The Island Walkers (26 page)

The snow did not stay; the town reverted to the dour emptiness of late autumn. One Saturday, emerging from Tugg’s Hardware, Alf saw the Fleetwood moving down Shade. It was definitely Prince, his tanned dome and handsome face lifted a little, with a kind of offhand nobility. The car floated over the Shade bridge and climbed towards the upper town, accelerating so smoothly it seemed to be powered not by an engine so much as a magnetism, a wish. Backing the Biscayne into the traffic, Alf began to follow. He had no plan. He was simply drawn to the other man, half in anger, half in the hope that something might yet be done about the layoffs — that he still had some purchase in the places of power. About a mile from town on the Johnsonville Highway, he caught sight of the Fleetwood just as it turned down a secondary road. At a rail crossing, he lost it again behind the monotonous lumbering of boxcars, and when the caboose finally rattled by, and the clanging and blinking at the barrier finally relented, there was no sign of it in the wasteland of gravel pits and cold grey lakes beyond. But a mile down the road, with the countryside
swathed again in the brown tangle of autumn, he glanced between the stone posts that marked the entrance to the Langside Golf Club (Members Only) and saw the car, parked among several others.

He left the Biscayne and walked into the clubhouse, through an empty locker room, up stairs onto a red carpet that led down a panelled corridor. A young waiter in a short jacket asked if he could help. Alf brushed past without a word, instinctively heading for the smell of food, the clatter of dishes. The dining room was mostly empty: a scattering of white linen squares across a large space lit by the daylight silvering at the mullioned glass. Prince was at a window table, in a grey tweed jacket, tieless, just pouring beer into a tall glass. As Alf approached, he looked up without expression. He might have been expecting him.

“Have a seat, Alf.”

That voice again: freakishly unruffled, the soul of civility. Alf had an urge to throw a chair through the window. He remained standing, in his jeans and windbreaker.

“You said this wasn’t going to cost anybody their jobs.”

“Would you like a drink?”

“You said this wasn’t going to cost anybody their jobs.”

“So you said.”

“Don’t get fancy with me!”

The young man in the short jacket and bow tie was hovering.

“Is everything all right, Mr. Prince?”

“Just fine, Danny. Bring Mr. Walker a —”

“I don’t want anything,” Alf told Prince. With a gesture from the executive, the young man turned reluctantly away. Prince spoke to the tabletop, gravely.

“As I remember, I was speaking only of the people whose names you gave to me. Or
were
going to give to me. And there, well I believe I kept my word. The man whose name you gave me wasn’t laid off.”

Alf looked down at the executive in disbelief: it seemed a snake’s argument.

“What are you saying? Are you saying if I’d given you all the names they’d have kept their jobs?”

The other man winced, as if at a digestive pang. “As it happened,” he said, frowning at the bubbles that rose in his pilsner glass, “I had no intention of laying off those people. But I have my own bosses, Alf. I don’t have the free hand everyone imagines I do. There are people above me who are determined to play rough.”

Prince looked up frankly now, with coldness in his eyes, a warning that he was barely tolerating this interruption, it had better not go on much longer. Alf fumed, moved his feet. In a company where the line of command stretched out of sight, you could always say it was someone else’s fault.

“I hold you responsible,” he said.

“So do they,” Prince said wearily. “I’m the meat in the sandwich.”

“Take those people back,” Alf said. “Go to your bosses and beg. Like I’m begging you now. Hell, you know what it’s like for them? With Christmas coming on? Take them back. I’ll stake my job on their not starting a union. If they do, fire me.”

Prince touched the neatly folded napkin beside his cutlery: the peace he was not being allowed to enjoy. The young man came back with a salad. They watched in a trance of blankness as he set it down, left.

“Take back Pete Moon,” Alf said.

Prince played with the pilsner glass, making the surface of the beer tilt rapidly.

“As I understand it, he was one of the leaders.”

“He didn’t lead anything. All he did was have the meeting at his house.”

“Oh really?” Prince said, and his eyes flashed up. “I believe you told me the meeting was by the river. There was a fire?”

He spoke with riveting irony. It was clear he had known all along that Alf had lied to him.

Alf stared grimly out the window. A groundsman was trundling a wheelbarrow past the putting green. Beyond, the fairways rolled towards a distant grey palisade of woods.

The waiter reappeared with Prince’s sandwich. Alf went on watching the groundsman as he put down the barrow and began collecting the small flags from the holes of the green. He was aware of how much better it would be to be out there, in the cold air, with his hands on honest metal, honest wood. Here, he felt crude, out of place. He did not know what to do with his hands. And he was nauseated: his rage turning sour inside him. He looked at Prince, who pushed the sandwich away from him, as if in distaste. The executive spoke directly to him now, with grim self-containment.

“Alf, I can’t give anyone his job back. But I can tell you this. As far as I’m concerned, that foreman’s job is still open for you. We’ve had our disagreements, you and I, but I still consider you the best man for —”

“You can shove your fucking job,” Alf said.

Driving back, he pulled up to the shore of one of the lakes in the gravel pit and turned off the engine. His hands were trembling. He buried them under his armpits and watched the grey water, which seemed ominously still, as though it had come to the very point of freezing.

21

A FEW DAYS LATER
, Alf sat at his cellar workbench, trying to ignore the commotion of an arrival overhead: the cheerful soprano of Margaret’s greeting, the drag of chairs. In his hands was a bit of pine he was struggling to carve into the likeness of a pike. His model was
an old Lands and Forests poster pinned on the tool board behind the bench. Caught in the glow of the hanging lamp, the freshwater fish of Ontario swam past in an ordered school. Rock bass. Yellow perch. Pickerel. The pike was the most sinister: a flexible torpedo of pure appetite, its splotched body narrowing to a flattened, evil head. To be that cold, that efficient, and beyond all feelings but the feelings of hunger and satiety: it seemed to Alf an ideal state.

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.