Journeyman Read online

  Copyright © Marc Bojanowski, 2015

  Soft Skull Press Edition 2017

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is Available

  Cover design by Kelly Winton

  Typeset by Avon DataSet Ltd

  eISBN 978-1-59376-668-9

  Soft Skull Press

  An Imprint of Counterpoint

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.softskull.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  for my parents,

  with love and gratitude

  1

  The man stands on the roof of the mansion enveloped by an amorphous cloud of atomized paint. He waves a spray gun back and forth over the stucco chimney stack, and with each pass of the gun new flecks materialize where others have disappeared, leaving him surrounded by an aura of dazzling light.

  Down in the courtyard, William Nolan Jackson watches the iridescent cloud expand and contract beneath the high noon sun. He watches the forms it takes around the painter’s movements, and he studies the colors flashing at its periphery, flashing as if some meaning exists there, playfully hidden, or hiding. There’s a pulse to the paint cloud, an itinerant ease to its transitions that Nolan admires. It is, for him, a thing of beauty.

  —Don’t see that every day, now, do you? a voice says.

  Nolan turns to find the job site’s foreman standing beside him.

  —No, sir, he agrees. You don’t.

  The foreman crosses his arms against his chest, lifts his chin, and tilts his head to the side. He squints to see the cloud better. Then, deadpan, he says to Nolan:

  —You want a lawn chair or something? Maybe an iced tea and a bucket so you can put your boots up?

  Before Nolan can respond, the painter’s compressor switches on, loud and jarring, and the foreman steps forward and raises his hands to his face so that the ends of his fingers press together at the bridge of his nose and his thumbs tripod along his jaw.

  —Hey, he yells at the house painter. I’m going to the deli for a sandwich. You want anything?

  When the painter turns, the cloud turns with him. It moves slowly, with a systemic elegance. The painter rests the spray gun in the crook of his elbow, his eyes hidden behind a pair of dark sunglasses freckled with old paint. He reaches into the front pocket of his splattered coveralls and removes a crushed pack of brand-name cigarettes.

  Behind him, Nolan notices, the sky is vast and white and blue. Wispy strands of cirrus extend into reflections cast in the window banks of a high-rise casino-hotel down on the Las Vegas Strip, and from the rooftop of another sky-rise the long arm of a yellow crane sweeps evenly over the desert cityscape. Nolan watches the painter place a bent cigarette at the corner of a wry smile and raise a disposable plastic lighter to his face. To the foreman, the man says:

  —Yeah. Get me a chocolate milk and a nudie mag.

  The last of his words are lost to flames.

  When he strikes the lighter, the paint cloud explodes, rattling the courtyard windows in their casings. Caught on fire, the man stands in place flailing and screaming, lifting one foot and then the other while swiping at his face and his head like a harried marionette in pantomime. Nolan steps forward, amazed. The color of the flames dull in the brightness of the day. Before Nolan can say or do anything, the painter’s knees buckle, his body collapses to the tiles, and he falls from the second-story roof, flames whipping about his body.

  Nolan is at the man’s side, swatting out the fire with his work shirt, when the foreman, breathing heavily, shoves him away. The foreman drops to his knees beside the man. Nolan’s ears ring and he can feel the desert sun warm on his bare shoulders. He sees a mason hurrying over with a five-gallon bucket of water. A tile setter hustles beyond the compressor noise, already pressing a cell phone to one ear and his free hand to the other. Seeing the compressor’s yellow extension cord, Nolan reaches down and yanks it from an outdoor wall plug. Suddenly, the job site is quiet. The mason runs up and lifts the bucket but the foreman raises his hand and stops him from dumping the water on the painter.

  —No, he says. The lye.

  The mason pours the bucket out on the concrete walkway and runs to a nearby spigot.

  Nolan steps toward the painter, who lies flat on his stomach, his arms straight at either side, his blistered palms upturned. The burns on his neck range from purple to red to black. Pressed to the dirt, his cheek glistens, and colorful bits of discarded wire-stripping stick to the pocks in his face. Tiny flames linger along the loops of his sneaker laces.

  Nolan knows the man isn’t dead, but he doesn’t know the extent to which he’s injured or what to do in the span of time before someone who will know arrives. He feels helpless, the feeling he despises most.

  The foreman, careful not to place his hands on the man’s singed coveralls, leans over the painter.

  —Set still, buddy, Nolan hears him say. Help’s coming.

  When the foreman speaks, a silver filling glints at the back of his mouth, and because of it Nolan notices the sunlight spilling over the painter’s body. He steps back and unfurls his work shirt and holds it up best he can as a shade.

  —Come on, man, the foreman whispers to the painter as the mason returns with the bucket of water and a handful of rags. Hang in there.

  Noon the next day Nolan arrives at University Medical Center to find the foreman and an electrician from the site smoking cigarettes in the shade of a cloth awning. The men stand on either side of a cylindrical concrete ashtray, down a gently sloped ramp from a pair of sliding glass doors that open to the hospital lobby. A camera, the size of a small black bird, sits above the center of the door. The foreman and the electrician raise and lower their hands to their faces and exhale smoke into a hot, dry afternoon breeze that occasionally threatens the electrician’s comb-over. When Nolan reaches the brushed concrete ramp, the foreman says:

  —Well, well, well, if it ain’t the Lonely Ranger.

  —How’s he holding up? Nolan asks.

  —Fucker survives Afghanistan to come home and fall off a roof.

  The electrician lowers his face and bites his lower lip and reaches up to smooth down his thinning hair. None of the men looks at each other.

  —Nah, the foreman continues, he’ll be all right. Doc says his back’s busted from the fall, but he’ll walk again with some rehab.

  —What about the burns?

  —The ones on his neck and hands are pretty bad—

  —Tell him about his forehead, the electrician interrupts.

  The foreman coughs up a floppy lozenge of green phlegm and spits it at the base of a nearby oleander shrub in bloom. Pink blossoms.

  —You tell him.

  —They grafted some skin up off his ass and glued it to his forehead, the electrician says, tapping his forehead with his middle finger, his cigarette protruding from his curled hand, a stupid grin on his pasty, unlikable face.

  —Old butthead, we’re calling him.

  —You’re calling him, the foreman says, taking a puff on his cigarette.

  Nolan stares into the electrician�
�s eyes until the man’s eyes waver and he looks away.

  —What room’s he in? Nolan asks the foreman.

  —421. His wife’s up there, sitting with him. Go on up and introduce yourself.

  The foreman lifts his fist to show Nolan the end of his cigarette.

  —We’ll be up in a bit.

  The house painter lies swaddled in gauze and face down in a bed designed for the injuries he’s sustained. His wife, a petite woman in her late twenties, sits in an armchair beside the bed. She points a remote control in the direction of a muted television, mounted high on the wall opposite. They have the room to themselves, and a colorful bouquet of flowers and a GET WELL SOON card adorn the particle-board dresser in the far corner of the room. A Mylar balloon presses against the ceiling. The tiny bell at the end of its ribbon lies nestled at the center of a stack of hospital pillows and folded blankets. The room smells of ammonia and synthetic citrus, and the regular beeps from the monitors are subtly oppressive.

  Nolan stands at the doorway, hat in hand, waiting to be acknowledged, but the woman is concentrating on the buttons on the remote. He doesn’t know the house painter outside of work, and even at work, not that well. He remembers one day when, at a burrito lunch the foreman bought for all the workers on site out of his own pocket, the painter shared two stories about his service overseas. The first concerned a raid on a hillside village of mud huts. A child cowered in a corner. The entire thing witnessed through the disorientating green of night-vision goggles. The second story briefly chronicled a spring snowmelt. The bleating of goats, stranded by a flooded river, reached the painter at the makeshift mountain outpost he and his fellow soldiers had constructed. They stayed at the outpost until summer, he said. They drank goat’s milk, still warm, and scoped the valley to no avail for a hidden patch of marijuana, the sweet scent of which was brought by the wind each evening to the young men, far from home.

  But Nolan can’t recall the man having ever mentioned a wife.

  A streak of light across the room’s only window brings Nolan back. In the distance, smoggy Mojave.

  The painter’s wife scoots to the edge of the armchair, and holding the remote with both hands she shoves it adamantly in the direction of the television. Nolan takes a quiet step back from the doorway. The day the painter shared his two stories, a teenage apprentice plumber asked him if he’d ever killed anyone in combat. The gathered tradesmen, sitting on buckets or against the mansion in the shade, looked at their food or their feet. The apprentice, though, looked the painter in the eye. Nolan watched the painter tilt a glance to those around him and say, almost laughing:

  —You see how easy that shit just fell off his tongue?

  One or two of the men nodded, and the foreman said:

  —I blame video games. That, and pornography.

  —What’s pornography got to do with it? the electrician with the comb-over asked.

  —I don’t know, the foreman answered. I just thought it sounded good.

  —Did you? the apprentice asked the painter.

  —You don’t understand this yet, Nolan said then, his voice almost cracking he spoke so seldom, but you’re being rude.

  —He’s the one telling war stories. The apprentice pointed at the painter.

  —Those aren’t war stories, son, the foreman interjected. We’re just talking about places we’ve been.

  —Even if I had, the painter said finally, I wouldn’t tell a shit-mover like you.

  —No reason to be insulting about it, the apprentice said.

  —Sure there is.

  In the hospital room, the painter’s wife shoves the remote at the television one last time before slumping back in the chair and letting her hands fall in her lap. Nolan steps back into the shadows of the hallway as the woman’s hair falls across her face and her features scrunch and her shoulders begin to shudder. He looks down at his hands, holding his hat, and he turns and leaves.

  Later that day, at a gas station quick mart, Nolan sets two 22-oz aluminum cans of domestic beer and five microwaved chicken tamales wrapped in plastic wrap on the counter.

  —And a half pint of that top-shelf brown, he says to the clerk.

  The clerk waves the bottle of whiskey in front of the scanner several times before the coded strip registers with a beep. Above her left shoulder, a small colored monitor displays Nolan, captured from three different camera angles. Nolan and each of the empty, stocked aisles.

  Outside, Nolan sits in the driver’s seat of his truck, parked in one of the quick mart’s parking slots, facing the last of the setting sun, with his white Western hat canted against the diminishing star. Parked in the next slot, a dusty, late-model sedan filled with an assortment of belongings all packed in brown grocery sacks. A dream catcher with red and yellow bird feathers dangles from the rearview mirror, held together by duct tape and wire. Nolan watches the reflection of the desert behind him, blue dark, in one of the sedan’s side mirrors. Ahead, the final arc of the sun.

  Over the next hour, vehicles come and go from the parking stalls around him, but he sits in his ’76 Ranger with the windows down, sipping the whiskey and enjoying the cross-breeze when it comes.

  When he was a boy, he and his older brother Chance wandered the oak woodlands of the Sierra Nevada foothills hunting rabbit with pellet guns their father had bought for them at Christmas. One morning early, they came upon a shack in the woods. A one-room structure with horizontal siding and a wood-shingle roof. Most of one entire wall was taken up by a French window curtained shut with thick red quilts, sun faded. A rundown windowless van parked in front of the shack. Gray sky reflected in large puddles of brown rainwater.

  Chance was ten and Nolan was seven, and as soon as they happened upon the clearing where the shack stood, the older boy dropped to a crouch behind a decaying log and began pumping his rifle. Nolan watched Chance aim at a green bottle of beer that stood by a leg of a chair on the front porch. Knowing, in the time it took Chance to aim, that he would be expected to shoot next. A sweet, foreign-smelling smoke rose from the stone chimney at the back of the shack. Winter, and the boys’ jeans soaking wet from walking in the tall grasses after a night of rain.

  Chance missed, and Nolan shot next and he toppled the bottle. They went on like this, choosing targets, old yellow-and-black license plates, torn seat backs, seashell wind chimes, all the while Chance working them closer and closer to the curtained window until it was Nolan’s turn. The better shot, he missed the window on purpose, but before Chance could shoot, the door to the cabin burst open and three men, set on fire, rushed out to the yard, fell to their knees, and began shoveling fistfuls of mud down their throats to extinguish the flames in their lungs. The last thing Nolan saw before he and Chance ran was the inside of the shack on fire, the flames rising from knocked-over equipment.

  They ran all the way home, and when they told their father what had happened their mother called in the fire. Later that evening, house windows dark and reflective, the phone rang in the kitchen and half an hour later their father was driving the boys to the sheriff’s department in Placerville. After parking across the street from the office, their father rested his hands on his thighs and said:

  —You boys did nothing wrong, so don’t act like it.

  Nolan watched the keys sway on their ring, the one key still inserted in the truck’s ignition. Leaning against the passenger door, Chance tried to stifle his cries, his eyes red and swollen.

  —Chance, their father said.

  —What?

  —What’d I just say?

  —We didn’t do anything wrong.

  —Then why are you crying?

  —I don’t know.

  Nolan looked up at his father as the headlights of an oncoming vehicle shone across his face.

  —Then we’ll just sit here until you’re ready.

  First drops of rain on the windshield and the feel of their father’s wool flannel on the back of his neck as the man reac
hed over Nolan to rest his hand on Chance’s shoulder. Three of them sitting in a row on the plastic bench seat. The cancer already in him.

  South of the gas station quick mart, just beyond the entrance ramp to the interstate, a faded billboard advertises an eighteen-hole golf course lined with luxury estates. A small figure waterskis across the glassy turquoise lake at the center of the illustration of the housing tract, the skier leaving in its wake the words Desert Oasis inscribed in elegant script. Nolan traces the letters of the words superimposed on that imaginary world. He traces them right to left so they lose meaning and then left to right so they gather it up again. For, impossible as the tranquil lake and the stately homes and the lush green fairway grass may seem in the desert, he knows that what the billboard promises, to some extent, is possible. He’s labored on its behalf in this state and others. He’s profited from helping to will it into the world.

  The upper corner of the billboard is torn to reveal a patch of blinding white space, a torn corner where some individual has reached and wildly inscribed, in black permanent marker, the name:

  LOS

  Nolan checks his mirrors, raises the bottle in a silent toast to the inscription and advertisement both, and then takes a sip of the whiskey.

  He stays in this place until daylight fades completely. Observer and participant.

  On the night of the burning men, an hour or so after they’d gone to sleep, their father opened the door to the room Nolan shared with Chance and stood in the doorway. Nolan was still awake. His father’s form cast in silhouette by the hallway light overhead.

  —Dad? Nolan finally said.

  —What’s up, bud?

  —Why were they eating mud?

  —What do you mean?

  —When they came out of the house, they ate the dirt in the driveway.

  His father sighed.

  —Do you know, Dad?

  —The fire was in their lungs.

  —Oh.

  —And they thought it would put it out.

  —But it didn’t?

  —No.

  —What were they doing in there?