The Island Walkers

by John Bemrose

  “You never tell me you love me,” Liz said.

  Joe looked up at the violet, too-bright eyes, watching him up there, beyond her pulled-up bra. She had told him she loved him once, whimpering it in a little-girl voice as he lay in her arms at the Executive.

  “You know I care for you.” Her face flickered in the lunar light, impassive.

  “I don’t want my mother’s life,” she said, tugging sharply at his hair.

  “No, well, why should you?”

  “The way he treats her,” she said, her gaze sweeping his forehead, as though evidence of her father’s sins lay there.

  “Hey now, I don’t treat you like that.”

  Once — this was driving up to Galt in the Lincoln — she had talked with remarkable candour about her father’s affair with Babs Wilcocks. “He thinks it should be nothing, we should take it as nothing — after all, he’s still here, or he is most of the time, he still loves us. He can’t see the unhappiness he causes. I mean, he thinks it’s unreasonable for us to be upset. He can’t see why we can’t all be in a good mood, and nice to everybody, like he is. Why do we have to spoil things — us, spoiling things! The crazy thing is, most of the time we play it his way. We pretend nothing’s wrong. And then something snaps: Mom gets drunk or — Mom gets drunk.” It was the most frank she’d ever been with him. He had liked her the better for it, had felt closer to her, once she dropped her theatrical airs. But at the same time, she had set a level of openness he couldn’t match. She was asking for that now, he felt, her stare full of demands he couldn’t meet.

  Abruptly, he sat up. Hand in hand, Fred and Ginger were strolling happily through a crowd of partygoers. Neither was out of breath.

  “Do you love me a little?” said Liz, ghostly behind him. Joe went still. Everything in the room seemed to demand his answer: the deep couch, the fine desk with its brass-handled drawers, the gilt-framed pictures, even Fred and Ginger, pausing now in an embrace to look at each other in suspended bliss: waiting for Joe’s response to come winging to them from thirty years into the future and make all exactly right.

  The thought of Anna came to him with such force he caught his breath. Earlier that day she had come into the A&P. She had seemed delighted to find him sweeping the floor in his apron, and stood chatting with him for a good five minutes. Since that time they’d talked in her bedroom, something seemed to have opened between them. But what? He felt held in suspense around her, as if a happiness he could not quite believe in was hovering nearby.

  “Joe?” Liz said. “Do you —”

  “Sure I do,” he said. He was staring at nothing, scarcely hearing. But he managed to reach out and squeeze her knee in its patterned stocking.

  It was just after midnight when he got home to find his mother in the kitchen. She was worried about his father. Apparently Alf had left to go for a walk at eight, saying he’d be back in an hour or two. She wanted Joe to drive over to the Legion and look for him. “Why don’t we just phone,” he said. “Joe,” she urged, “please do this for me.” There was a fierce, loaded concentration in her eyes. The pressure of unspoken things was in the room, and rather than broach them, he took the Biscayne and drove over to the Flats. It was snowing again, large flakes drifting out of the dark to settle an airy fleece on windshields and tree branches. He parked by the curb and approached the old brick house with its drawn curtains. He had never been in the Legion before — it was licensed, you had to be twenty-one to go in — and it had become a place of mystery to him. If the war was still alive anywhere in Attawan, it was alive here, and as he pushed through the heavy doors into the dimly lit entrance hall, he sensed the mood of the Thirties and Forties, preserved in these rooms like clothes in an old trunk. From around a corner came the roar of voices and music — “The White Cliffs of Dover” was flowing in its slow, nostalgic wave from the jukebox, a few people were singing drunk-enly along. He was about to go on when he noticed the display cases on either side of the hall. They were full of flags and old photographs and newspaper clippings: “GERMANY SURRENDERS!” But what held him was the file of army rifles going right back to the Boer War. The nicked, polished wood and oiled metal of the Lee-Enfields spoke to him of the battles he had read about: Passchendaele, Vimy, Dieppe, Juno Beach, the Scheldt Estuary. There was a Mauser too, which seemed to contain the very essence of the legendary enemy. Beside it sat a German helmet — that mythic shape, like a pageboy haircut forged in steel.

  Inside, he asked the barman, Nick Maroni, if he’d seen his father. Nick hadn’t, but he tapped his head — a signal for Joe to remove his hat — and said it was okay for him to have a look, so he went gingerly through the rooms, his toque crushed in his hand, past the large framed picture of the Queen in her blue sash, saying hello to people who greeted him. Coming back he stopped at a large photo that showed a brigade of soldiers sitting around a square of improvised board tables, eating Christmas dinner from their mess tins. He scanned the scene intently, moved by the merriment of the young men in khaki, envying them the adventure of their lives.

  Outside in the snowy silence, he looked at a small fruit tree, its branches loaded with white, and was overcome with a sense of having missed his father’s life. His father had lived, and he, Joe, had understood nothing about it — nothing about a life that suddenly seemed laden with rich, unheralded meaning. For a moment, looking away down the poorly lit street over the snow-muffled cars, he felt bereft.

  He drove around the Flats for a while, past the mills that seemed, just now, as desolate as prisons, then started towards home. On Bridge Street he saw his father tramping towards the centre of town. Snow had collected on the shoulders of his grey overcoat and in his dishevelled hair. As Joe drew up, his father stopped, and seemed to hesitate before coming to the car — seemed, almost, not to recognize the Biscayne — but then he moved quickly and got in, with a gust of cold air. There was a drop of moisture on his nose.

  “Hey fella, what are you doing out here?”

  “Oh Mom — you know how she is. Worried you’d got lost or something.”

  He was relieved and immensely glad to have found his father.

  “I stayed longer than I meant to,” his father said.

  “At the Legion?” Joe said. His father glanced over at him. “You were at the Legion?”

  His father looked away.

  “I was just there,” Joe said, a bit off balance. Since they’d played hockey on the river, that time with Smiley, they’d been getting along pretty well, as they usually did if they trod lightly. But now, he sensed an uneasiness in his father, which made him uneasy too. He drove forward, the tires spinning a little on the ramp to the bridge.

  “I must have missed you,” Joe said, eager to save his father any discomfort over the discrepancy. Perhaps he’d been in the washroom when Joe went through. “It’s a great place,” he said. “That collection of rifles —”

  His father said nothing. Joe might have taken that as a warning, but he couldn’t stop himself. Driving around the Flats, he’d remembered what his mother had told him, that before the war his father had been a different man. And now — the idea came with the swiftness of instinct — he wanted to make contact with that other man, that younger, happier man who could talk at his ease and enjoy himself. “I saw this picture, ‘Christmas dinner 1944’? I wondered if you knew anyone in it. It was obviously taken in Europe. They seemed to be in a ruined church. They were having a great time. You remember any Christmases there?”

  His father did not respond: he had sunk into one those baffling silences that made Joe feel he’d done something wrong, made him feel he’d been cast out, into a silence of his own. Waiting at Shade for the light to change, he saw another car draw up beside them. Doc McVey — his wide, bespectacled face emanating its usual arrogance — glanced past their hood to check for traffic. For a moment, his gaze lit on Joe and his father without apparent recognition, before he wheeled the Lincoln away up Shade.

  “Coming home from his girlfriend’s, I
guess,” Joe said, trying to bridge the gap with a joke.

  “Just drive,” his father said. Feeling suddenly chilled, Joe put the Biscayne in gear and they went on, between the darkened stores.

  38

  STANDING WITH BILLY below Rat’s Hill, Jamie was shivering, his mittens and the seat of his pants soaked from repeated trips down the hill on the piece of ruined cardboard that lay at his feet. He wanted to go home, but there was a problem. Billy wanted to come with him.

  “We could play with your soldiers —,” Billy said, his mouth hardly moving. His eyes travelled cagily from the zipper in Jamie’s coat to Jamie’s nose to some spot in the air between them. Far above them, at the top of the hill, Wayne Cox stood with one foot on his toboggan, eyeing the ice-chute that gleamed like a long stream of saliva in the hillside. In a nearby house, lights had come on, with their look of snugness and safety. Jamie said, “It’s time for supper. My Dad’ll be home.”

  “We could go up to your room.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I could wait in your room while you eat.”

  “I dunno. I don’t think so —”

  Billy went on grinning, refusing defeat. He wasn’t wearing mittens and his coat didn’t cover his brown, skinny wrists: he was shivering, and there was a drugged, sleepy cast about his eyes.

  “I guess I better go,” Jamie said.

  As he walked away, Billy spat and fell in beside him, his rubber boots squelching in the wet snow.

  “Anyways,” Billy said, “your dad’s gonna come and live in my house.”

  Jamie stopped and looked at Billy, who was grinning at Jamie’s chest. And suddenly his body felt wrapped in hotness.

  “That’s stupid. He’s not gonna —”

  “Yeah, he is.”

  “That’s stupid.”

  “Wanta fight about it?” This emerged so quickly Jamie knew Billy’d been planning to say it all along. When Billy had a problem, he would fight. If something wasn’t true, he would make it be true, with his fists.

  “No, it’s stupid.”

  “I’m not stupid!”

  “I know. But my dad’s not gonna live with you. That’s — silly.”

  “He came to our house.”

  “No he didn’t.”

  “Yeah, he did. He kissed my mom. I saw him do it in the cellar. That means he’s gonna live with us.”

  “No he didn’t,” Jamie said. But his face burned at the mention of the kiss. It didn’t sound like Billy had made that up. The kiss made everything look different: the purple sky, the stain of the ice-chute in the hill, all had the cruel, bright look of something true.

  Billy’s shove sent him staggering sideways.

  “Hey!” Jamie said, but Billy had that look he had seen so many times in the schoolyard when he was getting ready to fight, his eyes fixed almost sleepily on his, Jamie’s, mouth as if his mouth alone had made Billy mad. As if Billy no longer saw him, but only a mouth, a chin, a chest: places to be hit. He thought that being friends with Billy had made him safe from Billy. But here it was, like something he’d always known: that gaze from which he, Jamie, had somehow disappeared.

  He was walking rapidly away when he heard the churn of Billy’s boots. Billy was on him before he could turn. They both went down, punching and wrestling in the slush. At the crack of Billy’s fist a numbness spread up Jamie’s nose and into his forehead. A few seconds later, Billy had straddled him. Jamie bucked and twisted, struggling to free his wrists from Billy’s grip, looking up into Billy’s face, which was all fury now, the bad teeth clenched in a sneer. And he knew that Billy had more fierceness in him than he did. He was going to lose.

  Finally, he lay still. Billy’s face was close to his, under the thatch of black hair. He saw the brown spots on Billy’s teeth.

  “All right,” Jamie said. “You win.”

  Billy’s twisted his wrists.

  “Say it’s true,” Billy said.

  “What —”

  “Say it’s true your dad’s comin’ to live at my house.”

  He looked past Billy’s head into the murk of the sky. He could not say it. It was not true, it could not be true, and yet — some strange intuition drifting through his body — he sensed that to admit to it made it more likely. Words made things true, they made them be.

  “Say it!” Billy twisted his wrists again.

  He heard a car pass, on the road by the hosiery mill, a sound that might mean rescue, growing weaker. Distantly, across the fields behind the mill, a chainsaw stuttered and growled and he was filled with self-pity.

  He thought of his house on the Island: the lit kitchen where even now his mother would be starting to make supper. It occurred to him that she did not know what was happening to him. The thought filled him with sadness. He saw the top of the kitchen table and the little glass dish that held the butter, the perfect square of yellow butter. “That was my mother’s,” his mother had told him.

  “Say it.”

  He was filled with longing for his own life. And yet despite this, he felt he had come down to something he had always known, though he usually managed to forget it, he’d come down to the fact of the cold, slushy ground and him lying on it, beaten. This was something true, and it was underneath all the other things he knew were true too — school, summer holidays, his father, underneath all those things there was this cold, wet place that made him want to cry.

  “Say it or I’ll punch your face in.”

  “All right.”

  “Say it.”

  “My dad’s comin’ —”

  But he couldn’t speak the words. His throat had swelled and he felt the first tear spill from the corner of his eye.

  “Say it, crybaby.”

  He fought back, twisting and struggling. He got one hand free, but of course that meant Billy had his hand free: it made a fist and the fist struck him in the eye like a stone.

  “Say it!”

  Again they lay still, locked. Another car went past. It seemed much darker suddenly, though the wet, dirty snow gleamed from the hillside. He strained to see if Wayne Cox was still on the hill. But the brow was empty against the stark, high wall of a house.

  His coat was soaked now. He was shivering harder than Billy.

  “You can come to my house,” he said. “We can play with my soldiers.”

  He knew his mother would never let Billy in.

  Billy gave his wrists another twist and sat back, letting them go. But he went on sitting on Jamie’s stomach, deciding something.

  “You can borrow my tank,” Jamie said. His best Dinky Toy. “You can take it home.”

  Billy let him up and they walked in silence down West Street, their arms brushing as if they were friends. They passed Donnie Whittaker’s dog. In its mouth was a bloody bone. The dog slunk into the road, watching them with sneaky eyes.

  Then a car drew up, and it was Truck Cassidy’s taxi, its sides feathered with slush, and Billy’s mother was inside. She told Billy to get in, time for supper she said, and when Billy wouldn’t get in, she got out and grabbed him by the ear and marched him into the back seat. “We’ll see you later, honey,” she said to Jamie with a big smile. He looked at her huge, pink mouth.

  The lights were on in Jamie’s house, but the car was gone. He told himself Joe might have the car, but a moment later he saw Joe in the window, looking into the pages of a newspaper. For a few minutes he stood shivering in his soaked pants, wanting to go in but wanting even more to know where his father was. He was out with the car somewhere, but where? If he was just driving around, that was all right, but if he had gone over to Billy’s … He ran back to the corner, but there was no sign of the car, not down Water Street, where the distant stores nested in the glow of the street lights, nor up West, where the road was disappearing in thick dusk. He turned and looked left, where the butt end of Water Street climbed the ramp to the footbridge. Beyond lay the dissolving whiteness of the hill clouded darkly with trees. When he saw the car, its headligh
ts streaking among pines, he felt immediately it had to be his father, going to Uncle Pete and Aunt May’s house maybe, or just going, as big people always were, on errands and trips that seemed to have no end. He ran up the ramp and onto the bridge. The car was visible now, it tires rumbling on the snow-packed road as it hurtled down through the dusk, but it was not his father’s, he saw, not the brown Biscayne, but a low black car he did not recognize, speeding along the dead-end road as if it actually led somewhere.

  At that moment he heard a sound like the report of a gun. He staggered sideways, and when he recovered, not knowing what it was, he froze in a state of hyper-alertness. His heart seemed to be beating in his whole body. Peering through the chainlink mesh of the safety fence, he saw the river moving under him, a huge white snake moving its rough back slowly through the land. Now repeated gunshots came, and a rumbling like a train on the Shade Street overpass. Climbing up the mesh, he looked down and saw great blocks of ice shifting and climbing over each other’s backs. Underneath him, the bridge banged and hummed as the cakes of ice struck the abutments.

  As he watched, one particularly large cake climbed into the air. It reared straight up in front of him, taller than he was, taller than the bridge, and it was coming on slowly, towards the rail. He gazed up at it, unable to move.

  In its underside, many stones and bits of weed were imbedded like eyes. It advanced within a silence of its own, bobbing slightly. It was like a creature he’d seen in the Christmas Parade, a giant leaning its huge, grotesque head over the crowd.

  “Mommy,” he whispered. It was almost on top of him. And still he couldn’t run.

  It’s all right, the voice said.

  “All right?” he echoed, mesmerized. He watched as the creature sank. Just before it reached the bridge, it bowed its great, dripping head, sweeping so close to him he felt the chill of its icy body as it slipped beneath the bridge. He climbed down from the mesh and hurried to the opposite rail and watched it re-emerge, a giant spearhead of white ice, descending among its smaller brothers under the ghostly mass of Lookout Hill.