The Island Walkers (19 page)

“Woody Marr,” he said, turning back to Prince.

Prince hesitated, then wrote.

Alf experienced a strange, plummeting absence. It was like being at a memorial service. All that is read out is a name, and yet somehow the whole life is there, its dark parade.

“Next.”

Alf said nothing. He was staring at the bed with its flowered spread: its rumpled pattern of twining brown vegetation, huge pink flowers — a nightmare jungle repeated in a million rented rooms like this.

“I have to go,” he said.

Prince’s grin flashed.

“You’ve only given me one name.”

“I shouldn’t have. I’m not on the union side, but this is — I know these people.”

“Alf, as I’ve said —”

“When I’m foreman — then I’m on your side. But I can’t do it this way.”

“So you’re putting the gears to me.”

“This has nothing to do with you. It’s them —”

The blue eyes had fixed him with a disbelieving smile.
Oh come on
, they said.
You and I know what’s going on here. I can’t believe you’d be such a fool
 …

Outside, the pool lights had been turned off. Above, along the rails of the balconies, a heaven of small white lights had come on, twinkling around the courtyard.

The next day he watched Woody climb the stairs to the knitting room with a start of dread and relief. Relief that he was still here, and dread that he, Alf, had hung the other man’s life over an abyss. All that morning he kept glancing over at the knitter. The powerful little man with the straight back and the pug’s face moved quickly around his machines, tying up threads or replacing bobbins with brusque, angry gestures, just as he always did: a man perpetually pissed off and apparently liking it that way. Just before noon Alf walked down the aisle to Woody’s stand.

“So how’s old number eleven going?” Alf had fixed the machine two days earlier.

“Hey, buddy,” Woody said, his ugly face lighting up. He had never called Alf buddy before: evidently he suspected nothing. “She’s goin’ like the hoor from hell.”

That afternoon when Alf took his break on the fire escape, Woody sat where he had rarely sat before, beside him. There was something deliberate, almost ceremonial, about the way the knitter poured coffee into his Thermos cup, his breathing coming with a slow, laboured huffing. He sat erect, his back not touching the warm brick, and put one big, scarred hand on his knee. Then he raised his cup in a way that seemed extraordinarily dignified, like a stout Japanese warrior.

Along the balcony the other knitters smoked, talked, drank coffee or tea as they gazed out through the bars of the railing, over the deep millyard. Through a distant gap between buildings, golden-rod gilded the face of the dyke that hid most of the Shade.

“Best season of the year,” Woody growled. His blunt face had lifted, scowling to the sun: even his praise was defiant.

“My old man used to go deer hunting,” Woody said, “up on Manitoulin with the Indians. Had a bit of Indian blood himself.”

Alf didn’t suppose Woody could actually remember his father, who had been killed in the Great War. He kept silent. He didn’t want to encourage Woody, didn’t want to know any more about him. Yet Woody was determined to talk. He told Alf about Manitoulin Island: a hunt camp on an inland lake, a story about his father’s prowess with a rifle. “Went up there myself a few times. They remembered him in Wicky.”

Six floors below, a cart rumbled across the asphalt floor of the yard. Woody took out a package of Craven A’s and offered them to Alf, who felt compelled to pluck one out, though he had stayed away from cigarettes for ten years now. He bent to the flame dancing in the chapel of Woody’s hands and dragged smoke into his lungs, sitting back to expel it with the sense it no longer mattered what he did, watching the smoke’s pale body twist and disintegrate on the blue air.

Three days later Alf crossed Willard to the flat-topped building that held General Office. May Watson’s chair was empty, which was just as well: he didn’t have an appointment. He went swiftly up the stairs and down the carpeted hall, past the boardroom where he’d had his first meeting with Prince, searching for Prince’s office. But his name appeared on none of the brass nameplates marking the doors. Just as he was about to retreat, he heard a toilet flush. A few seconds later, Judy Stackhouse, Prince’s secretary, stepped into the hall, smiling warmly as she saw him.

He stood behind her in her office as she leaned into an inner room. The brief factual rumble of Prince’s voice answered her. “Send him in.”

Prince was standing with his back to him — pointedly, Alf thought — looking out the window behind his desk, one hand in the pocket of
his trousers as he surveyed a thicket of reddening sumacs. Without turning he told Alf to sit. Alf slipped warily into an armchair covered in green leather. On Prince’s blotter was a paper napkin and a half-eaten Digestive biscuit.

Prince took his own chair. “So,” he said, dusting at some invisible particles at the edge of his blotter. When he finally looked at Alf, his face was void of expression, as if Alf were no longer worth even the minimal trouble of courtesy.

“I think we’ve got off on the wrong foot somehow,” Alf said, his voice suddenly parched, breaking. “Somehow you’ve ended up teed off with me, and maybe I’m a bit teed off myself. But the thing is, I’m loyal to this place —”

“You have the names then.”

Prince cleared another particle: the last few grains of the time he had to spare. One more sweep and all his patience would be gone.

“Well, no. That’s not why I —”

“Then why are you here?”

“I — I thought we might start over, you and me.”

“And how would you propose that we do that, you and I?”

“I want to bury the hatchet. It’s just that —”

“I hadn’t realized the hatchet was out.”

Alf stared back at the man regarding him, it seemed, with utter frankness. Had he misjudged something? Was Prince offering more leeway than he’d imagined? Encouraged, he went on: “The thing is, that name I gave you, I’ve had it on my conscience. I’d just like to say: he’s a good man, a good worker, and I’d hate to feel I’d put him in danger in any way. Especially since, like I said, this union business is going nowhere.”

Prince swept once more at his blotter. “I know you like to tell yourself that, Alf. But it’s actually not the case. We have evidence that it is going somewhere. Those names you have are critical.”

Alf looked away. He had a cutting sense of letting the side down. What was the matter with him? And yet, his chance still lay before
him. He was still in Prince’s motel room. All he had to do was say a few names, and he would be back, instantly, in Prince’s good graces. He would resume his progress along the upwards-climbing road, the road that led, by degrees, out of the world of sore backs and time clocks. He stared at the rich wood of Prince’s desk.

“Alf, I fear you may be a little sentimental for this business.”

Prince’s voice seemed to arrive across a great distance, as his father’s once had, calling him out of a daydream.

“Business, Alf: it’s war, really. I mean, it’s played within the law, more or less, and people try to be gentlemen about it, even buddies. And that’s all necessary — oil for the wheels. But to be frank, it takes a certain bloody-mindedness. You can’t worry about other people too much.” The cajoling drone of Prince’s voice went on. Remotely, Alf heard separate words and phrases, floating sedately by on its tide. He stared past the smooth head in front of him, into the jungle of sumacs behind the office. What he saw was a wine cellar in France. In September of 1944 he had killed a German soldier who had ambushed him. The fellow had leapt over some barrels and Alf had whirled just in time to take his weight on the barrel of his gun and fire. A few moments later one of Alf’s mates had flung back a door and light had flooded the body at his feet. It was a boy, not more than fourteen or fifteen. Above his grey army uniform the startled eyes had already fixed on nothing. His mouth was open in a small, rabbity smile, as though he’d intended only a joke. In his hand was a broken wine bottle. Feeling light-headed, he left immediately. In the outer office, Judy Stackhouse looked up brightly. “Alf — are you all right, Alf?” She stood as he leaned for a moment, planting his hand on the edge of her desk. “Would you like a cookie?” Smiling hopefully, Judy nudged the package of Digestives towards him, across her scarlet blotter.

14

SMILEY PHONED
. Did Joe want to go hunting?

“Come over to my place,” his friend said, and hung up.

For weeks Joe had avoided Smiley’s house because he was avoiding Smiley’s sister. He had told Sandy they could still be friends, but seeing her was painful: painful to have his guilt aroused by the way she clung to him still, by the way she looked at him, as if there were a debt he owed her, though of course she never said what it was. She gave the impression she was willing to go on waiting, patiently, willing to do whatever it was he wanted, even if it was going to be years before he asked her. One morning he had walked to school, knowing she was following a block behind. He had refused to turn and wait for her. Then at the rail overpass he had looked back, in remorse, to discover she was no longer there.

He followed the path along the top of the dyke, with its view over the Island yards, where people were raking leaves towards spindling fires. The smoke rolled across the dyke, flattening over the dark water of the Atta.

Sandy’s father was kneeling on the back porch, prodding with a screwdriver at a small electric motor. His round face with its shiny cheeks glanced up at Joe.

“Joe,” he said flatly, looking back to his work. Almost casually, a judgment had fallen.

Joe lingered, watching, held by the hope of reprieve: held by the chance Charlie Richards would say something that would allow them to go on as before.

“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.