The Other Joseph (8 page)

“State of the Union,” I said. “You remember how I—”

“What happened to your goddamn finger? That new?”

I told him the story, then explained I was through with working. That as soon as I turned thirty I'd be ready for him to start freeing up some of my money. “I think I'll need, I don't know, forty or fifty grand a year to live on,” I said. “And a bunch more than that early on to buy a house with. Wheels too, probably. Basically, I need it to be where I can settle down somewhere and retire.”

“Retire! Been working since I was eleven.”

“Yes sir. But all the same.”

He nodded and began tapping at the keyboard, pausing sporadically to punch numbers into a desk calculator. I held my breath and waited, nervous as hell that at any moment he would look at me and apologize, tell me my January dream was a delusion. That my Airstream, Pearl Lane, Grand Isle days wouldn't be coming to an end.

But instead he whistled.

“Something wrong?” I asked. “About two million, right?”

“Afraid not.” On a stand next to his desk was a football he'd once showed me that had been autographed by a college Terry Bradshaw. He picked the ball up, smiled, then pump-faked. Spry for his age, my accountant/adviser. “Try two and a quarter,” he said.

“What?” I was smiling now too. “Really?”

“You watch TV? Dow's been breaking records lately. Even my grandkids know that. But thank Gil Bean, not me. Busy as a dog with fleas, Bean. He's aggressive, but he's safe. Bean wears
suspenders
and
a belt.”

“Who's Gil Bean?”

“Come now.” He shook his head. “That Dallas guy I told you about in the spring? Got most of my fat cats with Bean. He's done well by us. Very well. You want me taking your money out his hands? Beanie doesn't play with less than two million.”

“Well, do thank him for me.” I shrugged. “But, you know, I have all these plans.”

“With respect, that's small thinking.”

“Yes sir. Again, nothing needs to change till January. But beyond that, I'll be needing income. I can't live on a number.”

Mr. Donny Lee came around from his desk. He smelled like saddle leather. “And the tax men shall rejoice. They've been awaiting.” He laughed, said he would leave trying to sway me for another day. “Call me after your thirtieth, and we'll sort this all out. I'll quit making you richer if that's what you really want.” Then he slapped me on the back. He was done with me, and now I was done with Ruston.

I WOULD SPEND
the rest of the afternoon hiking green pinewoods with Sam. My good memories of Lake Claiborne State Park—a smiling me walking barefoot along a concrete bulkhead, tagging behind Tommy and wishing I was him; jars full of fireflies; hot dogs dangling from coat hangers; my family happy and together and sucking at honeysuckle—had kept me coming up there for Tommy's birthday every April, so after Ruston I bought groceries and drove the twenty-five miles northwest.

With summer over I had the park pretty much to myself, and I dropped a hundred bucks for a cabin on the lake. The water was shining in the sun, and I imagined Tommy swimming around and around forever, a frogman crossing salt waters to ascend Louisiana rivers. The Atchafalaya and then the Red, the Black, and
the Ouachita. Bayou D'Arbonne, finally. Bass, bluegill, catfish, sacalait. My brother slipped through a dam conduit to bring himself to Lake Claiborne, close to his home and with me, and he was staged in those six thousand man-made acres of blocked-up bayou, waiting for my next move, safe even among occasional gators, the Underwater Panther always somewhere, but not here, at least not now.

Sam and I saw wood ducks and deer, a coral snake and a roadrunner, and though I usually try to keep an even keel, tending to view too much happiness and hopefulness as dangerous, as a setup for a fall, that last evening in Louisiana—grilling corn and onions and country ribs on the back porch with Sam, listening to the trillings of toads and the chirpings of crickets, the booming
Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?
of a hoot owl as I planned to sleep, not in a travel trailer or on a rig or in a hotel, but in something like a house—I stared up at the star-splashed sky and was certain I was getting my first taste of how life would one day be for Roy Joseph, millionaire.

I
RODE THROUGH TEXAS AND OKLAHOMA WITH THE
radio off, and though I spent plenty of time pondering Lionel Purcell—and of course, Joni Hammons—Viktor Fedorov had come to dominate my thoughts. Which is to say I passed most of the drive thinking about women. Russian women. Marriage. A wife. Viktor had rung me twice already that day. He was harder to blow off than I'd thought. No messages, but those calls could only mean he was hoping I would reconsider.

For so long the main focus of my life had been to keep to a routine and avoid the unexpected by clinging to my island and my oil rigs. Yes, maybe it was foolish to have ever dialed Viktor's number, but when I reached Kansas I was actually starting to see the wisdom of giving myself a non-Joni motive to explain my presence in San Francisco. I wasn't violating any laws just by looking for her, but it couldn't hurt to have a verifiable, cover-my-ass story as to what I was doing in that city. I came to find a wife, officers. Nothing more, nothing less. Five working days, says the law. Five working days.

From a Holiday Inn in Wichita, I called Viktor and flip-flopped. Again. He had three candidates for me to meet. “It might be very difficult to pick,” he kept telling me. “I have done a good job for you.” I told him I'd make California on Thursday, and then I
took care of the rest. Step One: A computer in the Holiday Inn's business center. Step Two: Select a dog-friendly San Francisco studio apartment on Craigslist to sublet. Step Three: Swap some e-mails with the current tenant, Karen Yang, negotiating seven nights of Thursday-to-Thursday rent (six hundred dollars, plus a three-hundred-dollar damage deposit—good Lord). Step Four: Overnight Karen a two-hundred-dollar check so she'd hold the place for me.

TWO DAYS LATER
, somewhere in Wyoming, I swung into an I-80 rest stop to let Sam run around. Morning still, a dandelion sun. It was only me and a couple of truckers who were napping in their rigs. A dry, chill wind was lashing the parking lot, but the barren and brown land stretching all around us was as level as the Gulf before a storm.

The rest stop itself was brick restrooms and some picnic tables, and I couldn't shake the feeling that horrible crimes had happened there. That after miles of lonesome but beautiful scenery I'd arrived upon a murder stadium, a rape arena. It was as if, with no obvious place to visit evil on each other, man had to go blueprint one. I walked to the edge of the parking lot and watched Sam snake through the sagebrush and clump grass. To my right a slanted signboard sat bolted to a rusting pedestal, and sealed beneath dusty Plexiglas was a photo of an antelope and a drawing of a gaunt man dragging a two-wheeled handcart. Science for my mother, history for my father. Positioned between antelope and man: a paragraph informing me I was standing in the largest unfenced area in the Lower 48. The Red Desert. Millions of acres of high-altitude desert that separated the southern Rockies from the central Rockies, home to over fifty thousand pronghorn antelope, as well as a rare desert elk herd. Shoshone and Ute had roamed here, and later, passing through like me,
mountain men and pioneers, Pony Express riders and Mormons.

On the drive I had often fixed on some solitary house I could see from the interstate. A clapboard two-story walled in by Great Plains cornfields. An assembly-line modular anchored in the shadow of a western butte. A nation of immigrants, sure, but the exploring days of most Americans are well behind them, if they ever even explored at all. Perhaps some eccentric forefather had been a nomad, but now there his children remained. The shy kittens of a legendary alley cat. The Roy Josephs to that brave man's Tommy, wasting away in their own versions of my Airstream. Pioneers. It's easy to forget that even in the old times such venturesome spirits had been the exceptions. The vast majority kept on with their lives in well-settled lands—scratch-farming, drafting contracts, making hats—but you don't hear much about the shopkeepers and whatnot who never left home. Those trailblazers we celebrate, the ones chasing after someplace better, were outcasts, outliers, and outlaws.

Then came the Google car. I watched a white Chevy Cobalt veer onto the exit for the rest stop, eventually pulling into a spot a few spaces over from the LeBaron. The car had a contraption periscoping from its roof like the mast of a sailboat, and a logo on the door read
GOOGLE
in a rainbow of letters. A chinless, balding man wearing khakis and a lime-green polo stepped out. I was at the edge of the lot still, waiting for Sam. The man nodded at me and I nodded back, then he started walking toward the restrooms. I heard the Cobalt give a quick yelp as the doors locked.

I called Sam in, and once the man was gone we went over to his car to see what was what. The roof contraption was a kind of steel boom, and atop it were cameras aimed in all different directions. A bright glare was coming off the passenger-side window, and I touched my forehead to the glass so I could peer inside. A laptop computer was attached to the console, and the backseat was buried under crumpled fast-food bags and popped cans of Red
Bull. The laptop was open, but I couldn't read the screen. There was a metallic tick issuing from under the trunk—the exhaust system, cooling.

When I turned around I saw the Google man approaching. I put my hands up to let him see I meant no harm. He smiled. He was older, and a tube of fat ran above the waistband of his khakis. Something about him made me think family man, nice guy.

“My bad,” I said.

“Part of the job,” said the man. “Folks are always curious.”

“So this is how it's done?”

He chuckled, but then the phone on his belt holster chimed. “Just a sec,” he told me.

Sam had wandered. He was back in the desert, investigating, making discoveries, and I jogged over to get him while the man dealt with his phone call. That didn't take me long, but maybe some all-seeing, Silicon Valley royal was tracking his knight's progress and telling him to quit fucking around. Get on with it, make new friends on your own time. Whatever the reason, the man was in a hurry now. I watched from the desert as the Google car went gliding to the interstate, those cameras ready to tame everything. To continue shrinking the world even as I was trying to explore it.

B
ATTLE MOUNTAIN SAT ON A HIGH-DESERT HIGHWAY
that ran along I-80 in northern Nevada. There wasn't much there, and what
was
left looked to be fighting for its life. A railroad cut through town before continuing on west with the interstate, and the businesses I saw were mostly what I'd expected. Gas stations and trucker motels and baby casinos, some sad bars and a few dingy restaurants. No shortage of trailers in Battle Mountain, and on the slope of a faraway hill some irony-deficient crew of civic-proud dolts had spelled
BM
in enormous block letters fashioned from whitewashed rock. The work that must have gone into that. These are my people, I was thinking. I didn't know what battle was ever fought atop that brown hill, but if this town held the victors I never wanted to see the place the defeated were sent to live.

I spent my first BM evening in a motel-casino-restaurant-bar in the center of town. It was Monday, so I had two full days to devote to Lionel Purcell before I was due in San Francisco. In the nightstand I'd found a tattered Lander County phone book lying between the Bible and the Book of Mormon, but no Purcells were listed. In the morning, after some breakfast in the restaurant, I went and saw the leathery woman at the front desk to see if she could help.

“What you wanting with Lionel?” she asked.

“It's a private matter. So you know him?”

She sniffed and gave me an I-can-be-that-way-too look. “Sorry, mister,” she said. “
That's
a private matter.” Her nose was shriveled like a dried fig, as if God had cursed her for sticking it in everyone's business.

To hell with her. There were over three thousand other people living in Battle Mountain, no need to keep matching wits with this sphinx. I went back to my room to take a shower, and I'd just toweled off and dressed when there was a knock at the door.

Lionel Purcell. He was as big as I remembered him. Tall—every bit of six four—and built like a steer-dogger. And indeed, he was outfitted for a rodeo. Black Justin Roper boots and a straw cowboy hat. Dark blue Wranglers and a starched turquoise shirt.

“You're Lionel,” I said, dumbstruck.

The man looked past me, searching the room with flat gray eyes. He had the same mustache I recalled from the photo I'd seen online four years ago—a thick yellow horseshoe like the one Hulk Hogan sports—but there was some silver in it now, and he was in the neighborhood of fifty. Those eyes settled back on me. “I am, I am,” he said, his voice deep and gravelly. “And I'm betting you're Ahab's kid brother.”

I'd thought Tommy's nickname was Orion—that was what Lionel himself had told me and my parents—but when he was alive my brother never said anything to us about a nickname, Orion or Ahab or otherwise. “You mean Tommy?” I asked.

“Right. Ahab. So are you or aren't you?”

I nodded.

“You echo him, dude. An older, civilian model. Great to see you again.” He held out his hand, palm up, and I shook it. Sam had been asleep on the bathroom linoleum, but now he came out to see who was at the door. Lionel dropped to a knee and pulled
him close, started jingling the tags on his collar. “Heya, prowler. I like a Lab. What's
his
handle?”

“Sam . . . how'd you know I was here?”

“Bev called about twenty minutes ago, said a Roy Pickett Joseph with Louisiana plates was asking after me. Curious as a bag of cats, tough as a pine knot, Bev. I reckoned you might be some kin of Ahab's. He was the only Joseph I ever knew.”

Small towns are all the same, in certain respects. I told him I was passing through Battle Mountain on my way to visit San Francisco. That I'd seen his website years back and was hoping to talk to him.

Lionel grinned. “Doing the Kerouac thing?”

I guess.

“I've tried that. You leaving today?”

“Hope not.”

“So don't.” He slapped at Sam's ribs and stood. “You two come with me. No sense in staying at this shithole.”

Then Lionel was gone before I could even thank him. I moved my bags and the dog bowls to my trunk, and he sat in his diesel dually pickup while I went to see Bev. She lit a long cigarette when I came through the door, looked put out that Lionel hadn't murdered me. I laid my key on the counter, and she pointed her cigarette at me like a wand. I waited for her to speak, but she never did. The glowing tip of her menthol was tracing tiny circles in the air between us.

“All right,” I told her. “This has been fun.”

The weather outside was nice. Cold but not too cold. I started the LeBaron and followed Lionel onto the highway, then we cut left and crossed over the railroad tracks. He was driving a red Dodge. A sunbaked sticker on the bumper read
KEEP NEVADA WILD
!, and the double tires on the rear axle gave the dually a tarantula quality. It was a giant red spider, skittering.

Sam had his head hanging out the window, taking it all in with me. The day before, the salt flats of Utah had rattled him. As we crossed that white wasteland from time to time he would peek at me with a look like, Hey, um, are you seeing all this?

And that was the same look he gave me when we reached Lionel's trailer. It sat on a dust lot next door to a small vinyl-sided building doing business as Rhonda's Ranch. A ramshackle scrap-wood deck wrapped around the trailer, as if the single-wide had come crashing down atop a kid's clubhouse. Upright sheets of corrugated tin fenced the length of one property line—a windbreak, I figured—but Lionel's border with Rhonda's Ranch was free and clear.

Lionel parked his truck by some cinder-block steps that led up to the deck, and I stopped in the road. He slid from the cab onto the hardpan, then kicked a ball of chicken wire that went bouncing across the lot like a silver tumbleweed. A pair of soil-filled washtubs were sprouting high thistle, and he signaled for me to squeeze the LeBaron in between them, pumping both arms, a marshaler directing a plane into a hangar.

A cockroach came struggling out of a dashboard vent, one of those thumb-sized, hairy-legged tree roaches. A stowaway that had probably been living within the guts of the LeBaron since before I left Grand Isle. I looked over at Sam, expecting him to pounce, but he was still watching me. “We're doing this,” I said. And Sam kept on staring, listening but not understanding, as I lifted my foot off the brake and we made our way forward.

TWO COUCHES TOOK UP
most of the space in the living room of the trailer, but there were also books and bookshelves everywhere. There was no TV, just a radio in one corner playing outlaw country, a computer looping through a psychedelic screen saver in the other. Both couches were covered in a brown, leatherette
material that was ripped in places and showing synthetic clouds of white batting. Thin gold curtains masked the windows, tinting the sunlight amber, and stationed between the couches was a long, low coffee table made entirely of welded iron.

Lionel pointed at the table. “Watch out for that,” he said. “It's a shin buster, savvy?”

We each sat down on a couch, and Sam laid himself on the caramel carpet, his back pushed against the door. Lionel took off his cowboy hat and placed it among the paperbacks spread across the iron coffee table. Thrillers and mysteries mainly, plus some field guides for animals and plants. His blond hair was longer than I'd realized—longer than mine, even—but he had it tied up in a messy screw of a topknot. A ceiling fan above us was rotating slowly, and all those books gave the trailer the musty smell of a library, a Cybermobile. Sam had shut his eyes, and I asked if it was all right for him to be in there with us.

“Leave him be,” said Lionel. “He's fine.”

“You really don't care?”

“I really don't.”

“It'll be two nights at most. If that's okay, I mean.”

He nodded and removed a can of Copenhagen from the front pocket of his shirt. “You thirsty? Water? Pop? Milk?” He tapped the side of the can against his belt buckle, then whipped his hand, thumping his index finger on the lid to pack the tobacco tight. He waved the can at me, but I passed.

“Maybe some water,” I said.

“Sure thing.”

He twisted the metal lid off the can, then maneuvered a wedge of Copenhagen behind his bottom lip. Once he had his dip situated he replaced the lid and snapped his fingers to clean them. Specks of fine cut careened off the coffee table like fleas at war. He'd already grabbed himself a Dixie cup to spit in, lining the inside with a paper towel to keep it from spilling or splashing, and
now he went into the kitchen and filled a plastic bowl with water. He placed the bowl on the carpet beside Sam, doubled back to the sink and topped off a glass jar for me.

“Thanks,” I said, taking the water from him.

“Yup.” Lionel returned to the couch opposite mine. He'd untied his hair, and it was hanging in his face now. He flicked his head back, then spit into his cup. “Ouch. How'd you lose that?” He was looking at my left hand.

“Working. Out on a rig in the Gulf.”

“I imagine that'd do it.” He rolled the spit cup against his cheek and frowned. “So you've come to talk to me about your brother.”

“Yeah. And again, I'm sorry for dropping in on you like this. Just seemed easier than calling or writing or whatever.”

“Driving to Nevada is easier?”

“No. But I don't have to be in San Francisco till Thursday, and I thought you might still be living here. It wasn't that far out my way to swing by.”

“Not truly
on
your way though neither. Not from Louisiana. And how come now? All these years later?”

I took a sip of water. “Because Tommy has maybe got a kid in San Francisco, and I wanted—”

“A kid? What?”

“The mother tracked me down six weeks ago.”

He rocked back on the couch, laughing. “You're lying! That smooth-dog!”

I shook my head. “She says Tommy went home with her from some beach party in San Diego one night, and y'all shipped out not long after that.”

“And you've been talking to them?”

There was no soft way to explain all my amateur detective work, so I kept things vague. “Not that much with the daughter. But yeah, the mother and I have been.”

“They're needing money, that or one of your kidneys. You're caught in some psyops.”

“It was all my idea, going out there.”

“It's still fucking weird.” He ran his hand across his mustache. “What all you know about the mother?”

“She's a poet. Teaches at San Francisco State.”

“Oh boy. She married?”

“Doesn't look like it.”

“What's her name? I was king of the beach party.” He picked up one of the books on the coffee table.
The Shape of the Journey,
it was called. “And I read some poetry now and again too.”

“Nancy Hammons.”

“Never heard of her. Christ. San Francisco, poet. Gonna be a wild ride.”

“You've been there?”

“I've been everywhere, man.” He tossed
The Shape of the Journey
back on the table. “Suppose it's true what's she's claiming—want some advice?”

“Yeah. I know. Run the other way.”

“Then I won't say no more.” He scratched at the side of his neck. “You seem like a frayed rope. How old are you?”

“Thirty in January.”

He smiled. “That mama chose a bad time to fling this at you. Thirty packs a sting. Shit, I was a Mormon before I turned thirty. A good one, in fact. I'd door-to-doored for the LDS in God-awful, fecking Belfast for two years.”

“I'm working through it.”

“It's the day-to-day living that wears you out. Any idiot can face a crisis.”

I nodded. “True enough.”

“Chekhov. Read them Russkies, Roy. Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy. They teach us how to suffer like men. Copy?”

“Copy,” I said, thinking of
my
Russian. Viktor.

Lionel whacked at the coffee table with the toe of his boot. “I don't have any pictures of him or the guys or nothing. I was never keen on all that.”

“That's okay,” I said. Hell, I couldn't even look at that
FOR OUR TOMMY
album yet. “I just thought we could talk some.”

“I'm in.” He put on his hat. “But let's go out back.”

I followed him outside and saw five long dog kennels lined up across the rear of his property, right where the dust of his lot ended and flat scrubland began. As Sam presented behind us there came the howl of multiple hounds, heads bent back as they moaned, but Lionel whistled and they quit. He sank into a rusty folding chair, and I did the same. We were sitting side by side now. Rhonda's Ranch was off to the left, close enough to hit with a rock.

Sam lay down on the deck between us, contemplating the hounds, caged brothers and sisters who seemed to want him for their prison gang. “My mountain lion dogs,” said Lionel. He skipped his thumb along Sam's spine. “Treeing Walkers.”

“You're still a hunting guide?”

“Only sometimes. Trying to get back into it, by and by. I let life get away from me for a while there, spent some lost years in the bottle.” He wiggled his spit cup. “Things I could keep a grip on in the navy eventually got too slippery.”

I was fishing for something to say but coming up empty.

“Are
you
a drinker?” he asked.

“Not to where I can't not.”

“Good man.”

Morning had faded and the day was warming, the sky a few shades lighter than Lionel's turquoise shirt. Not far from the kennels stood a large work shed constructed from the same corrugated tin as the windbreak running to our right. The shed's wide doors were chained and padlocked. I looked over at Lionel. “Why did you call him Ahab earlier?”

“Ahab was what he went by.”

“But what about Orion?”

“The constellation?”