Waiting for Joe

by Sandra Birdsell

  “Wait here,” Alfred said to Joe and went into the house to call Verna’s friend on Evanson Street, while one of the policemen got up and went to the patrol car. He returned a moment later carrying a plastic bag.

  Soon after Alfred came out of the house, the screen door slapping shut behind him as he stood rigid, his arms tight at his sides. Older, suddenly feeble looking. “She might have gone to a movie, to a double feature.” He sagged against the veranda railing.

  The policemen went over to him and helped him to one of the veranda chairs, and he fell back into it. Then the officer picked the bag up from the step where he’d set it, opened it, and took out Verna’s blue canvas sneaker. Alfred grabbed hold of the arms of the chair and looked away, over Joe’s head and down the street as though he thought he might see Verna coming along it. And then he seemed to shrink as he said, “That’s her shoe.”

  Joe rushed up the steps and one of the policemen made a grab for him, saying, “Son.” But Joe pushed on past him into the house, and went pounding upstairs to his room, thinking, if only Alfred hadn’t called her friend on Evanson Street. If only they hadn’t left the house. Already blaming himself that his mother had not come home.

  Throughout the following days he looked for Steve. He expected him to show up somewhere, to be across the street when they emerged from the funeral home after the service for Verna, her family bunched up around them, moving slowly as though wading through deep snow. It was not Steve, but his mother, the youngest baby on her hip as she waited at one side of the door, as stricken looking as everyone else around Joe. She stepped toward him and he expected her to say, Sorry for your loss. But when she hesitated, Alfred nudged him to keep moving, and the moment to ask her about Steve was gone.

  While he waited for his father and the others to return from the cemetery Joe played Scrabble with his cousins on the back stoop, all the while hoping that Steve would come by in the lane. My mother drowned. He had not yet been able to say it out loud. A cousin shouted and pointed at a jet stream that arced across the northern sky, and when the others resumed the game Joe watched as the vapour stream grew wide and gradually faded into the blue. She’s not there, one of Joe’s aunts had said when the coffin was being carried to the hearse for the trip to the Pine View cemetery. Your mother’s spirit has flown away. And he wondered now, could she see him?

  That night he filled the bathtub and then slid down under the water and held his breath, listened to his pulse, like a knuckle flicking against the side of his skull. Was he really here? He went on to ponder that universal question, although he could feel the water buoy up his arms, the bob of his penis. Or was he dreaming? Sometimes when he was younger he’d dreamed of being in the bathtub and awoke to the hot sensation of himself peeing. Even now he might wake up and find himself tangled in the bedsheet and hear his mother counting out cribbage points. He pushed up to the surface, gasping, gouging the water from his eyes. As he dried himself, he saw his face in the mirror, and although he looked the same, he knew he was not. He was about to turn away when he noticed that Verna’s toothbrush was not in its holder.

  He suspected Steve might be watching the house for signs that his aunts and cousins had left. They had arrived days before the funeral to help with the arrangements and would stay for several more days to fill the freezer with meals, occupy Alfred with cribbage, ease Joe into his loss as though it was a body of cold water he would eventually grow used to.

  The moment their car pulled away from the curb the house was too suddenly quiet and large with their absence. Alfred went to his room and shut the door. Joe sat out on the veranda steps, thinking that Steve might appear from behind a tree across the street. Finally he got up, determined to find him.

  Steve lived in a small crumbling cottage-style house at the edge of the downtown neighbourhood where it gave way to used car lots and pawnshops. Its picket fence leaned out to the street and the lawn was trampled to hard earth. You and me should get to know one another, Steve’s mother had said to Verna one day when she’d gone by, and had invited her in for a cup of tea so strong you had to chew before swallowing. Steve’s mother had lost her Indian status when she’d left the reservation to live with a white man, something Verna had seen happen often up north. In the town where she grew up, she’d gone to school with Indian kids and she had no qualms about Steve and Joe being friends.

  Joe began to hear a wailing as he went along the lane toward Steve’s house, and it grew louder the closer he got, like cats were yowling, and under it was the rhythmic boom of a skin drum. When he reached the house he stopped, the hair on his arms tingling. Although the yard was strewn with toys, there was no one in sight and the window curtains were drawn. Indian singing, he thought as the voices suddenly grew louder and rose higher. It came from the basement. He knew Steve was part Indian, his mum had said, but except for the time when Steve’s grandmother, his kokum, had come for a visit, Joe had never thought about Steve being Indian. He was darker-skinned, but so were lots of kids in a neighbourhood that was made up mostly of immigrants.

  He turned round and walked away quickly, the reverberation of the drumbeat quivering in his breastbone. He began to run, his feet pounding hard against the pavement. He knew then that he wasn’t dreaming, that his mother had opened her mouth to breathe air and had breathed in water.

  Days later Steve appeared at Joe’s door, his hair cut short and slicked back from his forehead. He wore what looked like a new T-shirt, and cradled a stationery box in his arm.

  “Do you want to help deliver flyers?” he asked, his dark eyes flicking to Joe’s face, and then away. The camp was going to start at the church within days. “It’s free. You get gumballs for attendance. I’m going.” Steve said this in such a way that implied that even if Joe didn’t, he would. For the remainder of the day, their eyes didn’t meet again.

  “I want to go to the day camp at church,” Joe told Alfred through the bedroom door that evening and was surprised when it opened and Alfred stood blinking down at him. He hadn’t shaved, and tufts of silver whiskers hung from his chin. Joe stepped back from the billow of sour air. A plate with a half-eaten sandwich rested on the floor beside the unmade bed.

  “What’s it about?” Alfred asked.

  “There’ll be games and things.”

  Alfred’s shoulders sagged beneath his undershirt as he went over to the bureau and returned with his wallet, his hands trembling as he opened it.

  “It doesn’t cost anything,” Joe said.

  “Buy some groceries.” Alfred held out several bills and when Joe took them, he asked, “You doing okay?”

  “I’m okay.”

  As Joe went toward the stairs, Alfred’s door closed again. He stood at the top of the staircase looking down, remembering having sat beside his mother on the bottom step. And that he hadn’t wanted to kiss her. He crunched the money in his fist and shoved it deep into his jeans pocket, then sat down on the top step, thinking that likely he wouldn’t ever slide down the banister again.

  The following week Joe leaned over the railing of the church balcony and looked down at Steve. It was Steve’s idea that they jump from the balcony, the small cramped space near the ceiling, the paint on the plaster walls blistered and mottled with mildew. At its centre stood the silver Come to Jesus Chair. Joe had wanted to be the first to jump, but he regretted that now as he looked over the railing. Spread about Steve on the floor were the sofa cushions they’d arranged in a hurry, and the gaps between them seemed larger than they had been when Joe was down there among them. He wished that he was outside with the others, playing a game of dodge ball.

  “You’re chicken,” Steve said. In the silence, flies trapped between the window blinds and the glass buzzed loudly. He hugged his chest then, as though he was suddenly cold. “Didn’t you tell anyone about the man?”

  For a moment Joe didn’t understand. Then he remembered the man in the car calling out to him and Steve, and Steve going over to see what he wanted. And although he didn’
t recall a white baseball cap, the man might have been wearing a yellow shirt. But he wasn’t sure, as after that terrible night one day had flowed into another in a continuous stream of ache. When he’d gone house to house with Steve stuffing flyers in mailboxes, at last he’d been able to say, my mother drowned. I know, Steve had said and they continued on as though nothing had changed.

  “Why didn’t you tell my mother about that man in the car?” Steve asked now, his voice full, as though he was near to crying.

  “I forgot,” Joe said.

  “There you are,” Maryanne Lewis called out to Steve, her head and shoulders emerging into view below the balcony. Joe hung onto the railing as the walls suddenly began to move. His legs felt like they were melting.

  “I wondered where you got to.” Maryanne followed Steve’s upward gaze to the balcony, and Joe.

  The heat, the paint fumes from the silver chair were a force dragging him down to the floor. He pressed his forehead to his knees and wrapped his arms about them.

  He was unaware of Maryanne as she climbed the stairs to the balcony and crouched beside him. Then he felt her hand on the small of his back.

  “We’re so sorry, Joe. All of us. We know what happened and we’ve been praying for you. You’re not alone. We’re here. And Jesus is here. Jesus promised that he’d never leave us or forsake us,” Maryanne said.

  Soon Joe found himself kneeling at the chair on the balcony of the Salt & Light Company and admitting that he was like everyone else in the world. He had sinned and was lost. Like everyone who’d ever lived, he had fallen short of the glory of God. He hunched over on one side of the chair, while Maryanne knelt at the other, reading aloud from a small booklet she had taken from her skirt pocket. He was oblivious to her breath pouring over him.

  “Listen to your heart, Joe. It will tell you your sins.”

  The traffic streaming by on Portage Avenue was a dull rumble in the church balcony as Joe searched for something to own up to that would prove that, like all the people in the world, he needed to be saved.

  He had often argued with his mother. He’d told her he had brushed his hair, when he hadn’t. He was sometimes mean. Only this morning, when he saw that Cecil had left the cap off his toothpaste, he’d squirted out some paste and written Slob on the bathroom mirror.

  “I tell lies sometimes,” Joe said, his voice sounding shaky and high.

  “Yes,” Maryanne whispered.

  He confessed that he had once taken a bag of marshmallow puffs his mother had been saving for a special treat. He’d hid behind the TV console and stuffed his mouth with as many marshmallow puffs as he possibly could. He’d almost choked and had leapt out from his hiding place, his mouth foaming.

  “Adam and Eve hid too, Joe. They tried to hide from God when they ate the forbidden fruit, after God had told them not to. They hid because they were afraid,” Maryanne said.

  Because they didn’t want to get caught.

  Maryanne rested her elbows on the chair as she knelt across from Joe on the balcony, clasped her forehead and closed her eyes. “God has a wonderful plan for your life,” she said.

  “I hate Karen Rasmussen.” He realized it was true. It was Karen’s fault his mother had drowned. When the police came to the house, no one knew Karen was also gone. It wasn’t until the next day that Cecil heard on the radio that she’d been found dead after having given birth to a baby, and that a neighbour told Alfred he’d seen Karen leave the house looking angry and then Verna chasing after her. Joe’s aunts and Alfred had figured it out: Verna must have seen Karen jump from the bridge and had gone into the river to try and save her.

  “I don’t need to know who Karen is, or why you think you hate her. But I do know hate is a pretty strong word,” Maryanne said. “I’m going to keep my eyes closed, but you open yours now.”

  He saw her hand turned, palm up, on the edge of the chair. “Put how you feel about Karen, in my hand. And Jesus will take it away.”

  The blinds rattled in the sanctuary below and Joe realized Steve was still down there, listening. But he didn’t care. The other kids had come into the church and gone to the basement classrooms and he heard them begin to sing. Deep and wide, deep and wide, there’s a fountain flowing deep and wide.

  “Okay,” Joe said and he lifted his hand and dropped Karen Rasmussen into her palm. His body began to hum, as though he was a wire that had just been plucked.

  “Now close your eyes and repeat after me,” Maryanne said. “Dear God. Thank you for sending Jesus to take away my sins. Come into my heart, Lord Jesus.”

  He heard himself repeat the words. And when he opened his eyes he saw the water stains on the ceiling, like cirrus clouds of iodine. He was lying near the balcony railing on his back without knowing how he’d got there, legs and arms spread wide, his palms turned up and buzzing. He felt a light growing around him, the colour of liquid honey, and his body swelled with it. He wanted to laugh. A fountain spurted up, and water gushed from his nose and eyes. When he turned his head he saw Maryanne Lewis, head bowed, kneeling by the chair.

  As Joe nears Medicine Hat, the highway gives way to a corridor of fast-food restaurants, motels and gas stations, the light-trimmed facades and signs washed out by the setting sun. Keith spots a particular gas station and tells Joe to turn onto the service road.

  He pulls up at the pumps, then turns off the engine and hands the keys to Keith. “This is where I leave you. Thanks for the ride.” Joe is relieved to be parting company.

  “You betcha, take care, now,” Keith says.

  Bryce gets out of the van and heads off toward the garage and Joe follows, leaving Keith at the gas pump. Bryce’s stride is long and energetic; he has the physique of a runner, Joe thinks, and he must hurry to catch the door before it closes behind him. He follows Bryce along an aisle toward the sign indicating the presence of washrooms.

  He waits off to one side of the door in a corridor made even narrower by the stack of boxes along one wall. The gas station with its overstocked shelves and carousels of junk food and road trash, is an assault of colour after the hours spent staring at the beige horizon. Joe spots a rack of phone cards at the counter. He’ll buy time for his cell there, then he’ll grab something to eat and call Deere Lodge and talk to the supervisor before he talks to Alfred, and if he’s still awake around midnight, he’ll call Steve again.

  He hears water running in the washroom and then a towel roller being unwound. The washroom door opens. “Wait,” Joe says as Bryce is about to go past him. The boy stops abruptly and takes him in, looking blue-faced cold in the harsh fluorescent lights. “I likely won’t be seeing you again,” Joe says, wanting to say more, but he doesn’t know what.

  Bryce ducks his head, looks embarrassed, not knowing what Joe expects of him, while Joe feels a light pressure of warmth, like hands, come to rest on his shoulders.

  “You be safe.” Joe goes still inside, listens for what to say now. His light is shining all around you. “Do you need anything?” he asks. The skin across his cheekbones feels drawn and tight.

  “What?” Bryce asks. His Adam’s apple bobs as he swallows.

  “Are you all right? Why don’t I give you my cellphone number? If something’s not right, call me,” Joe says.

  Bryce backs away as though Joe’s threatened him, his face turning red with confusion. “Take off,” he mutters and pushes past Joe in the aisle, rushes over to the counter where Keith is now paying for the fuel.

  Joe leaves the gas station and strikes out along the service road toward what looks to be a village of fast-food restaurants, their facades like sheets of polished bronze as the sunset reaches its apex. The western sky is layered with burning colours, like liquid glass spilling out from the corona. In the twinkling of an eye, Joe thinks. Some small part of him still hopes to be rescued.

  Behind him, the eastern sky is a dark bruise, night already enclosing the land. He thinks of Laurie, and it occurs to him that perhaps he’s not so much leaving her as he’s being dr
awn away. He pushes aside the thought, feeling that he’s in danger of making a fool of himself. As he already had with the boy. Be safe, he should have only said that.

  Nearly an hour later, the hot meal and the heated air pouring from a vent above the booth bring on weariness and the desire for four walls, a space he can enter, close the door and sleep. He doesn’t want to land on Steve’s doorstep flat broke, but if he gets a motel room, he’ll be close to it. He’s made a point of not borrowing money from anyone except those in the business of lending it, and he can’t imagine borrowing money from Steve. He pushes aside his empty plate, thinking that he could have eaten more. As the waitress passes by the booth he calls her over to refill his coffee. Then he wraps his hands about the mug, its heat steadying; reminds himself that he’ll need to call Deere Lodge soon.

  The sound of the television above the bar rises, gaining his attention and that of the people around him. A newscast is in progress, an account of a police stakeout earlier in the day. The journalist’s voice is brittle with urgency as she reports from a country road that the pedophile had been holed up in an abandoned farmhouse and surrendered when the boys with him broke free and fled. In the background is the green van. Joe senses the collective relief round him, and as the volume is turned down and the newscast continues, he recalls Bryce, slope-shouldered, already looking defeated.

  As he calls Deere Lodge, beyond the window nightfall is almost complete, and the headlights of vehicles are pinpoints of light moving steadily along the highway and across his distorted reflection. A woman answers abruptly, identifying herself as Debbie Laurence, the supervisor. When she learns it’s Joe, her voice lightens.

  “Your father says that you’re out of town right now. Will you be away for long?” she asks.

  “Several weeks,” Joe replies although he’s no longer certain what, if anything, he might accomplish in such a short time.

  “I was hoping we’d have a chance to talk face to face,” she says.