The Island Walkers (25 page)

That evening he was unable to use the phone: someone was always in the kitchen. At eight o’clock he put on his coat and drove over to the Flats, glancing at Woody’s stucco bungalow as he floated past. Woody’s brown Ford with the Magnetic Hill sticker on the bumper sat in the drive. A minute later, approaching the arena, he saw the jammed parking lot and remembered the game:
someone there would know
. He parked the Biscayne on the edge of the baseball field, near a grove of oaks. Behind the trees rose the mills, a watery sheen in their dark windows. Ahead, a muffled chanting sounded in the pale, round hill of the arena.

He slipped down a corridor and emerged in the open space at the end of the bleachers. And Woody was there, standing by himself near the corner boards, watching the game through the wire mesh. Alf found himself moving towards him. This is stupid, he thought, all you have to do is see if he’s at work tomorrow. But he couldn’t help himself. On the back of Woody’s sweater-coat the image of a pheasant had been knit. The bird was beating up on sharp wings, its head like a hood pierced by a red eye.

He stood beside Woody. Just then, the puck caromed into the corner in front of him, and in a moment several players thudded into the boards. Sweating faces grimaced through the mesh as they battled for the puck. A whistle blew and they skated calmly away.

“So,” Alf said. His heart was slamming. “You still have your job or what?”

Woody went on looking at the ice, where the green and white uniforms milled. It was as if Alf didn’t exist, as if he were a ghost making sounds the living could not hear.

The cold air smelled of rotting wood, of winter.

“Yeah, I still have my job,” Woody said. “Can you think of any reason why I wouldn’t?”

Alf met Woody’s tiny, flinty eyes, like flashes of metal, of pure hatred in the podgy face. Around them, the crowd bayed.

20

WITHIN ANOTHER DAY
, he had the full picture. Everybody who’d been at Pete’s that night had been laid off, fourteen people in all. Only Alf and Woody were unscathed.

It seemed to Alf his involvement must be obvious to everyone, at least to everyone who had been at Pete’s, though by now, surely, word had spread. He couldn’t go out without the sense of being watched — watched and commented on, as if his guilt were indicated by a mark on his face, or by one of those signs the mill workers sometimes stuck on a fellow’s backside for a joke:
PLEASE KICK HERE
. But hell, he told himself, he’d only given up one name, and that man still had his job. He couldn’t really be blamed for the others, could he? And besides, the union was finished: so some good had come of the dirty business, hadn’t it?

But he kept thinking about the laid-off workers, especially Pete, and was unpersuaded by his own arguments. He traipsed down Shade Street, avoiding people’s eyes. Entering the
A
&
P
, he tripped on the step. A moment later he pushed through swinging doors into the odour of fresh-ground coffee.

His cart had a squeaky wheel. He pushed it past one aisle — too many people — and turned it, squeaking faithfully, down another. Joe was there, in a long white apron, putting up cans of peas.

They made small talk, awkwardly.

“I was thinking I could get some tickets for the Gardens,” Alf said. He felt an urgent need to give his son something, to fill his sense of a looming emptiness. The boy’s cheeks flushed.

“That a good idea?” Alf asked.

“Sure.”

“Great.”

“Good.”

Over Joe’s shoulder, Alf caught sight of Dick Forsyte, his small face grimacing as he studied the label on a can. Dick was one of the laid-off. The sight of him — so casually looking up from the can to the shelves — momentarily paralyzed him. Dick’s presence seemed large, radiant: he might have been famous. Alf shifted a step, concealing himself behind his son. “Forgot to go to the bank,” he said, swinging his cart away. In the street it was snowing: large, slow flakes falling peacefully out of the darkness.

The bank was overheated. He waited in line, in the solemn, churchlike atmosphere, looking down at the grey tiles tracked with slush. Ahead of him, a woman with her hair in a fraying bun — it was Matilda Squires, the Presbyterian minister’s wife — moved forward a step. By the heel of her shoe lay a quarter. Alf shuffled past it.

“Say, is this yours?”

He knew the voice — that compressed, slightly muffled quality, as if it came from underground — and he turned to meet Lucille Boileau. She was holding up the dirty quarter between thumb and forefinger.

“Oh Jeez, Alf, I didn’t recognize you.”

Her smile with its missing tooth lit her face.

“I’d say it was yours,” he said dryly.

She slid the coin into the pocket of her jeans. There was a childlike deliberateness in her movement, which he found pathetic: as if she thought the quarter was really going to make a difference. She
was wearing a black leather motorcycle jacket with silver studs on the shoulders, black jeans, and cowboy boots with pointy toes.

“I’m sorry about what happened,” he said.

“Well, what can you do, eh?”

“What they did, it was illegal —”

He felt he was about to burn up, in his zipped-up coat.

“I guess you got off, eh?” she said, glancing up shyly.

“For now, anyway.”

“Oh, they won’t lay you off. Not a good man like you.”

He waited for her in the street. She came down the steps counting a handful of bills and scarcely seemed surprised to see him. Snow fell silently around them, appearing and disappearing on her black hair, the black leather. He had a curious sense of their absolute isolation, as if they were meeting in a forest.

“Look, Lucille, I want to help you out.” She looked blankly at the folded wad in his hand. “You can pay me back when you get another job.”

He looked at her wide mouth, those overinflated lips. Years ago, he had heard a rumour that Lucille Boileau took in men for money.

“You keep that,” she said, pushing back his hand. “But tell you what: you can take me for a drink.”

They crossed the street to the Vimy House, passing through its low, arching porch, held up by stubby pillars of orange marble, into the dim lobby where a fuzzy grey cat lay curled on the desk. A leather couch leaked hanks of matted wool. He had not been in the Vimy House for years. His distaste for the place was underlaid by a sense of inevitability, as though the intervening time had been a kind of illusion. This was what had been waiting for him, and this was real: the smell of smoke and stale beer and longing, the dregs of a happiness that hadn’t lasted a single night.

He had abandoned himself to her; he felt he owed her that much, anyway. He traipsed after her black jacket into Ladies and Escorts, letting her choose a way among the small, round tables spotted through the room. She stopped near a large window entirely covered
by shapeless drapes. Beside it, in an ornate frame, hung a photograph of the old King and Queen, taken during their brief stop in town before the war. The famous couple were standing on the platform at the rear of their rail car, the King in a double-breasted suit, the Queen in a cavalier hat and white fur stole, waving over a mass of roses. The pale photo was like a reflection of distant sunlight, a lost afternoon.

“I was there,” he said, pointing, and knew again the smell of the oily railbed in the heat, the town band playing “God Save the King.”

“So was I,” Lucille Boileau said. “We walked up the West River Road, all the school kids. They gave us little flags. I was so happy: I was going to see the King and the Queen. But the train stopped too far down the tracks and the crowd got in the way. I never saw them.”

“Ah, you didn’t miss much,” he said. But he could still remember the thrill of seeing those royal faces, so familiar from photographs, smiling over the crowd that had run down the tracks to catch up to them. When the train finally drew away, sliding like a miniature version of itself into the heat-warped distance, it was as if some magic — some never-to-be-repeated chance at happiness — had fled their lives.

In a distant corner the only other customer, Bessie Kinnaird, stared at her wineglass. Behind the bar, Rick Taylor, in a white shirt rolled to the elbows, was working something out with a pencil. The room was quiet, a cave-shelter from the snow, a kind of tomb: Alf was relieved to be here.

Rick brought them four draft, setting each one on the yellow Arborite with a sharp rap. Alf supposed Rick was wondering what he was doing here with Lucille Boileau — he knew tongues could wag later — but for the moment he felt armoured in indifference. He belonged to Lucille now, to the large, dim room where every word and action seem muffled.

Lucille raised her glass. “To all us poor sods who lost our jobs,” she said. “No, that’s too sad. To the future!”

He threw back the bitter beer, swept by a wave of disgust. He couldn’t understand why she wasn’t accusing him, or at least acting
suspicious. Did she really trust him so much? At her distant table, Bessie Kinnaird raised her glass in a trembling hand and took a brief, wondering sip, like a girl.

“So are you looking for work?” he said sharply.

“Oh yeah, makin’ the rounds.”

Her vagueness irritated him.

“Where’ve you been? Up to Samuelson’s?”

“Sure.”

He didn’t believe her.

She shrugged, and he sensed her helplessness. Indians: they were all the same, weren’t they? Drifting through life, never doing enough for themselves.

“Have you been over to Johnsonville?”

“I don’t really like Johnsonville.”

“Why not?” he said. “If you can get a job there.”

Again she shrugged.

“What’s the matter with Johnsonville?” he persisted. “I would think that’d be a good place for you.”

She was staring unhappily into her beer.

“Isn’t it?” He thrust his question home, wanting to provoke her. He wanted her to see what he was.

“Why?” she said finally, to her beer. “Because there’s Indians in Johnsonville?”

He looked at her remorselessly.

“Everybody hates ’em there,” she said, tossing her head. “Anyways, I gotta be home for Billy.”

“Well, were you home for him before, when you were at Bannerman’s?”

She was silent; her wide face, which had something open and trusting in it, was trained unhappily at the table now. He pitied her and yet he kept the pressure on: he was waiting, half-elated by his own cruelty, for her to attack him. “There must be somebody who could look after him.”

“Not anybody I trust,” she said.

They drank for a while in silence, and smoked. She took his cigarettes sullenly, and the smoke drifted up from each of them, mingling under the high, pressed-tin ceiling. They had nothing more to say to each other, it seemed, and yet he felt bound to her, responsible. Behind the heavy drapes, cars swept the snowy street.

Alf shifted in his chair and noticed something at his feet: a stuffed animal, a little brown horse with a red wool mane.

“What have we here?” he said. When he tried to stand it up on the table, it fell soundlessly into a puddle of beer.

“Cute,” she said. “Rick’s little boy.”

He spoke in an undertone. “Can you imagine bringing up a kid in here?”

“Sure,” she said, as she ground out her butt. “It’s warm.”

She left to go to the john. Her reprimand lingered in the drifting strata of smoke, a bitterness he could not mitigate. What did he know about keeping warm? Compared to her, he supposed, he was rich. He saw her coat, with its torn, scarlet lining, crushed at the back of her chair, and wondered if he could slip the bills into her pocket.

Amazingly, she came back laughing. She told him she hadn’t noticed the toilet seat was up: she’d nearly fallen in. He lit another cigarette for her. Her face descended to his flame like someone drinking light and for a moment he loved her: her broad, foreshortened face with its black eyes shining like pools of oil, the little sickle scar on her forehead. Settling, she told him a story about ice-fishing with her father, years ago on Lake Erie. “I fell in,” she said, laughing again. “I mean, I was up to my neck in slush. Just like a bottle of Coke.” Her father had pulled her out and carried her, wrapped in his coat, to the nearest house.

“The people wouldn’t let us in,” she said. “So he had to run to the next house — it was another mile over, just about killed him. Just about killed
me
. They put me on the stove, eh? They had this platform for dryin’ boots. I got good and baked.”

“What do you mean,” he said, “they wouldn’t let you in?”

Her pink tongue skimmed her lower lip, and he understood what she meant, in the same moment that he understood he had shamed her.

He couldn’t stop thinking about Bob Prince. Whatever his own guilt in the affair, Prince was the force behind the layoffs, he had no doubt: the liar who’d told him he’d only give the union supporters a good talking to. He was in a fury with the man, with whatever fury he wasn’t already directing at himself. In a dream, he saw the executive’s dark-blue Cadillac Fleetwood patrolling behind him. He ran into a woods, but the car was soon there, above him, descending through the treetops with a thwacking sound, like helicopter blades. Its underside was composed of creamy flesh. In this belly a slit — some sort of mouth — pulsed open and shut, briefly revealing a toothless cavity.