Pete stalks away angrily toward the rear entrance of the mall. Laurie rises quickly and follows him. “Pete,” she calls and again, louder. He turns and she receives the full brunt of his scowl. “You’re Pete, right? You work with Joe, my husband?”
Pete’s anger turns to disgust. “Not any more, I don’t. And as if I haven’t got enough trouble, those bastards are always on my case. I can’t come into this place without being accused of something.” The gap between his teeth causes his s sounds to whistle.
“I was at Robin’s Donuts,” Laurie says with a placating gesture. “They said Joe was there with you. Do you know where he went?”
“He took off. One minute we’re at Home Depot and the next he’s gone,” Pete says. “When you see him, tell him I said he’s a jerk.” He turns, pushes through the doors and into the parking lot.
Laurie doesn’t know what to think. She retraces her steps through the mall, weaves her way among the people milling about, passes by the lit-up shops without glancing inside, only dimly aware of the woman greeter in the mall entrance to Walmart, a small frizzy-white-haired woman whose sore-looking eyes are too large for her face, and weepy looking, like the eyes of an aging cocker spaniel.
She sees herself on the video screen, a tall woman with tangled hair on top of her head, walking with purpose, a tote bag swinging at her side. A woman with anxious eyes.
She goes across the parking lot, thinking of Joe. She hurries across a traffic lane, aware of a red car with a crumpled front fender coming toward her, thinking vaguely that she’s seen it before, that she is beginning to see the same people over and over. The entire city of two hundred thousand cheerful people must pass through the doors of Walmart each and every day of the week.
She locks the door of the motorhome behind her, knowing immediately that Joe hasn’t been there in her absence. The premonition she had in Clara’s Boutique was real. Joe’s gone.
Four
JOE STOPS TO UNZIP HIS JACKET and in that brief pause brings his eyes up from the ground to the far distance where the ridge of blue hills begins to take shape. It’s almost noon and warm now, the morning cloud cover having moved off to the northeast where it rims the horizon in a band of pearl white. Released by the rush of air against his body, he continues to walk, keeping that faint elevation of land in sight.
When he’d hailed a taxi going past Home Depot, he’d felt as though he’d just punched his way out of a box. He paid the driver twenty dollars to take him as far as the money would go and after the taxi dropped him, he began to walk, needing to move, to wear himself down. Although his frustration is almost spent, he hasn’t yet reached the point where he feels he has no choice but to turn round. He keeps close to the rim of the ditch, a trough of moisture greening with vegetation, and away from the sporadic charge of traffic whose drivers speed up as they pass by, as though to point out that he is on foot and they are not.
Moments later his thoughts are interrupted by the sound of a motor and he becomes aware of the farmhouse in the near distance, a well-kept two-storey house where a woman struggles to rototill a strip of earth that borders the gravel lane leading to the highway. He notes her awkwardness; the khaki parka that reaches her knees, likely a man’s, and too large, judging from the way the sleeves are bunched up. It makes her look like a kid who’s taken on a job beyond her capabilities.
She sees him now and stops working, then stoops over the machine and shuts it off. She straightens and pushes the parka hood down onto her shoulders, as though this will give her a better look at him. When he sees the wedge of dark bangs on her forehead, the way her short hair sticks out at the sides, he can’t take his eyes from her. Grim determination, Alfred sometimes said when Verna tore into a job a man usually did to keep a house and yard going, including turning over the earth in the small backyard garden every autumn and again in spring. Alfred’s faulty Hong Kong heart, the result of incarceration in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, prevented him from doing anything strenuous. At any moment it might stop ticking. But Alfred was into his ninety-fifth year now, while Verna had been the one to die.
He guesses the woman is calculating the distance between them, the amount of time she has to get to the house, should she need to. If he hesitated in his pace, she’d turn and run for it. There’s no traffic and the silence is so complete, it’s a ringing in his ears. As he crosses the lane, the loose gravel shifts beneath his feet and he has to work to keep his balance, and he sees himself as the woman might see him, a middle-aged man walking along the highway, someone who has likely gone looking for trouble and found it. A moment later the Rototiller starts up; its whine follows him along the ditch like a dog sniffing at his pant legs.
He passes by a dug-out pond at the edge of the next field, its viscous surface wobbling with light. A row of wind-shaped trees border the field, their nude branches all crooked to the east and cradling scores of abandoned nests. Large egg-shaped stones are piled along the fenceline here and there, beige stones worn by the weather, porous and riddled with soil.
He stops for a moment to turn and take in the city behind him, which now looks like a chain of boxcars parked close to the sky. Laurie is worried, likely, and he’s surprised to discover that the thought leaves him untouched.
He goes down into the ditch and up the other side and over to one of the piles of stones, leans into it, its heat radiating into the small of his back. He closes his eyes and listens to himself breathe. There were times when he was younger, out in the country, that he’d imagined he felt the nearness of God. Times like when he’d be lying in the grass as darkness came on, after a day of duck hunting, sunlight a faint jiggle of pink on the slough. He’d thought this was like paradise, a marshy place, the reeds alive with water animals and birds crying out at the end of the day. He lay watching the orange autumn moon rise up over his knees and thought, feed me, oh breath of God.
Our father, our father, our father, he breathes now, and opens his eyes when he realizes that he is trying to pray, something he stopped doing years ago when he heard his prayers rebounding off the inside of his skull.
He will call Steve. Steve’s email message at Christmas lacked news. He’d just wanted to get in touch, to let Joe know he was back in Canada and working in Fort Mac. But he’d attached a picture of himself and his son, a kid with a mullet haircut whom Steve had in a headlock, the boy mugging pain for the camera. What leapt out at Joe from the photograph was the baseball caps they wore, the words Space Raider I stitched on the bill of Steve’s, Space Raider 2 on the boy’s, the names Joe had given himself and Steve when they were kids.
When the phone rings Steve’s son answers. His dad isn’t home, he tells Joe, and won’t be until midnight when his shift is over.
“Tell him Space Raider I called,” Joe says.
“Who?” the boy asks, and then he says, “Oh yeah. I get it.” He promises to leave a note for Steve.
Space Raider, a name Joe had likely got from TV, given how much time he spent watching it, even sneaking downstairs after his mother had gone to bed. In the morning she’d find him asleep on the couch, the TV still on. Your eyes are going to turn square.
He pushes himself off the stones and climbs up to the shoulder of the highway, and when he lifts his arm, he promises himself to only give it ten minutes. If no one stops to pick him up, he’ll head back to town.
Within moments a white service van with a rack of ladders strapped onto the roof passes by, and when it slows down and pulls onto the shoulder, Joe turns again to look at the city. If Laurie hadn’t spent it, there’d been enough room on the credit card for a tank of fuel. And what he earned would have got them the rest of the way to Fort McMurray, bought groceries until the first paycheque. Let Laurie find her own way there. He jogs toward the van, and the driver seeing him coming in the mirror, rolls down the window.
“Keith,” the man says and extends his hand for what proves to be a soft and half-hearted handshake. He’s sweating and pudgy, and beside him in the passe
nger seat is an adolescent boy who glances at Joe once without interest and then not again.
“Joe,” Joe says. “How far are you going?”
“Red Deer,” Keith says. “You’ve got a valid driver’s, buddy?”
When Joe nods, Keith says, “Okay, you’re on.”
Keith proposes that in exchange for the ride, Joe take on some of the driving. Joe already knows he doesn’t want to spend too much time with this man and so he tells him he’s only going as far as Medicine Hat. The boy crawls over the console into the back seat and Keith takes his place. In Medicine Hat Joe will get something to eat, and he’ll call Alfred.
Within minutes of Joe taking the wheel Keith begins to talk. He’s round in the face and pink-skinned, his hair falling in slick curls across his forehead. Although he appears to be in his early forties, he looks prepubescent. Pouches of breast fat jiggle beneath his T-shirt, his arms and face are hairless. He carries his spare tire below his belt, on his hips and lower stomach, like a woman.
He’s a contractor, specializing in home and business renovations, he says. He’s heading for Red Deer to put together a work crew in order to replace a flat roof on a house. He goes on to say that flat roofs aren’t architecturally logical, although he allows that certain styles of buildings are enhanced by one. Flat roofs constructed in the sixties and earlier have asphalt roofing, which means there are seams and the roof is never entirely waterproof. People don’t maintain a flat roof in the way they should and he sometimes finds moss and good size trees growing on them. “I’ve found lots of dead squirrels, and there was this cat once, it was like beef jerky, fried and dried out by the heat.” He’d found a woman’s diamond earring and wondered how it got up there. “I didn’t ask, if you know what I mean,” he says with a wink.
Joe doubts that Keith is really a contractor. He lacks the quiet self-assurance, the forbearance coupled with healthy skepticism that most professional contractors possess, which comes from years of being caught between the intransigence of tradesmen and the unrealistic demands of clients.
Keith says he resurfaces a flat roof with a synthetic compound that becomes a seamless membrane. The back of the van is loaded with gallons of the stuff, which explains why it pulls to one side.
“This is my right-hand man,” Keith says, finally getting around to introducing the boy, whose name is Bryce, the son of a friend.
“Howdy,” Joe says and receives a mumbled reply. He’s thinking Bryce ought to be in school. “He’s young,” Joe says.
“He’s old enough,” Keith replies in a way that warns Joe away from the topic, and for minutes they don’t talk, the silence filled by the back-and-forth chatter of a call-in show on the radio.
“Are you hungry, punk?” Keith asks the boy, the question tossed over his shoulder with mock toughness.
Bryce’s reply is drowned out by the radio and engine noise. Joe takes Bryce in through the rearview mirror. The kid must be about fourteen, fifteen, given the hint of fine dark hair above his top lip. There’s an evasiveness about him that reminds Joe of Steve at the same age.
Joe rounds a sweeping curve and the highway straightens out in front of them and stretches for miles, flat and mesmerizing. The hills lie behind him on the horizon now, thin and dark blue, like a murmur of thunder. On either side of the highway the fields are shorn and silver, hung faintly with mist that softens the bleakness of spring.
Keith rummages in a gym bag on the floor and comes up with a bag of taco chips, tears it open and jams it into the console between the seats.
“Help yourself,” he says gruffly, in a way that suggests his generosity makes him uncomfortable.
“Thanks,” Joe says. “Maybe later.”
Bryce darts forward and claws up a handful.
“Hey buddy, how about leaving some for us?” Keith says and although he’s spoken in a teasing manner, Bryce releases most of the chips into the bag.
“Sorry,” he mutters and sinks back into the seat.
Joe takes another good look at him in the mirror, his long and narrow face and turned-down mouth, the adolescent moustache like a smudge of dirt making him look younger than he likely is. Impassive.
“You can have my share. Me and taco chips have never agreed,” Joe says to Bryce.
“No thanks,” he says.
“Don’t be a prick,” Keith tells Bryce, again in a jesting tone. “Kids,” he says to Joe out of the side of his mouth, as though Joe understands what he means, an assumption that makes Joe uncomfortable.
“Come on, don’t let me eat all these chips by myself,” Keith says to Joe.
“I’ll pass.” Joe is light-headed with hunger but he doesn’t want anything from this man other than a lift to Medicine Hat. He sees in the mirror that Bryce is staring at the back of his head with a glimmer of interest. When their eyes meet, Bryce looks away. The highway is mined with numerous spring potholes, crudely and randomly patched.
“Fine,” Keith says tersely, startling Joe as he snatches up the bag of tacos and flings it into the back seat. “Go ahead, help yourself to a stomach ache.”
Joe winces, feeling that Bryce has just been clouted one across the side of the head. Moments later the bag crackles and he hears Bryce nibbling at a chip.
The highway rises in a slight incline that seems higher and longer for the flatness around them. When Joe reaches the crest he sees the alarming blue flash of warning lights, several police cars in the distance, and he drops his speed. The tail lights of vehicles glow as the drivers, like him, begin to slow down.
“Radar,” Keith says.
“I’m under the limit,” Joe reassures him. He took the Meridian because it was in the Quonset and not on the lot where there was the chance the owner might go by on the road and see it was missing. But he can’t help his sudden fear that it’s been reported stolen and the police are now looking for him. Two officers randomly direct traffic over to the shoulder. He glances in the rearview mirror and is caught by the alertness—is it anticipation or fear?—in Bryce’s face.
“Where’s the registration?” Joe asks.
Keith reaches above him to slide a card from a plastic sleeve on the sun visor, and when he gives it to Joe there’s a slight tremble in his hand.
Several vehicles are already lined up on the shoulder between the two police cars and an officer stands beside the driver’s door of the first one.
“Some kind of spot check,” Keith says and as they pass by, he nods and waves at the officer who signals with his arm that they’re to keep moving.
Joe slips the registration back into the sleeve while Keith drums on the dashboard in a short burst of energy before leaning back again. “I haven’t renewed my licence. I meant to do it before I left Winnipeg, but I ran out of time.”
Joe lets this pass. “You’re from Winnipeg?”
“Portage La Prairie. My dad’s got a farm there,” Bryce says. That he’s spoken surprises Joe, and Keith too, given the way he turns to look at the boy.
“What kind of farming?” Joe asks wondering now why the boy’s parents have allowed him to be absent from school, out on the road, working, and with a character like Keith, friend of the family or not. He’s seen boys the same age as Bryce thinking they’ve got it made because they’ve got a job at a car wash or pumping gas.
Before Bryce can reply, Keith answers for him. “Yeah, that’s right, his dad is a farmer. Raises llamas and a yard full of junk.” He dips forward to turn up the radio in time for the news. “I want to hear this,” he says.
The top item of the hour is the ongoing police search for the pedophile who has abducted a second boy and is believed to be heading west through Saskatchewan, a description of the van he’s driving, a dark green older model vehicle with a dent in the rear fender; a caution not to approach the man for the sake of the safety of the boys. This is followed by a report of a bombing of a house in Iraq that took the lives of several women and children. Both items incite Keith equally; his expressed revulsion for the pedo
phile is as vehement as it is for the trigger-happy American military.
Joe remains silent during Keith’s rant despite all the man’s effort to draw him in. At one point his gaze meets Bryce’s pale and red-rimmed eyes in the mirror, and again the boy turns away to look out the window. Moments later he covers himself with his jacket and closes his eyes. Keith, his righteous indignation spent, falls silent.
Joe welcomes the quiet, and then begins to notice the stiffness in his arms from clenching the wheel too tightly as the miles between him and Laurie slip by. He has no choice, really, but to do the right thing. Stop the van, get out and head back to Regina. Ride off into the sunset with Laurie and a prescription for Effexor, or some other drug.
If you ever get up this way, buddy, I’d sure like to see you. Steve’s email, devoid of the tone of his voice, didn’t really sound like an invitation. And yet, Joe thinks, recalling the picture Steve sent with the email, he went to the trouble to have Space Raider stitched on the baseball caps. Perhaps Steve recalled some of their childhood escapades and remembered the Indian sunburns, how they twisted the skin raw on each other’s wrists and thought they were tough when they didn’t wince or cry out. That they were like brothers from the start when Steve hiked over the fence and into Joe’s yard, his dark eyes fixed on the Dinky toys lined up on the clothesline stoop. I can play, eh, Steve said, and snatched up the race cars and sent them crashing into each other.
Joe recalls Steve standing lookout in the churchyard, a summer day, the year he’d since come to think of as being the last of his childhood. Steve’s barrel-shaped chest and huskiness made him look older than eleven. He’d shoved his hands in his jean pockets to affect a nonchalance, an innocence he worked at perfecting on adults, but never quite succeeded. Steve’s mirth, his mischievousness, always shone through. While he, Joe, had been a sneaky kid. Sneaky enough to run water in the tub to convince his mother he’d taken a bath. To leave the house with his swimming trunks rolled in a towel, knowing he had no intention of going to his lesson. He imagines his young reflection in the basement window the day they broke into the church. Spiderman swings across the front of his T-shirt and his lips are shiny with saliva and working as he tries to open the window. His shoulder blades are knife-thin and stick out, looking sharp enough to break through his skin.
Waiting for Joe Page 6