Journeyman Read online

  —To lighten the ship’s load, Nolan says.

  —Pretty awful, right?

  —That’s what the book’s about?

  —So far.

  A pause, then:

  —Why are you reading that book?

  —Like I said, I saw it at a friend’s, and she said it was good.

  —Maybe it’s because it takes place in San Francisco. You were thinking about me.

  She doesn’t respond, but he can sense that she’s smiling.

  —I can’t remember the last time I heard it rain, she says.

  —Thunder and lightning, too.

  —Hold the phone out so I can hear it.

  —What?

  —Hold the phone out. I want to hear the rain.

  —OK.

  Nolan opens the phone booth’s accordion door and holds the receiver up to the sky and lightning cracks and rain falls down on the cold hard plastic. Rain falls on his sleeve and runs down his forearm.

  —Could you hear it? he asks when he puts the phone back to the side of his head.

  —It’s beautiful.

  —It smells good, too.

  —I bet.

  —You know what pennyroyal is?

  —I do.

  —There’s some in a field near the booth. It smells like that.

  —Nice.

  He holds his free hand outside the booth and drops run cool along his bare arm. He can feel the rain fall on his cheeks.

  —I miss you, Linda, he says.

  —I miss you, too, she says.

  12

  Late morning of the next day Nolan wakes to the sound of an air tanker roaring over the rooftops of Valley Oaks, the plane’s four 1,500-horsepower engines vibrating the glass of water on the garage floor beside his mattress.

  When he steps into the hallway, he finds Cosmo’s bedroom door open. The blinds in the room are drawn shut and the blankets are bundled at the foot of the bed in the same place Nolan saw them before he went to bed after midnight. Cosmo never came home, and the time on the alarm clock on the nightstand flashes, waiting to be reset.

  While crossing the living room, the first thing Nolan notices through the sheer curtains of the picture window is a substantial column of smoke towering in the distance. He opens the front door and steps to the porch in his jeans and his bare feet and immediately he sees a neighbor standing in the street looking north, his hand pressed to his brow to shade his eyes. Nolan walks to the Valiant’s oil spot in the concrete driveway.

  —Wildfire, the man says to Nolan.

  —Where?

  —Fumarole Peak.

  —Must’ve started with all the lightning.

  —That’s what they’re saying on television.

  —How many acres?

  —Thousands so far.

  —And it only started last night?

  —That’s what they’re saying.

  —What about containment?

  —Not yet, the man says. This is going to be a big one.

  Throughout the day, the column broadens and flattens with the shifting winds. It loses its definition as it spreads and shrouds the range of mountains. With time, smoke and ash descend upon Burnridge. The day’s light takes on a sepia tone. Peach and orange hues. Autumn light. Beyond the shading leaves of Valley Oaks, the sun is a pale orb crossing the ash-white sky.

  Nolan stays indoors reading and cleaning and waiting for Cosmo to return, while the acrid smell of wildfire smoke seeps through the spaces around the doors and windows and down the chimney flue. He dampens and rolls bath towels and arranges them along the bottoms of the doors leading outside to hold the world at bay, but the smell of the smoke finds its way into the house. He stands at the sliding glass door, watching flakes of ash fall on his tomato vines. He sees a neighbor on a rooftop wearing a full-face respirator and spraying the composite roofing with a garden hose, rivulets of water coursing through the fine ash toward the aluminum gutters.

  At dusk, Nolan is sitting in the recliner with a handful of jumbled nails, arranging them one by one in his lap, trying to get them around the bandage on his thumb. The house phone rang earlier in the day and he heard their mother’s voice on the answering machine in the kitchen and he listened to her say she’d heard about the fire on the news and that she hoped they were OK and if they needed a place to go to get away from the smoke for a few days that they were welcome to stay with her.

  —I love you, boys, she said, with Nolan standing before the machine.

  —I love you, too, Mom.

  That night, just after dark, with smoke particles ferrying through the span of light cast by the front-porch lamp, a knock sounds at the door.

  —I don’t want to hear “I told you so,” Joe says once Nolan’s opened the door.

  —All right.

  —My wife’s sister called. The cops have Mason on camera setting the bonfires down at Memorial Beach.

  Nolan stiffens the muscles in his jaw and nods. Over Joe’s shoulder, Nolan can see the Ram parked in the driveway. The engine is running, and heat, emanating from the grille, plays the smoke up in gentle gusts before the truck’s headlights. The wipers swipe ash back and forth from the windshield.

  —They don’t know if he set them all, or if he’s just a copycat, but they got him on camera.

  —And no one knows where he’s at now.

  —No, Joe says, his arm free of the dishtowel sling. We’re all out in this looking for him, and I figured you might have some ideas.

  —I’ll grab my boots.

  They drive south along Burnridge Avenue, the town quiet and empty, layered with a fine dusting of ash. Tiny caps have formed on street-lamp globes and little ridges crown mailboxes.

  —Sometimes I stop smelling it, Joe says, but I think that’s just because I stop thinking about it.

  —I know what you mean.

  —My son almost puked; the smell is so strong out at our place.

  —You have any masks?

  —The hardware store was pretty well picked over by the time I got there.

  —Dampen a handkerchief.

  —That’s what Maria did.

  —Did it work?

  —We should have done it earlier.

  —You didn’t know the wind would blow this way.

  —No, but I just stood there, watching it come. I haven’t been able to take my eyes off it.

  —It’s not something you see every day.

  —No, it isn’t.

  —Yeah.

  They pass a man walking hunched over while holding a washcloth to his face. He ventures from the sidewalk into the street, where some kids have heeled their names in the ash. Joe leans forward and looks up through the windshield.

  —It’s strange driving so slow through town, he says. Everything seems so different.

  They come to a stop light at the car dealership. The insides of the cars are hollow with dark, and the decals on the windshields protrude slightly through the ash. On one windshield someone has written WATCH ME with their fingertip.

  Nolan is thinking that the lack of ash in the lines of the letters means the words were written recently, when two shadowy figures, hunched close to the ground, skulk among the cars toward either end of an arch of balloons spanning a dozen automobiles.

  —Nolan, Joe says calmly.

  —I see them.

  —What are they doing?

  —I don’t think they’re trying to steal cars.

  —Me neither.

  The intersection light turns green, but Joe doesn’t drive on until the figures have cut the arch free and the ends rise as the middle dips. The entire strand lifts through the smoke and slips into the gauzy dark like some giant, slow-moving bird.

  —Man, Joe says, leaning over the steering wheel to see it better.

  When Nolan looks back for the figures, they’re gone. The signal light turns yellow, then red. Joe drives on.

  Circling the plaza,
they drive slowly past equipment left from where the bank robbery scene was filmed. Ash has settled in small drifts in front of blinking red signal lights, and lines the thresholds of the darkened plaza storefronts. It lingers on the painted lines of the road and dulls the reflector dots.

  A station wagon, heavily laden with trunks and suitcases, drives toward the Ram with its windshield wipers flinging ash. Inside the car, a man and a woman with two children sitting between them on the bench seat. The children’s eyes are wide open, the parents’ eyes are tired and harried. Joe and Nolan raise their hands and the man and woman raise their hands back to them as the parties pass.

  —You think they’re coming down from it? Joe says.

  —It sure looks that way. Nolan nods, his reflection in the side window lit by the clock on the truck’s dash.

  —I bet there’s a hell of a view of this from the farmhouse, Joe says.

  Nolan looks to Joe.

  —Turn around, he says.

  —Why?

  —Because that’s where he’s at.

  Driving up the gravel road to the farmhouse they can see patches of smoldering hot spots behind the fire line as it wends its way toward the crown of Fumarole Peak, the flames drawn along invisible contours like red and orange cursive on a black page.

  —Wow, Joe says. Look at that.

  Joe parks the truck before the trash heap and turns off the engine. Strips of metal and glass shine in the headlights like the eyes of critters staring back at them. A BMX bicycle leans against the oak where Nolan usually parks Cosmo’s ex-wife’s ten-speed.

  When Joe notices Mason’s bike, he reaches for the door handle and says:

  —Son of a—

  But Nolan places a hand on Joe’s shoulder.

  —Give me a minute first.

  —He’s dead.

  —Just give me a minute with him first.

  —Why? He’s my nephew.

  —Because the last thing he needs right this second is someone yelling at him. He’s got enough of that coming his way.

  —What are you going to say to him?

  —I don’t know yet.

  —Nolan—

  —Joe, please. I called this. Please.

  —All right. Joe nods.

  The air in the house is thick with trapped smoke and ash. Without sheathing on the farmhouse roof, what light there is in the night seeps down the stairwell and makes the living room navigable. The floor was swept at the end of Friday’s workday, and the materials they left behind are neatly arranged. The ladders, coated in a fine gray ash and chained to the exposed studs, lie on their sides next to one another. Cardboard boxes of nails pressed against one another in a corner, out of the way. A bucket of joist brackets. An empty trash can, lined with a fresh bag. The site is a tidy, organized space, fit for careful construction.

  Nolan’s only been to sleeping job sites a handful of times, and the stillness, where there’s usually such commotion, pleases him, it speaks to his sense of order, as if the furnace of progress sometimes rests and cools before gathering its next heave.

  At the top of the stairs, Nolan turns down the hallway toward the north-facing master bedroom. He makes his way carefully down the dark hallway, moving his hands at either side of him, from one stud to the next, all the old nails pulled from their faces, all the old wiring yanked from their sides. His fingertips find coarse holes where the insulated wires once ran, bearing electricity to wall switches that lit how many moments, in how many lives?

  Nolan finds Mace in the master bedroom, sitting on an upturned five-gallon bucket staring at the wildfire, the darkened expanse of the valley floor spread out below. Nolan pauses at the door to gain his bearings, but then he walks forward to stand at the young man’s side, at the side of a young self seriously contemplating its own existence in and absence from this world. A young self angry at the ways the world isn’t because of the ways it never was.

  Written across the face of Fumarole Peak, the lines of the fire mesmerize Nolan. He can see the heat shimmering. He can see the color consuming the black. He watches matter transform.

  After a moment, Mace says:

  —You ever seen anything like this?

  —Once, a few years back, in New Mexico.

  —I’ve never seen anything like it.

  Mace raises a plastic bottle to his lower lip and spits tobacco juice into the mouth of the bottle.

  —In school, I read that the natives used to burn out valleys so they would grow back stronger.

  —I’ve heard that.

  —I bet this knoll was something else then.

  He shakes his head and spits into the bottle and then he just sits there, quietly staring ahead. Nolan leans against the window frame. He and Mason both have yet to take their eyes from the wildfire.

  —What happened to your eye?

  —I got in the middle of something.

  —Looks like you got the worst of it.

  —Tough to tell at this point.

  —Why’s that?

  —Guy who hit me busted his wrist.

  —Yeah, that’s worse.

  —But the guy he was aiming for could’ve used a good punch. A good punch might’ve served him better in the long run than not getting punched at all.

  Mason spits.

  —How’d you know where to find me?

  —You light those fires in town?

  The young man reaches up and scratches his cheek.

  —Lightning did this, he points.

  —I’m not asking you that.

  Mason lowers his eyes to the floor. He nudges a stray nail on the floor with the toe of his boot. Without lifting his eyes, he says:

  —Nobody got hurt.

  —Not yet they didn’t.

  —Are you going to tell Joe?

  —What, that I got suspicions?

  —Yeah.

  —I already did that.

  —What’d he say?

  —He didn’t believe me.

  —So why would he believe you now?

  —He said they got you on camera.

  Beyond the window, the blinking lights of a fire engine race across the valley, the lights skimming over the tops of the vineyard rows.

  —You’re making that up.

  —I strike you as the type who’d make something like that up?

  —To trick me, you might, yeah.

  —I’m not the type to play tricks like that.

  —How do I know that?

  —Because I haven’t shown you otherwise.

  The lights on the engine run out over the vineyards but its siren is silent.

  —There must’ve been more than one, Mason says.

  —I don’t know.

  —I saw the one on the boat shack, but I went for it anyways.

  The kid shakes his head as the truck disappears in the distance. Without lifting his eyes from the nail on the floor, Mason says:

  —Do you think I’ll go to jail?

  —I can’t say.

  —What if I’m crazy?

  —What do you mean?

  —You know, plead insane.

  —You’re not insane.

  Mason looks at Nolan, but Nolan continues to stare ahead.

  —I only set the bonfires down at the river.

  —It’s not me you need to convince of that.

  —They’re not going to believe me, though.

  —Probably not at first, no.

  —You know why I did it?

  —I do, Nolan nods.

  —Why?

  —Because you like how it feels. You like watching it happen. You like to see how others react to what you’ve made.

  —Did you ever do it?

  —No, but I know those feelings well.

  A light, cool wind passes through the picture window. Mason looks up from the floor and out at the wildfire.

  —Do you always wear that hat? he asks Nolan.


  —I generally take it off before bed.

  —No, I mean did you always wear it?

  —No.

  —Why’d you start?

  —It keeps the sun out of my eyes.

  —Lots of different hats to choose from. Why that one?

  —Because I like how it makes me look.

  —But you weren’t always this way, were you?

  —No.

  —You think you always will be?

  —No.

  —I was never with that girl, Mason says then. The one I told you about. I lied about that. I was trying to impress you.

  Nolan sets a hand on the kid’s shoulder.

  —Joe’s waiting on us.

  13

  After leaving the farmhouse, Joe and Nolan drive Mason to the Burnridge police station to meet his mother and the lawyer she called. With word out that the police have a suspect in the arsons, news crews have posted up outside the station. With all the smoke from the fire, they sit in their vehicles wearing masks. Pulling up to the station, Nolan notices the vans. He sees one man in a mask sleeping against the driver’s-side window of the van he’s in.

  —Vultures, Joe says.

  —Drive around back, Nolan says to Joe.

  Nolan gets out and slips past the sleeping news people and into the reception area. A cameraman sleeps in a chair in the waiting area, his camera at his feet, the lens a glossy, charcoal-colored eye, drowsing. Nolan walks quietly up to the bullet-proof partition and the night dispatch gets up from her desk and walks over and presses a button on the microphone on her side and says loudly:

  —Yes?

  Speaking softly so as not to wake the sleeping cameraman, Nolan says:

  —The boy you all are looking for is around back.

  —Who?

  —The boy—

  —Speak up, please.

  The reporter stirs. Nolan looks in the woman’s eyes.

  —Are you all right? she asks him. Is this an emergency?

  Nolan leans forward to speak into the microphone on his side of the partition.

  —I’m trying to do this without creating a scene, he says.

  —Do what?

  —Help.

  With Mason in custody, Joe drives Nolan home. He stops in front of Cosmo’s driveway, behind the Valiant, and puts the Ram in park.