The Island Walkers (42 page)

WHEN LUCILLE SLAMMED THE DOOR
of the Biscayne and walked away down Willard, Alf felt they were through. In a way, he was relieved — relieved she’d taken the initiative, which saved him the trouble of playing the bastard’s role, or at least of playing it to the hilt. And anyway, the stress of lying to Margaret, of always worrying they’d be
caught, had often seemed greater than the pleasure. He had promised himself a hundred times he would give her up. But when the pleasure came, and even more, the anticipation of pleasure, it obliterated everything, like a drug. By the end of the week he was having withdrawal symptoms. His hands seemed heavier, with the blood in them, lonely for Lucille Boileau.

Friday night, in a windless silence, it began to snow. On Saturday morning the large flakes — eyelid-catching flakes of indeterminate shape — were still floating down from an invisible sky, settling a pure whiteness over the yard. Alf and Margaret sat in the kitchen in their dressing gowns, over a late breakfast. From two rooms away came the squawk of the Saturday-morning cartoons. The renewal of winter had cast a feeling of snug isolation over the house and it seemed to Alf that he had returned home, to the simple pleasures of normality — a second cup of coffee, the scrape of a knife on toast, the Saturday paper — after a time of insanity that in retrospect half-perplexed him. When the phone rang, it startled them both. Margaret answered.

“It’s for you.” His wife held the receiver as if it were slightly repugnant.

“Alfie,” the voice said. Lucille.

It was if she had erupted inside him, out of a still pool. Her familiar voice, raw with cigarette smoke, seemed in danger of spilling from the receiver.

“I’ve got a broken pipe,” she said. “There’s water everywhere.”

“In the cellar?” he said, conscious of Margaret moving at the counter.

“It’s an emergency,” Lucille said.

“I’m not really a plumber,” he said sternly. “I’m not sure I have the right tools.”

“Oh you’ve got the right tools, Alfie.”

He turned to the wall.

“Look, have you tried a plumber?”

“I don’t have the money, Alf. There’s a foot of water down there now. If you can’t come —”

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said. “I’ve got to get dressed.”

“Who was that?” Margaret said, when he’d hung up.

“Lucille Boileau. Her cellar’s flooded. I
told
her — well, you heard me. I guess she doesn’t have much money.”

“I wonder why she’d call here?” Margaret said in a muffled voice to the coffee pot.

He shrugged, doing his best to look puzzled, innocent. But a wild, youthful happiness had invaded him: he felt like seizing his wife and dancing.

Alf had never been in Lucille’s cellar, with its rough stone walls and low ceiling. Against one wall, a broken pipe spewed a ragged plume of water that crashed noisily into the flood that lapped at the bottom stair. Lucille watched as he sloshed around in his rubber boots, searching with a hoe for the main valve.

“Alf —”

Feeling under the icy water he found the tap. In a few seconds, the stream had petered to a dribble.

“Don wants me to work at the store. One of the girls phoned in sick. I wonder if you could keep an eye on Billy.”

He looked at her on the stairs, stooping there in the weak light, her breasts free (he guessed) under her untucked plaid shirt. He was going to be here anyway — for hours, maybe. And besides, he’d do anything now to be back in her good books. It was a kind of madness, he saw: he was the drowning man who watches with curious equanimity the diminishing spot of light above his sinking head.

“He hasn’t been well,” she said, with a simpering smile that surprised him.

“All right.”

She let him kiss her, briefly, on the mouth. “I’m sorry,” he said, meaning he was sorry for their last date together — for whatever he’d done or hadn’t done that ruined their afternoon. She tousled his head, like a boy’s, and a few minutes later he heard the front door
slam as she went out. As he was poking about with the hoe, trying to find the floor drain (wherever it was, it was plugged), Billy materialized on the stairs. He was sitting in stocking feet and jeans and a red T-shirt with
ATTAWAN FALL FAIR
printed on it. In his hand was a large toy soldier clad in army khakis and a G.I. helmet.

“You could float a boat down here,” Alf said, trying to be friendly. He was in a good mood, feeling that he and Lucille were back on track.

The boy said nothing.

“I remember a flood when I was a boy. They had to come and take us out in boats. The whole Island was flooded. That was before they raised the dykes.” And again he saw the ghostly ice-cakes creeping through the misted streets, the rowboats nudging up to isolated houses — the swift, mysterious rippling of waters.

Billy looked at his toy soldier, making him jump — or fall — down a couple of stairs, making sure it landed on its head. He might as well have been deaf for all the attention he paid to Alf. Yet when Alf turned away, he felt the boy was watching. He was like a wild animal with his dark eyes that darted into hiding at the suggestion of a look from someone else.

Alf found the drain. There was a rock in it, apparently. It was as smooth as the top of a skull, wedged solid. He tried to pry it out with his fingers, with the edge of the hoe, with a screwdriver.

“Somebody’s put a rock in here,” he said. There was no response from the stairs. Looking around, he saw the boy was gone.

He got the rock out, but there was still a lot of muck clogging the drain. As he dug it out, he could hear Billy moving upstairs. After a while, he went up to look.

He found him in his narrow room, sitting on his bed — which was just a mattress on the floor — with a mess of comic books littering the dishevelled blankets. There was a smell of stale urine, and in the uncurtained window, a ferny garden of frost did not quite obscure the clapboard wall of the house next door. Billy’s gaze darted to Alf’s knees, fled back to his comic.

“Your mom tells me you’ve been sick —”

“Yup.” Billy’s answer came from far back in his throat. It was like a little man talking, a tough little gangster, almost comical.

“Feelin’ better now?”

“Yup.”

“Good.”

Billy was turning the pages of the comic book, too fast to be really seeing anything. Alf felt he wasn’t just shy. The boy seemed frightened of him. He had an impulse to go away — to stop torturing him with his presence — but he was held by the boy’s isolation. He wondered what his life had been, who his father was. Lucille had been with a lot of men. At that moment, Billy seemed to be the child of them all, abandoned and strange.

He said, “I’m Jamie’s father, you know.”

“Yup.”

“I’m a friend of your mother’s. We used to work at the same place.”

“Yup.”

“Are you hungry? Can I get you something to eat?”

“Nope.”

Alf hesitated, at a loss. He had never met a boy like this. He remembered his silence, that night he’d driven him home. He watched as Billy twisted his comic book into a roll and bit his upper lip. He seemed independent of the adult world somehow, of all worlds, locked in a world of his own. He seemed to Alf to have a secret, as if he were guarding a secret, and at the same time waiting for someone to come and guess what it was.
He
couldn’t tell.

“My grandfather drowned in Lake Erie,” Billy said, tightening the roll. The statement seemed to come out of nowhere.

“I knew your grandfather,” Alf said, squatting down, hoping to find his way into Billy’s gaze. “One winter — it was a long time ago — we cut ice together, on the Atta.”

The boy went on fooling with the tube of paper. But Alf felt he was listening.

“That was before people had refrigerators. They kept all their food in iceboxes. The iceman used to come around in the summer. He’d give us pieces of ice to suck. Sort of like Popsicles.”

The boy’s black eyes briefly met his, with a flash of amusement. And a stab of excitement — of life in the quick — leapt in Alf’s gut.

“Sure,” Alf said, warming. “Actually, he didn’t give them to us. We’d steal them, when he was away from his truck.”

Billy’s throat emitted a little laugh:
Heh!
He understood
that
.

“We’d go down by the river and suck them. Or if it was hot, we’d rub them all over our faces and chests.”

The boy was grinning at him now, his round face and black eyes and little teeth with their traces of rot shining up at him, happy and appeased. Yet even now, Alf suspected the boy had eluded him. His smile was like a mask, offered to a greater power — a smiling power who demanded a smile in return. But something else was going on behind it, in those evasive eyes, something he could not read, which moved him and held him there, in the little room.

37

THE TELEVISION FLOODED
the McVeys’ den with fake, flickering moonlight. Lying on the couch, his head in Liz’s lap, Joe watched an old Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie — that spry and dapper man moving like an elf down a broad staircase, taking his platinum-headed love in his arms. They wheeled around the floor with such exquisite synchronization there seemed to be no time at all between gesture and response.

Turning his head, Joe began to pick at the buttons of Liz’s blouse, exposing her peach satin bra with its frilly edges. Without taking her eyes off the screen, she helped him slide the bra up. Her breasts came
free. Absently, Liz smoothed his hair. They could not make love tonight because her father was out with the car and her mother and sister were up on the second floor. Her father, he supposed, was with Babs Wilcocks. Joe had seen the two of them a few nights ago, walking into the Vimy House’s Ladies and Escorts, the tall man with the stocky, plain, fur-coated Babs on his arm, the two of them looking almost formal in an old-fashioned way and — casting greetings right and left — clearly making no effort to hide their relationship. Joe had never understood it — Doc McVey, the richest man in town, drinking in the Vimy House. But he was a regular there and had once, the story ran, got into a shoving match with Bud Reed over some insult Bud had sent his way.

Joe nuzzled a breast, licked it, looked at it. Above, Liz’s blank face continued to watch the screen. Through the ceiling came a thump. He wondered if Liz’s mother had fallen down. Two weeks before, he’d watched her — she’d consumed one too many gin and tonics — lean slowly sideways, like the Tower of Pisa, with a bemused
here-we-go
smile in her sad eyes. He’d just managed to catch her.

“You never tell me you love me,” Liz said.

Joe looked up at the violet, too-bright eyes, watching him up there, beyond her pulled-up bra. She had told him she loved
him
once, whimpering it in a little-girl voice as he lay in her arms at the Executive.

“You know I care for you.” Her face flickered in the lunar light, impassive.

“I don’t want my mother’s life,” she said, tugging sharply at his hair.

“No, well, why should you?”

“The way he treats her,” she said, her gaze sweeping his forehead, as though evidence of her father’s sins lay there.

“Hey now, I don’t treat you like that.”

Once — this was driving up to Galt in the Lincoln — she had talked with remarkable candour about her father’s affair with Babs Wilcocks. “He thinks it should be nothing, we should take it as
nothing — after all, he’s still here, or he is most of the time, he still loves us. He can’t see the unhappiness he causes. I mean, he thinks it’s unreasonable for us to be upset. He can’t see why we can’t all be in a good mood, and nice to everybody, like he is. Why do we have to
spoil
things —
us
, spoiling things! The crazy thing is, most of the time we play it his way. We pretend nothing’s wrong. And then something snaps: Mom gets drunk or — Mom gets drunk.” It was the most frank she’d ever been with him. He had liked her the better for it, had felt closer to her, once she dropped her theatrical airs. But at the same time, she had set a level of openness he couldn’t match. She was asking for that now, he felt, her stare full of demands he couldn’t meet.

Abruptly, he sat up. Hand in hand, Fred and Ginger were strolling happily through a crowd of partygoers. Neither was out of breath.

“Do you love me a little?” said Liz, ghostly behind him. Joe went still. Everything in the room seemed to demand his answer: the deep couch, the fine desk with its brass-handled drawers, the gilt-framed pictures, even Fred and Ginger, pausing now in an embrace to look at each other in suspended bliss: waiting for Joe’s response to come winging to them from thirty years into the future and make all exactly right.

The thought of Anna came to him with such force he caught his breath. Earlier that day she had come into the
A&P
. She had seemed delighted to find him sweeping the floor in his apron, and stood chatting with him for a good five minutes. Since that time they’d talked in her bedroom, something seemed to have opened between them. But what? He felt held in suspense around her, as if a happiness he could not quite believe in was hovering nearby.