The Island Walkers (15 page)

“You never told me you were going up there! Where’s Fuzz, eh? You lost him again?”

“The rope broke.”

“
The rope broke
,” Lucille said to Alf, with heavy sarcasm.

“They were doing their best to get back,” Alf said.

“You get inside,” Lucille said.

Billy shot up the walk.

She turned back to Alf. She was about thirty-five, Alf guessed, beautiful in a severe, threatening way, her long black hair escaping its pins in wisps and collapsing waves, her high, plush cheekbones shiny with tears. There was something shy in the smile she offered him, he thought, and something evasive and cunning. For years — he saw her often at Bannerman’s, where she worked in the sewing department — her mouth had fascinated him, it was so wide, the lips so large and mobile, a freakish mouth, like some odd sea creature come to live on her face.

“I’d die if I lost him,” she told him, her eyes fixing blindly on his shirt front.

She lunged up at him, catching the back of his neck with one hand and putting her mouth on his. It was more than a kiss, it was as if she had leaned up to take a large, soft bite out of his face. Driving over the bridge, he was still thinking about it, an electric excitement flaring across his chest where she had pressed against him. He felt twenty again, everything vivid: the damp, rancid air over the river, his hands tingling on the wheel, and there, past the traffic light, past the Baptist church and the library, the high, lonely, crumpled moon.

10

THE LIGHT IN THE BATHROOM
had a greenish tinge. Jamie’s mother made him sit on the toilet, with the seat down, while she perched on the edge of the tub, one knee in its brown stocking touching his, her eyes looking straight into his. In Jarrod’s Shoe Store was a machine you put your feet into. Then you looked into a viewfinder and saw the bones in your feet, all pale and strange like little ghosts. He felt she was looking at his bones.

“What were you doing with that boy?”

“Nothing.”

“You weren’t doing
nothing
.”

She tapped his leg with the rubber spatula. It was what she used to spank him. Her anger was huge, it filled the green light and shone off the tiles behind her head, but he didn’t know what he’d done to make it happen. He watched the flat rubber touch his knee and looked back into her eyes. Usually there was help in her eyes, but now there was none, though he couldn’t help looking for it.

“We were just playing.”

“I don’t want you playing with that boy again.”

“Billy?”

“I don’t want you to have anything to do with that Boileau boy. Do you understand me?”

The spatula tapped again on his knee.

“Why?”

“His family are not our kind of people. Do you understand?”

He looked at the faucet in the tub, where a big drop was swelling, getting ready to fall.

“We were just having fun.”

“Jamie!”

“We
tried
to get back!”

He was crying now, and when he cried, his thoughts started to slide around, he couldn’t keep track. What was our kind of people? Kind was good, wasn’t it? His teacher, Miss Wayne, was kind, and his mother was, usually. Now she was not kind — was she not his kind of people?

“Look at me!”

He tried to meet those black eyes, which were looking at his bones.

“Dad wasn’t mad,” he whimpered.

“He doesn’t want you playing with that boy either. Promise me you won’t play with him again.”

“Mom!”

“Promise me!”

The spatula tapped. He was crying, he hardly knew why, except that something was not fair. What had he done wrong? When you did something wrong you were punished, but why was he being punished for just doing what he thought was right? He had tried to help Billy find his dog, and he had tried to get home as fast as he could. Only he hadn’t been able to find the trail.

“Jamie!”

“I promise! But, Mom, why are the Boileaus our kind of —”

“Why are they
not
our kind of people? Because, they’re just not nice, good people. They’ve been in trouble with the law.”

“What trouble?”

“That doesn’t matter. The point is, we’re done with them. Right?”

“Yes.”

“That’s my boy.”

She gave him another tap with the spatula and stood up: the matter was clearly finished as far as she was concerned. He watched her peer at herself in the glass. She put a finger to a place on her cheek and pulled the skin down. Inside the pouch under her eye it was red, like the inside of a fish’s gill.

On Monday Jamie stayed home from school with a touch of the flu, his mother said, feeling his cheeks. He sat in bed sipping ginger ale and looking at his books, especially the Tim stories, and at his Superman and Donald Duck comics. On Wednesday his mother announced he was well enough to go back. He went up the hill and found Billy waiting for him at the gate to the Boys’ Yard, grinning so widely — so clearly glad to see him — that Jamie felt sick to his stomach.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“Look what I got!” Billy said. He looked over his shoulder, then put his hand in his jacket pocket and pulled out a little cardboard tube with a brass cap on one end. It rolled in his palm.

“A bullet,” Billy said in his strange, throat-gurgling voice.

“For real?”

“Shotgun.”

“Where’s the point?”

“They don’t have points. You put in gunpowder. Then you put in other stuff, like marbles or rocks or
BB
’s. We can make gunpowder after school. Okay?”

“I dunno. I promised I’d help my mother.”

Liar
, the voice inside him said. Jamie blinked.

“You grind up coal and put other things in.”

“I dunno.”

“We can go to my house,” Billy said.

Liar, liar, pants on fire
.

“Shut up,” Jamie said to the voice, and felt his face burn. “Not you,” he said to Billy.

Billy put the bullet back in his pocket. Some Grade Five boys went by with their heads back, howling like wolves. Jamie walked off abruptly towards a group of boys who were playing conkers. Billy came with him. Jamie stood pretending to watch the nuts as they swung and smashed, but all he could think about, really, was Billy, who pushed another boy out of the way and stood beside him. He walked away again. Billy came again. He stopped and Billy stopped.

He tried one more time: walked over to the wall of the school, where Fattie Lonsdale and Mike Harms were down on their knees, tossing cards into a corner with quick flicks of their wrists: baseball cards and hockey cards and flags-of-the-world cards and car cards, covering up the asphalt in the corner like leaves. Billy arrived beside him. He grinned at Jamie with his brown-edged teeth: this was fun!

The monitor shook her bell and the boys in the yard began to drift towards the school. Billy fell in beside Jamie, in the line going into the south door.

“You better get to your door,” Jamie said.

“Oh yeah!” Billy said, and he clapped his hand over his head and pulled a face, as if to say, What a goof I am, and Jamie laughed in spite of himself. Then Billy started off, but he came back almost immediately and told Jamie to hold out his hand.

“What for?”

“C’mon, just hold it out.”

He put out his hand. Billy laid the empty shotgun bullet in it.

“It’s a present,” Billy said and ran off.

During spelling, Jamie felt a little queasy, and then just as he was putting his speller away under his desk, vomit shot out of his mouth. It slapped onto the hardwood floor and lay there in a big brown pool with flecks of yellow in it. He couldn’t believe it. He’d seen other kids throw up in school, seen them taken off to the nurse’s room while Mr. Small, the janitor, came in and spread sawdust on it, and scraped it up, and washed the floor, though for a long time afterwards no one would step there, on the vomit-smelling place that made you feel like vomiting too. And now
he
was that kid that had done this stupid, smelly thing. They were all looking at him now, up and down the rows, some of the boys grinning, or craning to see, or saying Wow, and looking at him like they didn’t know him any more, just like they looked at Hel Grimm, the German boy who couldn’t speak English and who had come to school one day wearing leather shorts.

11

BEHIND HER DESK
in General Office, the receptionist, May Watson, lifted her sagging alcoholic’s face. “They want you in the boardroom,” she droned, her heavily lidded eyes fixed on Alf’s chest.

“Did they say what it was about?”

They
: like a creature with twenty heads.

May’s right shoulder twitched, a faint shrug.

He went through the office, up the carpeted stairs and on through a murmur of voices, the machine-gunning of typewriters, conscious of the stains on his factory greens. The last door on his right bore a small brass sign:
BOARDROOM
. He paused, imagining a dozen men waiting for him on the other side, their heads turning as he knocked. But the room was empty. He went in, leaving the door ajar. Chairs of yellow oak surrounded a long table of the same wood. On a corner of the table, someone had left a napkin and a half-eaten Digestive biscuit.

He sat, but after a few seconds got up again. On the wall by the door, the grave features of former Bannerman’s executives, in photographs and paintings, gazed past him with a serenity that seemed fixed on some distant, finer future. On the opposite wall hung several historical photos. He roamed past them with his hands in his pockets, glancing at women in long-sleeved, high-necked blouses with elaborately piled hair, looking up from their sewing machines. Men posed stoically by trollies and drive-belts. He recognized several of his parents’ friends. They looked younger than he was now: Mary Plumstead, Vickie Short, Johnny Bickersteth, Al Partridge, so many of them English. Yes, when he was growing up, Midlands accents had been as common in town as Canadian ones. His mother had come out in 1910 on the
Empress of Ireland
, a girl of twenty-three with a ten-pound note pinned inside her blouse and her mother’s best silver teapot riding in her trunk, knowing no one. He searched for her in a large photo of the 1927 Bannerman’s staff picnic. He might have been
there himself that year: he would have been what, eight? A great mass of people in summer whites stared from a bleacher. Their unsmiling faces seemed to squint into the glare of an immense imposition.

He moved on to the next photograph: The Bannerman Stingers, Ontario Senior “B” Champions, 1938. He had a smaller version of the picture at home. All the same, he had to look for Joe, had to make sure his brother was in it, as if Joe, the wild one, the one who always did the unexpected, might have slipped from the frame when no one was looking.

And there he was, in his place in the first row, kneeling with the other players in his striped Stinger uniform, his curved stick slanting towards the enormous silver cup that flowered in front of them. He wore his blond hair slicked straight back, suggesting even in repose, speed, his genius for attack.

“Found someone you know?”

The rich, genial voice startled him. Masked by the drone of the air conditioner, Bob Prince had materialized across the table. He held a manila file folder against the breast of his light-beige suit. His bald, deeply tanned head gave him an oddly foreign look — Italian or even Arab.

“My brother,” Alf said, glad to see the executive. No matter what this meeting was about, he felt he had an ally.

“Oh yes? Let’s see —”

As Prince rounded the table and leaned to examine the photo, the air was suddenly brisk with his aftershave. In profile, his heavy jaw jutted out a little, with an exaggerated aggressiveness. “A hockey player!”

“He was pretty good. Best player on that team, anyway.”

“Ontario Champions,” Prince noted approvingly.

“After that series, the Leafs scouted him.”

“And did he go to the pros?”

“No, ah —”

“He had better things to do,” Prince said, with friendly condescension.

“I guess you could say that. When the war came he signed up right away. My mother didn’t want him to go, but we couldn’t keep him out of it.”