The Island Walkers (54 page)

“So, you found anything else?”

Alf shook his head, reluctant to talk more. His failure over the weeks to find work was far worse than being fired. He had once thought that any fool could find work, but he seemed to have come up against something impenetrable. Perhaps it was some flaw in himself he’d never sensed until now, or perhaps fate dealt in conspiracies: he was caught in the crosshairs of events, unable to escape their deadly focus. The effect was to make him feel foolish, unnerved, and yes, inexplicably embarrassed. He had recently developed the habit of putting his hand over his mouth as he talked — as if he were casually scratching his upper lip. In fact, he was hiding the depths — the rotting, untrustworthy depths — his words came from. He was hiding from his own suspicion that he was lying, without quite knowing whether he was.

“How you’d like to work for me?”

A brief laugh rasped in his throat. Doyle’s offer seemed a bitter joke.

“I could give you sixty a week. Not much, but better than you’re getting on unemployment insurance.”

“And what would I do?”

“You’d help me organize this place —”

Alf looked at him in disbelief.

Doyle nodded. “There’s a lot of people on side already. It’s the closing of the hosiery mill. They realize just how little they mean to these sons of bitches. There’ve been some changes with us too. We’ve got more money. I’ve got some girls to help me. There’ll be four of us. We’ll visit people at home — wherever we can find them. In the evenings, mostly. Put on a real blitz.”

Alf said nothing. The last time Doyle had played this game, several people had lost their jobs. He felt he was being asked to live his worst mistakes over again. Yes, time had circled back on itself, and the evil was here again, in Doyle’s dim room. It brought back memories of another room, the sailboats on the wall.

He went on smoking, staring at the labyrinth of pink roses in the filthy, wornout rug.

“You don’t want me,” he said at last.

“Why not?”

Again Alf shook his head. Given how he felt about himself these days, the answer seemed self-evident. But at the same time, he felt in capable of expressing it. Expressing it meant confession, and he could no more confess than fly. His guilt had become a dark weight his body had accustomed itself to, like a tree growing around a buried axe-head. He went on staring at the dilapidated rug, his cigarette growing a drooping worm of ash.

“You’re worth fifty votes to me,” Doyle said, butting his cigarette. “Maybe a hundred.”

Alf looked up at him, hardly trusting his ears. But the organizer was studying him gravely.

“People will follow you,” Doyle said. “They know you were treated unfairly.”

“That’s no reason to follow anybody.”

“No, but they trust you. You’re a sort of leader to them.”

“Oh fucking hell,” Alf said. “I wasn’t born yesterday.”

Doyle went on watching him, through smoke.

“You’re out of date,” Alf said bitterly, “if it was ever true. Which I doubt. I’ve fallen off the table.”

Cigarette smoke drifted along the sloping walls and ceilings. In the street, a fire-truck’s engine rattled. “So what do you think?” Doyle demanded, after a while.

Looking away to his left, Alf saw the sunlit asphalt far below, and remembered the old man he’d seen in the woods, the man who had come trudging along the trail that day, weeping. He saw again the black coat opened to reveal the red slit of the tie; heard again his sorrowful howling; saw him stop among the trees to blow his nose, then go on. It was as vivid to him as if it were all happening again, as if he were there in the grey mild air of the empty woods, with his back to the tree. Except that this time, grief — who knew where it had come from — welled up through
him
. He felt tears come, and turned his face aside.

After a few seconds, he composed himself and looked back to Doyle. The organizer had averted his eyes. In the smoke-layered dimness of the room, his pitted face gave the impression of great age, as though he had come through centuries of lifetimes. To Alf, Doyle seemed somehow connected to the old man in the woods, as if the organizer were thinking of him too. Alf felt a stab of affection for the other man; he hardly knew him, and yet — here they were in this strange knot of intimacy, more intimate, in a way, than anything he had shared for weeks with his own wife.

Late the next day, Alf stood across from Margaret as she sorted grimly through a heap of children’s jeans. Through the vast barn of the Johnsonville discount store, tangled piles of clothes had been dumped out on long rows of trestle tables, under the arctic glare of fluorescent lights. There were suits and dresses as well, their hangers squeaking incessantly as people shoved them along the racks. He and Margaret had not come here in the old days when he’d had a
wage, and he sensed it was a burden on her, to shop alongside the kind of people who frequented this wasteland of bargains. Not far away stood an Indian woman with long, greasy hair. Under her pink, slack-necked sweatshirt her vast breasts fell away to either side. She wore bedroom slippers, rimmed with fur, and brown slacks with a stain like dried mucilage down one thigh. Yet there was something proud in her carriage, frowning and royally disdainful, as she flicked through the mess of clothes.

He pawed through the trousers and from time to time held up a pair, which Margaret dismissed with a sharp glance and shake of her head. He felt, almost, as if she were dismissing him as well, for the pretty pass he’d brought them to. For a couple of weeks now, she had seemed short with him. He had tried to blame it on her time of month, but it had gone on too long for that. He worried that she’d found out about Lucille. It seemed possible: probably half the town knew about Lucille.

They paid for a pair of jeans and went out into the menthol brightness of the evening to the Biscayne. He asked Margaret if she’d like an ice cream. “We can’t afford it, can we?” she said dryly, and this, too, was a jab at him. But this evening he would not take an insult. He drove to the Dairy Queen and bought two small vanillas. Heading home, he took a longer, more scenic route along unpaved backroads, past ditches where shoots of new green flamed among cans and papers. They were mostly silent, turning their ice creams under the steady lathing of their tongues, burrowing into the parallel solitudes that had become their habitual form of being together, comfortable after a fashion. On the horizon, the sun had begun to sink, filling the car with a blood-red light. Glancing over, it seemed to him that her face had grown younger. Suddenly he felt a tremendous hope — and in the same moment, launching himself into its wide air, he felt himself sinking — afraid of how she would react to his news.

But it was too late. He had already spoken, “I’ve got a job.”

Looking over at her again he saw that her gaze had remained fixed on the road, as if in a trance. On her chin was a spot of ice cream, like a white mole.

“Margaret? I’ve got a —”

“I heard you.”

She looked at him. The sun’s red light burned over one eye. He saw he had kindled nothing in her, nothing like the wildfire of fear and hope he felt. It was as if she had lost the meaning of the word “job,” its aura of safety. And yet there was something helpless about her too, as if she had been cut adrift. He saw she was alone as he was. Something in him reached out to her.

“Do you remember last summer — that Irish fellow who came around to organize a union?”

“No.”

“Doyle. Malachi Doyle.”

“When all the people were fired,” she said.

He bit his lip. “He’s actually not a bad fellow.”

“You’re working with a union,” she said, her voice flat with disapproval. She was looking out the windshield again, into the thickening light. “After all unions have done for you.” She had been irrational on the subject of unions since’ 49. Even more than he did, he knew, she blamed his involvement with the union for the failure, later on, of his housebuilding business.

“It’s a
job
,” he said. “I’ll be making sixty a week.”

She blew out dismissively.

“What’s the matter with a union?” he said. “They’re not perfect, but they’ve done a lot of good for people.”

“Yes, like Pete.”

“Goddamn you, woman!” he roared to the road. Ice cream was running over his hands, over the steering wheel. He managed to get the window down and fling out his cone. “Goddamn you,” he said. This was more than a job to him. The last couple of days, knowing he would work with Doyle, he’d begun to feel like
himself again. But this feeling was weak, and here she was killing it.

They were silent for a while. The sun had disappeared. In the darkening blue, intersecting jet contrails made a cross of St. Andrew’s.

“I can help those people,” he said, struggling for calm. “The people who were fired. If we can get the union in, we can negotiate their jobs back.” Doyle had promised him this: it was one of the main reasons he’d taken up the organizer’s offer. He felt it would be a way of making up, at least a little, for what he’d done. But she seemed unmoved. She went on staring out the windshield. “And anyway, it’s not forever,” he said. “If the union goes in, I’ll get
my
job back.”

“According to
Doyle
,” she said, with infinite sarcasm.

“Margaret, you’ve got to trust me!”

“I’ve trusted you well enough,” she said. She was sitting with the remains of her cone, like a miniature version of itself forgotten in her fingers, looking straight ahead. “I trusted you with Carrie Crean.”

“What?”

“I think you heard me. Or are you going to pretend you don’t know her name?”

She was looking at him now, her black eyes glazed with tears.

“I know about her, Alf. I know what you’ve been doing.”

He steered blindly, hardly seeing the road. That she had come so near to the truth, without actually striking it, made him feel like a bullet had singed his hair. It was more shocking, in a way, than being hit. Somehow she had struck on the essential fact of his betrayal. He had not seen Lucille for months, but his sense of guilt was still raw, and she had put her finger right on it.

“Bastard,” she said, “bastard.”

He had never heard her use that word. The runt cone was melting over her fingers. A small muscle in her face twitched. He felt as if a craziness had broken out in the car and infected him. He was a hair’s breadth from driving them into the ditch.

“Stop the car,” she told him. “I want out.”

He kept driving, in a kind of panic.

“I’m going to be sick,” she said.

Even before he had completely stopped, she opened the door and climbed out, stumbling a little in her flats on the gravel. They were beside a kind of paddock. There was a metal gate, which she climbed awkwardly, her skirt riding up to expose the white straps of her garters. Beyond was a flat, green area spotted with cow dung, and the ruined foundations of a barn. She walked towards its caved-in doorway as if she lived there.

As he clambered over the gate, she went round the corner of the ruins, out of sight. When he finally caught up to her she was standing stock-still, looking at a mass of cattle in the corner of the compound, under the skeleton of a dead elm. They were looking at her from their furred, dirty-white faces, lowering their heads and backing against each other nervously.

“Come on,” he said. He took her arm, but she shook him off and went on staring at the cattle, with her head down, almost like them, as if the key, the secret, of her life lay there, among their broad hooves squishing in the mud, their wild, pink-rimmed eyes.

“Margaret, there was never anything between me and Carrie Crean.”

“You’re lying,” she said numbly to the cattle.

“I’m not lying.”

In the corner, a few of the cattle were drifting from the herd, lowing and moving towards them. The second time he took her arm she allowed him to lead her off, in her mud-clogged pumps.

They climbed the gate. But when he opened the car door for her she turned to him, her huge eyes searching his. He told her he loved her. He did his best to look back at her candidly. But he felt she was reading his guilt in his face, and much, much more than his guilt: her own loss was there, it seemed, her own hapless wandering was there, as if she were no longer sure what his eyes meant, or his mouth. She no longer knew him.

48

LATE THE NEXT AFTERNOON
he went back to Doyle’s hotel room. Doyle had been joined by two of his fellow workers, Shirley and Deirdre, who were to help with the organizing. Mary Carr, Alf’s mate from the sweater mill was there too, as a volunteer. The little Newfoundlander walked up and down the soiled carpet, exultant at being the centre of attention, jabbing at the air with her cigarette while she gave the names of possible supporters to Doyle. The organizer sat on the edge of his bed, writing her suggestions down while he squinted through the smoke from his own cigarette, stuck like a white peg in the corner of his mouth. The air was full of smoke, blue ranges and uplands of smoke, drifting and slowly dissolving.

Alf had his old chair by the window. With each name Mary came up with he grew more uncomfortable, taking hard drags on his own cigarette and looking bleakly out into the sunlit street. On the sidewalk, two women had stopped to talk. The world outside seemed a haven of sunshine and normality. But here, in this room, they seemed to be up to something else: an activity of smoke and shadows, conspiratorial, illicit.