Journeyman Read online

  Opposite the back porch of the farmhouse, strands of lichen sway in the breeze like powder-green scarves of lace. Nolan leans the bicycle against the trunk of one of the oaks, removes his hat, and dabs the sweat from his brow with his handkerchief. PACIFIC WIND CARPENTRY is written on the driver’s-side door of the pickup. As Nolan approaches the house, a figure stirs within. The front door is missing, and from the shadows emerges a deeply suntanned man with shoulder-length, sandy-blond hair and light blue eyes. He wears a serape with a beer logo over his heart and he reeks of marijuana smoke.

  —Morning, Nolan says, touching the brim of his hat. You starting a project here?

  —You with the county? the man asks.

  Nolan looks down the gravel road, then over at the woman’s bicycle resting pink against the tree.

  —Yeah, he says, I’m here to check your permits.

  That night, Nolan sits in the passenger seat of Cosmo’s Valiant as they drive down Burnridge Avenue toward the plaza. In a far corner of the sky, trapped beneath a low-lying, dense layer of fog, the yellow-orange glow of a house fire looms above the black composite rooftops and silhouetted power lines.

  —How many of these has he set?

  —Five, Cosmo says, raising a hand, the other one resting on the steering wheel and holding a long, skinny joint.

  Nolan whistles a short note.

  —But there’s only so many left to burn.

  —How’s that?

  —He’s only burning the old ones, the last of the heritage homes the transplants up from the city buy and remodel as weekend homes or retirement projects.

  —That’s too bad.

  —And that’s debatable.

  —You really think it’s OK to go around burning down history?

  —I think it’s political. An act of defiance. He’d rather see the Victorians and bungalows burn to the ground than the tourists move in, even part time, and take over the town’s history.

  —And you know this how?

  —Because I’ve been paying close attention.

  Cosmo offers the joint to Nolan.

  —I’m all right.

  —Suit yourself.

  Cosmo throws the joint out the window.

  —That easy to come by out here? Nolan asks.

  —Shit grows on trees.

  Nolan looks out the window and up at the sky, socked in by the marine layer that follows the river upstream and comes in from the coast most summer nights. The marine layer glows from all the lights of the town, and the spot above where the fire burns glows even brighter.

  —Fog is something else here, Nolan says, but Cosmo doesn’t respond, he’s so fixated on the spot above the fire.

  Nolan studies his brother’s reflection in the windshield. He can see the corners of Cosmo’s eyes squinting, his look pensive, determined. Finally, Cosmo says:

  —You actually go out on that bicycle today, wearing that hat and all?

  —What’s wrong with my hat?

  —Sun’s done gone down, partner.

  Cosmo smiles, driving with one hand resting on the Valiant’s steering wheel and the other out the window, feeling the air on an upturned palm.

  —You call Mom yet? Cosmo asks.

  —No.

  —You want me to?

  —I figured we’d both call her this weekend.

  —Which implies you’ll still be here by then.

  Nolan looks down at his hands and then ahead through the Valiant’s dirty windshield. Windows, flickering blue from the televisions turned on inside, stand out along the streetscape.

  —I happened on this remodel today, Nolan says. On the way out to the campground. Contractor there agreed to take me on as low man.

  —What’s a low man?

  —Means I do the grunt work.

  —Grunt work, Cosmo says. I like that.

  —Yeah, well, it’s not like I can be all that choosy.

  —Not wasting any time, are you?

  —Never saw much point in it.

  Cosmo stops the Valiant at a four-way stop. The Valiant is the only car at the intersection, the only car on the street that isn’t parked, but Cosmo doesn’t drive forward. A porch light shines on an ornamental plum at the end of its bloom. A mosaic of tiny pink petals fractured by black limbs and purple leaves. Cosmo stares at the tree.

  —Thing is, Nolan says, I was wondering if maybe you’d be willing to put me up for a spell. I’ll pay you some as I get it, keep my space clean, and do chores around the place. Maybe even restore that garden out back. Just until I can get some money saved up to move on.

  Cosmo continues to stare at the plum tree, radiant in the incandescent porch light.

  —The garden was her thing, he says and then drives the Valiant through the intersection.

  Nolan takes off his hat and places it on his knee.

  —Stay as long as you want, Cosmo says, his mood picking up suddenly. Stay until the bank forecloses on us. We’ll go down together, the Brothers Jackson.

  Nolan hears the sound of a distant siren heading in the direction of the fire.

  —You sure? Nolan asks.

  Cosmo leans forward to peer at the fire’s glow through an intricate network of power lines.

  —Mi casa es su casa.

  —Thank you.

  —No problemo. I’d offer to throw out the boxes, but the mediator got me to agree not to for at least the first year of the divorce.

  —Why?

  —In case this isn’t final.

  —You mean like you two might get back together?

  —Yes.

  —You see that happening?

  —No.

  —You want that to happen?

  Cosmo sighs.

  —No. And, I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I talk about it enough in my own head.

  When Cosmo sits back, Nolan says:

  —So what’s this I hear about Russian sailors?

  —Mom told you about that?

  —That, and I heard you hammering away this morning.

  —You really want to know?

  —Only if you want to tell it.

  Cosmo settles into his seat as the street-lamp lights pass over his mostly shadowed face.

  —Well, for about a decade now I’ve been extrapolating the geopolitical ramifications of an obscure naval battle that took place between Russia and Japan in 1905.

  —A decade is a long time.

  —Yeah, well, there’s been a lot of research to do.

  —I don’t know nothing about it.

  —You sure this isn’t boring you?

  —Shit, I can’t recall the last time I was bored.

  —Lucky you.

  —Go on.

  —English-speaking historians refer to it as the Battle of Tsushima. It was the first encounter between armor-clad, steam-driven battleships.

  —So you’re writing a book?

  Cosmo hunches toward the steering wheel again.

  —No, he says, this is more than a book. Books are relics, fetish items, and this is a movie that can’t be made because a screen can never encompass it.

  —So what’s the story?

  —The story’s not important.

  —Since when?

  —This isn’t for everyone, Nolan.

  —Who’s it for, then?

  —It’s not for anyone in particular. It’s just not for everyone.

  With his wrists resting on the steering wheel and his hands out over the dashboard, Cosmo begins to gesture as he speaks:

  —See, by my calculus, the repercussions of Tsushima have factored in events as significant and diverse as Hiroshima and Nagasaki, peak oil, Levittown, and the caves at Tora Bora. But also in the development of things as seemingly insignificant and unrelated as the action figure and Big Data. But even before that, there are all these interconnected stimuli coursing through hyperlinked synapses that strengthen with each fire to construct
this macrocosmic loom, a real nightmare web of knowing, the loom itself a delicate weave, weaving through weaves already woven.

  —But what happens?

  Cosmo takes his hands from the steering wheel and runs them though his hair.

  —Don’t be such a literalist. I’m talking about the rendering of an event the world itself has already rendered. It’s about tragedy and hubris. The transmigration of our souls to virtual reality. It’s about overzealous technophiles and solutionists and attempts to realign the trajectories of meteors using nuclear warheads. And you want to know the story? The story is dark matter, autism, binary, the Great Game. It’s about the influence of the English language on globalization. About lions and tigers and bears. All of it. We’re talking about an event where the mostly nameless participants are long since dead, devoured by the gaping maw of History.

  —I can see why it would take you so long.

  —It’s overwhelming, you know? It’s like this elemental tide of weighted signals proliferating into a three-dimensional mosaic of color, color cast in a spectrum only my eyes seem capable of discerning, because of what? The kaleidoscope that is the language I speak? An experience I had as a child watching three men burn to death? A high-ceilinged library at Cal where I read Mad magazine when I was supposed to be reading works by the dead white men whose names were carved in stone and placed in the upper reaches of that solemn room?

  Nolan watches his brother’s hands. It’s as if they’re lifting the ends of threads from the air above the dashboard, as if threads are there to be lifted.

  —The moment in time is like this kernel of data on the verge of being lost over the event horizon and into the Singularity. It’s right there before me, just folding and unfolding like an expanding and contracting universe that mirrors our own understanding of said universe, a complex motion resembling something as simple as the involuntary act of breathing, but a breathing that’s as deafening as the sound of our sun in space. No beginning, no end. As above, as below. Omnia ab uno. Omnia ad unum . . . But an arsonist—

  Cosmo shakes his index finger toward the fire glow, his glasses crooked at this point.

  —Now, there’s a dude who gets it. Most of the fools around here, all hoping to bump their heads on something authentic, they don’t recognize that all of this is just a sham. There’s a reason they want to make movies here, man: the façade’s already in place. But the arsonist understands this. He knows.

  —Knows what?

  —Let the Phoenix rise, man. Be the wind beneath its wings.

  When they arrive at the scene of the house fire, red and blue lights carousel across the curtained windows and front-door plates. A crowd has gathered behind the yellow cordon tape while firemen work their way to and from the periphery of the fire.

  Cosmo climbs out of the Valiant, walks directly toward the yellow line, and ducks under it without hesitation. Nolan eases out of the vehicle and closes the heavy door behind him. He walks along the sidewalk toward the cordon, weaving through shoulders coming and going, fingers pointing and mouths moving, everything generated by this particular spectacle.

  —You know what this is? Nolan overhears a man say to the woman standing beside him.

  —An old house burning to the ground, the woman says.

  —No, this is terrorism.

  —It’s probably some kid desperate for attention.

  —If so, he’s got mine.

  Water, running along the gutter, reflects the light of the flames that reach out of a second-story dormer and into myrtle limbs, wet from the firemen’s efforts. Upstairs, double-hung windows are coated with soot and, downstairs, the lathed front-porch posts are charred timber. A hole has been chainsawed in the roof, and Nolan watches flames cling to the rafters, to the porcelain insulators. Tiny orange sparks flutter through the dark interior of the house. It saddens Nolan to see such an old home destroyed. Old ideas and efforts and memories going with it.

  More than the fire, though, Nolan watches his brother. Cosmo is crouched beside the back end of one of the engines with the digital camera held up to his face. The flash from the photographs he takes momentarily lights the reflectors on the jacket sleeves of a group of firemen standing in the foreground. He lowers the camera to adjust the dials and the buttons. When Cosmo raises it again, Nolan sees the bright light of what must be flames, stilled, but pictured waving violently in the tiny display screen. The screen shines brightly in the reporter’s face, the world’s light having squeezed through a pinhole to fill it, flat as a page and completely illuminated.

  5

  To his first day of work on the farmhouse, Nolan brings nothing more than his lunch packed in a white plastic grocery sack that he’s tied to the bicycle’s handlebars. He finds Joe, the contractor who hired him, sitting in the cab of his Ram reading a surfing magazine and sipping yerba mate from a hollowed gourd.

  —Not even a hammer, bro? Joe says on Nolan’s approach.

  —No, sir.

  Joe tosses the magazine on the dash.

  —You don’t have to call me, sir, man. We don’t have those hierarchies here. It messes with the energy of the place.

  Straightaway, Joe has Nolan under the farmhouse, digging new footings with Manny, the other low man, both of them working side by side on their hands and knees beneath cobwebbed girders and old true-dimension redwood joists. It’s hot, dusty, mindless work among fat black widows and sharp concrete clods, splintered dog bones, and the frayed insulation of sagging 110 lines.

  To shed some light on the digging, Manny hangs a 150-watt droplight from a nail stuck in a joist, and the light sways from side to side between them each time Guillermo, Manny’s older brother and Joe’s foreman, lets the cut ends of arsenic-soaked four-by-fours fall on the floorboards overhead. Guillermo is a small bull of a man with a receding hairline and a buzz cut, a man Nolan will only ever see smile once. Each time Guillermo drops one of the cut ends of the four-bys directly above their heads, Manny curses at him in Spanish and pounds the undersides of the flooring with his fist, causing even more dust to fall and to surround the low men in a dazzle of roiling motes, backlit by the droplight.

  When Nolan first sees the motes, they remind him of the cloud in Las Vegas, of the painter’s wife and the hospital, of Linda. His neck and face well with shame. He turns to the digging, to the mindless work to forget.

  At the start of the day, Joe introduces Guillermo and Manny to Nolan as:

  —Los Hermanos de Zacatecas.

  The Brothers from Zacatecas.

  Guillermo is the older and more serious of the two, while Manuel, a tall, skinny, handsome trickster, is in his late twenties. Manny has been working for Joe for only several months, but Guillermo has been with the contractor for over fifteen years.

  —Picked him up the day I got my license, Joe tells Nolan at lunch that first day.

  The Mexican was seventeen years old then, barrel-chested and broad-shouldered and already a skilled carpenter.

  —Dude won this strongman competition down in Zaca. People stream down from the hills and everybody lifts cats and dogs and shit. Old people even get in on it, lifting, like, lizards and mice.

  Nolan and Joe sit in the shade on the front porch of the farmhouse near Manny, while Guillermo sits off by himself with his eyes closed, resting against a cut two-by-ten. In a large field below the farmhouse a swath of chamomile runs across the carpet of grasses, grasses already losing their green beneath the heat of the spring sun.

  —But it all comes down to two or three hombres who can lift a pig, Joe says. Billy-boy here won by raising a donkey.

  Joe lifts his chin in the Mexican’s direction.

  —Dude lifted a burro off the ground, bro. Think about that.

  On that first day Nolan learns that Joe, who is in his late forties, is married to a woman who has a teenage daughter and that he and his wife have a young son, named Joey. Joe tells Nolan he was born and raised in San Clemente, an ocean-side cit
y just south of Los Angeles, and that he spent his formative years surfing the coastline of southern California and Baja California Norte and Sur. He arrived in Burnridge when he was twenty years old at the helm of a German-made van he steered with a broken arm after having attempted to surf the cold tsunami waves of Mavericks.

  —When my wave came up and I dropped in, I saw the whole thing flash before my eyes, bro, just all of it. All I remember is waking up on the beach, people all around me, blue sky. Something stilled in me that day, and ever since then, life’s been nothing but perfect, empty sets.

  At the end of the first day, Joe offers Nolan a month of demolition and salvage work, and if things work out, the journeyman may be able to stay on for the duration of the remodel as the second low man.

  —I should have enough work until the end of summer, mid-fall at the latest.

  But, that first day on the job, Joe also makes it clear that, despite Nolan’s experience, he will report to Guillermo, the site’s foreman.

  —You need to understand, bro, Guillermo’s my boy. You may have skills, and we may speak the same lengua, but Billy-boy and me, we go back deep time.

  —I’m just grateful for the work, sir.

  —Don’t call me, sir, bro. No hierarchies, all right?

  —I apologize.

  —No worries, just don’t do it anymore.

  Nolan falls easily into the rhythms of work again. He slips into the days, all while picking up gradually on the details that make the place what it was, what it is, what it’s becoming.

  On his second day he unearths a blue glass canning jar, several old medicine bottles, and a set of brass hinges; on his third day, when Guillermo and Joe are off site on a side job, he inspects the foreman’s layout and cuts and has nothing but respect for the carpenter; after work on Thursday, Joe invites Nolan over to the truck for a beer after Manny and Guillermo leave and the two men look over the blueprints to the remodel, spread out over the hood of Joe’s Ram, and Nolan can feel Joe sussing out his knowledge with pointed questions.