Overland

by Graham Rawle

  “Are these details for our benefit or for yours?”

  “What are you saying?” George felt flustered; the major had him on the ropes.

  “That’s it, isn’t it, Mr Godfrey? You’ve created your own little world here. Got everything just how you want it. This goes beyond camouflage. You put up street signs because you want a proper address, because you need to make it feel like home. Perhaps you have no other home to go to.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The major shook his head, shrugging off his insinuation.

  George was humiliated, but refused to be baited. “We have some major elements still missing.”

  “What else can this place possibly need?”

  “All kinds of things. A boating pond. A windmill …” George pointed to the miniature he had made for the model.

  “A windmill, Mr Godfrey? You haven’t forgotten, I hope, that this is supposed to be downtown Burbank, California, not Amsterdam, Holland. The idea is to blend into the landscape. A Dutch windmill is going to stick out like a turd on a wedding cake. Maybe you need to spend a little more time on terra firma … take a look at the real world.”

  “I just thought a windmill would add character.” He immediately regretted his feeble justification. The major was quick to pounce on it.

  “Add character? This isn’t a tourist attraction, Mr Godfrey. A windmill is a landmark and it’s an anomaly—exactly what we’re trying to avoid. Think about it. It’s a tower with a big easy-to-identify cross on top of it. It might also interest you to know that sheep farms are relatively uncommon in California.”

  “I realize that, but we had a hundred and fifty sheep available to us from the prop department at Warner Brothers and with the timescale and budgetary constraints, it seemed—”

  “And if they’d had a couple of dozen elephants and the Leaning Tower of Pisa, I suppose you’d have taken those too?”

  “Now you’re being ridiculous.”

  “Is that so? A boating pond? You don’t consider that ridiculous?”

  “We need it … for the children.”

  The moment of madness hung in the air. George realized he had gone too far. He started to backpedal. “If you’ll just let me—”

  “You’re through here, Mr Godfrey. You are under the directive of the United States Army and your services are required elsewhere. I thank you for your time, but as of today, Project Overland is terminated.”

  Minutes later, George was heading along George Street back towards the lake. He was seething. A passer-by asked him how he was enjoying the weather, but he was too distracted to think about it.

  It was Major Lund’s dig about not having a home to go to that so enraged him. Where had he got that from? It wasn’t true anyway; George still had the apartment—although he had to admit he no longer thought of it as home.

  Even before Muriel left him, he was spending less and less time there. Increasingly tight production schedules at the studio meant more nights working late. At least that’s what he told her. Even on days when he was able to quit work at a reasonable hour he would find an excuse to stay behind. As the studio working day began its slow fade to black, George would wander the backlot streets, from Chicago’s South Side to the boulevards of Paris, simply enjoying the scenery.

  Meanwhile, left alone at home, Muriel had begun to explore new avenues of her own.

  The boss of the Skateland Roller Rink, where she worked the afternoon shift selling snacks from a concession stand, had offered her free skating lessons after work. His name was Gus Moretti. George had met him once when dropping Muriel off at the rink on his way to the studio. He was showily chivalrous, the oh-so-gallant hand-kissing type that likes to be regarded as a “ladies’ man.” He was wearing a tight red shirt, all puffed up with bumptious vanity like a frigatebird with mating on his mind. A pencil moustache hovered like a pair of migrating eyebrows over his upper lip. The tightly crimped wave in his hair was doused in oil and plastered down as flat as it would go. He informed George that Muriel was a naturally gifted roller skater—was George not aware of this? George was not. And now he was being reprimanded for failing to recognize his wife’s potential to be shunted around on wheels.

  Though they were not wearing skates at the time, Gus offered to demonstrate their latest move. Without waiting for a reply, he positioned himself behind Muriel, cinching her waist with stubby pork wiener fingers. She seemed to know what was coming. He bobbed down on his knees and suddenly sprung up again, lifting her up so that she was sitting on his right shoulder. George regarded this as something of a liberty, but Gus seemed to think that he was perfectly within his rights. Muriel was all for it; she crossed her ankles and brought her toes to a dainty point, her arms held out to her sides, palms presented upwards to emphasize the gracefulness of their pose.

  George smiled wanly, unsure how to react. Later, when he was driving along the freeway, he imagined Gus practicing his lifting technique at home with a hundred-pound sack of Purina Dog Chow.

  Still, George was niggled by self-doubt. Movie stars like Douglas Fairbanks Jr and Humphrey Bogart carried women all the time—women who had fainted or been injured, women too feeble to walk on their own. In the Tarzan films, Maureen O’Sullivan seldom got anywhere under her own steam; Johnny Weissmuller insisted on conveying her everywhere she went. It was second nature to Johnny; he made it look easy—that broad chest of his—but George had never carried a woman before, and certainly had never attempted to carry Muriel for fear that he would be unable to perform adequately.

  In Shangri-La Cottage, the two military men lingered in the aftermath of George’s indignant departure. The major took off his cap, fanning himself with it before replacing it on his head. He stood surveying the model landscape.

  “Jesus H. Christ, Lieutenant. What the hell has this guy been doing? Look at this thing. He’s got orchards, a library, a tennis court …”

  “I know, sir. It’s quite remarkable.”

  Spontaneously, they both started snickering. It was a side of the major that Lieutenant Franks had never seen and both were a little embarrassed by their juvenile outburst. It somehow made them laugh all the more.

  “Do we feel, Lieutenant, that in the creation of this make-believe world, Mr Godfrey might have lost a few of his marbles?”

  The lieutenant brought his laughter under control. “Well, sir, he certainly has gone beyond the call.”

  “Jesus, Lieutenant. The guy needs help. Best thing for him, and everybody else, is to remove him from this site—get him up to Seattle. Who knows, maybe they’ve got some good couch doctors up there.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You can tell the Residents they no longer reside here.” He bent over George’s model. “Christ, what a nut. Look at these. What are they? Sheep? And what are these?”

  The Lieutenant leaned in to study the model more closely. “Um. Not sure, sir. Cauliflowers?”

  That set them off giggling again. The major’s wheezing laugh brought on a coughing fit; he struggled to control it, wiping a tear from his eye. “Oh lord.” He put his hand to his mouth and studied the model, gently shaking his head. “How does he photograph this thing?”

  The lieutenant pointed up to the ceiling. “From up there, sir. He climbs up on the roof and pokes his camera down the chimney.”

  More laughter.

  “The amazing thing is, sir, he’s even built what’s underneath us. The model is in two parts. Overland is just the top layer. The whole thing lifts off like a lid.”

  “Really? How?”

  “If you just grab that side, sir.”

  The major took hold of one edge; the lieutenant took the other.

  “After three …”

  The lid was lifted.

  FOURTEEN

  WHILE THEY WERE in the midst of it, right there on the factory floor, for the majority of workers there was no sense of anything beyond Lockheed, beyond even their own section. Only the privileged few were aware of Overland. For the r
est, the hangar walls and the roof above them disappeared into darkness beyond a labyrinth of cranes, jigs and heavy machinery. Even if it were possible for the workers to see far enough to identify the parameters of their world, there was never time enough to look up. Day merged seamlessly into night with no let-up in production. Like a colony of fiercely patriotic worker ants, each of them concentrated on the job to which they had been assigned. The part they turned or the section they welded was a small but critical component in building an aircraft that could help win the war. Morale among the workers was generally high, but ironically it wasn’t the successes that brought it all home to them; it was the failures.

  That morning, news had reached Section D that one of the planes they had been working on, the Lockheed XP-49, a variation on the P-38, crashed during its test flight over Glendale. Following a successful eighteen-minute appraisal of its low-speed handling characteristics, Lockheed test pilot Eric “Mac” MacDonald lost both port and starboard ailerons as well as a section of the lower wing surface while performing a dive of 350 mph at 2,300 rpm. MacDonald bailed, but his chest struck the forked tail structure as he exited the fighter, either killing him outright or rendering him unconscious, as he made no effort to deploy his parachute. The aircraft span to starboard and crashed just outside the airfield perimeter. Though no one said it, many of the workers wondered if the fault had developed as a result of some minor error they had made: a misaligned wing strut, an incorrectly wired altimeter or a seized aileron cable. The young test pilot, whom many of them had known, left behind a wife and one-year-old daughter.

  In the wing assembly section, Queenie skulked over to a woman with dyed red hair who was checking for fractures in the wing frame with a tiny flashlight.

  “Have you got it?”

  The redhead looked round furtively. “Not here.” She nodded towards the women’s restroom.

  A few minutes later, Queenie was at the sink as the redhead entered. She handed Queenie a small label-less medicine bottle of black liquid.

  “It’s not for me; it’s for a friend,” explained Queenie.

  The redhead nodded knowingly. “Yeah, right.”

  Queenie shook the bottle, holding it up to the light. “It looks disgusting. What’s in it?”

  “Search me.”

  “But it works?”

  “So I’ve been told. Takes about six hours to take effect. I’ve never used it myself.”

  Queenie echoed the knowing nod. “Yeah, right.”

  She handed over a ten-dollar bill. The woman pocketed it and headed towards the door. Queenie turned the bottle over, looking for some guidance.

  “Are you supposed to take it all at once?”

  “I don’t think it makes much difference.”

  Later, as Queenie approached her workbench, she could see Kay wearing her welding mask visor flipped up on the top of her head while she inspected a recently welded seam. She took a small hammer with a pointed end and chipped away at the slag residue before removing the piece from the vice. Satisfied, she tossed it into a bin full of similar joints and prepared to repeat the process. She looked as though she had been doing this for years rather than a couple of days.

  She caught sight of Queenie.

  “Where’ve you been?”

  Queenie was noncommittal: she widened her eyes and poked out her tongue, wagging it playfully from side to side.

  “You can’t keep any secrets from me,” said Kay.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve been eating licorice.”

  “What?”

  Kay laughed. “Your tongue—it’s black.”

  At the shift changeover, they were standing in line to board one of the half-dozen special buses that were waiting to transport the factory workers away from the plant. Queenie was quizzing Kay.

  “What do you mean, on top of the factory?”

  “What I said: on top of the factory.”

  “On the roof?”

  “I guess so. On the roof. And between the roofs. It’s hard to see what they’ve done. For instance, that blue tarp over the yard is actually supposed to be a lake. I don’t know how they’ve done it, but there’s a whole town up there.”

  “A town? How can there be?”

  “There were trees and fields with houses and cars in the distance.”

  “That can’t be just camouflage. Must be something else.”

  “And there was a lovely lakeside cabin. Except none of it looked quite real. Like scenery in a theater.”

  “You mean like a movie set? You think they’re shooting a movie up there?”

  This had not occurred to Kay. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  Queenie snapped her fingers. “I’ll bet that’s it. It’s a movie set. It must be. They always try to keep it secret to keep the fans away—and to avoid having all the locals hanging around and getting in the way of a shot. That must be why no one’s allowed up there.”

  “I didn’t see a camera.”

  “Did you see any actors?”

  “I saw one man. He was fishing by the lake.”

  “Ah. The guy with the fishhook. Was he famous? A movie star?”

  “I’m not sure. I don’t go to the movies much. He was rather handsome.”

  “You’re hopeless. It could have been Cary Grant or someone.”

  “I don’t think it was Cary Grant, but I couldn’t say for sure.”

  “Did he say anything? Did he say—” Queenie slipped into a bad Cary Grant impersonation “—I love you my dearest darling; I love you with all my heart—?”

  “Not exactly, but he stared at me for the longest time. It was like there was this … connection between us.”

  “Connection? Between you and Cary Grant? Are you kidding? You’re hardly his type. Maybe whoever you saw was one of the extras—that’s what they call actors who don’t have a speaking part—”

  “I know what an extra is.”

  “—Except sometimes extras get to say a line or two and then there’s a chance the director or a big studio producer will see them and give them a screen test and make them famous. That’s how Lana Turner got her break. She was just one of the gals in the chorus, or a passer-by on the street, pushing a baby buggy or something.”

  “Pushing a baby buggy?”

  “Yes. That’s the kind of thing extras do—push baby buggies or sell flowers from a market stall. You never know what you’ll be asked to do from one day to the next. One minute you’re a diner at a medieval banquet in a conical hat, the next you’re running screaming from an erupting volcano. But you’ve only got to catch a producer’s eye and you can be on the fast track to a starring role in a major motion picture. If I could get myself up there as an extra, I’d have a good chance of landing myself a speaking part. I could make good money too.”

  “What about your factory work, doing something for the war effort?”

  “Oh, phooey to that! Someone else can do my shift.”

  “That’s not very patriotic.”

  Queenie yielded to a compromise. “All right already, so I’ll go on tour and entertain the troops like Marlene Dietrich or the Andrews Sisters.”

  “What are you going to do to entertain the troops?”

  “I’ll do a medley of my hits.”

  “What hits?”

  “Well, I haven’t had any yet, have I? Give me a break.”

  Kay raised her palms in surrender.

  “But first I gotta get myself up there,” said Queenie.

  “Well you can’t go up through the lake; they’ve removed the scaffolding and gantry.”

  “There must be another way,” she said, balling her fist determinedly.

  It could have been Scarlett O’Hara in her finest screen moment.

  MEANWHILE In Overland, two women were dragging a plywood car onto the driveway of 2301 Lake Street. The car had spent the day out of sight under some trees while the supposed owner would have been out at work, but now it was around the time a nine-to-fiver would be
returning to the bosom of his family, the car needed to be visible once again.

  They were maybe ten minutes into their journey, sitting side by side on the crowded factory bus.

  “Hot milk’s good for an upset stomach,” said Kay. “I’ll make you some when we get home.”

  Queenie winced and shook her head. She was suffering. She turned sideways in her seat and drew her knees up to her chest, burying her face in the hem of her skirt. She groaned.

  “Not far now.”

  “Oh Jesus. I have to get off.”

  “Just sit quietly …”

  Queenie spoke more urgently now. “I have to get off.” She called out to the driver, pushing past Kay and heading down the aisle like an anxious bride. “Stop the bus, stop the bus! I gotta get off.”

  She headed quickly for the door; Kay followed close behind, her hand resting reassuringly on Queenie’s back. The driver was reluctant to pull up at an unscheduled stop until Queenie demonstrated the urgency by vomiting thick black bile into her cupped hand. That did it. Within seconds the bus had swerved into the curb and the doors were flung open. Queenie lurched out and spewed the remaining contents of her stomach onto the grass verge. The driver watched before pulling smartly away.

  Kay looked on with sympathy, tinged with revulsion. She handed Queenie a hanky. Queenie straightened, wiping her mouth and swallowing hard.

  “How much licorice did you eat?”

  “It’s not licorice, you dope. It’s something else. Something I took.”

  “Something you took?”

  “A potion.”

  “What kind of potion?”

  “Some useless quack remedy. Supposed to, you know, get rid of something.”

  “Constipation?”

  “No, you goofball. A baby.”

  “A baby? What baby?”

  “The baby I’m going to have—unless I can do something about it.”

  Despite his reluctance to face the reality of it, George had been well aware of the imminent termination of Project Overland. Yet he somehow imagined that when the construction guys, the carpenters, decorators and painters returned to their regular jobs at the studios, he would remain there to manage things. The army would pack up and ship out, or whatever it is they do, and finally leave him and the Residents in peace. There were still jobs to do, but nothing so urgent that it couldn’t wait awhile. Of course when fall came he would need to change the color palette of all the trees and bushes, but that was a long way off.