Waiting for Joe by Sandra Birdsell Page B

street to the Baghdad carrying his army rucksack with a Thermos of tea, sandwiches and the pills he had to take at certain times of the day and night. Toothpicks rolled in cigarette paper.
    Usually the night breezes would have risen by now, bringing the odour of dust and grass, smoke from the fires burning up north near the town where Verna and Alfred had grown up, unaware of each other until Alfred returned from Japan. Since the forest fires had started, Verna called her friend and her sisters often, wanting to know if they and their families were safe, and had learned about the herd of caribou in the schoolyard, and how a cougar had come into one of her sisters’ gardens to drink from the fish pond.
    Usually, by the time Alfred left for work, the house would have begun to cool. Not long after, the television would go silent and his mother would set the table for breakfast. Then he’d hear her quick-footed tread on thestairs and along the hall, her bedroom door closing and shutting out the sporadic sound of traffic rising from Arlington Street.
    Living near the centre of the city had made Joe aware of how loud quiet could be. At the end of a day when the downtown emptied quickly and the ongoing rumble of the city ceased, the sudden quiet was unsettling. It sometimes sent him indoors to perch on a stool and watch while his mother prepared dinner. The hollow tick of her family clock in the dining room became a hard and determined click of sound, the muted voices from the kitchen radio, a hissing and spitting quarrel. The sudden workday quieting of the city, the quiet that had descended after the rock concert, was like a withheld breath.
    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 knucklelooked 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