Waiting for Joe

by Sandra Birdsell

  “Yeah, sure,” Steve says and laughs. “Maybe you could get close enough to club one of them with it.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Joe says. The one time they’d been deer hunting, they’d gone out to the abandoned farm site. From the rim of the coulee, Joe had been the first to see the deer below, five of them going along the frozen creek. He’d succeeded in wounding the largest of them, and they’d followed the trail of blood into the bush where they came upon the buck, which tried to rise to its feet at their approach, and failed. Steve finished the animal off, when Joe couldn’t.

  “Brooks is nowhere near my neck of the woods. What’re you doing in the armpit of Alberta, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Just passing through,” Joe says while he returns to the picnic shelter and the light glowing in the firepit, aware of an edge in Steve’s voice. “I talked to your boy earlier, did he tell you I called?”

  “Yeah, that was Dakota. He left me a note. Space Raider, eh? You noticed the baseball caps. I thought you’d get a kick out of that. These days I’m Space Raider 1, the big chief,” Steve says.

  “So, are you and Snow together again?” Snow being the woman Steve lived with for a time after they had a child.

  “Snow’s out of the picture. This time for good. I didn’t like what was going down with the boy, and so he’s living with me now. Has been for a couple of years. Dakota’s a great kid. When I look at him, I can’t believe I was ever his age. He’s right up there in school, Joe, figure that one out, eh? Are you coming to see us, then?”

  “I’m hitchhiking. If I get lucky, I could be there by tomorrow night. Listen, Steve, I need to find some work. A job. I was thinking maybe you would have some leads.” Joe gets it out quickly before he won’t, and cringes at what sounds like desperation, but there is no other way for him to say it.

  After a moment Steve says, “I take it things are not going great. So what’s up?”

  “I had to shut down the place. There was nothing happening,” Joe says knowing that Steve will likely guess the truth. “I’ll fill you in when I see you.”

  “And Laurie? Is she back in Winnipeg?”

  “Regina,” Joe says. “We have this RV. I left her there with it. I think we’ve split. It’s complicated, but it’s been coming for some time.” As he speaks, he knows it’s true.

  “I guess it happens, eh. That’s tough,” Steve says. “Sure, come on up. Dakota and I share this place with two other guys, but he can bunk in with me for a bit. Things aren’t as hot and heavy around here as they used to be, Joe. Places like Tim Horton’s are still begging for help, but I can’t see you doing that, eh?”

  “I can see myself doing whatever it takes,” Joe says, irritated by the suggestion that he would think himself too good. He turns toward a sound on the highway, and sees the far-off headlights of an approaching vehicle.

  Steve breaks the silence as he says, “Look, Joe, likely this could wait until you get here. But what the hell, maybe it’s easier on the phone. I’ve been wanting to talk to you about this for ages.”

  Joe holds his breath. Steve and Laurie. The few times the three of them had been together he’d noticed the teasing way they had with each other. That they knew things about one another. Now that he’s said he and Laurie have split, Steve wants to come clean. Let me tell you what you don’t know about Laurie.

  “There’s not much I can do about what’s happened in the past, Joe, except live with it. But I can let go of some parts of it. Let bygones be bygones. I’ve been thinking, especially since Dakota’s come to live with me. That night you and me took off for Polo Park, we were eleven years old. I don’t let Dakota out of my sight after dark and there we were, must have been close to midnight. Going after drink bottles.” And then he says, “Christ, you and me, two little kids. That was the same night you lost your mother.”

  Years ago. Like a dream. And yet his throat goes tight. “Yeah, when I got home the police had already found her.” He sees the car on the highway slowing down, and its turn signal blinking. “That’s about all I remember. The police being there, and my dad, freaked out.”

  “No kidding,” Steve says. “I always liked your mother. I’ll bet you don’t know that she once paid for my swimming lessons when my mother was short.”

  The car turns off the highway to the rest stop and comes along the winding drive leading to the picnic site. A lumbering Chrysler New Yorker, one of its headlights brighter than the other. “No, I didn’t know. Let’s talk, then. When I get there. You’re not going to believe this, but I’ve just got company. These people who gave me a ride earlier, they’re back,” Joe says, his voice steadier now.

  “Is that okay?”

  “Yeah, sure, they’re okay,” Joe says as the car doors open simultaneously and Joe and Amina, wearing jeans and matching fleece jackets, come toward him.

  Eight

  “I SURE HOPE THAT’S A SINGLE MALT,” Alfred says to the nurse as she fiddles with the bag on the pole and the clear liquid drips more rapidly down the tube on its way into his arm.

  She laughs. “Don’t you wish. No such luck, this is plain old Johnny Walker.” You’ve got good veins, you’re lucky, she’d said. Otherwise you might wind up looking like a pincushion.

  “Just a little something to put a tiger in your tank,” she adds, and pats him on the shoulder, then takes a blanket from the foot of his bed and wraps his legs in it before leaving. Swaddled like a baby. Her footsteps recede along the hall, her voice rises suddenly and then it’s gone as though a door has closed behind her.

  He’d meant to look for the moon, and now that the chair is gone it’s likely he won’t see it again. In his lifetime the moon had gone from being made of cheese, to a man’s face watching over him when he’d been left on his own, to a pale luminous sphere whose predictable waxing and waning, whose remoteness, had somehow been reassuring. He’s heard that the moon might one day be colonized by seniors. People of an age when the pull of gravity on earth has become a danger. Good thing he won’t be around to see that happen. The moon, littered with canes, walkers and adult Pampers.

  His old neighbourhood, he imagines, lies at the bottom of a pool of darkness, hugging the river. Laurie and Joe are working late tonight, and he’ll need to wrap their supper in newspaper and stick it under the couch cushions to keep warm. Or they’re going out to eat, he can’t remember if Laurie called to tell him, or not.

  Or there might be something on at the church, and that’s where Joe is now, he thinks, forgetting that it’s been years since Joe’s attended. If this is Wednesday, then he’s at the prayer cell. Alfred had always imagined the prayer cell would be a small room, windowless, with hard wooden benches—not what it was, Crystal’s family room, large and cushy with velvet curtains and rose-coloured furniture. They’d plunked him down in one of those tub chairs at the engagement party. People of all ages coming up to him and sticking their faces in his, shouting to make themselves heard, plying him with glasses of the sickly sweet punch that eventually did him in. When he went to go to the bathroom, he’d had to fight to free himself from that deep velvet chair, and had sent a table of food and glassware flying. He knew some of them thought he was drunk.

  It could be that Joe’s down at the public TV station, taping another program that Alfred will happen upon one afternoon while looking for something to watch. He forgets that it’s been many years since Joe’s been on television, that the Salt & Light Company had stopped broadcasting when the Lewis couple left Winnipeg.

  He’ll see Joe talking about the valley of the shadow, about victory, as though his life is a war that needs to be fought each day, the pastor and his wife looking on and nodding, agreeing with what their protegé has to say. Alfred hears their little moans of recognition when Joe talks about failure, the ordinary circumstances of his everyday life being dissected and put under the microscope to detect which parts might be good enough, and which are rotten, as though it is a sin to be wholly human.

  He’d once tuned in just as Joe
was telling the viewing audience that after the drowning death of his mother he had thought, for a time, that she lived in the television. He saw her. He saw his dead mother at a garden party. There were tables heaped with cakes and sugared fruit, and his mother came toward him across the screen carrying a parasol, looking like Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind, smiling at something beyond him. He truly believed, Joe said, that his mother had been saved. Before she died she had uttered the necessary words.

  Yes, well, Alfred thinks. As a child it would make sense that a password might be necessary to get into heaven. Just as heaven being an ongoing garden party would make sense. But Joe’s grown-up version that Verna was upstairs, that she was living beyond the universe in a house Jesus Christ had built for her, sounded like wishful thinking. “You have made yourself God,” Alfred had once heard Joe say. He’d looked straight at him from the TV screen, his pale eyes shining. “You’ve become the centre of your life. You love yourself more than you love God.”

  Not true, Alfred thinks. What he loved more than anything, was Verna, and Joe, and now Laurie.

  But he has to admit, Joe sounded good. He’d had to listen. And during the times, too, when Joe was a kid and Alfred let himself be talked into going to his Christmas concerts, he saw Joe’s confidence with his own eyes. He heard the authority in his son’s voice when he read from the scriptures, noticed that people went quiet and listened. Maybe Joe had been born for the pulpit, in the same way some were born for medicine, or politics, or to go to the moon. But Joe had not been born for business, Alfred had seen that failure coming a mile away. He wasn’t hungry enough for money to do without, in order to get it.

  If Joe were here now, in a collar, carrying the Good Book, what words would he give to a man who was about to head out under the sea, back into the darkness from which he came. Would Joe’s words make a difference, in the way that even a lit match had made a difference in that absolute darkness. The light from even a match had kept him steady and made another hour possible.

  If faith was a gift, as Joe had kept harping, then why hadn’t it been given to him? If he’d been given faith, become a believer, he would now ask God for a favour. He would like to have a visitation. There were people, like Verna, like some of the men who’d died in the camps, who’d heard and seen invisible things. But he never had, and he doesn’t expect that he will. Although he wouldn’t mind. He wouldn’t mind seeing Verna one last time, just as Verna had seen her own mother on the day of her death. Verna, at the sink, peeling potatoes, turning and seeing her mother in the doorway, seeing her smile, her nod of assurance that she’d forgiven Verna for leaving her to go off and marry the likes of Alfred. Now, there was a gift, if there ever was one.

  He wonders now if Joe’s I just know came from practice, in the same way he himself had memorized the images in the Centennial photograph across the room on the bureau, so that now, even when he can’t see them, he sees them more clearly than ever.

  Nine

  THE URGE TO SLEEP IS LIKE a hood that keeps slipping down over Joe’s head as they tunnel through the dark, the land only existing as far as the sweep of the headlights. He must struggle to follow what Lino says and opens the window a crack to combat the hot air pouring from the heater. Moments later Lino explains that he owns the car with another man, a co-worker at the meat rendering plant in Brooks, and he hadn’t been able to take Joe to Calgary without first speaking to him.

  “But I might have been gone,” Joe says.

  “It only took a few minutes to find out. And you see, you are here. I thought, this is a chance for us to get to know one another.” He speaks to Amina now and she reaches over to silence the music playing from the radio.

  “Amina and I have two older brothers. We haven’t seen either of them in many years. Maybe you will be our Canadian brother.”

  Joe laughs. There’s something appealingly boyish about Lino. “Maybe I will. Where are you and Amina from?”

  Amina turns to look at him, her large mouth gleaming with lip gloss. “We’re Sudanese, but we came from Kenya, the same refugee camp as our mother. In Kukuma,” she adds again as though hoping Joe will recognize the name.

  A grocery clerk once said to Joe when he asked, “I come from Eritrea, have you ever heard of it?” From the look in her eyes he knew she needed reassurance that it existed beyond the realm of her memory. He senses the same hope in Amina, but the truth is he’d not heard of Eritrea and would need to look at a map to know where Kenya and Sudan are.

  “Lino has been here already three years, but I came only six months ago,” Amina says.

  “You must have arrived in winter, then. I’ll bet the cold was a shock.” It is the only thing he can think to say.

  “Phfft,” she replies with a wave of her hand. “Yes, at first it was cold. But I quickly got used to wearing more clothes.” She plucks at the neck of her fleece jacket. “It is not a problem,” she says almost scornfully.

  Earlier when she had wanted to show him the handicrafts she had taken the headrest out of the seat back and now when she turns to face forward, her long neck, her head pebbly with tight curls, are a complete and precise silhouette against the glow of the dashboard lights. Joe thinks of the young woman on the Wildcats field hockey team who came from Trinidad. She was larger-boned than Amina and ran with great loping strides, while Amina is thin and long-limbed, which likely means she’s light on her feet, and fast. The Trinidadian wasn’t nearly as black as Lino and Amina, whose skin shines as though polished, and is the blackest Joe has ever seen.

  “When Amina was only a baby and I was seven years old, we were separated,” Lino says taking up where Amina left off.

  “It happened one night when the raiders came—the Murahiliin. They burned our village. They took the girls and killed the adults and boys. My two older brothers were away at university, and so we don’t know what happened to them. We don’t know what happened to our father, either,” he says, his voice vibrating with regret.

  “I, along with some other boys from my village ran into the bush that night. Even though I was only seven years old, I was used to looking after the goats, and I knew what cowards the hyena could be. The lion, the python, that is another matter, Joseph. I was afraid I would be devoured. But my parents had told me, should there be a raid, I was to run into the bush and not to come back, you see.”

  Not knowing what to say, Joe remains silent, watches the white lines rush toward them, the miles being eaten up. He recalls a movie, an African child threatened by a hyena, holding a branch up over his head to make himself appear taller.

  “I could see the fires burning, and so I stayed hidden,” Lino continues. “Maybe you know what happened, Joseph. I was never able to return to my home. Instead I had to run away, and soon there were other boys from other villages, all of us not having anywhere to go. Eventually there were over twenty thousand of us, boys, like me, walking, looking for a safe place to stay. Looking for our families. Going where there was food and water. Some were as young as three years old, and sometimes they had to be carried on the backs of the older ones. Twenty thousand boys, can you imagine? We walked for five years, over a thousand miles,” he says again as though he can’t believe it.

  He swivels his large head to glance back at Joe. “Do you believe miracles can happen?” he asks.

  “I haven’t given it much thought,” Joe says. But the truth is, during the last years of his church life there had been a sudden interest in miracles. Where once a miracle meant that a person’s life had been turned round for the good, the destitute were being clothed and fed, suddenly a miracle meant that a stunted leg would grow longer, arthritic fingers uncurled, herniated discs disappeared, miracles such as being able to find a convenient parking spot. Maryanne had wanted healing for a toothache, and the deacon had laid his hand on her face. Days later she showed anyone who asked, the chalky yellowish splotch on her molar. God had filled the tooth, she said, and Joe wanted to ask why God hadn’t given her a new one. Why were the
miracles always patch-up jobs, he’d wondered. And they came with strings attached, such as being contingent upon the degree of a person’s faith.

  “Aha,” Lino says. “Well, I am proof that they do.” He taps his own shoulder. “And there is another.” His graceful long hand rises from the wheel and gestures at Amina.

  “Amina was only a baby when they burned our village. She was taken from our mother’s arms. Twelve years later, she found us. At first when she arrived at the camp, I didn’t recognize her. But our mother did, that’s for sure,” he says. “For sure,” he repeats and swipes at his eyes with the back of his hand.

  They’re about to be overtaken by a white service van, and Lino remains silent. When it passes by, the thought of that number of boys walking for five years fades as Joe thinks of the boy, Bryce. That he and Keith, the roofer, have likely reached Red Deer by now and are in a motel. He gives in to his suspicion that Keith not only abuses Bryce verbally. He thinks of Steve, going over to the car that night to see what the man wanted, and being abducted. For three days. Steve’s subsequent evasiveness, his dedication to bodybuilding, make sense now. The tail lights of the passing van recede, red beads glowing in the far darkness.

  He thinks to ask Amina where she’d been before arriving at the refugee camp, but when he recalls the scar on her shoulder, he decides not to. “What happened to those twenty thousand boys?” he asks Lino.

  “Some of them, like me, are here in Canada. Others are in the United States. But most are still living in refugee camps,” Lino says. “So many of us perished, Joseph. Thousands of boys were taken by crocodiles. In a single day, while we were crossing a river. I myself saw it happen. It was terrible, let me tell you. And then thousands more took sick along the way, and died. We had no medicine, nothing, some of us didn’t have clothes. We were so thirsty all of the time, and so even though we knew what would happen, we still went to the water holes and so many were carried off by hyenas and lions.”