The Ballad of the Cannon-Ball

by FallenBelfry

Virgil Matthews has lost everything in his life. He'd lost it time and time again, and each time he does, he finds himself to be the bringer of his own damnation. But he was somebody, once. And maybe he can be somebody again. (Yes, this is a fic about the Virgil, the one and only, the formerly football-playing maverick who'd gotten himself trapped in a cell with Zib.)

1927

"All-right, time for you to go, fella."

The order was delivered across a curt stare and the sound of a glass being pulled back. He was being stared at yet again. This, it was always this. They'd give him a stern look or two and expect him to fall into himself, and to take this bashful retreat in stride, and to not protest it, not without a threat or two to the physical integrity of whoever decided to remove him from their establishment, at the least. Well, he'd show them all. That was his glass and he was not about to be robbed of it, not when he'd been so close to hitting the peak.

"I think you should reconsider," Virgil insisted through pursed lips, and he felt himself slur the words, but they sounded clear enough to him.

The man opposite – a wiry creature, the barkeep sort that fulfils many different roles, a typical tabby fellow with rounded grey ears and speckled fur – gave him a cold stare in response.

"I think you'll find that..." Virgil stifled a belch, "Depriving a man of his spirits on a night such as this is a most unwise decision."

"And why, say you, is it unwise?" The barkeep repeated. He'd held onto the glass the entire time, with five digits clasped about its rim and his palm splayed over the top of it, and Virgil knew the game. It was all about stopping another pour or two. It was declarative. And it was every bit as villainous as the rest of the circus, "Are you implying you'll do something if I don't fill you up again, old man?"

That was quite enough. That, then, was quite enough. Old man. Old man! He was only twenty-six, and he was young, he felt young, he felt alive and he felt he could take any swing he wanted, and so Virgil swung, and the barkeep dodged that. How'd he manage? It was such a well-delivered swing. Sure, it took Virgil off his feet and he stumbled back and to the side, and he had to clasp the bar rail to stop himself from diving into the floor, but it was well-aimed, and well-timed too. When he looked back up and across the bar, he found that the wiry tabby fellow disappeared. Then, he felt a paw on his neck and another on the buckle of his belt, and he felt himself move without meaning to.

"Unhand me!" he clamoured; the world was a wash, it tumbled into colours and shapes and it swam about his head, in that oily film that assaulted his eyes every time he'd been deprived of his peak. The peak was clarity. The peak is where sense lived and in sense he'd be able to take that swing again and lop the cad's head off, but it was too late, he was being dragged all over again and he knew himself licked. Still, not without protest. His feet slapped the floor behind him, toes slamming into the wood as he rattled all of himself from head to toe, paws swinging in front of his face, "You son-of-a-bitch, you bastard, I am somebody! I used to be somebody! You heard of me, you did, seven years ago! I played good ball!"

The air was full of talk. It took Virgil a moment to notice it, and once he settled his flailing, something he did not out of defeat but out of his own grace, he realised he was being stared at. The whole damn circus had come to town. It was a smattering of people; rich people. He could tell. Virgil was, after all, somebody. He'd always been somebody and now he was simply deprived of his stellar peak and so they stared at him. Flappers in sequinned dresses. Men with slicked back hair and narrow lips and eyes full of judgement, and they couldn't kick a ball like he could. Virgil grinned a smug beam to himself. They'd never have him. It was all about blowing him down, no doubt. Then the ride stopped.

It stopped in a tumble and a swirl of colours and then a hard slap of pavement against his back. He tried to steady himself. His ears were ringing. Then, realising he was flat on his stomach, Virgil rolled, rose, and sat up with the aid of his paws. The barkeep. Narrowed eyes, once more. The stare. They really did want to blow him down.

"Now stay here," The barkeep commanded, "And don't come back, you hear?"

"I was somebody," Virgil insisted quietly. There it was again, the knot. It was in his throat. He managed an impotent slap of the pavement with his palm and a little groan and then arched himself up, to try and get as close to the barkeep as possible, "I was somebody!"

"Everyone was somebody once."

The door closed. Dead silence. Somebody, once. Virgil was alone. The wood door before him was a simple one, the door of a two-storey house he'd been tipped off to by Matt, one of his buddies. Poor Matt. He'd been such a wash, Virgil thought, as the knot in his throat grew and became bitter, and he swallowed the retch that threatened to spill from it back down. A firefighter, Matt once told him, one of the better ones. He got a few medals for it, and he was in the war and got a few more medals there, too, and there'd been no respect for him since, and now he was a wash. But Matt? Matt hadn't the pleasure of being someone. Men who did not have that luxury could not know how truly cold the pavement was against him now, how bitter the drizzle that fell about him felt on his fur, and how much the divot in his tail ached, again and again, and how little it all meant to anyone. How little did it mean, really?

Maybe Carla would take him in again. That was his task: counting good graces. Deprived of his peak, upright again and stumbling, and he could see the worn tips of his own shoes. That was Corinth leather once. Matt tried to gamble him out of them at dice once, and Virgil knew why. The vestments of men who were somebody were coveted by those that weren't and so he slipped up and along the wall, paw outstretched and roaming across the skip-stone bricks. The stars shone above. The city, did too. It was Midsummer, he reminded himself, deep July, swinging and warm and adrift in Jazz and industry and smoke. He could make out a dot above him, and a few more, and they cascaded atop one another, to caress the blundering half-moon of a city electric, and he could hear a saxophone. Someone was practising. Someone, like he, wanted to be somebody but was not so readily given to being somebody and that was all that mattered. Carla? She was soft. She tended to that tail of his. Damnable Model T, damnable thin tires not at all given to avoiding the appendages of good men; damnable modern world, all of it, gas and electric and mass-produced. One such vehicle blew past now, packed with bodies and none gave him the time of day or looked for him, and so he stumbled onwards – maybe he'd do it now. He'd finally go and do it. Jump into the cut of the Mississippi. Carla would be shattered. Did he want that? There was an answer in him, and Virgil found it expelled onto the pavement before him with the contents of himself, the half hot dog he'd split with Matt and old Ricky, and a few drifts and eddies of the fifty cents he spent on whiskey, and the rest of him.

It was late, and a long way home, and so he walked, empty of himself, loose and limp and dreaming.

1922

"Go long!"

The voice came from outside. It came from the raised window lip in the coach's office, the one that had been propped up with a broom. Laugher followed. Virgil shifted in his seat.

"You need to stop this."

Coach Danvers was a severe man. A black tuxedo cat with greying brown spots, he took to this sort of severity before. He had his digits laced before him in a triangle shape, brows furrowed, and he stared at Virgil. And each time he took to it, he'd done so over matters related to sports. Yard lines, fouls, and flags. This wasn't Virgil's first talking-to. The last one he'd been given to for excessive celebration at the touchdown line after what he and everyone else found was a great pass, and so did Danvers, but he did not appreciate the boy opposite stripping himself of his shirt and whipping it about. Immoral, he called it. But this talking-to?

"This is the second time this week," Danvers pressed with a small clap of his palms and then a thud of them down onto his desk, "The boys at the clubhouse told me you came in absolutely demolished."

"I was not that drunk," Virgil retorted, and all he got in response was a deep sigh out of his coach, "I swear. It was just a few drinks."

"I cannot have players breaking the law like that," Danvers' brows laced themselves together even more tightly, and Virgil could make out the channels in the deep black fur now; they collapsed in on the white spot on the coach's nose and made him seem all the more furious for it, "You have to understand, we have a reputation to uphold."

He did not want to listen to this. It was the same, always. A few drinks with the clubhouse, nothing at all out of the ordinary or even mildly odd, and he'd seen the rest of the student body do the same. If the mathematicians could all pile into a car or two, all the ones that did drink, and go down-town for a spot of swing and a tip of the bottle, why couldn't they?

"Do you not have someone at home?" Danvers inquired with an indistinct motion of his paws, pleading almost, "Someone, anyone to temper you a bit in this?"

"I wasn't the only one."

Danvers' upturned palms came down firmly on the desk and the man rose now and bellowed, "I am not concerned with the others! If my star quarterback comes stumbling into the clubhouse at three in the afternoon, out of his mind on moonshine, and barrels into a journalist from the Post-Dispatch in that state, that makes the rest of us look bad!" His right shot up and he jutted an index finger at the wall accusatorily, "Them, too!"

"But I-"

"No more," the coach turned and planted his paws on either side of his head with a despairing shake of it, "I don't want to hear it. Pack yourself up. You're off the field for the rest of the season."

The words hit Virgil like a truck. This was not right. This couldn't have been right. Not like this, not when he was this close to a hundred on rate. Virgil shot to his feet at once and thrust his paws down onto the desk, and then narrowed his eyes.

"Do you have any idea what you are doing?" He demanded.

Danvers shook his head side-to-side and chuckled weakly, "I fear that I do. And you-" The jutting finger returned, this time to the middle of Virgil's chest. It jostled him back a bit, "Do you have any idea what you are doing? To us? To the team?"

"You don't know what it's like," he insisted. The core of him was on fire and those planted paws curled and he felt his claws dig deep channels into the wood, thrust into lines and then into more and he sank in. That was a fine desk. He'd make a mess of it in turn, if Danvers really wanted him to, "You don't know."

"Tell me."

"Why should I?"

Danvers gave a blank stare to this.

"Do you think, really, that it'd make any difference? I am out there every single week, every single God damned week," The Lord's name felt vain now but he held onto it and it rose out of the fire in him and bellowed across the table and if he could, Virgil would gladly leap across it and thrust his paws against the fat man's neck and squeeze, properly, "And I come home to what? An empty house. Nothing, nobody. Just bare walls."

"People hurt," Danvers insisted, his lips a line and his brows unlaced now and all of him awash in this horrendous sympathy which Virgil knew so well, "They do. The boys do. Do you think I don't?"

"Then what don't you understand?!"

"I don't understand why you drink!" Danvers' protruding paw balled itself up into a fist and hit the table hard, and caused the inkwell on the corner of it to skip up a touch, "Why any of this is needed. Why don't you just...talk to me. To someone. Hell, boy," There was a crack in his voice, "I vouched for you, for three God damned years. I vouched for the broken boys from the trenches, too. I told them, he's a good one, the Matthews kid. The Cannon-ball! Our Cannon-ball! He's got an arm like a torpedo and a good head on him and he'll guide you, and now look at yourself." He motioned across the whole of Virgil, "A drunk!"

"You're just a temperance cad, aren't you? Just one of those nuts who thinks the bottle is sickness and that we can't indulge every now and again."

"You can!" Danvers volleyed back, "You can, I do too! But for Goodness sake, you come in here a wreck. That is the problem, Virgil. That! Not the damned drink. Not your love of dancing or whatever it is you do when you're all gassed up. It's you, and now I think it may have always been just you."

"Well, then," Virgil said at last. He'd thrown his paws up and slapped them down against his sides and shook his head side-to-side, and that was that, "I'm off the team, aren't I?"

"For now," Danvers insisted, "For now, and only because you leave me no choice at all, kid. But please," He'd propped himself up on his paws against the desk again and then shook his head weakly. His eyes drifted down. Virgil watched the old man shrug, "If you do get better, just tell me. The faith I had in you? It's still here. Don't do this to yourself."

"Maybe I'll take up baseball."

For all the despair that ran rampant on Danvers' features now, it could not hide the disgust at those words. He gave a weak nod and then turned his back and sighed, "Get out."

"What-"

"Get the fuck out."

Greta's door. It somehow seemed more inviting before. It was a plain wooden thing, divided into four equal panels and with a peep-hole and a number nine on it, and Virgil raised his paw. No way but up. Things could still look up, they could. He gave a rap against the wood. He heard steps. She always had little feet and they shuffled sweetly and he heard the doorknob rattle. Greta.

"Hey there," He greeted, and at once found himself casting a relaxed pose against the door-frame, "How's things?"

"Virgil," she countered simply.

"What's the matter? Unhappy to see me?"

One of her brows cocked. She was beautiful. She was every bit as beautiful as he knew her, a Southern belle in all senses of the word, cream champagne fur in a calico pattern with white breaking it up, and her blonde hair fell about the sides of her head, and she was beautiful when he first saw her and she was beautiful just then, too. Greta sighed, "Not unhappy. Bewildered, perhaps."

"And why's that?"

"Well, last you were here, you did storm out, you know," He watched as she plucked at her own hair disinterestedly. She wrapped it about her digit and let it spin itself out, and then she shrugged plainly, "You told me all sorts of awful things. And now, this? A day later?"

"I'm sorry, I really am," he raised a paw and ran it across the back of his head. His own shoulders rose and fell, and though he did not intend it as such, the motion turned into a shrug, "I shouldn't have. You deserve better."

"You know, I think I do."

To this, he blinked, "What are you saying?"

"Nothing, yet," Greta explained. Her tone was as flat as the surface of a still lake, and she'd looked up at him just then, in a bit of a grimace and then a drawn apart smile, "But you know, maybe this is just an error of yours. You didn't mean what you said, did you?"

"I never do," Virgil exclaimed, and then spanned the little boundary between them. His paws settled on her hips and hers did the same, but found his sides; she was shorter than he was, after all, "It won't happen again. I promise you."

Their lips met briefly. He held her, quiet and still and kissed her in the door-frame, and she stood on her tip-toes as he did. Then, in the breach of their parting, she dipped her chin faintly, "You know, I somehow don't believe you and do believe you all at once."

"I could always prove it to you."

"Stop smiling," She commanded, and slapped his side a bit as she did; he could see the inkling of fury in her eyes and he found it delicate and unserious, and so he kissed her once more, "You cad."

"Would you like me to?"

"What happened to you?" Greta pressed now, and where he expected a playful grin, he found a serious and unsmiling expression instead. Serious, unsmiling, and severe; Danvers, all over again, "Something happened. You'd not turn up here so fast with this little apology of yours if not."

"What do you want me to say?" Their paws slipped once more and they stood a respectable distance apart, "That I'd been boxed up by someone? That I'd my head pounded in and now I've come to count my good graces again?"

"Not this," Her digits found her forehead and she gave a shake side-to-side and then a little sigh, through closed eyes, "Look, if you want to come in, do. But at least tell me what happened."

He'd have to, didn't he? He was powerless before the likes of her when she took him apart like this, and Virgil cursed himself. Women, he mused briefly, eyes flitting across her hair and her lips and settling on the middle of her face, and he looked down at the floor right after, as if the view somehow stunned him, "It's crude."

"I'm used to crude."

"I'm off the team."

At once, her paws flew up either side of herself and she wandered into her room, walked a lap, and then went back out, to the door, "Really?"

"Yes."

"For Goodness sake," her voice was stiff and empty and she surveyed him in the same fashion, "Could you at least tell me exactly what it was that caused this?"

"You know what it is," Virgil confessed. His tone was dark and the leaden weight in him, the creep of the cold up his back, all of it came back and he'd tempered it with fury before Danvers but now, with her taking him apart like this, only the guilt remained, "I wound up at the clubhouse a little under duress."

"Again?"

He wanted her to be sharper. He wanted her to be angrier. He wanted fury and brimstone and a cussing out and a tussle right after where he'd counter each word with a kiss and a well-aimed wink up at her, ideally from between her legs, but there was nothing, now. Only blankness. An empty stare. A rap of her index finger against the oak frame. Greta drew breath and he cut her off, "Yes. Again. I fucked up."

"You did."

"I'll change," he insisted, "I'll do a better job of it, I'll do a better job and I won't be such a damned cad any more. I'll do proper by you. I said I'd marry you and I will, and it won't be like this any more. no more me turning up at the door in the middle of the night asking you to take me in again like I am some sort of forlorn little kitten. I'll use the money, I'll clean up and get back on the team and we'll have a nice car, and a nice house, too, and we'll be happy again, we will. You know I am good for it."

Nothing. Silence and stiffness and Greta was barely moving. Barely breathing, too, he noted. Then, without any more words, she simply reached for the door and closed it in his face. Plain wood. Four panels of it and the number on it, and her delicate steps, and Virgil, and then nothing at all.

1918

"It should have been you."

This was the usual, then. It was so well-expected by now. A familiar dance. Anna, at the dining room table, with fury in her voice. He'd just come in. Just out the door he was, still in his jacket and shoes and he'd not the time to take either off, and she commanded him to sit. A letter lay in her paw. Virgil recognised the War Office stamp at once. The wood felt cold against his back. Her eyes narrowed and she sighed, he watched her palm the table shakily, slapping the appendage onto the wood in a blank search. Then, she found it, opened the tin, fetched one, and pressed it between her lips. Virgil reached into his pocket for a light programmatically. Her paw shot up and slapped his, hard, and the lighter arced across the room and into the wall.

"It should have been you!" Came her cry. Her lips shook with rage and the white of her cheeks lay stained with tears and he could see how little his mother cared for it at all. For the light, for his coming, for any of it, "You. Couldn't you have been born just a year earlier?!"

"Mother," he countered, and Anna shook her head to that, furiously and briefly and sharply, too, and then simply settled her paws before herself in flat fives. The smoke spilled from her lips through bitter sobs.

"They should have fucking drafted you," One of her paws balled itself up and hit the wood, and he felt the reverberation of it in him, "You'd be better at this. You're a good runner. And if you'd be the one, I'd not-"

The sentence ached in him. Virgil knew the end of it. He knew the core of it and its thrust and it pressed into him, and left him quiet.

"Richard was a good boy," She reached up and took the tear-stained cigarette out from between her lips and flicked it at him, "He was smart. He was wiser than you, always smarter and faster on his feet. Always keener on things. He'd deserved better than this."

If he could bleed, he would. If he could feel anything, he would. This is what this was all about. This is why she'd sent for him, this is why the Connelly boy came bounding up to him in the middle of their game of catch and tugged him aside and told him, your mother, she's unwell. She's shaken. She says you're needed. She said something unforgivable to Connelly too, something to that effect, to the same effect as she'd wept out now and Virgil could tell it was him and his own that she was after. This was it. Richard was dead and he'd died in a pit some place. He died broken and alone and all Anna could muster was more cutting remarks and more of her damnable smoke and more of it blown and ashed at him. Virgil stood.

"Sit the fuck down."

"No," he volleyed back. Bitter tears rose in him too. They read as children. They read of soldiers and glory and men who die with a full-throat laugh in the enemy's face and die as heroes, and not in the raked muck of some foreign field where nobody knew him. Nobody knew Richard. Least of all Anna. Mother. The word stuck at him like a catch-weed and she grinned a mean beam up at him and then shook her head bitterly once more.

"This is so very much yourself," She remarked. There was poison in her words, "Like your fucking father."

"Don't!" His paws came down onto the wood just like hers and she shot to her feet, too, "Don't you fucking dare compare me to that lout."

"Oh I will, Virgil. I am going to and you'll sit there and you'll see yourself in him," Anna insisted. Her tears were gone and in their wake, only fury remained, and the curled yellow telegram in block letters, stamped in its uppermost left corner by the War Office; dispassionate green stamp-ink, news paper, brown and grey and a little bit yellow still and the words had been smudged since she first touched it and it was tear-stained now, and there were no more tears in her, "You're going to look into that dark mirror and you'll see that you never were meant for anything. And someday, you'll be dead."

He grinned bitterly, "You'd fancy that, wouldn't you?"

"I would," Her paw rose and she spanned the boundary and caressed his cheek, and her touch was as cold as ice, "I would smile and laugh like never before. I'd never again hear that door in the middle of the night. I'd never again have to wonder what you could have been. You'd be dead and I'd be gladder for it."

"Do you think I didn't love him?"

"Love means nothing coming from you."

That, then, was it. Anna turned and walked to the window and then leaned herself on it, and exhaled deeply. A cry spilled from her lips. It turned to a scream. She bellowed out his name – Richard. Rick. And all she managed thereafter was a long and empty 'why'.

1925

Virgil's life was beset by closed doors. It seemed to him that he found himself before one every now and again, and each time he did, he found himself in a wounded state, wishing to drag himself through it and into it and ask, in muted words, for some pittance. Tonight was no different. The wind blew cold. December. He couldn't get enough wood to fix the window, and the deposit was already lost, so he'd not be able to afford it for a while. He grimaced a bit. His tail. It ached again, and that meant another door and another pittance, and he raised his paw. A three-tap knock. It was a plain thing, metal, heavy, and with big brass handles on it, and above it, on a metal arc, the words 'Veteran's Association.' The door opened ajar by about an inch.

"Virgil?" Came the query and he gave a stiff nod, "Not again."

To this, he offered nothing more but a plain shrug and a muttered apology, and predictably, the pittance he offered, one of himself and himself alone, had met its mark: the door was open and he walked in, and was ushered across the space.

"She's upstairs. As always. Do hurry. We have a lot of them tonight."

It was always jam-packed on nights like these. Winter nights. The cold did something to men's minds. It was an all hours place and this was immediately apparent, right from the first step into the wood-floor space and the bareness of it. A desk, a wooden desk with a typewriter, a green glass lamp on it, some papers, and an ashtray, half-full now and each had been sucked down by the nurse that led him down the lobby and into the main corridor now. The hospital was a shaky old building. It had been lashed together of brick and it barely held the air out, but it did so well enough, and Virgil felt at least a little glad that the War Office still had the decency of keeping some of it open, for however much and however long they could. The walls were bare. A filing cabined glared at him from the corner and he gave it a polite and aimless nod and then they went into the main hall. This was where pain lived, he reminded himself. The nurse before him pressed her paws against the wooden doors and pushed, and they swung open heavily. Rows of beds on either side. Cots, really, the cheapest sort. Men lay in them, prostrate. Virgil let himself look for a moment, though he told himself two streets and a close encounter with one of those Minerva import cars ago that he'd not let himself. Men, broken men. All flat on their backs and seeming like bundles now, drawn up in what meagre blankets they could amass for their sort. Some had their arms pressed by their sides and stared up dumbly and others were squat and sitting and transfixed in themselves, and one man, an older man, a former officer, Virgil wagered, was now up and about and wandering around his cot and swinging his paw at the air blindly.

"They're coming!" he repeated, "They're in here, they're coming. I hear them digging in the walls. My God, I can hear them, I can hear them." One of his arms shot up and he raised an index finger and turned, and once he did, Virgil could see that he hadn't a face any more; there was a muzzle there, once, and now it was a hollow space made of bone and tongue and grown in with scars and he bellowed, with a slop of his own saliva, "Men! To arms! Shovels! We need to dig, we need to dig, we need to dig! Dig!"

They went. The nurse led on and she looked in the man's direction for but a moment, and then led on deeper. They cried like this every night, Virgil knew. In his neighbourhood, too; in open windows in the Summer he'd hear men cry and weep and he'd hear their fists come down on their wives and mothers when they begged them to settle, and so he knew why the nurse stared. It was easier that way. It was easier to let the faceless old man his shovel and let him swing it. It was simpler to let him believe he was still leading some manner of a charge some place, easier than being the object of his phantom campaign and to be flung against a wall as he'd seen done to another nurse, once.

"Up here," The reached the other side of the space and the nurse held the door open for him. Virgil bowed politely but she saw none of it. She'd already sped off. His tail ached. By God, it ached. It ached badly and he wished it cut off and then remembered that this would make the hurt grow deeper, and so he sped up the steps. Two at a time, he did, up a narrow wallpapered corridor that had been done up in officious green at some point in the far past, and was now home to mystery stains and empty sconces, of which only each third or fourth had a bulb in it. But he knew his goal. Carla Siffredi; he needed her, and he needed her badly. The old man still bellowed. Dig, he kept hearing, through a closed door and up the stairs he stood atop now, and then nothing. They'd put him back down again, he wagered, put that needle in him and put him down. Carla.

There was no door upon her office. Virgil smiled to himself. That, at least, was good news. He bounded the length of the hall, the other doors shut and locked, and paused before the frame. He rapped his fingers against it. It took a tilt of his head inwards for her to look up from her writing, but she did. Carla blinked at him.

"So soon?"

"It hurts, again."

His little confessional prompted her to stand to her fullest height, and she was a tall woman. Tall, with curled and rounded ears and a narrow muzzle, all too pleasant to look at, and her white nurse's gown was stained. Her fur looked even more grey in the light. All grey, from tip to tail, just like he was white. She stood before him.

"Come," she ushered him in quickly, and he felt her paw on his shoulder. He felt it, and the touch and squeeze of it, and she turned to pull him inwards, "Sit."

The space was as much abysmal as any other in the care of the War Office. To call it an office in its own right seemed facetious. It was a closet, once, evidently, windowless and made of bare brick, and home now to her table which was the width of her chair, and a lone metal bed, and nothing more. No sheets on it. Just an old mattress. Virgil sat down upon it. The instant he did, he felt a yelp pass his lips. The damnable appendage ached furiously. It rose up and curled itself into his lap and, once there, it prostrated itself into a semi-circle. He held it with his paw, near the base of the injury. Carla, who remained on her feet, surveyed him from the door now.

"That is not right," she insisted, but made no effort to approach him, "I can see it from here. It looks raw. What did you do to it?"

"Nothing," Virgil insisted across a flat shrug; it was raw and red and he could make out a single cut on it, and though he did lie to Carla, he knew what happened. It was Matt, again, that imbecile. Matt and his little came of catch, with broken bottles of all things. He'd be able to run to the line with one and it broke by chance alone and when it did so, it broke beneath his tail and he raked the raw spot over the glass.

"Looks like a cut," When he looked up once more, he found her closer this time, and more or less beside him. She was a built woman, he noted, even under the gas light that adorned the tiny filing cabinet behind her equally tiny desk, she had heft and shape to herself and was easily twice all of him, in all the ways she could be. The bed rocked beneath her. Two grey paws unfurled themselves and lay themselves flat in her lap and he, obligingly, unfurled his wounded tail across them. Carla furrowed her brow, "Madre santissima, how long did you let this sit for?"

"Only a day or so," Virgil lied again, and he'd done so with a lop-sided grin and his eyes cast up and to the side as if all this were nothing at all. Carla gave him an expressionless stare in turn, "All-right, maybe a bit more."

"Il bugiardo deve avere buona memoria," Came her response, muttered into the span between her downcast muzzle and the appendage he presented to her, and she gave him a little sideways glance, "You told me just the other day that you'd been playing around sharp things again."

Virgil drew into himself a bit. Though she was smiling, and she was, a big and wide beam and altogether too innocent for what he'd gotten himself into, he felt it was a juvenile expression, and he felt himself young in the worst of ways. The tail in Carla's lap flicked a bit. She combed it down with the flat of her palm, and then held it in her grip, and he gave a bit of a jostle of it so she pressed the tip of it down with her thumb, "I'm sorry for lying."

"You know you don't have, to me," She reassured and he gave a long and low nod, "I am only here to help."

Her feet made a thud as they met the floor and she threw herself off the bed and out of the door. In the frame, she paused and, without looking back, jutted a finger at him, "You stay put. I cannot have anyone knowing that you are here."

So it went each time. Virgil needed precious little reminding of the fact that he was an interloper. It was in all things, in all the foreign things about him. The ledger on the table, for one, full of names of men who were worthy of something, who were heroes and who lived in the muck and fought in it and came back heroes, and he'd wish them all the best, mutely and from where he sat. It was not his world. It was his brother's, once, in the muck of France. The boy met his end in the Somme, Virgil learned many years later. He met his fate at the end of a bayonet charge and they'd never even gotten a smidge of him to bury. There were only his medals, and there were the ribbons, and Anna had them now. Her apartment. It was in the same brushed metal tin she kept the telegram in. He could still smell her cigarettes. Virgil grimaced and then let himself fall back, his head against the wall and his eyes upturned and eyeing the ceiling. Why did Carla always help him like this? It was not without risk to herself. His head was pounding. It felt like something gripped the sides of it and pressed inwards and if he hadn't known better, if he hadn't fought this a dozen times before and then some, he'd think it'd actually happen to him. If they'd found him here, she'd lose her job and then she'd be like him, she'd have been a great woman, a great somebody turned to nothing, turned to drudgery in the snow and the emptiness of some rental apartment, and Virgil swallowed it all down. Footsteps approached. They were of the same cadence as hers and so he did not bother rising, and Carla reappeared. A small, square tin lay in her paw, with a white cross atop.

Their little ritual was always similar, when it came to his tail. Her paws were soft and gentle about it, and she never asked too many questions. It was always the wound that preoccupied her. It was the picking of it, the cleaning of it, and he winced when she poured the antiseptic on and then the bandage and she fixed it with a tug of her paw. The fabric was white, brilliant white. The tail flicked once more and Carla held it down with her thumb anew, and Virgil felt that the white of that bandage was by and away the cleanest and neatest thing about himself. He hadn't meant to lie, really. It was automatic. It was the volley of his mother's words, Anna's bitterness in his ears, and it was coach Danvers all over again, and it was that damnable Edmund Church who once told him he'd give him a pittance to clean himself up and so he took the pittance and drank it away, and he simply did it, automatically. He did it from something in himself where things rose and died and Carla looked to him, then. Virgil paused.

"You are a silly man," she whispered, "You are able-bodied and you are well in the head and really, why don't you just do something about all this?"

"About what?"

"This," she motioned across the appendage, still in her lap and curled about her wrist now, "You know better. You should know better."

"I should, shouldn't I?"

"Then why don't you?"

So he sat. Virgil sat and thought. His ears combed back and he drew a breath, and he wished that he could surmise it. He wished he could carry it through. That he could tell her, Carla, dearest, the woman with the soft paws and the gold ring of a dead man around her finger, I'm a sad old oaf. He'd tell her, at twenty-four, a sad old oaf full of regrets. He'd nearly jumped in the cut again, earlier that morning. He'd gotten rocks in his pockets and all and he found it nicer than seeing her again, nicer than lying again, perhaps. Nicer than knowing that the bandage would be white for now and then grey and black again and he'd go. He'd go and wander. To that apartment. To the foreclosure notices shouted through his door. To the window he meant to patch up but never did, and he'd blame the spirit, but he knew it not so. The bottle, it did not raise itself to his lips. He did not drink himself away for the sake of drinking alone, but to be someone again. And it was all just another reason to throw one back and fling it against a wall and then cut himself on the bits of it later.

"I want to not be," he said, and to this, Carla's brows rose and she made a little odd shape with her mouth, as if he'd been a boy and was fussing and was now doing it again, and so her paw met the top of his head. Virgil sank into the touch with closed eyes, "I want to not be. I want it to be undone. I did so much poorly. I did it poorly and I regretted it, I cut myself on it. On the edges. And now I am here."

"You are not alone."

To this, all he managed was a dismissive shake of his head, though soft and faintly lost, "You are wrong."

"Am I?"

Through the breaks in his consciousness, through the sudden leaden weight that took him, he felt her paw again and the thumb and the caress of it, up and up and to his flank and she now lay in him, in the crook of him. Without thinking, Virgil raised an arm and but it about her. It found the middle of her, and there, it drummed. An idle tune, he thought, a reminder. She really is real, this odd nurse. They'd met so long ago, as if in a dream. He, with a shiner to put the world to shame with on his face and she, tear-stained from a night's shift and furious with him, and they simply fell into each other's embrace. Alone. She was someone and he wasn't any more and it simply would not be fair to her. Not to someone like her. Not to Carla, who had so much love to give to the world, and he, who had a load of it all and nothing else to his name. Maybe the medals. Maybe he ought to find that spare key and open Anna's door and hunt the tin down, and throw them in the cut, too. He'd be with his brother. In the stories of soldiers.

"I want you to be," Carla cut in. Her words thrust themselves into his thoughts and Virgil blinked. Her head was beside his, against his shoulder and he could see her breathing, and the way her paws picked at one another, "I'd be quite sad if you weren't, any more."

"But why me?"

"You are not as poorly and rotten as you make yourself out to be," the melody of her voice drifted in again, between a tired sigh, and he thought her half asleep but found that she looked up and gave him a little half-beam; him, of all people, "You're kinder than you think. You come visit an old widow and you keep her company, and then she tends to you. You let her."

"I lie to you."

"Men lie," she exhaled, "They lie, simply. It is the way of the world. Men lie and women listen and pick the truth out."

"That is your job. To treat me," he cut curtly and to this, she said nothing, "I am just a patient."

"I wouldn't risk myself for a patient like so."

An image entered his mind. It was spurned by the scent of her, by the presence she made on the mattress. There was a divot beneath her where the fabric bent and it bent beneath him, too, and it was warm and he never quite wanted it to end. It was folly. It would be him in some office job, him with combed down white fur and her at home, slinging a pot about in her middle age, twice as old as he was and he, twice happier than he'd ever be for it, and he eyed the ring on her finger. A bigger one. She'd have a nicer one, another. Virgil would watch her keep both and one was the past and the other was the present, and so he turned and lay his nose into her hair and exhaled. Carla smelled of bandages. She smelled of hospital scents and of herself. It was love, in him. It was plain and bare love, and that was folly, the folly of the twentieth century, the folly of the electric lamp streets and himself on them, slinging his body up and along the cobbles and into dark alleys and down bottle-necks into places where the liquor ran deep and he could barely breathe, it was the folly of love, all of it.

The great and big foolish projects men wrought from stone and steel and Model T cars that flattened people's tails when they did not look, all in the service of this terrible thing called love. It made men desirous, delirious, it made them unlike themselves, and they'd think, in this unlikeness of themselves, that they'd been given to tasks impossible. His was the white bandage and hers were the gentle grey paws, and his was the street and hers were the broken men in beds, and he was alone and she was somebody, and he'd never be anyone again. His was not the Moon that men coveted nor the motor-car nor her pot, which she swung about and ladled out on to patched-up plates, nor was his the warm bed in which she resided now with him, in the hospital of mad and broken and possible men, all too plausible in their ruin. This, here, it was love and it was impossible, and Virgil wished himself dead, but he'd never say, because she'd beg the impossible and she'd be impossible too, and then they'd be impossible and in love and all alone again, together, in this electric cut of cars and drink and not being.

"I love you."

"Don't say that," he begged, and then she said it again and he, not being anyone any more, not before those words, lay back and felt safe to say it, too.

1927

The morning rose with a whip-crack. He'd only become aware of it once he neared the old cannery ruin. It broke above him in streaks of white and pink, and he waded through the muck to it. There was bird-song, someplace. It was not in the trees because they were all gone. He wandered past a fenced-off yard. In it, two dour-seeming men stacked logs atop each other and he looked and then kept walking. Virgil stopped, bent down, and collected another stone. It was polished, and he figured that some time ago, when he still had a book on this, he'd be able to say which. He'd confidently be able to say it; which rocks the Mississippi belched up from itself. They gathered on the mossy banks, in the reeds. Richard would pick them with him. They played skip-stone in the cut, once, where the boats once docked and though it was an awkward and raised angle, his brother always could skip it the fullest distance to the mouth of the artificial bay and it'd sink, there. The fathomless Mississippi. Men died in it. Men died in France, too. They sank into depths. Virgil walked. Unsteady, again. It had been like this for a bit, now, he noted, even when the drink left him and the head-ache, too, though he had one just then, his walk was uneven and he felt it the portent of something and he was glad for it. Anna. Undone. If she weren't dead, she'd be laughing at him right then. Those stones wouldn't be enough, she'd proclaim bitterly, but then again, you never could do anything right, could you?

Daybreak lent itself easily to this. The cannery closed a decade ago, he recounted, and when it was open they'd sneak into it through gaps in the clap-board fencing, but now, there was no more need. Sometimes, other winos milled about here. Not in the morning, not this early. That's what made this so particular a spot. Such a good spot. The gate was rusted and ajar. Virgil pressed his paw to the lock and pushed, and it came open. A creak echoed. He took a step and then another. Nothing. Bird-song, still, from that place far away. Virgil crept up and along the empty yard. He could recall men, here, too. Before the war, especially, there were many, and they hoist big bags of cement and stacks of wood about and onto the riverboats, and they'd sing little tunes sometimes, and other times they'd cuss. The cannery loomed above him. Rows of broken windows lined its edges, where the warehouse roof cascaded into a continuation of itself, and Virgil could see the Summer day breaking into its fullest stride. His shoes felt heavy with much. He stopped and shook some out and then found another pebble, and so he stopped shaking. His pockets rattled. Should be about two dozen by now, he reasoned. Enough. So long as they weighed more than he did and he could feel the coat tug on his shoulders, and he reasoned: that was probably enough.

The cut, then. A long, grey-brown streak of water, with tall walls made of corrugated steel and cement, all poured over fifty years ago, and now worn and empty; the metal coping rusted through and was brittle, and as he stood upon the edge, he saw flakes of it rustle down into the water and then sink. They kept going. It was about three feet here, at the shallow end. Virgil walked the span of it. He walked it and then paused near it, and felt himself tip to the side. That'd not be much at all, that would be all it took. He'd done himself in properly, now, he'd given himself something. A dark and small thing that grew in him and it racked him sometimes with coughs in the night, and he saw blood on his sleeve more than once. It was finality. Spots of it, and what Carla once called sputum, and little flecks of himself delivered in spams onto the fabric, to where they left their indelible portents. Maybe a year, if he didn't go through with it now. Maybe two or three and more coughing. Carla would give him something for it each time she saw him. She'd tend to him and with her it would be three and beyond and five and ten and a chance and he'd no need for it, nor for her, nor did she need him. The syrup she doled out tasted bitter but he swallowed it all, and the thing would remain but it ached less, and then he'd wander again. Virgil stood upon the edge. The deep end. Nine feet. The number had been painted in red on the edge with a warning and it was done after the cannery closed, to warn passers-by. To warn them away. Men died in fathomless depths, the digit cautioned, and do not be like them. Do not be like them.

Carla. Virgil balled his paws up. Behind him, the bandage on his tail hung loose and limp and it had been three weeks since she'd done that, two days since he'd seen her, and one since they last embraced and though she was older and he young, still, he felt ancient. When they parted, Carla cried. She could not say why. Virgil asked but she could not say. All she managed was a side-to-side shake of her head and a muttered 'be safe,' and then those three words that made it impossible, and that was the end of it. The deep, cold cut. Virgil dug into his pocket. A stone.

A small, grey thing. Perfectly round. It fit squarely into the centre of his paw. He raised his arm, wound it back, and threw it, edge forward, onto the water. One, two, three, and a fourth, minute and implacable and then it sank. Nine feet. How deep was France? Or Savannah, sweet Savannah on the Ogeechee river, where Greta told him the air smelled of the bog and they'd have a nice house and that was a lifetime ago, how deep was that? How deep was Anna?

"I'm sorry," he managed. Tears ran across his cheeks. They were small at first, and then bigger, and bitter, now. He'd done himself in at last. They'd robbed him of his peak and he wasn't anyone any more. The cut waited for him. Richard waited in it, too. Carla, as well, afloat and upturned and pale and still adorned with that golden ring, and the other one, the unknown, the one he wanted to give her.

"Hey, mister."

It took Virgil a moment to even realise that someone had been speaking to him at all. He turned on his heel and faced the source of the voice. A young boy stood before him – a grey Persian boy with dark brown and cream fur and big, blue eyes, ears upturned into a triangle shape, round and curious and aimed at him, now – and Virgil raised his paw and waved dumbly.

"What're you doing?"

The end of things, Virgil thought, and then spoke, "I suppose I'm looking at the water."

"What's down there?" The boy inquired, and then leaned all of himself to the side on one foot, "It's just water, isn't it?"

"I suppose."

"Wait, I know you," The boy said, and then snapped his fingers lightly, "You're a ball player, ain't you?"

Sense left him. It departed from him the same way it arrived, from the tips of Virgil's fingers through the length of him and down, into his planted feet and the dusty concrete, and down deeper, into something else entirely. All he managed was a blink. A blink, a perk of one of his crooked ears, and a smile, and so he held his paws out, flat and upturned, "I'm no ball player. See these paws? That's not the paws of a ball player. That's what a man that isn't somebody looks like."

"But you are somebody," The boy insisted palely, "I saw you. My dad's got a poster of you. You've got this big ole W on your varsity jacket and a ball under your arm and two big columns behind you."

They'd taken that in the nineteen twenty-one season, just before the play-offs began, and they'd insisted on those stupid stone pillars to make it all seem more Grecian and athletic, and he'd not thought anything of it then, but he could see them now and himself beside them, and so he nodded, again, a soft and empty motion.

"No man who's got that kind of pillar behind him's a nobody."

"Maybe I am," Virgil argued; the boy was nine, maybe a bit older, and he had his paws behind his back and a big smile on his face, and he kicked a pebble along the ground.

"Maybe you are," The boy countered, "But men who are nobody were somebody, once, weren't they?"

Virgil said nothing.

"Why are you out here, anyway?" he continued, and in his insistence, he took a step towards Virgil and then dropped his paws into his pockets, "You're here to drown yourself, ain't you?"

"A boy your age shouldn't know that."

"But you are."

Virgil nodded.

"It's a sham, all of it," the boy said softly and then leaned back, up and onto his heels, to look at the morning sky, "Lots of men come here to do that."

"I know."

"They dredge them up after, when they wash up on the other bank," he leaned on one foot again and motioned behind Virgil, to the reeds across the way, "That's the other state, isn't it?"

"Illinois," Virgil explained and the boy gave a severe nod.

"Nobody should die in Illinois, sir."

"What makes you say that?"

"My dad, he says that," Evidently seeing the man as curious, the boy paced across the width of the cut and threw himself up and onto a sideways barrel. Virgil briefly wondered if it'd roll away beneath him but found it had been propped up with a brick, and had a divot in it already, and the boy steadied himself, "He says that people who die in Illinois may as well have gone straight to Hell."

"You shouldn't say that," Virgil cautioned with a raised finger, "That word."

"What, Hell?"

"Yes, that. It's-"

"Improper?" The boy tilted his head to the side, "I don't much care, you know."

"Where's your old man?"

"In Illinois," he said and laughed and it was the impish laughter of a child who'd just gotten in a joke, and so Virgil laughed, too, "Over there. East St. Louis. He works the barges."

"And you?"

"I work the yard here."

"Alone?"

The boy shook his head vehemently, "Sometimes there's a dog. I don't call him nothing."

"Why not give him a name?"

"He's better off without one."

The wind blew stiff and warm. The air smelled of faintly of muck, and it smelled of reeds and acacia trees that had been cut down and chopped up, and it smelled of cars. A leaf blew across the bare ground; green, still. Virgil cleared his throat, "I think you should clear out."

"So you can do it?"

There'd been some point in hiding it before but the kid was bright, and so, Virgil dipped his chin and dug into his pockets. Pawfuls of rocks. He held one out to the boy. "I'm ready," he said.

"You don't seem it."

To this, all he could do was cant his head to the side in bewilderment, "Why not?"

"Well, here you are, a ball player, and you're talking to me, and I think," The boy tapped his nose with his index finger knowingly, "That you'd sooner use those to throw them as practice than to drown yourself. You're somebody."

"I'm not."

"I don't talk to nobodies."

Virgil shrugged, "Why me?"

"You seemed lonely, I suppose."

"This shouldn't be possible," Virgil countered, "You're some sort of apparition. You're something to pull me out of this."

"My name's Keith," There was no sign of anything but confusion on the boy's face, and only then did Virgil realise he'd been jutting a finger out at him now, an accusing one, in service of nothing he could immediately place; and so he lowered his arm. Keith grinned, "I'm not sent by nobody. I'm just here."

"And you work the yard."

"Yessir."

"What do you do all day?"

"Well," Keith sat up and reached behind himself, and he scratched at his back in that outstretched form, like a workman ironing out a kink in his back. His arm dropped and he exhaled, "Sometimes I fight here. I fight the Germans, all along the cut."

"There's Germans here?"

Keith tapped his nose again, "You can't see them. They're clever like that. My old man told me about them, how they'd come out of the fog and mist. You gotta shoot the mist, like so," and then the boy threw his arms up into little balled up fists, held them at a span's length of each other and jutted them back in recoil as he made one pop sound after another. Then, he laughed, "See?"

"How many was that?"

"I dunno," Keith shrugged, "I'll have to check the bodies later."

"How many did you bag until now?" Though he could not quite understand why, Virgil crossed his arms and listened, and as he did, he reached into his pocket to pull out the pawful of stones he put in and then let them drop, into the water beside him, "A dozen? More?"

"Hundreds, sir," Keith announced proudly. The boy rocked himself back and forth, "You're spilling your stones."

"I am."

"What's your name?"

"Virgil," he offered, and Keith pouted a bit, and so he offered again, "Virgil Matthews."

"Oh yeah, you're somebody," Keith announced with a confident beam, "My dad calls you the Cannon-ball."

It had been an age since he'd heard that and last he did, he called himself that in Carla's mirror and she asked him what he said and he said, nothing. Nothing. Breakfast was getting cold; nobody, "That's my name."

"Told ya. They don't make posters just like that."

Before he had a chance to say anything, Keith flung himself off the barrel and paced down the cut and along the edge of it.

"What're you gonna do now?" The boy asked.

Virgil shrugged, "What should I do?"

"Shoot some Germans. It's fun."

"And then what?" Virgil pressed, and the boy shook his head a bit, "What do I do then?"

"You come back. You do what matters, I guess. That's what my dad told me. Said he came back for me. It's just him and me now."

"They're not real. The Germans."

Keith gave him a slightly furious look, "Says who?"

"They're impossible."

"Men are never impossible. Not even the Germans," the boy walked away. The cut bubbled and it rustled and the breeze drew more of the waves in against the corrugated metal edge, and Virgil stopped and looked as the boy went; he stopped by the metal grate, turned, cupped his paws about his mouth and shouted, "You just can't see them!"

The gate slammed shut. Virgil, at a loss, stood there. The stones felt heavy. He reached in, shovelled another pawful out, and let it spill. It bubbled. Three more pawfuls, and then nothing. Nine feet. Men drown here. They drown beneath the barrel. He balled his paws up. It should've been him, Anna said, once. He raised them and held them up, same span apart, and said, loudly, "Bang!"

And he felt like someone, again.