Waiting for Joe (20 page)

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 motioned 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.

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 Bushy 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.