The Island Walkers

by John Bemrose

  “What’s that for?” he said.

  Charlie Richards worked on without answering: he who for years had treated Joe with such friendliness Joe had felt like one of the family. In the summer, waiting for Sandy to come home from her waitressing job at the Oasis, Joe used to sit with him on the patio under the Manitoba maple, sharing a lemonade, while he talked about the war with an air of humorous disbelief, so unlike Joe’s father, as if the whole thing were a bit of rollicking bad luck he’d been fortunate to have escaped: that time in Italy, when a sniper had kept him pinned against a rock for an entire day …

  And then Sandy would arrive, swinging around the corner of the house in her beige Oasis uniform, her eyes going straight to Joe’s, her lips suppressing a smile that emerged anyway: their happiness a secret, though he saw now it must have been plain to everyone. All that was gone now, a summer, an eon, ago. Watching her father’s prodding screwdriver, he was filled with regret.

  “I found it in the cellar,” Charlie Richards said. “It’s a good little engine. Seemed a shame to throw it out.”

  Smiley carried the .22, its barrel pointing towards the ground as if it were scenting a trail. They left the grass of Lions Park and entered the cleft in the cedar bush. Then the borders of fields, woods, the path weaving in and out of the light, past an old hay mow rusting into a heap of rocks spotted with the golden suns of lichens. He wondered if his father had ridden it. His father had worked on Wiley’s farm as a boy, and its fields were saturated with the stories he had told Joe: unharnessing the draft horses, King and Maud, riding them bareback into the river in a time before time when actions seemed larger than life, and so powerfully etched they could almost be happening still, just out of sight — his father and Pete Moon still racing the heavy-shanked horses through the gleaming shallows. He had a sense that little had happened in his own life, by comparison. His father, in a way, owned the land he was walking on, just as he owned the Depression, and the war, all the great adventures of the past, and now nothing was left to Joe but a kind of ordinariness, a sadness.

  Across the sloping field stubbled with the pale, chewed-off stalks of corn lay small heaps of earth — groundhog mounds — as if someone had dug random postholes. Joe and Smiley watched them keenly, looking for something to kill. A blue jay flew towards a pine, and Smiley followed it in the scope, his heavy face grimacing against the stock.

  “Pow,” he said softly, and the jay both died and lived.

  They settled into a hollow, on dry, pressed-down grass, looking back over the field they had just skirted. Distantly, across the river, they could see the heights of the North End, above the severe gash made by the CN tracks. Joe scanned the backs of the big houses, their roofs and second storeys visible over the edge of the precipice. It was possible Anna Macrimmon lived there, just there, behind the green awning; or there, where a huge beech had shed half its gold.

  “Give me the gun,” he said.

  The tunnel of the scope took him closer. He planted its thin cross on the naked limbs of the beech, on a dilapidated gazebo where an orange towel hung from a railing.

  Swiftly he lowered the .22 and sighted into the field. His shot raised a puff of yellow dust that drifted away.

  “Hey!” Smiley said.

  “I thought I saw one,” Joe said, lying. He had had to fire. He handed back the gun with trembling hands.

  After an hour they had seen no groundhogs, so they went on, following the trail where it descended through trees into the bottomlands of the Atta: the savannah of grasses and weeds and wild fruit trees where a few weeks earlier Jamie had been found. After a while they came to a sandy beach by the river and sat on a great, silvered log, looking out at the beer-coloured water where it spread towards a rapids.

  “So,” Smiley said.

  Joe waited for the blow: he was sure his friend was going to lay into him about Sandy.

  “So I guess I’m droppin’ out,” Smiley said.

  “Dropping — you mean, out of school?”

  Smiley’s deep-set eyes scanned the water. There had been no hint of this.

  “Smiley!”

  His friend shrugged, as if the whole matter were beyond explanation and even comprehension: it was just something that had happened to him. Joe was on the verge of laughing. Surely Smiley was joking in his deadpan way. His friend was one of the best two or three math students in the class. He had talked of going to university.

  “I thought you were going on. I mean, what are you gonna do, go into the mill?”

  He didn’t bother to hide his sarcasm. Smiley sat with his head down, twisting a bit of stick.

  “With your abilities, you could be a teacher. Some kind of scientist —”

  “Thought maybe I’d join the Marines.”

  “The Marines?”

  “See the world,” Smiley said with a bleak giggle.

  “Tell me why you wouldn’t go on. Seriously.”

  Smiley looked at the stick in his hands and said, “It just seems pointless.”

  “What does? Getting up in the world? Not having to work with your hands?”

  “I sort of like usin’ my hands.”

  “So you’re going to join the Marines and” — Joe gestured angrily at the river — “kill people.”

  “I wouldn’t stay there for long. Just for a year or two, for the fun of it —”

  “They shave your head and call you an asshole. You call that fun?”

  Joe could get no more out of him. He looked at his friend: at the snub nose plastered with coppery freckles, at his eyes flicking back and forth over the sand, his smile secretive and angry, as though he were enjoying the destruction of his own life. Joe got up and moved towards the water, picking up a stone and flinging it hard, watching it enter the river and standing with his hands on his hips, watching the water change and not change, sliding towards the churning catastrophe of the rapids.

  “I love Anna Macrimmon,” Smiley said.

  Joe turned back towards him. What Smiley had said seemed so preposterous, so impossible, that it had already become incomprehensible.

  “The new girl,” Smiley said in a choked voice, looking at him miserably. “I love her.”

  It was impossible. Smiley never spoke like this, never revealed his feelings, straight out, about anything. There was always a joke instead.

  But Smiley was looking towards the water with such desolation, Joe knew it was true.

  “You’re friends with her,” Smiley said. “Maybe you could speak to her for me.”

  “Speak — what would I say?” He was just starting to experience outrage at what he felt was a trespass.

  “I dunno. Find out how she feels about me.”

  “She’s not your type!”

  “How do you know? What’s my type?” The small eyes flicked at Joe, hostile.

  “She’s a poet. You don’t like poetry,” Joe said, grasping at straws. He couldn’t come right out and say, She’d never love you. You’re a slob, it’s unthinkable.

  Smiley looked back at the river, unmoved.

  “I mean, hell,” Joe said, walking back towards the log, “she’s — you know, the way she is, the way she dresses, she’s —”

  “What — better than me?”

  “I wouldn’t say that exactly —”

  “It’s what you meant.” And to the river: “You’re saying she’s too good for me.” After a moment he added, “I know she is. I know I won’t ever get her. But when she — all I have to do is see her, and I know she’s the only one I’ll ever want.”

  “You’ll want others,” Joe said.

  “Fuck off,” Smiley said.

  “Oh come off it.”

  Smiley exploded from the log. Joe had no time to react before his friend was shoving him backwards, shoving and straight-arming him with a cold fury in his shrunken pupils.

  “For fuck’s sake, what are you doing?” Joe yelled, shoving back. In a way, he was not surprised by what was happening. What was coming out of Smiley now �
� he had the feeling he’d always known it was there, a resentment that had become more tightly packed with every year, awaiting a spark like this. He was frightened, not so much by any physical danger as by the sense of vast emotion running amok. With pounding heart, a little desperate, guilty too (he knew he’d spoken in a superior way to Smiley, knew that he’d always felt secretly superior to his friend, and sensed that now he was reaping his punishment), he pushed back. They were slapping at each other, on the verge of punching, when Smiley strode back to the log and picked up the .22. He turned and sighted the gun at Joe’s forehead. The eye Joe could see was closed, while Smiley’s other eye was buried behind the glass porthole of the scope. Smiley’s finger held motionless on the trigger, and still Joe didn’t believe he’d pull it. He stood watching, alert but not really afraid as Smiley sighted the gun down his chest.

  “Pow,” Smiley said.

  15

  BILLY WAS WAITING for Jamie under the elm. Yellow leaves were falling, one and two and three at a time, twirling and wafting and setting down, soundlessly, on the asphalt of the empty Boys’ Yard. Every day Billy’s class for slow learners was dismissed fifteen minutes earlier than the other grades, and every day when Jamie’s class got out, Billy was waiting for him. Several times, Jamie tried hanging back inside the school, but Billy went on waiting, sitting under the elm, looking up at the doors. Jamie always had to leave eventually, driven out by a teacher or the janitor, and always he told the same lie to Billy. “I have to go home and help my mother.” Billy usually walked home with him, though his own house was in another direction, on the Flats. Jamie would say, “Don’t you have to go home?” and Billy would say, “My mom ain’t home from work yet,” and go on scuffing along beside him, grinning that brown-toothed grin whenever Jamie looked at him, as if there was nothing better in the world than scuffing along in the leaves — the piled and drifted leaves whispering and swishing around their knees — in the smell of bonfires. The first time, he had come right up to the door of Jamie’s house and would have come in too, if Jamie hadn’t blocked his way. “I have to help my mom,” Jamie told him while Billy peered past him into the kitchen. Jamie was afraid his mother would see them together. Then there would be the spatula to deal with again, the bone-looking in her black eyes.

  Billy stood up and came towards him through the yard, smiling that blazing smile that made him, Jamie, feel bad, knowing he was going to lie to him again, lie to him and disappoint him and — after they’d walked down the hill together — leave him standing on West Street while he went into the house. The worst thing was that Billy would wait outside the house, sometimes for a long time. Jamie would look out and there he’d be, sitting on the curb, poking at something with a stick. Once, his mother had seen Billy waiting. “Is that the Boileau boy out there?” Jamie had shrugged and said he didn’t know, and his mother said, “Just wait in here till he goes away.” No, he couldn’t go out and play until Billy went away, and when it was finally safe to go out, there was nobody to play with. The lonely feeling he got — the sad, lonely feeling — was not just in him. It was in Lookout Hill, rising yellow across the river, and in the river, the colour of old metal, chopping away among its scummy stones. He’d float sticks and bomb them with stones, or go over to Lions Park and swing, until he was called for supper.

  “I know,” Billy said in his flat voice, with a hint of a sneer. “You have to go home and help your mother.”

  “No I don’t,” Jamie said.

  Billy was walking beside him now, towards the gates. No I don’t had just popped out. He was sick of telling the old lie, but now that he’d said something else, said the truth, he felt like he didn’t know where he was any more. He didn’t know what to say next.

  Across the road a black dog with a white streak between its eyes was lifting its leg to pee.

  “We could go to the Indian Trail,” Billy said, after a moment.

  “All right,” Jamie said. But he felt like running away.

  It’s all right.

  He looked up, startled.

  “Really?” he said, questioning the voice. He had stopped at the gate. The dog was by another tree: a squirt of yellow and it trotted on.

  Sure, the voice said. Go ahead.

  “What?” Billy said.

  Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!

  Jamie laughed. The voice had tickled him.

  “What!” Billy said, dancing around him.

  “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!”

  Billy was dancing from foot to foot while he held his crotch with one hand like he had to go to the bathroom.

  “We could make gunpowder!” Billy said.

  They crossed the park and went down the road that led to the Indian Trail. The trail ran through woods on a steep bank, so that you could look down and see a road, rooftops, far below you — or up and see the fences straggling along at the end of people’s yards. But the trail itself (which was really many trails, interwoven) was a secret place, and they went along hidden from view, with sticks for spears, a raiding party that had snuck into town to burn and steal things and kill people. They were on horses now, little Indian ponies that neighed and stamped and sidestepped down a slope to a clearing. On the far side of the clearing was a smooth, rounded rock, like the half-buried shell of an enormous turtle.

  “My grandfather’s buried there,” Billy said. “Underneath the rock.”

  “For real?”

  “He was a chief.”

  Jamie looked around. He had forgotten the spatula and his mother’s eyes. The motionless yellow trees around the stone (they were standing on it now, as on an island in a rising flood) seemed to know they were there.

  16

  TALK OF LIZ McVEY broke out one day after gym, when the boys of 13A were dressing in the locker room. Dick Osborne said he’d heard that Liz had broken up with her boyfriend, Bobby Tanner, a salesman three or four years older than she. Bobby, someone else said, had been “banging her.” This set off a spirited discussion about who might get to bang her next, a happy prospect since Liz was generally agreed to be one of the best-looking girls in the class. Brad Long — idly drying himself in the doorway of the shower — shamed them all into silence by announcing, with an air of melancholy authority, that Liz was a “classy lady.” There was something in his reputation as a ladies’ man that took the ground from beneath their feet, for if Brad, who was generally thought to be “doing it,” spoke up for a girl, it reminded them of their own pitiful lack of experience. The “classy lady” was out of range of most of them, anyway, because of her looks and because she was the daughter of the town’s richest man.

  When Liz stopped Joe in the hall, all this was in his mind. You couldn’t hear that a girl had been doing it and then forget all about it as she stood not two feet away, gazing at you with those large, beautiful, yet somehow frozen eyes. She wore her curly hair cropped short, and her full mouth was crimped a bit on either side, pushing out the underside of her top lip. It was a babyish kind of mouth, with a look of having just been pulled off the bottle. Joe was attracted to her, yet didn’t care for her habit of putting on airs, especially an air of languorous boredom. She was a star actress with the Drama Club. A year before, he had watched her play the lead in Deirdre’s Island, a murder mystery about a vengeful society lady and her guests. An entirely different Liz had emerged: taut and feline and astonishingly mature. The critic from the Johnsonville Gleaner had gone off his head about her, but at the same time she had given Joe the willies, there was something so repulsive about the atmosphere of controlled hysteria she conveyed.

  Now she was asking him to a party at her place, the following Saturday night. This was so unexpected — he was not a member of the North End gang — that he hesitated. She seemed provoked by this, for staring at him with those too-bright eyes, she purred, “People will be disappointed if you don’t come,” with such an insinuating emphasis on “people” that he felt pierced by some as-yet-undeciphered message and said, Sur
e, he’d be glad to come. After she’d trailed off, he stood dissecting that cryptic “people,” coming almost instantly to the conclusion that she was referring to Anna Macrimmon.

  In the next class, English, he watched Anna reading her copy of Macbeth. For weeks now he had been aware of a deepening connection between them. Their conversations seemed to carry a more complex load of emotion. Their glances, he felt, increasingly hinted at the possibility of a mutual future. He was almost sure this was real and not just something he’d dreamed up, but he didn’t speak about it in case he was fooling himself. Now he watched her as she read with deep focus, that absolute self-containment she seemed able to summon, to fall into, at any time. He had seen it during an assembly, while a comic skit was being performed on stage. He had looked over at her and discovered her — amid an entire gymnasium roaring with laughter — simply looking, neither amused nor disapproving nor oblivious. There was some force of calm in her, some mindfulness, that he admired and was in awe of, for he had never seen such a thing in anyone, except perhaps in Archibald Mann, though in Mann’s remoteness there was always something stern, as if he were dissecting or even judging what he saw. But in Anna Macrimmon there was no judgment: she was simply looking, her head a little lowered in that way she had, and in that looking, he felt, was more seeing than he could himself imagine. What was she thinking? Did she think them all fools? He had come to the point where she seemed superior not just to all the other girls but to himself as well. This was daunting — what could he possibly do to deserve her? And yet he pressed on, in his secret way, pursuing her.

  He let two classes go by before he contrived to meet her in the hall. She seemed no more friendly than usual, chatting to him as they moved through the crowd, though when he asked if she was going to Liz’s party, she sent him a brief sideways smile, past the pale wing of her hair, and said, in a whimsical, sing-song voice, “Oh, I think so.” There was a flirtatiousness here, he thought, woven with shyness, at once hiding and disclosing something deeper.