Waiting for Joe

by Sandra Birdsell

  Joe looked about the park for Steve, thought he might be among the several boys leaning against the community centre building, passing a cigarette between them. He turned and saw Alfred had fallen far behind and so he got off the bike and waited. His mother was sitting on the veranda step now. Beyond her the girls from Rosemont Place were coming across the yard, all five of them bunching up at the gate when they reached it. Karen Rasmussen was among them. Some nights after Alfred had gone to work, Joe would hear voices and when he came downstairs he found Verna and Karen out on the veranda talking. The girl, seeing him at the door, called out like she was Ed Sullivan, “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s give a warm welcome for Joey Boy.”

  Going for a walk with Alfred meant having an ice cream sundae at A&W, while Alfred laid down the law and the consequences of breaking it. “See my finger? See my thumb? See my fist? You’d better run,” Alfred used to say, his fist descending to tickle a spot on Joe’s belly. An ice cream sundae and a talk at A&W was a version of that baby game.

  “Those young twits were having a cigarette. I’ll skin you alive, if I catch you doing that. Smoking will stunt your growth,” Alfred said when he reached Joe, speaking with a roughness Joe never felt.

  Not if I don’t start until I’ve stopped growing, Joe thought.

  “You’ve caused your mother pain. Why did you want to go and do that?” Alfred said, walking alongside Joe now as he wheeled the bike.

  “I didn’t want to,” Joe said, startled at the thought.

  “Well, you have. And what were you and Steve thinking? Just what in tarnation were you hoping to accomplish?”

  “We were just having fun.”

  “Fun.” Alfred snorted. “You keep on having fun like that and you’ll wind up in juvenile detention. You stay away from that church from now on. You hear?”

  “I hear,” Joe said, remembering Maryanne’s promise of horseback riding, and that he and Steve had said they’d deliver the flyers.

  When they reached Portage Avenue they left the shade of the elm trees and immediately Joe felt the simmering glare of the sun, a fireball hanging low above the city. He expected they would turn at the corner and was surprised when Alfred stopped to wait for the traffic light to change and then crossed over Portage Avenue. He wanted to see the yellow canoe hanging in the store window, but as they came near the Fuel and Supply store, the blinds had been drawn against the lowering sun.

  “I’ll go in tomorrow,” Alfred said, worrying, Joe knew, that the canoe would be sold before he could save enough.

  Joe saw their reflection in the store window, himself at eleven years old, prepared for a life of opposition. He’d grown up with old parents in an old house and had learned to put his shoulder to a sticky door, adjust his play to the tilt of floors, and his stories to his parent’s outdated expectations. He straddled the bike, balancing on his toes while he waited for Alfred to decide what to do next.

  The sun shone through Alfred’s grey halo of wiry hair and his shaggy eyebrows met above his nose. He wore scuffed boots both winter and summer, socks rolled down now against the heat and looking like rings of sausages. His khaki Bermudas bagged at the rear, and the concave sag of his chest was compounded by the jelly roll of fat at his waist. Verna was proud that Alfred was no longer skin and bones, as he had been when they married. There’s nothing to gain but ridicule when you try to look like something you’re not, Verna had once said, when Joe wondered why his father did not dress like other fathers.

  Alfred had sensed Joe looking at him and his mouth began to work. “I’ll be right back,” he said and took off for the entrance of the Fuel and Supply store, returning moments later looking as though he’d won an argument with himself.

  They continued on to A&W on the opposite side of the street, where several cars cruised the lot in search of a vacant spot. A city transit bus lumbered by, its sides painted with the maple leaf flag in celebration of Canada’s Centennial year. Flags hung limply from flagstaffs on buildings, and the light standards along Portage Avenue. Curlicues of decorative lights unfurled across the street and met at the median in the shape of a maple leaf. Sometimes after Alfred had gone to work at the nightclub, Joe and Verna would go for a walk to the intersection to see the Centennial lights along Portage Avenue, the icy white lit-up curlicues, the red maple leaves hanging at the centre of the street repeated into infinity.

  “It might be some time before we even get near the door,” Alfred warned as they took their place at the end of a lineup of people hoping to get into the restaurant.

  The rhythmic boom of rock music reverberated in Joe’s breastbone from car radios turned up high and to the same station, as though this had been agreed upon. The music broke off suddenly to the familiar voices of children singing the Centennial song. Cann-aaa-daa- … we are twenty million. If I had a dime for every time that song was played, I’d be a rich man, Cecil had said, and he and Joe had tried to calculate how much money, at ten cents a play, Bobby Gimby would make in a single day.

  As the people in front of them failed to move forward and the lineup grew longer, Alfred’s face became pale and slick, and Joe knew his father would soon lose patience. Especially over the rowdiness of several young men who had swarmed out of line and now milled about the entrance. From the Brazilian soccer team, Joe heard someone say. One of them managed to push his way into the restaurant and they all began shouting their food orders to him. Glass shattered and Joe turned to see that a waitress had dropped a tray loaded with mugs of root beer. Car horns blared, there were catcalls and whistling as the waitress skated to the order window and took down a broom and dustpan clamped to the wall.

  A man who’d been leaning against a car came toward them, walking carefully, as though he was on a balance beam. He was slight and wiry, wearing white jeans and a baseball cap, and a yellow shirt printed with tropical birds.

  The city was overrun with similar lithe, cat-like men who spoke Portuguese or Spanish, and with American-sounding athletes whose twangy voices Joe had overheard in the drugstore. And myriad volunteers wearing colour-coded pants and shirts, sunburned spectators, evangelists. People had driven for miles to attend the Pan American Games and all the campgrounds were filled with trailers and tents. Prostitutes and pimps mingled among the patrons at the Club Baghdad where Alfred was custodian.

  “Hola,” the man said to Alfred and lifted his baseball cap, pulled his fingers through his dark slicked-back hair, and jammed it back on.

  “How’s it going, fella?” Alfred asked.

  Cheers rose up now as several people were allowed into the restaurant.

  “It’s like this all over. It’s very difficult to get something to eat,” the man said. His eyes slid from Alfred to Joe, and then back to Alfred. He rubbed his chin absently and then again looked at Joe. Joe braced himself for what he expected would be the usual embarrassing comment about the colour of his eyes.

  “Is this your grandson?” he asked Alfred, and Joe knew that when Alfred explained he was his father, the man would say one thing while his eyes would say another. When Joe was born Alfred had been forty-four years old, and Joe blamed his father’s age for his own perceived inadequacies. The sight of the waitresses gliding effortlessly from car to car on roller skates took him back to the one time he’d been to a roller rink, his muscles cramping with the effort to remain upright while Alfred gripped him by the scruff of the neck. Forget it, I don’t want to do this, Joe had said. Just forget it.

  The man stared at him again, and his smile faded. Then the muscles in his face grew taut as he took Alfred by the elbow and turned him away from Joe. He spoke to him urgently, their faces only inches apart.

  Alfred swore suddenly, and the man stepped away, then abruptly turned and went to his car quickly, and within moments he was backing it out of the stall.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Alfred said, but his hand came down hard on Joe’s shoulder, clamping him in place. “Listen here, Joe. You see that man again, you tell me right away. Don’
t you talk to him, don’t you go anywhere near him.”

  The fierceness in Alfred’s voice stopped Joe from asking why.

  When they returned home Joe was surprised that the remains of supper were still on the table. When he went looking for his mother he came across her rubber thongs lying to one side of the front hall. Her canvas sneakers were not in the boot rack.

  “She’s gone gadding about,” Alfred concluded. She sometimes did disappear for an hour in the early evening to smoke and gab with her friend on Evanson Street, leaving them to clean up the supper dishes and Alfred to see to it that Joe bathed before going to bed.

  Hours later Joe awoke in his airless small room at the back of the house to the heat, heavy, like a cat had settled on his chest. And to an electric guitar screaming to a crescendo. It broke off, and the roar of the crowd at the arena became a solid wall of sound.

  He hadn’t put the fan in the window because he’d wanted to hear the rock concert, but he had fallen asleep before it started. We never go anywhere, he thought. When he went to move now, he found his legs were tightly intertwined in the sheet. The more he fought to free himself, the more tangled he became. He thrashed against what seemed to be the thwarting of even the smallest of his desires, and suddenly he was free, and panting in the heat. The roar of the crowd had lessened and was overtaken by the rising tide of traffic along Portage Avenue, and the honking of horns.

  He heard Alfred speak and turned toward the light in the hall. Since the heat wave, Alfred had moved the nightly cribbage game to the upstairs veranda and he was out there now, stripped to the waist, rivulets of perspiration running along his crooked spine and into the indentation on one side of it, where Joe had once been able to fit his fist. Alfred used to play checkers every night with his war buddy, Earl, when they were imprisoned in Japan. A wood crate had been the board, the stones they’d gathered from the prison yard, the checker pieces. Earl thought to darken some of them with lamp black. Every night they buried the stones for safekeeping. Alfred slept on a shelf near the roof of the prison barracks, and sometimes he saw the stars through a crack and tried to count them. What he hadn’t said was that his nose was inches from the roof and that he was unable to stretch out fully, which was why his head jutted from his shoulders, as though he was perpetually belligerent.

  Alfred began counting his cribbage points now, slapping the cards down on the table. When he was done, the other card player counted his cards, and Joe realized it was the boarder, Cecil, and not his mother, playing with his father tonight. Her unusual prolonged absence made him want to go out onto the veranda, crawl beneath the card table and slide up between his father’s knees.

  There was the clink of pop bottles being gathered up, and then Cecil’s heavy step along the hall as he went to his room. Joe heard water run in the bathroom, his father showering in preparation for work. He’d soon go off down the street to the Baghdad carrying his army rucksack with a Thermos of tea, sandwiches and the pills he had to take at certain times of the day and night. Toothpicks rolled in cigarette paper.

  Usually the night breezes would have risen by now, bringing the odour of dust and grass, smoke from the fires burning up north near the town where Verna and Alfred had grown up, unaware of each other until Alfred returned from Japan. Since the forest fires had started, Verna called her friend and her sisters often, wanting to know if they and their families were safe, and had learned about the herd of caribou in the schoolyard, and how a cougar had come into one of her sisters’ gardens to drink from the fish pond.

  Usually, by the time Alfred left for work, the house would have begun to cool. Not long after, the television would go silent and his mother would set the table for breakfast. Then he’d hear her quick-footed tread on the stairs and along the hall, her bedroom door closing and shutting out the sporadic sound of traffic rising from Arlington Street.

  Living near the centre of the city had made Joe aware of how loud quiet could be. At the end of a day when the downtown emptied quickly and the ongoing rumble of the city ceased, the sudden quiet was unsettling. It sometimes sent him indoors to perch on a stool and watch while his mother prepared dinner. The hollow tick of her family clock in the dining room became a hard and determined click of sound, the muted voices from the kitchen radio, a hissing and spitting quarrel. The sudden workday quieting of the city, the quiet that had descended after the rock concert, was like a withheld breath.

  A moment later Alfred paused in Joe’s doorway. “You’re not sleeping,” he said.

  “I was. You woke me up.”

  “I’ve got to go to work now. Cecil’s not going anywhere. You need anything, he’s here.”

  “Okay.”

  Cecil liked to think he was boss. He likes to throw his weight around, Verna sometimes joked at the sound of the accountant dropping his dumbbells on the floor. Cecil trimmed his beard to make himself look like Mad Dog Vachon, the wrestler.

  “If you’re still awake when your mother comes home, be sure to tell her good night. And don’t get out of bed.”

  “But what if I have to go to the bathroom?”

  “Except for that.”

  As Alfred went downstairs, Joe spread his fingers against the light shining from the hall. The scab on his knuckle looked like a thick black beetle. Maryanne Lewis sounded like Betty on The Flintstones. Friendly, nice.

  A dog began to bark, and then another, and Joe scrambled across the bed to the window. He was relieved to see his bicycle leaning against the clothesline pole where he’d chained it before coming to bed. Since the Pan American Games had begun, a lawn chair and a sprinkler had grown legs and wandered out of the yard. The accountant’s Pontiac was parked beside the garage. A moment later Joe saw what had alerted the dogs—Steve, bare-chested, emerging from the darkness of the lane into the pool of light cast by the street lamp towering above the garage. He had brought his newspaper bag with him.

  Joe dressed quickly and then, in the event that Cecil might look in on him, rolled up a blanket and made the shape of a body crooked in sleep and covered it with a sheet. But when he went past Cecil’s door, the crack under it was already dark. He held his breath as he went downstairs.

  The boys hurried along the lane, going toward the river and the meandering street that followed the river’s course, a street whose traffic was light at most times of the day and night. There was less chance they’d be stopped and asked what they were doing out at that hour. They followed the dampness and odour of fish for minutes, and then reached the place where the creek emptied into the river and where the train trestle bridge spanned its breadth, a geometric puzzle set against the city-lit sky.

  There they cut away from the river to go through a neighbourhood of newer and large houses, their destination the arena at Polo Park where the rock concert had been, and where they would scavenge for bottles beneath the end zone bleachers. They’d often done this after an afternoon football game, but this was the first time they’d gone at night. Joe felt a wind blowing inside him as he hop-skipped across Portage Avenue, a blazing corridor of lights, and he denied the urge to run while the traffic hurtled toward him.

  As they went along the sidewalk Joe was unaware of the car coming up behind them in the parking lane, slowing and inching along at their pace. He only noticed it when it pulled away in a burst of speed, the ice-white lights fleeing across the trunk. Half a block away it veered sharply into the curb and parked, its engine idling as they came near.

  “Don’t worry, it’s not the fuzz,” Steve said, sounding older.

  When they were abreast of the car the driver leaned across the seat, the passenger door opened and he called out, his voice rising in a question. Do you know? The last of what he said was lost to Joe as he remembered his father’s warning earlier in the day about the man in the yellow shirt. As Steve went over to the car door, Joe took off running.

  His feet skimmed the pavement, and the curlicues of lights across Portage Avenue became a blur. When he saw the Hot Spot Café, he knew
he’d reached Arlington Street, and then he was soon racing along it, dashing through the halos of yellow light shed by the old street lamps, the chasms of darkness between the lamps where his childhood nightmares nested.

  When he saw the police car parked in front of his house he slowed to a walk. As he came nearer he saw his father, sitting on the veranda steps between two policemen, leaning forward and holding his head as though to shut out whatever the police were saying. Joe feared they’d come to arrest him for breaking into the church and his urgent need to tell someone about the man in the car was gone. Perhaps Cecil had discovered him missing and called his father at work, and his father had called the police.

  Joe entered the yard and Alfred looked up at him, bleary-eyed, as though for a moment he didn’t know who Joe was. Joe was surprised and vaguely disappointed that Alfred hadn’t asked why he was outside, clothed, and not upstairs in bed.

  “Dad?” he said and the policemen looked up at him, unsmiling.

  “Is this your son?” one of them asked, and when Alfred nodded, he muttered, “Christ.”

  “Joe, you haven’t seen this before, have you?” Alfred plucked a piece of paper from his thigh and laid it carefully across his palm as though it was something alive and not a rectangle of lined paper, wet and almost transparent.

  “It’s a receipt from Quinton Cleaners,” Alfred explained.

  Joe shook his head, without even looking, he knew he hadn’t seen it.

  “It has this address on it. The name, Beaudry,” one of the policemen explained to Joe, then stared down at his hands hanging between his knees.

  “I told you, that doesn’t make it Verna’s,” Alfred protested. “She wouldn’t go for a swim in the river.”

  “Wading, Mr. Beaudry. That’s what the witnesses said. They were out in their backyard and saw a woman wading along the shore. This receipt was found in her pocket.”

  “There’s got to be an explanation. It is not my wife,” Alfred said, and transferred the receipt to the policeman’s thigh.