Journeyman Page 5

  —Bunch of soldiers were there, waiting on a funeral.

  —A boy died in Iraq. It’s been in the papers.

  Nolan stretches his legs out comfortably before him, the toes of his clean white socks threaded with gold.

  —I worked alongside this one guy, on a framing crew out in Idaho, he joined up after 9/11. I often wonder what happened to him.

  —I thank God every night for the Marines not taking Chance. I know it hurt his pride, but I’m grateful for it.

  Nolan scratches at the stubble on his jaw. He covers his mouth with his hand.

  —What’s on your mind? his mother asks.

  —I regret, sometimes, not going.

  —Don’t talk nonsense.

  —I mean it. I feel like sometimes the one thing I could have done in my life to make a difference came and went.

  —Even with everything we know now?

  —I mean Afghanistan.

  —The Good War.

  —You can’t understand.

  —Excuse me?

  —I don’t mean that to be harsh, Mom, but it’s a fact.

  —The need to experience war?

  —To fight for something like that, yeah. Some men feel that.

  —And you don’t think women do?

  —I think it’s different.

  —Which doesn’t mean I can’t understand it.

  Slender flames sway and strike at oak rounds in the fireplace. With the damp bottom of the beer bottle, Nolan makes slow, wide circles around his kneecap, the movement leaving a wet mark in the blue of his jeans.

  —Even with everything your father went through, you still feel that need?

  —Those experiences made him who he was.

  —A broken man.

  —He wasn’t broken.

  —Maybe not for his sons he wasn’t.

  She looks down into the mouth of the bottle in her lap.

  —Let me ask you something, she says. How long are you going to keep doing this?

  —Thinking about the war?

  —That will never go away. I’m talking about the roaming.

  Nolan can feel the warmth of the fire against the back of his hand. The comfort and luxury of the moment, of a safe home. He watches the mark on his jeans dry and fade.

  —I don’t know.

  —Don’t you want a family?

  —Sometimes I think about that, sure.

  Raising her hand, palm up, ushering him gently:

  —And what do you think?

  —I don’t know if I could bring someone into all of this.

  —Bringing them in is the fun part.

  Nolan smiles.

  —I walked into that one.

  Outside, the wind gains some, and moments later the flames of the fire, as if charmed, move with it. His mother sighs:

  —No, she says, it’s bringing them through that’s the hard part.

  —I don’t know that I’d be any good at it.

  —No one does. But it doesn’t stop us.

  —No.

  —Biological imperative.

  —You sound like Chance.

  —He sounds like me.

  —No, he sounds like Chance.

  —Yes, he does.

  Nolan tilts his bottle to measure its contents.

  —Your father wouldn’t have wanted you to join. He would’ve been furious to know that Chance got as far as taking the physical.

  —He wanted to keep those experiences for himself.

  —That’s not it.

  —He could be a selfish man.

  —Says the son who hasn’t seen his mother in almost a year.

  —You know I can’t live here.

  —No, I don’t. You’ve never explained this wanderlust of yours.

  —There’s too much of him here. Too much of me not being here when he was sick.

  —There wasn’t anything you could have done for him.

  —I could have been here more.

  —He liked that you were out there, exploring. My god, he loved your postcards. He would just lie in bed and look at them at night.

  Nolan looks down at his hands.

  —The place he made for me isn’t the place I want.

  —What does that mean?

  —I feel trapped by all this.

  —All what?

  —The world.

  —Now, you sound like Chance.

  —It’s like he set up this idea, when we were kids, that the world was a certain way, and I saw it that way—

  —Because that’s how he described it to you—

  —And that’s the problem. That’s the way he described it, but that’s not how I found it to be.

  —You act like he was alone in it.

  —I didn’t really ever know Grandpa.

  —I mean me. Your mother.

  —You were always more realistic.

  —Less broken.

  Nolan stares into the fire.

  —Yeah, he says, I guess so.

  —When was the last time you spoke with your brother? his mother asks.

  —It’s been a while.

  —Did you know that Dawn left him?

  —No, I didn’t.

  —Seven months ago. He’s boxed most everything up and moved all their furniture into the garage. When I was last out there, he spent all night playing video games or in his room writing. I got the feeling he’s barely keeping his job at the newspaper, and I don’t know this for certain, but I think it’s only a matter of time before he loses the house.

  She raises the bottle, but before sipping from it, she says:

  —Ridiculous investment.

  —What’d they pay?

  —Six-fifty.

  —That house isn’t worth half that.

  —California, his mother states.

  —Not just California.

  Nolan looks up at the photographs of his family arranged on the mantle. Photographs and his father’s medals, the only obvious evidence in the room of his war. Evidence of his father’s war, evidence of his grandfather’s war in the room around him. Firelight dances across the photos, turning the shadows glossy. Nolan wonders what objects will become the antiques of his and Chance’s war.

  —Promise me something, he says then.

  —What’s that?

  —No matter what happens between you and Frank—

  —Nolan—

  —Hear me out.

  —We’ve been on a couple dates.

  —And I’m glad for that.

  —I think—

  —Please. Hear me out.

  —OK.

  —Don’t take down the photos of him. The medals.

  —I wouldn’t.

  —I could see how another man might not like having to be around that—

  —Frank’s not that way—

  —But if he turns out to be—

  —Then, I’d never let it get that far.

  She pats him on the knee.

  —You remember the last time you were here with Chance?

  —Right after Dad passed.

  —You remember what he said about them? Our pictures?

  —No.

  —He stood right there and he said, “Someday, these will mean nothing to anyone.”

  —Always did have a way with words.

  His mother smiles.

  —Be nice.

  —Not the nicest thing to say.

  —No, but he’s wrong. Look around you. All this stuff, my hobby, this stuff means something to me. It hasn’t always been mine, and it won’t be, but for the time that it is, I appreciate it.

  —I’m not sure I see what that has to do with our pictures.

  —What I’m trying to say is that you’re a carpenter, Nolan, not a soldier. You’re a builder, not a destroyer.

  —Dad wasn’t a destroyer.

  —Yes, he was. In his own way, he was.

&nbs
p; —What you’re saying is, find a place and settle down.

  —I’m saying give it a chance.

  Wind swirls against the house and down the flue, fluttering the fire.

  —What’s Chance writing? Nolan asks after a moment passes.

  —Something about Russian sailors.

  —What the hell does he know about Russian sailors?

  —He smokes a lot of marijuana these days. For his migraines.

  Nolan shakes his head. Outside, the cat meows beneath the front door.

  —I’m happy that you’ve gone and seen and done like you have, Nolan, I really am, even though I worry about you not settling down.

  She hesitates.

  —I don’t think I’ve asked you for much since he passed, but I’d appreciate it if you’d check on Chance for me. Spend a night or two with him. Just check in on your way to the ocean.

  —People’s hearts get broken, Mom. Doesn’t mean you get a free pass to be a stoner.

  —There’s something else at work, Nolan. Something’s upsetting him. He writes me these rambling letters about the President this and Western civilization that. In the last one all he could talk about was “irrational exuberance.” I sometimes daydream that a bunch of television people are camped in the front yard because Chance’s been making bombs in his garage or gone into a post office with a loaded gun or something, and I don’t know what to say to them. I don’t know how to explain what I did wrong because I don’t know. I can’t figure it out.

  —He’s not like that, Mom.

  She looks away from him, takes her scared eyes to the fire, to the shadows and light playing there.

  —How would you know? she says. You didn’t even know his wife had left him.

  Nolan leaves the next morning while his mother waves goodbye from the front porch of the family home. Rounding the bend, he looks in the truck’s side mirror and he sees she’s still standing there, so he taps the horn twice and she raises her hand to him. Itinerant son, wayward again. A worried look about her mouth. Creases at the eyes. Finding a place for her hands. He’s seen that look before and it’s not stopped him.

  Forty minutes later he’s caught in traffic on the elevated interstate cutting through Sacramento. The day is already warm. He told his mother he would visit Chance, four hours east in Sonoma County, but he’ll take his time getting there and he won’t stay long. At some point in their youth, after the fire, before their father’s passing, the brothers grew apart. Chance became an articulate and social individual, confident in asserting his opinion regardless of whether he was wrong or right; he was just desperate to be heard. There was something he got from being heard. Nolan, though, Nolan turned inward. As distrustful of words as he was uncomfortable using them, he honed his skills of observation. At the family dinner table he sat quietly and listened to the debates Chance stirred with his parents. He took in their ideas and listened carefully to them, and then he watched his family away from the table to see what led to those ideas. His mother at the school library, reading at lunch when he’d swing in to visit, or working in her garden. Chance on the family phone, talking with friends late at night in his room, or sneaking out to smoke and to drink at Placerville Union, unaware that their father would be buried there in a decade’s time. And, their father, corporate park custodian, sitting on the couch at night mock-yelling at the nightly news, working alongside their mother in the kitchen preparing dinner while the boys did homework at the kitchen table. As proud as their mother was of Chance following in her footsteps to Cal, so their father was of Nolan’s wandering.

  But would he still be proud? Even he settled down and married and started a family.

  Crossing the Sacramento River in traffic, Nolan eavesdrops on the middle-aged man in the pickup next to him. The man also drives with his window down and his forearm resting on the door. He talks on his cell phone all the while.

  —No, the man states. Absolutely not. Our response must continue to be, no.

  In the next lane over, a tractor trailer bears an advertisement identical to that of a billboard looming above the overpass exchange ahead.

  —I don’t care about the collateral damage, the man says. OK? Over my dead body. That means never.

  It’s afternoon when Nolan enters the Coastal Range of northern California by way of an oak-lined back road. Black power lines weave through an irregular latticework of gnarled limbs while vineyards, rows recently mowed, line either side of the road. The squat brown vines glow at their spurs with the green hue of leafy shoots.

  The last time he drove this road he’d come to the small town of Burnridge for his brother’s wedding. Chance was working as a reporter at the local weekly newspaper and his fiancée had a small yoga studio across from the post office. They’d just bought, with his mother’s assistance, an overpriced tract home. Nolan arrived in Burnridge just before the ceremony, and he left not long after the reception ended. Several months later he received a card at his PO box in Eureka that read:

  Thanks for the toaster.

  Despite his having gifted them a spiked carving platter he’d made from handsome slats of maple, walnut, and teak, and into which he’d burned their initials.

  Just because you put effort into something, don’t expect others to appreciate it, his mother said to him when he mentioned the card in one of their conversations. It might not be their thing.

  Crossing the Sotoyome Valley floor the road straightens some and the cleft dome of Fumarole Peak, towering in the distance beneath a vague layer of cloud and haze, comes into full view. Nolan crosses a river bridge, and at the far end of the bridge a hand-painted sign reads:

  BURNRIDGE CAMPGROUND—TRAILERS WELCOME

  He finds the manager rolling sealant over one of two dozen or so picnic tables pushed together in a large clearing.

  —We’re closed until the First of May, the manager says without looking up from his work.

  —I was wondering if maybe just for the night.

  —That’ll be fine in a week.

  —I can pay cash.

  —Like I said.

  Nolan looks over the picnic tables.

  —I tell you what, he says.

  He finishes sealing the remaining tables by sunset. From inside the manager’s double-wide comes the television broadcast of a baseball game underway in Los Angeles. An aluminum phone booth stands at the far end of the front porch, its fluorescent light flickering in the chrome-plated change box. Nolan stands looking at the phone booth. He knows Linda’s probably getting ready for her shift. She’s probably standing in front of the bathroom mirror wiping away steam, her hair up in a towel, the tightly coiled cord of her hair dryer hanging down, almost reaching the beige bathmat. On the counter, the small transistor radio tuned to public radio.

  They never gave a name to what they shared, but, looking at the phone, he wants to believe she will know it was as significant for him as he believes it was for her. He also knows wanting something to be some way doesn’t make it so.

  Nolan raps on the four-by porch post at the entrance to the manager’s double-wide. A yellow ribbon decal is peeling from the corner of a curtained window. A security camera, tucked in a corner of the porch awning, aimed at the door.

  —Hold on a sec, the manager says from inside.

  A moment later, he opens the screened door with a can of beer in each hand.

  —Take a seat, he says, handing Nolan one of the cans before settling into a weathered armchair.

  —Much obliged.

  Nolan sits on the top step of the front porch, leans back against the railing, opens the beer, and takes a long slug. He finishes nearly half of it in one drink. He takes a second drink and then wipes his mouth on the back of his hand. It’s quiet at the empty campground, verdant and clean, and the cool smells of dusk, so near to the river, are tinged by sealant.

  —Tables look good, the manager says, stretching out a leg and massaging his knee.

  —I us
ed the last of your thinner cleaning up.

  —They’ll make more.

  Down at the river, swallows weave through the bridge’s rusty truss work.

  —Nice and green out here, Nolan says after taking a sip of his beer.

  —You’d never know we were in a drought.

  The manager takes a sip of his beer and then rests the cold can on his knee.

  —That rig of yours looks like it’s covered some ground.

  —Yes, sir.

  —How long you had it?

  —I’ve only had the Ranger a few years now, but I’ve had the trailer since I was nineteen.

  —Ranger before they became minis.

  —Yes, sir.

  —Looks like you’ve done some work on the trailer.

  —I have.

  —I always like to see people take care of the old things. The things built right.

  A quiet moment passes between the two men as an approaching vehicle’s headlights throw truss shadows over the backs of Nolan’s truck and trailer, parked below the sharp bend in the road at the entrance to the bridge. Shadows and light lean away from their origins and then back again as the car passes the entrance.

  —How far is the ocean from here? Nolan asks.

  —About an hour or so. That where you’re headed?

  —Eventually.

  —Nice out there.

  —That’s how I remember it.

  The manager looks into the mouth of his beer can.

  —I usually have the gate open at dawn.

  —Yes, sir.

  —You know, if you’re looking, there’s plenty more work around here.

  —I’m afraid I’m just passing through.

  —Figured I’d offer.

  —I appreciate it.

  When Nolan finishes his beer, he stands and squashes the aluminum can beneath his boot.

  —Leave it there, the manager says. I’ll take care of it.

  Nolan sets the squashed can on the porch railing, and the remaining beer trickles from a pinch in the can, out along the railing before soaking into the aged redwood.

  —Thanks again for the hospitality.

  —My pleasure. Enjoy the ocean.

  —Thank you.

  As Nolan is walking downhill, he hears the car approaching before he sees it. He’s thinking about how if he were in any other town he’d stay and help the man. Swim in the river each morning and walk the surrounding vineyards each evening searching for arrowheads and coins. Maybe even settle in for the rest of the summer and watch the leaves change during the fall. But not here. Not mere miles from his brother.