by John Bemrose
Again his light swept over the river. Sluggish water gleamed in its covert, alien life. Jamie could swim, but Alf’s father, too, had been able to swim. And so it came back to him, despite all his efforts to keep it at bay: that Sunday afternoon in June of 1952, when he’d looked out the front window and seen Gerry Milton, the Town Yard foreman, pacing on the sidewalk as if he were undecided or lost, his rubber boots leaving faint, wet tracks on the concrete. They met at the front door. When Gerry told him, his face plaintive under his rumpled hair, his eyes boring into Alf’s as if he, Alf, might save him from this distress, it seemed to Alf that he had always known that his father was dead. He had known it for time out of mind, it was part of who he was and who his father was. Gerry was not giving him news, but only forcing his gaze to the side, towards a blackness that had always existed.
He had had to tell his mother. He led her to a chair while she cried, What! What! And he understood that she, too, already knew, had always known. Perhaps it was the war that had given her foreknowledge: she had already lost Joe, Alf’s brother. And now she knew, or had come within a hair of knowing, that her husband, too, was dead. He had been dead through all the forty-six years she’d known him, dead through their courtship on these same paths where he, Alf, was walking now, playing his feeble beam ahead of him, dead from the first moment he had taken breath and dead for a billion years: dead was inscribed in the bone, in the minuscule, pushing seed, in the whirling atom.
When he told her, her right arm flailed with a life of its own, as if she might push away the knowledge falling into the light. He had hated life at that moment, and he felt the same hate sickening in him now as he stopped and looked up through the treetops, where a few faint stars pulsed, to calm himself. He was in a rage against life, because this was what it came down to: the fear, and the fear entirely justified, because somewhere out there your own death, and the deaths of those you loved, was waiting for you. Life enticed you to love it. It lured you on with the sweet, terrible music of happiness. Life told you: Love, Get Married, Work, Hope, Pray, Put Everything on My Altar. And in the end it abandoned you without a backwards glance …
He followed the trail along the edge of the woods. He felt calmer now, and ice cold, set against life, determined to pluck his son from its trap. He would find the boy if he had to die doing it. Beside him, the rough, weedy fields moved past in the moonlight. Then the trail descended to the bottomlands of the Atta. The area had changed since his boyhood. Then cows had grazed here, and kept the land clean and open. Now it was thick with wild fruit trees. Pale, narrow paths ran everywhere, a confusion in the grey, metalled moonlight.
“Jamie!” a voice cried distantly, and hope flared in him. Had they found him?
No one cried again. He went on. The little trees, like rough bouquets, seemed to stand in his beam as if expecting something, stupidly. Then the brush exploded beside him, and he whirled to meet the attack, his heart slamming. His beam just caught the fleeing deer, its white tail uplifted, bold as a placard, as it bounded away among the trees.
“Christ,” he said, and regretted swearing. He felt he had to keep himself pure or Jamie would not appear. He had to be clean, silent, calm. He went on, aware he no longer had a plan. He was simply following his instinct, following the paths to the north, searching in the mud for more running-shoe marks (he found none) through the great plain made by the oxbow, trekking on with a grim alertness. He could no longer hear anyone calling. Perhaps they had found him? “Jamie!” he cried, and his own voice came back to him, a much smaller cry from the wall of the valley.
Again he reached the river, and stood playing his beam over the grey water. There was something sinister about the water, furtive and scheming and hurrying to escape. A little rapid surfed along like a tribe of small water creatures, making their desolate way upstream. The air smelled of autumn, of decay, a chilling emptiness.
Upstream, a bit of the rapid seemed to detach itself: a scrap of whiteness moving erratically in the dark. He shone out his beam and it stopped. Jamie was there, in his white T-shirt and shorts, his eyes glassy, blinking in the light like an animal caught drinking. In a moment he would vanish.
“Jamie!”
“Dad!”
“Stay there! Jamie, don’t move! I’ll come to you!”
He moved around the edge of the black inlet that separated them, stumbling through thickets and water, the beam of his light darting back to Jamie continually. Then they were together, the boy in his arms.
His beam swept over a second pair of legs, also in shorts, standing about twenty feet away. There was a boy there, a dark-haired boy about Jamie’s age, his arm raised against the light. His little body in its red T-shirt was pulling slowly back, as if he meant to run away.
“Who’s that?” Alf said. He had let Jamie slip to the ground. The other boy, still held by the light, had put a start of fear in Alf, as if he were in some way involved in the danger to Jamie and was a threat yet; as though he had found only half of Jamie, and the other half remained to be brought to safety. He turned his beam back to his son, who was waving the other boy over.
“Jamie! Jamie!” voices cried from the hill.
“I got him!” Alf yelled.
A silence, then: “He’s got him! He’s got him!”
“Is that the Boileau boy?” Alf said.
“Billy,” Jamie said to the boy. “It’s all right. It’s my dad.” The Boileau boy was peering to see past the light, his black eyes fiercely suspicious. Alf was surprised to find the two of them together. The Boileaus were tough, poor. The boy’s uncle — or was it his cousin — had been in jail.
“He lost his dog,” Jamie said. “We tried to get it. We went up past the cave. We got lost.”
“Come here, son. It’s all right.”
The Boileau boy grinned a wooden grin and did not move.
The searchers returned in a group, jubilant under the lopsided moon. Jamie rode for a while on Alf’s shoulders. Pete offered to give Billy a ride, but the boy shook his head and moved away, walking a little way off from the others and saying nothing, though from time to time he grinned that painful automatic grin, as though he thought it was required of him.
Beside Alf, Bill Olmstead was going on about how he had never had any doubt they’d find the boy. He branched into other stories, about lost children and lost dogs and the time he’d got lost himself, in the bush behind some cottage up north. And not one of those episodes had turned out badly, Bill declared, as if good fortune were only a matter of having a positive attitude.
Ahead of them, Pete was walking with his head down, the unused rope swinging in a coil from his hand. The sight moved Alf: the guy had come through for him, without a moment’s hesitation. Well, of course, he’d have done the same. Catching up to his friend, Alf put his hand on his shoulder. “Pete — thanks.” “Okay, buddy,” Pete said, avoiding Alf’s eyes and blurting out the words, as if they sprang from an emotion too powerful to be safely acknowledged.
Alf drove Billy home. The boy sat alertly on the edge of the Biscayne’s front seat, grunting yep or nope to Alf’s questions and watching every turn of the road. His hard little voice sounded trapped in his throat. There was something of a queer little man about him.
The Boileaus lived on the Flats, on the east side of town, in a plaster-and-lath cottage overshadowed by the rail embankment. One of the supports for the front porch had been replaced by the trunk of a birch tree. Pulling up at the curb, Alf looked at the curtainless front window and saw the flickering of a small television, the top of a couch, and a hole in the wall that showed the lath-work beneath. He wondered if Billy had even been missed. But then he saw Lucille Boileau trudging along the street from the direction of the river. When she saw the car, she stopped. Getting out, Alf shouted to her, “It’s all right, I’ve got him,” and watched as she buckled, as if struck in the stomach. She was still weeping when she came up to him.
She crushed Billy’s head against her. Then thrust him back abru
ptly, giving him a sharp slap on the side of the head. “You had me worried sick!”
“Don’t be too hard on him,” Alf said. “He was with my boy. They got lost up the Atta.”
“You never told me you were going up there! Where’s Fuzz, eh? You lost him again?”
“The rope broke.”
“The rope broke,” Lucille said to Alf, with heavy sarcasm.
“They were doing their best to get back,” Alf said.
“You get inside,” Lucille said.
Billy shot up the walk.
She turned back to Alf. She was about thirty-five, Alf guessed, beautiful in a severe, threatening way, her long black hair escaping its pins in wisps and collapsing waves, her high, plush cheekbones shiny with tears. There was something shy in the smile she offered him, he thought, and something evasive and cunning. For years — he saw her often at Bannerman’s, where she worked in the sewing department — her mouth had fascinated him, it was so wide, the lips so large and mobile, a freakish mouth, like some odd sea creature come to live on her face.
“I’d die if I lost him,” she told him, her eyes fixing blindly on his shirt front.
She lunged up at him, catching the back of his neck with one hand and putting her mouth on his. It was more than a kiss, it was as if she had leaned up to take a large, soft bite out of his face. Driving over the bridge, he was still thinking about it, an electric excitement flaring across his chest where she had pressed against him. He felt twenty again, everything vivid: the damp, rancid air over the river, his hands tingling on the wheel, and there, past the traffic light, past the Baptist church and the library, the high, lonely, crumpled moon.
10
THE LIGHT IN THE BATHROOM had a greenish tinge. Jamie’s mother made him sit on the toilet, with the seat down, while she perched on the edge of the tub, one knee in its brown stocking touching his, her eyes looking straight into his. In Jarrod’s Shoe Store was a machine you put your feet into. Then you looked into a viewfinder and saw the bones in your feet, all pale and strange like little ghosts. He felt she was looking at his bones.
“What were you doing with that boy?”
“Nothing.”
“You weren’t doing nothing.”
She tapped his leg with the rubber spatula. It was what she used to spank him. Her anger was huge, it filled the green light and shone off the tiles behind her head, but he didn’t know what he’d done to make it happen. He watched the flat rubber touch his knee and looked back into her eyes. Usually there was help in her eyes, but now there was none, though he couldn’t help looking for it.
“We were just playing.”
“I don’t want you playing with that boy again.”
“Billy?”
“I don’t want you to have anything to do with that Boileau boy. Do you understand me?”
The spatula tapped again on his knee.
“Why?”
“His family are not our kind of people. Do you understand?”
He looked at the faucet in the tub, where a big drop was swelling, getting ready to fall.
“We were just having fun.”
“Jamie!”
“We tried to get back!”
He was crying now, and when he cried, his thoughts started to slide around, he couldn’t keep track. What was our kind of people? Kind was good, wasn’t it? His teacher, Miss Wayne, was kind, and his mother was, usually. Now she was not kind — was she not his kind of people?
“Look at me!”
He tried to meet those black eyes, which were looking at his bones.
“Dad wasn’t mad,” he whimpered.
“He doesn’t want you playing with that boy either. Promise me you won’t play with him again.”
“Mom!”
“Promise me!”
The spatula tapped. He was crying, he hardly knew why, except that something was not fair. What had he done wrong? When you did something wrong you were punished, but why was he being punished for just doing what he thought was right? He had tried to help Billy find his dog, and he had tried to get home as fast as he could. Only he hadn’t been able to find the trail.
“Jamie!”
“I promise! But, Mom, why are the Boileaus our kind of —”
“Why are they not our kind of people? Because, they’re just not nice, good people. They’ve been in trouble with the law.”
“What trouble?”
“That doesn’t matter. The point is, we’re done with them. Right?”
“Yes.”
“That’s my boy.”
She gave him another tap with the spatula and stood up: the matter was clearly finished as far as she was concerned. He watched her peer at herself in the glass. She put a finger to a place on her cheek and pulled the skin down. Inside the pouch under her eye it was red, like the inside of a fish’s gill.
On Monday Jamie stayed home from school with a touch of the flu, his mother said, feeling his cheeks. He sat in bed sipping ginger ale and looking at his books, especially the Tim stories, and at his Superman and Donald Duck comics. On Wednesday his mother announced he was well enough to go back. He went up the hill and found Billy waiting for him at the gate to the Boys’ Yard, grinning so widely — so clearly glad to see him — that Jamie felt sick to his stomach.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“Look what I got!” Billy said. He looked over his shoulder, then put his hand in his jacket pocket and pulled out a little cardboard tube with a brass cap on one end. It rolled in his palm.
“A bullet,” Billy said in his strange, throat-gurgling voice.
“For real?”
“Shotgun.”
“Where’s the point?”
“They don’t have points. You put in gunpowder. Then you put in other stuff, like marbles or rocks or BB’s. We can make gunpowder after school. Okay?”
“I dunno. I promised I’d help my mother.”
Liar, the voice inside him said. Jamie blinked.
“You grind up coal and put other things in.”
“I dunno.”
“We can go to my house,” Billy said.
Liar, liar, pants on fire.
“Shut up,” Jamie said to the voice, and felt his face burn. “Not you,” he said to Billy.
Billy put the bullet back in his pocket. Some Grade Five boys went by with their heads back, howling like wolves. Jamie walked off abruptly towards a group of boys who were playing conkers. Billy came with him. Jamie stood pretending to watch the nuts as they swung and smashed, but all he could think about, really, was Billy, who pushed another boy out of the way and stood beside him. He walked away again. Billy came again. He stopped and Billy stopped.
He tried one more time: walked over to the wall of the school, where Fattie Lonsdale and Mike Harms were down on their knees, tossing cards into a corner with quick flicks of their wrists: baseball cards and hockey cards and flags-of-the-world cards and car cards, covering up the asphalt in the corner like leaves. Billy arrived beside him. He grinned at Jamie with his brown-edged teeth: this was fun!
The monitor shook her bell and the boys in the yard began to drift towards the school. Billy fell in beside Jamie, in the line going into the south door.
“You better get to your door,” Jamie said.
“Oh yeah!” Billy said, and he clapped his hand over his head and pulled a face, as if to say, What a goof I am, and Jamie laughed in spite of himself. Then Billy started off, but he came back almost immediately and told Jamie to hold out his hand.
“What for?”
“C’mon, just hold it out.”
He put out his hand. Billy laid the empty shotgun bullet in it.
“It’s a present,” Billy said and ran off.
During spelling, Jamie felt a little queasy, and then just as he was putting his speller away under his desk, vomit shot out of his mouth. It slapped onto the hardwood floor and lay there in a big brown pool with flecks of yellow in it. He couldn’t believe it. He’d seen other kids throw
up in school, seen them taken off to the nurse’s room while Mr. Small, the janitor, came in and spread sawdust on it, and scraped it up, and washed the floor, though for a long time afterwards no one would step there, on the vomit-smelling place that made you feel like vomiting too. And now he was that kid that had done this stupid, smelly thing. They were all looking at him now, up and down the rows, some of the boys grinning, or craning to see, or saying Wow, and looking at him like they didn’t know him any more, just like they looked at Hel Grimm, the German boy who couldn’t speak English and who had come to school one day wearing leather shorts.
11
BEHIND HER DESK in General Office, the receptionist, May Watson, lifted her sagging alcoholic’s face. “They want you in the boardroom,” she droned, her heavily lidded eyes fixed on Alf’s chest.
“Did they say what it was about?”
They: like a creature with twenty heads.
May’s right shoulder twitched, a faint shrug.