Waiting for Joe

by Sandra Birdsell

After talking to Alfred he had another coffee, and considered returning to Winnipeg, finding temporary work in one of the box stores in the south city limits, living in a cheap motel on the Pembina strip that would give him anonymity, freedom from telephone calls and mail. He could work nights, spend the days with his father. But he couldn’t take him home. And while Alfred understands that a business might go belly up, he wouldn’t understand how it was possible for him to lose the house.

  Still, in the south end of Winnipeg there would be little chance of coming upon people he knew, except for Pauline. People such as the deacon who surprised him by calling last winter. When he and Crystal were engaged, Joe had shared many meals with the family, and been a frequent weekend guest at the lakeside cottage. The deacon began calling him son. After he and Crystal split up, the man had found ingenious ways to look straight through him.

  The deacon explained that when he’d heard Joe’s business was suffering, he’d put him on his prayer list. “It’s been some time since we’ve seen you, Joe. But you’re never far from our thoughts. The Lord laid it on me to call. Why don’t we get together over lunch and talk.”

  Joe thought to say that until the Lord laid it on him to accept, he’d have to decline. After he and Crystal parted she went to live with relatives in Toronto where she eventually married a stockbroker and had several children. Her happiness and Joe’s failure had eased the way for the deacon to call. Joe feared he’d be asked to pray over the meal. And he would hear himself come up with something that sounded shallow and rehearsed. And so he’d turned down the invitation.

  A light shudders on the horizon, a semi-trailer, given the height of the beams. As it approaches, he turns his back, his body buffeted by the current of wind as it barrels past. Three more semis follow, passing him like a sudden storm. They round a curve in the highway, their running lights like one long and continuous string.

  At the Juba Industrial Park there was a garage that serviced such rigs, and when the drivers came into Pauline’s diner he noticed how they sought one another out, truckers of all ages, gathered at tables talking the lingo of the road. He’d once belonged to a group of people who’d had their own language. The Lord laid it on me to call. Catchphrases that seemed to stop conversation, rather than encourage it.

  As he walks, the sky seems to grow darker, the stars white and brittle. He senses the Rocky Mountains in the dryness of the wind blowing in his face and imagines the undulation and thrust of stone, the long and gradual ascent of the highway, straight and rising for miles into the mountains. He walks faster and then breaks into a jog, and feels the jolt in his knees, his clumsy heaviness.

  He counts the seconds, hoping that soon he’ll be aware of nothing but his feet moving across the ground. The mantra of his youth comes to mind, what he told himself while facing a difficult exam, or his fear of heights, or running cross-country with Steve whose endurance seemed endless, even though he was a smoker. The recitation of I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me turned him into a warrior armed with the sword of the Word, marching to do battle with himself.

  Although he’d played varsity basketball and was on the track team, he had mostly chosen to remain on the sidelines of high school life. Except for Steve, his friends were kids in the church youth group, and they often went bowling, or to a movie, or for pizza, with Pastor Ken and Maryanne, or one of the parents. When they were older they sometimes drove out in several cars to the gravel pits on a hot summer night and leapt from the cliffs into the deep pools of turquoise water, or to the Big Whiteshell Lake in winter where they cross-country skied, ending up at the cottage of Crystal’s parents for chili and games of charades.

  It wasn’t difficult for Joe to decline soft drugs or to avoid the girls willing to make out at the parties he sometimes went to after a basketball game. Stuck up. Beaudry thinks he’s something. He’d learned to keep quiet about his convictions in high school and especially university. Open-mindedness only went so far. Had he confessed to serving prison time, or to being gay, he knew acceptance would have been more forthcoming than if he’d professed that Jesus Christ was his personal saviour.

  Steve stopped coming to church when he and Joe reached their teens, although he still showed up for youth night once in a while. Half the time he didn’t get what the pastor talked about and the other half he felt he was being pressured by Joe and others to make a decision for Christ, as though he wasn’t good enough the way he was. Pastor Ken had advised Joe that of course they could still be friends, but best friends? He doubted Steve was the wisest choice. We all love him, he’s a great guy. But being nice, being a great person, just doesn’t cut it. I am the way, Jesus said. No man gets to God, except by me.

  The reality of being human sometimes clashed with Joe’s youthful zeal, and Steve had been witness to some of his struggles. Steve brought him home, dead drunk, from his first and only experiment with hard liquor. There had been other lapses, like the time they’d gone to the beach and Joe, seeing a Walkman left unattended on a blanket, picked it up. Hours later the owner, a woman, came upon him and Steve at the concession stand and Steve was listening to the Walkman. Joe was forever shamed by his own silence while Steve endured the woman’s string of racial invectives. “Screw you,” Steve said to Joe when he tried to apologize later, and his lips had gone blue with anger. He took off, and Joe waited for him until the last bus, and then returned to the city alone. Steve had hitched a ride into town, and the next day his father had driven him up to the reserve. Steve did sometimes go to Sandy Lake to stay with his grandmother, but this time he was away for the rest of the summer.

  * * *

  In the last year of high school, Steve and Joe took the Bushy sisters with them to an abandoned farm. All that spring, and then into the final month before the track meet, they’d been parking the car at the farm site and going out crosscountry running along the ridge bordering the nearby coulee, a deep bowl scooped out of the earth that had a stream running through it. Sometimes deer rose from whorls of flattened grass near the stream, looked at them a moment before skipping off into the thickets of chokecherry. Janice and Helen Bushy. When they’d landed at the bus depot they’d called, Steve said, taking Joe to the nearby rooming house where they were staying. He’d met them years ago at a powwow.

  “They couldn’t make a living fishing up there,” Steve said without explaining how it could be that the two girls had been employed catching fish. When they entered the sisters’ room near a staircase on the main floor of the rooming house, Joe was surprised to discover that the older girl, Helen, who was seventeen, had a baby.

  “This is my friend, Joe,” Steve said, and Joe felt something in the broad-faced girl’s leap forward to welcome him, although she only nodded with the barest hint of a smile. Her dark hair lay across her forehead in heavy bangs, the style of the Indian residential school kids, like a bowl had been set on her head and someone had cut around it.

  Her eyes pooled with worry as she looked past Joe to the fussing baby, clad only in a diaper, who was hauling himself up to his feet in the crib in a corner of the room. She went to him, lifted him over the side, and as he straddled her hip, Joe laughed at the sight of his huge thighs, ringed with rolls of fat.

  “He’s a midget sumo wrestler,” Joe said and when Helen didn’t react, it occurred to him that she might not know what a sumo wrestler was. Or a midget.

  “Jordan’s got a rash, eh,” Helen said above his fussing. “Look.” She turned his arm to show Joe the inside of it, then the back of his leg, both having patches of rough looking skin that oozed.

  It was as though she expected he could do something about it. Jordan took notice of Joe then, and began to cry, grabbed at his mother’s neck and pressed his cheek against hers, as though trying to get inside. Joe wanted to wipe away the rivulet of clear mucus glazing his top lip.

  Steve, who’d been straddling the only chair in the room, got up and motioned for Helen to give Jordan to him, and Joe was surprised when Steve di
d what he’d wanted to do, lifted the hem of his T-shirt and wiped away the snot. Steve jostled the boy in his arms while speaking to him in Cree, and gradually Jordan grew quiet.

  There was only enough space in the room for the sagging double bed, a chest of drawers whose veneer was partly stripped away, the single straight-back chair. A thin rope was strung diagonally across the space, and moments later, the younger sister, Janice, a taller, slender version of Helen, came in, having rinsed out several diapers in the bathroom down the hall, and began slinging them over the line to dry. She too dipped her head in obvious embarrassment when Steve introduced her.

  Their eyes, like Steve’s, darted away from Joe’s whenever he looked at them directly. Where did they eat? He found the answer when he saw the garbage can at the foot of the bureau, crammed with fast-food wrappers.

  “At night Jordan cries. It’s hot in here, eh, and the rash gets bad,” Helen said. She perched on the side of the bed and stared at her sandals, her thick toes looking dusty, though the nails seemed wet with red polish.

  “They bang on the door. Tell us to keep him quiet. I take him into bed with us, but it gets hot, and then he gets more itchy.”

  Steve said something to her in Cree and she laughed, her face a plum blush of embarrassment.

  “Helen usually doesn’t talk much. It must be love at first sight,” Steve said and she snatched up a pillow and pretended to throw it at him.

  Later they went for a walk and wound up at Vimy Ridge Park where they came upon Alfred and his friend Earl at a picnic table and stopped to talk for a moment. Joe looked on, thinking that Steve seemed looser-jointed, relaxed and full of teasing with the sisters present. He’d never heard him speak Cree until now.

  On the weekend after Steve had taken Joe to meet the Bushy sisters they picked them up at the boarding house for the drive into the country, Steve at the wheel of his father’s car, a rust bucket he kept licensed for the times when Steve’s mother grew lonely for her family.

  That the sisters had been watching for them became apparent when they pulled up in front of the rooming house and the door opened immediately. They hurried down the steps, looking summery, Helen in a pale blue cotton dress belted at the waist, Janice in a flared skirt and blouse, both of them carrying white clutch purses.

  Dressed as though going to church, Joe thought with a start. Thinking of the girls at church finding each other and disappearing into the washroom and then sweeping into the sanctuary, Crystal among them, trailing sweet-smelling hairspray and perfume. Even Jordan appeared to be dressed up for the occasion in a pair of stiff-looking jeans and a T-shirt that looked new, and a miniature version of Kodiak workboots that must be uncomfortable given the way he sat on Helen’s lap in the back seat, his legs straight out as though he was afraid to move them.

  “Hey, big guy, how’s life?” Joe said once they were underway, reaching back to grab Jordan’s hand, startling him. Jordan pulled it free and stuffed it into his mouth while staring at Joe. Jordan Bushy. Right on. Joe smiled as he thought of the teasing the boy would face down the road, given his bushy hair.

  “Those are great boots,” he said to Helen.

  Her smile was filled with gratitude. “They’re cute, eh. I got them at the Army and Navy.” Joe realized that she had wanted him to notice. Her voice was low, like Steve’s, but smoother in the way one sound glided into another. Like jazz.

  The sisters hardly spoke during the drive through the city, but Joe sensed their anticipation and Helen’s watchful eyes on the back of his head. When he turned and pointed out the fighter jet at the entrance of Assiniboine Park, she looked at him and not the airplane, her face lit up with such intensity as she smiled, that he forgot what he wanted to say.

  It must be love at first sight. His thoughts careened about as he made small talk with Steve.

  At school Joe had learned about the use of condoms in the event he was going to have sex; the classes he attended at the Salt & Light Company focused on how to avoid having it. The special series for teenaged boys, Frank Talks About Sex, were conducted by Pastor Ken, and whenever he entered the room at the start of the class inevitably someone would say, “Hey, where’s Frank?” or “Heeere’s Frank!” in the way Ed McMahon introduced Johnny Carson. Then they all laughed too loudly, and Joe along with them. Let’s face it, guys, I’ve been your age. Believe me, I know how hard it is, Pastor Ken said, which caused an uproar of giddiness that took several moments for him to rein in. And then he talked about masturbation and Joe barely listened, thinking how he couldn’t look at Maryanne Lewis without imagining the size and shape of her nipples. He wondered if they were light or dark, remembering what he had seen in the magazines Alfred sometimes left lying open on his bed. Joe had seen the slash of a woman’s sex, the puff of hair around it, and whenever he awakened from an erotic dream painfully stiff, he masturbated while imagining that Maryanne’s nipples and hair were silver, and her slit was a pearly pinkness like the inside of a conch shell.

  As they drove toward the city limits Joe pondered how he might get rid of Steve and Janice at some point in the day. And when they were about to pass through the neighbourhood straddling the edge of the city, he saw the drugstore and asked Steve to pull over.

  “Just what did we forget?” Steve asked, referring to the full trunk.

  “Rubbers,” Joe said under his breath, and for a moment Steve didn’t understand. And when he did, he got out of the car, and Joe followed.

  Steve leaned against the hood, his arms crossed against his chest, the muscles in his thick neck working. “You’re kidding,” he said. And when Joe didn’t answer, he said, “What, you plan on losing your virginity sometime soon?”

  Joe looked over his shoulder at the Bushy sisters in the car, and Steve swore. “You know what? You’re something else.” Then he snapped his fingers in Joe’s face and said, “Where’s the money.”

  Joe jogs along the shoulder of the highway remembering how eager Steve had been for him to meet Helen and Janice Bushy, to introduce Joe to his people, and Joe’s Christ warrior mantra seems a mockery. He recalls Helen looking up at him as he stretched out beside her on the blanket he’d spread under a tree. The string of saliva at the corner of her mouth breaking when she laughed, her dark eyes turning in the direction Steve and Janice had gone for firewood.

  “You like me,” she said, and Joe knew it was a question. “Yes, I do,” he replied.

  He could see the edge of her white bra at the V neckline of her dress, how it pressed into the curve of her breast and he was about to reach out, his fingers stiff and shaking, and undo a button. Then his eyes came to rest on Jordan lying on the other side of her, staring at him as though trying to memorize his face.

  Joe got up then, and went over to the car, unnerved when Helen unfastened her dress and Jordan crawled into her lap and clamped onto her nipple. He took the rifle and targets from the trunk, set one against a pile of boards near the abandoned farmhouse and started to shoot, the sound bringing Steve and Janice back to the clearing around the homestead, Steve with an armful of firewood. He saw Helen on the blanket, fussing with the front of her dress, and threw the wood to the ground.

  “Targets, fucking boring,” he said to Joe. “Come on, let’s shoot at something that moves.” He indicated with a jerk of his head that Joe should follow him.

  They crossed a rectangle of earth, bordered on one side by a row of apple trees, that must once have been a garden and was now thigh deep in weeds. Joe puzzled over Steve’s apparent anger as he stooped to avoid branches and followed him over to a large and sagging tin shed.

  The spirited chirps of the sparrows echoed loudly as they approached, but when they stepped into the dim interior, the chirping stopped. The sudden silence was eerie and Joe felt watched, smelled heat and feathers, and as he grew accustomed to the semi-darkness his eyes were drawn upward. “Holy.” There must be dozens of birds, perched on the rafters.

  The sound of his voice and Steve’s sudden movement as he motion
ed for the rifle brought about the flutter of wings as several birds took off and flew to the far end of the shed. Steve began to shoot, and the birds tumbled from the rafters, while the others lifted up at once and swarmed toward them where they stood, daylight at their backs, the doors hanging askew on the hinges. Joe felt the air move as the birds veered away, flew to either side of the shed, their wings backpedalling when they met the walls, their chirps piercing as they flitted above them, looking clumsy now, and heavy.

  Steve kept shooting, the bullets pinging as they met the tin siding. He hadn’t picked off more than a single bird in flight, and the clip was spent now. He lowered the rifle. “They’ll come back,” he said and ejected the clip, and when Joe gave him another, he turned away and went closer to the open doors, while Joe stood still, craning his neck as he looked up. There was a hole in the roof, the size of a stovepipe, through which he could see daylight.

  Within moments a bird fluttered down onto the rafters and soon after the others followed. He expected Steve would shoot now, and when he didn’t, Joe was about to turn to him when Steve said, “You know what, Joe? I was with that man three days. With that freak. By the time my mother could convince the cops I was missing I was gone three days. If that had been you missing, how long do you think the cops would have waited to start looking for you?”

  Joe’s scalp tightened as he imagined the impact, the bullet boring into his shoulder blade.

  “You think you and me, there’s no difference between us. But there is. Big differences,” Steve said. Joe heard a noise, and then Steve was at his side and shot another round, the rifle rebounding in quick small jerks, while several birds dropped to the floor.

  “Thanks,” Joe said when Steve gave him the gun, feeling stupid for having said, thanks, his arms shaking. The gun was warm, and felt heavier than he knew it to be.

  “You think Helen is an easy lay because she’s Indian.”

  Joe didn’t reply, but raised the gun and without aiming, shot at the rafters. Not because of that, he thought. She’d had a baby, and so she’d been around. He turned to see that Steve had left, could see his back through the fruit trees.