Annabel - Kathleen Winter [111]
Wayne walked there at night just to look at the lights and did not talk to the youths who drank on the wharf under the lower Battery. There was a store called Jack’s Corner Shop on the corner of Duckworth Street and the lower Battery, where old men loitered smoking their cigarettes. It was in that shop, as he bought two hot dogs for eighty-nine cents from the machine with silver rollers that made the wieners look more delicious than they were, that Wayne met Steve Keating fetching a tin of Carnation milk for his mother.
“Hey! You’re that guy I met in Caines. Are you?” Steve Keating peered into Wayne’s sweatshirt hood.
At work Frank King had already expressed doubt about Wayne’s changing appearance. In fact he had told Wayne he had better clean himself up in the next week or Frank would have to take him aside. “You’re preoccupied,” Frank had bellowed. “You’re not energetic. A person can hardly hear you.” Frank had stepped back to get a better perspective. Wayne’s eyes held something that looked to Frank King as if it had gone through the end of wrong or right and come out another side. “You are not projecting an air of confidence, my friend. I don’t know how you have sold any meat at all.” It was true that some of Wayne’s customers had stopped ordering from him. He had begun making deliveries later in the day so that the bulk of them would happen in darkness, just as he had told his father he might have to do.
“You look different,” Steve Keating said now. “But you’ve got the same boots on and the same jacket, and the way you walk is just the same. Do you want to go look in Katie Twomey’s front window? I can show you the waterfall in her house.”
They walked the lower Battery and Steve went in his own house and gave his mother the tin of milk while Wayne waited outside. Steve’s house was a cream-coloured bungalow with two tiny windows, and below it was scraggly rock that led down to the wharf where the youths hung around. Wayne saw them look at him, sodium vapour lights from the harbourfront lighting their faces orange. They were older than Steve. When Steve came back out, one called up, “Hey! Keating! Who you got there?”
“Never mind him,” Steve said. “That’s only Derek Warford. Come on.” He started back up the hill. “I’ll show you Katie Twomey’s private waterfall.”
“Hey!” Derek Warford shouted. “Keating! Answer me when I ask you something, you little fucker.”
“Wait here,” Steve told Wayne, and he went down to where Derek Warford had started walking uphill. Wayne waited. He did not want to go down there and have Derek Warford look too closely at him. He saw Steve talk to Derek Warford, then hand him money, and Warford went to the wharf and took three beer out of a case and gave them to Steve.
“Here.” Steve handed Wayne a bottle.
“What did you tell him?”
“I told him you were looking for Archibald White’s house.”
“Who’s Archibald White?”
“Archibald White is an English professor who built that blue mansion up by the Battery Hotel. I told Warford you were lost and I was showing you how to get there.”
“Why did you tell him that?”
“So he wouldn’t bother us. Come on.”
They went up a staircase and behind some gardens until they came to a house with no lights on. There was a scrap of bare veranda and Steve sat on it, opened a beer, and began to drink it. He made no effort to look in the window or try to show Wayne what was inside. It was one of the first nights when the wind was not cold enough to cut through you. Wayne sat down and the wood was not warm, but cold did not creep through his jeans. They had the whole night harbour down below them. The sodium vapour lit up the undersides of gulls circling over a Belgian research vessel and a rusted hulk from Russia. If you had binoculars you could look right into the portholes, and even