Journeyman Read online

  The low men pull wiring hand over fist and toss porcelain insulators out gaping holes where double-hung windows once stood. They yank free heavy quilts of chipped tile and sawzall rusted galvanized water pipes from the second-story bathroom. They walk through rooms sunshot and roiling with motes as they haul moldy swaths of fiberglass down the stairs and out the back door, leaving drag marks through the farmhouse in the sheetrock and wallpaper dust. In one day alone they amass a garbage heap in the driveway nearly a story tall.

  Joe meets them at the end of that day with a Mexican beer and lime for Nolan and a cola for Manny.

  —A lot of trash, he says to Nolan, handing the journeyman the beer.

  —Yes, it is.

  They all three stand looking over the trash heap.

  —One day, Joe says, all that was new.

  —No más, Manny says.

  —That’s what I just said, Manny. No más.

  —Sí, no más.

  —Always have to have the last word, don’t you, smartass?

  —¿Cómo? Manny smiles, sipping his cola.

  —Cómo, my ass, Joe says. You know what I meant.

  It’s moments like these that leave Nolan feeling most at ease in Burnridge. He likes the camaraderie, the talk, the harmless practical jokes Manny plays on Guillermo and Joe. He also likes spending eight to ten hours of his day being held accountable for things he can handle. The tasks at hand focus his mind and keep at bay the troubles that hound him when he’s off work. On the ride to the farmhouse, he goes over in his mind the day’s jobs. As a low man with a journeyman’s experience, it’s difficult to get too excited about the work, but it reminds him of simple things he’d forgotten—how to use a shovel efficiently, how to mix quick-setting concrete effectively, how to use your body judiciously in backbreaking work.

  Each morning, Manny and Joe flip a coin to determine the station to which the radio will be tuned until lunch. Joe favors classic rock to the local Spanish-language channel Manny always chooses. Nolan and Guillermo don’t care either way. When Joe wins, he lowers his head and nods while raising his right hand, index finger and pinkie splayed, thumb pressing down the middle two fingers to form Satan’s horns.

  —Yeah, baby, he says. Rock ’n’ roll, baby.

  To which Manny responds by turning down the corners of his mouth and raising his shoulders in a shrug.

  But when Manny wins, he bends back at the waist and raises his hands before his face to play a triumphant air trombone out of the corner of his mouth while Joe covers his ears and groans.

  Nolan enjoys listening to the Spanish-language station. He pays attention to the lyrics, picking out the words he recognizes so as to translate them and to contrive some semblance of a story. Each day that summer he hears the story about the man who bears 1,000 scars from love, that and the story that begins with the father making a long-distance call home to Mexico to talk with his wife and his son.

  —This guy, Manny says one afternoon while standing on a ladder to pull insulation from the ceiling and handing it to Nolan, who stuffs the lengths into heavy-gauge trash sacks. This guy is no más.

  —No más, no más? Nolan asks.

  —Sí, Manny says, dragging his thumb across his throat. Drogas.

  —Oh.

  —You know drogas?

  —I do.

  —You like?

  —Not really.

  —You know cartel?

  —Just from the newspapers.

  —Is crazy in Mexico.

  —I read that.

  —This one time, I see a man stop his car and put a man from his trunk, you know? Manny says, miming dragging a corpse from the trunk of a vehicle. This man is muerto.

  —A dead man.

  —You know this? Muerto?

  —Sí. Muerto.

  —Then this man, he take a gun and he shoot the man.

  —The hombre muerto?

  —Sí.

  —¿Por qué?

  —Porque hay mucha people in the street. He want the people to see him.

  —Wow.

  —Is crazy.

  Most days, though, after listening to the Spanish-language station for an hour or less, Joe starts wailing from some far reach of the house and doesn’t stop until he’s made his way to the radio and changed the channel.

  —No más, he screams. No más tubas.

  Sometimes, he’ll walk into the room where Nolan and Manny are working and cover his ears and yell over the music:

  —No más tubas, Manny. Mañana, OK? I can’t take it. I need my rock ’n’ roll clásico. Mañana tubas. I promise.

  —You promise? Manny says seriously.

  —Sí, I promise.

  —OK, mañana.

  When Manny turns away, Joes says to Nolan:

  —How can you stand that shit? It all sounds the same.

  —He probably says the same thing about your music.

  —My music? You mean our music?

  —I mean classic rock.

  —Did he say that?

  —Say what?

  —That it all sounds the same?

  —Not that I know.

  —I thought he might’ve said it to you in Spanish.

  —My Spanish isn’t that strong.

  —You let me know if he does, though, all right?

  —I’m not going to get mixed up in those games.

  —Oh, it’s too late for that, bro. You’re committed to this site.

  He is a house away from Cosmo’s after a long day of work salvaging and cleaning hardware when, coasting the bicycle, he passes the teenage girl sitting in the green grass of her front yard between two teenage boys. All three have cigarettes in their hands and they sit in the shade of a crepe myrtle, just above where someone, using bleach, has written CONSERVE WATER in two-foot-tall letters across the width of the lawn.

  The night before, Nolan was in the kitchen making white rice and a veggie stir-fry when Cosmo burst in smelling of beer and began complaining about how the teenager’s lawn sprinklers were over-spraying the lawn and that water was puddling on the sidewalk. And this a week after Cosmo had published a story in the Observer describing voluntary water-reduction measures suggested by the Burnridge city council.

  —You know what this is? Cosmo said, pacing back and forth in the kitchen, an open beer in his hand.

  —I’m sure you’re going to tell me, Nolan said, tapping a wooden spoon on the edge of the wok he’d scored at the Salvation Army.

  —We live in a disposable culture, Nolan. We drink water from disposable plastic bottles, we throw away our razor blades, we divorce our spouses.

  —Grab a plate.

  —How do they not see they’re watering the sidewalk?

  —I don’t know.

  —I do.

  Extending a plate to Cosmo, Nolan looked deeply into his brother’s eyes, alive with thoughts and thinking, and he didn’t like what he saw there.

  —They don’t care, Cosmo said. Let others conserve while they water liberally.

  As Nolan rides by the girl, she stares at him through a pair of dark sunglasses. Her painted lips a thin line, her jaw set.

  —Bullet-proof vests burn worse than bullet-proof glass, one of the teenage boys says to the other.

  —Like you know.

  —That’s what my cousin says. He says that shit straight-up ignites.

  The young woman follows Nolan with her chin. She sits with her bare legs stretched out in front of her, a cigarette in her hand, and the smoke wafting above the shaded grass.

  —Your cousin doesn’t know shit.

  —He bangs, yo.

  —He ain’t no gangsta.

  —Say that to his face, fool.

  —Fly his pranksta ass up here. I’ll learn him how we roll.

  Nolan looks away from the girl, but, seeing Cosmo’s Valiant parked in the driveway ahead, he steps on the top pedal and pushes the bicycle forward.
r />   He sets out on the bicycle for the hills west of town, for the cool of the windy back roads lined with maple and spice bush, for the rumpled and cracked asphalt roads dappled with sunlight and shadow. With the road to himself, he pedals and drifts, pedals and sways, allowing the momentum and the breeze to loosen thoughts free from his mind.

  West of town, the road steepens severely. The road banks are dense with poison oak and some of the buckeyes are in bloom. Nolan climbs off the ten-speed and pushes the bicycle up the hill. At the top of the incline, he notices a NO TRESPASSING sign. Beneath it, a well-trod footpath.

  Nolan lingers by the edge of the road, checking in both directions and up the trail for game cameras. Then, he strikes out along the path and follows it up to the ridgeline. The dirt of the path is light as talc and he uses exposed roots as step treads. Spider webs gather on the insides of his elbows and he reads this to mean no one has been on the path for some time. He likes that; it satisfies something inside of him, something wordless and meaningful.

  As he crests the ridgeline, a panoramic view of the river valley opens before him. Below, Burnridge lies nestled within a substantial crook in the river. He rests the bicycle against a fallen oak, which is also used as a makeshift bench, the bark on the tree worn smooth by people like him who come to sit and to watch and to listen.

  It’s an established town, Burnridge, a dream town cut off from the rest of the world by low hills studded with oaks. Glints of sunlight and motion lure Nolan’s eye about the townscape, along streets shaded by a diversity of trees. He sits silently, listening carefully to his own breathing and then to the drone of bees in a nearby manzanita. The drone blends into the steady washes of highway traffic that reach him faintly from 101. He watches traffic on the highway bridge cross the river in opposite directions. From the bridge the river straightens and heads south, disappearing into a riparian line that divides the patchwork of green vineyards that extend as far as the eye can see, all that orderly green barely contained, it seems, by hills on both sides of the valley, wild oats gone golden and dry with summer and drought.

  Down in the small town, sparks of light shine now and then, here and there, reflected off moving windshields. From the heritage homes to the postwar bungalows, the 1970s’ farmhouses sided in T-111, and Valley Oaks Estates, in particular, where the trees have yet to mature, the rooflines resemble the tops of the walls of an intricate maze, an idea immured by milled wood, metal and asphalt, stucco, plastic, wire, and glass, a system of intercommunicating paths and passages.

  —Don’t you ever wonder where all the copper comes from? Cosmo asked Nolan the night before while they sat outside on the patio after eating the stir-fry, Cosmo calming some as he smoked his first joint of the night. Don’t you wonder where all the wire that runs the stuff we leave on when no one’s home comes from? We extract raw materials from the earth and convert them like acolytes to do our bidding.

  Nolan scans the town below. He doesn’t see what Cosmo sees, not all of it, and not because it’s not there.

  —Sometimes, Cosmo continued, blowing smoke over the cherry at the end of the joint, I think I can hear the telephone lines humming in the streets with all our mundane love songs and our caffeinated diatribes, our silences pregnant with meaning. I can hear and feel the matrix, held fast with nails and rebar. I’m attuned to the labyrinths of words hurrying us toward our collective ruin.

  At the overlook, Nolan sits forward on the trunk bench and looks up at the sky, blue and cloudless. He closes his eyes. The air is hot and dry and still.

  When he opens his eyes, he sees a head of smoke rising southeast of the plaza, not too far from the river. The smoke is black. A structure fire. And it lifts slowly and silently above the rooftops of the heritage homes and through the leafy canopy there.

  —“To the man holding a hammer,” Cosmo recited, “everything looks like a nail.”

  —That sounds like something someone who never picked up a hammer would say, Nolan responded.

  —Maybe. Maybe not.

  A siren calls from the fire station downtown. Then another siren, but from a different part of town, marked by a different pitch and whine. Both sirens hidden by trees and buildings. As the column of dense black smoke rises higher into the sky, beginning to redden along the ridgeline behind Nolan, the edges of the cloud become more clearly defined by the bluing of the sky to the east.

  He wants to believe Chance didn’t throw bleach on their neighbors’ lawn. He wants to believe Chance would never go so far as to set houses to fire. He wants to believe these things, but the more time he spends with Cosmo, he just doesn’t know.

  When Nolan stands to leave, he notices a handful of unfiltered cigarette butts, crimpled white butts stubbed out in layers of boot prints. He looks away from the butts, grabs the handlebars of the bicycle, and does what he does whenever he’s confronted with something he cannot fix, repair, or rebuild: he moves on.

  Linda picks up on the third ring.

  —Hello.

  —Hey, it’s Nolan.

  Then, to fill the silence deepening at her end of the line, he says:

  —How are you?

  —I’m fine. What’s up?

  —I just wanted to hear your voice.

  —Yeah, well, you should have treated me nicer.

  —Linda.

  —I’m where I need to be in my life, Nolan.

  —Linda, listen.

  —No, you listen. What the fuck is with you?

  —Just hear me out.

  —Really? Like I owe you that? Why is it that all the men I attract lately are, like, stuck in this malaise?

  —Linda—

  —This injured-little-boy malaise. Life is difficult, all right? It’s challenging. Face it like a man.

  Click.

  That night he sits in Cosmo’s backyard, looking up at the stars and steadily working his way through a twelve-pack of beer. Snatches of unintelligible conversation and loud music come from the house down the way. It sounds like the teenage girl has a few friends over and they’re all gathered in her backyard.

  Nolan came home to an empty house, despite Cosmo’s Valiant parked in the driveway. Walking out to the patio, he stubbed his toe on the barbeque. Then, he hit his front tooth on the lip of his beer bottle and spilled most of that sip down the front of his shirt, which was clean. When he sat in one of the patio chairs, he heard the plastic supports crack like they might give.

  —Go on and break, he said. Not like things can get much worse.

  He sits there drinking for ten minutes by himself until a rustling sound stirs in the adjacent neighbor’s yard, the fence dividing the properties shakes, and Cosmo tumbles over the fence and into the garden that Nolan so carefully planted in the raised bed. Cosmo stands, dusts himself off, and steps down onto the concrete patio.

  —I was never here, he says with his index finger pressed to his thumb and three fingers raised to pass over Nolan a mind-erasing wave. You never saw me.

  To which Nolan squints and says:

  —Did you go through the other backyards to get there?

  —Well, yeah, Cosmo says. Only a Jedi would dare to walk down the middle of the street.

  —That wasn’t smart.

  —Actually, it was.

  —If you got caught in one of those backyards—

  —But if I was seen coming at them from the front, it would have ruined the element of surprise.

  Nolan raises his hands and then drops them.

  —I give up.

  —There any more beer? Cosmo asks.

  —Grab me another while you’re at it.

  Cosmo returns with two bottles of cold beer. He pulls the other chair nearer to Nolan and sits in it.

  —There was another fire today, Cosmo says, taking his lighter from his shirt pocket.

  —I saw the smoke.

  —He went for it in broad daylight.

  Cosmo uses his copper Zippo to lever the cap
off one beer, which he hands to Nolan, and then the next, which he drinks from. Then, he settles back in the seat and produces from his coat pocket an empty bottle of organic fancy-grade maple syrup, which he sets on the concrete at the chair’s leg.

  —What’s that all about? Nolan asks.

  —Don’t worry about it.

  —If you did what I think you did—

  —One, you have no idea what I did, and two, this is one of those situations where not knowing could keep you out of prison.

  Nolan suppresses a smile.

  —You ever think about walking down the street, knocking on the door, and talking all this out?

  —Join hands and sing “Kumbaya”?

  —Might work.

  —No, it wouldn’t, because they don’t understand civility. In fact, I’d be willing to wager an everything-pizza dinner they can’t even comprehend the possibility that they might be deserving of retaliation. Their field of comprehension doesn’t reach that far.

  Nolan laughs.

  —What’s so funny?

  Nolan laughs again, but loudly, so Cosmo looks at him and states:

  —You’re drunk.

  —Little bit. Nolan nods. Little bit.

  —Tough day at the office?

  —Just felt like getting drunk.

  —On a school night?

  —I don’t have to be there until seven tomorrow.

  —In that case, you want to smoke some weed?

  —I might take a puff.

  Cosmo produces a skinny joint from his shirt pocket and rolls it expertly between the ends of his fingers to straighten and to loosen it some before lighting the end with his Zippo.

  —Got those things stashed all over your person, don’t you?

  —What was it Dad always said?

  —Save me some ice cream?

  —Prepare for the worst—

  —And hope for the best.

  Cosmo says:

  —They’re going to start filming the movie next week. They sent a copy of the screenplay to the newspaper for me to get the locals to create buzz on social media.

  —And?

  —It’s essentially a car commercial.

  —What’s the story?

  Holding the smoke in his lungs, Cosmo says:

  —You and story.

  Nolan reaches for the joint and Cosmo hands it to him.