The Island Walkers (7 page)

“You okay?” Her voice small.

“Fine. How about you?”

“I’m fine.” She did not sound fine. Expansively — and to forestall any serious talk — he swept his arm around her shoulder, gave her a squeeze. The black road shone like a pelt.

Stopping in front of her house, he watched as she got out and went up the drive. When she turned on the porch to wave, he had already started to pull away. As he swung east onto Water, the whitewashed, foreshortened facade of his own house flashed and dropped behind as, with deepening anticipation, he accelerated through the rain-sweetened air. The Biscayne charged up the long hill past King’s Park and Central School and the railway station, flying over the hump of the bridge into the North End. For a moment, as if a spotlight had found him, questioning his right to exist, he was aware of the condition of the car: of the rust eating its way around the fenders, of its old car smell, the dust on the dash. His shirt prickled at his back, another flaw: it was a hand-me-down from his father.

The rain had stopped. He prowled the streets in a hush of tires, passing under ancient trees where solitary street lights burned in nests of wet, shining leaves. Across vast lawns, the big houses peered darkly from their porches. Every object — those paired Muskoka chairs, glazed with rain — seemed about to disclose some secret. He turned onto Robert and the McVeys’ house reared up among its maples: a neo-Georgian place with banks of shuttered windows and a wide front door. All the lights were out, save one on the second
floor, glowing between slitted drapes. Slowing as much as he dared, he glanced up the drive and saw the Lincoln nested in shadow, its big, low-slung body alive and, it seemed to him, ambiguous, its properties only to be guessed at.

5

MOST MORNINGS
, Alf walked to work. And most mornings, when he reached the corner of West and Water, he glanced left to see Pete striding off the footbridge from Lions Park, lunch pail swinging. Pete lived on the other side of the park, in a small clapboard bungalow he had built with Alf’s help in the early Fifties, under the wooded flank of Lookout Hill. Pete worked in Bannerman’s dyehouse, which explained why his hands and arms were often stained with streaks of Persian red or navy blue, and why even his clothes sometimes looked (Alf thought) as if he’d been painting a barn with a shovel. He wore a baseball cap, tilted well back off his narrow forehead.

This morning they met as usual. Pete’s thin face lit up as he saw Alf, his eyebrows rising in humorous acknowledgment as though the two of them shared an ongoing joke they need not explain.

They fell in together, striding at a good clip along Water. Fifty paces ahead of them, Joe scraped along in his jeans and T-shirt, armoured, as it seemed to Alf, in the trappings of his secret life. What was the boy thinking about? Alf had no idea. Six forty-five. A torrent of light rushed the trees on Lookout Hill. Birds sang like mad from maples shrouding the small front yards. They passed the brick cottage where Alf had grown up — the same ragged cedar hedge, the same balding lawn — under the maroon leaves of the maple Alf’s father had planted in 1939, when Alf’s brother had gone off to war. He always sensed a presence here, as if his parents were alive still,
peering out from the curtained windows, waiting for them to come back. But he gave the house scarcely a glance. He didn’t want memories now, any more than he wanted talk. Enough to be awake in the flooding light. Mercifully, Pete was keeping quiet.

The main street still lay in shadow. Others were travelling with them, on the opposite sidewalk, or gliding past in cars: all headed for the mills, all wrapped, still, in the solitariness of their recent sleep. They passed the white pillars of the war memorial: Alf did not give it a glance, though he was aware of it, of the names carved in its stone, a chorus breathing, it seemed, with a nearly inaudible hush, under the stir of leaves. Then past the hardware store with its display of powerful lawn mowers, the tiny office of the
Attawan Star
, where the show window featured a large aerial photo of the town, the forking rivers a dark, inverted Y. High overhead, the eastern face of the post-office clock met the assaulting light.

Pete tugged down his visor, to shield his eyes from the sun streaming down Bridge Street. Bannerman’s whistle gave a warning howl. I better get that old Jacquard going, Alf thought, and felt the sudden shock of cool air as they advanced over the Shade.

Pete gave a tap to the bridge rail, as though for luck. “Alf, I just put this out to you —”

Something in his friend’s tone alerted him. Far ahead, Joe reached the end of the bridge and abruptly pivoted towards the path that ran along the dyke. His sudden movement shocked Alf, as if the boy had simply flung himself away.

“You might have heard. There’s this organizer in town —”

Overhead, gulls screamed.

“A bunch of us have been meeting with him. Nothing’s settled, like. We’re just checking out our options.”

“Doyle,” Alf said, half to himself. He hadn’t heard anything of the man for a couple of weeks. He’d begun to believe, to
hope
, that he’d left town.

Pete gave a little laugh that to Alf sounded guilty. “I guess maybe he’s talked to you.”

“I think maybe you know he’s talked to me.”

“Yeah, yeah, well actually —”

“Well actually what?”

“I said I’d speak to you.”

“About what?” Alf said grimly. Of course he knew. He glanced sharply at his friend and Pete’s nervous eyes fled under his visor.

“Like I said, we’re just checking out our options.”

“You don’t have any —”

Pete fell silent. Alf knew he was being remorseless with him, unusually so. And still he had anger to burn: he tried to put it into walking, as if he could simply leave Pete’s news behind. Up ahead, Joe had already disappeared from the dyke. There was a stink of decaying river weed. And the screaming gulls.

They were not used to major disagreements. They might argue about who was the better hockey player, Pulford or Baun, but their friendship was built on an easy amiability — an understanding they would avoid anything that roused strong emotion. It was no preparation for this — the air bright with danger.

Pete tried again, on a placating note: “A union can do things, Alf. These layoffs — if we had a union, there’d be seniority, like.”

“You always said you were anti-union.”

“I mean, they wouldn’t be able to treat people like they do. There’d be protocols.”

“Protocols,” Alf mocked. He was sure Pete had got the word from Doyle. His friend, after all, had barely graduated from public school, and he had never cared about current events or political matters, as far as Alf knew. He never read a newspaper. “You know what happened the last time we tried this?”

“I know it was bad. But we gotta move on —”

Gotta move on
. He suspected that was Doyle’s argument too.

“You don’t know,” Alf said grimly. “You weren’t here.” Meaning: you were still in the navy in ’49. You have no right to speak about what happened.

“Different circumstances, Alf.”

Alf threw up his hands in anger and despair. They had nearly reached the end of the bridge. Pete had to hustle to keep up. “Malachi’s a good guy, Alf.”

“A good guy,” Alf seethed. The very mention of Doyle made him want to hit something. He felt as if Doyle and Pete had been conspiring behind his back. He spoke with angry sarcasm: “So Malachi’s a good guy. A nice guy to have a beer with. Is that any reason to follow him? Hell, good guys have been screwing up the world since it began.”

He swung onto the dyke-top path. Pete kept right behind him, down the dirt incline that led onto the playing fields behind the arena. Two hundred yards away, sunlight boiled in the upper storeys of the mills. At the lip of the stack, a rag of smoke flapped.

Pete said, “I mean, hell, if you think a union’s such a bad idea, why don’t you come out to one of our meetings and tell us why?”

Alf stopped. Pete’s eyes met his frankly from under his visor. There was a plaintiveness there, a beseeching. But at the same time, over a nervous smile, Pere was challenging him, and this was new. Alf was startled.

“You’re a fool,” Alf said. “You follow this guy and we’ll all live to rue it. Honestly, Pete, you’re a bigger ass than I thought.”

Something changed in Pete’s gaze, something went bright and at the same time seemed to burn up in its own brightness. It was as if he disappeared. His face was still there, grinning as if he believed Alf was only joking, but Pete had gone away, sunk beneath his features like a drowning man beneath the surface of a pool. Alf turned away, joining the crowd streaming into the deep canyons between the mills.

The stairs of the knitting mill were a mass of people, a steady thunder of shoes climbing the filthy treads. He put his head down and trudged. He had done this for eighteen years, all told. The thousands of mornings seemed to have become one morning,
this
morning, an eternity he was condemned to spend watching, a few inches from his
face, the wide, labouring bum and knotted calves of Millie Jennings.

He was still furious. How many of these people had talked to Doyle? Who was taking the organizer seriously? What he could see told him nothing. Yet everything he looked at — Millie’s ugly legs, a discarded gum wrapper — seemed a clue. Every face in its bland, dreaming thickness had turned treacherous.

The knitting room was on the top floor, the sixth. He walked towards the bench where his tools were kept, noting with disgust that someone had failed to put one of his wrenches away. A faint, chortling murmur made him look around. Sun slanted among the rows of tall machines, each bearing its circular rack of bobbins. Against the far wall, the knitters sat on their long bench, looking back at him with blank, unreadable faces. He was swept with distaste at their sullen immobility. Just then, the buzzer gave out its nasal command: seven o’clock. It was time to go to work, but the knitters did not stir. Their tardiness — it would last only a few seconds — was meant to declare that they were their own masters, even here.

Hearing the sound again, he looked up. Under the high ceiling, a drive-belt hummed, awaiting the moment when its power would be channelled to the machines below. Inches above it, on a sprinkler pipe, sat the trapped pigeon. Alf could clearly make out its slender head, cocking sideways to look down on him with tiny, burning eye.

The next morning, when Pete didn’t show up on the Lions Park footbridge, Alf went on by himself. It was the same the next morning, and the next. Pete was driving to Bannerman’s now. Each day, arriving at the mills, Alf saw the Sarasota’s towering tail lights parked in the dead-end lane beside the dyehouse. But he never managed to run into Pete himself.

He felt he really
should
call his friend. Pete was prone to these withdrawals. Once, years ago, Alf had criticized Pete for something, and Pete had vanished from his life for nearly a month. Then one day he’d just showed up again, acting as if nothing had happened. Alf
supposed that’s how it would go now. One morning Pete would come striding off the Lions Park footbridge, grinning his gap-toothed grin, telling some funny story, and they would go on as before, without a mention of their quarrel. He was worried, though, and sorry, yes definitely sorry, for some of the harsher things he’d said.

Twice he picked up the phone to call his friend. Twice he put the receiver back down, with a sense of confusion and defeat. He couldn’t sort out apologizing from admitting he was wrong.

One hot afternoon in the midst of this standoff, he was sitting on the floor of the knitting room, among the parts of a knitting machine he’d spread on newspapers, when the freight elevator floated into its bay. Behind the safety gates, Alf caught a flicker of bodies moving. Then the gates were flung back and a group of men stepped out. Their dress shirts, turned up crisply at the cuff, broadcast a shock of white into the room. There was a young woman with them: tall, in an extremely short skirt, her long legs stalking forward in black mesh stockings. A bald, tanned, handsome man touched her back and leaned over to whisper something into the teased cloud of her hair. She put back her head and opened her mouth in a silent, cheerless laugh, showing a wealth of teeth.

Twenty feet away, Alf instinctively drew up his legs, a man exposed in the bath. They had stopped outside the elevator. The bald man, who stood well over six feet, seemed oddly familiar. But the only figure Alf recognized was Gordie Henderson, the assistant manager of the sweater mill. He looked around anxiously, as if searching for shelter in a thunderstorm.

Spotting Alf, Gordie hurried over.

“Alf, I need Matt.”

“Think he went down to the dyehouse,” Alf said, glancing up. Tufts of black hair blocked Gordie’s big nostrils. In truth, Alf had no idea where Matt Honnegger was. The soon-to-be-retired foreman was just as likely to be in the can, relaxing.

“These people are from Intertex,” Gordie said in a tense undertone. “Top guns. They want a tour.”

“I’ll see if I can find Matt.”