From his assumed position of invisibility, Ray looked out at the other men and found them fascinating. They came from all over, from worlds Ray had never seen. Some of them talked with him and Ray replied as best as he could. But there was something different about George. When George noticed him and spoke to him, Ray didn’t feel frightened. He was the opposite of his brother, the opposite of a bully. George was tall, mellow, a decent Midwesterner, the kind of American they put in propaganda films. He had a round-cheeked face, eyelids that hung at a slight diagonal down to the outer edges of his eyes and a small mouth. His neat ears, exposed by his crew-cut, were sometimes comical, sometimes sad. Gentle and unassuming, his easy way with friendly gestures had a powerful effect on Ray. The first time Ray really noticed this was at the end of an assault course. He crossed the line nauseous with effort. His lungs were a tight burning thickness that he couldn’t get air into. He bent double and drooled onto the ground. When he straightened up again, George winked at him. ‘Nice day for a stroll.’ Nothing clever or out of the ordinary. Just a little humour.
When they played cards together, the slow courtesy of George’s manners made Ray think of the real America that he came from, evenings spent talking softly and watching the sun set from rural porches. It was nice to get a feel of that. Ray thought that if you put George in a cowboy picture, he would be the store owner who becomes the sheriff when the sheriff is shot, a man who just knows what is right and sticks to that.
In westerns Ray liked the huge skies. His own had been crowded by buildings, ranks of windows and zigzagging fire escapes, pigeons, laundry, faces. In the cowboy pictures the skies were barred with streaks of cloud or brilliantly hot and empty with hungry vultures spiralling through space. Under those skies the strong, simple stories, men moving with their animals.
Closing his buzzing notebook, hushing the pages together and fitting it back into his pocket, Ray squinted up at the sky. Being on a ship in the middle of the Atlantic, no larger sky was possible. A dome, it dropped round to horizon on all sides. Clouds made its colours similar to that of the troopship’s paintwork, sober greys and blues. The ocean churned beneath him. It was easy to think about eternity here, big things of life and death, in this fateful vastness, or if not to think about them at least to say their names. Time. Fate. Courage. Journey.
Ray returned to the noise and smells below decks. Most had stopped vomiting now but odours lingered in pockets, acrid with a tang of burned iron and bleach. When Ray first entered the ship it had reminded him of going down into the subway, that same flickering roar and riveted, heavy, hard-working metal. Ray walked past card games and letter writing, push-ups and smoking and comic book reading to find the boys of his squad. He found half of them together.
A conversation about women. Their shapes, their smells, sweetness and deceit, the variations across nationalities, whores, wives, girls. Women were so exhaustively discussed that Ray felt them almost materialising, wished into existence. Randall was on the subject of freckles, apropos of a girl he knew back home, and what amount of freckles was the right amount. This girl had the perfect number.
Floyd, squatting on his heels, said, ‘Sounds like everybody’d be wanting to fuck her. How many guys are hanging around her now, you reckon? Right now? I bet right now this kid ain’t even vertical.’
Randall leaned back and punched his shoulder.
‘What’s her address?’ Floyd went on. ‘Texas, by the beef cow by the cactus. That it? Maybe if I get a light injury I’ll go pay her a visit.’
Randall put his hand to the side of Floyd’s head and shoved. ‘You’ve got bad morals, boy. No wonder no woman ever touched you.’
Randall was a disappointing Texan. Ray had always imagined them as tall and square, squinting, sun-weathered. Randall had the look of poverty, grey and small. His body was tightly knit, with jerking reflexes. In his bleak wrists and the clever joints of his fingers, Ray saw Randall’s grip on things. Firing at the range, Randall produced the quick rhythmical chuck-chuck sound of a well-handled weapon. There were odd nicks like blows of a chisel in Randall’s scalp where the hair didn’t grow. Ray couldn’t remember what it was Randall did back home, probably because he was cagey about it. Most likely he was living on welfare. What he’d tell you was how great a pitcher he was, how women shed their clothes for him or were devoted sweethearts. That was the army for you. Everyone was at it, being new men, lying freely, old selves left behind with their soft civilian clothes. Not George, though. He was honest, a Christian man who crossed his hands in front of his chest, bowed his head and concentrated when the padre said prayers.
‘You’re making that stuff up. You’ve seen that girl with, like, her boyfriend or something,’ Ray said. George smiled.
‘What are you talking about? Ignorant. Don’t know anything.’
‘So what’s her name?’
‘Daisy.’
‘Daisy?’ Ray laughed, emboldened by the flow of conversation. ‘I knew you was making it up. Daisy is, like, a cow you had or something. Why didn’t you even say something we could believe, Mary-Ellen or Elizabeth-May or something? Daisy.’
‘Listen. Fuck. Goddamn it, listen. You’re a little wop virgin, Marfione.’
‘That’s Italian virgin to you,’ Ray said.
‘That’s nice,’ George said. ‘Like a Leonardo da Vinci.’
Floyd held a cigarette in his left hand. With his right he lit a match against his teeth, poking it far back into his mouth and dragging it along the underside of his molars. A tussle of brightness inside his mouth then he held up a match in full flame. Nonchalantly, he lit his cigarette. That was Floyd announcing he was bored with Daisy. ‘Out of our hands anyway,’ he said. ‘The war will decide if we get to see any of these people again.’
‘Don’t talk that way.’
‘Where are we even going? Nobody knows. Officers don’t tell us.’
‘We’re going to fight, to land. We know that.’
‘Too busy eating that gourmet shit upstairs.’
‘Fuckin’ right.’
‘I’ve got to say I’m looking forward to some fighting. Get some fresh air at least.’
Fear thickened in the ship over the coming days. You could feel it. The men got angry, exercising furiously or stalled, torpid, their faces seizing up. After they were briefed about the operation they had at least a target to think about, an object in mind, procedures. But still in his dreams Ray flailed forwards on the training ground, sweat stinging his eyes and loosening his grip on his rifle. Impotent with his bayonet, he was unable to drive it into the dummy or scream his battle cry. Other indistinct men ran past him into the danger he wasn’t ready to meet.
Bad weather took hold of the ship two days before the landings. The men hung on as the dark interior sank suddenly sideways, rose, slid across, plunged. There were rumours of torpedoes but none came. Vomit rolled across the floors. There was a kind of mad festivity about it as they puked and shouted, kicked about inside a turbulence equal to their dread. Rain clattered onto the metal hull and decks. The engines churned. Men vocalised as they retched, barking, moaning, almost singing. George held onto his bunk. For comfort, Ray watched him. George’s eyes were closed. He seemed to be speaking a prayer. Dunphy, the big machine-gunner in Ray’s squad, fell badly and sat and cursed, holding his wrist. A few of the men had started cheering as the ship reached the summit of its tilt and fell down, like it was all a ride at Coney Island.
When the storm let go of them there was cleaning up to be done, heads to be cleared, as after a wild, violent party.
In the final hours before landing on the North African coast, the boys listened to their instructions again and again, readied their weapons and kit. They were consumed with practical thoughts, or at least attempted to be, thinking things through with a determined sanity: materialist, mechanical, rational, so clear and potent it was as dizzying as moonshine. Army sanity. This was how you did it. This was how you got through. Drills and procedures. There was an opportunity to automate yourself and just fit in. This was what Ray’s urge to hide counselled him — the hope that he could disappear into the military machine and present no individual target. Religion was there to cover the part of them that remained exposed. The padre said prayers. Ray looked at George, standing there, praying along. His ears looked small and serious. There was a Catholic priest as well for the boys who wanted him. Ray was not really a church guy. The priests back home were too friendly with the tough guys, both types parading around the neighbourhood in their fancy outfits, accepting the tributes of the people. But he went for a blessing anyway. His mother would want him to.