of other men had simply gone off to war, but she thought he needed a special, cushy assignment. On the other hand, the assignment was something he was plainly qualified for, much more than he was to be a grunt.

  He woke hot and dry-mouthed after only a few hours, his heart racing, the smell of coffee hanging oily in the air. Though night still seemed entrenched, Caleb was moving around, cracking eggs, setting a pan on a burner.

  They ate in silence. Caleb instructed him to go outside to the pump and scrub with soap so the elk wouldn’t catch their scent so easily. As the darkness faded to indigo, they walked into the woods. For hours, Jamie followed Caleb, a rifle on his back, his head aching and his stomach sour. He didn’t ask where they were going. Clouds of blue mist shifted among the trunks and branches. He tried to step where Caleb stepped, to make as little noise as he did, but Caleb seemed to slither like a snake, with barely a rustle, while he clomped along like a cart horse. A stick cracked under his boot. Caleb glanced back.

  “Sorry,” Jamie whispered. Caleb held up one arm. Jamie stopped.

  Caleb seemed to be listening, but Jamie, straining his ears, perceived only faint dripping and under that an ambient silence prickling with all the sounds that could not be heard: growing plants, creeping insects, drifting dust. In the war, he knew, such a silence would be tense with the possibility of unseen weapons being lifted and aimed. Caleb took a bamboo tube from his belt and blew through it, making a shrill rising note that ended in a low honk. They waited. In the distance, an elk bugled. Caleb gestured to the left, and they continued on.

  By a small pond, Caleb
pointed to hoof prints and to mud smeared on the trees by wallowing animals. After a while, he stopped again and knelt with his rifle across his knees. Jamie sat on a cushion of pine needles, his back against a tree trunk. There was nothing to see, only mist. Jamie allowed his eyes to droop closed.

  Some time later, Caleb shook his shoulder to wake him. A hard knot of bark was digging into his back, drool slimed his cheek. Caleb pointed into a meadow that had materialized just beyond the trees. Yellow light pierced the patchy fog still hanging low over tall grass. A herd of elk was moving slowly along, grazing: females with knobby legs and mulish ears, the bull at the back, watchful, the dark fur at his neck thick and shaggy like a lion’s mane.

  Jamie picked up his rifle. They crept forward to the edge of the trees. “You’ll have a clear shot,” Caleb breathed. “Wait.”

  Jamie cocked the gun, bent his cheek to the stock. The bull moved closer. Through the sight, Jamie watched him lift his head, tilt it so the thick branches of his antlers tipped parallel to his back. His black nose pinched and quivered; his eyes showed white at their inner corners, urgent with the rut. “Now,” Caleb whispered.

  The animal was rough and heavy with life. Jamie imagined the legs crumpling, the magnificent antlers lying in the grass like discarded pitchforks. He lowered the rifle. Reflexively, Caleb lifted his, accustomed to taking the shots others missed. “Don’t,” Jamie said.

  The bull elk looked toward them, ears swiveling. Jamie jumped up, waving his arms. He shouted. The animal turned and ran, setting the cows galloping. Dull thunder as the herd streamed down the meadow, their cream-colored haunches flashing bright until the fog swallowed them.

  England