Waiting for Joe (21 page)

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When Steve came up the walk to the house, Joe hesitated at the door, not recognizing him immediately. He was twice the size, his forearms beefy and pectorals straining against his T-shirt, while his thighs threatened to split his jeans. He’d been working out, Steve explained, an understatement given the bulk of his sculpted body. His greeting was stiff, his voice tight. But when Joe was in the kitchen fixing coffee he heard the old Steve, the smoky huskiness, the cracks of laughter, as he visited with Alfred.

Steve arranged to meet Joe and Laurie later, at the entrance of the stadium, and as he came toward them he seemed unaware of the effect he had on the people milling about, awed by the hugeness of his muscled body, how they grew quiet and gave way to let him pass through.

“Holy mackerel, Joe, how in hell did you manage this? Ugly mug like you,” Steve said as Joe introduced him to Laurie. Joe saw the sudden shyness in her eyes, her smile go sideways.

They went to claim their seats and there was a moment of awkwardness as Laurie chose not to sit between them. And then, as though to cover for it, she became animated, touching Joe’s thigh, grabbing at his arm when she talked past him to Steve. He saw her as Steve must, her sexual energy in the impatient shifting of her body, the way her breasts came forward when she raised her arms to refasten the clips in her hair. When Bowie at last descended on stage in the glass spider, the roar of the crowd was instantaneous and deafening. “You’re not going to let her go alone?” Steve yelled when Laurie pushed past them to get down to the floor, and before Joe could respond, he went after her.

Laurie and Steve were at least a head taller than most of the people, but Joe quickly lost sight of them, and when after a few moments he too fought his way down to the floor he was unable to spot them among the crowd, which had gone instantly wild at the moment Bowie appeared. Joe took refuge at the side to watch the spotlights, the dancers, Bowie, everything an undulation of colour and movement that made no sense; nor did the music, distorted, and ultimately drowned out by the howl of the crowd.

He made his way to an exit and burst through the doors feeling as though, like Jonah, he’d just been regurgitated. He went to the parking lot to wait for the concert to end, leaned against the car and turned his face up to the night coming down over the city, the warm autumn air tinged with the onset of decaying vegetation and the smoke of stubble fires in outlying fields. He was grateful for Clayton, his assistant, who would keep things running without a hitch at the Happy Traveler tomorrow when he and Laurie went to the lake for what would likely be the last of windsurfing, before it got too cold.

The music reverberated in the buildings around the stadium, and he got into the car to escape it, turned on the radio and thought of Laurie and her appealing uncertainty. When are you going to make an honest woman out of that girl, Alfred kept asking, his way of letting Joe know he wanted to keep Laurie in their lives.

He rolled up the window to better hear Grappelli playing “Limehouse Blues” and watched two boys going along the railway tracks, one of them whacking at weeds with a golf club. It was the same freight line that skirted the edge
of his neighbourhood, crossing the Assiniboine River on the train trestle bridge.

And he thought about how he and Steve had hitched rides on that slow-moving train, how they rode it across the bridge and out to the sugar beet factory. Then they hiked across country to where a stand of burr oak sheltered the ghost town. He remembered the eerie quiet as they went through yards, feeling there were people at the windows watching. Mouse dirt, broken glass, rotting linoleum, the musty smell of abandonment and ruin. He remembers a cupboard in a yard, small drawers holding pieces of metal. He and Steve, sitting on a bench in grass that was as tall as their shoulders, Steve saying he wanted to be a policeman, but he couldn’t do the math. He’d go away and stay with his grandmother on the reserve and then had to struggle to catch up at school when he got back. Joe had lent him his notes, taken him home for a bowl of Alfred’s barley soup and a quiet place to study, had tried to tutor him. But it was true. Steve couldn’t get math, no matter what way Joe tried to come at it. “Why aren’t you guys out setting cars on fire,” Alfred said to them from the doorway when they studied, which is what he would say to Joe when he came upon him in his room on a Saturday night, boning up for Sunday school. Boning up on God.

Those times when he and Steve were young teenagers going out into the country, he had sometimes turned to watch that train moving across the horizon and thought that heaven was a freight train, and he was the man riding on top a car, his forehead resting on his knees, on a journey away from, and toward something; heaven was that
movement of being carried along, being held between the beginning and the end.

He listened to the music playing on the car radio and watched those two boys disappear into a culvert beneath a street, and he thought if he ever had a child, he’d need to make time to take him places, as he and Steve used to do. During a drive down the coast to California he’d seen the large number of streamliners on the road, the parks filled with motorhomes, and came back to discover there were only two RV dealers in the entire city of Winnipeg. Once people got to know where he was, after a slow first half year of business, he hadn’t looked back. And now two years later, although he could sometimes steal a day or two to go canoeing or windsurfing with Laurie, he seldom got out into the country.

He must have fallen asleep, as it seemed the next moment people were swarming from the exits of the stadium into the parking lot. He waited another quarter of an hour, and was about to go into the stadium to look for Laurie and Steve when they emerged at the far end of the lot, coming quickly when they saw him, expressing relief and surprise that he’d waited. Steve’s arm dropped from Laurie’s waist and she stumbled toward him, her eyes too bright when she hauled him into a prolonged kiss. He smelled coffee.

He released her, and looked at Steve, expected the usual wisecrack to deflect the tension between them. Steve’s eyes held his, hard and unswerving. “What kept you guys?” Joe asked.

It was Laurie who answered. They’d taken the wrong exit and wound up way the hell and gone on the opposite
side of the arena, she said, while Steve turned away and lit a cigarette.

The following day when Joe arrived at Laurie’s apartment, he was surprised to find her waiting at the lobby door, subdued and dark around the eyes. Of course, he thought. Steve had been to see her after they’d parted last night. And she’d let him in. He imagined Steve’s dark hands on Laurie’s body, and he reached for her, thinking they would go upstairs, but when he tried to kiss her, she turned away.

When they were out on the lake she didn’t follow when he began tacking toward the shore. Instead, she went out farther and faster than she had in the past, without him being there to signal or shout instructions. He beached his board, then stood watching, noting the straightness of her back, her obvious strength, her hair like a banner streaming.

He went walking along the dunes until they gave way and the shoreline rose in a blunt cliff carved out by the wash of water and wind, which had exposed a stratum of shale, gravel and soil. A glint of light caught his eye and he went over to it and pried loose a chunk of flint, but which he took to be obsidian, black glass. He jostled it from hand to hand and felt it grow warm. It was a stone that had come out of fire. On its smooth dark surface were minute ripples and whorls, and as he ran his finger across them he imagined he was feeling God’s breath. Even before the stone had been magma, before the world had been made—whether that had happened in seven days, or seven trillion years, didn’t matter—God knew all the ripples and whorls inscribing his life. Did that mean then, that his mother’s death, the way she’d died, had been predestined?
He had often wondered, and throughout the years, Pastor Ken never came right out and said, yes. Only, that the end result of his mother’s tragic death had brought Joe into the kingdom of heaven. Joe went over to the water’s edge and dropped to his haunches, the stone dimpling the sand between his feet. And his mother’s death had brought Laurie to the house that day. The stone, he thought, was an object lesson, a reminder that nothing happened in his life without there being a reason.

He’d been like the ancient Greeks, viewing his own dark and hazy reflection in a piece of burnished brass and thinking he had a clear picture. His notion that the events of other people’s lives had been arranged by God for his benefit, was like the ancients believing that light emanated from their eyes.

On the day the Twin Towers came down, he’d been flipping through channels at the office and happened upon Pastor Ken and Maryanne’s weekly TV program, the two of them, stricken, seated at a table and clutching each other’s hands while they tried to make sense of what had happened. He’d taken off for Vancouver then, feeling threatened the whole time. He met up with a blizzard around Golden. Driving in near zero visibility, he’d hit a patch of black ice and almost slid into a guardrail and the ravine hundreds of feet below. He kept seeing the trapped people at the windows on the top floors of one of the towers, and hearing Pastor Ken say that 9/11 was a wake-up call, that he didn’t believe the people had died for nothing. God would use their deaths to shake up the world. Joe pulled over into a rest stop, shivering with fatigue, got out and
walked along the railing overlooking a canyon. Water plummeted down the face of it and into a rock-filled stream, far below. He stared into the canyon, and it came to him that saying their deaths were a wake-up call was taking ownership of their tragedy.

By the time he’d reached the outer limits of Vancouver his need to talk to Pastor Ken had dissipated. He pulled off the road and got a room at a motel, slept around the clock, then headed back. And during the drive home, he thought of Crystal, and how sure he’d been that they were meant to go to Bible college. And then how certain he’d been that Laurie had come into his life for a reason. But Crystal had always been there. And once people realized she had claimed him, suddenly they were a couple and found themselves being seated together, given the opportunity to be alone more often. And when Laurie came to live with him and Alfred, the smell of her shampoo stung his nostrils and followed him down the hall to his bedroom. He couldn’t sleep for hearing her move about on the other side of his wall.

During the drive back to Winnipeg he realized that he’d grown weary of the winter trips to hot climates, the dinner parties that wound up with everyone drinking too much, himself included. Of the house, whose rooms had become busy and exaggerated,
eclectic
, Laurie’s friend Sandra had said.
How she pulls it all together is beyond me. But it works
. Which meant that everywhere he looked, there was something else to see, like a furniture showroom he had to fight his way through. Perhaps if they’d had a child, he’d thought. That might have been reason enough for them to be together.

His feet are hot and tender now, and he feels the stones of the shoulder through the soles of his running shoes. But when he’s on the asphalt he keeps looking behind him, although he knows he would hear a vehicle coming. There’s more traffic going east than west now, the lights steadily boring through the darkness across the broad median of rolling land.

A moment later a dark shape comes toward him in the field beyond the ditch, an animal, he realizes, when he sees the white bars on its chest shining in the dark. The prong-horn antelope stands just inside the fence now, taking him in, its ears pricked forward, its curiosity stronger than its fear. He imagines the air quivering between them with the intensity of the animal’s awareness. This is something he can tell Steve about when he calls him later. A buck, given the black cheek patches, a big sucker. Suddenly the antelope turns and is gone, the solid thud of its hooves giving way to the sound of an approaching vehicle.

One of the headlights is brighter than the other, and the car travels slower than most. Come on, come on, Joe urges through clenched teeth, raises his arm and is shot through with hope as the driver begins to brake. The car, an old Chrysler New Yorker, pulls onto the shoulder and stops about a hundred feet ahead of him.

He resists the urge to sprint when the driver gets out of the car and comes round the back of it, watching as Joe walks toward him. A black man, and tall. Looking even taller for the mustard-coloured garb he wears, a robe of some kind, the hem rippling around his ankles in the wind. As Joe draws near, the man’s smile is sudden and broad as he extends his hand in a greeting.

“Good evening my friend, my name is Lino. May I ask, what is yours?” His handshake is a brush of warmth against Joe’s palm.

“Joe,” Joe says. He suspects this is an inspection, and he must pass it if he’s going to be given a ride.

“Joe,” Lino repeats. “Is that like Joseph, then?” His voice is the boom of a kettle drum, reverberating and deep.

“Yes.” He hasn’t often been called by his full name and he finds himself straining toward it, as though
Joseph
is a shining sphere suspended in the air just beyond his reach.

Joseph Alfred Beaudry. Joseph after Verna’s father, whom he never met. The man died without having witnessed the miracle of Joe, born to Verna and Alfred Beaudry despite their advanced ages, and the possibility that her eggs and his milk had soured. Joe, a breech, the umbilical cord snaked twice around his neck, a miracle delivery. The Dalai Lama, the Christ Child, Prince Joe, Verna’s sisters used to refer to him among themselves. The boy with eyes that were far too pretty for his own good. His long, dark and curling eyelashes would wear thin on a grown man. You could see men with eyes like that, who’d been doted on as kids because of their looks, and were left holding the bag when they’d gone bald, not realizing that their pretty eyes looked ridiculous now in the scheme of things.

Those blue incandescent eyes that Alfred hadn’t been able to look into without getting a knot in his throat, are now sore and half shut against the wind-driven grit.