by John Bemrose
The McVeys forged on as if they were on some important expedition, Sally with her usual air of good-natured, slightly goofy self-confidence, her face up, and Liz hurrying after her with her head down. And finally the third girl, taller than either of them and walking more slowly as she followed them up the earthen ramp and onto the pedestrian walkway.
At first it seemed as if Sally was planning to lead the little group across the river and into the woods on the far shore. But about two-thirds of the way across, she stopped abruptly and turned to look over the river. Her sister stopped beside her. The other girl stopped a few feet to their left. She leaned over the rail to look down into the little rapid. The movement lent an inward curve to her wide-set shoulders, bare in their sleeveless blouse, and in the water, Joe was suddenly aware of the nakedness of his feet, bicycling slowly.
It was an odd moment, those on the bridge and those in the water and at the edge of the woods looking at each other without saying a word, looking and perhaps wondering, as if until that moment they had not suspected that the world contained any others but themselves. The only sound was the plash of the little rapid and, briefly, the faint, tearing roar of a high jet as it trailed to the west.
For several seconds, an eon, no one spoke. The sun burned orange on the top girders. The river gleamed distantly, as it descended between the green fields upstream. The distilled, shadowy air held all in suspension. Joe could not take his eyes off the third girl. There seemed to be something on her right cheek, a whiteness, like a dusting of flour, but when she moved her head a little (or perhaps he himself had moved, carried almost imperceptibly away by the current), he could not be sure he had seen anything.
It was Smiley who finally broke the spell, calling up to the bridge that the girls should come in swimming: the water was great.
Then Liz McVey, who in class sounded so icily sure of herself, called out in a voice that seemed oddly quavery — an old woman’s voice — that they didn’t have their suits.
“Not really necessary,” Smiley said in his normal speaking voice, to Joe.
“What!” Liz called, her voice gaining strength. “Can’t hear you!”
“What!” Smiley roared to the bridge.
“What!” Liz called. “What did you say?”
“I mean, she can always borrow mine,” Smiley said quietly to Joe.
“Ah let up,” Joe said.
“What! What did I do?” Smiley held out his hands, his beer, in a plea of innocence.
“Stop teasing them.”
“Teasing!” Smiley practically shouted it. “I’m not teasing! Why would I be teasing!”
Joe knew they had to have heard on the bridge and that this was Smiley’s intent; he was out to embarrass someone, he didn’t care who.
On the bridge, the two sisters drew together to confer. The third girl continued to look over the water. At the edge of the woods, someone growled, “What the fuck are they doin’ here?” It was Marty Cain. Joe watched him step out from behind a tree, his thick body looking white and unhealthy in the shadows. From his hand dropped a twenty-sixer of rye.
Someone else said, “We should make ’em go swimmin’.” “Ah come on,” Joe said again, but he was not sure anyone heard. In truth, he didn’t give a damn about the McVeys. It was the other girl he was worried about. She seemed out of place with the McVeys, better than them and, in some inexplicable way, vulnerable. In the space of two or three minutes, he’d become her protector.
But of course there was nothing he could do but watch, in a state of extreme attention, slowly moving his arms and feet to keep his place in the current.
The McVeys looked down the river and over at their car, clearly uncertain about what they should do. Beneath them, the little rapid hushed and splashed.
“Fuck the lot of them,” Marty Cain growled, taking a swig from his bottle.
“We’re waiting!” Smiley shouted to the bridge.
“Shut up!” Joe said.
“What’s eating you?”
“Just leave them alone.”
Smiley looked at him, mischief glinting in his deep-set eyes.
“Hey, you in love again?”
Joe turned in the water, furious. On Turtle Rock, Sandy had sat up and was watching matters intently. She sped him a smile of amusement: wasn’t this fun?
On the other side of the river, Sid Kovacs shouted up to the bridge, “Who’s your friend? The good-looking one?”
“Asshole,” Joe seethed across the water.
“Use your eyes, man,” Sid squealed back, making no attempt to keep his voice down. “Lookit the body on her!”
“Take off your clothes and join us!” Sid called joyfully to the bridge. “We can have an orgy!” And he let out a whoop and threw himself backwards in the water. His spluttering head reappeared a moment later, minus his horn-rims. “My glasses!”
The sisters were no longer in doubt. They began to walk back along the walkway, with as much casualness and dignity as they could muster. As they passed the third girl, Sally murmured something to her and touched her arm, but instead of following the sisters, the girl turned and looked down over the opposite rail, on the upstream side of the walkway, through the torn roadbed. Joe knew what she was seeing: the speeding water visible through the hole in the concrete, which made you feel the bridge itself was racing upstream. Finally she began to follow the McVeys.
Sally McVey reached the sand-flats and Marty Cain, putting back his big head, bellowed, “Rich bitches out!” Bellowed it with a viciousness that broke from him like a torrent of poison. “All fucking whores back to Snob Hill!” Yet even then the situation might have been salvaged, for at first only a shocked silence answered Marty, as if the others felt he had gone too far. Then Liz McVey began to run, spurting forward suddenly, and in a moment her sister was running too. From the edge of the woods, pandemonium erupted: catcalls, boos, the pack gone wild.
Under a willow, someone beat jubilantly on an oil drum with a stick. The sisters passed the parked cars, Sally leading as they headed for the safety of the Lincoln. Joe smashed at the water and yelled at the others to stop but soon realized he was only adding to the din. Appalled, he watched the third girl walk calmly across the sand-flats. She neither hurried nor looked as if she wanted to. The abuse from across the river might have been only a breeze.
Then she did something extraordinary, she stopped and looked at them. She looked first at Sid Kovacs, tilting her head a little as if she were wondering what kind of odd beast this was, sitting up to his chest in water and braying like a five-year-old. Sid fell silent. Then she looked at Joe. He said, “Sorry” to her but, with the din still going behind him, was not sure she heard. He saw there was something on her cheek, at once whitish and pinkish and in the dimming light oddly elusive, changeable: a dusting of snow, the imprint of a tiny hand.
The others, too, had fallen silent. It was odd, as if they were expecting her to make a speech, or lead them towards some other, more interesting activity. Someone, a girl, laughed sharply, perhaps in embarrassment. The mad tattoo on the oil drum had stopped.
Down the shore, the Lincoln gunned into life. As Joe turned in the water to watch, the girl walked calmly towards it, her white tennis shoes lifting and falling on the packed sand.
It was late when they got back to town and gently raining. They came down West, past the crouched, jammed-together houses of the mill workers. Beyond, the Atta and its valley made an unfathomed darkness, stretching for miles into a countryside that was a misery to think of: wet woods and mud and huddling animals. Sandy sat next to him, her hand with his school ring resting on his thigh. It was how she always rode, but something had changed. There was a sense of distance, disjunction, a sadness that seemed to flow from some irrevocable and inexpressible failure. At the same time, a new idea was beginning to course through him, with an excitement that made him blow suddenly through his teeth.
“You okay?” Her voice small.
“Fine. How about you?”
> “I’m fine.” She did not sound fine. Expansively — and to forestall any serious talk — he swept his arm around her shoulder, gave her a squeeze. The black road shone like a pelt.
Stopping in front of her house, he watched as she got out and went up the drive. When she turned on the porch to wave, he had already started to pull away. As he swung east onto Water, the whitewashed, foreshortened facade of his own house flashed and dropped behind as, with deepening anticipation, he accelerated through the rain-sweetened air. The Biscayne charged up the long hill past King’s Park and Central School and the railway station, flying over the hump of the bridge into the North End. For a moment, as if a spotlight had found him, questioning his right to exist, he was aware of the condition of the car: of the rust eating its way around the fenders, of its old car smell, the dust on the dash. His shirt prickled at his back, another flaw: it was a hand-me-down from his father.
The rain had stopped. He prowled the streets in a hush of tires, passing under ancient trees where solitary street lights burned in nests of wet, shining leaves. Across vast lawns, the big houses peered darkly from their porches. Every object — those paired Muskoka chairs, glazed with rain — seemed about to disclose some secret. He turned onto Robert and the McVeys’ house reared up among its maples: a neo-Georgian place with banks of shuttered windows and a wide front door. All the lights were out, save one on the second floor, glowing between slitted drapes. Slowing as much as he dared, he glanced up the drive and saw the Lincoln nested in shadow, its big, low-slung body alive and, it seemed to him, ambiguous, its properties only to be guessed at.
5
MOST MORNINGS, Alf walked to work. And most mornings, when he reached the corner of West and Water, he glanced left to see Pete striding off the footbridge from Lions Park, lunch pail swinging. Pete lived on the other side of the park, in a small clapboard bungalow he had built with Alf’s help in the early Fifties, under the wooded flank of Lookout Hill. Pete worked in Bannerman’s dyehouse, which explained why his hands and arms were often stained with streaks of Persian red or navy blue, and why even his clothes sometimes looked (Alf thought) as if he’d been painting a barn with a shovel. He wore a baseball cap, tilted well back off his narrow forehead.
This morning they met as usual. Pete’s thin face lit up as he saw Alf, his eyebrows rising in humorous acknowledgment as though the two of them shared an ongoing joke they need not explain.
They fell in together, striding at a good clip along Water. Fifty paces ahead of them, Joe scraped along in his jeans and T-shirt, armoured, as it seemed to Alf, in the trappings of his secret life. What was the boy thinking about? Alf had no idea. Six forty-five. A torrent of light rushed the trees on Lookout Hill. Birds sang like mad from maples shrouding the small front yards. They passed the brick cottage where Alf had grown up — the same ragged cedar hedge, the same balding lawn — under the maroon leaves of the maple Alf’s father had planted in 1939, when Alf’s brother had gone off to war. He always sensed a presence here, as if his parents were alive still, peering out from the curtained windows, waiting for them to come back. But he gave the house scarcely a glance. He didn’t want memories now, any more than he wanted talk. Enough to be awake in the flooding light. Mercifully, Pete was keeping quiet.
The main street still lay in shadow. Others were travelling with them, on the opposite sidewalk, or gliding past in cars: all headed for the mills, all wrapped, still, in the solitariness of their recent sleep. They passed the white pillars of the war memorial: Alf did not give it a glance, though he was aware of it, of the names carved in its stone, a chorus breathing, it seemed, with a nearly inaudible hush, under the stir of leaves. Then past the hardware store with its display of powerful lawn mowers, the tiny office of the Attawan Star, where the show window featured a large aerial photo of the town, the forking rivers a dark, inverted Y. High overhead, the eastern face of the post-office clock met the assaulting light.
Pete tugged down his visor, to shield his eyes from the sun streaming down Bridge Street. Bannerman’s whistle gave a warning howl. I better get that old Jacquard going, Alf thought, and felt the sudden shock of cool air as they advanced over the Shade.
Pete gave a tap to the bridge rail, as though for luck. “Alf, I just put this out to you —”
Something in his friend’s tone alerted him. Far ahead, Joe reached the end of the bridge and abruptly pivoted towards the path that ran along the dyke. His sudden movement shocked Alf, as if the boy had simply flung himself away.
“You might have heard. There’s this organizer in town —”
Overhead, gulls screamed.
“A bunch of us have been meeting with him. Nothing’s settled, like. We’re just checking out our options.”
“Doyle,” Alf said, half to himself. He hadn’t heard anything of the man for a couple of weeks. He’d begun to believe, to hope, that he’d left town.
Pete gave a little laugh that to Alf sounded guilty. “I guess maybe he’s talked to you.”
“I think maybe you know he’s talked to me.”
“Yeah, yeah, well actually —”
“Well actually what?”
“I said I’d speak to you.”
“About what?” Alf said grimly. Of course he knew. He glanced sharply at his friend and Pete’s nervous eyes fled under his visor.
“Like I said, we’re just checking out our options.”
“You don’t have any —”
Pete fell silent. Alf knew he was being remorseless with him, unusually so. And still he had anger to burn: he tried to put it into walking, as if he could simply leave Pete’s news behind. Up ahead, Joe had already disappeared from the dyke. There was a stink of decaying river weed. And the screaming gulls.
They were not used to major disagreements. They might argue about who was the better hockey player, Pulford or Baun, but their friendship was built on an easy amiability — an understanding they would avoid anything that roused strong emotion. It was no preparation for this — the air bright with danger.
Pete tried again, on a placating note: “A union can do things, Alf. These layoffs — if we had a union, there’d be seniority, like.”
“You always said you were anti-union.”
“I mean, they wouldn’t be able to treat people like they do. There’d be protocols.”
“Protocols,” Alf mocked. He was sure Pete had got the word from Doyle. His friend, after all, had barely graduated from public school, and he had never cared about current events or political matters, as far as Alf knew. He never read a newspaper. “You know what happened the last time we tried this?”
“I know it was bad. But we gotta move on —”
Gotta move on. He suspected that was Doyle’s argument too.
“You don’t know,” Alf said grimly. “You weren’t here.” Meaning: you were still in the navy in ’49. You have no right to speak about what happened.
“Different circumstances, Alf.”
Alf threw up his hands in anger and despair. They had nearly reached the end of the bridge. Pete had to hustle to keep up. “Malachi’s a good guy, Alf.”
“A good guy,” Alf seethed. The very mention of Doyle made him want to hit something. He felt as if Doyle and Pete had been conspiring behind his back. He spoke with angry sarcasm: “So Malachi’s a good guy. A nice guy to have a beer with. Is that any reason to follow him? Hell, good guys have been screwing up the world since it began.”
He swung onto the dyke-top path. Pete kept right behind him, down the dirt incline that led onto the playing fields behind the arena. Two hundred yards away, sunlight boiled in the upper storeys of the mills. At the lip of the stack, a rag of smoke flapped.
Pete said, “I mean, hell, if you think a union’s such a bad idea, why don’t you come out to one of our meetings and tell us why?”
Alf stopped. Pete’s eyes met his frankly from under his visor. There was a plaintiveness there, a beseeching. But at the same time, over a nervous smile, Pere was challenging him,
and this was new. Alf was startled.
“You’re a fool,” Alf said. “You follow this guy and we’ll all live to rue it. Honestly, Pete, you’re a bigger ass than I thought.”
Something changed in Pete’s gaze, something went bright and at the same time seemed to burn up in its own brightness. It was as if he disappeared. His face was still there, grinning as if he believed Alf was only joking, but Pete had gone away, sunk beneath his features like a drowning man beneath the surface of a pool. Alf turned away, joining the crowd streaming into the deep canyons between the mills.
The stairs of the knitting mill were a mass of people, a steady thunder of shoes climbing the filthy treads. He put his head down and trudged. He had done this for eighteen years, all told. The thousands of mornings seemed to have become one morning, this morning, an eternity he was condemned to spend watching, a few inches from his face, the wide, labouring bum and knotted calves of Millie Jennings.
He was still furious. How many of these people had talked to Doyle? Who was taking the organizer seriously? What he could see told him nothing. Yet everything he looked at — Millie’s ugly legs, a discarded gum wrapper — seemed a clue. Every face in its bland, dreaming thickness had turned treacherous.
The knitting room was on the top floor, the sixth. He walked towards the bench where his tools were kept, noting with disgust that someone had failed to put one of his wrenches away. A faint, chortling murmur made him look around. Sun slanted among the rows of tall machines, each bearing its circular rack of bobbins. Against the far wall, the knitters sat on their long bench, looking back at him with blank, unreadable faces. He was swept with distaste at their sullen immobility. Just then, the buzzer gave out its nasal command: seven o’clock. It was time to go to work, but the knitters did not stir. Their tardiness — it would last only a few seconds — was meant to declare that they were their own masters, even here.