by John Bemrose
He had taken up carving during the war, for a distraction. He could remember sitting on the bank of a canal, its surface broken by upthrusting pieces of machinery, the bloated belly and stiff legs of a dead cow. In his hands he held a little piece of wood, its dirtiness nicking white with each stroke of his pocketknife: a small sanity. He had carved farm animals and given them away to children.
There had been a boy about Jamie’s age with huge, believing eyes, the eyes of hunger. Alf had given him a tin of rations, but the boy’s face had lit up only when Alf offered him the little horse he had not quite finished, its tail still attached to its hind legs. Un cheval. Pour vous. Fumbling in his high-school French.
He gaped at the memory, come up after all these years. The boy in his cloth cap. A smell of burning oil and rotting flesh. Alf touched the piece of wood to his nose. Someone else had been there too, a soldier, whom he experienced as a pressure of absence, a shadow without a face, though he could see the man’s boots dangling beside his own over the putrid water. He was sure the man, whoever he was, had not lived out the day.
Margaret came down the stairs and stood beside him.
“It’s May,” she said in an undertone, touching his back. “She’s terribly worried about Pete.”
He stared at the fish in his hand.
“Alf, I wish you’d tell me what’s wrong.”
“Nothing’s wrong,” he said tersely.
Nearby, the furnace blower came on with a soft roar. They had known each other for twenty-three years, and the silence between them could not merely be silence: it was a night cut by the flight of coded messages, the riffling of dog-eared files. He slid her a hard glance and saw her face — those vivid eyes in her porcelain skin — rapt with a pained earnestness, offering him the balm of listening and talk. She loved him, he saw. Often he tried to tell himself it was otherwise, that they had been going their separate ways for years — she with her friends on the Hill, her church interests, her music; he with his work, his fishing, his sports. They had the family in common, but otherwise they might just as well have been living apart. It was convenient to believe this, it set him free, it justified his unhappiness. But he saw it was not true.
He pushed past her and trudged up the stairs. At the kitchen table, May looked up at him and he saw in her darkly circled eyes the shadow of his own malaise.
“I’m worried sick, Alf.”
“Hey, it can’t be that bad.” His voice seemed magnified and unreal to him, like that time he’d acted in a play for the Couples’ Club. He had played a gardener, a role with only three lines, and yet he’d felt as false as at any time in his life. “Pete’s had rough times before.”
“Not like this.”
Alf pulled out a chair. Behind him, Margaret filled a kettle at the sink, then turned to the stove. In the soft explosion of little blue flames he sensed the presence of a powerful, saving domesticity. For a moment he believed in their ability to help May. To help themselves.
He said, “You know, when he got out of the navy, he had a hard time then? He was really down. But he got through it, eh? A few weeks?”
May was watching him hungrily, her eyes glittering with unspilt tears.
“Or that time you lost the baby?”
“Yes.” Her voice small.
“You know, he’s got too much of the devil in him, that guy. He’ll bounce back.”
Margaret had swept noiselessly from the room. He noted her absence with a slight start of panic. He did not feel up to comforting May alone.
“How long has it been since you’ve seen him?” she said.
He shrugged, pulling a face. “Oh I don’t know. A few days maybe.” He was lying: it had been at least two weeks. He had found it unbearable to be with his friend. He had had to move with such careful, guilty deference that he seemed to be holding his breath. “I lent him tools,” he said, eager to put in a good word for himself. “He was gonna start work on the rec room.
“He seemed fine,” he went on. He felt he had to keep pouring words into the silence. “Practically his old self. In fact, he seemed pretty hopeful.” Manic was more like it. Alf had seen his friend in this state before, though never so bad: half-crazy with plans, talking a mile a minute, and still, unbelievably, talking union. Talking about Malachi Doyle as if the Irishman were Jesus Christ himself, as if he were going to save them all yet. Malachi this, Malachi that. Malachi thinks we should lay low for a while. Malachi says that when the union goes in, we’ll get our jobs back. Alf hadn’t had the heart to contradict him.
“He was looking for work,” Alf said. He knew his friend had been out every day, covering the county in the Sarasota. Filling out forms. “Had some good leads too. Up at Samuelson’s …”
He found himself talking about the places where Pete was likely to find a job. It was as if he had caught his friend’s desperate optimism, and was using it to fill the space above the table. But it was no good. May was shaking her head.
“It’s different now. He’s given up.”
“Not for long,” Alf said quickly, and saw again the boots of the other soldier, hanging above the canal.
“He just sits in his chair all day, watching TV. He’s drinking —”
Margaret returned with a box of Kleenex. May was looking at Alf through her tears with a strange, anxious smile, as though everything she was telling him about Pete was in fact the source of some secret happiness. He could not take his eyes away.
“He hit me,” she said in a high, pleading voice. “It’s the first time he’s ever —”
Margaret leaned over, sliding her arm along May’s back.
“I can’t blame him,” May was saying, “Not really. I was nagging him to get out, to see his friends. I told him it wasn’t the end of the world, people had lost their jobs before, and he started to swear at me and then he — he’s not himself, Alf!”
Tears swam down her face. He watched in dull horror. You did one thing and it made other things happen, like a scattering of billiard balls. And then there was a woman you had known all your life, an innocent woman, weeping at your kitchen table.
Behind them, the kettle had begun to sing.
Alf trudged across the Lions Park footbridge. The Atta fell towards him through shallow rapids: a waste of yellow water he wished he could go on following indefinitely along the muddy trails that accompanied it out of town.
He had to knock twice before Pete’s eye and part of his face appeared in the small, round window in the front door. For a second, his pupil regarded Alf with a curious indifference: a specimen under glass.
“Hey buddy,” Pete said, bringing him in.
Alf entered the dim, hot room with its reek of stale beer and farts: the compost of unhappiness. Staring at the TV, Pete let himself down into his plaid Easy-Boy.
On the screen, football players broke from their huddle and trotted back to their positions. The screen was full of snow, and from time to time the picture swam upwards, creating the odd impression that the room was sinking.
“American game,” Pete said. His gaunt face — thin even for him — was dark with stubble. He glanced covertly in Alf’s direction, his gaze briefly brushing Alf’s knees. It was the look a frightened man might give, checking out sources of danger.
“Get yourself a beer,” Pete said, staring again at the TV. He had his own bottle, he had several, parked on the TV tray beside him. “You know where they are.”
To Alf, there seemed a hint of accusation in this. You know where they are. As if Pete were calling to account their years of friendship, the years his house had been as open to Alf as his own. As if he were saying, I trusted you.
Alf fetched a beer and sat on the low couch, grateful for the distraction of the game. He needed time to think about what he would say. The announcer’s voice, rich with masculine authority, rose and fell with the action. There were other voices too, higher and more nakedly excited, and the crowd roaring distantly.
Alf had the nightmarish sense he had lived
all this before. Prince’s motel room came back to him with a shock: the sailboats on the wall, the flowered bedspread, the little blue makeup case. And Prince picking his corns on the bed, in the smell of aftershave. There had been a football game on then too: the same soporific blend of voices and crowd sounds, the sense of important, exciting things happening, but happening elsewhere. On the screen, a clutch of cheerleaders shook their pompoms like the heads of vanquished enemies.
The picture swam upwards and went on swimming as the room sank. Though the temperature must have been over eighty, he felt chilled and his throat was sore. Pete did not move.
“I’ll fix that,” Alf said.
“Just give it a rap.”
The picture righted itself. He went back to the couch wondering how long Pete would have sat there if he’d been by himself.
When a commercial came on, he asked Pete how the job hunt was going.
“Had a few nibbles,” Pete said, after a while. On the screen, an old man was pouring out cornflakes for a smiling boy. In the land of happiness.
“Oh yeah? Who?”
Pete didn’t answer.
“May dropped by our place,” Alf said, steeling himself. He did not like to talk about emotional difficulties, his own or anyone else’s. Better to be silent and let them solve themselves. But he had promised May. He said, “I guess she’s pretty worried about you.”
Pete took a swig of beer: he might have been deaf.
“Look, if you don’t want to talk, just say so,” Alf said, with an edge of irritation. He experienced a thrill of danger: it was the first time since Pete’s firing he’d dared to speak roughly to him.
“What’s to talk about?”
“Your wife’s over at my place, bawlin’ her eyes out. She’s worried sick.”
“She tell you I hit her?” Pete said to the TV.
“Yeah, but she doesn’t blame you. And anyway, that’s not why I’m here. I’m worried about you too.”
Pete said nothing.
“Look, what’s going on with you? Is it the job or what?”
He was daring Pete to accuse him. He sat watching his friend, exposing himself like a target. But there was a hostility in this, and more power than Pete could face. Pete flashed another sideways glance at Alf’s knees, took a swig of beer, and continued to stare at the screen.
“I dunno,” Pete said. He winced and shifted in his chair. “I get these funny ideas.”
“What do you mean?”
“I dunno. I can get pretty black. Paranoid, like.”
Alf waited.
“Just a mood, you know,” and Pete motioned with his bottle towards the screen, where a large Negro with immense, padded shoulders tore off his helmet and began to yell at another player. Pete said, “You have to wonder who your friends are.”
“What do you mean?” Alf said, his throat tightening. If it’s going to happen, he thought, let’s get it over with.
“Just craziness,” Pete said, moving his bottle in a dismissing wave. “Not important.”
Alf said, “You think I had something to do with your losing your job —”
Pete went on watching the screen for what seemed an eternity. Alf watched the thin face of his friend, laid back against the white antimacassar.
“Not you, buddy,” Pete said finally. “Woody’s the guy. Everybody knows that.”
“Because I wouldn’t give your name to God himself,” Alf said, managing to produce a rasping chuckle. “Not that He’d ever ask for it.”
Pete grinned at the screen.
Alf tried to turn his attention back to the game, but his heart was pounding. Not you, buddy, Woody’s the guy, everyone knows that. Did Pete really believe that, or was he just trying to let Alf off the hook? His mind raced with a thousand questions, questions he wanted to ask Pete but didn’t dare. I’ll never let you down again, he promised silently. Yes, he’d get Pete through this bad patch and they’d go on together, better friends than ever. Talking — confessing — would do no good at all. It would only cause more pain, and their friendship didn’t need more pain. Better to encase what he knew in cement and sink it to the bottom of a deep hole and let it stay down there, forever. Let it disappear, as it surely would, with time. Unless Prince talked, of course. Or Woody. He had stopped breathing. He sucked in air and stared at the screen where the cheerleaders were bouncing in another war dance.
The next program was a Roy Rogers rerun. Cowboys on horseback thundered merrily among the pale hills of California. Pete seemed mesmerized. Alf was moved by the images of foreign sunshine, that rollicking male freedom.
“You gotta get out of the house,” he said, with a sudden uprush of tenderness. “You’re rotting in here.”
“Where would I go?”
“Anywhere. We’ll drive down to Port Dover. Pick us up a couple of babes.” They had actually done this years ago, before the war. On the pier they had met two girls and driven with them to the sand hills: immense crests of sand, and the greeny-blue of Lake Erie spread below them.
“This time,” Pete said, “I get the pretty one.”
They went the next day, a Sunday afternoon of brilliant light flooding the brown land waiting for winter. Alf drove the Biscayne. Pete sat in his dark-blue Stingers jacket, occasionally raising his cigarette to his lips as he stared out the windshield. He did not look to the right or the left and did not speak unless prodded by Alf.
They were driving south, towards the Great Lake that had drawn them all their lives. Alf had gone to Erie by train the first few times to attend Bannerman company picnics as a boy. Later, his father had taken him bass fishing at Long Point, and in recent years Alf had occasionally rented a cottage for a week at Port Ryerson. He had never lost his excitement at seeing the lake after a long absence, and now, as they crossed the endless flats of the hinterland, studded with the green and red barns of the tobacco farms, he felt the old anticipation rising in him again, the old freshness of anticipation.
As they drew near Port Dover, little mounds of sand erupted beside the highway, and as they came down the muddy river the sky ahead seemed to change, to grow larger and brighter. They swung on to the bridge and there it was, past the dull little river and the derelict boats and the buildings and the pier: dazzling, turquoise Erie.
They ate lunch in a near-empty restaurant overlooking the public beach, in the full heat of the sun streaming in the plate-glass windows. Pete kept his coat on, zipped to the chin, and left half his whitefish untouched. Out on the lake, a snub-nose fishing boat was ploughing in across the glitter, its shadowy silhouette trailed by a cloud of gulls.
On the way out, Alf stopped off at the washroom. Pete said he’d meet him outside, but when Alf emerged blinking in the glare, the scrap of beach was empty. A cottage with boarded-up windows looked out bleakly to the lake. Alf went back to the street, walking past the Biscayne and along the line of restaurants and tourist shops, most of them closed. He experienced a stab of panic. He realized that, in some way, it made perfect sense for Pete to disappear, to evaporate in broad daylight.
He walked around town, and finally came to the concrete pier with the stubby lighthouse at its far end. A boy on a bicycle came clanking off it, with a fishing pole laid across the handlebars. The pier looked empty, though he could not tell if anyone was standing behind the lighthouse. He started to move swiftly along the pier, fighting down a rising sense of alarm.
He was almost at the lighthouse. And now he was past it. No one was there, on the guano-spotted end of the pier. He looked into the clear water. An oil stain shone on the swell, the body of a tiny fish floated upside down. The sandy bottom was just visible, ten or fifteen feet down — the rippled, empty, sandy bottom, wavering as though alive.
Pete was waiting for him at the car. They’d just missed each other, apparently; Pete had gone into a store to look at some belts, he said. Driving home in the waning light, the long shadows of the tobacco barns reaching over the frozen earth, they talked more easily than they had on t
he way down. Pete told a story Alf had never heard before, a story that began with Pete’s ship putting into Marseilles, a couple of years after the war. He’d gone on shore leave and found his way into a small nightclub where a band was playing jazz. It wasn’t like any jazz you’d ever heard, he said, it was faster, happier, one guy was playing a violin. Later in the evening he’d danced with a woman who had taken his fancy. “She was the prettiest thing,” he said, keeping silent for a while. “Black eyes … God.” He’d fallen for her, he said, to the point where he was ready to stay in Marseilles. But he had gone back to the ship. “I still think of her,” he said. “Isn’t that strange? I think of her like I met her only yesterday. I can still feel the way her back felt. So slim and — makes you wonder what could have been, you know? You do one thing different, and your whole life is different.”
Two days later, a Tuesday afternoon, Alf was repairing a machine when Matt Honnegger told him he was wanted on the phone. Margaret, Matt said. Alf left his tools and walked towards the little office that overlooked the gravelled roof of the dyehouse. A pigeon was on the sill, looking in, and for a moment he saw its orange, unblinking eye, which seemed to watch him with naked curiosity before it flapped off. On Matt’s desk the receiver lay on its side, looking blacker, heavier, than usual. In the eighteen years he’d worked for Bannerman’s, Margaret had called him only twice: when Joe had been knocked off his bike by a car, ten years before, and in September, when Jamie had been lost.
For a moment, her voice saying his name, crying his name, held in the balance the lives of his children. Who was hurt? Who had slipped away into the unthinkable? It’s Pete, Margaret said, and he experienced a momentary relief before her voice carried him further, away from safety, away from the world that had existed only moments before. It was the car, Margaret said. She was crying. Pete had shut himself in the garage and turned on the ignition. May had found him.
22
THE MORNING AFTER PETE’S FUNERAL, under a faultless blue sky, each twig and branch bore a delicate slice of snow. There was a sense of hospital stillness, as if the snow or the sender of the snow, conscious of a need for convalescence, had swaddled everything in bandages. Joe dressed as quietly as he could — he needed to be at his job at the A&P by nine — and slipped into the hall. The closed door of his parents’ bedroom — nearly as white as the snow outside — met him with a mysterious, oppressive blankness. He went swiftly downstairs, propelled by a quickening expectation of escape. But his mother was at the stove, making breakfast.
