The Other Joseph (6 page)

So I was biding my time, but I still had that storage unit. Though I stayed clear of Dry Springs, every April, on my way to Lake Claiborne, I'd pass through Ruston and go by Peach City Self Storage to check on my survivor spoils. I assumed one day I'd want at least some of what I was holding on to. The family photos and
a lot of the furniture, sure—but also Mom's homemade quilts and framed Audubon prints, Dad's coffee tins full of musket balls and Caddo arrowheads, Tommy's yard-sale pedestal globe and the flag America traded us for him.

I'll always remember what I was thinking on that helicopter ride to Lady of the Sea. Hang in there, I was telling myself. You're not quite thirty yet, but in three months your scarlet letter can be burned, and in four months, yes, happy birthday, you'll be an honest-to-God millionaire. You can start a new life in some new place.

And though I hadn't decided where that new place would be, there was one thing I did know for certain about my future. That I was finally through with the oil patch. I was done. Retired. They took my finger, but they wouldn't take me.

C
ONVALESCENCE. HEALING, ONE-HANDED DAYS
spent hoping Joni would resurface. Almost every night, the same nightmare. I'm bleeding on the Loranger Avis, but this time no one can help me. I am pale and then dizzy and then dead. A doctor had warned me anxiety and even flashbacks wouldn't be uncommon after such an injury, but I'd made it to twenty-nine without going down the therapy-and-Prozac rabbit hole, and I was afraid to start now.

Then, October. I was asleep in the Airstream and never heard my phone ring, but in the morning I saw a missed, 2
A.M.
call from an area code I didn't recognize. Nearly two weeks had elapsed since I wrote that e-mail to Joni behind her mother's back, the short note urging her to get in touch with me if she wanted. To the Cybermobile. I reverse-searched the number on a white pages site and found out it belonged to a San Francisco cell phone, then $4.95 on my credit card bought me a person. Nancy Hammons. But “Joni” might have been an alias, I realized. Then again, Nancy Hammons might be the mother. Maybe she hadn't said all she wanted to say to me. Or maybe it
was
Joni who called, but her phone was in Mother Nancy's name. Or maybe it was only a misdial.

I hardly knew more than a fence post about social networks,
but there were MySpace and Facebook accounts for a lives-in-San-Francisco Joni Hammons. The profile pictures were just of a sunset, or a sunrise, and security locks excluded outsiders and the uninvited. But I was like Sam on a scent trail by that point, and though I didn't find anything else encouraging for
“Joni Hammons” San Francisco
online,
“Nancy Hammons” San Francisco
brought better luck, some credible hits. I learned there was a Nancy Hammons who taught poetry at San Francisco State and had published a few books of poems. That a Nancy Hammons ran lots of Bay Area 5Ks. That, as a concerned parent (a concerned “single” parent, in fact), a Nancy Hammons had once written a letter to the
San Francisco Chronicle
complaining about budget cuts affecting George Washington High School. Then, eureka. She mentioned her daughter Joni in that letter—horrifying the teenager, I'm sure, but abetting me. An English department faculty page and a literary journal's website both led me to the same photo. This Nancy Hammons seemed to be in her later thirties, just as Tommy would have been, and had boy-short hair dyed to an extreme blond. Attractive, but in a leave-me-the-fuck-alone way. I typed
Nancy Hammons
and
San Francisco
into the white pages site, and that gave me a phone number and address for a house on a street named Marvel Court.

After that phone call—maybe from Nancy Hammons, maybe from Joni Hammons—I waited for someone to write or call me again. Joni was pretty much all I could think about, but I didn't know what else to do. I could have tried that cell phone or Marvel Court number and pled my case to mother and/or daughter, but what if they told me to leave them be? What move would I have left then? But I wasn't beaten yet. I had her last name, and I had her address. And thanks to my lost finger I had the free time. If Joni wouldn't come to me—if she was through with e-mailing and calling, that is—maybe I could come to her.

First, however, I had to find out a few things about California law. As best I could deduce, as a nonresident, visiting registered sex offender, RSO Roy Joseph would be required to register locally, or at a minimum report to a police station to be “assessed and cleared” should I remain in any California city or county for more than five “working” days. So I could have one week in San Francisco without being notched and branded. Five working days, plus a Saturday and a Sunday, to locate Joni and meet her. And though by the middle of December I wouldn't have to worry about such legal bullshit in Louisiana or anywhere else, December was too far away to wait on. That missed phone call had revved an engine that must have been idling quietly inside me, and I didn't want second thoughts and excuses to shut me down. As soon as my hand was healed, my post-op appointments through, I had to solve the mystery of this supposed niece of mine—even if that meant sidestepping Nancy Hammons.

Go, Tommy whispered in that smooth voice of his. Go.

YEARS BACK
, once I'd gained an appreciation of the Internet and its capabilities, every so often I would try looking for Navy SEAL Lionel “your brother went out like a hero” Purcell on the computers in Grand Isle's pre-Cybermobile library. And in 2003 I was directed to a crude, slapdash website. Apparently someone by that same name ran a guide service out of Battle Mountain, Nevada. I scrolled through photographs of hunters with bloody-mouthed antelope and mule deer, and then I saw him. Older and heavier than the SEAL I'd met when I was fourteen, but even behind the gunslinger mustache I could tell it was him. He was sitting astride a collapsed buck and frowning at the camera. There was an e-mail address, but I could never get past the idea that writing Lionel Purcell might result in him doing some
where has life taken that
guy?
sleuthing of his own. Orion's little brother, the sex offender. Not too long after I first came across the website it disappeared, and I took that as a warning I should remember what Tommy's old sweetheart Camille had told me way back when about how some things are best left alone.

But then Joni happened. That e-mail of hers couldn't have been easy to send, and I felt ashamed for having put Lionel Purcell on the shelf. He knew things, and if a teenager could be brave enough to hunt for news of Tommy, I could do the same. I imagined Joni would be asking a lot of questions if and when I found her, and I wanted to be able to give her more than my foggy boyhood memories of my brother. The Battle Born Outfitters website was still missing, but I pulled a map up and finished hatching my plan—on the drive to California I'd stray north, then take I-80 west to Battle Mountain. I would stop there and see what came of it. Nothing perhaps, but at least I could tell Joni I'd tried turning that rock over. Eventually I would need to find a place to stay in San Francisco, yet that could wait. I just wanted to be on the highways that would begin taking me to Nevada and Lionel Purcell, California and Joni Hammons. And with all that decided, those bleeding-out-on-the-Loranger-Avis nightmares came to an end.

THE LEBARON WAS A MAROON
'94 model with over two hundred thousand miles on the odometer, but she'd also been a gift from my parents and that had made her hard to part with. The frame was well rusted due to the salt of Grand Isle, and there was a gray patch on the center of the hood where the paint had burned away from the primer. Counting on the LeBaron to get me all the way to Nevada, much less California, was a gamble, but I reckoned if I was meant to ever reach either place I'd make it okay.

Though, before that, north Louisiana. In Ruston:

A raid on Peach City Self Storage to grab a photo album I wanted to bring to San Francisco with me.

A dutiful-son appearance at the Joseph plots in Oak Crest Cemetery.

A face-to-face, state-of-my-finances meeting with accountant/ adviser Mr. Donny Lee. Assuming Mr. Donny Lee had no surprises for me, in January I'd be thirty years old and rich and no longer an RSO. After San Francisco I intended to take the quickest and easiest route back to Grand Isle, then spend the next two months preparing for the beyond-Louisiana place where I could begin my third act.

And the drive to Ruston would take me past the exit for Dry Springs. I'd avoided Dry Springs altogether since my exile, but now I would make my return. Already I was recalling things I hadn't mulled over in years. What it had been like to help my parents take apart Tommy's bedroom. What it had been like for me to take apart theirs. The guilt I'd felt when I sold. Those first lines from my mother's journal, the two sentences I couldn't read past—words buried somewhere in my storage unit.
To be a parent is to always wonder whether the world sees your children the way you see them. My son is gone.

The farm was the only real home Tommy or I had ever known. And though in some ways the thought of visiting Dry Springs had me feeling more uneasy than pondering Battle Mountain or even San Francisco did, it was an embarrassment that I hadn't been there in ten years. My brother was whispering to me again. Go, Roy. See, feel, learn. Before the month was out the stump on my left hand was fully healed, covered by an itchy patch of marbled skin, and I crossed over Caminada Pass at dawn on an October Thursday, Sam lying beside me on the LeBaron's bench seat like a roll of yellow rug, some clothes and a sleeping bag stuffed into my offshore duffel bag.

Sam slept and I drove, following the Highway 1 two-lane through the low, chartreuse and khaki sponge-lands of flat marsh and open water between Grand Isle and Leeville. On shell and asphalt shoulders, families fishing blue crab and redfish, five-gallon buckets and tailgates and folding chairs, thawed chicken necks and soggy shrimp, popping corks and cast nets, jean shorts and rubber boots, white people and black people and more, the last names often the same or similar save for the Vietnamese over three decades here now, refugees like me, all of them close enough to blow a wake of hot wind over as I rocketed past in the LeBaron, the phone and the radio and the thoughts of my maybe niece and of Tommy and of a SEAL called School all distractions threatening to make me slip from the road and become a sideswiping killer of fishermen. And when others speak of Louisiana as backwater or third-world they usually mean places like these, places that are falling, sinking, eroding into the suck of slinking salt waters, and nowhere as badly or as quickly as the fading fifteen crow-fly miles between my island and the harder ground that finally appeared after the Bayou Lafourche lift bridge. All that was behind me would one day be gone. The marsh, the highway, Grand Isle. But I was safe now. Acadiana. Some trees. Oaks, even. Commerce and industry and telephone-pole signs.
INJURED OFFSHORE? . . . I BUY GARFISH . . . PROP REPAIR
. Homes and businesses and solid ground, yes, but now that dark bayou to follow as well. Diesel rainbows, eddies of foamed trash. Ahead: Golden Meadow, Galliano, Cut Off, Larose, then another big bridge. The crossing of the Intracoastal. Agriculture, sugarcane. The backwater becoming a banana republic here. Some of the farmers burning their fields preharvest. The land all around me on fire and smoking.

Stand by your brother, for he who is brotherless is like the fighter who goes to battle without arms.

—A
RAB
P
ROVERB

W
EST OF NEW ORLEANS SAM AND I QUIT THE
highways for the interstates. I-55 took us up to Hammond, and we left crawfish and boudin and the Catholic majority behind. In Louisiana you drive north to get South, trading Cajun Country for Dixie somewhere just below here—in Ponchatoula, maybe Manchac—and we were in the hardpan pinewoods now, sweet tea and barbeque country, Bible Belt towns that looked and felt like the Dry Springs I remembered.

In Tangipahoa Parish, three enormous white crosses in a dairy pasture, and billboard after billboard.
AIDS: JUDGMENT DAY HAS COME . . . ORIENTAL SPA AND MASSAGE: TRUCKERS ENCOURAGED!
Then, gas in Kentwood, where a sign welcomed me to
THE HOME OF BRITNEY SPEARS
. For over a year Malcolm had us believing her mom gave him a Jesus-camp hand job once, back when Britney was still a Mouseketeer. A lie, but a good lie. The interstate again. Into Mississippi. We passed a caravan of dove hunters on their way to rain lead onto sunny fields of sorghum and millet. Two retrievers were slithering in the bed of a Ford, jockeying for the best wind, while a third sat stone still and watched me and Sam go by. A black Lab staring at us like a dog of war.

IT WAS A BIT PAST NOON
when I hit Jackson and hooked onto I-20, and forty miles later I arrived in Vicksburg, on the east bank of the Mississippi River. Vicksburg is across the bridge from the upper part of Louisiana, lies along the usual route I'd take each April to call on Lake Claiborne with the Airstream. Tomorrow I'd be in Dry Springs and then Ruston, and though I'd never spent the night in Vicksburg before, this was a good place to break for the day. I hadn't made it very far, but the most necessary step, actually leaving, had been accomplished.

I checked into a hotel near the interstate. I had an ice chest filled with dry dog food in the trunk, as well as another containing tennis balls and towels and pet shampoo, bowls and a few jugs of water, and once Sam was situated I sat down on the bed in our room. But I wasn't tired yet. I wanted out. I needed to come up with something to help eat away the hours, and in Vicksburg that meant either the casino boats or the military park—site of the forty-seven-day siege of that fortress city on the Mississippi. Pemberton had ridden beyond the works to meet with Grant under an oak soon to be butchered by souvenir-seeking soldiers, then surrendered on the Fourth of July, one day after Lee retreated from Gettysburg. “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea,” said Lincoln. I get no thrill from stabbing at a draw-to-deal button on a video poker machine, so I had a hamburger and a beer in the hotel restaurant before driving off for Civil War parkland.

If it was my mother who taught me the most about science and nature, it was my father who taught me about history. When Tommy was a boy Dad used to take him to Vicksburg, and after Tommy got too teenage cool for those trips it was my turn. My father loved exploring that park, at least until the sad times came, and there was one spot in particular he always brought me—a big grassy hill on Confederate Avenue. All through the park the states that had troops at Vicksburg erected separate monuments
in memory of their fallen soldiers, and atop that hill I could see Louisiana's memorial to its cannon fodder. An eighty-foot column of granite crowned with a carved-stone flame.

I left the LeBaron and hiked to the top of the hill. It was well into October, but still fairly hot outside. I was breathing heavy from the climb, wearing jeans and my Red Wings because I almost always wear jeans and my Red Wings, and a T-shirt was pasted flat to my back. I looked around and saw black vultures or maybe turkey buzzards circling off to the west. This seemed to be the highest point in the entire brother-against-brother park. Good ground, those dead generals might have called the hill, same as Cemetery Ridge. You'd think there would be a constant breeze in such a high place, but there wasn't, not on that day.

A slice of shade had sundialed out from the monument, and I stood within that long shadow and lit a cigarette. My head started to spin, but I kept smoking. Another drag and I gagged. I dropped the Winston and pressed my hand against the monument to steady myself. The granite was warm, and my eyes focused on where stone met grass. Much of that cut rock lay underground, hidden like the substructure of an oil rig beneath the surface of the Gulf.

I stayed that way, nauseous and propped up by a memorial stone, until I heard someone yell. I turned to look. A platoon of after-school Boy Scouts was charging the hill. I wiped the spit from my lips and watched them come. A dozen or more boys with bright, beautiful, wiseass faces like Tommy's. All of them running, all of them attacking.

AFTER THE MILITARY PARK
I walked Sam back and forth on the hotel's parched kidney of lawn. I was obsessing over what my north Louisiana tomorrow might bring, and I took a nap that brought the first dream, good
or
bad, I'd had in weeks. Instead of the Loranger
Avis, instead of a nightmare, I'm on the farm in Dry Springs. Four riders on four horses are moving across our land, waving as they come, and though I am apart from them and watching I think they are us, the Josephs, my family. That there are two versions of me. One who carries on, and this one who waits.

So, not a nightmare—more like something inside me was in fact trying to fix itself while I'd been sleeping. Or maybe I just woke before things could get ugly. It was nine o'clock when I opened my eyes, and I swapped my T-shirt for an oxford, then went by the front desk to ask where I might still be able to find a decent dinner. A girl with a canary-yellow handkerchief tied around her neck was working the counter, and she was somehow both freckled and tan. Besides the casino boats, all she had to recommend was a place downtown that had charbroiled steaks. She scratched out directions. “But you should hurry, sir,” she said. “Have a blessed evening.”

Downtown was quiet and had the stepping-back-in-time, movie-set look of many a downtown in my reconstructed South. A look that suggested it had once been prosperous and flourishing, but long ago withered. Still, Vicksburg's seemed to be doing better than most, and that was probably due to the money and the people those casinos brought in. A portion of downtown had been cleaned up, restored, and along the brick-paved and lamppost-lit main drag there were closed-for-the-night antique shops and art galleries, that sort of thing. Riverboat gambling, the answer to all our problems.

The steak restaurant I was searching for sat on the river side of the street, and I was able to park at the curb. The hostess did her best to smile when I came in, but I could tell her heart wasn't in it. That her thoughts were on the punch clock already. Her name tag said Mindy, and she could have been the cousin of the girl at the front desk of my hotel. I envisioned their common ancestor, an Irish cotton buyer.

“One?” she asked.

“Yeah. Sorry. I know I'm pushing it.” There was a bar in the back, and a black man with wild white hair was washing glasses at the sink. I pointed at him. “Can I just eat up there?”

Mindy dealt me a menu from the stack on her podium. She seemed relieved. “Absolutely,” she said, before sliding around me to flip the sign on the door. “Mr. Charlie will take good care of you.”

I made my way to the bar and settled onto a stool. The bartender Mr. Charlie dried his hands slowly with a towel, but he didn't acknowledge me. He was staring off into space while I read through the menu. “All right, then,” I said. “Hi.”

Mr. Charlie was wearing a black bow tie and vest, a white shirt, and had a flat boxer's nose. He looked exhausted. He was too old to be up that late, much less tending a bar. “You ready?” he asked.

On the Gulf rigs Tuesdays and Saturdays are steak night. Friday, seafood. But I was a free man now, could eat steak whenever I wished. “So I guess I'll have that T-bone,” I said. “Medium rare, please. And I can pass on the salad.”

“It's free.”

“I don't want to keep you any longer than I have to.”

“Naw. What dressing you like? Italian?”

“Sure. I appreciate it.”

Mr. Charlie took the menu and went into the kitchen. When he came back he put the salad in front of me. I thanked him again and asked for a double bourbon and an ice water.

He started to grab a whiskey glass but then stopped himself. “ID?” he said.

Jack Hebert's sister-in-law/concubine Tricia hadn't put blades to me since before the Loranger Avis—my hair was to my eyebrows, halfway past my ears and lapping at my collar—so I lifted my bangs off my forehead so Mr. Charlie could truly see me. My
squinting roughneck face. “Come on, sir,” I said. “I'm just about thirty.”

He shrugged. “That's a kid to this gramps. I don't take chances no more.”

I almost told him to forget the bourbon, but finally I pulled out my wallet. I handed him my driver's license, and his eyes jumped when he saw the
SEX OFFENDER
printed in orange letters under my photo. A recent development. Nearly every year the Louisiana legislature came up with some new degradation, and as of 2006 I had a pervert driver's license to go along with the sex offender identification card I was required to always have on my person. They love me at the DMV.

I got my well bourbon and my ice water, but Mr. Charlie fixed them in silence. I asked him to just go ahead and box up the T-bone when it was ready, and he disappeared into the kitchen. There was a TV behind the bar. I watched an NFL week-in-review while I picked at my salad, all my appetite gone. The Saints had beaten the Falcons in the Dome on Sunday, but that only put them at two and four for the season. The Saints. It was heartbreak every year with them.

After a while Mr. Charlie brought the T-bone, then he took my money and returned to the kitchen, still playing the mime. Mindy was gone as well, and I stepped out onto the sidewalk with my steak, looked left and right down the street. The LeBaron was the only car around, but I thought I heard music. I glanced up. There were speakers fastened atop the cast-iron lampposts that lined both sides of the road, and I walked into the middle of the street and listened. It was calliope music. The paddleboat and circus kind. Those lamppost speakers seemed like something the government would install in anticipation of a disaster, a way to help calm the masses and keep them from rioting. In a deserted downtown that campy music was eerie as hell, made me think the world had ended while I'd been inside. That the four riders
from my dream had actually been the horsemen of the apocalypse. I drove to the hotel, and that was the night I first called Viktor Fedorov.

VIKTOR FEDOROV
was an international marriage broker. He also owned a car service. Years back, long before Joni's e-mail, I'd learned of him from the captain of one of the crew boats that sometimes motored me to and from certain rigs. Captain Terry had a Russian wife who was a celebrity among us hands. Larissa was her name. She would always see Terry off from the dock—often making her the last flesh-and-blood female we'd lay eyes on for two weeks—and I'm sure I wasn't the only one who kept a mental picture of her filed away for the shower. I'm not saying Larissa was a goddess (fried blond hair, old-world teeth), but she was definitely out of Terry's league. Some of the guys had taken to calling her the Coke Bottle on account of her figure, and what always ate at me most was when, returning to Grand Isle at the end of a stint, I'd spot her waiting along Bayou Rigaud for Terry. There I'd be with nothing to look forward to but Sam and my empty Airstream, now stuck having to think on rat-faced Terry getting to go home with a woman. Another reminder that a matrimony of any sort might be forever out of the question for me.

But, to his credit, Terry wasn't shy about the truth behind that marriage of his. There's this Viktor out in San Francisco, he told me on the crew boat one day. Viktor runs a first-class operation. None of that mail-order-bride bullshit. No flying all the way to an ass-fuck corner of Russia to meet a roomful of white-slave farm girls. Viktor matches his clients up with gals already here on work visas. Intelligent, pretty gals like Larissa. Women who know the language. Women who will ink a prenup and are less likely to get homesick. Sure, she's in it for the permanent visa, but everybody wants something out of a marriage.

Terry was aware of my past, of course. He knew the reason I lived half of each month offshore, the other half holed up on Pearl Lane. The reason I had few friends and kept so much to myself. The reason why on occasion I'd receive anonymous letters warning me to leave Grand Isle. But Viktor will work with you, Terry assured. Just be up front, because the feds will be checking on that if y'all make it to the marriage-visa stage. Full disclosure for foreign brides. That's the law these days, Roy.

Indeed, Terry knew so much about the law it made me wonder about
his
past. At the time I'd told him I wasn't interested—but now I was bound for San Francisco, and I was feeding most of a twenty-five-dollar steak to Sam inside that Vicksburg hotel room, lonely and depressed, when one Terry story rose up in bits from the dark depths of my memory. Something about a homeless guy who challenged him to a footrace through Golden Gate Park. Town's like a cereal bowl, Terry had said to me. Fruits and nuts and flakes.

Except for the Russian who'd introduced him to Larissa, that is. Terry could have been president of his fan club. And though in Grand Isle we made our share of cracks about Terry and the Coke Bottle, I'd seen something once that came bubbling to the surface next. They were parked in Terry's truck at the Sureway. I couldn't hear what they were saying, but Larissa was laughing, flashing the new braces on her tangled teeth, and there was nothing fake about it. They were happy. And alone in my hotel room, I wanted that too. Suddenly the coincidence of Terry's marriage broker and Joni both being in San Francisco felt almost like a sign.

So I called Terry and woke him, asking for his man's number, and that same night, before I could change my mind, I introduced myself to Viktor Fedorov. He was an Ivan, all right. Spoke with the same gruff accent and short, to-the-point sentences as a helicopter pilot Russian I knew from the oil patch. I told Viktor I was coming out to San Francisco for a week of vacation and would like to have a sit-down, and things took on their own momentum
after that. I e-mailed him a webcam photo from a computer in the hotel lobby—one of a roughneck sitting at a computer in a hotel lobby—then wrote a humiliating little essay explaining both my circumstances and my plans for the future. Viktor said to check back in a couple of days, before I even reached the city, and he would rustle up a few women who were willing to consider me. I'd pay him $250 for each one I met. An actual marriage would cost five grand.