Free Waiting for Joe by Sandra Birdsell

wobbling with light. A row of wind-shaped trees border the field, their nude branches all crooked to the east and cradling scores of abandoned nests. Large egg-shaped stones are piled along the fenceline here and there, beige stones worn by the weather, porous and riddled with soil.
    He stops for a moment to turn and take in the city behind him, which now looks like a chain of boxcars parked close to the sky. Laurie is worried, likely, and he’s surprised to discover that the thought leaves him untouched.
    He goes down into the ditch and up the other side and over to one of the piles of stones, leans into it, its heat radiating into the small of his back. He closes his eyes and listens to himself breathe. There were times when he was younger, out in the country, that he’d imagined he felt the nearness of God. Times like when he’d be lying in the grass as darkness came on, after a day of duck hunting, sunlight a faint jiggle of pink on the slough. He’d thought this was like paradise, a marshy place, the reeds alive with water animals and birds crying out at the end of the day. He lay watching the orange autumn moon rise up over his knees and thought, feed me, oh breath of God.
    Our father, our father, our father
, he breathes now, and opens his eyes when he realizes that he is trying to pray,something he stopped doing years ago when he heard his prayers rebounding off the inside of his skull.
    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 enoughroom 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