Dan Vyleta - Smoke

“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 simple. 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?