The Island Walkers (41 page)

Then Lucille came down the hall. Her tight grey T-shirt had moulded to the abrupt mound of her breasts, showing the wrinkles in her bra. With a lightness like happiness, the arrow of desire fled through his chest.

She twisted open the lock.

“Trying to keep me out?”

She cast him a hard glance and began to clear the kitchen table. Plates and glasses crashed into the sink. She turned on a tap.

“You okay?”

She did not answer. He found a towel and dried for her. He had no idea what he’d done, but his guilt was on a hair-trigger these days. Penitent, cagey, he put up a glass.

“What is it?” he said, smiling.

She set a plate in the rack and stared straight ahead of her.

“I want to go out.”

“Out —”

“You know, like people do. I’d like to get in that car of yours and go —” She waved her hand airily. Soapy water flew onto his cheek. “Out for a drive.”

“We’d be seen,” he said gently.

“Maybe we should be,” she said, attacking a pan. “I think I’d
like
to be seen.”

“But there’s Margaret,” he said. He spoke his wife’s name warily, hating to bring her into it. He never talked about Margaret with Lucille. It had seemed a way of protecting them both.

Lucille shrugged.

He did not love Lucille Boileau. At that moment, watching her shrug off Margaret, he half-hated her. But he wanted her — with a fury of disappointment that made his mouth dry.

“We can talk about it,” he said.

“What’s to talk about? I get my coat, we go out.”

Her eyes burned on his now, furiously challenging though at the same time there was something misfocused in them, something that missed him, by a hair.

“But if Margaret finds out —” He smiled again, placating. Why should he ruin his marriage for the sake of their pleasant afternoons? He was pained that she couldn’t see this.

“Queen Margaret,” she said, mocking. She studied him a moment. “You know, if all it is is sex, maybe you should pay me. You sneak over here, we go bang-bang, you pay me. A lot more honest, eh?”

“Lucille —” He felt she was tearing something valuable, in her anger.

“I’ve done it, you know. Out West there: Winnipeg, Edmonton. The good Johns of Winnipeg!”

Those black eyes held his.

“You’re shocked,” she said, with satisfaction.

“No,” he said. “Yes.” His face had gone hot.

She was still staring at him, darkly triumphant, as if she’d cut herself on purpose. “I started when I was thirteen. I can always start again.”

“Don’t,” he said.

“Don’t what?”

“Hurt yourself.”

The look in her eyes changed slowly from triumph to mockery. She began to laugh, hoarsely and without joy. Then stopped.

“You kill me,” she said. She tossed a sponge into the sink. “You don’t want me to hurt myself. I wonder why that is. Do you love me?”

Helpless, he met her eyes shining with sarcasm. All her life, its desperation and defiant survival, seemed revealed in her face, daring him to gainsay it. Below her lower lip was a small scar in the shape
of the letter C. She had told him it was from a skating accident. Now he doubted it. He doubted everything he knew about her.

And she knew he didn’t love her: it was her trump card.

“I care for you,” he said.

She snorted in disgust and walked away from him, towards the bare beige wall mapped with cracks. On a calendar he saw a photo of a jet fighter, silver on blue, like a holy medal.

She turned back to him, “You see, I’ve been here before. Except most of the others — I don’t mean out West — I mean here in town —” She stopped and looked at him again. He felt he was being reconsidered, judged. She said, “I came back here to start over, you know. No more Johns, just good honest boys. That’s what I was going to have — good honest boys.” A cold hostility lit her eyes. He felt neither good nor honest. “They at least
thought
they loved me,” she said. “At least they said they did. And who knows, maybe they did. I’m really not so bad, you know.”

“No,” he managed. Gazing for a moment out the window, a smile of pain twisting her face, she seemed not to hear him. An icicle fell, passing her head like a dagger.

“Then do you know what happens?” she said, turning back to him. “Do you know what
always
happens? They leave me!” Grinning, she flung out her hand; it fell and struck her thigh. “They up and leave me, all of them. Do you know why that is?”

He shook his head and stood waiting. Everything he thought of saying seemed trivial.

And besides, he knew that he, too, would leave her. He felt there was something missing in her: an absence where, for a man, there could be no rest.

“If I can do anything,” he said finally. This seemed so pathetic he dared not meet her eyes.

“I told you,” she said. “You can take me for a ride.”

He thought he would take her straight into the country, where they were less likely to be seen. But she insisted on a town route, she needed cigarettes from a particular store that “gave her a deal,”
she said. Glumly obedient, wondering what this “deal” was, he took the Biscayne across the Bridge Street bridge and up Shade, then over to Station. She raised her broad face to the windshield, in a show of defiance. She was
going
to have a good time, a pleasant, normal time, or at least look like she was. Her eyes like black glass.

An old man was shuffling up Station Hill. Bent at the waist, so that his face peered straight down at the sidewalk, he planted his cane in front of him, then caught up to it with shuffling baby steps. He travelled miles this way, like a snail: Ralph O’Grady.

“Give him a ride,” Lucille demanded.

“He’s all right.”

“No, stop!”

He stopped. He’d always felt it was only a matter of time until his secret came out, though he never imagined it coming out on an afternoo in spin with Ralph O’Grady. But he felt helpless to resist. He knew he was going to leave her, was already guilty about
that
. Guilty, too, about getting her fired. He thought about the revelation she’d once worked the streets. He felt he owed her something, for the life she had had. But all these reasons were pathetic, weren’t they? Put into the scales against even a featherweight of love, they were nothing.

And too, he had not yet given up on his afternoon. In half an hour, in an hour, they might be back at her house, in her swaying bed. All he needed was fifteen minutes with her, even five. Just looking at her in her packed jeans, as she went over to talk to Ralph, made him want her. Maybe he did love her. In bed, she had met him as no woman ever had, with an appetite equal to his, even greater than his. At certain moments they seemed to burn the world up, to replace it with something entirely their own. He was grateful to her for that, grateful to her for the pleasure of knowing her naked: her strong, thick body beautiful to him, as if life itself had taken her form and offered itself to him — those pooled, darkly budded breasts — in her swaying bed, each Tuesday afternoon.

He watched as she brought Ralph to the car. The old man was so bent she had to turn him around and ease him, bum first, into the back seat. Ralph cracked his head on the top of the door but hardly seemed to notice. “Oopsies,” Lucille said.

They continued up Station Hill. In the rear-view, Alf saw the old man’s twisted head and red eyes leering from under his cap. He wondered if Ralph knew where he was.

Lucille asked Ralph how he was doing.

“Oh, can’t complain.”

“At least the weather’s warm, anyways.”

“Is it?”

“We take you to your place then?”

“Who’s this?” Ralph said. In the mirror, Alf saw the old man squinting at him.

“This is Alf Walker. You know him!”

“Oh sure, I know him!”

The caved-in mouth grinned.

The Biscayne passed the railway station, where pigeons dotted the tiled roof like stones, and crossed the humpbacked bridge into the North End. Lucille had turned sideways, her arm crooked over the back of the seat as she chatted with Ralph. Alf saw how one breast climbed higher than the other, under her wrinkled T-shirt. He was stalking her, he couldn’t help it, even here where every window seemed to watch, where his reputation and even his marriage had perhaps already begun to unravel, all he could think about, really, was getting his hands on her. You pathetic bugger, he thought. He remembered sharks he’d seen once in a photo, swirling ecstatically in water reddened with their own blood.

After they’d dropped Ralph off in front of his little bungalow, they drove to the Junction, to Hank Hays’ Lunch and Gas. Lucille strode briskly in front of the car, her head up like royalty, and disappeared in the door with its slanting Orange Crush sign. When a grey station wagon pulled into the pumps, Alf averted his face,
praying that Lucille would stay inside until John Henson drove away. But in a few moments the stooped, grinning figure of the Anglican sexton leaned over to wave at him through the windshield. Alf had no choice but to roll down the window.

“Can you believe this weather?”

“Not really.”

John Henson smiled his fixed, wincing smile. He always looked as if something sharp were poking him from inside.

The door with its Orange Crush handle opened and Lucille emerged behind John.

“I’m just giving Lucille Boileau a ride,” Alf explained too soon. John went on grinning, clearly not understanding. Lucille passed in front of the hood and John glanced at her. But he didn’t really take note until she climbed in beside Alf. Then the sexton’s head came down and he peered at the woman in the black leather motorcycle jacket.

“I don’t believe we’ve met,” Lucille said.

“Hah! Well!”

John was grinning at full wattage now, showing tortured gums. He was never at ease around women, except perhaps very old ones, where he got to play the gentleman with a gallant hint of all the risque things he would do if they were younger.

“Alfie, introduce us.”

Alf had no choice. Lucille and John’s clasped hands shook in front of his face. He didn’t doubt that John knew who Lucille was, even if he’d never spoken to her. Every man in town knew who Lucille was.

“I’m just giving her a lift,” Alf said, trying again.

“We’re going for a little spin,” Lucille said brightly, ruffling Alf’s hair.

“Right,” John said, his eyes bulging. He jerked up his thumb like an umpire calling
out
at home plate: “I’m just filling up!”

They drove away. A slow freight was drawing through the level crossing, each boxcar floating with majestic, drumming grace behind
the barrier. Far up the tracks, the invisible engine wailed. Alf asked for a cigarette and she lit it for him in her mouth before passing it over. He considered: there was no predicting what John Henson would make of seeing him with Lucille. It would be a test of his Christianity at the very least.

They followed Danson’s Lane to the old one-room schoolhouse, now a residence, and swung north among thawing fields streaked with black earth, low ranges of dirty snow, rivers of glittering ice-water. High behind them, the sun of early March poured its steep brightness onto the land. Smoking, Alf began to relax. Light flickered through the woodlots, and in a muddy paddock a black horse broke suddenly into a trot, throwing its head as if tossing invisible reins.

He thought again of what she had told him earlier. In his mind’s eye, he saw an Indian girl in a skimpy dress, or maybe stovepipe jeans, grinning from the curb while men like him looked her over. The thought put a cutting loneliness through him, and yet he was fascinated. He glanced at Lucille. Her face tilted back a little, her eyes gazed almost dreamily up the road as it unfurled beyond the smoke from her filtered Caporal.

On a post, a sparrow hawk watched the Biscayne speed past, a momentary irrelevance. A high mountain of cumulus, nearly invisible in the north, slowing changed shape.

By the time they reached the village of Cairn, her silence had turned gloomy. Nothing he said could rouse her. She smoked fiercely, looking straight ahead, ignoring his remarks. He drove through the back streets to a place where a pond spread towards a cedar bush. The pond was still covered with ice and snow, perforated by a few dead trees. He stopped and rolled down the window. A woodpecker was tapping somewhere, with an irregular, bright exactness. The bird was in its own world, with something to do, work that wholly occupied it. But they were in the smoke-filled car, trapped in a kind of vacuum.

“What’s the matter?” he said. He reached along the back of the seat to touch her hair. A quarter to three: he felt their afternoon
might be salvaged yet. “You’re so beautiful,” he said. He meant it.

She gave him a sideways glance and a chill went through him. There was such hostility in her look that he felt instantly attacked. At the same time, she did not seem to really see him. Her look was blind, as if he might have been any man sitting there. As if he was merely a body.

They drove back to town by the Galt Highway. The sense of oppression in the car had deepened. It was as if some terrible thing had happened between them, and now it was impossible to speak without calling up the terrible thing itself. But what had happened? A look, a few words. No, the atmosphere of doom could not be explained by that look or those words, and yet somehow the look and the words had released it, like a spell.

She smoked steadily, with an impatience that verged on fury. She had to get back to the house, she said, Billy would be home soon. He suggested they still had time to go to her place, but even he could see the afternoon had all but slipped away. At the corner of Bridge and Willard she suddenly demanded to be let out. But when he stopped the car, she went on sitting, staring straight ahead of her, and it seemed to him that she was waiting for something from him: waiting with a stubborn, defiant anger to receive from him something he could not imagine, but which she seemed to believe she was owed.

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