Journeyman Read online

  —I figure we should wait a day or so before starting back up, Joe says.

  —Yeah, all right.

  Music, playing outside, thumps faintly over the diesel engine. As Nolan reaches for the door handle, Joe says:

  —I’m sorry I didn’t hear what you said the other day.

  —I should have been more clear in what I was saying.

  —You didn’t know enough to accuse him of it?

  —No.

  —Well, thanks for at least trying.

  —You would have done the same.

  —No, I probably would have accused the little shit without any evidence.

  Nolan opens the truck door and immediately the loud and discordant music sounds from the house down the way. The front door to the house is open and ash somersaults through the porch light and settles over the concrete porch and the lawn.

  —Sounds like a rager, Joe says.

  —Sounds like it, Nolan responds, still looking at the illuminated doorway and knowing somehow that Cosmo is associated with it standing open like that, with the bright light shining within.

  Joe extends his hand.

  —Thanks, Nolan.

  They shake.

  —No worries.

  —No worries? Joe smiles.

  —It’s all good.

  —I’ll see you later.

  —Bye now.

  —Adios.

  After watching Joe’s taillights disappear, Nolan turns to Cosmo’s house, where the Valiant is parked in the driveway at an angle, the tires cranked hard to the side. Ash has lightly filled the track marks, the steps heading into the house, and those coming back out and going down the street toward the open door.

  Nolan walks inside Cosmo’s house and when he opens the door to the garage, he finds the cardboard boxes un-stacked and kitchen utensils, pots and pans, oven mitts, placemats, and chopping blocks strewn about the room. In the middle of all this, Nolan notices the fireproof box is open on the love seat and the .38 and the six cartridges are gone.

  As he sprints down the street, his footsteps land occasionally in ones made earlier by Cosmo, and each footfall stomps ash into air thick with smoke. Nolan slows as he approaches the front porch. Music blasts through the bright doorway. Peering around the door jamb, he sees a middle-aged woman slumped over a dining-room table, her head resting on her arms. She sits beneath a brass chandelier outfitted with light bulbs made to resemble candles. A mess of beer bottles and wine glasses and shot glasses surrounds her. A cookie sheet of seasoned potato strips sits at the center of the table, a smeared dollop of ketchup pushed toward the corner of the sheet. Nolan sees the woman’s shoulders rise and fall with each breath she takes. He crosses the threshold.

  The sound is tremendous about him as he steps from the tiled foyer to the living room. A swath of beige carpet, heavily stained by foot traffic, leads toward a staircase, where a pair of sneakers lie upended at the bottom of the staircase. Clothes are strewn over the floor, over the back of the couch where Cosmo sits, his feet propped on a coffee table littered with alcohol bottles and cigarette butts, pizza crusts and deep-fried jalapeño poppers.

  Cosmo has the gun in one hand and a beer in the other and he is aiming the gun at the sliding glass door across the room and talking to himself. The patio is dark beyond the glass, and the door vividly reflects the room’s interior, with Cosmo at its center. When Cosmo sees Nolan slip into the reflection in the sliding glass door, he smiles and raises the beer bottle and yells:

  —If you can’t beat them, join them.

  Nolan steps over to the jumbo entertainment console and turns down the volume on the receiver until the house is completely quiet.

  —You missed a good one, Cosmo says loudly, his hearing having not adjusted yet to the quiet. Kids these days, he says, they do it right. They go for broke.

  Nolan steps forward and extends his hand to his brother.

  —Give me back my gun, Cosmo.

  —No, I’m good. I don’t want to leave yet.

  Nolan stands before his brother, his hand extended and open.

  —Anyone see you with that?

  —No, I took it out after they left for more tequila.

  —You need to meet me halfway on this one, Cosmo.

  —I’m fine, dude. Grab a beer from the fridge. Everyone’s coming back. I’ll put it away before they get here.

  Nolan looks Cosmo in the eye until Cosmo looks down and away.

  —That doesn’t belong to you, Cosmo.

  —I was looking for a spatula. I was going to throw pancakes over the fence at them, like discs.

  —What did you plan on doing with it?

  Cosmo rolls the .38 from side to side using his wrist, his hand beneath and then on top of it. With his eyes on the handgun, he says, meekly:

  —I don’t know.

  —Give it back, Cosmo. Dad gave me that.

  —You ever wonder why he gave you a gun and me a lighter?

  —I don’t know why.

  Cosmo lifts his eyes to Nolan’s.

  —He told me once the lighter saved his life. Did you know that?

  —No.

  —Of course.

  Nolan watches his brother’s brow unfurrow as his tired, sad eyes return to the gun.

  —You weren’t there when he got talkative at the end.

  Nolan curls and uncurls his fingers.

  —Give it here, Cos.

  —He was in a foxhole. At night. He said he and the guy he was with hadn’t been “in country” for more than a week. Apparently, he lit a cigarette with this very lighter, and then passed it over to the guy, still lit, and a sniper blew the guy’s brains out. Dad said he spent the entire night in the foxhole with some dead guy’s brains all over the place.

  —I didn’t know that.

  —He said he never told anyone what happened, he was so ashamed.

  Nolan slides his teeth over each other, back and forth, lightly, his hand still extended, but lowered some.

  —I remember, Cosmo says, when I was a kid, how the two of you would stay up late watching westerns. I could hear the gunshots from down the hall and I would get so mad because I couldn’t concentrate on my reading.

  —You could’ve watched with us.

  —Really? Could I? Thanks.

  Cosmo closes his eyes and shakes his head.

  —What if I didn’t want to? What if I wanted to read in peace and quiet? What if I wanted all of us to sit around and read?

  —You were always different than the rest of us. Better, even.

  —Boy genius, Cosmo scoffs. I think he thought I was gay.

  —What?

  —Because I would rather read than watch westerns with you guys.

  —That’s all in your head, Cosmo.

  Cosmo looks down at the gun.

  —They traveled all that way just to die.

  —Who did?

  —The Russians.

  Quietly, Cosmo adds:

  —At the end, I thought he might get better.

  —I’m sorry I wasn’t there.

  —You should have been. Cosmo nods, more with his shoulders than his chin.

  —I know. I was wrong not to.

  Cosmo rubs the handle of the .38 with his thumb and the snub-nosed barrel droops toward the carpet.

  —When I got home tonight, I thought you’d left. I thought you’d left, too.

  —I’m not going anywhere.

  —She said I’m obsessed.

  —Who did?

  —Dawn. She said I was obsessed with everything but her. That’s why she left me.

  Cosmo looks up at Nolan and his eyes are red-rimmed and puffy. Scared.

  —I think I’m going crazy, Nolan.

  —You’re not crazy. You’re a mess, but you’re not crazy.

  —You think? He smiles.

  —I know.

  —I’m sorry that guy hit you, Cosmo says.

&n
bsp; —I know you are.

  —I mean, I’m not sorry I didn’t get punched, but I’m sorry you did.

  Nolan smiles a crooked smile and shakes his head.

  —Give me my gun back, smartass.

  Cosmo looks Nolan in the eye and he hands him the gun. Nolan tucks the snub-nosed revolver in the waistband of his blue jeans at the small of his back and then he extends his hand once again.

  —All right, Cosmo says, taking his brother’s hand. But not too fast, or I’ll be sick.

  Nolan helps Cosmo from the couch, helps steady his brother where he stands.

  —I did shots with the mom, Cosmo says as they cross the foyer. Apparently, she parties with the kids to keep an eye on them.

  Nolan closes the front door behind them, and Valley Oaks is as quiet as he has ever heard it. They walk side by side up the middle of the street. Nolan has his hands in his pockets and Cosmo scratches at his head. Nolan can see his footprints in the ash from when Joe dropped him off. He can see his footprints from when he ran down the street. He can see the parallels of Joe’s tires running down the street, in and out of the street lamps, in and out of pools of light filled with swirling flakes, in and out of lines and decisions and actions and indecisions and memories and remnants of memories yet.

  On the walkway leading to Cosmo’s front porch, Cosmo says:

  —It’s time to burn this place to the ground. Collect the insurance money before the bank forecloses on us.

  —How much do you need?

  —More than I have.

  —Yeah, well, I might be able to help out with that some.

  —Your insurance check came through.

  —Yes, it did.

  —I know. I saw the envelope in the mail.

  —Then why ask?

  —I wasn’t asking. It was a simple declarative sentence.

  Two weeks later, alone on the job site, Nolan crawls beneath the farmhouse, holding the droplight out before him. Several days earlier Joe noticed a creak in the kitchen subfloor, and so now Nolan is carrying the worm-drive saw, his tape, square, hammer, and a handful of nails out to reinforce the subfloor with blocking.

  The light and the tools make the crawling difficult. Nolan has to keep below the new plumbing and electrical work while navigating his way around a recently installed network of insulated heating and cooling ducts. Every now and then he has to stop to gently yank the droplight’s cord free of brittle snags in the concrete footings, and the action sends odd and jarring shadows through the stubborn dark.

  When he gets to the area beneath the kitchen, he rolls over on his back and sinks a sixteen in a joist two bays over from where he needs to install the blocks. He hangs the light from the nail and by it he takes his measurements. He measures twice and he cuts once. Then, he wedges the cut blocks in by hand and taps them in place with his hammer and nails them fast. He reaches up and tests them by hand. Solid pieces of clear fir held tight up against the plywood subfloor between beautiful, old, true-dimension redwood joists.

  Finished with the task, Nolan rests for a moment, letting his eyes wander over everything they did that summer: the new green board posts, the stem wall, the seismic sheer paneling, the galvanized brackets bolted down tight. Much of it his and Manny’s work. The low men.

  The wildfire burned for five days straight, the wind blowing ash and smoke over the town on some days, and from it on others. On one of those days, a house fire started downtown. The arsonist’s remains were found inside, lying on the floor on the way toward a bicycle, outfitted with panniers, that was parked on the back porch. In the panniers, glass jars of gasoline. The remains were never identified. A nameless man consumed by his methods, his reasons never to be known.

  Reaching for the droplight, Nolan notices a signature, written in pencil, on the flat side of a new fir joist:

  Guillermo Del Caminoreal

  The quiet carpenter who signs his work where few, if anyone, will notice.

  When he meets Linda at the Sonoma County Airport, the last traces of his black eye are faint, but still there, waiting for her approval.

  —Nice, she says, reaching up to touch it, but stopping short. You want to tell me about it now or keep it in your arsenal until I’m furious with you and ready to leave?

  —What makes you so sure I’m going to make you furious?

  —You’re right. I won’t let that happen again.

  Nolan looks down and away from her eyes but he takes her hands in his own.

  —I’m sorry, Linda. I’m glad you’re here and I’m sorry.

  —You’re lucky I’m here. You know that, right?

  He looks back into her eyes.

  —I do.

  —Don’t fuck it up.

  He pulls her close and they hug and he holds her for some time, smelling her and remembering how she feels in his arms. When they separate, Nolan grabs the handle to her suitcase and they walk across the nearly empty parking lot toward Cosmo’s Valiant.

  —Where’s your truck? she asks.

  —Part of the same story.

  On the way to the ocean, they drive the Valiant through canted bars of hazy light that penetrate the cool dark of a densely wooded stretch of back road. Linda sits with her hand resting between them on the bench seat, a hand he wants to hold but he’s nervous in a way he hasn’t been since he was a teenager, so he doesn’t.

  When they near the ocean, she rolls down the window all the way and leans her head out into the rushing wind and turns her face up at the sky.

  Don’t fuck it up. He smiles to himself.

  They emerge from the redwood forest into old cattle land, a jumble of old sea floor uplifted by subduction and terraced by hooves. Dotted with serpentine outcrops. Flaxen-colored hillsides folding over one another on their way down to the blue of the Pacific Ocean. Nolan turns on to the coastal highway, and drives south along the edge of the continent. Before long he pulls the Valiant into an asphalt turnout overlooking the ocean and parks at the head of a footpath that leads down to a sandy beach. A flock of seagulls weaves tight weaves overhead in one giant, revolving mass.

  —Maybe we should sit here a minute. Linda smiles.

  —I hear you.

  The vast expanse of the Pacific lies before them, and rack upon rack of cresting waves crash on the sandy beach and spread out over the wet sand. Linda leans forward and looks across Nolan.

  —What are you looking at? he asks.

  —How far is the Golden Gate from here?

  —I don’t know, about an hour or so. Why, you want to go?

  —Not yet. I was just thinking about those urns.

  She sits back and looks west.

  —It was a good idea to come out here, she says.

  —Yeah.

  —“Yeah.” She shakes her head, smiling.

  A string of automobile traffic passes the turnout. Nolan and Linda sit comfortably with the wind rushing around the Valiant while gull shadows cross dark troughs of the waves, cross the coruscating spindrift. Linda scoots across the bench seat and Nolan raises his arm and settles it around her shoulder as she rests against him, placing her hand on his thigh. After a moment, she looks at him and smiles, and then she looks out over the ocean through the Valiant’s dusty windshield.

  —I can’t wait to kiss you again, he says.

  Without looking toward him, she says:

  —So don’t.