The Walking People (45 page)

What if Julia had been home, Greta demanded of Michael after Ned finally left. Or Eavan, who could put two and two together faster than most adults. They'd never told the children anything about Johanna living in New York. As far as the children knew, Johanna had gone straight to California and then gone home again when Lily got sick.

"You're making too much of it," Michael had said. "Poor man," he'd added, and Greta saw red.

"Poor man?" she sputtered. "I don't see what's so poor about him."

"Greta, it was your own mother who told me we have to watch out for each other here. We're from the same place, Ned too. So what harm if he does his drinking here instead of in a pub with strangers who don't care whether he lives or dies?"

How dare he use her own mother's words back at her, as if he knew Lily as well as Greta did. "She meant you and me," she corrected him. "Not us and any drunk Irishman who comes along. And truth be told, she really only meant me and Johanna. In fact, she once wanted to pay my way home and leave you here. Mine and Julia's way home. She said you could do as you liked."

That had shut him up so good he was still turning it over the next morning, until over oatmeal in the kitchen she told him she'd made it up. Lily had loved him. She was sorry. He'd just made her so mad.

"I thought that might be it," he'd said, and hunkered over his bowl and dug in.

 

Now Greta felt sure that Ned Powers was about to go on a bender, in their car, in their new town, and she'd done nothing to stop him. And when he came back he'd be full of memories and all sorts of blather, and all three of the children around to listen—nothing else to do. Greta busied herself with sweeping, vacuuming, scrubbing the already spotless bathtub, toilet, underneath the kitchen sink. After two hours she strode out on the deck, pink rubber gloves dripping, and announced to Michael, "I knew it." Back inside she muttered, "I knew it, I knew it," until it started to take on the rhythm of a song.

Thankfully, James and Eavan had put ice cream out of their minds the moment a young girl knocked on the screen door and introduced herself as, "Jessica, two houses down, going into fourth grade." After a quick introduction, but before agreeing to go outside to play, Eavan had raced from room to room in search of Julia, and once she found her, dragged her by the hand to the bathroom, where Eavan sat perfectly still on the closed toilet seat as Julia redid the braid of that morning. "I'm coming!" she shouted as soon as Julia snapped the rubber band tight around the end.

"Wait," Greta said, grabbing Eavan mid-flight before she disappeared out the door. "Just wait," she said again, feeling that there was something she should say or do here but not sure what was called for. "Where are you going?"

"Outside," Eavan said, nodding toward Jessica, who was waiting on the front step.

"Are Jessica's parents home?" Greta asked. Eavan shrugged. "You can go as far as Jessica's house on that side and the house next to us on the other. And don't cross the street unless you come back here and ask me."

"Mom, there aren't even any
cars
on this street. We don't even—"

"Eavan," Greta cut her off. "Don't start. And bring your brother."

Another two hours—sheets on beds, curtains on rods, Eavan and James full of stories of aboveground swimming pools and sprinklers that spit water in circles that could follow a person around a yard, all glimpsed—they swore with fingers crossed—from within the boundaries they had been given, and Greta was unable to speak. They needed that car. Between the closing fees and the lawyer and the real estate agent and the rental truck and Julia's new bed and the first mortgage payment, they needed that car to return safe and sound.

"You have to understand—" Michael began when Greta went to help him inside, but she held her hand in front of her face and closed her eyes.

Finally, around nine o'clock, Michael, Greta, and Julia all heard the sound of Michael's diesel engine coming up the block. Eavan and James had fallen asleep watching television in Greta and Michael's room. "Greta," Michael said, grabbing her wrist. "Not a word. You let me handle this." He dropped Greta's wrist, and she walked over to the couch and sat with her two hands pressed between her knees.

"I see it now," Greta said. "It was him all along. The accident at work. He nearly killed you. Him and the drink. I knew it. Didn't I say it? He's like a wrecking ball that thinks it—"

Michael hushed her and then said to Julia, "You stay here."

Whenever Eavan or James did something wrong, Greta often told them about an old dog she'd had at home. Julia had never heard of this dog before Eavan and James came around, so she listened closely whenever Greta told the story. It was Greta's older brother's dog, really. Greta had known him only when he was very very old, but one thing she remembered was that when the dog did something wrong, they could tell just by looking at him that he was guilty. Just one look at his lowered head, and Julia's grandmother would send Greta to check whether he'd dirtied the drying laundry with his paws or shit
in one of the bedrooms. This is the story Julia thought of when Ned Powers opened the screen door and stepped inside.

"How's it goin?" he asked, closing his eyes against the strength of the overhead light.

"Ned," Michael said. "Julia's going to drive you home tonight. How does that sound?"

"Ah no," Ned said. "Not with the way that girleen worked today. Have you got your driver's license, Julia? Well, that's grand."

"I drove up here this morning, remember? I'm almost twenty-two."

"I was twenty-two once," Ned said. "We all were," he added, and burst out laughing.

"You set, Ned? She doesn't mind." Michael turned toward Julia with a look that said he was sorry.

"I couldn't," Ned said, and then a long pause as he scratched his neck. "I'm dead tired to tell the truth."

"Ah, go on," Michael said. "All that hard work you did today. I'd drive you myself if I could." One hand clutching the banister for balance, Michael reached toward his friend with his right hand outstretched.

"I don't mind," Julia agreed as the men shook hands.

"Let him take the bus," Greta said from her perch on the couch. "Let him sober up on the damn bus."

"I'll drive you home, Ned," Julia said again.

"Well then, I'm going with you," Greta said, standing up.

"Leave it, Greta," said Michael.

"Come on, Ned," Julia said, and was out the door and into the car before Greta could make it outside.

 

Julia didn't know how to get to the Bronx from Recess. From Manhattan, yes, they'd been to the Powers's apartment a few times for dinners, two Easters, an occasional Thanksgiving, and for the Christening parties of Ned's two babies. One dead, Julia reminded herself. Dead for years now.

Instead of running back inside to ask her father what road to take, what bridge, she decided to drive back into the city and go the way she knew. Ned, awkward in the small bucket seat, seemed to have trouble
finding a comfortable arrangement for his shoulders, and he kept pulling on the portion of the belt that crossed over his chest. "Jesus," he muttered after a while, and pressed the button on the buckle that set him free. He tugged at the crotch of his jeans, pulled at the collar of his T-shirt.

"Well, thanks a million," Ned said as Julia eased the car away from the curb. The interior smelled of cigarettes and the sharp, musky smell of whiskey once it has made its way down the hatch and out again through the pores of the skin.

Julia turned onto the main road and maneuvered the car forward through the dark tunnel of oak and evergreen trees that lined the road on both sides. Greta was usually so calm, but something about having Ned Powers around made her crazy. It wasn't the drinking, Julia felt. It couldn't be. One of the newer tenants in 222 was a drinker, and Greta had felt so sorry for her, told everyone to be kind to her, how she used to spiff herself up the day after being found, once again, locked out of the building and asleep in the vestibule. Then, as Ned cleared his throat beside her, Julia remembered that Ned was one of the few people who'd known her parents from the beginning, all the way back to a furniture moving job her Dad had when he first arrived. They lost touch for a while, but had run into each other again when they were both shaping for day labor at a construction site in Queens. After another few years of seeing each other off and on, Ned had called Michael one morning in the mid-1970s and asked if he could help him get on as a sandhog.

"I knew your Dad before he had any
gasúir,
" he once said to James, picking him up and swinging him over his head. This was before he had any children himself, no little boy to love and grieve, no wife to accuse him at night and cry to go back home. "Even Julia?" James had asked. To James, Julia seemed almost as old as his parents. "Oh, Julia," Ned had said. "Yes, Julia. Julia was there almost since the beginning. I wasn't counting her."

"No problem," Julia said now, reaching over to turn on the radio. "I like driving."

"And you did college, didn't you, Julia?" Ned said, leaning his forehead against the cool glass of the window, then abruptly shaking
himself upright, rubbing his face vigorously up and down, up and down, as if scrubbing it with a washcloth.

"I just finished."

"Good for you," he said, and leaned forward to squint at a faint light in the distance. "I was useless at school myself. The times tables and seven goes into ninety-nine how many times and all that."

"I hated math too," Julia said, seeing what he was seeing, finally. She wondered if they'd been wrong about him. Maybe he wasn't so bad after all if his eyes were sharp enough to have caught that light in the distance, sharp enough to have recognized it for what it was from so far away.

"I'm out of fags," Ned said, eyeing the small store where it sat glowing, twinkling in the middle of the parking lot, growing bigger and brighter the closer they came to it. "Would you mind stopping? I'll run in."

Julia pulled in, parked in the spot closest to the front door, unbuckled her seat belt. She could hear the rush of cars on the highway just beyond the row of trees at one edge of the lot. The entrance ramp was just a stone's throw away.

"You don't have to get out," Ned said. "You stay."

Julia ignored him, and inside the overbright store she looked at the magazines and the newspaper headlines while Ned paced up and down the aisles, pretended to search for something he couldn't find, finally walked up to the refrigerated beer section and pulled the door open. He took out a six-pack of Budweiser and then another. He walked over to the register and placed them carefully on the counter. "And a pack of Camels," he said to the young, pockmarked man behind the counter.

"And a 7-Up," Julia said, sliding the single can across the counter.

"And a 7-Up," Ned repeated without looking at her.

Back in the car, as he cracked open the first can, Ned pointed out how weak American beer was compared with other beers, how watered down, how American beer could hardly be called alcohol at all, how despite its weakness Budweiser was a good union beer, a well-made beer, as good as any German or British or Irish beer, and how he'd never drink Coors, not if he was dying of thirst in the desert and someone handed him a cold Coors in a chilled glass.

"So, Ned," Julia said after the third pop and hiss. He had placed the two empties neatly in the pockets he'd taken them from, and each time, in the careful manner he placed them and secured them, he seemed to want Julia to notice this courtesy. "You and my Dad go way back, right?"

"Way back. Green as grass, the two of us. Poking our noses inside every room of these fancy apartments, and the cut of us, my God, they'd be holding their breath before we even touched a thing, afraid we'd smudge cushions and cloth things, lampshades, I dunno, them things they hang over the windows that aren't curtains—I called them curtains once and the missus of the house corrected me. You know the ones, long things from the windows and the see-through part underneath. Anyhow, whatever they're called, it was great
craic
altogether."

"And you knew my mother too? Back then?"

"The tunnels is nothing like moving furniture. Better work, some would say, better money anyhow, but not like the moving, when you could be inside and outside all day long and every job was during the day, and even when you were inside, there was light coming in through the windows, and nine days out of ten you'd be home by supper and the evening news and that's the end of it."

"You met them when—1963 ... 1964?" From the passenger seat came a fourth pop and hiss.

"The problem with the tunnels is the dark. Some say the damp. Some say the dust. I say the dark. I'll be working away, and all of a sudden I think to myself how I'd like to just look out the window and see what kind of a day it is at all, and of course there is no window, because there you are hundreds of feet under the sidewalk and by the time you call for the cage, it's ten minutes later and four minutes up and four minutes down and they'll dock your pay and mightn't let you on the next day. And to go up on break takes too long and they don't like to be sending the cage up and down like that, so it's eight hours straight in the pitch dark except for the lights they string around, which is fine when you're standing right under them, but not a mile down the tunnel. That's the trouble I have."

"I know," Julia said, trying her best to make her voice warm with sympathy. "But listen for a second, Ned. Just listen. Do you remember
meeting my mother in 1964? Back when you and my father were still movers? Do you remember meeting her when she was expecting me?"

"Expecting you?"

"Pregnant."

"Your mother is a good-looking woman. Not at first, but you come around to it after a while."

"Jesus, Ned, concentrate for a second. It's important."

"I remember her pregnant, and you ten or twelve following her around."

"Earlier. Pregnant with me. Do you remember?"

"I had two myself," Ned said, reaching again for the supply tucked neatly at his feet. "One died, God rest him. An innocent child, so no worries where he is now and the priests say I should be happy about that. I should be happy about that. I should be. Up in heaven flyin' around with the other babbies."