Journeyman Read online

  —Old butthead’s wife said she enjoyed your visit at the hospital the other day. Said you had nothing but nice things to say about him.

  Nolan looks down at the door knob. Brushed stainless. Same as Linda’s sink.

  —Didn’t think I’d mention it?

  Nolan turns to face the foreman.

  —I thought you might.

  —You’re not thinking it’s your fault or some stupid nonsense like that, are you?

  —No, sir, that ain’t it.

  —Good. My wife pulls that crap. Drives me nuts.

  —I just didn’t know what to say.

  —There wasn’t nothing to say. I mean, look, I don’t mean to lecture you, but something like this, you were there, you witnessed it, and that means you show up, look his wife in the eye, and mumble something about how sorry you are that she married a stupid, clumsy man, and you hope they never breed if he can ever get it up again long enough to try.

  —Yes, sir.

  —After that, you just stand around for at least fifteen minutes making small talk, sipping burnt, rotgut coffee, and praying to God that some well-endowed nurse comes in demanding to take your temperature.

  Nolan looks down at his hands.

  —Yes, sir.

  —Most times, the foreman says, it ain’t knowing what to say as much as it is just being there not knowing how to say it.

  —I know.

  —I hope so, Jackson. I really do.

  2

  He descends into Death Valley at dawn by way of Daylight Pass, the shadows of his truck and Airstream trailer passing systematically over the desert landscape. His profile, distinct and familiar, glides over a blur of wildflower, rock, and sand. Beyond the dusty windshield, thirteen westbound contrails converge above the Panamint Range, the uppermost peaks of which still bear a light dusting of snow.

  The morning is bright and cold and the landscape vast and desolate until the headlights of an oncoming vehicle catch Nolan’s attention. Using the ends of his fingers, he steers the Ranger and trailer back into his own lane. He steadies his hands on the wheel, gauges his parameters, and the vehicles pass without incident.

  He glances over at his profile, rushing across the earth. Bright sunlight surrounding the shadow-shape of his features and his Western hat, his arms up and his hands on the wheel. He likes how he appears, all velocity and direction. He starts to reach up to touch the brim of his hat in a lighthearted salute, but thought of Linda and the painter’s wife and people like them stops him. He turns from his profile, and his shadow follows suit, as if it had any choice in matter.

  At Zabriskie Point Nolan quits the road to stretch his legs and to admire the hoodoo badlands. Shadows drape the jagged spines of the erosions and cling to the steep sides of the narrow canyons. He walks the asphalt path to the elevated panorama. He studies three metal placards stationed before the vista to explain the geology and the history of the place. Then he sits on the low rock wall bordering the overlook and vista. He runs his hands over the sun-warmed rocks while admiring the construction of the wall. He considers the hands that placed each rock.

  Before him, horizontal bands of tawny and red run almost perpendicular to slender upthrusts of brown and black. Nolan traces rills and gullies with his eyes, follows the flow down deep gulches and along distant waterlines of an ancient lake. To the north, Manly Beacon, shaped by desert downpours. A range of consistencies set before him, stages and methods of erosion. Someplace in the gradual upheaval and sink, fossilized animal tracks and grasses and reeds that once swayed beneath the same sun. Other than the grainy stirrings of a low wind, the quiet of the badlands is immense, the sunlight blinding.

  He’s not there for more than ten minutes when a tri-axle tour bus lumbers around a bend in the highway and parks in the turnout beside his truck and Airstream. Side mirrors extend from either side of the bulging windshield like insect antennae. The waxed exterior of the coach gleams in the sunlight. After the engine settles to idle, the door to the bus opens with a hydraulic wheeze and a spit of dust. Two dozen retirees disembark, chattering like grackle. The men wear short-sleeve, button-up shirts tucked into khakis and the women wear sunhats. They all wear sunglasses and most of them carry disposable plastic bottles of water. They walk slowly up the pathway to the promontory, the line stretching and thinning, a pilgrims’ procession.

  As the tourists spread out along the wall or gather around the placards, one woman breaks off from the group and walks directly over to where Nolan sits alone on the rock wall. She takes a seat less than an arm’s length away from him, and says:

  —Phew.

  —You made it.

  —Plenty more where that came from, sonny.

  —No doubt, ma’am. No doubt.

  From her purse, the woman produces a soft pack of 100s and peels back the foil. She gives the pack a seasoned shake and offers one of the protruding cigarettes to Nolan.

  —Coffin nail?

  —I’m all right, thanks.

  —Suit yourself.

  The woman lights a cigarette and exhales. Then, she passes the slender wand over the view before them.

  —Spectacular vista, she says as blue tendrils of smoke dissipate in the wake of her slow-moving hand.

  —Yes, ma’am.

  —Where I’m from, Orlando, it’s all flat. Only way to get above sea level is to drive an overpass.

  —Sounds pretty flat.

  —Very flat. Nothing pretty about it.

  The woman makes a fist with her cigarette hand and jerks her thumb over her shoulder in the direction of Nolan’s Airstream, glaring in the morning sunlight.

  —My third husband had one of those. Begged me on his deathbed to bury him in it. You know what a hole like that would cost to dig?

  —It’d have to be some hole.

  —Decided to take myself on vacation instead.

  The woman brings the cigarette to her mouth to conceal her smile and smoke collects beneath the brim of her sunhat. A second or two later, she says:

  —That was a joke.

  —Yes, ma’am.

  They sit quietly. The day is already warm and the woman smells pleasantly of sunblock and tobacco smoke. Nolan watches a group of men, standing at the placards, point to the illustrations and then up to the mountains in the distance, immediate and far.

  —Are you going to tell me where you’re from, cowboy, or are you going to make an old lady ask?

  —No, ma’am.

  —No, you’re not going to tell me, or, no, you’re not going to make me ask?

  Nolan smiles and shakes his head. The woman also smiles.

  —Truth is, ma’am, it’s been a long time since I’ve been from one place in particular.

  —So you’re a bum.

  —No, ma’am. I ain’t no bum.

  —What, then? A drifter?

  —I’m a journeyman carpenter, ma’am.

  The woman brings the cigarette to her mouth, presses it between the furrows in her lips, and inhales deeply.

  —Are you looking for work out here?

  —This here’s beyond my skill set.

  The woman smiles at this, and her teeth reveal weathered ridges similar to those beyond where they sit, similar save for a difference in scale.

  —So, what then? Sit here and wait until something comes up?

  —No, ma’am, I’m just passing through.

  —Where to?

  Nolan hesitates before answering.

  —It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the ocean.

  —How old are you?

  —Creeping up on thirty-two.

  She shakes her head.

  —Must be nice.

  Then:

  —My grandson’s thirty-two. Flies a drone for the Air Force. His body’s here, but his mind’s over there. How this works, I’m too old to understand.

  Nolan looks down at his hands and nods.

  —At Thanksgiving this y
ear, his wife said he’s the only man who comes home from war smelling of deodorant sweat. Better that than mustard gas, I told her.

  The woman shakes her head. In a tone of conciliation, she says:

  —Before her time.

  She brings the cigarette back to her mouth and for a moment she and Nolan sit without speaking while the other tourists mill about, taking pictures and applying sunblock, or sharing time at the placards. The sounds of laughs and voices and movements echo weakly over the badlands. Finally, the woman says:

  —Have you ever seen satellite photos of Earth at night?

  —You mean from outer space?

  —Yes, outer space. What’re you, suddenly slow?

  —No, ma’am.

  —You sure about that?

  —Hopefully.

  —I don’t understand how this fills you with hope? Do you mean to say, I hope not?

  Nolan looks up from the heel of his boot and directly into the woman’s face for the first time.

  —You don’t let up, do you? He smiles.

  She lowers her sunglasses and stares intently at him through fragile, light green eyes. She points the end of her cigarette at him, three-quarters of an inch of ash waiting to break off between them.

  —The words you speak, she says.

  —And the company you keep, he finishes.

  The woman winks at Nolan and then raises the sunglasses over her eyes and turns to the view. Staring ahead, she says:

  —Two words describe what Earth looks like at night from outer space.

  —All right.

  —Lava flow.

  He boondocks early that evening in a pull-through slot at the North Star Mobile Park just outside Independence, California, on Highway 395. He sits inside his Airstream, at the small Formica table at the front of the trailer, patiently worrying a jumble of eight-penny galvanized nails in the palm of his hand. The door is open to the last of the daylight. Canned laughter from a syndicated sitcom reaches him from the television inside a neighboring double-wide, the wheels removed from its axles and a green plastic apron wrapped around its waist.

  A warm breeze slips through the trailer’s screened door smelling faintly of propane. The breeze lifts the corner of a calendar pinned to a kitchen cabinet Nolan made from redwood lath boards he salvaged from a remodel in Reno, Nevada. One side of the cabinet bears the pencil drawing of a swan he found on the board after yanking free wallpaper and plaster. Beneath the swan is the year 1905. The breeze also lifts the edge of the road atlas spread out on the table before Nolan. It lifts the edge of the two-page letter he’s just written to Linda, a neat version of the rough draft he spent most the day composing in his mind and on a yellow legal pad.

  With the nails cupped in his left hand, Nolan rests the length of his forearm on the table and uses the palm and fingers of his hand to manipulate the jumble so as to free one nail at a time, as if he were preparing to hammer up siding or down subfloor. Staring vacantly at the network of lines on the atlas, Nolan sets a freed nail on the letter and begins unjumbling the next one. It’s a form of meditation, untangling nails, something he gleaned from an old timer he watched practice it at lunch each day on the site where they both labored as rough framers.

  —This is what we used to do before nail guns, the old timer told Nolan when the young journeyman asked him what he was doing. This was before all the pop-pop-pop you young bucks got nowdays.

  The man would sit in the shade and eat his lunch and untangle nails, mindlessly, it seemed, extricating one at a time from the sharp confusion.

  Nolan sets another nail on the handwritten letter. The scent of singed hair lingers at the back of his throat. The colorful nips of wire-stripping clinging to the burns on the painter’s face. The awkward bend of his neck.

  From the television next door sounds the indecipherable speech of actors in a television sitcom.

  When the last of the nails is arranged before him, Nolan stands and walks over to the cabinet and tucks the corner of the calendar behind its tab. Above the grid of days and dates, a glossy photograph of cold ocean waves crashing over wet black rocks. A redwood-lined crag in the distance. The Lost Coast written in tiny letters at the bottom right corner. Nolan leans against the cabinet, feeling the warm breeze on his forearms, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up and in.

  He looks down at the letter, and in the shadows falling across it he remembers light ripples from the community pool playing up the side of Linda’s condominium the first night he knocked on her door. Vacillating shadows and waves of artificial light fluttering up the T-111 siding, over the latex-painted eaves, and into the night, gone.

  At the back of his trailer his work hat and his dress hat lie crown down in the arms of a Western hat hanger. Below this, the oak dresser in which Nolan keeps the few clothes he owns. He traded for the dresser at a flea market in Phoenix, Arizona, refurbished it himself and adorned each drawer with a pair of stamped-brass, winged-hourglass pulls he’d come across in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Mounted above his bed is a long, rectangular bookshelf made of stained barn wood that he salvaged in Ashton, Idaho, and stocked over time with carefully chosen field guides, road atlases of the western United States, and a small collection of used paperbacks, each one read several times through. For his wash space, a lead mirror hangs above a brushed stainless oval sink he bartered for in Eden, Wyoming. The mirror is set in a rectangular frame he crafted from quarter-sawn oak and is held fast by mortise and tenon, the chamfered ends of which stand a little proud. His kitchen sink is cast iron and porcelain. Its bronze faucet found in broad daylight on a sidewalk in Sparks, Nevada. The countertop is soapstone, gifted to him in Eureka, California. Alongside the trailer’s only door, a barometer, thermometer, and compass, and adjacent to these, a walnut curio box displays several handsome arrowheads and old coins, a rusted railroad spike, a long, slender piece of river-smoothed brick, a chunk of asphalt he came across in a forest near no road, and a bird’s nest constructed from lace lichen and wild oat stalks, boar hair and a broken toothpick still wrapped in its cellophane sleeve.

  He was nineteen years old when he bought the trailer. Gutted it that very same day. Thirteen years later and it’s still a work in progress. He looks at the hats, carefully placed to preserve their shape. He knows what the hats signify and he knows how he feels when he’s wearing them, with his eyes shaded and his line of sight obscured from others. He wasn’t raised among men who wear Western hats, but he’s come to feel most at ease around them.

  He sits comfortably surrounded by his possessions. He knows they travel well and can be readily found when needed, for he’s arranged his belongings carefully. For nearly half his life Nolan’s worked to fashion order in the world. He’s cut and joined rock, metal, plastic, wire, and wood, and still mastery eludes him. Still it wills away, and what he works something into, chance and time undo elegantly and infinitely, beyond his ken of patience and perception, everything new commencing toward unravel and decay.

  Outside, the breeze gains some, and the pages of the atlas and the letter struggle against the weight of the electroplated nails, coated in zinc oxide to fortify them against corrosion and rust. Canned laughter sounds from the adjacent double-wide, canned laughter and applause and the jingle that leads the audience to a commercial break.

  3

  Noon the next day Nolan navigates the Kingsbury Grade, switchbacks carved into the eastern face of the Sierra Nevada, a granite tsunami cresting over basin and range. Small mansions dot the lower portion of the escarpment, and the sun shines yellow white in their picture windows. He takes the switchbacks in low gear, up through impressive road cuts and past wind-twisted pine while keeping to paths made by previous travelers and concentrating on the sounds his tires make on the sanded roadway. The shadows of his Ranger and Airstream drift over the last of the snow fields, still glittering beyond the splattered road banks.

  In South Shore, just across the California state line at Lake Tahoe,
Nolan stops at a gas station to shave in the men’s room. Gang graffiti and unaffiliated handstyles adorn the walls and the saccharine stink of urinal cake suffuses the tiny bathroom. Above the bathroom mirror, someone has written on the wall:

  It’s only the world. Let it burn.

  Nolan warms the razor in a steady column of hot water and then draws his face from behind a mask of soap. He taps the razor on the edge of the sink, knocking free clumpy shards of wet hair along the porcelain bowl. With the water steaming the bathroom mirror and his face half-shaved, he lowers the razor and stands there, gathering the words on the wall in the wool of his mind.

  A little over an hour later, he quits Interstate 50 west of Placerville and cuts out for a back road that leads into the foothills of El Dorado County. The lush, green hillsides are easy on his eyes after all his time in the desert. Craggy oaks stand leafless and black against the grasses, and clusters of mistletoe ball in the upper reaches of the bare canopy. The road follows the contours of the rolling landscape, landscape he surveys with the knowledge of someone who once knew it well.

  Before long, he turns right on a gravel road that leads a quarter mile downhill to a ranch house surrounded by tall oaks. He stops the truck before the house, kills the engine, and listens to it tink and cool. Smoke drifts from the chimney, low over the composite roofing, down into the lasts of a well-tended winter garden and among the starts already planted for spring and summer. A cat slinks around a neatly stacked woodpile, meticulously covered with a blue tarp and lashed fast with bungee cords. An older model Accord, kept up, is parked in front of the garage. Nolan pushes back the brim of his hat with his thumb and smells the wood smoke on cold air filling the cab. He is sitting there, looking over the basin of a long, west-facing slope, when the front door opens and his mother steps out drying her hands on a cotton dishtowel. She shakes her head and smiles. Before opening the cab door, he reaches across the bench seat for a bouquet of carnations he bought at the gas station in South Shore.