Waiting for Joe

by Sandra Birdsell

  In the days that followed Helen began calling Joe from a pay phone on a corner near the rooming house, asking, so what are you doing? Asking, do you want to do something? Go for a walk? One night she called him from the Children’s Hospital where Jordan had been admitted with croup and was having trouble breathing.

  Joe could hardly see for the milky cold mist when he entered the steam room, Helen a dark shape leaning over the crib at the centre of it where the mist seemed to be the heaviest. He made his way among the cribs, most of them empty, and when he reached her, his shirt was damp. She didn’t see him coming and when he stepped up to her side, she grabbed his arm and then threw her arms about his neck, her body shaking as she began to cry.

  “Okay, it’s okay,” Joe said. He wanted to embrace her with love. In the way the elders and deacons embraced one another following communion, in the way the people around Joe in church reached for him, and for each other in an exchange of agape love, but his penis had raised its head. He stepped away and went over to the crib and looked down at Jordan, curled on the mattress, relieved to see his chest rising and falling.

  “I didn’t know who to call,” Helen said. Steve’s mother wasn’t home. “And I don’t know where Janice is.” She ground at her eyes with the heels of her palms. “Sometimes she comes back late at night and she won’t say where she’s been.”

  Joe felt as though he was suddenly treading water in a deep lake. He’d seen Janice once, downtown near the repair depot where he worked during the summer, her features vivid with cosmetics, looking older than sixteen. She was going past the Albert Arms Hotel with someone who was old enough to be her father. He had to make a phone call, he told Helen, but he would come right back.

  He found a pay phone at the end of the corridor beside a waiting room. He called Pastor Ken, and when he hung up he went into the room and picked through a pile of magazines on the coffee table. Then he sat down with a National Geographic, settling for an article on the Apollo 17 mission. He looked at the purplish-grey landscape and the black sky beyond the Lunar Rover, the astronaut raking up rock samples, while the earth appeared to sit on the curvature of the moon. He thought to take the magazine home to Alfred, who was sometimes skeptical about whether or not there had been a moon landing. The wall clock hummed as the time passed, and when he heard a noise down the hall he set the magazine aside, thinking Helen might come looking for him.

  When he came into the steam room he was surprised to see a man and woman who stared at him when he went over to Helen, likely assuming that like them, he and Helen were parents of a croupy child. He stood at the end of the crib, while Helen hung onto the side railing as though it was saving her life.

  “His face is hot, now,” Helen said. “He’s worse.”

  “Do you want me to get a nurse?” Joe asked, worried. Jordan’s breathing did sound more raspy now.

  As though in answer, a nurse entered the room, her shoes squeaking noisily on the wet tile floor. Helen quickly stepped back when she came over and reached into the crib to take Jordan’s pulse, then shook a thermometer and put it under his arm.

  “It sounds like he’s having real trouble breathing,” Joe said, knowing Helen wouldn’t speak up.

  “It always sounds worse than it is,” the nurse said and then looked at him. “Are you a relative?”

  He was a friend, Joe explained and she raised her eyebrows, then turned away to retrieve the thermometer. Just then Maryanne Lewis hurried into the room, Crystal behind her.

  “More friends?” the nurse asked Helen, who looked at Joe to explain their presence.

  “Well, all of you can’t be in here,” the nurse said and went over to greet the other couple waiting for her at their child’s crib. When she greeted them, Joe noted the friendliness of her tone as she spoke to them.

  “We left as soon as you called,” Maryanne said, her attention turning to Helen as he introduced her. Then she swooped down and gathered Helen into a hug. Helen shrugged free angrily, and turned to Joe, wanting him to answer the question in her eyes. “We’re friends of Joe’s,” Maryanne explained. “We thought you might be able to use a break.”

  Joe couldn’t help but notice the contrast, Maryanne’s springy platinum hair, her crisp candy-striped blouse and capri pants, against the man’s white shirt Helen wore, damp and clinging to her chest, the shirt-tails hanging at her hips. He couldn’t help but notice the shapelessness of her thick, strong body. You like me. It wasn’t a question, but an appeal. He heard the callousness in his reply.

  “Why not come and have a cup of coffee. We’ll go down to the cafeteria. Joe and Crystal will stay,” Maryanne said.

  At the mention of her name Crystal stepped forward. “He’ll be okay with us,” she said to Helen, and Joe was surprised when Helen allowed Maryanne to lead her away.

  “Hi,” Crystal said when they were alone. She turned her luminous flat eyes up to his face and her Adam’s apple bobbed as she swallowed. Sometimes when she entered the sanctuary with the other girls he noticed that she would look for him. In a room full of people he’d feel watched, and see her turn away. Her family had been visiting the Lewises when he’d called, she explained. Maryanne had asked her to come along.

  Then she glanced down at Jordan and her nervousness was gone. “Oh, is he ever cute,” she whispered.

  Jordan opened his eyes then, and seeing her, he began to whimper.

  Crystal leaned into the crib. “Hey, don’t worry. Mommy’s coming back soon,” she said, her voice startling Jordan into silence.

  She drew the flannel blanket over his shoulders and began to hum, a song Joe recognized as “Jacob’s Ladder,” the children’s hymn he’d learned when he’d first gone to the Salt & Light Company and thought he was beyond the age to sing and mime the action of climbing a ladder. But he remembered the words, the line ending with children of the cross. And he thought, that’s what he was. He was a child of the cross. That was the real difference between him and Steve.

  Days later Pastor Ken bounced a pencil against his desk while Joe talked. His eyes bored straight through Joe when he confessed to having bought milk, the makings of sandwiches, fruit and breakfast cereal, for the Bushy sisters. He’d gone with Helen to a clinic to see about Jordan’s rash, which had turned out to be eczema, and bought the ointment the doctor had prescribed. He didn’t say that they’d had sex one afternoon when Janice took Jordan out to the park, a quick event that was over in a sudden push and flare of pleasure. Instead, he said that he had a deep concern for the welfare of the Bushy sisters.

  “You may mean well, Joe, but believe me, this is not for you,” Pastor Ken said.

  “This?” Joe asked.

  “She’s not the kind of person you would want to be involved with, is she?” Pastor Ken asked and Joe sensed he was holding his breath. They locked eyes for a moment before Joe turned away. “No, she’s not,” he said.

  “All right then,” Pastor Ken said. “I’ll let some of the women know about the Bushy sisters. It’s not up to you to do this.”

  Helen, Janice and Jordan arrived at church the following Sunday and were escorted by the deacon to the front of the sanctuary with an older couple who had volunteered to take the sisters under their wing. They were seated on an overstuffed couch, the man and his wife on either side trying not to look pleased to have been asked to dedicate themselves to the Bushy project. Crystal and her friends claimed Jordan, taking him downstairs each Sunday where they entertained him in the baby room, released him to Helen’s arms at the end of the service, sometimes clutching a new toy, or a box of animal crackers, his stubborn bushy hair wet and brushed flat at his crown. When Helen called, Joe made excuses why he couldn’t meet her, and on Sundays he avoided the bewildered puzzlement in her eyes, and then her anger.

  One Sunday, the elderly couple arrived without the Bushy sisters and the baby, quietly concerned about their whereabouts. When they had gone to pick them up, they’d been told the girls had moved out. There had been others like the Bush
y sisters, who suddenly appeared at the church one morning, stayed for a time and left, and there would likely be more. If they were meant to stay they would have stayed, the deacon explained. Sometimes the winnower would come to the threshing room floor and separate the chaff from the wheat.

  After Joe and Steve graduated from high school, Steve left Winnipeg to take up full-time what had been his summer job, roughnecking for a drilling company in Brooks. Joe went on to university. Now and then throughout the years Joe would suddenly hear from Steve after months of silence. He would call from a pay phone in a small town near the drilling site, and from a gas station in Sandy Lake when he went to the reserve. He’d called once from Venice Beach, drunk, shouting above the noise in a bar that he was going to get married, and the next time Joe talked to him he couldn’t remember having said that, or who the woman had been. For a time Steve worked in Texas, and he had his own apartment then, and Joe was able to call him frequently. When Joe opened the Happy Traveler, Steve sent a bottle of Bollinger champagne, his card saying, Still playing with toys, Joey, only big time now. Way to go. And then he enlisted with the Princess Patricia Canadian Light Infantry, and was stationed in Shilo. On his first leave he came home, wanting to connect with his family, wanting to meet Joe’s skirt, Laurie, whom Joe had been going on about for some time now. He had tickets for David Bowie’s Glass Spider concert.

  * * *

  When Steve came up the walk to the house, Joe hesitated at the door, not recognizing him immediately. He was twice the size, his forearms beefy and pectorals straining against his T-shirt, while his thighs threatened to split his jeans. He’d been working out, Steve explained, an understatement given the bulk of his sculpted body. His greeting was stiff, his voice tight. But when Joe was in the kitchen fixing coffee he heard the old Steve, the smoky huskiness, the cracks of laughter, as he visited with Alfred.

  Steve arranged to meet Joe and Laurie later, at the entrance of the stadium, and as he came toward them he seemed unaware of the effect he had on the people milling about, awed by the hugeness of his muscled body, how they grew quiet and gave way to let him pass through.

  “Holy mackerel, Joe, how in hell did you manage this? Ugly mug like you,” Steve said as Joe introduced him to Laurie. Joe saw the sudden shyness in her eyes, her smile go sideways.

  They went to claim their seats and there was a moment of awkwardness as Laurie chose not to sit between them. And then, as though to cover for it, she became animated, touching Joe’s thigh, grabbing at his arm when she talked past him to Steve. He saw her as Steve must, her sexual energy in the impatient shifting of her body, the way her breasts came forward when she raised her arms to refasten the clips in her hair. When Bowie at last descended on stage in the glass spider, the roar of the crowd was instantaneous and deafening. “You’re not going to let her go alone?” Steve yelled when Laurie pushed past them to get down to the floor, and before Joe could respond, he went after her.

  Laurie and Steve were at least a head taller than most of the people, but Joe quickly lost sight of them, and when after a few moments he too fought his way down to the floor he was unable to spot them among the crowd, which had gone instantly wild at the moment Bowie appeared. Joe took refuge at the side to watch the spotlights, the dancers, Bowie, everything an undulation of colour and movement that made no sense; nor did the music, distorted, and ultimately drowned out by the howl of the crowd.

  He made his way to an exit and burst through the doors feeling as though, like Jonah, he’d just been regurgitated. He went to the parking lot to wait for the concert to end, leaned against the car and turned his face up to the night coming down over the city, the warm autumn air tinged with the onset of decaying vegetation and the smoke of stubble fires in outlying fields. He was grateful for Clayton, his assistant, who would keep things running without a hitch at the Happy Traveler tomorrow when he and Laurie went to the lake for what would likely be the last of windsurfing, before it got too cold.

  The music reverberated in the buildings around the stadium, and he got into the car to escape it, turned on the radio and thought of Laurie and her appealing uncertainty. When are you going to make an honest woman out of that girl, Alfred kept asking, his way of letting Joe know he wanted to keep Laurie in their lives.

  He rolled up the window to better hear Grappelli playing “Limehouse Blues” and watched two boys going along the railway tracks, one of them whacking at weeds with a golf club. It was the same freight line that skirted the edge of his neighbourhood, crossing the Assiniboine River on the train trestle bridge.

  And he thought about how he and Steve had hitched rides on that slow-moving train, how they rode it across the bridge and out to the sugar beet factory. Then they hiked across country to where a stand of burr oak sheltered the ghost town. He remembered the eerie quiet as they went through yards, feeling there were people at the windows watching. Mouse dirt, broken glass, rotting linoleum, the musty smell of abandonment and ruin. He remembers a cupboard in a yard, small drawers holding pieces of metal. He and Steve, sitting on a bench in grass that was as tall as their shoulders, Steve saying he wanted to be a policeman, but he couldn’t do the math. He’d go away and stay with his grandmother on the reserve and then had to struggle to catch up at school when he got back. Joe had lent him his notes, taken him home for a bowl of Alfred’s barley soup and a quiet place to study, had tried to tutor him. But it was true. Steve couldn’t get math, no matter what way Joe tried to come at it. “Why aren’t you guys out setting cars on fire,” Alfred said to them from the doorway when they studied, which is what he would say to Joe when he came upon him in his room on a Saturday night, boning up for Sunday school. Boning up on God.

  Those times when he and Steve were young teenagers going out into the country, he had sometimes turned to watch that train moving across the horizon and thought that heaven was a freight train, and he was the man riding on top a car, his forehead resting on his knees, on a journey away from, and toward something; heaven was that movement of being carried along, being held between the beginning and the end.

  He listened to the music playing on the car radio and watched those two boys disappear into a culvert beneath a street, and he thought if he ever had a child, he’d need to make time to take him places, as he and Steve used to do. During a drive down the coast to California he’d seen the large number of streamliners on the road, the parks filled with motorhomes, and came back to discover there were only two RV dealers in the entire city of Winnipeg. Once people got to know where he was, after a slow first half year of business, he hadn’t looked back. And now two years later, although he could sometimes steal a day or two to go canoeing or windsurfing with Laurie, he seldom got out into the country.

  He must have fallen asleep, as it seemed the next moment people were swarming from the exits of the stadium into the parking lot. He waited another quarter of an hour, and was about to go into the stadium to look for Laurie and Steve when they emerged at the far end of the lot, coming quickly when they saw him, expressing relief and surprise that he’d waited. Steve’s arm dropped from Laurie’s waist and she stumbled toward him, her eyes too bright when she hauled him into a prolonged kiss. He smelled coffee.

  He released her, and looked at Steve, expected the usual wisecrack to deflect the tension between them. Steve’s eyes held his, hard and unswerving. “What kept you guys?” Joe asked.

  It was Laurie who answered. They’d taken the wrong exit and wound up way the hell and gone on the opposite side of the arena, she said, while Steve turned away and lit a cigarette.

  The following day when Joe arrived at Laurie’s apartment, he was surprised to find her waiting at the lobby door, subdued and dark around the eyes. Of course, he thought. Steve had been to see her after they’d parted last night. And she’d let him in. He imagined Steve’s dark hands on Laurie’s body, and he reached for her, thinking they would go upstairs, but when he tried to kiss her, she turned away.

  When they were out on the lake she
didn’t follow when he began tacking toward the shore. Instead, she went out farther and faster than she had in the past, without him being there to signal or shout instructions. He beached his board, then stood watching, noting the straightness of her back, her obvious strength, her hair like a banner streaming.

  He went walking along the dunes until they gave way and the shoreline rose in a blunt cliff carved out by the wash of water and wind, which had exposed a stratum of shale, gravel and soil. A glint of light caught his eye and he went over to it and pried loose a chunk of flint, but which he took to be obsidian, black glass. He jostled it from hand to hand and felt it grow warm. It was a stone that had come out of fire. On its smooth dark surface were minute ripples and whorls, and as he ran his finger across them he imagined he was feeling God’s breath. Even before the stone had been magma, before the world had been made—whether that had happened in seven days, or seven trillion years, didn’t matter—God knew all the ripples and whorls inscribing his life. Did that mean then, that his mother’s death, the way she’d died, had been predestined? He had often wondered, and throughout the years, Pastor Ken never came right out and said, yes. Only, that the end result of his mother’s tragic death had brought Joe into the kingdom of heaven. Joe went over to the water’s edge and dropped to his haunches, the stone dimpling the sand between his feet. And his mother’s death had brought Laurie to the house that day. The stone, he thought, was an object lesson, a reminder that nothing happened in his life without there being a reason.

  He’d been like the ancient Greeks, viewing his own dark and hazy reflection in a piece of burnished brass and thinking he had a clear picture. His notion that the events of other people’s lives had been arranged by God for his benefit, was like the ancients believing that light emanated from their eyes.