Waiting for Joe by Sandra Birdsell Page A

perceived inadequacies. The sight of the waitresses gliding effortlessly from car to car on roller skates took him back to the one time he’d been to a roller rink, his muscles cramping with the effort to remain upright while Alfred gripped him by the scruff of the neck. Forget it, I don’t want to do this, Joe had said. Just forget it.
    The man stared at him again, and his smile faded. Then the muscles in his face grew taut as he took Alfred by the elbow and turned him away from Joe. He spoke to him urgently, their faces only inches apart.
    Alfred swore suddenly, and the man stepped away, then abruptly turned and went to his car quickly, and within moments he was backing it out of the stall.
    “Let’s get out of here,” Alfred said, but his hand came down hard on Joe’s shoulder, clamping him in place. “Listen here, Joe. You see that man again, you tell me right away. Don’t you talk to him, don’t you go anywhere near him.”
    The fierceness in Alfred’s voice stopped Joe from asking why.
    When they returned home Joe was surprised that the remains of supper were still on the table. When he went looking for his mother he came across her rubber thongs lying to one side of the front hall. Her canvas sneakers were not in the boot rack.
    “She’s gone gadding about,” Alfred concluded. She sometimes did disappear for an hour in the early evening to smoke and gab with her friend on Evanson Street, leaving them to clean up the supper dishes and Alfred to see to it that Joe bathed before going to bed.
    Hours later Joe awoke in his airless small room at the back of the house to the heat, heavy, like a cat had settled on his chest. And to an electric guitar screaming to a crescendo. It broke off, and the roar of the crowd at the arena became a solid wall of sound.
    He hadn’t put the fan in the window because he’d wanted to hear the rock concert, but he had fallen asleep before it started. We never go anywhere, he thought. When he went to move now, he found his legs were tightly intertwined in the sheet. The more he fought to free himself, the more tangled he became. He thrashed against what seemed to be the thwarting of even the smallest of his desires, and suddenly he was free, and panting in the heat. The roar of the crowd had lessened and was overtaken by the rising tide of traffic along Portage Avenue, and the honking of horns.
    He heard Alfred speak and turned toward the light in the hall. Since the heat wave, Alfred had moved the nightly cribbage game to the upstairs veranda and he was out there now, stripped to the waist, rivulets of perspiration running along his crooked spine and into the indentation on one side of it, where Joe had once been able to fit his fist. Alfred used to play checkers every night with his war buddy, Earl, when they were imprisoned in Japan. A wood crate had been the board, the stones they’d gathered from the prison yard, the checker pieces. Earl thought to darken some of them with lamp black. Every night they buried the stones for safekeeping. Alfred slept on a shelf near the roof of the prison barracks, and sometimes he saw the stars through a crack and tried to count them. What he hadn’t said was that his nose was inches from the roof and that he was unable to stretch out fully, which was why hishead jutted from his shoulders, as though he was perpetually belligerent.
    Alfred began counting his cribbage points now, slapping the cards down on the table. When he was done, the other card player counted his cards, and Joe realized it was the boarder, Cecil, and not his mother, playing with his father tonight. Her unusual prolonged absence made him want to go out onto the veranda, crawl beneath the card table and slide up between his father’s knees.
    There was the clink of pop bottles being gathered up, and then Cecil’s heavy step along the hall as he went to his room. Joe heard water run in the bathroom, his father showering in preparation for work. He’d soon go off down the