The Island Walkers (10 page)

But today, thinking of Billy, art wasn’t so much fun. He drew in a couple more Indians, on their horses, and looked out the window. The great, frowsy head of the elm was there, filling the sky. Once, he’d seen it in a storm, all grey and tossing and lit by lightning: a huge, living head, tossing its wild hair. Was that God? Silently, he said to the tree, “Please help me,” but the tree went on hanging, like a great, sad old umbrella with holes in it. Maybe it would rain and he wouldn’t have to fight. He’d never seen anybody fight in the rain. He thought Billy might, though.

Billy was his age, but he was in the special class for slow learners, along with the retarded kids like Dougie French — Dougie with his big, slobbery lips and happy eyes. Billy wasn’t retarded, but the previous year he’d been in Jamie’s class and he was always in trouble. Once he’d got the strap for sassing Miss Bell. The dark leather strap, thicker than a belt, had smacked down on his hand four, five times and Billy had laughed a strange gurgling laugh while Miss Bell, her face getting redder, had hit him three times more. When Billy came back down the aisle to his desk, his cheeks were shiny with crying but he hadn’t made crying sounds: he was grinning, as if it were all a joke.

When the bell went, Jamie stayed behind and asked Miss Wayne — he
loved
Miss Wayne, with her broad, happy face and kind voice — if he could help her clean up. But she said, No thank you dear, and smoothed down his hair a bit. He went out into the hall, with his rolled drawing in his hand. From the landing, he could see out the window above the door, see clear through the empty Boys’ Yard all the way to the gate and the park across the road. And Billy was there, sitting on the curb, poking a stick at something in the gutter as if, maybe, he was torturing an ant. Looking at him, Jamie felt alone, maybe more alone than he’d ever felt. Billy was alone too. The two of them were more alone, it seemed, than if there had been only one of them.

Jamie went downstairs to the washroom and tried to pee. But there wasn’t any pee to come out, so he went to the fountain and let its clear water bubble up like little silver balls for a while before he
drank. When he went back upstairs, Mr. Small, the janitor, walking with quick steps behind his wide broom, called out that he shouldn’t be there.

He went out. Walking across the Boys’ Yard towards the gate, he thought of a plan: when he got to the gate, he’d run — tear away like blazes down the hill and hope he could make it home before Billy jumped him. But for some reason he didn’t run. He walked past the elm to the gate and looked across at Billy, who dropped his stick and stood up. Jamie had a strange feeling that all this had happened before, and there was nothing he could do about it. He didn’t feel afraid any more, just lonely, like that time when he was little and his mom had forgotten to pick him up at the babysitter’s.

“Come over here,” Billy said.

Jamie hesitated. Somewhere nearby, a whisper in the trees, the voice said,
It’s all right
.

Clutching his drawing, Jamie crossed the road.

“What’s that?” Billy said, scowling at the tube in his hand.

“My drawing. Indians.”

Billy looked at him. Not at his nose this time, but at him. There was something sleepy in his dark eyes, and bright too, as if he were peeping out of a fog.

“Show it to me.”

Jamie unrolled his drawing on the grass. Billy got down beside him, on his knees. There was a hotness coming off him, as if he’d been running.

“These Indians are attacking the wagons,” Jamie said. “It’s because the white people are taking their land from them. This one with the red feather, that’s Crazy Horse.”

“Crazy Horse,” Billy said. The name sounded hard and queer, stuck somehow in his throat.

“He was the greatest Indian leader. He was a friend of Geronimo. They used to live around here, a long time ago.”

For several seconds neither of them spoke as they looked at the picture.

“I’m an Indian,” Billy said.

Jamie went on staring at the picture, but he wasn’t seeing it any more. He was feeling the still, blank space where Billy’s words had gone, like a pebble when you dropped it off the bridge and it hits the water and disappears. But the rings are there, spreading out, and something else: a feeling in your body.

“My mother’s Indian. She don’t like me to tell anybody.”

“I won’t tell.”

They looked at the picture.

“This is a good drawing,” Billy said.

“I’m gonna put more Indians in.”

“Scalps?”

“Yeah. I could show them scalping somebody.”

Jamie rolled up the drawing and they got to their feet. He was looking right at Billy now, seeing the black hair that came down in a mop almost to his black eyes, and the skin that looked brown, tanned maybe, and maybe a bit dirty, and his heart was going again, under his T-shirt, but it wasn’t because he was afraid. It was because this was all new. He was somewhere he’d never been: he was with an Indian.

8

A TUESDAY: BURNT GRASS
under a cloudless sky. The Grade Thirteen boys plucked lacrosse sticks from a cardboard drum and played a game — shirts versus skins — between the towering white H’s guarding the ends of the football field. In the distance, across waves of goldenrod and the low darkness of a marsh, rose the faultless green — an Island Eden — of the golf course. Joe flung a long pass to Bobby Merchant and remembered he’d forgotten to study for his French test. Later, he
skipped his shower and walked quickly through the crowded halls to Mr. Kay’s room. He’d bone up before the others arrived.

Flooded with indirect sunlight, the first-floor classroom held thirty desks of blond wood. Along the walls hung framed posters depicting the Place Pigalle, the Eiffel Tower, and the ruins of the Roman theatre at Orange. At the front, Mr. Kay stood with his back to the blackboard, talking to someone sitting at the desk before him. The teacher was speaking French, pushing out the sounds with an exaggerated earnestness in a big, hollow voice. He wore a short-sleeved nylon shirt, a narrow wool tie, and black horn-rims whose bridge he kept nudging up his nose with the middle finger of his right hand.

She sat in the first desk of the window row: a girl in a light-green sleeveless dress, her slender right arm lying on the desktop, motionless except for a small stroking movement of her fingers on the wood. As Joe flung his gym bag under his seat, the teacher offered a bland hello and the girl turned to glance at him. The shock hit him before he knew what the shock was for, as if his body had recognized her before he did, recognized the face whose details he had pretty much forgotten, under the thick bangs.

He opened his book and stared into it, seeing nothing. At the front of the room, their conversation ran on. Joe looked up again and saw, on her cheek, that pale dusted whiteness, a burn, or a birthmark: the brand of the evening on the river.

She, too, was speaking French. He thought she sounded French, the way she rounded the sounds, savouring them before she sped them on their way with protruding lips. Mr. Kay’s wide, grinning face — at the moment it seemed an overgrown boy’s face — had reddened.

Joe turned a page. But it was all a charade now. He might have been an actor pretending to read while he waited to say his next lines. He kept looking up at her, at her dress cut in a low square at the back, exposing tanned, ideal skin; at the thin silver bangle she toyed with at her wrist. Her light voice had a trace of something low in it, an
impure chest note that thrilled and obscurely frightened him. He listened to their conversation with dry mouth, half-resenting her arrival: he had been happy with his life.

What were they talking about? Though he’d always done well in French, he was lost before the effortless flow of their talk: it was something about France, he thought, or was it Switzerland? Something about picnics and cheese and the price of coffee — or was it cafés? In the street, Vern Melling’s truck rumbled by, carrying a small mountain of fly-circled trash, and from a juniper bush below the window a bee floated up, testing the flow of cooler air along the glass.

The rest of the class began to arrive, a hubbub of voices and flung gym bags and books slapped down on desks. The girl in the light-green dress looked around, curiously. She did not see — though Joe saw — how in the aisle behind her Elaine Brown hugged her books to her chest and directed a tolerant smile at the interloper who had stolen her desk.

“Bien!” Mr. Kay said loudly: their signal to quiet down. “Alors mes amis,” he said. A book dropped, and through the open window the bee floated in, drifting upwards towards the fluorescent lights.

The teacher discovered Elaine, waiting.

“Ah Elaine! Ton banc!”

“C’est votre banc?” the girl said. Silence was spreading through the room as the others became aware of her.

The girl started to rise, but Elaine said she was happy to sit at the back. “You’re sure?” the girl said. In her voice was a hint of laughter, as if she were secretly enjoying this bit of confusion. Hugging her books, Elaine walked to the back, smiling a prim, self-congratulatory smile.

Speaking in French, Mr. Kay introduced the new girl: Anna Macrimmon. The name sounded odd to Joe, a patch of rocky land amidst the smooth lawns of the French. She had turned to the class and Joe looked again into her face, drinking every detail: the birthmark on her cheek, the faint Asiatic slope of the eyes, a pale, unusual
green under her dark and well-defined brows. Her bobbed hair with its thick bangs gave her a tomboyish look, he thought.

“Bonjour,” she said to the whole class.

One or two ragged bonjours answered back.

“Non, non,” Mr. Kay admonished. “Encore! Plus fort!”

They managed it better the second time. Joe was chagrined, on her behalf. Their welcome must have seemed childish to her, he thought, like something in grade school.

Mr. Kay handed out scrap paper. The test was about to begin. The teacher’s brogues squeaked as he paced slowly at the front of the room, reading out,
en anglais
, the sentences they were to translate. “He will have come. You ought to stay. She will have been there.” Pens scratched and tapped in the pauses. Anna Macrimmon tilted her head to the side as she studied what she had written. The wing of her hair fell forward, and she tucked it back behind her ear. He saw that her ear stuck out a little, a flaw of sorts. Above, the bee followed the fluorescent lights and then abruptly glided down to touch the poster of the Roman theatre at Orange: the golden ruins under their blue, savage sky.

In small groups, the students of 13
A
walked along a sidewalk white as bone and as straight as a runway, between the carports and burnt lawns of the new housing development known as the Shade Survey. Every year, Mr. Mann invited his senior history class to lunch at his home. Joe trudged along beside Smiley, who was telling some story about how he and Freddie Farmer had been nearly killed on the weekend. They’d been driving along the Johnsonville Highway, going almost ninety, Smiley said, and it wasn’t only dark, it was foggy, and suddenly they’d noticed the road curving away to the right and they were headed to the left, into God only knew what. “Shit, man,” Smiley said, and a great happiness shone in his deep-set eyes, “I thought we’d bought it.”

But a lane had appeared in the headlights. They’d run over a gate and smashed the grill on Freddie Farmer’s dad’s car, but otherwise no damage done.

Thirty yards ahead, Anna Macrimmon was walking between Liz McVey and Elaine Brown. Joe caught the back of her head, vanishing and reappearing among intervening bodies. Even when he lost sight of her, or looked elsewhere — at the sidewalk, or into Smiley’s tiny eyes, racooned with fatigue — he could sense her presence, a peculiar, magnetic darkness in the blazing sun. He had failed his French test, and had an intimation that worse lay ahead. His lack of a shower had left him sweating, a disaster when he considered that he was also wearing his red-and-white-checked sports shirt. The cloth was cheap, and stank as his sweat reacted with the dye.

They went up the narrow drive between high cedar hedges, past the plaque that told them that Abraham Shade, the founder of Attawan, had built this house in 1823. Then the house itself appeared, a long, low cottage with unshuttered windows, surrounded by tall locusts. Patches of sun trembled on its walls of whitewashed plaster. The blue door stood open.

They sat on the parched front lawn, under the huge, arthritic locusts, while Mann talked to them with his back to the valley of the Shade. The teacher — Joe’s mentor and favourite — was a slim, rather short man, his heavy eyelids pouched with melancholy, his thinning white hair combed forward in points like Julius Caesar. He spoke more quietly than any of their teachers and, on the whole, said less. Yet there was something in his slow, abraded speech that held them, a kind of casual sincerity, as though it would be impossible for him to say anything but what he actually thought. He was retiring at the end of the year.

Mann spoke of Abraham Shade and his house. Behind him, the valley floated in late-summer sun. Details were visible, miniaturized by distance: the webbing of the
CN
trestle and, glimpsed through its stone legs, the brown water of the Shade, easing towards the sheer
line of the dam’s edge. Beyond, the Bridge Street bridge and the backs of the downtown stores seemed at once to move and to remain fixed above the metallic glint of the rapids. But what predominated was the vast, ecstatic light itself, a presence that seemed to lean off the still-hidden reaches of autumn.