The Island Walkers

by John Bemrose

  “Pete,” she said, putting down her spoon.

  “I guess you guys have been busy.”

  “Well you can take over now,” Alf said, glad of his old friend’s arrival. With Pete, there would be jokes, stories: he would forget.

  Margaret stood up.

  “Don’t get so drunk you fall off the roof,” she said dryly, reaching for Alf’s plate.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll keep an eye on them,” Pete said, shooting Jamie a wink. The boy’s face swam with pleasure. Pete was “Uncle Pete” to him and Penny: since their grandmother’s death, the closest thing they knew to a relative.

  Margaret did not deign to reply. She only tolerated Pete for his sake, Alf felt. Years ago, she had asked Alf why he considered Pete his best friend. “I just think you might do better,” she’d said. “I wouldn’t say he was my best friend,” Alf had said, wounded and on the defensive. But whom was he closer to, really? Yet he knew what she meant: there was something of the lost soul about Pete, with his broken teeth and fixed stare, his Grade Nine education.

  Margaret lingered with a stack of dirty plates in her hand, asking after Pete’s wife, May.

  “Oh Jeez, she’s not fit to live with these days.” Pete’s eyes with their look of innocence-protesting candour had settled on Alf, even though he was technically answering Margaret. “I can’t do anything right. I put my glass down, she says, ‘Don’t put it down there!’ ”

  Jamie laughed at Pete’s mocking falsetto. But Penny was watching him soberly, as if unaware of any joke. On her plate was an apple with a slice cut off its side, the white flesh turning brown.

  “Well I’m sure she has her reasons,” Margaret said. “Penny, you haven’t eaten your dessert. Bring it in with you, you can help me with the dishes.” Moving as if hypnotized, Penny swung her legs over the bench and sat staring at the grass.

  “You heard about Timmy Morton?” Pete said to Alf.

  Alf murmured that he hadn’t and looked away, hoping to dislodge his friend’s gaze, hoping Pete might at least once address Margaret, who in the past had complained that Pete ignored her. “Is it just me,” she’d asked, “or does he do it with everybody? Sometimes I get the feeling he’s afraid of women.” Alf had hastened to assure her Pete was like this with everybody, at least when Alf was around. And it was true, Pete always directed his attention to Alf, as though that were the only comfortable place he could look. They had been friends since childhood.

  “Guess he got so lubricated he went home to the wrong house,” Pete said, still fixing on Alf. “You know those houses on Gold Street: they all look the same? Guess Timmy pulls in the drive, thinks it’s his place, but he’s actually next door!” Pete grinned around at Joe and Jamie, but his gaze quickly returned to Alf. “Sly Callum’s place — Timmy goes right inside like he’s in his own kitchen …”

  It was a good story — Pete was always up on the latest scandal, which he usually dramatized with a few twists of his own — but Alf was distracted by Margaret’s departure. She and Penny had gone off across the grass, picking their way over the scattered reefs of old shingles to the back steps. A few moments later, Alf glanced around and saw his wife’s dark hair reappear at the window, as she clattered at the dishes in the sink.

  “So he’s in the wrong bedroom,” Pete was saying. “He’s taking off his clothes in the wrong bedroom! So then Sly wakes up and says, ‘Who in hell’s that?’ And Timmy thinks, That don’t sound like Jean! So then Sly jumps on him, starts pounding him out —”

  “Sly’s just a little guy!” Joe said, relishing the story.

  “Yeah,” Pete says, his eyes growing huge. “But don’t cross him, eh? So I guess Mary finally turns on the lights and they get it sorted out.” Pete was focused on Alf again, his eyes wide with amazed disbelief, as if Alf and only Alf might have the answer to the wonder of human behaviour he was expounding. “I guess Jean was so mad at Timmy when she found out — made him spend the night in the car!”

  Hearing the laughter of his sons, Alf grinned. But he was somewhere else, thinking of the woman moving through the dim house behind him.

  4

  SANDY CLIMBED INTO THE BISCAYNE. Her new cat-woman eyes met Joe’s.

  “Wow,” he deadpanned. Eyeliner. Mascara. He wasn’t sure he liked it.

  “If you don’t like it, I can take it off.”

  “Take it off?” His gaze slipped to the tops of her breasts, white as scars above the dipping edge of her halter top. A thin silver chain fell out of sight. At its weighted end, he knew, down there between her breasts, hung Christ in his agony.

  “Dirty mind,” she said, lifting her chin to the windshield.

  West Street lay deserted. They drove off the Island, past small plaster houses, small frame houses, past Bannerman’s old hosiery mill with its decapitated bell tower and up the broken asphalt road wedged into the hillside. At the hump of the level-crossing he glanced left and saw heat shimmering in the distances beyond the town, over the oily bed of the empty tracks: the eternal absences of Sunday.

  She took a small, spade-shaped bottle from her purse, removed the top with its little brush, and with great concentration began to paint her nails. Irritated, he watched the way she curled her tongue over her upper lip and held her hand away to examine her work, an artist enslaved by perfection. It was his notion of her that she was too absorbed in trivial things.

  “Why do you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Paint yourself up like that?” He had nearly said, Tart yourself up. Sometimes, and especially now, in the daylight, he was ashamed of their connection.

  She gazed frowning at her hand. The bright-red polish suggested to him a cheap carnival gaiety, a violence.

  “You don’t like it?”

  “It just seems … I don’t know.”

  “I could take it off if you don’t like it.”

  “No, no,” he said, and a moment later: “Anyway, once we get in the water, it’s not likely to last, is it —”

  “The nail polish?”

  “The stuff on your eyes.”

  She adjusted the mirror and studied herself, worriedly. In profile, her face was almost flat. It had been her father who, years ago, had begun to call her Monkey.

  “It’s just for fun,” she said, pulling down the skin of her cheekbone.

  “Look at me.”

  There was something attractive in her makeup, almost primitive, like a mask that made her new. Behind its drama she might be anyone.

  “It’s growing on me,” he said.

  She was a year younger than he — his best friend Smiley’s little sister, or at least that was how he’d thought of her until a school dance in May, when in the heat of the spring evening, among bodies turning in the pulsation of the speakers, she had tugged him onto the gym floor for a Ladies’ Choice. And in the slow maelstrom of couples, with Paul McCartney wailing like there was no tomorrow, they had drifted into a swaying intimacy so easy and natural he felt he had been preparing for it all his life.

  They had been steadies all summer. She wore his school ring, taped to make it fit. His mother disapproved. He’d overheard her responding on the phone to a friend who had apparently seen him and Sandy together in the Biscayne. “It’s only one of those summer things, quite temporary. I mean, they’ve grown up together — hardly a seedbed for romance.” Then his mother’s friend said something, and his mother had replied, in a tone of infinite knowing and scorn, “Yes, exactly. She’s not really up to his mark at all.” Later, Joe had upbraided her. “She’s a wonderful girl,” he said angrily, wanting to hurt her, “and it’s not temporary.” In fact, he knew it was. His mother’s judgment of Sandy and his own, secret judgment were uncomfortably close. But he hated it when his mother anticipated his thoughts: it made him feel she had stolen a piece of him.

  Sandy slid over, burrowing a place for herself under his arm. Her hair yielded to the pressure of his body like a basket of woven grass. In its teased, complex, slightly sticky depths
was mostly air. Her breasts pressed together, their tops rising above her halter: stacked goudas. Under the seat he had brought a flashlight. Later, after they’d swum at the bridge, after they’d eaten a hot dog at the Rendezvous, they’d drive out to their parking place above Coles Rapids. He was planning to leave the flashlight on in some place where it would shed an indirect glow, softer than the overhead light, easier on the batteries too. For him, Coles Rapids was the focus of their date, the exciting endpoint of a journey without which the journey would hardly be worth making.

  At the Fairgrounds, he accelerated. They crested the new bridge, with its fleeting view of the gravel pits that surrounded the town: turquoise, spring-fed craters, too cold for swimming, and farther away, the conveyor belts leading like little elevated roads across a sad, desert landscape littered with boulders and rusted equipment. Finally, they broke out among the farms: the old houses flashed behind windbreaks of poplar and spruce, while the great, weathered barns held their course like ancient galleons riding the seas of green and bronze crops — the long, patrolling wave of summer.

  By four-thirty they had had their fill of swimming and retreated to the flat limestone of Turtle Rock. They lay on their stomachs, on Sandy’s pink beach towel, facing upstream towards the iron span that stamped the sky with its dark trapezoid. Chunks of collapsing roadbed hung beneath it like the innards of a disintegrating mattress, suspended by tortured strands of rusted steel. The bridge had long been closed to cars. Only the pedestrian walkway remained open.

  Directly below, a little rapid flickered and hushed where the river entered the calm of the pool. The water in the pool was opaque, the colour of creamed coffee, brimming with the soil the Atta had picked up in its long, meandering journey through the farmlands to the northwest. The surface scarcely seemed to move, though here and there bits of weed or grass floated along.

  There was only one swimmer in the pool now. Her head moved slowly, edging into the current below the bridge. To their left, the abrupt, sandy bank and the massive, corrugated trunks of the willows lay in shadow. From deep in the recesses among the trees, over the cooling sand littered with the remains of fires and picnics past, voices could be heard. A bottle popped as it broke on a rock. There were almost twenty people on the river this afternoon, but except for the cars ranged along the sand-flats on the opposite bank, there was little sign of them. They had retired to escape the heat, to neck, to drink. By now their activities were all but enveloped in a drowse of silence.

  Sandy rolled to her back, wriggled against him. Her hair had collapsed into a stringy mass. Most of her makeup was gone, save for a blotch at the corner of her right eye, as if she had been weeping tar. He licked his finger and cleaned it off. Her face was broad and childlike, her mouth wide and thin-lipped and supple. But what took him aback just now were her eyes, gazing at him with such unguarded affection he had to look away.

  “Think we’ll get married?” she said.

  “Married?” he said, suddenly grinning.

  “I don’t mean now, but maybe —” Her finger traced something on his bare arm. “You know — someday.”

  “I got university,” he said.

  “I could work, help put you through. Lots of gals do that for their guys.”

  Her “gals” bothered him. As her makeup bothered him, her too-bright clothes. Sandy might live on the Island too, but their families couldn’t be more different. He thought of her house: the ugly wallpaper, the mess of clothes that never seemed to get cleared up, the absence of books, of decent music.

  “How do you know lots of girls do that?”

  “I read about it,” she said, sulking. “I do read, you know.” She gave him a little shove. But what she read mostly were romances with titles like April’s Summer and Ann Masterson’s Only Choice. He had tried to get her to read something more serious — James Joyce’s Dubliners, Churchill’s history of the Second World War — but she hadn’t got very far with them. “Not really my style,” she’d said, handing his volumes back. “I’m not as smart as you.” She said it happily, as if her lesser intelligence were a relief.

  “I don’t know,” he said, after a while. He meant he didn’t know about getting married. In fact, he’d known as soon as she raised the subject that he wasn’t going to marry her, if he got married at all. But he was being vague to avoid hurting her. It was the one thing he could give her to make up, at least a little, for the imbalance in their feelings for each other: the solicitous tenderness of the guilty.

  “We’d have our own place,” she said. Her fingertips were moving up and down his arm, brushing the blond hairs against his skin. “Our own bedroom.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Where we could … you know.”

  Her eyelids dropped, and he glimpsed in marriage possibilities —a silky intimacy — that was more than they had known. They had not made love, not fully, not in the way he craved, and now, in the webbed crotch of his swimsuit, flattened against the warm rock, things were beginning to happen.

  “Tell me more,” he said, looking at her.

  “Well, you know,” she blushed. He had run up against her natural modesty. When they made out in the Biscayne, she kept her eyes closed.

  “You make it sound pretty good.”

  “It would be good.” There was play in her gaze now, he had never known her to be so openly seductive.

  “Why don’t you kiss me?”

  Her mouth had never yielded such softness. All he could think of now was what her kiss promised for later, at the rapids. He kissed her again. Between his body and the rock, a second, tubular rock had materialized.

  “So what do you say,” she said cozily, as if the matter was all but decided. He was amazed at how tenaciously she could hang on to her original idea.

  “Will you show me tonight?” he said. “What being married to you will be like?”

  “Bad boy!” she said, slapping at his arm.

  “But will you?”

  “Bad boy,” she said, pushing at him.

  He hung his head: he liked being a bad boy.

  “Seriously now,” she said, “what do you think? A possibility?”

  Her eyes held a probing sharpness.

  He said, truthfully, “I just never thought about it.”

  “So you just think we’ll go on like this?”

  “It’s kinda nice.”

  “But it’s enough for you?”

  He looked across the dimming water. The swimmer — it was Marilyn Truscott — reached the shallows and stood up, water pouring off her shoulders. For a few seconds, as she fiddled behind her neck with the tie of her swimsuit, she was all the girls he hadn’t known yet.

  “Yeah,” he said, “it is enough for me.”

  “You,” Sandy said. She pushed at his arm dismissively, with a show of good humour, but he knew she was hurt. She lay back and closed her eyes, lifting her chin, as if she had found a superior lover in the sun.

  A flat, headachy light was coming off the river. “Think I’ll take another dunk,” he said. After a few minutes he got up slowly and padded with a show of indifference to the edge of Turtle Rock.

  He surfaced just in time to hear Smiley call out, “Ship ahoy!” His friend stood in his plaid swimsuit at the edge of the willows, his pale, hairy gut spilling over the pleated edge of the suit, the iodine glint of a beer bottle clamped in his hand, gazing across the river to where a large, sky-blue car was descending through the pasture towards the sand-flats. It was coming slowly, almost hesitantly, easing over white outcrops of bedrock, brushing weeds, disappearing behind a cluster of wild fruit trees to re-emerge with glare masking its windshield: a Lincoln, and brand new by the look of it. Joe had no idea whose it was.

  “Jesus,” Sid Kovacs said. Sid had just entered the shallows from among the parked cars, a few yards to Joe’s right. He was standing in his slouchy little trunks and black horn-rims, his hair swept up by his last dive like a merganser’s crown. His mouth gaped in an expression somewhere between ama
zement and moronic self-forgetfulness as he watched the big car pause.

  “Well, it’s Sunday,” Smiley said drolly. “It might be Him.”

  Treading water, Joe watched the great, flat-sided car nose down the slope. Its engine was audible now, a low throbbing hum, a bit ominous, as though it were connected to powers, to purposes, he could not read. In that moment many of the kids on the river felt like trespassers. They had never known who owned this place by the water, perhaps they were about to find out. But whoever was in the car was hidden by the reflections coming off the windows. Then as the Lincoln approached the long earthen ramp leading to the ruined bridge (“Maybe he’ll try to drive over,” Smiley quipped hopefully), Joe caught a glimpse of Sally McVey in the driver’s seat, her chinless face lifted like a turtle’s. Beside her sat her older sister, Liz, and in the back seat, a third person, at once lit and obscured by the sunlight flooding the car.

  Sid said, “What the fuck are they doing here,” and it seemed he spoke for everyone on the river. They were all watching now, watching from the woods and the water’s edge as the big car turned along the sand-flats and crept towards their parked cars, its power steering singing and weeping, its engine complaining at having to go so slowly: watching and wondering with Sid, why were the McVeys here? They never came here, kids from the North End just didn’t, they swam mainly at the country club, in a pool Joe had never used himself, though driving past at night he had seen its turquoise glow in the hillside, and heard the excited voices of swimmers across the dark fairway.

  The Lincoln crept forward, among the loose ranks of Chevs and Fords and Plymouths with their rust spots, their reddish, primed panels where some home-repair job had got stalled halfway. It passed the Walkers’ old beige Biscayne and went on, like a visiting dignitary inspecting the tatty honour guard of some Third World country, stopping at last behind Smiley’s pickup loaded with furniture he was supposed to be delivering to his uncle. Then the sky-blue car fell silent. In the pause that followed, a gull, anguishing, fell away down the sky and the river shone in its distant, unshaded reaches, far upstream. Then the doors of the car opened and shut and three figures emerged to walk swiftly behind the other cars and out onto the sand-flats towards the bridge. Sally led the way, in her Bermuda shorts and golf hat, followed by her sister, Liz, with her slightly rounded shoulders, her ponytail jiggling. A few steps behind came a girl Joe did not recognize, a tallish girl, also in Bermudas, who wore her blonde hair in a Dutch bob: a blonde helmet whose front edges curved up slightly over her cheeks. She seemed aware, as the McVeys did not, of the people watching from the river. Twice she looked over at them, at Sid Kovacs, gaping back at her from the shallows, and at Joe, treading water in the deepest part of the pool. There was curiosity in her glance, he thought, and a sense she knew her situation was absurd.