Waiting for Joe (11 page)

A moment later Alfred paused in Joe’s doorway. “You’re not sleeping,” he said.

“I was. You woke me up.”

“I’ve got to go to work now. Cecil’s not going anywhere. You need anything, he’s here.”

“Okay.”

Cecil liked to think he was boss. He likes to throw his weight around, Verna sometimes joked at the sound of the accountant dropping his dumbbells on the floor. Cecil trimmed his beard to make himself look like Mad Dog Vachon, the wrestler.

“If you’re still awake when your mother comes home, be sure to tell her good night. And don’t get out of bed.”

“But what if I have to go to the bathroom?”

“Except for that.”

As Alfred went downstairs, Joe spread his fingers against the light shining from the hall. The scab on his knuckle
looked like a thick black beetle. Maryanne Lewis sounded like Betty on
The Flintstones
. Friendly, nice.

A dog began to bark, and then another, and Joe scrambled across the bed to the window. He was relieved to see his bicycle leaning against the clothesline pole where he’d chained it before coming to bed. Since the Pan American Games had begun, a lawn chair and a sprinkler had grown legs and wandered out of the yard. The accountant’s Pontiac was parked beside the garage. A moment later Joe saw what had alerted the dogs—Steve, bare-chested, emerging from the darkness of the lane into the pool of light cast by the street lamp towering above the garage. He had brought his newspaper bag with him.

Joe dressed quickly and then, in the event that Cecil might look in on him, rolled up a blanket and made the shape of a body crooked in sleep and covered it with a sheet. But when he went past Cecil’s door, the crack under it was already dark. He held his breath as he went downstairs.

The boys hurried along the lane, going toward the river and the meandering street that followed the river’s course, a street whose traffic was light at most times of the day and night. There was less chance they’d be stopped and asked what they were doing out at that hour. They followed the dampness and odour of fish for minutes, and then reached the place where the creek emptied into the river and where the train trestle bridge spanned its breadth, a geometric puzzle set against the city-lit sky.

There they cut away from the river to go through a neighbourhood of newer and large houses, their destination the arena at Polo Park where the rock concert had been, and where they would scavenge for bottles beneath
the end zone bleachers. They’d often done this after an afternoon football game, but this was the first time they’d gone at night. Joe felt a wind blowing inside him as he hop-skipped across Portage Avenue, a blazing corridor of lights, and he denied the urge to run while the traffic hurtled toward him.

As they went along the sidewalk Joe was unaware of the car coming up behind them in the parking lane, slowing and inching along at their pace. He only noticed it when it pulled away in a burst of speed, the ice-white lights fleeing across the trunk. Half a block away it veered sharply into the curb and parked, its engine idling as they came near.

“Don’t worry, it’s not the fuzz,” Steve said, sounding older.

When they were abreast of the car the driver leaned across the seat, the passenger door opened and he called out, his voice rising in a question. Do you know? The last of what he said was lost to Joe as he remembered his father’s warning earlier in the day about the man in the yellow shirt. As Steve went over to the car door, Joe took off running.

His feet skimmed the pavement, and the curlicues of lights across Portage Avenue became a blur. When he saw the Hot Spot Café, he knew he’d reached Arlington Street, and then he was soon racing along it, dashing through the halos of yellow light shed by the old street lamps, the chasms of darkness between the lamps where his childhood nightmares nested.

When he saw the police car parked in front of his house he slowed to a walk. As he came nearer he saw his father, sitting on the veranda steps between two policemen, leaning
forward and holding his head as though to shut out whatever the police were saying. Joe feared they’d come to arrest him for breaking into the church and his urgent need to tell someone about the man in the car was gone. Perhaps Cecil had discovered him missing and called his father at work, and his father had called the police.

Joe entered the yard and Alfred looked up at him, bleary-eyed, as though for a moment he didn’t know who Joe was. Joe was surprised and vaguely disappointed that Alfred hadn’t asked why he was outside, clothed, and not upstairs in bed.

“Dad?” he said and the policemen looked up at him, unsmiling.

“Is this your son?” one of them asked, and when Alfred nodded, he muttered, “Christ.”

“Joe, you haven’t seen this before, have you?” Alfred plucked a piece of paper from his thigh and laid it carefully across his palm as though it was something alive and not a rectangle of lined paper, wet and almost transparent.

“It’s a receipt from Quinton Cleaners,” Alfred explained.

Joe shook his head, without even looking, he knew he hadn’t seen it.

“It has this address on it. The name, Beaudry,” one of the policemen explained to Joe, then stared down at his hands hanging between his knees.

“I told you, that doesn’t make it Verna’s,” Alfred protested. “She wouldn’t go for a swim in the river.”

“Wading, Mr. Beaudry. That’s what the witnesses said. They were out in their backyard and saw a woman wading along the shore. This receipt was found in her pocket.”

“There’s got to be an explanation. It is not my wife,”
Alfred said, and transferred the receipt to the policeman’s thigh.

“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.