Waiting for Joe (3 page)

Joe sighs so deeply Laurie feels the shudder in the mattress. When she went to meet him last night at Canadian Tire, she didn’t recognize him for a moment. He was still the same, tall, yes, lean and well-muscled, but his arms hung at his sides while he listened to the man talk. Pete, a Métis, Joe had said, who never shut up. What made Joe stand out among others were his eyes, as brilliant a blue as she’d ever seen. With the light in his eyes gone, he looked ordinary.

Joe lies on his back, head propped in his arms. He’ll need to call Steve soon. Let him know that they are
headed his way, and why. Men older than Joe have been hired on in the tar sands. He’s heard the stories, seen the news, the Newfies, fishermen, packing up and driving thousands of miles, six beefy guys crammed into a Honda Civic, their gear strapped on top. Kids and wife bawling on the doorstep.
We’re just going to have to learn to do without him. He’ll come back with enough money to see us through for years
. A young single man vowed not to return until he chalked up a million. Six guys living in a one-bedroom apartment in Fort McMurray, taking turns cooking and sleeping in the bed. He bets those fishermen don’t have any more qualifications than he does. He has some welding. He and several of his buddies once restored an old Chevy from the frame up and he took a welding course at Red River College to do it. It might be enough to get him hired. What he’ll make at Canadian Tire added to the credit remaining on their one card will pay for the fuel, with enough left over to see them through to a first paycheque. All he wants from Steve are his contacts, nothing more.

A vehicle drives past the motorhome and stops nearby. Its doors open, and then slam shut. The murmur of voices seems dreamlike and far away. What I would like to do, a woman says, but the remainder of her words are lost. A man laughs in response, which brings Laurie to the surface. She recognizes the high-pitched cackle of the white-haired greeter at Walmart, a man who looks to be in his late sixties.

“Welcome to Walmart,” she says. “I think that’s the man who greets people at the door. He looks like he’s past retirement age.” Though he’s elastic in the way he can dip sideways, bend backwards to try and peer into her tote bag.

“He likely is. They’ll hire anyone,” Joe says.

She wants to tell him that she was awakened by the cellphone this morning. Maryanne Lewis, her voice as sugary and bright as a jar of jelly beans. How was Laurie doing? Fine.
How’s Joe this morning? When he called us last night he sounded pretty down. Ken and I just know that something good is going to happen for Joe. Will you tell him to get in touch?
I’ll tell him, Laurie promised, but when she saw Joe had left the sandwiches on the dinette she went tearing after him and forgot to relay the message. Something good is going to happen for Joe. Which means either he’ll find a million dollars lying in the gutter, or he’ll find twenty-five cents. Or he will find nothing. That too could mean something good has happened.

Joe becomes aware of the heavy scent of Laurie’s hair. When she met him at work last night, she looked different, her usual strawberry blonde hair was the colour of a new penny. Her hand lies across his chest and the sight of the moisturized sheen of her tanned skin, the perfect white crescents of her French polish are an irritation itching at the base of his skull. Throughout the past winter, these early months of spring, while he’s been locked in his racing thoughts, she’s been able to think of things other than the end of life as they’ve known it. He pushes away from her, up and off the bed, and goes into the bathroom.

Laurie hears water running, Joe scooping it up from the sink and splashing it into his face, his underarms, his scrotum. They are not to use any more water than necessary, no showers. As if she wants to, given there’s no hot water. She had to use the microwave to heat water to rinse away the hair colour, the shampoo.

Don’t think, she tells herself.

Don’t think about Joe setting the big screen television down against the garage wall and ramming into it with the Explorer. Smashing with the sledgehammer the things that failed to sell on eBay, or in the
Bargain Hunter
. He would rather smash them than let her put them in the garage sale where they’d sell for such a small fraction of what he’d paid for them. There’s my profit, Joe said, only a small fraction of what he was thinking, she knows.
What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
She’d seen that line of scripture highlighted in his Holy Horoscope, her name for the book of daily meditations he used to keep on the bedside table, its pages loose and its cover gone soft like a chamois.

He gestured to the appliances on the parking pad, the Cuisinart Power Prep and her Chi Vitalizer machine, the Bose sound system she’d just bought for the kitchen, the espresso maker and crushed ice drink maker she’d hunted down and found on sale at Home Outfitters, the small appliances lined up there on the parking pad, shining and wet from a light rain, looking as though they’d just been taken from their boxes.

She’d gone into the basement and covered her ears to shut out the noise as Joe smashed the appliances to smithereens. She sat on the floor, back against the stone wall, consumed by guilt and not knowing why. Joe could have waited until night, but the smashing would have brought lights on in the neighbourhood, the houses on either side of them being so close that sometimes they’d hear quarrels, music played too loudly, a hoarse cry in the night. In those final weeks she’d hardly seen anyone though. It was
like they knew the Happy Traveler was no longer in business and were avoiding them, fearing that what they were going through might be contagious. But of course, the neighbourhood came out in droves to their garage sale, cockroaches swarming over the leftovers of a feast. We’re moving to the new Waverly subdivision to be closer to the business, Laurie had thought to say should anyone ask, but no one did.

Joe enters the bedroom, his nakedness shielded by the wastebasket. “I sure as hell hope this isn’t what it looks like,” he says, the words compacted between his teeth.

She realizes her mistake. The price tags and sales slips should have been tucked down into the garbage out of sight. Through the years she’d learned to bury them beneath vegetable peelings in the can under the kitchen sink. When rushed she’d sometimes stuck them into potted plants, or under the mattress in a hotel room.

He upends the wastebasket and a shower of garbage drops onto the bed, the tags, the tiny plastic envelopes containing spare buttons and loops of thread, the flattened packaging from the skin care products and cosmetics, the crumple of tissue that had been wrapped around the purple robe. The gloves she wore while colouring her hair are stuck together, the latex mass smeared with what looks like dried blood. They give off an acrid odour that quickly permeates the air between them. She winces as he flings the wastebasket aside and plucks up several of the tags.

“Did you record these in the notebook too?”

His voice is unbearably caustic. Only moments earlier she’d embraced the full weight of him, borne his collapse. She still holds his semen. She wants to point out that she
coloured her hair herself instead of going to a salon, but remains silent. “I’ll need to look half decent when I start job hunting,” she finally says.

“Job hunting in that.” He indicates the purple robe lying on the floor at the foot of the bed.

“I’ve had that for years,” she lies.

Laurie had also bought a black linen sundress printed with large green ferns. When she tried it on she imagined wearing it on a summer night. The three of them, Steve, Joe and herself, seated on a café patio overlooking a busy downtown street. Buying the dress was insurance that there would be better times ahead for her and Joe. And when she saw herself in it, she remembered, too, the way Steve used to look at her.

“Dammit, Laurie. Where’s your head? We’ve got to get to McMurray first.” He gathers his clothing from the floor, dresses quickly, snatches up the cellphone from the dinette table and is gone.

“H
EY
, D
AD
. I
T’S ME,”
Joe says. Alfred, gripped by coughing, puts the receiver down. A moment later a young woman speaks into the phone.

“Mr. Beaudry? Your father will be just a minute.”

I’ll call back, Joe intends to say, but she’s already gone. He walks along the lane beside Boston Pizza, waiting for his father to come back on the line, skirting crumbling potholes iridescent with oily water. From a nearby tree a bird calls its name, chick-a-dee-dee-dee buzzing through the rumble of traffic on Albert Street. Joe spots the bird, wondering why something that small needs such a large voice. At the side door of Boston Pizza, two men and a woman in white caps and aprons huddle under a canopy having a smoke.

He takes in the greasy-looking ponytail of one of the men, his arms covered in tattoos; the startled slack-jawed look of the other, a kid really, his thin face riddled with acne; the woman, overweight and half asleep. He wouldn’t
have hired them, not even to sweep snow from the roofs of vehicles, hose away the grit in summer that could corrode paint, and sometimes split open the skin on his hands.

He senses their growing and calculating interest in him and stifles a sudden paranoia. Likely they saw him leave the Meridian and are noting his leather bomber jacket, looking for the bulge of his wallet in his hip pocket.

In his ear he hears the young woman gently scolding Alfred, and his anxiety shifts to his father’s cough, which sounds rough, and then he worries that the time on the cell will expire before they’ll be able to talk.

The lane grows wider as he walks, becomes more of a service road that provides access to the parking lots of the businesses along Albert Street. On one side there are the backs of commercial enterprises, identical square buildings painted stark white, and on the other, brown brick apartments, their wide predictable balconies looking like yawns. The clearing sky is criss-crossed with a grid of wires, the lane opening up in the distance to a street, and a fringe of trees beyond it in a residential neighbourhood. The Lakeside District, Pete, the Métis he works with, had said. But what’s called Wascana Lake is only a man-made pond, and is nowhere near enough for the inhabitants of the Lakeside District to see. Or to smell either, a good thing, Pete said. Algae, goose poop, sometimes so thick you can walk across it. His grin revealed the gaping space in the front of his top teeth.

When Joe enters the parking lot at Canadian Tire Pete is slouched in a lawn chair beside his small truck, legs splayed, the bill of his cap pulled low. He’s been watching
for him, Joe guesses, and notes the gate to the garden centre is closed. Something is up. At that moment Alfred comes back on the line and Joe stops, turns away from the noise of traffic and hears Alfred ask, “Is it raining there?” Meaning, where is Joe?

Their house on Arlington Street is walking distance from Deere Lodge and so, for a short time, they’d shared the common bond of the weather and the traffic along Portage Avenue.

“No, it’s not raining, but it sure looks like it wants to,” Joe says, having to speak loudly to make himself heard.

“I don’t understand that. It’s pouring here. It has been for hours,” Alfred says, annoyed. “It was five o’clock this morning when I went to the bathroom. It was raining then, and it still is.” When Joe doesn’t reply, his father’s voice softens. “If this keeps up, don’t come today. More than likely the underpass will be flooded.”

Joe takes a deep breath. “But, Dad, you know I’m away right now. Laurie and me? I told you that. We’ll be back at the end of the month. I won’t see you until then.” He winces inwardly as he recalls the way Laurie and he had to struggle to get Alfred across the lobby at Deere Lodge, his suitcase falling open, the hollow clatter of the tea-stained dentures tumbling from the plastic bag and skittering across the floor. Alfred’s spares, the several pairs of dentures he’d hung on to throughout the years in fear something might happen to the current ones. The sight of them had taken the wind from Alfred’s sails, jolted him from his tantrum and sent Joe to his knees. He’d gathered them up, vowing to himself, and later to Alfred, that his stay at Deere Lodge was only temporary.

“That’s right, you told me,” Alfred says, his voice thinning to squeeze back another paroxysm of coughing, and failing. “I’m here,” he says a moment later.

“That cough of yours sounds pretty serious.”

“You’ll be back when?” Alfred asks.

“The end of May, first week in June at the latest,” Joe says above the sudden blare of a car horn, the screech of brakes. He looks up to see the near rear-end accident at the intersection beyond. Antsy, he thinks. Everyone’s antsy this morning, including him, to finish talking, to get on with what he needs to do next. Call Steve. Get to McMurray and find some work, fast.

“I’ll get the girl to write that down,” Alfred says and calls to the woman attending him.

“Not now,” Joe interrupts.

“What?”

“I’ve got to go now, Dad. I’ll call later on in the day.”

“When?”

“Later.”

“It’s the girl here, wants to know what time. They’ve tried reaching you at the house and the shop, and both of the phones are down.”

“I gave them this number,” Joe says, exasperated. “I told them to call me on my cell.”

“You’re not exactly answering that phone either,” Alfred says. “Where’s Laurie?”

“She’s here with me. Why?”

“She wasn’t there yesterday. Clayton Wells went by the house looking for you and no one was home.”

Joe’s mind reels with confusion for a moment. “That’s because we’re travelling right now. I just told you that. Of
course Laurie wasn’t at home, she’s here with me, Dad.” Why was Clayton Wells at the house? he wonders.
Was
he at the house, or is Alfred confused?

“Well, put her on then,” Alfred says. “I want to have a word with her. She should stop sending flowers. I’d do better with a shot of brandy now and then, and the chance to see her ugly puss.”

“I can’t put her on. She’s up in the hotel room. I came down to get some breakfast,” Joe lies.