Smoke

by Dan Vyleta

  He is like so many of his class. Crude, greedy, and stupid. Smoke drifts out of his hairline in thin, greasy streaks; he’s hunching his shoulders, in apology, or fear.

  “They be a rebellious lot,” he says for the fourth or fifth time, squinting at me. “Crim’nels in my book.”

  He sounds West Country to me. An outsider here. Living his life by a handful of lies that have become true through ceaseless repetition.

  “I’m a good man, I am. Salt of the earth.”

  He bites the gold again, wipes snot across his beard with the heel of his palm, farts. Nervous wind, Mr. Price used to call it. He caused it in a good many people, would stand there sniffing and flash me a wink. The thought of Price lends fresh focus to my task.

  Again I ask about the two boys and the girl. “Posh folk,” I say. “Gentry. One of them is badly wounded.” It is hard to explain to the man that I don’t give a toss about their dwarf insurrection. It’s not like the Spencers own the mine.

  He remembers something at last. A girl has been seen, down the mine. A stranger. In the company of one Francis Mosley. A haulage woman passed them in the dark.

  “Can’t have been gentry though,” he muses. “Dirty like an Arab, see. Wearing breeches. Most likely a whore. And then, a-course,” he adds after much frowning, “there was three figures on the path. Stevie Milner says he saw ’em pass. But gentry, no, that they wasn’t.” He looks at me wearily, worried he’ll lose his gold.

  “Let me guess. They were dirty, too.”

  “Like they was dunked in mud.”

  “Take me to the place where they were seen.”

  My bitch growls when he moves. Nótt: named for the Norse mistress of the night. She has taken a liking to the greasy little man, sniffs his crotch like it is made of bacon. He nearly drops his coin.

  ф

  I have been at it for six days now. Each morning, I get up before dawn and saddle the horse. Each evening, a supper with Mother, pale and fretting, in her eyes a question she’s afraid to ask. We have a simple relationship, Mother and I. We have replaced emotion with economics. Recently we have added crime to the ties of debt and blood.

  “Are you assisting the magistrate’s search?” Mother asks the second morning I set off.

  “No. I have my own ideas.”

  “You have found a trace then?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Please. Be careful,” she says and for a moment I think she means for myself. I look at her, my breakfast in my throat, hoping, dreading that she will force a talk.

  But she says nothing further.

  As I ride off her hand brushes the saddlebag bulging by my thigh.

  ф

  I never thought they might be hiding down the mine. But that’s where Nótt leads me, once she puts her nose to the narrow bridleway where the strangers have been sighted. The colliers stop in their tracks when I enter the work yard. The smell of snow is in the air, but nothing has fallen yet. The sky sits low against the hills. It would make a wonderful painting, Nótt crouching, long tail cocked, her ears pressed high against her head. I ride over to the pit shaft, watch it spit up a cage. A union, forming down the bottom of this hole. Talking revolution through mouthfuls of bread and dripping. All you’d need to do is cut the cable. Trap them like rats. Grandfather is right. This is a world of idiots. I wait until Nótt has emptied her bladder and then we turn, back to the bridleway. They must have left before dawn. Six hours head start. But I have a horse.

  ф

  They split up once they reached the train depot. It takes me a while to establish this. The men here are close-mouthed, suspicious. But no pauper can resist gold.

  They remember a boy with a bandage, of course. He travelled with a girl. Heading south I am told. London-way. Cooped up with a wagonload of chickens, and some fellow cutthroats, heading home.

  It’s the other boy no one can tell me about. Not until I find a man who spoke to him, the boss of a racket selling passenger tickets to freight trains. He has a band of degenerates on staff who will break your legs if you think you can catch a ride for free.

  We talk at length. An enterprising man. He reminds me of my grandfather. Affable, given to whimsy. Happiest when making a profit without breaking a sweat.

  “What’s he to you?” he asks once we have established he knows the boy I am looking for.

  “I’m his elder brother.”

  “You don’t look alike.”

  “Ah, well. You’d have to talk to Mother about that.”

  The man laughs. I slip him money.

  “He ran away, did he? This brother of yours.”

  “He is guilty of that particular folly.”

  The man jingles coins within a meaty fist.

  “Awful dirty for gentry,” he muses.

  I smile and add one more coin to his stack. Then I call Nótt to my side. The man studies her weight, her teeth.

  “Big dog.”

  “Enough of this.”

  He shrugs, counts up the money. “He was heading for Oxford. Got family there perhaps?”

  “A kindly uncle.”

  “Those are the best sort.”

  ф

  I am left with a choice then. London or Oxford. My inclination lies with the city. Thomas is there. He tasks me, Thomas, tender like an abscess in my throat. How deftly has he slipped into Mother’s regard, where I could only wheedle with my money. How artfully has he contrived to set a mark against my name at school, so that I have to endure Renfrew’s insolent probing. And how similar is our Smoke once woken; how seductive in its kinship; how intolerable in its rivalry. But it’ll be hard, I imagine, tracking someone in London. Too many people, too many scents, even for Nótt. Oxford will be easier. Charlie Cooper must be heading back to school. To do what, I wonder; talk to whom? How much has he seen? It is this simple question that decides me. I want Thomas. But there must not be any talk.

  There are no trains to Oxford until the following day, not from this depot. I resolve to make my way by horse. It won’t be any faster that way, but after a week of waiting it feels good to be on the move.

  Darkness falls early. And just like that unease descends upon me, half childish fear, half longing, my hand dipping in the saddlebag. The feeling has grown familiar in the week since Price’s death; resembles the tangle of shame and excitement that attends the first discovery of self-abuse.

  In confusion then, fretting, unsure whether it is to indulge or to distract myself, I look for company and shelter; make out a farmhouse by its chimney in the distance then see the glow of a fire in a field much closer by. When I approach, I find two men sitting around a pot of boiling potatoes. Two rabbits, crudely skinned, hang skewered over the fire. The men rise, alarmed: crooked figures, thin as rails, the clothes mere rags. Underneath the dirt and Soot their complexions are fair and ruddy. Tinkers, not Gypsies. All the same, unwelcome on these shores.

  “A pastoral scene,” I greet them, resolving relief into swagger. “Two Irishmen poaching rabbits in another man’s field.” I dismount. “Not my field though, so please don’t fret. I am just another traveller. Weary. Now my friends, might I share some of your rabbit, seeing that you stole it and are eating for free?”

  ф

  They are drinking men. I don’t usually partake in alcohol, but as I lie there, listening to their talk and laughter, I accept the bottle and take a swig, and later another, then another. It heats the stomach, and gives an odd sharpness to the night. At length I slip a sweet under my tongue and taste the liquor through its herbal tang.

  As for the Paddies, they are quite at ease with me now. I am prey to them: a rich fool waiting to be robbed. I for my part am too preoccupied to disabuse them of the notion. When one of them sidles over to the pile I made of saddle and bags, it is Nótt that jumps up and pushes her maw into the soft of his tummy. I trained her to do it and hence know the feeling, of her hot wet breath soaking through one’s shirt. It feels as though one’s skin grows paper-thin. The man starts smoking, very f
aintly, and my bitch, she wags her tail.

  “Sure meant nothing by it,” he says almost sulkily though he holds his body very still. “Just admiring the rifle. An unusual piece. Foreign design, is it?”

  “And what do you know about guns?”

  “Father was a gunsmith. Never learned the trade myself, mind.”

  An artisan’s son, fallen on hard times. And for a moment it rises in me, the urge to tell him about this rifle and its telescopic sight, accurate at four hundred yards. A German design. Illegal. Cursed.

  I am aware that it is not the desire to show off that tempts me but the lure of confession, boyish and weak; am aware, too, that within this weakness, buried like a thorn, sits some other longing yet, darker in temperament and stronger by far, which has long sketched its own outcome to the night.

  “Best leave it alone, my friend.”

  But the man has sensed my hesitation. As has Nótt, who has stepped back and eyes me in confusion while the vagrant, slowly but brazenly enough, kneels down next to my saddlebag and studies its bulge. Again the urge takes hold of me to self-betray.

  “Go on,” I say, suck weakly at my sweet. “Pull it out if you must.”

  What emerges looks (even to me, after days of familiarity) like nothing so much as a man’s face, denuded of bone and cured by a tanner. The eyes are brass-rimmed disks of glass. Where nose and mouth are to be expected, the face grows a proboscis, long and limp like a wet sock. At the far end, this snout is weighted down with something very much like the head of a watering can. For a moment a gust of wind catches the mask and fills its features with volume; then the rubber inverts and the thing hangs dead from the man’s fingers.

  “What is it? Some kind of mask?”

  I find the semblance of my normal voice, brittle at its edges.

  “A respirator. Chap called György came up with it. A Hungarian inventor. He wished to design something that would protect soldiers from the madness of battle. It filters out Smoke. Trouble is, you can hardly breathe in it. And who ever said soldiers should be sane?” I hesitate, watch the mask watch me from brass-rimmed goggles; each breath of breeze a hint of life within its rubber cheeks. “But, you see, it works differently now. A family friend made alterations.”

  The Irishman, however, has already lost interest in my explanation and picked up the drinks bladder that was stashed alongside the mask. It’s heavier than he expected, the bladder’s neck hanging flaccid from his fist; the bottom swollen like a woman’s rump. He unscrews the nozzle, sniffs at the contents, squirts a drop into the palm of his hand.

  “What’s this? Tar? Soot?”

  Pain, I say. Rage. Shreds of childhood. Infancy, the years unremembered. Bottled and raw.

  I am no longer sure whether I am speaking aloud.

  He stares, shrugs, replaces the bladder then returns his eyes to the gun, keeps looking at its angular butt, shod in finest silver. The leather sheath alone is worth five guineas.

  “We aren’t thieves,” he mutters, either to convince me or to convince himself, turns on his heels and returns to the campfire to offer me another pull of his jug. “No, that we are not.”

  And without further ado, kicking off his shoes and picking through his toes for clods of dirt, he launches into a song, high-pitched and morose. When he is done, his companion, silent till now, looks over to me, a blade of grass in his mouth.

  “Begging your pardon, sir,” he smiles, “but you mustn’t let my brother here spoil the night with his sorry old bleating. Tell us a tale, then, something that’ll pass the time while there’s still liquor in the jug. Please do, sir, or this one, he’ll never shut up.”

  “A tale?” I say, gazing over to where the mask, carelessly repacked, winks one eye-glass at the moon.

  Why not?

  They have seen the gun. Our fates are already decided.

  And I—drunk, heartsick, on the threshold of my future—I am needful of some talk.

  ф

  “He set out to shoot horses.

  “Imagine a young man, lying naked on a blanket high up on the dust floor of a derelict mill. Not me, mind, but someone like me: a well-born, handsome youth, the heir to a large fortune. Like a prince in a tale. He is freezing, our prince. A January morning, dawn just broken. Above him are the rusted gears once powered by the windsails. Beyond them vaults a hole-punctured roof. A streak of pale light cuts across his shoulders, another separates his hand from his arm. The window in front of him points west. All around him, in the mill’s old timbers, there nest a thousand starlings. They scattered when he first climbed up. Now, an hour later, they have returned to their home. A rifle stretches from the young man’s hand. His clothes are tied into a bundle near his feet.

  “There is a bar of soap in the bundle, too, and a rough cotton towel. By his left shoulder sits a box of sweets. (You know what sweets are, my dears? Oh, I think you do!) You see, our prince, he is expecting to show, that morning. Not much—he pops a sweet in his mouth just as he thinks it—but a little. Shooting horses, it’s a different business than dropping a deer. Especially when they are in harness: dressed for work. His fingers are moist on his gun.

  “It is a long wait. Time for a thousand thoughts. He smokes a cigarette. To settle himself. To get in the mood. Cigarettes and sweets: he’s been indulging himself of late. It’s changing him, little by little, on the inside. It’s as though his skin has become a soft cocoon. A new self, straining against it, denting it, stretching it taut. It is a process not without pain.

  “Soon the worry grows in him. That he’s not up to it. That his hackles lie flat and his spirit is cowed. That he will fail, will miss his shot, be humiliated. A fortune in cigarette butts, stubbed out on the mill floor: and yet he can find no edge, no fire in him, feels like a match that will not catch. His teeth are aching with the sweets. He gets up, reaches for his bundle. He fetches his mask.

  “It’s a new toy, this. Borrowed rather than stolen; paid for, if you want to be petty about it, by his grandfather’s coin. It’s like the cigarettes, he has been told, but also different. He has yet to try it out. It is, he understands, a simple chemical reaction. You fill up a tin-like container, then screw it onto the front of the respirator. And then, when you are ready, you inject it with a syringe. The science behind it, well now, that’s a well-guarded secret. The basis for his family’s wealth. But none of this matters to our friend. He lies, naked, a rubber mask over his head. Gooseflesh on his back and buttocks; sweat beading on the inside of the mask.

  “He waits until they come into sight. A team of four, dragging a four-wheeled coach: slow on the muddy road. Two horses, they agreed, he and his man; when the coach stops. An easy target, with a gun of this precision. The telescope sits awkward against the goggles of the mask. As for our friend: he’s scared, the coward. Liquid bubbling through his bowels like he’s eaten rotten meat. It’s all he can do to press down on the syringe.

  “Now all he has to do is breathe, and drown.

  “In the first moment, all he feels is panic. It should be like cigarettes, the best and the strongest, dark as tar; just the same, only more so, a new kind of kick.

  “But what he inhales is not like cigarettes at all, is overwhelming in its purity, wilful and alive. Dying men’s sins: handpicked and distilled. His own rise feebly to their summons, childhood pranks called to muster before Satan. The sweets in his mouth have long turned into lumps of coal.

  “Their plan is simple. It’s a bad plan, really; hastily drawn up and lacking in logic, but a plan all the same. He is to aim for the front two horses. His man on the box will cut them loose; turn the coach with the remaining two; flog them half to death as he races them home while more shots are fired at the fleeing coach. An investigation will follow, a curfew, a national hunt. All this, just to convince two schoolboys to stay put. You have heard of unwelcome guests. Well, these guests are very welcome indeed. One will not hear of their going home.

  “The first bullet passes clean through the horse. It is so si
mple. Our young man pulls the trigger here, and over there a ribbon of red flies through the air. The shot is bad, a full yard low, shatters the shin and sends a shudder through the horse’s torso, so present in the crosshairs, he could reach out his hand and feel the dance of muscles underneath the fur.

  “He pauses for a moment, looks up. All around him the air is alive with the flight of birds. A thousand wings beat patterns into his rising Smoke. Little vortexes forming; sculptures of shadow, writ on the air. A moment, that’s all: the double thud of his heart. Then he takes aim at the second horse and shoots it through the neck.

  “There: he has done it. The horses are down, his mission is completed. But already he’s pushed back the bolt, put another bullet in the rifle’s chamber. He is not himself, you see. He is wearing a new face.

  “The telescopic sight finds the coachman. He is the young man’s servant, his confidant, his surrogate father. It may be said that the young man loves him. And yet the word beats in his ears. Father. How close have they been; how many years has the older man protected him; how many times has he offered him comfort, how many tears wiped away?

  “How many humiliations has he witnessed?

  “Father. A poor surrogate this: stupid, coarse, clumsy like a fool. A caricature bought to mock him; kept in service as an admonition, as a joke. The thought thickens the Smoke in his mask, flavours it with childhood. Our friend’s an orphan, you see, or something very like. His parents were a picture frame on the table by his boyhood bed. ‘This one’s a snake,’ his grandfather explained, ‘and that one was a sissy. It’s a wonder he sired you at all.’ No good-night kisses, just the heavy touch of the old man’s hand. A boy not bred for weakness. Crosshairs drawn on his father’s chest. A curl of the finger. The smoke of the gun swallowed by the billows of his personal pyre.

  “Parricide. You might think it’d be enough, the wages paid, the mask satisfied. But the lad has already worked the bolt. He sights another target; a young man standing in the open door of the coach. The telescope brings him ever so close. Fun-house mirror: like a twin born to different loins. Gawking, not yet in fear; the mouth an arching O. Three shots. The third one hits him, right in the head. The whiplash of impact. By rights he should be dead.