Journeyman Read online

  But during that first week, Nolan spends the bulk of his time with Manny, and in that time he learns that Manny can talk. He learns that all of the men in Manny and Guillermo’s family, except for their father, are working in California, participants in one of the world’s great diasporas, and that before coming to work for Joe, Manny was on the floor of a cola factory in St Louis, Missouri. Nolan learns that Manny dislikes the abundance of sugar in American cuisine, that he’s been drunk only once in his life, and that he harbors a fondness that borders on fetish for a select few classic American automobiles.

  —El Mustang, he whistles, pushing his index finger against his thumb and shaking down and loose the bottom three fingers of his right hand, two, three times, chest high. Mustang is the best.

  As low men, Manny and Nolan are assigned the rudimentary apprentice work essential to the farmhouse remodel. They dig the footings for the new piers and stem walls; they unload, haul, and mix the concrete sacks in the tight, cramped space beneath the floor joists; they tear out the double-hung windows and rip down the sheetrock and the fiberglass insulation from the walls; they salvage the antique hardware from all the doors and light switches and all the kitchen and bathroom cabinets; they make the dump runs. It’s dirty, strenuous work, made easy by conversation.

  —You have wife? Manny asks Nolan on Monday morning of Nolan’s second week on the job.

  —Nope.

  —Girlfriend?

  —Nope.

  —You joto?

  —Nope.

  —Ah, Manuela.

  Manny is twenty-nine, Nolan learns. He’s been married for four years already to a woman ten years his junior, and in the moment of silence it takes for Nolan to do the math on that one, he can feel Manny grinning at him a grin that in the English language is best described as shit-eating.

  —You mean to say she—

  —No, está OK. Manny smiles. En México, when he, the father, when he write the paper, no hay problema.

  —No problemo, huh?

  —Sí, no problem.

  Manny and his child bride and their three-year-old daughter, a little girl whose name translates into English as star, live in a two-bedroom apartment they share with Guillermo, who has no women in his life, or none that Manny speaks of if he knows. Manny is the youngest of the five brothers, all of whom work in construction, the trade their father taught them, and their father’s father, him. But Manny’s dream is to own a chain of car washes in Zacatecas, a major metropolitan area two hours north of the pueblo where he and Guillermo were born and raised.

  —Cha-ching, Joe tries to teach Manny how to say at lunch one day.

  —Ching-ching.

  —No. Cha. Cha.

  —Chan-ching.

  —Forget it, Joe says.

  But for as much as Nolan gets along with Manny and Joe during those first two weeks, he feels a quiet, steady tension between him and Guillermo. They’re roughly the same age and approximate in skill. Every now and then, when Joe asks Nolan for his take on a situation, Nolan senses a change in Guillermo’s presence, a defensiveness, as if he’s wary of the ease of communication between Joe and Nolan and bitter at Manny’s effort to learn English and Nolan’s to learn Spanish. For all his years working and living in the United States, Guillermo’s English is rudimentary at best, his vocabulary limited to his trade.

  —Maybe you and Joe have work en el futuro, Manny says to Nolan one afternoon while Joe and Guillermo are out on a lumber run. Maybe you and Joe no need Los Hermanos.

  —I’m a short-timer here, Manny.

  —¿Cómo?

  —I no work here mucho tiempo.

  —¿Por qué no?

  —Porque no vivo aquí.

  —Where you live?

  —Here and there.

  —Es imposible. Live here and there.

  —It’s a figure of speech, Manny.

  —¿Cómo?

  —Never mind.

  One morning during Nolan’s second week, the four of them stand on the farmhouse porch to watch a half dozen hot-air balloons, their baskets filled with tourists, rise up through the fog hovering above the valley floor in the shadow of Fumarole Peak. The colorful patterns of the balloons stand out against the mountain, tall and majestic and covered in grasses drying to a tawny-drab beneath the lingering sun. Hillsides the color of the deer that cross them. The builders listen to the tourists chatter, the stillness of the valley punctuated by their voices and by bursts of flaming gas from the balloons.

  The last of the balloons are still in the air when the crew stops for an early lunch. While Guillermo dozes off to the side against his plank, in a large plastic mug Manny mixes a can of tuna fish, a plastic baggie of canned corn, chopped jalapeño, and two single-serving-size packets of mayonnaise. Nolan eats a smoked turkey sandwich on wheat bread, and Joe fashions bites of sautéed kale, brown rice, and baked tempeh from a wooden bowl using a pair of stainless steel chopsticks. Raising the bowl to his face and stuffing his mouth, he says to Nolan:

  —You know, man, you ever need a lift, just say the word.

  —I appreciate that, but I enjoy the ride.

  Manny quietly scoops the tuna salad onto salty soda crackers and douses the combination with hot sauce. Chewing, he watches the balloons between bites.

  —How do you like living in Valley Oaks? Joe asks.

  —I like it just fine.

  —Place went up overnight.

  —About how tracts do.

  —When I first landed here, Valley Oaks was all prune orchards, not even grapes, yet. I used to take ladies out there when the trees were in bloom. We’d bring a blanket and a fat doobie and snuggle up and trip out on all the petals drifting down like snowflakes. Man, they dug that. Mother nature will get you laid every time, bro.

  Guillermo begins to snore, and Manny raises an eyebrow and smiles mischievously. He gets to his feet, creeps over, and crumbles a cracker all over Guillermo’s chest.

  Joe says:

  —Let sleeping dogs lie, Manny.

  —¿Cómo?

  —Perro durmiendo.

  —No, Manny says, sitting back down, perrito.

  Joe chopsticks kale into his mouth and says to Nolan:

  —You apprentice on tracts?

  —I did.

  —Just a bunch of dudes building their muscles and working on their tans.

  —I heard that said on a rooftop in Texas once.

  —What about, can’t see it from my house?

  —Heard that here in California.

  —Ain’t no Steinway?

  —New Mexico.

  —Good enough for government work?

  —Nevada.

  —Good enough for the girls we go with?

  —Oregon.

  —Damn, bro, you been around.

  Nolan nods.

  —I worked this one tract, Joe says around the food in his mouth, Rancho something or other, down out of Bakersfield. The foreman there would show up every Friday at quitting time with two shoeboxes full of cash and, I shit you not, the bed of his El Camino filled with crushed ice and cold beer. I don’t know how many journeymen were on that tract, but we’d grab a couple two, three beers, get in line and he’d pay us out. Five o’clock rolls around at the end of a hot summer Friday, and up rolls this El Camino filled with cold beer. Easily the best summer of my life. Partied like a rock star.

  Joe sets the chopsticks in the bowl and wipes his mouth on the back of his sleeve. Then, he reaches up under his serape and produces a package of rolling tobacco.

  —Young bucks nowdays, they no comprendes, bro. None of them ever had to work tracts. Tracts around here are all Mexicans with nail guns. All the lily-white boys around here, all they know is high-end, boom shit. Finish work and jobs with architects on site. Restoration remodels and eight, nine, ten-thousand-square-foot custom jobbies. Real magazine-quality, yuppie shit. Bunch of bucks all covered in tats like they’ve done time, throw
ing paychecks at gas-powered toys like it’ll never end. Bragging about buddies they got in Iraq, Afghanistan, like their spending habits aren’t part of the equation. Shit. They’ve never had to weather the lean years, never had to hustle up some work. They don’t remember ’91. Hell, you probably don’t remember ’91.

  —I caught the tail end of it.

  —Tail end was the rebound.

  Nolan nods.

  —Ups and downs, man, and we’re due for a down. Mark it.

  Joe gestures over to where Manny sits cleaning the inside of his mug with a tortilla.

  —Meanwhile, Billy and Manny here fret about getting sent back down south. Fucking builders of civilization and they got to be worried about getting deported. Fucking astonishes the reasonable mind.

  The final balloon descends to the valley floor, and a passenger van with tinted windows drives across the field to meet it, leaving dark, parallel tracks across the chamomile.

  —The other day, Joe continues, I heard about this one job, down by the plaza here, this old Victorian. They got half a dozen carpenters for an entire year’s worth of finish work. Can you believe that? A year’s worth.

  Joe fingers tobacco into the channel of paper and then takes from the sack a plastic baggie rolled over a length of crushed marijuana.

  —But, bro, you hear about tracts going up down around Phoenix, Santa Fe, Vegas, tracts like five, six times the size of Valley Oaks, all these retirement communities built on golf courses out in the middle of the desert. Real common-sense-type shit. Dudes working under flood lights at night it’s so hot.

  —I know it firsthand.

  —So, you know, man. You know.

  The van parks and the tourists who have climbed out of the balloon’s basket are standing off to the side. A few of them take pictures of the balloon folding in on itself.

  —A few years back, I land this project two blocks from the plaza. Sweet little craftsman bungalow this couple from the city bought. Tony and Toni. True story.

  Joe raises the spliff, licks the tacky edge of the rolling paper, and expertly folds it over itself before twisting one end gently.

  —Me and Billy drop anchor on the place. Time and material up the wazoo. The husband’s this doctor on some reality television show. Swear to dog. Inner-city ER, or some shit like that. She’s in on this start-up in Silicon Valley. Oodles of tech money. Kind that survived the dot-com bubble, no problem. They’re of the beautiful people. Double income, no kids. Train for triathlons together. Do yoga. Get colonics. You can hear the sex from miles away.

  Nolan watches the balloon splay out over the field, nearly deflated, colorful folds sagging into colorful folds. Manny takes out a flip-phone and begins texting.

  —Anyway, it takes me and Billy-boy a year and a half to finish. I hand over change-order after change-order, and the Tonys, they don’t flinch. Not once. Never.

  —Nice.

  —No doubt, right? But then they move in.

  —Here we go.

  —But it’s not what you think. Our work’s tight. Billy’s a stud. I’m a carpenter Titan. But the pool, man, brand-new in-ground swimming pool that runs north–south. Every time the doctor swims laps, the sun’s in his eyes when he goes to breathe. So they tear out the pool and put in a brand-new one that runs east–west.

  Joe tucks the baggie of weed into the cigarette pouch and reaches under his serape and puts the pouch away. Nolan watches as he places the spliff at the corner of his mouth and raises a plastic lighter to the end of it, the flame tiny and blue. Exhaling smoke, Joe says:

  —Fucking people like that, it’s no wonder some dude’s running around here trying to burn all the old houses to the ground.

  6

  Saturday morning. Nolan wakes at six but stays on the love seat in the garage, wrestling with a headful of thoughts until seven. After cooking a leisurely breakfast of cheesy eggs, seasoned home fries, and uncured bacon, he borrows Cosmo’s Valiant so that by nine he is at the hardware store spending part of his first paycheck on a hammer, framing square, and tape. By 9:30 he is outside the opening doors of the one local workwear shop, where he buys underwear, socks, two work shirts, and a new pair of blue jeans. At the local nursery, a mile south of town, he picks up several bags of soil amendment for the raised garden beds, along with tomato, basil, pepper, kale, squash, and arugula starts. On the drive back to Valley Oaks, he stops at a high-end grocery store and buys chicken thighs, which marinate in lemon, red wine vinegar, oregano, and rosemary while Nolan spends the afternoon working the soil and arranging and planting the vegetable garden.

  That evening, with the light golden in the canopy hollows of a neighbor’s oak, the chicken thighs hiss on the grill and Nolan, freshly showered and standing barefoot on the concrete patio in his new jeans and a long-sleeved denim button-up he bought his first week in Burnridge at the Goodwill, looks over his day’s work while dribbling beer now and then on flames fueled by the dripping chicken fat, but careful with the dribbling so as to avoid raising soot. It’s a peaceful, comfortable summer evening in the first week of May, a backyard evening scented by a neighbor’s jasmine and fabric softener. Clothes dryers run and automated watering systems switch on. Cooking sounds and snippets of conversation, both real and televised, reach the backyard.

  Cosmo, sitting nearby, leans back in his chair and exhales marijuana smoke at the sky. He adjusts his eyeglasses as the breeze shifts and smoke from the barbeque gets in his eyes.

  —It doesn’t get much better than this, he says, slouching back and resting his forearm on the top of his head. Life in the contado.

  —I don’t know that word, Nolan says, sitting in the lawn chair opposite Cosmo.

  —The contado is the area beyond the city that sustains and enriches the city. They cut down our trees, mine our hills, and divert our water, for which the city provides protection and some sense of luxury. It’s kind of like benevolent pillaging.

  Cosmo scoots forward in the seat:

  —Did you know that for the first time in recorded history, the population of humans in urban areas has surpassed the population of rural areas?

  —Can’t say I did.

  —Historians and scientists believe we’re living at the end of the Agrarian Age. They say this is a new geological epoch because we’ve altered the Earth so much. Did you know that?

  —I didn’t.

  —The Anthropocene. And you and I, we keep the entire thing interconnected.

  —How’s that?

  —I write sentences, you drive nails, and together we bask in the spoils of war and assist in the fabrication of this vast and expanding network of interconnectivity. Believe it or not, us two, sitting here, this is us assisting in the war effort.

  Cosmo drops his joint to the concrete and steps on it with the toe of his scuffed Hush Puppy.

  —Did you know hospitals are introducing robot doctors? Not, like, cyborgs, but these four-foot-tall robots with screens and cameras.

  —No, I didn’t.

  —Yeah, they’re like these robots with screens for faces that wheel around hospitals.

  Nolan stands and turns the chicken on the grill. Grease hisses on the flames. Cosmo says:

  —Not everyone is OK with this, you understand.

  —No, I get it.

  —I mean, think about this, are we prepared for this level of disassociation of the body and mind? What does this mean for us as a species? In the long run?

  All of a sudden, loud, discordant music plays from backyard speakers located several houses down the block on their side of the street. Somehow, Nolan knows the music comes from a house where, in his first two weeks at Cosmo’s, he has seen and heard a middle-aged woman and her teenage daughter come and go separately or argue loudly. The aggressive drumming, inarticulate bass, and mashed guitar sounds alter the weekend tranquility of the housing tract in the same way the mother and daughter’s frequent arguments have startled him with their sharpness and meannes
s. Sitting up and looking in the direction of the noise, Cosmo raises his voice while continuing:

  —They say we’re connected like a web, but that’s just the shape for now. In the future, like, way in the future, we’ll learn it looks nothing like a web. It’ll be like nothing we know now because we’ll model it on something we know then. It’s the same way we no longer think of time as an arrow or a sundial.

  —What do you think it will look like?

  —I don’t know, but I think if we ever figure it out, the light bulbs will explode in our domes and we, as we know we, this, this will be gone lickety-split.

  Cosmo stands, adjusts his pants, and stretches his back.

  —Have you ever considered your part in all this? he asks Nolan. You know, what your hands have done?

  —I have.

  —And?

  —I feel like I’m a small part of something big.

  Cosmo walks to the fence line, in the direction of the music, and stands on the edge of the raised garden bed and peers over the fence.

  —Do you ever wonder where’s it all going? he asks Nolan. Have you thought about that?

  —It’s just what we do.

  —What about when we’re gone?

  —We’re gone.

  —And that doesn’t bother you? Scare you?

  —There’s not much I can do about it.

  —Bullshit, Cosmo says, jumping down from the raised bed. You, me, we’re complicit in the destruction.

  —I like to think of myself as a builder.

  —So you’re a lover, not a fighter.

  —That’s not what I said.

  —It doesn’t matter what you say, you take material from the earth and shape it into something else. I do the same thing, just with the abstract. And we—Cosmo points at Nolan and then at his own chest—we done over-built, partner. Put the blame where the blame is due. No one, and I mean no one, is innocent. We are all complicit because we impose order upon matter just as matter imposes order on us. Matter is all that is, and peace is stasis, and stasis is death. But why do I care? Why do I think about it? Because of my geospatial location and the socioeconomic factors that shape this place? Because of the vocabulary of my environment? Because my father suffered from PTSD before there was a PTSD from which to suffer?