Waiting for Joe

One
 
 
It is early morning when Joe Beaudry awakens to a droning sound, the ceiling fan, he thinks. His father has left it going again in his room at the back of the house. But when Joe opens his eyes, the greenish light is seeping in around the edges of the blind and he remembers that he and Laurie are parked on the Walmart lot in Regina. The cold is like a hovering presence above the bed, alert and waiting for his next move.
 
“What time is it?” Laurie asks, and she feels the sudden tension in Joe, his surprise that she’s awake too. She sees his arm rise and the glow at his wrist lights the bottom of his stubbly face.
 
“You don’t want to know.” It’s near to three o’clock, Joe doesn’t say. When he came to bed around midnight unsettled by the red wine they’d drunk with supper, Laurie was already asleep. She lay completely still, hands folded and tucked under her chin, the rise and fall of her breathing barely perceptible. He’d often been jealous of that stillness, of whatever took her away. Soon after, he’d heard the clatter and dull rolling sounds of the skateboarders at the far end of the lot, and then the sweeper making its nightly pass of the shopping centre parking lot, beginning at Safeway and working its way toward them. He must have slept though, because the droning had awakened him, maybe a turboprop warming up at the airport.
 
He sits on the side of the bed for a moment thinking of Pauline. By now she’ll know he’s left. He didn’t call to say goodbye. He didn’t want to suggest there was more to them other than that she was sometimes lonely and he was in no hurry to go home. They found themselves agreeing to meet for a drink, to talk, Joe doing most of the talking once it became apparent that his RV business, the Happy Traveler, was failing. He turns to flip the blanket over Laurie to double its warmth, regretting their haste to leave Winnipeg, their lack of foresight in not thinking to look in the drawer under the bed to make sure there was adequate bedding, their not having hung on to the sleeping bags.
 
When Joe gets up and crosses the room Laurie smells the garlic—the pizza they had for supper. She fights the ache in her chest while she watches Joe in the closet mirrors, the glowing rectangle of the window lighting up the space around him, his buttocks tinged green as he bends to collect his clothes. How quickly he pulls on his jeans, T-shirt and hoodie. He leaves her without speaking.
 
Like Joe, she’d heard the sweeping crew, their shovels scraping up the debris the machine left behind. The noise receded when the work crew and machine went round the back of Walmart. She’d slept again, only to be awakened now by the muffled drone. The Meridian was supposed to be well insulated against the elements and noise, but it’s damp and chilly, and she hears what could be an airplane. Or it might be the city, two hundred thousand people breathing. Then comes the electric whirr of the Meridian steps unfolding, Joe opening the door, the woof of air compressing as it closes behind him.
 
She listens for his footsteps and hears none. She heaps his pillow onto her head to shut out the light, tells herself, Laurie, do not think. Do not think about Joe turning away from her yet again. She puts the thought in a jar, screws the lid down tight and imagines setting it on a shelf up near the ceiling.
 
Don’t think about the house, its vibrant rooms like a jewel box, the colours of mustard and the Mediterranean; the geranium-red kitchen only just renovated, the warm sheen of its cork floor. That about now she would be washing the winter dust from the upstairs veranda, preparing it for the summer months when they liked to leave the door from the bedroom open throughout the night and they would awake to the tap-tapping of the nuthatch daubing the inside of the gourd she’d hung in the ornamental crabapple tree. To the thick odour of the Assiniboine River rising in a cloud at the foot of the street, the smell like fish and rust.
 
She tries not to think of Joe’s father, Alfred, of going past Deere Lodge the evening before they left and seeing him at the window, outlined in that little square of yellow light in his little square room, among a myriad of lights along Portage Avenue. His liver-spotted coconut of a head framed by the window. She puts the thought of Alfred in a jar, screws down the lid, sets it up on the shelf. Within moments the pillow, warmed by her breath, is a cave of comfort she can safely fall asleep in.
 
 
Joe stands in the parking lot taking in the dazzle of frost scalloping out from the bases of the concrete parking stops and light standards, emerging on the side of a nearby garbage container, while the Meridian remains untouched. When they’d arrived in Regina three days ago, he’d parked where the manager suggested, at the front of the lot and close to its perimeter, parallel to Gibson Road. By the end of that first day a couple of employees had erected a chainlink enclosure nearby.
 
It’s filled now with bales of gardening supplies, bags of soil, containers of herbicides and pesticides, chemicals he sometimes gets whiffs of. The enclosure is the source of the greenish light, while above Joe, the orange glow of the sodium vapour lights obliterates the stars. He thinks of the Happy Traveler lot, how in the early years the rows of trailers and RVs were lit by a single light, until he came upon the remains of a bonfire in a thicket behind the storage Quonset and installed a security camera and two more lights. He regretted having done that when it came time to take the Meridian, which was parked inside the Quonset near the gate, the shortest distance between his need for wheels and a place to live.
 
He’d carried his .22 rifle in a duffle bag. Worried that it looked suspiciously light, he’d waited until the taxi merged with the glowing stream of tail lights going into the city before setting off along the road bordering the industrial park. He felt dwarfed by the security fences around the sprawling complexes, some of those lit-up yards as large as two city blocks and filled with long-distance hauling rigs and trailers. He passed by ATCO and its mountains of prefab office structures and workforce housing; a pipeline and drilling company, it was a major supplier to the oil patch and several Arab states. Then the newest complex, the company making Portakabins, the trailers that were used by the military at the Canadian base at Doha during Desert Storm and now in Afghanistan.
 
When he reached the most northerly section of the park he turned onto the dirt service road and then veered into the ditch, cursing as he plunged through a film of ice and his tassel loafers filled with frigid water. The bank was slippery underfoot and he grabbed at dried weeds to haul himself up the slope. The barbed wire fence bordering the field behind his yard was alive with shredded plastic bags, like tethered dogs leaping and snapping at his face when he stepped down on the bottom strand and swung the duffle bag through the space onto the frozen ground. Then he ducked between the wires and carried the bag toward a clump of bushes whose crown was clotted with more plastic that rippled in the wind. He was still in the business suit he’d put on in the morning for his meeting with the loans manager of the credit union, hardly dressed for the bite of spring on the northwesterly edge of Winnipeg.
 
There was a hollowed-out space inside the bushes where branches were broken off, and the ground was lined with cardboard. He dropped to his knees and slid the bag inside, thinking that someone had called the bushes home. Could be the man in the oil-stained parka, whom Joe had caught picking through the garbage at Pauline’s restaurant. He’d swung round at Joe as though he expected to be chased off and was prepared to object. The skin on his hands looked smoked and thick, his feral eyes like a windstorm. That man in the thicket, watching Joe shut down in increments, his four employees gone, one after the other. By the time winter arrived, only Joe going about the yard, the air hazed with snow sifting off the motorhomes and trailers, the roofs growing higher each day with perfectly shaped domes of snow that he’d had to punch through before he could clear them off.
 
The cold penetrated through the cardboard where he sat in the hollowed-out bushes, his knees drawn up, trench coat pulled tightly around him, hands shoved into its sleeves for warmth while he waited for the lights in Pauline’s to go out. For Pauline to lock up her diner, get into her van and drive off to her acreage in the south end of the city where she kept horses. He didn’t want Pauline to have to lie, to say she wasn’t aware of anything unusual happening next door, even though she’d made it clear that he was welcome to store whatever he wanted in the shed at the back of her property. She wouldn’t talk, he knew, although people were talking, the men in the diner going quiet whenever he came in, the bank clerks avoiding eye contact with him.
 
The Winchester .22 that Joe cradled against his chest was his father’s gift to him on his sixteenth birthday, but like most of what Alfred had given him, he’d seldom had a use for it. This morning when Joe got up, Alfred had been awake, sitting at the kitchen table over a mug of tea. He’d been unable to sleep through the night, he’d said, and Joe heard it as an accusation, that it was his fault Alfred had been up and knocking about his bedroom at the end of the hall. His father knew something was in the air and Joe knew he would soon need to tell him about the arrangements he’d made for him to take up residence at Deere Lodge.
 
Pauline’s van started up and backed off the diner lot, its headlights sweeping across ...