Joe follows Lino to the passenger side of the car where a woman has rolled down the window in anticipation of their approach.
“Amina, this man is Joseph,” Lino says and she sticks
her long thin arm through the window and takes Joe’s hand in her own and shakes it. He stoops to greet her, and is met by a blast of hot air and a spicy scent.
“Welcome to you, Joseph,” she says. Her mouth takes up half of her face, and her smile is a flash of light.
“Amina is my sister,” Lino says.
“Where are you going to go?” Amina asks, her eyes gone serious with the question.
When he tells her Calgary, Lino says, “Aha. We are going to Brooks. If you like, we can take you that far.”
Joe agrees and waits while Lino arranges boxes on the back seat to make room for him.
Within moments of being on the road, Lino begins to talk loudly above the sound of the heater. He and his sister work at a meat processing plant in Brooks. They’re returning from a day in Medicine Hat where they and several friends rent a small space outside a clothing store in a shopping mall. Where they set up tables and display their crafts. This day was his and his sister’s turn to sell, Lino says. That is why they’re dressed the way they are, he explains, people around here need to see some colour. “It makes them happy. And when they’re happy, they’re more apt to buy something.” He laughs. “You see, I’m not in this country very long, but I know something.”
“I will show you what we have,” Amina says and releases her seat belt, turns and tugs the headrest free and drops it on the floor behind her. She leans across the seat to rummage through one of the boxes, her thin arms wiry, and gleaming as though with oil. The red cloth she wears is knotted at one shoulder, the other being bare, and at its base there’s a jagged Y-shaped scar.
A moment later, she sets on Joe’s knees, in turn, several small framed pictures of giraffes grazing in trees, elephants bathing in a stream; flowers in vases, of which there are only just a few left, she says, as they had sold very quickly. “Sittina will have to make more flowers,” she says to Lino.
“Aha,” Lino says in agreement.
She rests her elbows on the back of the passenger seat, cups her chin and watches intently as Joe looks at the pictures, the images cut from bits of fabric and glued in place, the scenes finished with fine line drawings of a grass hut, a bird in a tree, scribbles of clouds, a small naked child holding a long stick. She is waiting for his appraisal, he knows.
“They’re great,” he tells her, and adds that he hasn’t seen anything quite like them.
“So, do you like them?” she asks with concern.
When he assures her that he does, she digs into another box and comes up with a pair of salad servers which she hands to him, urging him to feel the smoothness of the pecan-coloured wood, the geometric pattern notched into the ivory material banding the handles.
“They are carved by hand,” she says, and reaches over to tap one of the handles, saying, “That is not plastic, Joseph. It is bone. You only need to rub them with a little bit of oil, that’s all. You don’t have to use soap to clean them.”
At a loss as to what to say, Joe asks if she made them, and her smile fades. She half closes her eyes and looks away from him as she says, “No, they’re from Kenya. From our mother and our half-sisters. They make them. They are twenty dollars,” she says turning to look at him again.
Joe laughs to cover his discomfort, realizing that she
means for him to buy something. When he tells her that he doesn’t have a need for salad servers, she looks puzzled. “For your wife, your family. For your mother,” she adds in a way that suggests it’s preposterous he hasn’t thought of that.
“No wife, no family.” Joe is caught by her brief startled glance, her “hmn” as though she is weighing what he’s said. She takes the salad servers from him, then dives into another box. Her long narrow body is halfway in the back seat, and he realizes that she’s the source of the spicy scent, and that it comes from her hair.
She gives him a small box filled with bracelets made of polished black stones, interspersed with red beads. The black stones are magnetic, she tells him and demonstrates how they cling together. “It is good for your pain,” she says and taps her wrist. “Lino makes them. He is very quick. He can make one while he takes his supper.” She picks up a bracelet and smells it. “I think he was eating peanut butter.”
Lino’s deep laughter fills the car. “Amina is going to do well in university, wouldn’t you say, Joseph?” His large head swivels on his neck as he turns to look at Joe, and then he goes on to explain that in autumn she will begin to study at the University of Alberta. “She is going to be a doctor,” he says. “And when she is finished, I will become an engineer. She is first, because she is more intelligent than I, and if I can’t do the engineering, then my little sister can look after me. Yes?” Once again his laughter fills the car. She says something to him in an African language and raps his shoulder with her knuckles in mock annoyance.
She takes the box of bracelets from Joe and puts them away. “Now I will show you what I make,” she says, with
the eagerness of a child. From a shopping bag on the floor she carefully takes out a bundle wrapped in tissue.
“Mats,” she says as she unwraps it and holds out to Joe what proves to be layers of cloth.
“Amina, say, placemats,” Lino shouts.
“Yes, for the table,” Amina says, with a bashful grin.
She peels one off and gives it to Joe.
The placemat has been pieced together from beige, brown and blue swatches of cloth that look like bark, burlap, and the shimmer of water. The fabric is interwoven with twists of hemp, frayed and knotted coloured yarn, and strands of copper wire.
“Trees, flowers, that is lightning,” she says pointing out the copper wire to Joe.
“A river?” he says, and runs his finger across a patch of blue silk.
She smiles in appreciation and nods. He notes that the mat is lined with the same mustard-coloured fabric as the robe Lino wears. This is something Laurie would go for, he thinks, and then complain later that it couldn’t be cleaned. “Awesome,” he says, having picked out the abstract pattern of a landscape.
“It is fifty dollars,” Amina says.
“They’re beautiful, but I’m afraid not.”
“Why do you say,
afraid
?” she asks, puzzled.
“I’m afraid of the price,” Joe says with a grin, and as he goes to return the placemat to her, she shakes her head and holds up four fingers.
“Fifty dollars for four of them.” She looks at him, long and hard.
“I’m sorry, I’d like to, but I can’t buy anything,” Joe says.
She studies him a moment longer and then says, “That’s okay.”
She takes the mat from him, rewraps them and puts them and the pictures away. Then she slides down into the passenger seat and for a moment looks straight ahead into the highway rushing toward them, the lights of approaching vehicles like multi-faceted beads rolling across the land.
She’s thinking, Joe assumes, judging from the stillness of her profile, and he regrets that he cannot buy anything. Lino speaks to her twice before she hears him, and then she says, “Okay,” and fastens her seat belt.
A moment later she says something to Lino, what sounds like a question, and Lino replies. There’s another short exchange between them, and then Lino calls to Joe, “Amina and I, just now we are together after not seeing each other for five years. So we sometimes like to speak our language. It is necessary.”
Joe is about to ask Lino about the circumstances of their reunion, when Lino goes on to say, “Amina says she thinks that you are poor. Is that true? Are you a poor man, Joseph?”
He’s startled by the question, objects to it in his head, and then is surprised to hear himself reply, “Right now, I am, that’s for sure.”
“I don’t understand this,” Lino says. “How is this possible? How is it possible for a person in a country such as this one, to be poor?”
“It’s a long story,” Joe says and he tries to explain how he came to lose his business. Lino listens carefully, his ear turned toward Joe, nodding and saying, “Aha,” while Joe runs through the litany of factors that caused business to
drop off at the Happy Traveler, hearing himself speak as Pauline would have, feeling injured, a victim of fate.
“This is very unusual for me,” Lino says after a moment of silence, the tires humming and thumping as they come upon a section of the highway where the potholes have been recently patched. “I cannot say that I understand it. You have no family. No wife. We were told that here, in this country, there are more women than there are men. Me, I am now waiting. But when I finish my education, I will marry. I think this is the reason why you are poor, Joseph. Excuse me if I say so. You are poor because you have no family.”
He is poor because he has a family, Joe wants to say but he would need to explain the irony. The maxed-out credit cards, the trips they couldn’t afford, the two leased vehicles, a house full of overpriced crap. We threw our money away.
They soon arrive at Brooks and Lino drives on past the exits for about a mile, and lets Joe out near a rest stop beyond the highway, a piece of land enclosed by trees.
“There’s a picnic shelter, and if you can’t get a ride you could stay there for the night,” Lino tells Joe. “Do you have matches, Joseph?”
When he says he doesn’t, Lino reaches across Amina to the glovebox and comes up with a packet. “You can pull some grass,” he says as he presses the matches into his palm. “It is dry enough to get a fire going, and then you can put on some wood,” he says as though Joe might not think to do that.
“Goodbye, Joseph,” Lino and Amina say and in turn they shake his hand. He senses that their farewell is not as embracing as their greeting was.
Later the flames of the bonfire in the firepit have subsided, and Joe stares into the glow of embers, his chest and face warmed by the intense heat. It is like the coals are breathing as they flare and recede with the rise and fall of the wind flowing through the screens of the picnic shelter. He imagines words emerging in the embers still holding the shape of the log, the black letters faint and thread-like, a line of script on the side of a fiery cliff in a mountainous landscape of heat.
What person, when his child asks for bread, would give him a stone
. He thinks of the flint stone, of his blindness, his need to see himself in everything and everywhere. His self-delusion, vanity, that he would come to believe that even his mother’s death had been predestined for his benefit.
He thinks of his father’s anger: the feeble pummelling of his fists against his chest was like a club smashing open his ribs. When he hefted Alfred up from the floor in the foyer at Deere Lodge, he was amazed at how heavy he was. A meteorite. A chunk of iron. His body, shrunken and compacted by age.
The unyielding hardness of Alfred’s body made Joe aware that he’d seldom had reason to touch his father. Laurie had taken on the tasks of elder-proofing the house; installing the bathroom aids that ensured his safety. She took on the toenail clipping and scrubbing of Alfred’s head. Once when Joe chanced upon Laurie helping Alfred out of the bathtub, he’d caught a glimpse of his father’s buttocks, two brown and creased leather bags hanging from his rear. The sight had nauseated him.
But that day at Deere Lodge, when those dentures fell and scattered about on the floor, he wanted to gather his
father in his arms and carry him to the Explorer parked at the entrance where Laurie waited, hugging the steering wheel, her face hidden.
A car passes by on the highway, its sound blending with the sound of the wind sweeping across grass in the fields beyond the rest stop, and he wishes he had persevered a bit longer on the chance he would have got a ride. He doesn’t want to sleep on a bench, whether it’s sheltered or not.
The crunch of gravel under his feet is inordinately loud as he walks along the road circling through the rest area, toward a row of trees at the far end of it. He’s aware of the vastness of the fields beyond, the absence of lit windows. He begins to smell damp earth, and hears water running. There must be a stream below. He peers down the slope of land, which drops into a stand of small trees and underbrush. As his eyes grow accustomed to the shadows he sees three antelope, their faces turned toward him, frozen, as they take him in. When he prepares to relieve himself, they move several steps down the slope, and stop. Moments later he sees the white bars on their chests emerge in the dark.
“You’re not going to believe this, but I’m in your neck of the woods, near Brooks, in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by antelope. Bucks, three of them, from what I can tell,” Joe tells Steve in reply to his question of where he’s calling from. “I wish I had my rifle.”
“Yeah, sure,” Steve says and laughs. “Maybe you could get close enough to club one of them with it.”
“Thanks a lot,” Joe says. The one time they’d been deer hunting, they’d gone out to the abandoned farm site. From the rim of the coulee, Joe had been the first to see the deer below, five of them going along the frozen creek. He’d
succeeded in wounding the largest of them, and they’d followed the trail of blood into the bush where they came upon the buck, which tried to rise to its feet at their approach, and failed. Steve finished the animal off, when Joe couldn’t.
“Brooks is nowhere near my neck of the woods. What’re you doing in the armpit of Alberta, for Christ’s sake?”
“Just passing through,” Joe says while he returns to the picnic shelter and the light glowing in the firepit, aware of an edge in Steve’s voice. “I talked to your boy earlier, did he tell you I called?”
“Yeah, that was Dakota. He left me a note. Space Raider, eh? You noticed the baseball caps. I thought you’d get a kick out of that. These days I’m Space Raider 1, the big chief,” Steve says.
“So, are you and Snow together again?” Snow being the woman Steve lived with for a time after they had a child.
“Snow’s out of the picture. This time for good. I didn’t like what was going down with the boy, and so he’s living with me now. Has been for a couple of years. Dakota’s a great kid. When I look at him, I can’t believe I was ever his age. He’s right up there in school, Joe, figure that one out, eh? Are you coming to see us, then?”