The Island Walkers (36 page)

“Can I sit down, Alf?”

“Sure, Freddie. Make yourself comfortable.”

Freddie sat with an odd formality, looking as pleased as if he’d just been invited into Buckingham Palace. His canny little eyes shone and his big lips hung open in a silent laugh.

“So how you keeping, Freddie?”

“Can’t complain.”

He had a rasping, fractured voice, as if each word was coated in phlegm.

Freddie said nothing more, but sat smiling at Alf as if this were all the conversation he needed — as if the most pleasant thing two people could do was sit at a little table and look at each other.

“Doing any work these days?”

“Oh yes.”

“Over at Kellys’?”

“That’s right.”

Alf looked down at his beer. It was hard to bear the relentless focus of those watery eyes, that smile with its unguarded friendliness and innocence.

For some time they drank in silence. The Leafs got a goal and a few men roared while others looked up indifferently. A snow-plough rumbled in the street, bone on bone. Freddie said, “You found your brother.”

He was grinning his crumpled grin at Alf, as if Alf would know exactly what he was talking about.

“My brother?” Alf said, wondering. Surely Freddie must mean Jamie, the night they’d found him up the river, with Lucille Boileau’s boy. But how did Freddie know about that?

“You dove down and got him,” Freddie said, beaming.

“I dove,” Alf said, wondering. Then he remembered. One summer afternoon in the early Thirties, he and his brother had gone swimming at Bannerman’s Number One dam. And Joe had disappeared below the apron. Alf hadn’t been worried, not at first. There was a place below the apron where you could slip between the timbers and come up in a sort of leaky cave, behind the damface — he had shown it to Joe himself. But after a few minutes, Joe hadn’t reappeared so Alf dove to find him. And yes, his brother was there, in the dim cold cave streaked with the brown light of the Atta. He was sitting hugging his knees and he was crying in a muffled way, his mouth on his knee. Had he panicked? Alf didn’t know. It had taken him a long time to calm Joe down. Finally, their heads had broken the surface together.

Freddie must have been there, standing on the apron, or on the stepped cement wall to the west: a thirty-year-old man-boy in his old-fashioned striped bathing suit that covered most of his body, gaping at them as they swam to shore. Perhaps Freddie hadn’t known about the cave behind the damface, perhaps he thought Alf had rescued Joe from the bottom.

And Freddie had kept the memory fresh. Kept his admiration fresh.
You found your brother
. As if their slick heads had only just now burst from the icy, spring-fed hole below the dam.

“You remember that?” Alf said.

“Oh yes! You went far down.”

“Not so far,” Alf said. “He was all right, really.” He did not have the energy to explain.

They drank for a while without speaking. Why had Joe been crying? Some hurt, some slight he would never understand. Alf felt he had spent most of his youth looking after his younger brother.
Make sure nothing happens to Joe
: his mother’s battle cry. He had
pulled Joe out of fights, he had fought fights for him, he had taken him everywhere, up the river with his friends when he didn’t really want Joe tagging along with his manic gaze that was always broadcasting the announcement that he was twice as ready as anybody for whatever adventure they had planned. At times Alf had hated him, his mother’s favourite. Once, he had pushed him out of a tree and, once, he had jammed a pea-shooter down his throat out of sheer spite. Mostly, though, he had done the job assigned him. He could never remember having an ordinary, relaxed time with his brother, because he was always looking out for him.

Yet he had loved Joe too, as he discovered one rainy night in the summer of 1944, when his sergeant had taken him aside in the barn where they were camped near the Dutch border to tell him his brother, who was serving in a different unit, had been killed. It had seemed impossible. Joe had had so many near-misses over the years, in cars, on the river, in hockey games, and barroom fights, that Alf had begun to think his brother was untouchable, a miracle-kid. Once — Joe couldn’t have been more than fifteen — he’d climbed across the Shade on the underside of the
CN
trestle, manoeuvring among the black girders far above the water. Alf hadn’t been there, but he’d heard. Why did you do it? he had asked. And Joe had said (Alf had never forgotten this), “When I think of something, I have to do it. Even if it’s crazy. I can’t sleep unless I do it …”

Alf’s sergeant, his dirty face shining in the light of the hurricane lamp, told him that Joe had been napping in a ditch when a landmine had gone off beneath him. Apparently, he’d rolled over on it in his sleep. Alf left the barn and stood in the rain. Some time later, his sergeant found him and led him back to shelter.

“I wasn’t always able to bring him back,” Alf said.

“No,” Freddie said.

“There are people you can’t bring back. When you murder them, they stay dead.”

Freddie shook his head: it was the sad truth.

Alf drank. He felt they understood each other perfectly.

Freddie finished his glass and stood up.

“Time for me to go upstairs, Alf.”

He watched Freddie move off among the tables with his shuffling steps, nodding here and there in his courtly way. Across the room, a bottle broke with a pop and someone shouted, “Attaboy, Coach.” When Alf looked again at the table where Freddie had sat before joining him, he saw that someone else had taken it. The man was wearing an old-fashioned tweed cap with a flat top and stubby visor. He had twisted in his chair to signal the waiter, so that Alf could not see his face, but Alf instantly experienced a terrified elation, as if he were about to fly off a cliff.

The man turned in his chair and Alf saw the scrawny-handsome features, the girlishly fine skin, the nose bent from a fight, the blue eyes fixed on his with a wild, familiar merriment, as if he were enjoying his little surprise. He was wearing the heavy tweed suit he had bought in Johnsonville for the victory banquet, after the Stingers had won the provincial championship in 1938. As Alf watched transfixed, the man touched one hand to the knot of his maroon tie with a curious, suggestive delicacy.

Alf had stopped breathing. His brother had not aged a day in the twenty-one years since he’d last seen him. And it seemed to Alf that since then he’d only been hiding. Joe had found some secret place where no one would ever think of looking, where even time, somehow, had been fooled into passing him by. He looked no more than twenty, with his smooth skin flushed with rose. And there was mischief in his smile as if he were more than pleased with himself, and happy too. Happiness spread from him like the power and hope of youth itself, as if it were coming not just from him, but from all the young men who had ever lived. And this power flooded to Alf, engulfing him in a warm, calming tide. He started to rise from his chair — he wanted to go to Joe, to embrace him — and in that instant Joe was gone.

But the feeling remained, a sense of well-being that penetrated his whole body. He wanted to call out, Hey, it’s my brother! But he sat in a stupor, looking around the dim room where everything now
seemed to glow — men’s faces, and the flickering moon of the television, and the glasses in front of him, which seemed to contain a miraculous liquid, a distillation of yellow blossoms.

He had a craving for the depth and quiet of the night. At the door of the Men’s Beverage Room he looked back in wonder at the table where his brother had sat. Two other men occupied it now, two men in colourless jackets, talking to Sid Walters as he put down their beer. And with a new shock of wonder, Alf remembered that it had been in this very room where the victory banquet had been held, in the days when the Vimy House still clung to a kind of propriety. He tried to recall the room as it had been that night: the long tables covered with white cloths, the draped flags and picture of the new King, the championship cup displayed proudly at the head table. He remembered roast beef, a tedious speech by the mayor, but he couldn’t establish where Joe or he had been sitting.

Alf went on down the hall, conscious that his happiness was already fading. From the open door to Ladies and Escorts came a wave of laughter. It seemed to wrap his body, to pull him towards the room. “You don’t!” a woman cried. She was answered by another woman’s scandalized bray. The hotel cat lay curled on the desk. Its green eyes noted his passage indifferently, as if his body were of no more account than a movement in the air.

Realizing he needed to pee, he turned and went back down the hall. The stairs to the cellar washrooms were steep, and as he descended he experienced a moment of vertigo, as if the floor below him were exerting a magnetic pull. In the washroom he fell: landed on his back, on the floor of tiny white-and-black tiles in a puddle of what might have been urine. He scrambled to his feet immediately and for a moment stood gripping the edge of a sink. There was a mirror to his left, but he avoided looking at it.

He did his business in the ancient, foul-smelling urinal, where the porcelain was webbed with tiny cracks, and stood for some time afterwards, leaning his forehead on a cold, sweating pipe, aware of the
soaked seat of his trousers, of the ruins of his life. “You’re a fool,” he said, and with this pronouncement felt a little relief. “Just a bloody fool.” He wept a little, laughing at himself through his tears. In front of his face, the tan wall scribbled with graffiti somehow looked different than it had a moment before, the letters clearer. He supposed he’d been a fool all along, only like most fools, he hadn’t noticed.

In the hall outside, he saw a pair of woman’s legs in jeans coming down the stairs. She wore low black boots with silver studs and a blouse of grey, metallic-looking material. At her throat was a black choker with a cameo. Lucille Boileau. When she saw him, she broke into a grin. But it fell away as he went up to her and took her by the shoulders. When he bent to kiss her, he half-expected her to draw back or even to strike him, but in the last second before he closed his eyes he saw her own eyes narrow and darken, as she lifted her mouth to his.

30

SNOWFLAKES, ENDLESS SNOWFLAKES
came glittering into the light Margaret had left on over the back porch, burning with a steady faithfulness that reproached him. He washed his face at the kitchen sink, scrubbed at it with a dishtowel, then saw he’d put the stain of Lucille’s pink lipstick on the towel. He took the damp towel to the cellar and hid it under his workbench.

Climbing back up to the kitchen, he met Margaret in her dressing gown.

“Oh, it’s you.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“I wasn’t asleep. I’m worried about Joe. This snow.”

“Where is he?”

“He told you,” she said critically, studying him for a moment before she crossed to the window. Since he’d fought with Joe on New Year’s Eve, she’d seemed more distant, just like Joe himself: the civilized side of the family, the Selwoods, closing ranks against the barbarian Walkers. “He and Liz McVey were driving to Toronto. Some kind of concert.”

He watched her cup her hands on the glass and peer out, then turn to him.

“Are you all right?”

“I was just taking a towel downstairs. I got some grease on me, I was sponging it off —” He felt a need to explain everything, everything
but
.

There was an awkwardness between them, a mismatch of rhythms. He was standing at the top of the stairs, and felt frozen there as if he no longer had volition or reason to move. As if movement might betray him.

“Are the roads bad?”

“No, no. He’ll be fine.”

He bestirred himself, moving to the sink and taking down a glass, glad of the distraction. Yet again he had the feeling of being frozen in place, as if he had never been anywhere but here, watching the white rush of water from the tap, watching it splash and overflow his glass, sensing her gaze across the room.

The world seemed unreal, the glass in his hand both heavier and lighter than it really was. He felt he might drop it. As it touched his lips, he thought of Lucille Boileau, the dark mass of her hair spilling over his groin.

“He seems awfully serious about her,” she was saying. “I don’t know why he doesn’t bring her by. I wonder if he isn’t ashamed of us.”

“Ashamed?” he said, turning. He had hardly been listening.

She left the room. For a long time he remained motionless. Behind him, the tap dripped: he’d been meaning to fix it for weeks. The wind shrieked briefly under the door. He went back to the cellar
and took out the towel. It was dark with wetness, impossible to tell if the lipstick was gone. He hung it from a nail. Thoughts of Lucille Boileau kept coming back to him — the way she had undone her bra, her eyes fixed with mischievous triumph on his, as she knelt before him on her creaking rick of a bed. The memory of pleasure was in him, a pleasure of its own.

He bent to the space under his workbench and found the old metal tackle box that had belonged to his father. It opened easily, the tiered drawers revealing themselves like the terraces of a miniature garden. Each little compartment held lures: silver spoons with hooks and tiny beads; hand-carved wooden fish, their backs striped or spotted with yellow and brown paint, their clustered hooks tangled and rusting. One compartment was filled with various weights of sinkers, like little grey bombs, and with various sizes of hooks. There was a float, cleverly fashioned from a gull’s quill, its tip painted red. When his father slipped off Bannerman’s dam, the tackle box had remained on the cement ledge by the shore. Alf had left the contents just as they were.