The Island Walkers (29 page)

23

“
SEE, IT SAYS CRAZY HORSE
. ‘Crazy Horse grew up in a Sigh-Ox village,’ ” Jamie read, hesitating only a little on the hard words, “ ‘on the great plains.’ Can you read that?”

On the bench beside him, in the Children’s Room of the library, Billy was grinning his grin that was not really a grin, showing his brown-edged teeth. They were alone.

“Try to read that —”

“Crazy Horse,” Billy said, giggling as if it were a great joke, and his black eyes snuck sideways, as if he wanted to get away. Jamie was trying to teach him to read. One day they had met Billy’s mother on the street, and seeing that Jamie had a book and Billy had none, she had said, “I wish you could get Billy here to read — get him out of that class with the retarded kids.” So he’d taken Billy to the library. And seeing that Billy just looked at the backs of the books on the shelves and then started walking on the benches as if
that
were more interesting, Jamie thought he’d find him a book he might like.
The Story of Crazy Horse
was one of his favourites. But all Billy did was flip through, looking at the pictures, then he started balancing on the benches again. So Jamie started reading it to him in the hopes he’d get interested and read it to himself. “Read that!” he said, pointing. “Read the next sentence. It’s really a good story.” Billy stared where he was pointing, and his grin got more fixed and the light in his eyes looked as if it were going to burn him up. He pushed the book away.

“What’s the matter?”

“I don’t feel like it.”

They went outside, into the slowly falling snow. At the corner, Billy said, “I got you a present.”

“What?”

Billy wrestled inside his windbreaker and dragged out the Crazy Horse book, in its clear plastic wrapper.

“You took this book?”

“It’s for you,” Billy said, in his flat voice. “I hooked it,” he said, still grinning, and Jamie remembered the chocolate marshmallow cookies Billy had hooked the day before, from Kinnear’s store. They’d eaten them at the rock in the Indian Trail.

“You don’t have to hook things in the library. They’re free. You can take anything you want. You just show them your card.”

Billy grinned: Okay, he knew
that
!

Jamie took the book from Billy, explaining he’d already read it, put it inside his coat, and snuck it back into the Children’s Room. When he came out, Billy was throwing snowballs at a Stop sign. They started across the road, and it was then, looking south towards Water, that Jamie saw his mother. She was crossing Water, marching briskly along in her grey coat, her arms filled with groceries. All she had to do was glance to her right and she’d see him with Billy. His father had seen him with Billy one day on the main street and had only winked at him as if their being together was a kind of joke. It would be different with his mother. There was a sharp edge inside her, and wrong was on one side and right was on the other, and she never hesitated to tell him which was which. And also, he wasn’t entirely sure it wasn’t wrong to be with Billy. He hadn’t felt too good about those cookies. But he had no other friends, and besides, Billy wouldn’t leave him alone. He stuck to Jamie like glue.

He took a step backwards, to get out of her line of sight, then another. Billy grinned.

“What ya doin’?”

“Nothin’. Walkin’ backwards.”

Billy laughed his gurgling laugh and took a couple of steps backwards himself.

They went along Bridge Street to the bridge and looked down at the steaming black water, at the weeds bending under its surface, and up the river past the dam to the rail trestle, where a string of boxcars was rumbling against an empty sky. “We’re Sigh-Ox Indians,” Jamie said.

“Okay.”

“You can be Crazy Horse, because you’re the real Indian.”

“You wanta come to my house?” Billy said.

They walked to the Flats, along Willard and Pine to Billy’s. The place made Jamie sad with its lonely-echo feeling and no pictures on the walls, just a couch with a rip down the back. Billy’s bed was a mattress on the floor, his toys were scattered all over, and there was a smell of pee. After a while Jamie said he had to go: he and his Dad were going to buy a Christmas tree. “Are you getting a tree?” he asked, and Billy said he was going to cut one, right now. They could both go and cut one, okay? And because Jamie wasn’t going with his father until that night, and because cutting a tree would get them out of the house, he agreed.

Billy brought up a hatchet from the basement, and they walked up the road under the rail trestle: a web of dark girders through which slits of faraway sky showed. They went up a short street and along another to a forest of evergreens. In the forest, which was still and peaceful, the snow poured over the tops of Jamie’s boots and chilled his feet: he was beginning to wish he hadn’t come. But they waded on, talking about which tree would be good to cut, and finally they picked one and Billy started hacking at it with the hatchet. Pale gashes appeared, but though he was hitting it fiercely, gritting his teeth, he couldn’t get much deeper than the bark. Then Jamie took a try and it was while he was whacking away at the trunk that a voice sounded beside him. He was so scared he dropped the axe. He was ready to run, but Billy just stood there looking at a man — an old man Jamie did not know. He was smiling at them with a mouth that had no teeth. “Trying to take my treesh are you?” he said in a rough but not unfriendly voice. “I know yis one,” he said, nodding at Billy. “Who are you?”

“Jamie,” Jamie said. The old man was wearing an open coat and a plaid shirt underneath and a cap from which his ears stuck out like handles. He winced and looked at the tree and said they should come with him to the house, he’d get a proper saw. Jamie looked at Billy,
but Billy just fell in behind the old man, following in the soft trail his boots made.

The house sat up on a small hill above the forest. Behind it stretched the open space of a gravel pit, where Jamie could see cement towers and a snowed-over line of conveyor belts. Then he was in a big kitchen, not bright and neat like his mother’s, but warm, with bare-wood cupboards, a kitchen table painted bright red, and an oil stove with slits in its side that reminded him of catfish gills. The old man told them to take their boots off and sit down at the table. While the old man was rummaging in a cupboard, Billy looked across the table at Jamie and said, “We’ll get candy.”

“Did I hear something about candy?” the old man said. His hair was as white as the snow.

He came back with a big glass jar full of different kinds of sweets: jawbreakers and licorice and others wrapped in twists of foil. The old man set the jar on the table and looked at Billy and said, “So, shall we tell him our little game?”

Billy looked at Jamie. “You take your pants down and he feels your dick and then you get the candy. Sometimes he sucks it. Then you get three candies.”

Jamie wondered, Sucks the candy?

“I don’t do anything you don’t want,” the old man said to Jamie. His smile had changed, he had teeth now, yellow teeth as straight as the boards in a fence. Jamie felt his face go hot and the old man giggled and said, “Now I think Billy here should go first, to show how it’s done. Okay, Billy?”

Billy jumped out of his chair and went over to a couch near the oil stove. He lay down and the old man went over and sat beside him on the couch and looked back at Jamie. “It’s just a little game,” he said. “It feels nice. Why don’t you come over here and look?”

Jamie didn’t want to go over, but when the old man winked at him and shook his head for him to come, he went. He stood beside the old man as he put out his big, lumpy hands and pulled down Billy’s trousers. And he thought of being in the doctor’s office when
Doctor Carr looked at his dink, carefully pulling back the skin, and he thought of the time Carol Jenkins and her friend Chrissy Bell had pulled his pants down in Carol’s outhouse and they had hardly been able to stop laughing, and afterwards the girls had pulled their own pants down and showed him the place where they had no dinks, just a slot like a piggy bank. All these other times seemed to be with him now, as he watched the old man move his big, crooked fingers very gently over Billy’s thing, pulling and stroking it the same way he, Jamie, sometimes pulled and stroked Red’s ear, feeling its smoothness run through his fingers. “There there there,” the old man said (he had hair in his ears and even sticking out of his nose, Jamie saw), and he seemed almost to be singing, crooning away like a mother to a crying baby though Billy wasn’t crying, he was grinning up at Jamie as if he considered the whole business rather silly. Then he stopped grinning and his eyes went far away, blank.

“See, that’s all there is to it,” the old man said suddenly, looking around at Jamie. “You wanta try?”

“Aren’t you gonna suck it?” Billy said.

“Not today, you rascal.” And the old man snapped the band of Billy’s underwear. “You get yourself a candy or two. Just call me the Candy Man,” he winked to Jamie.

Billy pulled up his pants and got off the couch. The old man was looking at Jamie now, looking at him with a friendly smile in his eyes, showing his board-straight teeth. “Nothin’ to it,” he said.

“He’s chicken,” Billy said, walking back to the table.

The old man winked at Jamie and patted the couch.

“Just hop on,” he said.

Jamie lay down on the couch. He looked at the ceiling and looked at the old man’s long chin with its spiky stubble and felt his pants being drawn down. When the old man said, “Just raise your hips a little,” he did, and felt his nakedness in the air. Then the fingers touched him, and it felt nice down there, it felt nice and smooth, except the old man’s hand was a little cold, just like Doctor Carr’s hand, and the old man was crooning over him now, as he pulled his
thing just like he, Jamie, pulled Red’s ear. “Oh you’ve got a nice one,” the old man said. “That one’s gonna be a real beauty,” and he bent over suddenly and kissed Jamie’s dink. But his stubble scraped Jamie’s thigh and made him twist away and the old man pulled him back, hard. In that moment, he knew something sharp and angry in the old man. The old man had jerked him back to where he wanted him, jerked him back like you’d jerk a bag of sand. Suddenly, he wanted to go home. He wanted to be at home, at the kitchen table, drinking tea-milk, and his mother there and all the lights on and the house snug against the cold. But he was not there, he was here, and the old man was bending to kiss him again, and everything that had been so strange and nice — the nice old man, the candies, the touch of his hands and even his lips — suddenly was replaced by a loneliness so strong he wanted to cry.

He heard his voice say, high and strange, that he had to go, but the old man kept his face down on him and he felt his dink in the old man’s mouth and the drag of something else that must have been his tongue. The thing was,
down there
it felt good, but down there was only a part of him now, small and far away, and in the rest of him he did not feel good: he felt cold and lonely, and he had the idea that the old man was eating him, eating him bit by bit starting with down there and there was nothing he could do about it. He looked at the ceiling, he looked at the old man’s head, balding and covered with scabs. He turned his head and looked at the little table by the couch and saw the old man’s teeth sitting there in a jar, grinning underwater. “I have to go,” he said again, and the old man lifted his face, which was red now, and said in a coy, pleading voice, “Arn you going to help ush cut the tree?” Putting his hands over his dink (it felt wet, he half-expected it was bloody though he didn’t look), Jamie told the old man he was going with his father to buy a Christmas tree. So the old man got up and put in his teeth and Jamie got up and pulled up his pants, not looking at himself down there, not even wanting to know that down there existed. He did not want candies now, but he picked one out of the jar, fake-smiling when the old man made a joke,
not wanting the old man to touch him again. Before he could go out the door, the old man bent down to him. He held Jamie’s shoulder with one hand and said, “Who’s your father?” And for a moment Jamie, looking over the old man’s shoulder at Billy, who was poking away in the candy jar, not upset at all it seemed by what had happened, could not think of his father’s name.

“Alf Walker,” he said finally, and the old man grunted. Then he said, “I wouldn’t tell anybody about this if I was you. This is secret, okay?”

Jamie said okay: he would promise anything if he could just get out. He looked over at Billy again, thinking they could leave together. But Billy was chewing a candy and did not look back. “We can go,” Jamie said, but Billy did not seem to hear him.

“Because if you tell,” the old man said, and his fingers tightened hard on his shoulder, “bad things might happen. Okay?”

“Okay,” Jamie said, and the old man said, “Look at me,” and he looked at the old man and saw the bad things in his eyes.

Outside, he trekked away through the forest of Christmas trees. The sun was just going down, a fire behind the hill across the river, and the snow was blue, and their old tracks were blue. And though he was headed home, he felt he had no home, he was just here, with a lump in his throat and a wet, loose feeling in his pants, trudging in the blue snow that spilled over his boots and went on forever.