The Island Walkers (6 page)

“We’d have our own place,” she said. Her fingertips were moving up and down his arm, brushing the blond hairs against his skin. “Our own
bedroom
.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Where we could … you know.”

Her eyelids dropped, and he glimpsed in marriage possibilities —a silky intimacy — that was more than they had known. They had not made love, not fully, not in the way he craved, and now, in the
webbed crotch of his swimsuit, flattened against the warm rock, things were beginning to happen.

“Tell me more,” he said, looking at her.

“Well,
you
know,” she blushed. He had run up against her natural modesty. When they made out in the Biscayne, she kept her eyes closed.

“You make it sound pretty good.”

“It would be good.” There was play in her gaze now, he had never known her to be so openly seductive.

“Why don’t you kiss me?”

Her mouth had never yielded such softness. All he could think of now was what her kiss promised for later, at the rapids. He kissed her again. Between his body and the rock, a second, tubular rock had materialized.

“So what do you say,” she said cozily, as if the matter was all but decided. He was amazed at how tenaciously she could hang on to her original idea.

“Will you show me tonight?” he said. “What being married to you will be like?”

“Bad boy!” she said, slapping at his arm.

“But will you?”

“Bad boy,” she said, pushing at him.

He hung his head: he liked being a bad boy.

“Seriously now,” she said, “what do you think? A possibility?”

Her eyes held a probing sharpness.

He said, truthfully, “I just never thought about it.”

“So you just think we’ll go on like this?”

“It’s kinda nice.”

“But it’s
enough
for you?”

He looked across the dimming water. The swimmer — it was Marilyn Truscott — reached the shallows and stood up, water pouring off her shoulders. For a few seconds, as she fiddled behind her neck with the tie of her swimsuit, she was all the girls he hadn’t known yet.

“Yeah,” he said, “it
is
enough for me.”

“
You
,” Sandy said. She pushed at his arm dismissively, with a show of good humour, but he knew she was hurt. She lay back and closed her eyes, lifting her chin, as if she had found a superior lover in the sun.

A flat, headachy light was coming off the river. “Think I’ll take another dunk,” he said. After a few minutes he got up slowly and padded with a show of indifference to the edge of Turtle Rock.

He surfaced just in time to hear Smiley call out, “Ship ahoy!” His friend stood in his plaid swimsuit at the edge of the willows, his pale, hairy gut spilling over the pleated edge of the suit, the iodine glint of a beer bottle clamped in his hand, gazing across the river to where a large, sky-blue car was descending through the pasture towards the sand-flats. It was coming slowly, almost hesitantly, easing over white outcrops of bedrock, brushing weeds, disappearing behind a cluster of wild fruit trees to re-emerge with glare masking its windshield: a Lincoln, and brand new by the look of it. Joe had no idea whose it was.

“Jesus,” Sid Kovacs said. Sid had just entered the shallows from among the parked cars, a few yards to Joe’s right. He was standing in his slouchy little trunks and black horn-rims, his hair swept up by his last dive like a merganser’s crown. His mouth gaped in an expression somewhere between amazement and moronic self-forgetfulness as he watched the big car pause.

“Well, it’s Sunday,” Smiley said drolly. “It might be Him.”

Treading water, Joe watched the great, flat-sided car nose down the slope. Its engine was audible now, a low throbbing hum, a bit ominous, as though it were connected to powers, to purposes, he could not read. In that moment many of the kids on the river felt like trespassers. They had never known who owned this place by the water, perhaps they were about to find out. But whoever was in the car was hidden by the reflections coming off the windows. Then as the Lincoln approached the long earthen ramp leading to the
ruined bridge (“Maybe he’ll try to drive over,” Smiley quipped hopefully), Joe caught a glimpse of Sally McVey in the driver’s seat, her chinless face lifted like a turtle’s. Beside her sat her older sister, Liz, and in the back seat, a third person, at once lit and obscured by the sunlight flooding the car.

Sid said, “What the fuck are
they
doing here,” and it seemed he spoke for everyone on the river. They were all watching now, watching from the woods and the water’s edge as the big car turned along the sand-flats and crept towards their parked cars, its power steering singing and weeping, its engine complaining at having to go so slowly: watching and wondering with Sid, why
were
the McVeys here? They
never
came here, kids from the North End just didn’t, they swam mainly at the country club, in a pool Joe had never used himself, though driving past at night he had seen its turquoise glow in the hillside, and heard the excited voices of swimmers across the dark fairway.

The Lincoln crept forward, among the loose ranks of Chevs and Fords and Plymouths with their rust spots, their reddish, primed panels where some home-repair job had got stalled halfway. It passed the Walkers’ old beige Biscayne and went on, like a visiting dignitary inspecting the tatty honour guard of some Third World country, stopping at last behind Smiley’s pickup loaded with furniture he was supposed to be delivering to his uncle. Then the sky-blue car fell silent. In the pause that followed, a gull, anguishing, fell away down the sky and the river shone in its distant, unshaded reaches, far upstream. Then the doors of the car opened and shut and three figures emerged to walk swiftly behind the other cars and out onto the sand-flats towards the bridge. Sally led the way, in her Bermuda shorts and golf hat, followed by her sister, Liz, with her slightly rounded shoulders, her ponytail jiggling. A few steps behind came a girl Joe did not recognize, a tallish girl, also in Bermudas, who wore her blonde hair in a Dutch bob: a blonde helmet whose front edges curved up slightly over her cheeks. She seemed aware, as the McVeys did not, of the people watching from the river. Twice she looked over at them, at Sid Kovacs,
gaping back at her from the shallows, and at Joe, treading water in the deepest part of the pool. There was curiosity in her glance, he thought, and a sense she knew her situation was absurd.

The McVeys forged on as if they were on some important expedition, Sally with her usual air of good-natured, slightly goofy self-confidence, her face up, and Liz hurrying after her with her head down. And finally the third girl, taller than either of them and walking more slowly as she followed them up the earthen ramp and onto the pedestrian walkway.

At first it seemed as if Sally was planning to lead the little group across the river and into the woods on the far shore. But about two-thirds of the way across, she stopped abruptly and turned to look over the river. Her sister stopped beside her. The other girl stopped a few feet to their left. She leaned over the rail to look down into the little rapid. The movement lent an inward curve to her wide-set shoulders, bare in their sleeveless blouse, and in the water, Joe was suddenly aware of the nakedness of his feet, bicycling slowly.

It was an odd moment, those on the bridge and those in the water and at the edge of the woods looking at each other without saying a word, looking and perhaps wondering, as if until that moment they had not suspected that the world contained any others but themselves. The only sound was the plash of the little rapid and, briefly, the faint, tearing roar of a high jet as it trailed to the west.

For several seconds, an eon, no one spoke. The sun burned orange on the top girders. The river gleamed distantly, as it descended between the green fields upstream. The distilled, shadowy air held all in suspension. Joe could not take his eyes off the third girl. There seemed to be something on her right cheek, a whiteness, like a dusting of flour, but when she moved her head a little (or perhaps he himself had moved, carried almost imperceptibly away by the current), he could not be sure he had seen anything.

It was Smiley who finally broke the spell, calling up to the bridge that the girls should come in swimming: the water was great.

Then Liz McVey, who in class sounded so icily sure of herself, called out in a voice that seemed oddly quavery — an old woman’s voice — that they didn’t have their suits.

“Not really necessary,” Smiley said in his normal speaking voice, to Joe.

“What!” Liz called, her voice gaining strength. “Can’t hear you!”

“What!” Smiley roared to the bridge.

“What!” Liz called. “What did you say?”

“I mean, she can always borrow mine,” Smiley said quietly to Joe.

“Ah let up,” Joe said.

“What! What did
I
do?” Smiley held out his hands, his beer, in a plea of innocence.

“Stop teasing them.”

“Teasing!” Smiley practically shouted it. “I’m not teasing! Why would I be teasing!”

Joe knew they had to have heard on the bridge and that this was Smiley’s intent; he was out to embarrass someone, he didn’t care who.

On the bridge, the two sisters drew together to confer. The third girl continued to look over the water. At the edge of the woods, someone growled, “What the fuck are
they
doin’ here?” It was Marty Cain. Joe watched him step out from behind a tree, his thick body looking white and unhealthy in the shadows. From his hand dropped a twenty-sixer of rye.

Someone else said, “We should
make
’em go swimmin’.” “Ah come on,” Joe said again, but he was not sure anyone heard. In truth, he didn’t give a damn about the McVeys. It was the other girl he was worried about. She seemed out of place with the McVeys, better than them and, in some inexplicable way, vulnerable. In the space of two or three minutes, he’d become her protector.

But of course there was nothing he could do but watch, in a state of extreme attention, slowly moving his arms and feet to keep his place in the current.

The McVeys looked down the river and over at their car, clearly uncertain about what they should do. Beneath them, the little rapid hushed and splashed.

“Fuck the lot of them,” Marty Cain growled, taking a swig from his bottle.

“We’re waiting!” Smiley shouted to the bridge.

“Shut up!” Joe said.

“What’s eating you?”

“Just leave them alone.”

Smiley looked at him, mischief glinting in his deep-set eyes.

“Hey, you in love again?”

Joe turned in the water, furious. On Turtle Rock, Sandy had sat up and was watching matters intently. She sped him a smile of amusement: wasn’t this fun?

On the other side of the river, Sid Kovacs shouted up to the bridge, “Who’s your friend? The good-looking one?”

“Asshole,” Joe seethed across the water.

“Use your eyes, man,” Sid squealed back, making no attempt to keep his voice down. “Lookit the body on her!”

“Take off your clothes and join us!” Sid called joyfully to the bridge. “We can have an orgy!” And he let out a whoop and threw himself backwards in the water. His spluttering head reappeared a moment later, minus his horn-rims. “My glasses!”

The sisters were no longer in doubt. They began to walk back along the walkway, with as much casualness and dignity as they could muster. As they passed the third girl, Sally murmured something to her and touched her arm, but instead of following the sisters, the girl turned and looked down over the opposite rail, on the upstream side of the walkway, through the torn roadbed. Joe knew what she was seeing: the speeding water visible through the hole in the concrete, which made you feel the bridge itself was racing upstream. Finally she began to follow the McVeys.

Sally McVey reached the sand-flats and Marty Cain, putting back his big head, bellowed, “Rich bitches out!” Bellowed it with a
viciousness that broke from him like a torrent of poison. “All fucking whores back to Snob Hill!” Yet even then the situation might have been salvaged, for at first only a shocked silence answered Marty, as if the others felt he had gone too far. Then Liz McVey began to run, spurting forward suddenly, and in a moment her sister was running too. From the edge of the woods, pandemonium erupted: catcalls, boos, the pack gone wild.

Under a willow, someone beat jubilantly on an oil drum with a stick. The sisters passed the parked cars, Sally leading as they headed for the safety of the Lincoln. Joe smashed at the water and yelled at the others to stop but soon realized he was only adding to the din. Appalled, he watched the third girl walk calmly across the sand-flats. She neither hurried nor looked as if she wanted to. The abuse from across the river might have been only a breeze.

Then she did something extraordinary, she stopped and looked at them. She looked first at Sid Kovacs, tilting her head a little as if she were wondering what kind of odd beast this was, sitting up to his chest in water and braying like a five-year-old. Sid fell silent. Then she looked at Joe. He said, “Sorry” to her but, with the din still going behind him, was not sure she heard. He saw there
was
something on her cheek, at once whitish and pinkish and in the dimming light oddly elusive, changeable: a dusting of snow, the imprint of a tiny hand.

The others, too, had fallen silent. It was odd, as if they were expecting her to make a speech, or lead them towards some other, more interesting activity. Someone, a girl, laughed sharply, perhaps in embarrassment. The mad tattoo on the oil drum had stopped.

Down the shore, the Lincoln gunned into life. As Joe turned in the water to watch, the girl walked calmly towards it, her white tennis shoes lifting and falling on the packed sand.

It was late when they got back to town and gently raining. They came down West, past the crouched, jammed-together houses of the mill
workers. Beyond, the Atta and its valley made an unfathomed darkness, stretching for miles into a countryside that was a misery to think of: wet woods and mud and huddling animals. Sandy sat next to him, her hand with his school ring resting on his thigh. It was how she always rode, but something had changed. There was a sense of distance, disjunction, a sadness that seemed to flow from some irrevocable and inexpressible failure. At the same time, a new idea was beginning to course through him, with an excitement that made him blow suddenly through his teeth.