Beneath the Net

by Curtis Smith

Your first dream ended on a Reno undercard. A left hook hollowed you to the core, your insides a column of dead air, the punch a whistling thousand-pound bomb whose impact turned your thoughts to dust (how expertly you'd been played, five rounds of jabs and straight, quick rights, just enough leathery rat-a-tat to keep you on your heels, and then...). The canvas scratched your back and you beheld through moth-fluttering eyelids the otherworldly vision of a half dozen suns burrowing through cigar-smoke clouds. Impossible to tell where your dislodged mouthpiece stopped and your tongue began. Somehow you made it to your feet, oblivious to the world's new silence, to your cornerman who'd already thrown in the towel and was ducking between the ropes to rescue you, your boxer's instincts working you like a puppet on strings, your deeply-engrained belief that you could no more quit than you could stop breathing.

Jean Harlow movies. Radio songs like "Moonglow" and "Cheek to Cheek." The whores who gathered in the alley behind the gym, sundown vampires whose bodies turned cold the moment their backs touched their stained sheets. The girl from your hometown, the preacher's daughter who, the night she finally stopped saying no, began to sob the moment your hand reached beneath her home-sewn dress.

This was all you knew about love.


You loaded freight cars and rousted hobos in the Santa Fe yards, sheered llamas in Utah, paved mountain roads in Colorado. On the radio, you listened to news reports from Europe and Africa and the Pacific. The world seemed intent on consuming itself, armies on the march and whole countries vanishing, and, truth be told, you didn't much care one way or another. In each new town, you'd find your way to the gym, watch the fighters, sometimes wrap your hands and hit the bag...and around the corner from every gym was a bar...and just outside, the whores who looked right through you, knowing.

When the war finally came, you tried to enlist, faking your way through the physical until the bored doctor took a peek at your ruptured eardrum and told you to get lost. And there you were again, a fighter unable to fight. You hitched a series of rides to California, crossed the desert in a pickup bed shared with a mangy dog and caged, squawking chickens. The moon shone across the dead sea, and you pulled your tattered coat tight around your shivering body. Who were you, anyway?


Army engineers had rigged football fields' worth of camouflage over the airplane factory's hastily-erected holding areas and warehouses, the loading bays and slope-roofed hangars. The camouflage reminds you of seaweed tangled in a fisherman's net, and as you cross the vast parking lot, the frayed cloth strips flutter in the breeze, the net heaving with the rhythm of a restless ocean. You gaze up at the sky cut into the tight squares of a giant crossword puzzle, the clouds and blue, the faint morning moon and winter's evening stars.

You smoke your morning cigarette until the burning nub warms your fingers, nod a hello or two (but no one knows a thing about you, your boxer's past, the home you left long ago). A sleepwalkers' parade files past, faces obscured by the net's ever-shifting play of shadow and light, and you think of the deeper camouflage of a man's life, his heart wrapped in actions and stances meant to mask the sorrows that are his alone.


You spot a woman at the plant. Tall and blonde, pointed knees poking her overall's enveloping blue with every step. Her arrival as one of seven in a backfiring Ford reminds you of a midgets' circus trick. You start setting your alarm twenty minutes earlier just to plunk yourself in her path, smoking and kicking stones into the plant's backhoed trash pit. Down there, the maze of oily rags and paper scraps and broken wooden skids bristles with the traffic of scurrying rats. Tat-tut-tat scold the netting's strips of olive cloth.

Her story comes to you filtered through a dozen tongues. Her husband's body left on some jungle island-speck, and what more do you really need to know? On your way home, you stop at the gym and hit the heavy bag for the faraway glint of her green eyes, for the way the shadows fall across her face beneath the camouflage net, for the itching, melancholy lust that's taken root in your heart. Afterward, you take a shower...grab a beer...and with your last three dollars, you find a street-corner girl, and in the perfumed dark, you imagine her speaking in a voice you have yet to hear.

Her name, your foreman tells you, is Gail.


Hello, and can she hear the nervous sputtering in your gut, your throat's dry desert of apprehension? The Ford's six other women, in their work boots and babushkas and bobby-pinned hair, walk right past, but your blonde lingers by the trash pit's edge and accepts your offer of a cigarette. OK, she says when you ask if you can meet her for lunch, but the cafeteria's din plays tricks with your bad ear, so you suggest a retreat to the wide, open doors by the supply depot. Want a chaperone? the Ford's driver asks, and her squinting eyes fix you in a tail gunner's stare.

Outside, you sit on empty metal drums, your lunch pails balanced on your laps. The swallows that nest high in the depot's exposed girders swoop around you. You tell her about the night in Reno, but then feel ashamed, your misfortune petty and selfish compared to hers. Flustered, you play the clown, walking on your hands with pennies and match packs raining from your pockets, tossing up crust strips for the darting birds to pick out of midair. Her laughter eases the embarrassment of your buffoonery.

Look, she says. Near the depot doors, the netting slants down, its stretched edges anchored on metal poles, and there the net jerks with the wing-flapping struggle of an entangled swallow. You and Gail stand side by side, half-blinded by the sun as you study the bird. Gail drags over one of the drums and climbs on top, momentarily posing like the surfing girls you've seen at the beach. She motions you over and, without revealing the vaguest hint of her plans, hoists herself onto your shoulders. Her boot heels dig into your ribs. It's impossible to see what she's doing, her actions relayed by faint movements in the tug of war she wages to release the bird, a curse she immediately apologizes for; the moment's awkward sexuality fades rapidly beneath the strain of holding her for so long. A feather drifts before your eyes, then another, and finally the struggle ceases. She slides down, holding onto you, one of her overall bib straps coming undone on the way. Blushing slightly, she refastens the strap's hook. Bloody peck-marks dot her hands.


Here's what you've come to know: She prefers Basie over Sinatra, Cagney over Gable. She has hidden talents for pitch-perfect whistling and blowing slowly-dissolving concentric smoke rings. Her head swirls with facts and lists she can recite at a moment's notice (the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the roll call of Snow White's dwarves, the batting averages of the entire Gashouse Gang). But the deeper parts of her, the parts you alone want to know and possess, are only hinted at in the way she hums along with radio tunes you've never heard, in her unnerving habit of abandoning a conversation mid-sentence to stare out the nearest window, her forgotten cigarette wasting away to a gray, ashy column.


On a rainy November evening, you take her to the movies, and as the newsreel plays, many in the crowd sit forward at the sight of your factory's bombers trundling down a palm-lined runway. How unlikely, the planes' rumbling flight, their tons of hastily-welded metal flung into the sky and arranged in wedge formations like winter geese. The bomb-bay doors open, revealing a seaside town's tight grid of houses and then the bombs' flight, moments of silent anticipation, a breathless waiting that reminds you of a swimmer's rise from a lake's silty bottom. The bombs' strangely graceful cascade dwindles to invisibility, then they are reborn in rapidly-multiplying dusty blooms. Give 'em hell! one man yells, his cry cheered and applauded throughout the darkened theater.

I want to go, Gail says, already gathering her coat and purse.

Ten minutes later, you're climbing her apartment building's rattling fire escape, four flights of narrow steps slick with rain. Her window is open; the curtains drape around you as you straddle the sill. She waits for you in the middle of a dark, sparsely-furnished room. Her palm gently pushes you back and, one by one, she undoes the buttons of her dress.

I loved my husband, she says.

I want to be a good man, you say. I want to be good to you.

She stares at you, unblinking, intent; you think that if the entire building fell down around you, she wouldn't notice, a singularly focused state of mind you can only compare to that night in Reno when you willed your uncomprehending body off the mat. Her dress billows to the floor, a soft moat that grows with the addition of her slip, her bra and panties. The streetlamp below shines onto the ceiling, a spotlight shaft that divides the room into night and day. She steps toward you, hiding nothing, and it's not until you're holding her that you realize you're both trembling, your naked, pressed-together hearts beating like the wings of the sparrow she once saved, a creature desperate to leave the false trappings of this earth and return to the sky.

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