The Island Walkers (52 page)

On the flats, under a grove of black willows that obscured the houses and lights above, she turned to him. The moon, a battered, ancient coin, hung over her shoulder.

“You were supposed to follow me the first time.”

“What?”

“I look around and there’s Dick Christopolous.”

“You don’t like Dick Christopolous?”

She laughed bleakly, pushing at his chest, and went on. Suddenly energized — the numbness and passivity of months seemed to be falling away, though he was still baffled by what was happening — he hurried after her.

They crossed the flats to the river, entering in a few steps its cold atmosphere, with its smell of decaying weed and slime. On the black water, a swath of moonlight glittered like a school of minnows.

“Very nice,” he said.

“Look at me —”

He turned to her. His own face half-shadowed hers in the grey moonlight. The noise of the party drifted down the hill.

She put her hands on his chest and shoved him backwards, along the damp path.

“God, you make me mad,” she said. And a moment later, a cry of dismay: “I can’t believe I’m doing this!”

She strode away along the path that followed the river. He hurried after the white flicker of her running shoes.

“Anna. Anna, stop — can’t believe you’re doing what?”

She stalked on, nearly falling at one point when she stepped into a small hole. He sensed she was crying — why crying? what had he done? — but was unable to see her face clearly.

Then she stopped and faced him.

“This is crazy,” she said. “We should go back.”

“Okay.” He started to turn.

“No, wait!”

He turned back. More used to the darkness now, he could make out her features, but could not quite read her expression. Her cheeks were definitely wet. And her voice, when it came again, seemed to be struggling for breath.

“You want me, don’t you? I mean, you want to be with me?”

“Yes.”

He did not move.

“If we do this,” she said, “we’re going to hurt people.”

“Yes.”

He hardly dared let himself understand her, and at the same time his understanding leapt forward, wildly.

“Anna,” he said. They stood looking at each other, half-seeing each other, in the dim moonlight. His months of holding back held him back now. Everything he wanted was here, but he couldn’t move.

Suddenly, with a small cry, she lunged forward, took his head between her hands, and kissed him awkwardly on the mouth. For a moment she pulled back to look at him. Then she put her arms around him. Holding her now, moaning her name, he drank in the smell that was almost a non-smell, which rose from her hair, scarcely believing he was feeling the press of her long body against his.

They went together up the river. They went silently, almost gravely, holding hands, conscious of a deed done. She kept sighing as if dismayed at herself. When he asked what was wrong she shook her head and said nothing. The path ran above the sharply edged,
shallow bank, descended to cross the mouths of streams, ran on again. Neither of them had ever been here. From time to time they stopped: each time he kissed her he felt he had never kissed her before. He had to keep kissing her so that he could remind himself that what was happening was true. Between kisses he forgot what her mouth tasted like, forgot what her body with its small breasts felt like as it pressed against him. Then he remembered:
it was like this
.

Now they could hardly go twenty steps without embracing. They embraced and separated, embraced and fell down. She was laughing with him in the hollow place behind a fallen tree trunk, laughing and weeping both, with a fluidity of exchange that left him bewildered: she was balancing above him on the trunk like a ten-year-old who cares about nothing else. They went on. The ground sloped up to what looked like a flat platform. Climbing up its side they saw a long pond, with a little dam gurgling at one end. Under the dark surface fish were rising, breaking the velvet membrane of the water with delicate kissing sounds. The moon was in the pond now, wobbling and broken. “There are many moons,” she said, leading him around the path. She had grown sombre, as if instructing him: a virginal priestess pointing out the mysteries of the place. “Every moon has a different name. They’re sisters.”

He had no idea if she was making this up on the spot, or reciting some old mythology. It didn’t matter: everything she said was miraculous. He threw himself into the game. “Every kiss is a fish, and every fish — is delicious.”

She contradicted him violently. Fish were sacred to Aphrodite, she told him. “We don’t eat them.”

“Never?” he said.

“Not unless we want to lose her favour. Which I don’t think we do.”

She kissed him with slow deliberation now and, before they could separate again, took his hand and placed it on her breast. The moment had the formal aura of an offering, as if Aphrodite were not some old name from the past but a power hovering over them even
now, infusing every touch with divine meaning. She watched him in the moonlight. “Sooner or later, everybody loses her favour,” she said. “She’s easily bored.”

“I’ll never be bored with you,” he said. “I couldn’t be.”

But already he feared she might be bored with him. It might happen tomorrow, it might happen in the next five minutes: he seemed held aloft by a kind of spell, not quite daring to believe in what was happening. If he had suddenly found himself alone by this pond, shivering in the damp like that guy in the Keats poem, he wouldn’t have been entirely surprised. He wanted her to echo back to him: I won’t be bored with you either. But she laughed and touched his mouth as if to stop his words and turned back to the pond. A frog splashed from the bank.

There was a second pond, higher than the first, behind another gurgling dam of iron and cement. In this second pond there were no fish, or at least none rising. The moon in this pond was clear, only wobbling a little with the slight movement of the water. They were near a barn, and could sense the slow presence of large animals — cows or horses — and smell the heavy sweetness of hay and manure. “You know I can’t smell horse manure without thinking of vanilla ice cream,” he told her. “It’s the ice-cream man — his wagon was pulled by a horse. You could hear his bell, all up and down the streets.” He was saying anything that came into his head, with no worry about its irrelevance, because tonight everything was connected. Moon, icecream man, horse manure, love, his soaking shoes: all part of the same thing, a thing that had no name but which contained them as the grey moonlight contained them in its silver bowl.

Laura Becker’s house was quiet, the great windows blazed from empty rooms. Everyone had gone on to the next party. Not quite everyone. Turning a corner into the front yard, they saw the black Olds waiting by the curb. Behind the wide windshield sat the twinned, accusing shadows of their guilt.

They slipped into the back seat. It was Anna who spoke first, telling Brad she wasn’t feeling well. (Was it a lie, Joe wondered, or had the events by the river made her ill?) She wanted to go home. No one spoke as the Olds cruised the moonlit streets. Brad dropped off Joe and Liz first. “We can take the Line,” Liz said as they climbed the steps to her house, as if they would simply continue to the next party.

She went up to the bathroom. He waited in the family room, looking out at the floodlit yard. He felt capable of anything — it was the promise of Anna’s touch, given secretly across the back seat before he left the car — and now as he heard Liz come into the kitchen behind him, he turned to her. “Come here,” he said softly, the executioner calling to his victim.

As he poured out his deadly mixture of truth and lies, she watched him without expression, her heart-shaped face pale in the dimly lit room, her beautiful eyes fixed on his with their look of startled candour, at once ferocious and cold and completely vulnerable. Her silence unnerved him. She was doing nothing to defend herself, only watching him with the calm air of someone who has expected such treatment all along. He was fumbling now, fumbling out his apologies like a fool. “I’m sorry,” he said, for the third or fourth time. “I know it isn’t fair —” Not knowing what else to do, he moved to embrace her. She was stiff in his arms. He let her go, looking around uncertainly. “I guess I better go.”

“Anna won’t have you,” she said, her voice small.

Her eyes were still fixed on his.

“She was involved with someone else. She told me — she told me she can’t love any more.”

He stared at her.

“Someone else,” he said numbly.

“A man,” Liz said, and her gaze seemed to push his eyes back into his head. “Not a boy like you.”

He moved off but, at the stairs to the kitchen, looked around again. She was gazing out at the starkly lit patio, at a glass-topped table where someone had left a pair of hedge clippers. He was chilled
by her isolation, it gave her a strange authority, and for a moment he nearly went back to ask her what she meant. Finally he crossed the kitchen’s glare and left the house.

The black Olds was coming along Robert. It pulled up to the curb beside him. “Hey, guy,” Brad said, subdued. “Mind having a few words —”

Joe got into the front seat. The Olds swept under the shadows of trees and poles, through the Junction past the ghostly silver barns of the Fairgrounds and out of town.

He glanced at the speedometer: the green ribbon had crept to eighty, and was still extending itself. A thrill of fear went through him. Brad was leaning forward a little, over the wheel, as if wanting to embrace it.

“You wanted to talk.”

Brad said nothing — no matter what Joe said, Brad met it with a hostile silence. He supposed Anna had told Brad it was over between them: at least he hoped she had. But as Brad’s silence went on, it suggested there had been complications. Perhaps Anna had not freed herself. Perhaps — he knew this was a primitive idea, and hoped it was wrong — they were going to have to fight for her. They swept past the glittering deep lakes of the gravel pits, white as chalk in the moonlight, past sleeping farmhouses and mailboxes and ancient maples and fields darker than the night up the grey highway, its white centre line — now broken, now a single streaming thread — speeding under the wide hood of the Olds. At the tops of hills, they seemed about to leave the road and fly. At a rail crossing, Brad barely slowed: the Olds thudded on its springs as if it had been dropped from the sky. The speedometer read a hundred.

“Slow down,” Joe shouted at him. “For God’s sake, it isn’t worth
this
.”

“Nothing’s worth this,” Brad said with an irony Joe couldn’t read.

“What did Anna tell you?” Joe said. He was desperate to know exactly how things stood, desperate to start a rational exchange that
might sap Brad’s focus on speed. But all his words were absorbed by the pact Brad had made with the open road. Every thought Brad had, every sorrow, was channelled away from speech and into this relentless pressure on the accelerator, this calm, expressionless focus on the highway revealing itself beyond the wheel. Brad was furious — that much seemed clear — but he was letting the engine of the Olds deliver his fury, in a storm of working pistons. He was furious, and grim, but the car seemed almost triumphantly happy, roaring out its hallelujah in the extremity of its power.

They were in the wrong lane now, approaching the crest of another hill. Joe swore at Brad while scanning the smooth horizon for the headlights of an oncoming car. He was on the verge of grabbing the wheel, or perhaps the gearshift — throwing it into neutral. But there were no headlights, there was no other car. They broached the crest, and again seemed about to fly over the expanse of moon-bleached countryside. A few lights burned at the ends of lanes: little beacons of sanity.

He buckled his seatbelt, ignoring Brad’s snort of derision. They were approaching the village of Cairn. They would have to slow down, surely: there was often a police cruiser there, Joe remembered. But as the village’s outskirts hove into view, Brad veered off in a skidding turn down a sideroad. The car fishtailed on gravel. A mailbox on a post reared in front of them, a square-headed victim frozen in the headlights, and went down with a thump and the sound of breaking glass. They sped on. Brad flicked on the high beams — the low on the right had been smashed — and then, with a sudden, jabbing movement of his left hand, turned off the lights altogether. Now their way was lit only by the moonlight pooling on the road, between the shadows of big trees, turning the fields on either side to seas of ghostly absence. Joe knew they were going to die. At any second Brad might turn the Olds into a tree. Or a culvert (there was one now, dangerously close) might catch the wheels and flip them. He sat in horror, unable to read Brad’s mind, unable to gauge the edge over which he might or might not tip them. Everything he saw now
seemed a clue to their fate: an open gate, a mailbox, a tractor parked by the road; all threatened, and all, as soon as they had swept past, became part of life’s mercy. In the ditch an animal’s yellow eyes glinted and went out.

Then Brad began to slow. At the next crossroads he brought the Olds to a stop. Breathing hard, trembling, Joe looked over at him.

“Maybe you should get out,” Brad said to the windshield.

“Let me drive,” Joe said. “We can talk.”

“Get out.” Brad said. He was still hunched forward, as if bound to the wheel.

“At least turn on the lights.”

Brad looked at him.

“The lights —”

Brad obeyed. The powerful beams stabbed down the road, lighting trees, the corner of a shed.

“I’m sorry,” Joe said. He knew, now, that he had won.

He started to walk towards Attawan. Behind him, he could hear the Olds rumbling over washboard, headed deeper into the country. Turning, he saw a cloud of dust rising beyond a field, a white spectre in the moonlight as it trailed towards him. He was five or six miles from town. It hardly mattered, he would have walked a hundred, gladly, through the earth-scented night, through the moonlit fields under the great rustling trees that lined the pale road and cast their living shadows ahead of him.