He will call Steve. Steve’s email message at Christmas lacked news. He’d just wanted to get in touch, to let Joe know he was back in Canada and working in Fort Mac. But he’d attached a picture of himself and his son, a kid with a mullet haircut whom Steve had in a headlock, the boy mugging pain for the camera. What leapt out at Joe from the photograph was the baseball caps they wore, the words
Space Raider I
stitched on the bill of Steve’s,
Space Raider 2
on the boy’s, the names Joe had given himself and Steve when they were kids.
When the phone rings Steve’s son answers. His dad isn’t home, he tells Joe, and won’t be until midnight when his shift is over.
“Tell him Space Raider I called,” Joe says.
“Who?” the boy asks, and then he says, “Oh yeah. I get it.” He promises to leave a note for Steve.
Space Raider
, a name Joe had likely got from TV, given how much time he spent watching it, even sneaking downstairs after his mother had gone to bed. In the morning she’d find him asleep on the couch, the TV still on.
Your eyes are going to turn square
.
He pushes himself off the stones and climbs up to the shoulder of the highway, and when he lifts his arm, he promises himself to only give it ten minutes. If no one stops to pick him up, he’ll head back to town.
Within moments a white service van with a rack of ladders strapped onto the roof passes by, and when it slows down and pulls onto the shoulder, Joe turns again to look at the city. If Laurie hadn’t spent it, there’d been enough
room on the credit card for a tank of fuel. And what he earned would have got them the rest of the way to Fort McMurray, bought groceries until the first paycheque. Let Laurie find her own way there. He jogs toward the van, and the driver seeing him coming in the mirror, rolls down the window.
“Keith,” the man says and extends his hand for what proves to be a soft and half-hearted handshake. He’s sweating and pudgy, and beside him in the passenger seat is an adolescent boy who glances at Joe once without interest and then not again.
“Joe,” Joe says. “How far are you going?”
“Red Deer,” Keith says. “You’ve got a valid driver’s, buddy?”
When Joe nods, Keith says, “Okay, you’re on.”
Keith proposes that in exchange for the ride, Joe take on some of the driving. Joe already knows he doesn’t want to spend too much time with this man and so he tells him he’s only going as far as Medicine Hat. The boy crawls over the console into the back seat and Keith takes his place. In Medicine Hat Joe will get something to eat, and he’ll call Alfred.
Within minutes of Joe taking the wheel Keith begins to talk. He’s round in the face and pink-skinned, his hair falling in slick curls across his forehead. Although he appears to be in his early forties, he looks prepubescent. Pouches of breast fat jiggle beneath his T-shirt, his arms and face are hairless. He carries his spare tire below his belt, on his hips and lower stomach, like a woman.
He’s a contractor, specializing in home and business renovations, he says. He’s heading for Red Deer to put together
a work crew in order to replace a flat roof on a house. He goes on to say that flat roofs aren’t architecturally logical, although he allows that certain styles of buildings are enhanced by one. Flat roofs constructed in the sixties and earlier have asphalt roofing, which means there are seams and the roof is never entirely waterproof. People don’t maintain a flat roof in the way they should and he sometimes finds moss and good size trees growing on them. “I’ve found lots of dead squirrels, and there was this cat once, it was like beef jerky, fried and dried out by the heat.” He’d found a woman’s diamond earring and wondered how it got up there. “I didn’t ask, if you know what I mean,” he says with a wink.
Joe doubts that Keith is really a contractor. He lacks the quiet self-assurance, the forbearance coupled with healthy skepticism that most professional contractors possess, which comes from years of being caught between the intransigence of tradesmen and the unrealistic demands of clients.
Keith says he resurfaces a flat roof with a synthetic compound that becomes a seamless membrane. The back of the van is loaded with gallons of the stuff, which explains why it pulls to one side.
“This is my right-hand man,” Keith says, finally getting around to introducing the boy, whose name is Bryce, the son of a friend.
“Howdy,” Joe says and receives a mumbled reply. He’s thinking Bryce ought to be in school. “He’s young,” Joe says.
“He’s old enough,” Keith replies in a way that warns Joe away from the topic, and for minutes they don’t talk, the silence filled by the back-and-forth chatter of a call-in show on the radio.
“Are you hungry, punk?” Keith asks the boy, the question tossed over his shoulder with mock toughness.
Bryce’s reply is drowned out by the radio and engine noise. Joe takes Bryce in through the rearview mirror. The kid must be about fourteen, fifteen, given the hint of fine dark hair above his top lip. There’s an evasiveness about him that reminds Joe of Steve at the same age.
Joe rounds a sweeping curve and the highway straightens out in front of them and stretches for miles, flat and mesmerizing. The hills lie behind him on the horizon now, thin and dark blue, like a murmur of thunder. On either side of the highway the fields are shorn and silver, hung faintly with mist that softens the bleakness of spring.
Keith rummages in a gym bag on the floor and comes up with a bag of taco chips, tears it open and jams it into the console between the seats.
“Help yourself,” he says gruffly, in a way that suggests his generosity makes him uncomfortable.
“Thanks,” Joe says. “Maybe later.”
Bryce darts forward and claws up a handful.
“Hey buddy, how about leaving some for us?” Keith says and although he’s spoken in a teasing manner, Bryce releases most of the chips into the bag.
“Sorry,” he mutters and sinks back into the seat.
Joe takes another good look at him in the mirror, his long and narrow face and turned-down mouth, the adolescent moustache like a smudge of dirt making him look younger than he likely is. Impassive.
“You can have my share. Me and taco chips have never agreed,” Joe says to Bryce.
“No thanks,” he says.
“Don’t be a prick,” Keith tells Bryce, again in a jesting tone. “Kids,” he says to Joe out of the side of his mouth, as though Joe understands what he means, an assumption that makes Joe uncomfortable.
“Come on, don’t let me eat all these chips by myself,” Keith says to Joe.
“I’ll pass.” Joe is light-headed with hunger but he doesn’t want anything from this man other than a lift to Medicine Hat. He sees in the mirror that Bryce is staring at the back of his head with a glimmer of interest. When their eyes meet, Bryce looks away. The highway is mined with numerous spring potholes, crudely and randomly patched.
“Fine,” Keith says tersely, startling Joe as he snatches up the bag of tacos and flings it into the back seat. “Go ahead, help yourself to a stomach ache.”
Joe winces, feeling that Bryce has just been clouted one across the side of the head. Moments later the bag crackles and he hears Bryce nibbling at a chip.
The highway rises in a slight incline that seems higher and longer for the flatness around them. When Joe reaches the crest he sees the alarming blue flash of warning lights, several police cars in the distance, and he drops his speed. The tail lights of vehicles glow as the drivers, like him, begin to slow down.
“Radar,” Keith says.
“I’m under the limit,” Joe reassures him. He took the Meridian because it was in the Quonset and not on the lot where there was the chance the owner might go by on the road and see it was missing. But he can’t help his sudden fear that it’s been reported stolen and the police are now looking for him. Two officers randomly direct traffic over
to the shoulder. He glances in the rearview mirror and is caught by the alertness—is it anticipation or fear?—in Bryce’s face.
“Where’s the registration?” Joe asks.
Keith reaches above him to slide a card from a plastic sleeve on the sun visor, and when he gives it to Joe there’s a slight tremble in his hand.
Several vehicles are already lined up on the shoulder between the two police cars and an officer stands beside the driver’s door of the first one.
“Some kind of spot check,” Keith says and as they pass by, he nods and waves at the officer who signals with his arm that they’re to keep moving.
Joe slips the registration back into the sleeve while Keith drums on the dashboard in a short burst of energy before leaning back again. “I haven’t renewed my licence. I meant to do it before I left Winnipeg, but I ran out of time.”
Joe lets this pass. “You’re from Winnipeg?”
“Portage La Prairie. My dad’s got a farm there,” Bryce says. That he’s spoken surprises Joe, and Keith too, given the way he turns to look at the boy.
“What kind of farming?” Joe asks wondering now why the boy’s parents have allowed him to be absent from school, out on the road, working, and with a character like Keith, friend of the family or not. He’s seen boys the same age as Bryce thinking they’ve got it made because they’ve got a job at a car wash or pumping gas.
Before Bryce can reply, Keith answers for him. “Yeah, that’s right, his dad is a farmer. Raises llamas
and
a yard full of junk.” He dips forward to turn up the radio in time for the news. “I want to hear this,” he says.
The top item of the hour is the ongoing police search for the pedophile who has abducted a second boy and is believed to be heading west through Saskatchewan, a description of the van he’s driving, a dark green older model vehicle with a dent in the rear fender; a caution not to approach the man for the sake of the safety of the boys. This is followed by a report of a bombing of a house in Iraq that took the lives of several women and children. Both items incite Keith equally; his expressed revulsion for the pedophile is as vehement as it is for the trigger-happy American military.
Joe remains silent during Keith’s rant despite all the man’s effort to draw him in. At one point his gaze meets Bryce’s pale and red-rimmed eyes in the mirror, and again the boy turns away to look out the window. Moments later he covers himself with his jacket and closes his eyes. Keith, his righteous indignation spent, falls silent.
Joe welcomes the quiet, and then begins to notice the stiffness in his arms from clenching the wheel too tightly as the miles between him and Laurie slip by. He has no choice, really, but to do the right thing. Stop the van, get out and head back to Regina. Ride off into the sunset with Laurie and a prescription for Effexor, or some other drug.
If you ever get up this way, buddy, I’d sure like to see you
. Steve’s email, devoid of the tone of his voice, didn’t really sound like an invitation. And yet, Joe thinks, recalling the picture Steve sent with the email, he went to the trouble to have
Space Raider
stitched on the baseball caps. Perhaps Steve recalled some of their childhood escapades and remembered the Indian sunburns, how they twisted the skin raw on each other’s wrists and thought they were tough
when they didn’t wince or cry out. That they were like brothers from the start when Steve hiked over the fence and into Joe’s yard, his dark eyes fixed on the Dinky toys lined up on the clothesline stoop. I can play, eh, Steve said, and snatched up the race cars and sent them crashing into each other.
Joe recalls Steve standing lookout in the churchyard, a summer day, the year he’d since come to think of as being the last of his childhood. Steve’s barrel-shaped chest and huskiness made him look older than eleven. He’d shoved his hands in his jean pockets to affect a nonchalance, an innocence he worked at perfecting on adults, but never quite succeeded. Steve’s mirth, his mischievousness, always shone through. While he, Joe, had been a sneaky kid. Sneaky enough to run water in the tub to convince his mother he’d taken a bath. To leave the house with his swimming trunks rolled in a towel, knowing he had no intention of going to his lesson. He imagines his young reflection in the basement window the day they broke into the church. Spiderman swings across the front of his T-shirt and his lips are shiny with saliva and working as he tries to open the window. His shoulder blades are knife-thin and stick out, looking sharp enough to break through his skin.
They’d come over the fence and through the bushes behind the church, and Joe’s arms were criss-crossed with white scratches that were already fading as he knelt in front of the window. Although the window was rain-swollen, one of its hooks had been left undone. While Steve kept watch, Joe wedged the screwdriver between the casement and the frame, levering it hard, and the rotting wood began to splinter. Then the screwdriver slipped, and he felt a stab
of pain. “I hurt myself,” he moaned and threw the tool to the ground and sucked at the flap of skin on his knuckle where blood had begun to pool.
“Let me,” Steve said, and after a curious glance at Joe’s wound, he dropped to his knees and elbowed him aside. It was his screwdriver anyway, it was his idea, he should be the one to do it. And it was he who had seen the new man in the neighbourhood, the pastor, wheel the gumball machines on a dolly up the front steps of the church.
A trickle of blood hurried like a red worm across the back of Joe’s hand. His mother would notice the cut and want to know how it had happened. If he said he’d got it at the pool, she’d worry about safety and call the city pool authorities.
The sound of a whistle spurted up from the park across the street, and the din of shrieking children subsided. The lifeguard was clearing the pool for a head count. That was where Joe was meant to be. He already knew how to swim, he just didn’t know how to breathe while swimming. But he was not going to kneel in the cement wading dish with the little kids, put his face in the water and learn how to turn his head to take sips of air. He could hear his own heartbeat now, and then a dull rolling sound, like a bowling ball going down an alley. An instant later the sky filled with Tutor jets flying in formation, so low he could see the rivets in their underbellies.