This Magnificent Desolation (25 page)

Joshua climbs from the bike and sits upon the creosote timbers at the water's edge. Before them the water heaves out to the bay and there is the bridge with traffic moving like small Matchbox cars across it. Duncan sits next to Joshua, waiting for him to speak. Joshua pulls
a cigarette from his shirt pocket and lights up. It's pungent and smoky and better smelling than Duncan's mother's Claymores. Joshua purses his lips and glares at the horizon. When he looks at Duncan, his brow remains furrowed, gnarled like a knot of scar tissue. His skin shines like resin. His eyes are yellow-tinged and cracked by blood vessels.

Are you okay? Duncan asks. You don't stay around much. You're always taking off.

I know, I'm sorry about that.

It's all right.

Joshua puts his hand on Duncan's shoulder briefly, and then sighs long and slow. No, it's not, he says, but thanks for saying it is. Sometimes it's just hard for me to be around people, no matter how much I want to. Sometimes I forget things, I lose track of the days. I forget that a lot of things have changed and that a lot of things haven't changed at all. I get all mixed up—the things I think are important, that everyone should remember, they don't. And the things people talk about—well, it's all so much crap.

I had a dream last night and in it I was talking to my best friend but I couldn't even remember his name. We were waiting in the tunnel, and he had no face—it was like there was a veil or a caul over it, something those old sailors used to say they'd been born with so that they could see the future, or the stars, or the weather or some such fuck. Anyway, he started walking down the tunnel away from me and I tried to call out, tell him to come back, but I couldn't remember his name—you believe that? My best friend and I couldn't remember his name—I just kept shouting: Hey! Hey!

Duncan nods. It's the war.

Is that what your mother says?

Yeah.

What else does she say?

Duncan shrugs. That you're not the same person you used to be. Joshua holds his smoke, then exhales slowly, nodding. He laughs then and slaps Duncan's shoulder. He keeps his hand there, and the
weight of it feels good and reassuring. On the water a dredge turns in the fading sunlight and it is as if it is rolling, belly up, its underside squaring the last of the sun at their faces, and Duncan squints against it.

What's your mother cooking tonight?

Meatloaf.

Goddamn. I love your mother to death but her meatloaf is enough to make a man wish he'd never come home.

I know, I tried to tell her. She thinks it's her best dish.

Joshua tosses his cigarette onto the walkway and, for a moment, as they rise, Duncan hesitates, wondering if he should pick it up. The light has gone down and Joshua stares across the water, his face lost in shadow: faceless. Duncan is suddenly seized by the impulse that Joshua might tell him something real if only he were to ask him in this moment. Joshua, he says, what was the war like? Is that where you knew my daddy from?

War? Joshua bares his teeth and they flash in the gloom. He seems to be staring at something beyond the bridge and out past the bay. But it's already dark and there's nothing to see but Venus shining in the east.

I don't find much use in talking about the war, Duncan. You know that. The people that can't seem to shut up about what they did and what they saw, I can never understand. Seems like if they saw so much when they were over there, they'd have enough of it by now, y'know? You never forget what you've seen. No need to talk about it, make it real, more than it is. It's already too real. Sometimes I feel as if I'm watching a movie and it's my life, exactly the way it is—was—and I can't do a thing to change it. It's just a film reel playing over and over again, and I can't take back the good or the bad and I can't switch it off. And so I just have to live with it.

He stares above the rooftops as night comes slowly down and points to a meteor that flares briefly across the horizon. He says: I guess that's what war is, never forgetting even when you want to.
But then there are some things you never want to forget no matter how hard it is, like watching your friends die and not being able to do a thing about it. You're nineteen, a fucking wise-ass punk that can't stop fooling around thinking you're so cool, that you're invincible and then—Poof! a Viet Cong bullet blows your face apart and you're gone.

Your friend? The one whose name you couldn't remember?

Joshua slides flakes of tobacco across his teeth with his tongue.

Yeah. Company medic.

Duncan waits but Joshua is silent. And my daddy?

Your daddy? He never did a tour. Joshua shakes his head. No, that's not where I met him.

The streetlights are broken and slowly the stars come into view as the clouds clear—the Big Dipper and the Six Sisters and most of the autumn constellations, all glittering in slow winking cadence.

Damn, Joshua says and sighs deep and long, will you look at that beautiful sky.

And Duncan is sure that Joshua is not seeing the sky at all. He points to the top of the sky where day and night meet. I sometimes think of my daddy up there, he says, with the astronauts and the angels.

And he expects Joshua to grunt dismissively or laugh at him but Joshua says, as if he is truly considering this: Well, that's as good a place as any. Better than here for sure.

And perhaps he is thinking of his friend—a young man laughing, joking, singing exuberantly on a trail with the ash-gray loam light of dusk filtering through the jungle canopy—up there with Duncan's daddy, the astronauts, and all the angels. And Duncan smiles with the thought that they are looking down upon Joshua and Duncan and holding them in their care, for that is what the dead do, just as much as we pray for them and ask for God's divine intercession, the dead who have been left behind and are not yet at God's side remain like angels to look after their loved ones, to guide and watch
over them and keep them from harm until they are all reunited at the End. And this is what he tells Joshua.

Jesus, kid, Joshua says, Jesus. You have a way of getting into a man's head.

When they pull up on the bike, Duncan's mother stands at the curb, arms folded stiffly across her chest. Her face is set and stern, yet with the flicker of shadow and light she is disarming in her beauty. Even Duncan recognizes this. Joshua's back stiffens and he gives a low whistle of admiration. For added affect, he guns the engine as they coast toward her.

Joshua, I don't want my son riding motorcycles.

Joshua pushes out the kickstand, turns to look at Duncan, and then grins and shrugs.

You, she points. Get off that bike now. I don't want to see you on it again.

Maggie, Joshua says softly, reassuringly.

Get in the house.

Maggie.

What?

It won't kill him, you know.

Since when did you become his parent?

I'm just saying, it's all cool. Let him be a kid.

Duncan stands in the alcove watching and listening to them. Joshua blows mother a kiss and begins to back the bike away from the curb. Above him Orion and Ursa Major blink into life, and somewhere up there the astronauts and his father are looking down.

Where the hell are you going? she says.

Joshua looks at her in surprise—it is one of those rare expressions of his: a veil is lifted and in that brief glimpse Duncan sees no pain or rage or loss or confusion, and perhaps something of the Joshua that was there before. What? he says.

I've got meatloaf on, and I was counting on feeding three mouths. Park that thing and get your ass in here. And for a moment Duncan thinks Joshua will merely gun the bike and careen off down the hill, but instead Joshua smiles, relieved it seems, bumps the curb stone with his tire, swings out the kickstand, and shuts off the engine.

On one condition, he says.

Yeah? Mother plants her weight firmly on a hip. What's that?

Let my man Duncan on the bike.

From the alcove Duncan grins. Sitting on his black motorcycle amidst shimmering vapors from the steaming exhaust, Joshua is an angel and a messenger, a divine portent of things to come: He is an intercession of grace.

September 1984

The end of summer and the beginning of school. Raining afternoons, suspended in gray dusky light, and the sense that the day will never end. In class, sitting amidst the hubbub and throb of other children, with their whispering, their groaning and gurgling bellies, their kicking and tapping feet, and the chairs and desks creaking with the barely restrained tension of their movements. The walls are softly dripping with condensation and the radiators pinging and clanging and then sighing their warm exhales, and he stares out at the playground and off toward the distant rail yard and the towers of the Edison plant. Clouds are staggered in rows, as if they'd toppled end to end upon each other and lie there, still and foreboding over the horizon. Every once in a while a sudden squall comes up, pushes a spattering of rain against the window and sends the partially drawn, unfurled slats of the wooden blinds clattering, and then the wind subsides and everything is gray and still again. The glass shudders
and clears, and then the wind and the rain pull back, birds flee their roosts, the yellow lights burning in the windows of three- and four-story clapboard houses shimmer blearily through the gloom. Seagulls settle in groups upon the playground tarmac and then, like a blast from God's bellows, the wind sweeps them up and they are tossed, thrashing and crying, into the churning gyre over the city.

His teacher Mr. Hotchkiss suffers from a rare pathology that prevents him from controlling his tears. It comes from a head injury sustained during the war, he says, when he was blown from the top of an LV carrier by an RPG round. Part of his frontal lobe was damaged and now he no longer has the inhibitors for certain emotional faculties and so he cries whenever his emotions are stirred. He cries when he is sad and when he is angry. He cries when he is happy and immensely pleased by something. He cries when he looks out at the playground and sees light glancing in a particular way through the clouds or a figure of birds streaking in the northern sky or rain drifting in from the bay bent aslant through the yellow streetlights. He cries when he watches smoke belching from the Edison plant's stacks. And he cries when a student admits to not having done his homework or when it is apparent he has not done the required reading. Duncan wonders what it would be like to cry all the time. He wonders how you would ever get anything done. He wonders at the manner of injury that would cause such a condition and he wonders if Mr. Hotchkiss knows Joshua from his visits to the V.A.

Mr. Hotchkiss is writing something upon the board and the deep timbre of his voice vibrates nasally on certain words and is as calming as a distant foghorn out at sea. On these long, gray days, Duncan is content to merely listen to it. Magdalene is at the front of the class, listening attentively. Her black hair is pulled into a tight, gleaming bun, and he imagines her aunt taking the hair and, from her wheelchair, yanking it back with such force that Magdalene staggers and cries out.

When the bell sounds, Duncan is glad for the escape but waits for
the other kids to leave first until only he and Magdalene remain. But she walks to the front of the class to talk to Mr. Hotchkiss, and Duncan leaves alone.

In the school playground he stands in the farthest corner, facing east, looking through the chain link toward the rail yards and, beyond, the squat towers of the Edison plant, ash gray columns upon which white and red lights alternately flash as a warning to low-flying planes. White smoke pumps in steady funnels up from the stacks and melds into the low clouds covering the city. Rain spatters the ground and brings up the smell of warm concrete. It begins to fall harder, and soon it is dripping and shimmering upon the chain link. Duncan stares at the towers of the power plant and the giant transformers, ribbed ceramic pylons arranged like rows of giant sparkplugs.

A teacher clangs the bell and the other children race from the school yard, whooping and hollering, rushing to the lockers to gather their belongings to take home, and to the buses waiting at the front of the school or for their parents waiting in warm, idling cars. The lights upon the smokestacks revolve through their alternating flashing cycle. The dark shape of a jet bound for San Francisco International descends through the clouds silently and passes, trembling, over the city spread out before it, and only after it has passed does Duncan hear the back-roar of its turbines, a startling whine pressing out against the clouds.

After a moment there are footsteps through the rain, long and determined, and the sharp strike of high heels upon stone.

You're easy to find, you know, his mother says. You're always the one standing on your own, staring off into space. Didn't you hear the bell? It's time to go. Purgatory's over for another day.

She reaches for his hand, shakes the sleeve of his jacket.

Duncan, you're all wet.

So are you, he says, without looking. He can smell the heat of whiskey off her breath.

No I'm not. I've got an umbrella.

Duncan turns and Maggie grins. Rainwater rushes down her long face and spills into her open mouth.

C'mon, I've got a surprise for you.

What is it?

It wouldn't be a surprise if I told you.

At the car she reaches into the backseat and from a bag pulls a package, meticulously wrapped in sparkling blue paper that details the moons and planets of the solar system.

Duncan smiles and rips at the wrapping paper. It's a miniature replica of the
Saturn V
, a Makemark C series, with fuel propellant and a remote control firing switch. When he pulls it from the box, raindrops bead upon its red paint and trickle down its sides.

They don't come painted, Duncan says, turning the rocket it his hands, marveling at the glistening sheen of the latex.