Journeyman Read online

  Nolan looks down into the mouth of his beer. A garbled voice begins to sing above the music, words Nolan can’t extract from the wall of sound.

  —Our enemy, Cosmo says while rolling his shoulders and then pulling his arm across his chest by cupping his elbow, our enemy believes we as a nation have reached a stage of effeminacy. They write this, declare it to one another in writing and on web videos as an assessment of how best to end us. Them pussies are all words, they say. Labial, dental, guttural. Ductile, malleable, sectile.

  Cosmo raises his index finger and wags it at Nolan.

  —But the arsonist, he gets it and he’s got the cojones to do something about it. He lights fires to clear out the understory so it can grow back stronger.

  Cosmo abruptly leans over, picks up his bottle of beer, turns it over, and shakes out the last bit as he takes the few steps toward the kitchen’s screened door. Nolan watches him, sensing somehow that his brother has decided how he wants to respond to the music. With a hand on the door’s handle, Cosmo points at Nolan’s beer and asks:

  —You want another?

  —Please.

  While Cosmo is inside, Nolan stands and turns the meat on the grill and again he pours a small amount of beer on the flames to knock them down. He can hear Cosmo inside, rooting around the refrigerator. For some reason, it makes him think of one night when Nolan was still in high school after Cosmo had gone off to Cal. Nolan came home late to find their father sitting on the living-room couch, in front of the television, watching the 10 o’clock news. He always sat in the middle of the couch when he was alone, in the middle of the couch and straight backed, with his hands palms down on his thighs, as if he were meditating. How many times did Nolan find him like this, tired at the end of a long day at work, following events around the world that he claimed direct connection to, that he claimed some special purchase on because of the events of his youth?

  But this time was different. Nolan took off his shoes and jacket at the door, greeted his father, who greeted him back, and he walked into the kitchen and opened the fridge door and stood in the cold bright light, debating his choices. He heard his father change the channel from the news to a comedian’s late-night talk show. The comedian’s voice diligently working its way through a scripted monologue, during which Nolan’s father laughed, lightly at first, and then loudly, genuinely, with the comedian’s voice rising to be heard above the studio audience’s rising laughter and applause. Nolan heard the show transition to a commercial. His father continued laughing, but there was something odd about his laughter that compelled Nolan to check on him. He found his father crying. A grown man, on a couch before a television, late at night in his own home, sitting still as tears streamed down his face. Nolan walked into the room and placed his hand on his father’s shoulder.

  —You all right, Dad?

  —No, his father said, placing his hand on Nolan’s but not taking his eyes from the television. Let me be alone, bud, OK?

  In Cosmo’s backyard, Nolan stares at the barbeque coals. Orange-red scrims of ember oscillate along thin lines of white ash.

  Effeminacy?

  From the kitchen, Cosmo says:

  —How come we never go out and meet any women?

  Nolan looks up at the marine layer absorbing the light of the small town, and says:

  —Because you’re a mess.

  —What’s that?

  —I said, let’s do it.

  Cosmo returns with a fresh joint at the corner of his mouth, two cold beers, and a full carton of free range, antibiotic-free, vegetarian-fed eggs that Nolan bought that morning when buying the chicken and some fresh salad greens. Food like his brother hadn’t eaten in how long? Food the likes of which he would eat how often after Nolan had gone? Cosmo hands Nolan a beer and then sets the carton of eggs on his chair.

  —If you’re about to do what I think you’re about to do, Nolan says to Cosmo, don’t.

  —Are you your brother’s keeper?

  —For one, I paid for those and that’s not how I want them used, and two, it’s not right.

  —Right is relative.

  —Have you seen the lady who lives there? That’s a single mom down there.

  —She’s not a single mom.

  —How do you know?

  —Because I pay attention to these types of things. I listen to their arguments. It’s a house divided, and the father is currently in absentia. Besides, Cosmo says as he opens the carton and pulls out a single egg, my beef isn’t with the parental units. My beef is with their hellion offspring.

  —Cos, Nolan says, but Cosmo tucks the joint behind his ear, licks a finger, raises it to gauge some imaginary wind, and, before throwing the egg at the noise, he says:

  —Stir the web, wake the spider.

  Several days later, on his way home from work Nolan notices a telephone booth as he rides past the Chinese restaurant at the north end of town. The aluminum frame rectangle stands tall and empty, its glass windows covered with pollen and dust. Without hesitation, he swings the bicycle around, buys a prepaid calling card at the gas station quick mart across the street, ducks into the phone booth, and dials the numbers, hesitating briefly before the last one, but finally pushing it through.

  Linda answers on the third ring:

  —Hello.

  —Hey, Nolan says.

  A dense quiet coalesces at the other end of the connection. The receiver feels sticky against his ear.

  —What do you want, Nolan?

  —I just wanted see how you are. To hear your voice.

  —I’m fine.

  —Good.

  In the background, children playing in the community pool. She must be walking toward the bedroom window, or sitting at the foot of her bed, facing the window, the comforter pulled taut and extra pillows heaped at the headboard.

  —A letter, Nolan?

  —I know.

  —No, obviously you don’t.

  —Yeah.

  —I didn’t think I was wrong about you. I thought you were a good guy.

  —Yeah.

  —Yeah? she scoffs. All you have to say is, “yeah”?

  Frustrated, he lowers his forehead against the glass, tipping his hat back on his head. A jeep pulls into the restaurant’s parking lot and noses within feet of the phone booth. Bland faces within the vehicle turn their eyes on him, sudden audience to his misery.

  —I want you to leave me alone, Nolan.

  —I’m sorry, Linda.

  —Me, too. I wish you didn’t think it was OK to just run like that.

  —I know.

  —No, you don’t. Not yet, you don’t.

  He sits on the love seat, drinking beer alone in the garage with the front door up and the side door open in hopes of cooling the room still hot from a day when the heat was enough to stave off the coming of the marine layer. Air conditioners hum alongside the houses, and children, out of school and out of doors, ride bicycles and scooters up and down the long block.

  Work under the farmhouse has been especially hot during his fourth week, and Nolan still feels it after a cold shower and several cold beers. A cool breeze comes up the sloped driveway off the shaded street, but still his face and neck are hot, and some of that, he realizes, is the shame that lingers from his conversation with Linda.

  He could tell from the tone of her voice and the length of her silences that he’d hurt her.

  —Duh, she’d said pointedly to him a time or two when he’d stated the obvious. Duh or No, duh, and always with eyes acknowledging she knew other words, longer words, but that those words, in this case, worked weakly, and he was to understand that.

  He sits oiling the snub-nosed .38, a gift from his father on the day he set out with the Airstream at nineteen.

  —You know what this is? his father asked him, looking him forcefully in the eye.

  —Yes, sir.

  —You know what it’s for?

  —I do.


  —Good. Be smart with it. Don’t be careless or stupid. Owning one’s a privilege, not a right.

  Nolan wipes the soot clean from the fireproof box and while doing so he considers selling the handgun for cash and using the money to buy a bus ticket back to Vegas, to work there instead of Burnridge, to build his stake and try to reconnect with Linda. He wonders how many times she would close the door on him before finally opening it. Could he wait that out? Then, why leave in the first place?

  —You’re quiet, she said once after they’d been kissing. She took off his hat and put it on her own head and they kissed, pressing their bodies against one another and smoothing and grabbing at one another, and during a calm to catch their breaths she put the hat back on his head, and straightening it she said, You’re quiet, but you do have a flare for the dramatic.

  Cosmo is in his office again with the door closed, typing. Nolan wipes the revolver’s blued metal free of his fingerprints and slides five shiny brass cartridges into their chambers, feeling at his fingertips how the cylinder fits the machined rest with a soft click, so seamless and smooth, the simple result of millennia of tinkering.

  With the handgun loaded, Nolan aims it at the cardboard box in front of him, his finger pointed along the cylinder, nowhere near the trigger.

  —Pow, he says quietly.

  As he lowers the gun, he notices that several of the boxes have been opened and Cosmo’s rooted through them. He can see the carving platter he gave Cosmo and Dawn as a gift and it makes Nolan wonder whether his brother was searching through the boxes for something in particular or just revisiting items from his marriage. Nolan can imagine him doing this, eyes bleary from alcohol and weed, hair greasy and disheveled, angry and sad all at once.

  There have been several times since Nolan moved in with Cosmo that he’s considered mentioning his brother’s marriage and divorce, but each time he edged away from doing so because talk like that is not something they’ve done, it’s not something they did when their father was diagnosed with lung cancer, when he was dying. After Nolan’s mother told him over the phone of the diagnosis, she asked him to call Cosmo because he’d taken it hard. Then, she put his father on, and he said:

  —Yeah, can’t say we didn’t see this one coming.

  After talking with his father, Nolan didn’t call Cosmo, and Cosmo didn’t call him.

  At the end, pneumonia set in. Their father died quickly and peacefully, during the night’s false dawn. Cosmo was home and he and their mother were at the bedside. Nolan was on an interstate, driving home. Dash lights and the reflectors in the road before him. Choking back tears, thinking, I do not want to see you die. I will see you dead.

  Cosmo was silently furious with Nolan when he finally arrived, later that morning. Even then, his brother was already an amateur alcoholic. Not yet the stoner, though. On Nolan’s walk down the hallway to see his father’s corpse, Cosmo shouldered him and hissed:

  —Selfish prick.

  The sound of his car spinning in the gravel driveway as he drove away for most of the day while Nolan held vigil with his mother. His father’s stillness concentrated between them.

  —The first time I brought him home, your grandmother said, “You always did have a soft spot for injured angels.”

  Late that afternoon, the funeral home came to take him and Nolan and Cosmo helped as two young men lifted the sheeted cart into the back of the hearse. They spent a week with their mother, not talking much to one another, listening to and comforting her. Cosmo was the first to leave. They stood on the porch as he drove away.

  —He’s not wrong, Nolan, she said once Cosmo was gone. You could have made more of an effort to be here sooner.

  —I’m sorry.

  —I’m not the one you should be apologizing to.

  Nolan thought she meant his father, but months later, while sitting on a rock in the middle of a mountain lake, watching swallows slice back and forth through a scrim of gnats gathered above the water, he realized she had meant Chance. Cosmo. Brothers both.

  Truth be told, though, Nolan doesn’t know Cosmo all that well. He didn’t want to come for the wedding because, from all he’d heard from his mother, he believed the marriage wouldn’t last, and what’s the point of taking time off from a steady paycheck just to watch your messed-up older brother marry a woman you suspect will leave him because they’re too young to know any better and too arrogant to try?

  He doesn’t know Cosmo, but he does. In Nolan’s first month in Burnridge, his brother’s fascination with the arsonist has blossomed into an obsession. According to Cosmo, pressure is mounting on local officials to stop the arsons before tourism is affected, before something other than old, abandoned houses get destroyed.

  —Before it becomes the main attraction, as Cosmo says.

  Although Nolan won’t say it, he is worried about his brother. One night Nolan got up to urinate and he found Cosmo asleep in front of the television, bathed in the blue glow, reeking of wood and synthetics smoke, as if he’d been poking around the scene of the crime, spending time among the charred ruins.

  The video-game controller was upside down in his lap, and looped music played as Cosmo’s female avatar stood in an open meadow, turning from side to side, alert but waiting, scantily clad and disproportionate and armed with a recurve bow. Abruptly, the avatar took several steps and then stopped. She nocked an arrow, drew back the string as if to shoot, and then lowered the bow and turned from side to side before returning to her original position.

  —Default mode, Cosmo called it, suddenly awake. She’s operating in default mode.

  The light of the television changed as the avatar moved, and out of the corner of his eye Nolan noticed their father’s copper Zippo, tucked in Cosmo’s shirt pocket.

  —You all right? Cosmo asked.

  —Yeah. You?

  —Golden.

  He didn’t think Chance was capable of setting fires like the ones that had been set, but he didn’t know if Cosmo was. He knew their father had given Cosmo the lighter same as he’d given Nolan the gun, but Nolan didn’t know what the man had said to Cosmo, he didn’t know how Cosmo had responded, or what was in his eyes when he did. They had their own moments with their father, and about those they had spoken little, if at all.

  A car passes along the street, bringing Nolan back to the garage. He takes a sip of his beer, empties the .38 cartridges into his shirt pocket, takes another sip of the beer, and thumbs the hammer back on the revolver. He dry fires the handgun once at the box in front of him, stands, and lifts the flap on one of the cardboard moving boxes. At the top of the box he finds a picture of Cosmo and his wife standing on a beach in Baja California Sur. Their honeymoon. A hotel looms in the near distance and a crescent-shaped beach curves around the gently lapping waters of a calm bay. The word Canción reads across the bottom of the photo. Song.

  Suddenly, bellowing thumps of a steady bass line increase in volume until a raised, four-wheel-drive mini-Ranger lurches onto the quiet street, speeding recklessly, loud noise blasting from speakers in the bed of the truck. Nolan looks up from the photo, sets it back in the box, and walks out of the garage and down the driveway, tucking the handgun in the waist of his blue jeans at the small of his back.

  He’s halfway down the sloped driveway when Cosmo sprints past, dressed in his bathrobe and slippers. Cosmo stumbles at the end of the driveway, loses a slipper, kicks off the other, and continues barefoot toward where the truck parks in front of the house down the way.

  —Cosmo, Nolan calls after, but his voice is lost in the blaring music.

  As the truck is pulling up in front of the house, the front door opens and the teenage girl Nolan has seen come and go runs from the house and down the driveway, followed by her mother.

  —Hey, sweetheart, Cosmo yells at the girl. Hey, who do you think you are?

  When the girl gets to the bottom of the driveway, the passenger-side door to the truck opens from inside and
the girl hops up and in. The truck lurches forward as she pulls the door shut behind her. Defeated, the mother stops at the top of the driveway. Her shoulders slouch.

  Cosmo stops as the truck speeds to the end of the street before whipping back around, lolling on its leaves. With the mini-Ranger approaching, Cosmo stands defiantly at the side of the street, his bathrobe open at the top, his bare feet planted on the hot pavement, his fists on his hips, and a shock of hair shoved upright in a suggestion of cultivated mania.

  The music carves out space for itself in the suburban calm, it bores through the quiet, and as the truck passes Cosmo, the girl leans across the young man driving and with her young, pretty, excessively made-up face contorted into a hideous mask, she raises her middle finger and sticks out her tongue.

  Cosmo stands there astonished for a second or two after they’re gone, the bass fading. Then, he ties the belt of his robe around his waist and walks back to the house. Nolan looks to where the mother was standing but she is gone and the front door to the house is closed. He can still feel the bass in his lungs long after the truck has made its way out to Burnridge Avenue. When Cosmo walks within reach, Nolan places his hand on his brother’s shoulder.

  —There’s nothing you can say to that, Cosmo says, his glasses crooked and his jaw muscles clenching and unclenching.

  —Come back inside, Cos.

  —Absolutely nothing that will make her understand her role in the coarsening of our society, in the downfall of our republic.

  —Let’s drink a cold beer, bud.

  7

  After shoring the foundation, Manny and Nolan set about gutting the house clean. They rip out stained carpet and padding in the bedrooms and they pry yellowed asbestos tiles from the kitchen floor. Tearing down the living-room sheetrock, they find wallpaper so brittle it crumbles into a fibrous dust in the palm of their gloved hands and swirls before their masked faces. Behind the wallpaper run redwood lath boards a true foot wide. Beautiful old wood.