by John Bemrose
And too, he had not yet given up on his afternoon. In half an hour, in an hour, they might be back at her house, in her swaying bed. All he needed was fifteen minutes with her, even five. Just looking at her in her packed jeans, as she went over to talk to Ralph, made him want her. Maybe he did love her. In bed, she had met him as no woman ever had, with an appetite equal to his, even greater than his. At certain moments they seemed to burn the world up, to replace it with something entirely their own. He was grateful to her for that, grateful to her for the pleasure of knowing her naked: her strong, thick body beautiful to him, as if life itself had taken her form and offered itself to him — those pooled, darkly budded breasts — in her swaying bed, each Tuesday afternoon.
He watched as she brought Ralph to the car. The old man was so bent she had to turn him around and ease him, bum first, into the back seat. Ralph cracked his head on the top of the door but hardly seemed to notice. “Oopsies,” Lucille said.
They continued up Station Hill. In the rear-view, Alf saw the old man’s twisted head and red eyes leering from under his cap. He wondered if Ralph knew where he was.
Lucille asked Ralph how he was doing.
“Oh, can’t complain.”
“At least the weather’s warm, anyways.”
“Is it?”
“We take you to your place then?”
“Who’s this?” Ralph said. In the mirror, Alf saw the old man squinting at him.
“This is Alf Walker. You know him!”
“Oh sure, I know him!”
The caved-in mouth grinned.
The Biscayne passed the railway station, where pigeons dotted the tiled roof like stones, and crossed the humpbacked bridge into the North End. Lucille had turned sideways, her arm crooked over the back of the seat as she chatted with Ralph. Alf saw how one breast climbed higher than the other, under her wrinkled T-shirt. He was stalking her, he couldn’t help it, even here where every window seemed to watch, where his reputation and even his marriage had perhaps already begun to unravel, all he could think about, really, was getting his hands on her. You pathetic bugger, he thought. He remembered sharks he’d seen once in a photo, swirling ecstatically in water reddened with their own blood.
After they’d dropped Ralph off in front of his little bungalow, they drove to the Junction, to Hank Hays’ Lunch and Gas. Lucille strode briskly in front of the car, her head up like royalty, and disappeared in the door with its slanting Orange Crush sign. When a grey station wagon pulled into the pumps, Alf averted his face, praying that Lucille would stay inside until John Henson drove away. But in a few moments the stooped, grinning figure of the Anglican sexton leaned over to wave at him through the windshield. Alf had no choice but to roll down the window.
“Can you believe this weather?”
“Not really.”
John Henson smiled his fixed, wincing smile. He always looked as if something sharp were poking him from inside.
The door with its Orange Crush handle opened and Lucille emerged behind John.
“I’m just giving Lucille Boileau a ride,” Alf explained too soon. John went on grinning, clearly not understanding. Lucille passed in front of the hood and John glanced at her. But he didn’t really take note until she climbed in beside Alf. Then the sexton’s head came down and he peered at the woman in the black leather motorcycle jacket.
“I don’t believe we’ve met,” Lucille said.
“Hah! Well!”
John was grinning at full wattage now, showing tortured gums. He was never at ease around women, except perhaps very old ones, where he got to play the gentleman with a gallant hint of all the risque things he would do if they were younger.
“Alfie, introduce us.”
Alf had no choice. Lucille and John’s clasped hands shook in front of his face. He didn’t doubt that John knew who Lucille was, even if he’d never spoken to her. Every man in town knew who Lucille was.
“I’m just giving her a lift,” Alf said, trying again.
“We’re going for a little spin,” Lucille said brightly, ruffling Alf’s hair.
“Right,” John said, his eyes bulging. He jerked up his thumb like an umpire calling out at home plate: “I’m just filling up!”
They drove away. A slow freight was drawing through the level crossing, each boxcar floating with majestic, drumming grace behind the barrier. Far up the tracks, the invisible engine wailed. Alf asked for a cigarette and she lit it for him in her mouth before passing it over. He considered: there was no predicting what John Henson would make of seeing him with Lucille. It would be a test of his Christianity at the very least.
They followed Danson’s Lane to the old one-room schoolhouse, now a residence, and swung north among thawing fields streaked with black earth, low ranges of dirty snow, rivers of glittering ice-water. High behind them, the sun of early March poured its steep brightness onto the land. Smoking, Alf began to relax. Light flickered through the woodlots, and in a muddy paddock a black horse broke suddenly into a trot, throwing its head as if tossing invisible reins.
He thought again of what she had told him earlier. In his mind’s eye, he saw an Indian girl in a skimpy dress, or maybe stovepipe jeans, grinning from the curb while men like him looked her over. The thought put a cutting loneliness through him, and yet he was fascinated. He glanced at Lucille. Her face tilted back a little, her eyes gazed almost dreamily up the road as it unfurled beyond the smoke from her filtered Caporal.
On a post, a sparrow hawk watched the Biscayne speed past, a momentary irrelevance. A high mountain of cumulus, nearly invisible in the north, slowing changed shape.
By the time they reached the village of Cairn, her silence had turned gloomy. Nothing he said could rouse her. She smoked fiercely, looking straight ahead, ignoring his remarks. He drove through the back streets to a place where a pond spread towards a cedar bush. The pond was still covered with ice and snow, perforated by a few dead trees. He stopped and rolled down the window. A woodpecker was tapping somewhere, with an irregular, bright exactness. The bird was in its own world, with something to do, work that wholly occupied it. But they were in the smoke-filled car, trapped in a kind of vacuum.
“What’s the matter?” he said. He reached along the back of the seat to touch her hair. A quarter to three: he felt their afternoon might be salvaged yet. “You’re so beautiful,” he said. He meant it.
She gave him a sideways glance and a chill went through him. There was such hostility in her look that he felt instantly attacked. At the same time, she did not seem to really see him. Her look was blind, as if he might have been any man sitting there. As if he was merely a body.
They drove back to town by the Galt Highway. The sense of oppression in the car had deepened. It was as if some terrible thing had happened between them, and now it was impossible to speak without calling up the terrible thing itself. But what had happened? A look, a few words. No, the atmosphere of doom could not be explained by that look or those words, and yet somehow the look and the words had released it, like a spell.
She smoked steadily, with an impatience that verged on fury. She had to get back to the house, she said, Billy would be home soon. He suggested they still had time to go to her place, but even he could see the afternoon had all but slipped away. At the corner of Bridge and Willard she suddenly demanded to be let out. But when he stopped the car, she went on sitting, staring straight ahead of her, and it seemed to him that she was waiting for something from him: waiting with a stubborn, defiant anger to receive from him something he could not imagine, but which she seemed to believe she was owed.
36
WHEN LUCILLE SLAMMED THE DOOR of the Biscayne and walked away down Willard, Alf felt they were through. In a way, he was relieved — relieved she’d taken the initiative, which saved him the trouble of playing the bastard’s role, or at least of playing it to the hilt. And anyway, the stress of lying to Margaret, of always worrying they’d be caught, had often seemed greater than the pleasure. He had promised himself a hundr
ed times he would give her up. But when the pleasure came, and even more, the anticipation of pleasure, it obliterated everything, like a drug. By the end of the week he was having withdrawal symptoms. His hands seemed heavier, with the blood in them, lonely for Lucille Boileau.
Friday night, in a windless silence, it began to snow. On Saturday morning the large flakes — eyelid-catching flakes of indeterminate shape — were still floating down from an invisible sky, settling a pure whiteness over the yard. Alf and Margaret sat in the kitchen in their dressing gowns, over a late breakfast. From two rooms away came the squawk of the Saturday-morning cartoons. The renewal of winter had cast a feeling of snug isolation over the house and it seemed to Alf that he had returned home, to the simple pleasures of normality — a second cup of coffee, the scrape of a knife on toast, the Saturday paper — after a time of insanity that in retrospect half-perplexed him. When the phone rang, it startled them both. Margaret answered.
“It’s for you.” His wife held the receiver as if it were slightly repugnant.
“Alfie,” the voice said. Lucille.
It was if she had erupted inside him, out of a still pool. Her familiar voice, raw with cigarette smoke, seemed in danger of spilling from the receiver.
“I’ve got a broken pipe,” she said. “There’s water everywhere.”
“In the cellar?” he said, conscious of Margaret moving at the counter.
“It’s an emergency,” Lucille said.
“I’m not really a plumber,” he said sternly. “I’m not sure I have the right tools.”
“Oh you’ve got the right tools, Alfie.”
He turned to the wall.
“Look, have you tried a plumber?”
“I don’t have the money, Alf. There’s a foot of water down there now. If you can’t come —”
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “I’ve got to get dressed.”
“Who was that?” Margaret said, when he’d hung up.
“Lucille Boileau. Her cellar’s flooded. I told her — well, you heard me. I guess she doesn’t have much money.”
“I wonder why she’d call here?” Margaret said in a muffled voice to the coffee pot.
He shrugged, doing his best to look puzzled, innocent. But a wild, youthful happiness had invaded him: he felt like seizing his wife and dancing.
Alf had never been in Lucille’s cellar, with its rough stone walls and low ceiling. Against one wall, a broken pipe spewed a ragged plume of water that crashed noisily into the flood that lapped at the bottom stair. Lucille watched as he sloshed around in his rubber boots, searching with a hoe for the main valve.
“Alf —”
Feeling under the icy water he found the tap. In a few seconds, the stream had petered to a dribble.
“Don wants me to work at the store. One of the girls phoned in sick. I wonder if you could keep an eye on Billy.”
He looked at her on the stairs, stooping there in the weak light, her breasts free (he guessed) under her untucked plaid shirt. He was going to be here anyway — for hours, maybe. And besides, he’d do anything now to be back in her good books. It was a kind of madness, he saw: he was the drowning man who watches with curious equanimity the diminishing spot of light above his sinking head.
“He hasn’t been well,” she said, with a simpering smile that surprised him.
“All right.”
She let him kiss her, briefly, on the mouth. “I’m sorry,” he said, meaning he was sorry for their last date together — for whatever he’d done or hadn’t done that ruined their afternoon. She tousled his head, like a boy’s, and a few minutes later he heard the front door slam as she went out. As he was poking about with the hoe, trying to find the floor drain (wherever it was, it was plugged), Billy materialized on the stairs. He was sitting in stocking feet and jeans and a red T-shirt with ATTAWAN FALL FAIR printed on it. In his hand was a large toy soldier clad in army khakis and a G.I. helmet.
“You could float a boat down here,” Alf said, trying to be friendly. He was in a good mood, feeling that he and Lucille were back on track.
The boy said nothing.
“I remember a flood when I was a boy. They had to come and take us out in boats. The whole Island was flooded. That was before they raised the dykes.” And again he saw the ghostly ice-cakes creeping through the misted streets, the rowboats nudging up to isolated houses — the swift, mysterious rippling of waters.
Billy looked at his toy soldier, making him jump — or fall — down a couple of stairs, making sure it landed on its head. He might as well have been deaf for all the attention he paid to Alf. Yet when Alf turned away, he felt the boy was watching. He was like a wild animal with his dark eyes that darted into hiding at the suggestion of a look from someone else.
Alf found the drain. There was a rock in it, apparently. It was as smooth as the top of a skull, wedged solid. He tried to pry it out with his fingers, with the edge of the hoe, with a screwdriver.
“Somebody’s put a rock in here,” he said. There was no response from the stairs. Looking around, he saw the boy was gone.
He got the rock out, but there was still a lot of muck clogging the drain. As he dug it out, he could hear Billy moving upstairs. After a while, he went up to look.
He found him in his narrow room, sitting on his bed — which was just a mattress on the floor — with a mess of comic books littering the dishevelled blankets. There was a smell of stale urine, and in the uncurtained window, a ferny garden of frost did not quite obscure the clapboard wall of the house next door. Billy’s gaze darted to Alf’s knees, fled back to his comic.
“Your mom tells me you’ve been sick —”
“Yup.” Billy’s answer came from far back in his throat. It was like a little man talking, a tough little gangster, almost comical.
“Feelin’ better now?”
“Yup.”
“Good.”
Billy was turning the pages of the comic book, too fast to be really seeing anything. Alf felt he wasn’t just shy. The boy seemed frightened of him. He had an impulse to go away — to stop torturing him with his presence — but he was held by the boy’s isolation. He wondered what his life had been, who his father was. Lucille had been with a lot of men. At that moment, Billy seemed to be the child of them all, abandoned and strange.
He said, “I’m Jamie’s father, you know.”
“Yup.”
“I’m a friend of your mother’s. We used to work at the same place.”
“Yup.”
“Are you hungry? Can I get you something to eat?”
“Nope.”
Alf hesitated, at a loss. He had never met a boy like this. He remembered his silence, that night he’d driven him home. He watched as Billy twisted his comic book into a roll and bit his upper lip. He seemed independent of the adult world somehow, of all worlds, locked in a world of his own. He seemed to Alf to have a secret, as if he were guarding a secret, and at the same time waiting for someone to come and guess what it was. He couldn’t tell.
“My grandfather drowned in Lake Erie,” Billy said, tightening the roll. The statement seemed to come out of nowhere.
“I knew your grandfather,” Alf said, squatting down, hoping to find his way into Billy’s gaze. “One winter — it was a long time ago — we cut ice together, on the Atta.”
The boy went on fooling with the tube of paper. But Alf felt he was listening.
“That was before people had refrigerators. They kept all their food in iceboxes. The iceman used to come around in the summer. He’d give us pieces of ice to suck. Sort of like Popsicles.”
The boy’s black eyes briefly met his, with a flash of amusement. And a stab of excitement — of life in the quick — leapt in Alf’s gut.
“Sure,” Alf said, warming. “Actually, he didn’t give them to us. We’d steal them, when he was away from his truck.”
Billy’s throat emitted a little laugh: Heh! He understood that.
“We’d go down by the river an
d suck them. Or if it was hot, we’d rub them all over our faces and chests.”
The boy was grinning at him now, his round face and black eyes and little teeth with their traces of rot shining up at him, happy and appeased. Yet even now, Alf suspected the boy had eluded him. His smile was like a mask, offered to a greater power — a smiling power who demanded a smile in return. But something else was going on behind it, in those evasive eyes, something he could not read, which moved him and held him there, in the little room.
37
THE TELEVISION FLOODED the McVeys’ den with fake, flickering moonlight. Lying on the couch, his head in Liz’s lap, Joe watched an old Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie — that spry and dapper man moving like an elf down a broad staircase, taking his platinum-headed love in his arms. They wheeled around the floor with such exquisite synchronization there seemed to be no time at all between gesture and response.
Turning his head, Joe began to pick at the buttons of Liz’s blouse, exposing her peach satin bra with its frilly edges. Without taking her eyes off the screen, she helped him slide the bra up. Her breasts came free. Absently, Liz smoothed his hair. They could not make love tonight because her father was out with the car and her mother and sister were up on the second floor. Her father, he supposed, was with Babs Wilcocks. Joe had seen the two of them a few nights ago, walking into the Vimy House’s Ladies and Escorts, the tall man with the stocky, plain, fur-coated Babs on his arm, the two of them looking almost formal in an old-fashioned way and — casting greetings right and left — clearly making no effort to hide their relationship. Joe had never understood it — Doc McVey, the richest man in town, drinking in the Vimy House. But he was a regular there and had once, the story ran, got into a shoving match with Bud Reed over some insult Bud had sent his way.
Joe nuzzled a breast, licked it, looked at it. Above, Liz’s blank face continued to watch the screen. Through the ceiling came a thump. He wondered if Liz’s mother had fallen down. Two weeks before, he’d watched her — she’d consumed one too many gin and tonics — lean slowly sideways, like the Tower of Pisa, with a bemused here-we-go smile in her sad eyes. He’d just managed to catch her.