The Other Joseph (15 page)

The image of a family of grieving, helpful Minnesotans sitting cross-legged on the floor of a hotel room, scissoring slits into the bottoms of flyers—that will be in my stupid head forever.

“Drugs,” he said.

“Pardon?”

“Mark and his darn drugs. We've been expecting something like this.”

He took out a handkerchief, blowing his nose as I reeled Sam in. At first I thought the old man was crying, but he wasn't. It was chilly and wet due to the fog, and he just had a runny nose.

“Well,” he said, and then he ambled off. He was moving very slowly, and Sam and I watched him. This was a tough old bastard. His generation doesn't let life get to them like mine does. I'd probably had more nightmares and mind slips in the past two months than he'd had in his eight decades, and I've never even worn a uniform—or at least not his and Tommy's kind of uniform. As part of a seventh-grade social studies project I once asked three north Louisiana D-Dayers about the war, but all they had really wanted to talk about was how by golly the women in France had been.

The old man skipped the next telephone pole but stopped at the one after that. He fished out another flyer to staple, then all of a sudden he stumbled. The staple gun went clattering onto the sidewalk, and luckily the pole caught him or he'd have been lying on the concrete himself. I ran over, and Sam scampered along beside me, dragging his leash.

“You all right?” I asked.

“You're back.”

“Yes sir.” I sat Sam while the old man got his staple gun. I sensed that in his prime this shrunken grandfather in a ship-reunion cap had been a stocky farm boy who could have whipped my ass up and down that street, but those were bygone days. He lifted the flyer he was holding, then stapled it flat to the telephone pole.

“Lawrence Sorensen,” he said, offering his hand.

“Nice to meet you. Roy Joseph.”

“Two first names? You a southerner, Roy Joseph? You sound like a southerner.”

“Yes sir.”

Lawrence didn't have much of a grip, but he was still clenching my hand. “But you live here?” he asked.

“I do,” I said, not wanting to get into it. Sam was on his belly, alert but being good and still, somehow knowing this wasn't a time for merriment.

“Ever run across our Mark?”

“No sir. Never.”

“Bet you see this as harebrained.” He let me loose. “But they all were set on coming, and I wasn't about to let them do this without me.”

I didn't see anyone else out walking in the cold, Sorensens or otherwise. “Where are they now? Your family?”

Lawrence slapped at the flyers pinned against his stomach. “Split up in the park and thereabouts, doing what I'm doing. I made them give me fifty of these, let me cover a few blocks.” He shook his head. “I guess they were right. I guess I should've stayed in Minnesota.”

Though I had planned to take Sam to the park, I knew what I should do. What Tommy would have done for another navy man. For anyone, really. Even Sam understood. He was on his feet now but sulking.

“Let's go over to the supermarket,” I said. “You can get a cup of coffee, and I'll finish this up. Won't take me long.”

I could tell Lawrence wasn't too thrilled by the idea of quitting, but his body was failing him and he seemed to recognize that. I left him while I put Sam in the apartment, and when I returned Lawrence had walked to the telephone pole at the corner of Fulton to post a last flyer by himself. I hurried to him, and he handed me the staple gun like he was surrendering a weapon.

“Are you ready?” I asked.

He shrugged, but I started leading him down Fulton, the out-of-commission LeBaron up ahead, already filthy with city grunge, monitoring us as we made the three blocks to the Safeway.

I sat Lawrence on a bench by the front entrance. There was an arcade unicorn plugged into the wall, and a woman was watching her little girl bounce back and forth. “Or would you rather go inside?” I asked. “It'll be warm in there.”

Lawrence hadn't spoken since we'd begun our march, but he looked as if he wanted to tell me something now. He pointed across the street. A row of condo buildings blocked our view of the Pacific. “I was in San Fran with the
Doyle
in '46,” he said. “Only other time. Did you know this around here used to be an amusement park?”

“No sir.”

“I still remember. It was called Playland. Funland, maybe. Me and some shipmates got into a fight with some locals right on the carousel.” He laughed, coughed, and then laughed again. “Us brawling as that thing spun round and round. All those civilians frogging off like they were swabbies on a sinking ship.”

“Must've been a sight.”

“That it was.” He was staring at the girl on the plastic unicorn. “Back then a man could fight another man and not get himself killed. People are meaner now.”

“You think so?”

“Sure I do.”

I slid the staple gun under my belt. They sold to-go coffee over by the deli, and I bought a cup and a Sunday paper. When I went back outside I saw the unicorn had been abandoned. I gave Lawrence his black decaf, then set the newspaper next to him on the bench.

“Thank you, son,” he said. “What do I owe you?”

“My treat. Wait right here and don't worry. I'll pound this out.”

He was grateful but he was proud, and I could see I had him
feeling a bit like a child. He passed me the flyers, and I walked those same three blocks up Fulton to Forty-Sixth Avenue, stopping across from that last flyer he'd posted. I got to stapling. There were about twenty flyers left, and I zigzagged through the avenues, careening from Fulton to Cabrillo to Fulton until my jean pockets were confettied with tear slips and I was once again at the Safeway. Thank Tommy, not me. I'm just his proxy, Mr. Lawrence. You'll never meet him, but he's behind this.

I had only been gone maybe a half hour, and Lawrence was still sitting on the bench where I'd left him. The newspaper hadn't been touched, and his coffee was resting on top of it. He was sleeping. I sat down on the bench, and when I cleared my throat his eyes flittered open under the bill of his warship cap.

“Hey,” I said. “Done and dusted. You're all set.”

He looked over at me. He seemed groggy, and it took him a second to sweep away the cobwebs. “You got both sides of the street?” he asked. “I forgot to tell you both sides.”

“Yes sir. Both sides. Hope some good comes of it.”

“So do we.” He didn't sound optimistic, and there was no reason he should have. Mark Sorensen was doomed—destined for some killing acre and as good as dead, really—but the Sorensens had needed to do something, anything, and this hunting trip was the best they could come up with.

I set the staple gun between us. “What now?”

“Nothing.” Lawrence reached inside his windbreaker and pulled out a big-buttoned cell phone that must have been meant for seniors. “I appreciate your kindness, but this spud sack is peeled. I'm supposed to call them when I'm through.”

I suspected his phone was also a GPS tracker, and that as his mind went from sharp to blunted some son or daughter would activate that feature if they hadn't already. Before long this man wouldn't be able to go anywhere—Minnesota, California, the Persian Gulf—without them being able to find him, and I wondered
if he realized that. He was tapping around for some number, and though I was eager to help, I knew he wanted me to let him accomplish this one small thing for himself.

And soon I could hear the phone ringing even from my side of the bench. A woman answered with a loud, Hey, Papa—and Lawrence put the phone to his veiny, jumbo ear, said he was all right and all finished. You guys can come get me. Tell Larry Junior I'm at that grocery store.

Lawrence tucked the phone back in his jacket. He would like me gone before his family showed. Somehow I knew that as well. He wouldn't shake hands sitting, so we stood up together. The light fog had become heavy fog, and I reminded him to wait inside the store if he got too cold.

“That boy is sick, Roy Joseph,” he said. “He's sick, and we should've dragged him home when we could.”

I nodded. I didn't know if Mark Sorensen left Minnesota because he was running to something or, like me with Dry Springs,
from
something—but, either way, leaving seemed to have been the wrong move for him. I had written off Dry Springs, my own home, years ago, but maybe that was a long and extended mistake. Maybe what I'd always thought of as an exile had in fact been a flight. Then there was gung-ho Tommy, dying on the other side of the planet. It's not just a job, it's an adventure. What if he'd never gone looking for that adventure? Who's to say what might or might not have happened to us? Who's to say we wouldn't all be on the farm together come December? Instead of one Joseph there are six, seven, eight of us. Wives, children. Our parents. We're roasting a Christmas llama as new wars are waged on TV.

LATER, MUCH LATER
, I walked with Sam to the Great Highway and watched the sun set into the ocean. I stood there as night fell and people started lighting campfires on the beach. Government-
sanctioned fire pits, seasoned oak bought from the Safeway at precious-metal prices, but to me this was like observing the aftermath of some catastrophe that had caused civilization to crumble. A second Dark Ages. The peak oil world or a plague, a thinning of the herd. I saw those five taxpayer campfires, then envisioned not five but five hundred, campfire after campfire all down the beach. Golden Gate Park was now a hellscape of stump-covered sand hills, every last tree cut and hauled off. Sharon Stone was dancing in hobbles. Robin Williams, made to split park wood. San Francisco. About forty-nine square miles. There were nearly a million people crowded onto that rock of a city. It was really only a matter of time.

Lawrence and I had said our good-byes at the Safeway earlier, but then I'd gone by those across-the-street condos and played guardian. And though he had waved at me to move on, I wouldn't leave until I knew he'd be taken care of. Fifteen minutes, then a white minivan pulled into the parking lot. And this had been such a nice thing to witness—the Sorensens piling out of their rental, the smile on Lawrence's face as he forgot me and rose to meet them—that I wish I could have just chanced upon that scene, that I didn't have to know the what and the why of it all.

I
N GRAND ISLE I'D DEVELOPED CERTAIN HABITS, CUSTOMS
, and rules for simple living, and on Pearl Lane Mondays I often made a batch of something I could eat from for the rest of the week. Comfort food. Red beans, white beans, a basic gumbo. And, seeking comfort, I had short ribs in the oven now. They were simmering away in one of Karen Yang's pristine pots.

When Washington High emptied that afternoon I would be waiting. With luck I'd be able to spot Joni, and finally we would meet. Though for weeks I had tried to prepare for this day—other than, Hello, I'm Roy Joseph—I still didn't know what those first few things I'd say to her would be. If Mom, Dad, Tommy walked out of that school I'd trip over myself rushing over to hug them, to tell them I loved them before our window closed and it was me versus the universe again. There would be no trivial talk, not before I said the important things.

But Joni? She was like a child left by gods to prove they exist. A foundling being raised in a temple far from her home, born into a role she had no choice but to accept. A girl to be revered by priests and pilgrims not for who she was but for what she was. So yes, I had thought about this day plenty, but in the end I knew all I could do was be bold and let the current seize us, hope the
river would eventually carry us away from that temple, that place of surrogate worship, and toward something real.

Yet what would happen once I had told that temple child everything I could about Tommy? Once I'd shared the Gospel of Roy and converted the pagan girl? Maybe at that moment of conversion I would see her as a niece—but when I shed my disciple robe would she see an uncle standing there? Would she have any more use for me at all?

And there was Marina to think of as well. The likelihood something real, something good, could come from that either. Sunday had passed by without any word from Viktor about my date with her, but I knew she took the bus to the park most mornings to see her friends at the nanny pond. I couldn't stay gone too long with those ribs in the oven, but I was restless. I combed my hair and shaved, put on jeans, my Red Wings, a T-shirt. The Loranger Drilling windbreaker I'd poached off some jackup a long, long time ago. As I was slipping out the door with Sam I was reminded of my boyhood hunting days—of me and Tommy in a tree stand together, of the deer whose antlers were collecting dust in Peach City Self Storage. My first rack buck. An eight-point that lived wily and nocturnal all season only to lose his vigilance and cunning during the rut, chasing does across a daytime clear-cut until Tommy whispered, “Take him, Roy,” and a bullet fired by a kid drilled through his animal heart. Tommy's hands wet with blood; my face painted red.

A MILKY, SUN-HIDDEN DAY
, but several glum nannies were already pondside when I arrived. Sam and I were walking the blacktop path, and I didn't see Marina initially—but then the nannies parted, a woman in pink waved, and I realized it was her. She had revamped herself since our Saturday dinner, had dyed her
hair from copper to the color of oil. I waved back, and all of the nannies were looking at me now. Marina said something to them, then pushed her stroller a few feet closer to the group, set the brake, and came over. She was wearing tennis shoes and tight gray corduroys, the same puffy pink-and-wolf coat she'd had on at Viktor's. Sam was watching her approach with his head cocked.

“Small world,” I said.

But if Marina was shocked to see me, she wasn't showing it. “This is your dog?”

“Yes. Sam.”

She put her cigarette between her lips. “Let him go.”

I tossed my end of the leash, and Sam went wiggling to her. She crouched and began smoothing his yellow hide.

“I like your hair,” I told her. “It's Elizabeth Taylor-y. You know, as Cleopatra?”

She slapped her hands together before taking the cigarette from her mouth. A smile, then. I'd never seen one from her. A closemouthed, teasing sort of smile. Cleopatra. This looked to be the best thing I ever could have said. “You are here for me?” she asked.

“Maybe.”

“Maybe or yes?” She ground her cigarette out on the asphalt. “Viktor knows I am coming here always. He told you this, no?”

“Yes,” I admitted. “But I don't want to take you away from your friends.”

She stood, satisfied. “Say what is true. At least with me this is how you should be.”

“I meant what I said about your hair.”

“I could tell this. And you are taking me?”

“For a walk or something. But—”

“Stop. I would like to walk with you.”

“Yeah? Great.” I pointed in the direction of her stroller. “The little Satan?”

She sighed and gave a slow nod. The other nannies were watching still, and I waited with Sam while she went back in among them. She spoke to the nannies, then retrieved her charge. The big, sleek buggy was like the Cadillac of strollers. She wrestled it over to us, and I saw the sleeping Coleman baby, all bundled and as pink as a piglet.

“He seems calm enough,” I said.

“
Da.
For now, yes. You will push him?”

I situated myself behind the stroller, and she took Sam's leash. We kept mostly quiet as we walked, and I decided I liked this about Marina. How she didn't come at me with question after question. We made it to the end of the pond, then turned left onto a path that followed a road. Eucalyptus trees loomed over us, and a salt, icebox breeze was rustling their fingery leaves in a white noise type of way. The park's concrete lampposts looked like the iron ones I remembered from downtown Vicksburg, and a Mark Sorensen flyer was taped to the first of them we passed. A few cars went by, a few bikers, a few joggers, and anyone taking us in would think we were just an American Dream family out with their dog. This Russian woman might actually be my wife one day. She might even have
my
child. I stared down at the baby, but I didn't feel a thing. He was like a plastic doll. Not even an extra in this movie, but a prop.

The baby was still sleeping when we came to the buffalo pen. Shaggy bison were grazing in the middle of about ten high-fenced acres, and Sam barked once at them but then quit, paws on the fence, unsure if he was seeing wild animals or livestock. I'd been by here before, and in a park full of strange things this was one of the strangest. I looked over at Marina, but she was standing with her back to me as she watched the buffalo. There was a small red heart tattooed at the base of her
neck, right below her purple-black hairline. I wanted to ask about it but stopped myself.

I got Sam to sit and started telling Marina what my mother or maybe my father once taught me about nineteenth-century market hunters. Part science, part history. How sharpshooters would catch up to a quivering sea of brown and position themselves on a distant rise, then—working methodically, beginning with the outliers and the strays—drop buffalo by the hundreds without ever spooking the herd. “To the buffalo,” I explained, “all that shooting didn't sound any different than thunder.” And of course, I was thinking of Lionel Purcell too. Of him and his crazy sniper rifle, shelling Himalayan snow cocks.

I wasn't sure if Marina was listening, but then she turned to me. “How do you know what it is buffalo believe?” she asked. “Are you a buffalo?”

We were like Terry and Larissa now, joking in the parking lot of the Sureway in Grand Isle. She seemed interested, so I dipped back even further on the timeline and described a buffalo jump. Imagine a great, loping herd being stampeded through a long chute of rock and willow until bulls and cows and calves plunge over the edge of a cliff. Imagine more braves waiting below with their spears. They move blood-soaked through the broken-legged and lowing buffalo.

Then came Spanish ponies, rifles, railroads. I finished my lecture and asked if she'd like to have dinner. “Only me,” I said. “No Viktor, no Sonya.”

Marina didn't answer right away. We just stood there, but then I saw her shrug. “Yes. But it cannot be tonight. Tomorrow, Mr. Buffalo?”

We traded phone numbers, and she texted her address to my cell. Then I told her I had something cooking in the oven and needed to head back. She nodded but stayed where she was—on a rise with someone else's baby, watching those city buffalo—
until finally she said she was ready and let me return her to the nanny pond.

ON THE WAY BACK
to the apartment I called Viktor, and he seemed annoyed I hadn't waited for him to coordinate with Marina himself. “For what time?” he asked.

“She told me to pick her up at seven.”

“Okay. I will make a dinner reservation.”

I tried to tell him that wasn't necessary, that I should have the LeBaron fixed by then, but he hung up before I could get the words out. The day was growing colder, and the fog sliding in from the Pacific looked like billowing smoke. I have a talent for layering worries atop worries, and I began to picture a sequence of events in which my unattended oven had set the building, then the block, then the Outer Richmond afire. An earthquake jostles Karen Yang's apartment, and a gas pipe tears lose. A sulfur-stinking cloud snakes toward the open flame of the oven burner, a pilot light.

Earthquakes. I didn't know the first thing. Do I run outside or stay indoors? Fill the bathtub? And there were these signs all through the neighborhood—
TSUNAMI EVACUATION ROUTE
written across a drawing of a big wave. At least a hurricane gives fair warning. San Francisco sat on a powder keg.

But on this day the earth kept still, and when we got back the apartment smelled only of cooking meat. I pulled a rib bone for Sam, cooling it with water from the sink, then he slurped the bone from my hand and went parading to his towel like a happy thief. In three days I'd have to leave San Francisco. I was feeling restless again.

THE GROUNDS OF
Washington High covered at least two whole blocks in the Outer Richmond, and at three fifteen a mob came
pouring from the main entrance. The building looked more like a misplaced slice of the Pentagon than a school, and I positioned myself off the fog-socked corner of Thirty-Second Avenue and wide, median-split Geary Boulevard, figuring Joni would probably cross there on her way home to Marvel Court. And just as I was reckoning this was a stupid idea—me showing up, believing I could find her—a black-jeaned, book-bagged, sunglasses-in-the-fog girl with long, straight hair and a highlighter-blue
I ♥ NY
sweatshirt emerged from the crowd.

Marvel Court was directly ahead, less than two blocks away, yet for some reason Joni turned left. I followed her to Thirty-Third Avenue, then realized she was about to join a crush of students forcing themselves onto a city bus. I hustled over, but the door closed behind her. The 38 Geary was a beast. A long, limited-stops-to-downtown double bus with accordion bellows between the two segments. The rear door was still open, and I jumped aboard without paying. Book bags and teenagers were pressed every which way against me, but I was nothing to them. They went on about their conversations. California slang.
Hella
this and
hella
that. I could see now just how young they were. Damn. They were babies. Is that really what I'd looked like in high school? The ninth grader at Tommy's basketball-court memorial service?

And where was Joni going anyway? We rode east, at each stop exchanging rowdy adolescents for cheerless adults until eventually the bus wasn't quite so crowded. I was still standing near the back, and she was in a sideways row of seats up front. It was no real trick to hide from her, as she seemed to be making it a point not to look from the book she was holding. The librarian posture, the level-bangs-then-sunglasses disguise, the hood of her sweatshirt thrown over her head—she was doing everything she could to make herself invisible as well. No, to make all of
us
invisible. She'd transported herself to someplace where she could
forget the garbage bags spilling clothes an apple-gumming man in an oversized
WE FEED THE CITY
T-shirt had dropped by her leg. Someplace where she didn't have to acknowledge the peekings of those salesmen and blue-collars who, despite the paisley book bag between her feet, appeared to have concluded she was fair game. The pages of her paperback were turning so fast I couldn't help but wonder if she was only pretending to read. If instead she was keeping tabs on everyone. Hoping the grease monkey to her left and the polyester suit to her right would quit hitting their knees against hers, on purpose or otherwise. That
WE FEED THE CITY
would never get around to asking her whatever question seemed to be forming on his lips. That the nine-fingered sex offender would have a comforting explanation as to why he was shadowing her.

A half hour went by, and we were in a seedy, liquor-stores-and-massage-parlors section of downtown when Joni stashed her paperback. The Tenderloin—a neighborhood that seemed dominated by tenement buildings and dilapidated hotels that looked like tenement buildings. I was certain this couldn't be her destination, but then she shouldered her book bag and stood. The bus stopped, the door opened, and she hopped down onto the sidewalk. Unless I could content myself with a second missed opportunity, another lost day, I had to do the same.

I was behind Joni, on the sidewalk near a cluster of African men divvying up stacks of pirated DVDs. And I was about to say something to her when she went hurrying across the street. No Sea Cliff sauntering, not here, but as soon as she reached the opposite sidewalk she paused in front of a brick building. Crooked fire escapes latticed the narrow six-story, and a neon sign on the first was blinking
TAROT READINGS.
Joni had a key in her hand and was unlocking a graffitied door. Suddenly I was very, very afraid for her. If I had been her shadower before, I was her angel now, her sworn protector. I wasn't really thinking anymore, just
acting. I was sprinting, dodging cars, and I made myself call her name but the honk of a horn drowned me out. The heavy door shut. She had been swallowed up again, and when I tried the handle it was locked.