The Other Joseph (16 page)

Then I got the feeling
I
was being watched. I looked back at the street. A police cruiser was parked where the bus had been—a windows-down black-and-white with a cop at the wheel, bulky in his body armor, the visor of his blue service cap aimed my way. He was shaking his head but had an amused look on his veteran face, loving the moment when the perp sees he'd been made. I was trapped—walk off now, I had no doubt he'd be coming to hassle me.

You weren't following that girl, were you? Let's see some identification. My oh my, a Louisiana pervert. How long you been with us here in San Francisco, ace?

The door. I didn't see any other choice. An intercom was bolted against the side of the building. A single button, no room numbers or anything. Some asshole had molded chewing gum over the button, and I pushed at the hardened glob.

There was a long nothing, then a woman's voice came on. “Yeah?” she said. “Who's this?” She sounded faraway and scratchy, as if she was speaking to me from a space pod orbiting the earth. I could feel the drill of cop eyes even worse than before.

I brought my mouth closer to the intercom. It smelled like bile. “Is Joni Hammons there?” I asked. “What?”

“Is Joni Hammons there?”

“What? Talk!”

“Can you hear me?”

“Fuck. Stay put. I think this cocksucker is broken.”

The intercom hushed, and I stood there, nervous and waiting, fighting the urge to glance back for that police cruiser. Long minutes ticked by before the door creaked open, and I saw an
enormous woman dressed in purple sweats. She wasn't fat, just large—a true giant of a woman pulling at her curly hair like some frustrated cartoon character. I was guessing she worked as a gatekeeper for this hell, that she was a minion of a slumlord. She was pan-faced and blotchy, had toothpaste-blue eyes.

“Whataya want?” she said.

“I'm looking for Joni Hammons. Do you know her?”

“Daniel's chick?”

I had no clue, of course, but I'd say anything to get off the sidewalk. Away from that cop and toward the unknown dangers Joni might be in. “Yeah,” I said. “Her.”

“So call them. I'm the super, not a doorman.”

“Sorry, sorry. Dead phone.”

The woman looked me over, and I was preparing for her to tell me to beat it when instead she moved aside. A lesser miracle, but I felt like I'd parted the sea, calmed a lion—or at least tickled some curiosity within her. I stepped in before she could reconsider, and she closed the door, turned her back to me, went lumbering on. It was like she was daring me to accost her, like she was hoping I might be dumb enough to try something, and I saw now that, of all things, she had an aluminum fish bat in one hand—a sort of billy club sports use to bash the brains of gaffed tuna and whatnot.

We were at the head of a dark and grimy hallway. The floor was carpeted, but a tear ran down the centered length of it like a wound showing concrete flesh. On either side of me unmarked doors led into what could only be very small rooms, and stairs rose up at the end of the hall. Joni was in one of these rooms, a victim of bad judgment, doing God knows what with God knows who. Perhaps this was not about jumping into a river with her and seeing where the current took us. Perhaps the only reason fate had brought me to California, perhaps the only reason I
was ever even born, was so I could brave that miserable building and save Joni Hammons from Joni Hammons. She had a curse in her blood. No matter what her name was, she would always be a Joseph.

I followed the woman up to the third floor, then halfway down the hall, before she stopped to pound on a door to our right. I heard the click of a dead bolt turning, and then I saw her—Joni standing between the frame and the cracked door, hair like splayed horsetail, her lipstick a smear of pink. The sunglasses were gone now, and her eyes flicked to me but then returned to the woman. Green eyes. Those didn't come from any Joseph I ever knew. I have plain brown eyes, all of us did.

“Where's the fire?” she said. An uneasy girl trying to sound like a droll adult.

I eased forward. “Hi,” I said. “I need to talk to you.”

Joni looked back over at me. I was about to speak again, but now she was staring at my face and touching her own. “No freaking way,” she said. She staggered, still holding the doorknob. The door swung all the way open, and I saw the room. A guy was in there with her. No shirt, older than Joni was, but not by too much. There was a leather tool belt lying on the floor, and the legs of his torn jeans were tucked into a pair of work boots. Red Wings just like mine.

“Joni,” he said, “who is this?”

She'd let go of the doorknob and was twisting at the bottom of her sweatshirt.
I ♥ NY
was like an eye chart now. “It might be him,” she said.

“Who?”

“That man I wrote.”

“That's right,” I said.

“You mean?”

“Yes,” said Joni.
“Him.”

The no-shirt kid was straw-haired, good-looking. Skinny but strong. A hammer jockey, judging by the gear on his tool belt. I was studying him, being wary, when a jab to my arm spun me around. That mean little fish bat was in the giant woman's hand, and she was squared up, ready to unload if she had to. “You come in here starting crap?” she said.

“No. It's not like that.” But I was bracing for her to smack me on the skull like a swordfish when the kid got between us.

“Geraldine,” he said. “Wait. I think we know him.”

She lowered her fish bat, but Joni only stood there watching. “Dang,” I said to Joni. “I'm sorry we had to meet this way.”

“Shut up,” said Geraldine. “Want me to call the cops, Daniel?”

He didn't seem to love that idea. A furrowed, north-south line had formed on his smooth forehead. He looked like he was failing a math test. There was a small ceramic pipe smoldering atop the radiator in the corner, and I could smell pot smoke. Actually, gang, a cop's right outside. Just drag me down to the street, and he'll be there.

“I'm not sure,” said Daniel.

Joni had moved away from us to sit on the sagging edge of a Murphy bed. Daniel turned to her, but she stayed mute. I tried to speak, but Geraldine told me to shut up again. We were all deferring to Joni now, and finally her long hair swayed.

“Really?” Geraldine asked.

“Yes,” Joni whispered. She didn't try to explain herself. Daniel was still standing by, hovering, but she was like a statue.

Geraldine poked at my stomach with the fish bat. “You gotta leave right now,” she said, each word louder than the last. Her cheeks were as red as if someone had slapped them, and all that anger made me think that, for her, this had quit being about me.

“Let her hear me out,” I said.

“Leave or I'm calling the cops whether these two want that or
not.” Then Geraldine chose for me. She took me by the elbow and tugged me into the hall. “They're damn well getting me high for this trouble,” she said. “Don't you be here when I'm done.”

My adrenaline was up, but I'd process that shit show later. The law had chased me into that building, and now the law was chasing me out. Geraldine stomped back inside the room, and I made my defeated way to the stairwell. I was at the end of the hall when I heard footsteps and turned. No-shirt Daniel was walking toward me. “I can't just let you skate,” he said. “Not after that.”

“Oh yeah?”

He kept coming, but then he went past me and sat on the stairs leading up to the next floor. “So you've been following her?” he asked.

“Only to talk.”

“But how'd you even find her in the first place?”

There was more concern than hostility in his stoner eyes, and I felt myself leveling. “I got a phone call from San Francisco, so I went online, did some digging.”

He dropped his head and nodded.

“I'll speak to her mom,” I said. “I should have—”

“Don't.” He looked up again. “Please. She can't know we're still together. That bitch has it in for me.”

“Hard to believe.”

He pointed at my chest. “She'd have it in for you too.
That
you can believe.”

“Or I might change her mind about me.”

“Her?” He laughed without smiling. “Never. I love Joni. Don't fuck us, man.”

“All right. So I won't call Nancy.” I sat down beside him. The kid stunk of the workday, needed a shower. “I will be writing Joni, though. Tell her to watch for my e-mail tonight, okay?”

“You won't stop with this?”

Daniel had thick wrists, cuts and scars on his hands and forearms. Despite all his melancholy cool, maybe he was willing to stand up and attack me.

“Look,” I said. “I did this in a messed-up way, but I want Joni to know a bit about who her father was.”

“I'll kill you if you hurt her.”

“You won't have to kill me, boss. I'll disappear forever if she asks me to.”

He seemed almost ashamed to have threatened me, so I reached into an inside pocket of my windbreaker and pulled out a photo of Tommy. Before leaving the apartment that morning I had turned to the final few pages of
FOR OUR TOMMY
, grabbed a 3 x 5 of my brother, then quickly put the album away. He was wearing a blue cap and gown, the cocky smirk of a senior. On his birthday that April he'd drive to the recruiting office in Ruston, that ragged hair soon to be gone.

“This is him in high school.” I handed Daniel the photo. “Will you bring it to her? I have an entire album to show her.”

“Go,” he said. “Just go.”

I stood, but before I left I came close to telling him he was sweating the wrong thing. He, not Joni, needed the saving—someone to tell him that eventually she would grow bored with him and set a course for the future she was meant to have. That one day he'd be all but forgotten by that pretty girl down the hall. In ten or fifteen years this life you've fallen into will have taken its toll, Daniel. You'll have a bad back and a roughneck face of your own by then, stained teeth from all the coffee and cigarettes. Your knuckles will always be scabbed. Your nails will always be dirty. Then maybe a circular saw jitterbugs across your hand some hungover morning. One way or another, you
will
be broken. It's already beginning to happen, and it's probably already too late. Too late for you and me both.

I WENT INTO THE YARD
behind my apartment with Sam, smoking a cigarette while he crunched at a rib bone. In the quiet cold I could hear the ocean, and I had a stunned, autopilot feeling not so different from the one I'd sometimes get during my last exhausted days on an offshore stint. Like I'm standing outside my body and watching Roy Joseph.

Until I started with these notes of mine, I doubt I have ever put more thought into writing anything than the e-mail I'd sent Joni that night. My best shot at easing the fears of a sixteen-year-old girl and not failing my brother:

Joni,

How to say this? I'm so, so sorry for what happened earlier. I'm in San Francisco to visit a buddy, and I couldn't be in the same city as you and not try to meet you. I've written you before, so maybe you don't want to meet me . . . but in October, someone—you? your mother?—called me and from the cell number I was able to find out your name and address. Today, I'm sorry, but I followed you. My plan was to catch up with you after school—but then you got on a bus and I saw you go into that building . . . I was worried about you. I promise this is the last time you'll ever hear from me uninvited. I have to go back to Louisiana on Thursday. Here's my number if you want to rewind and . . .

I didn't mention Baker Beach or the spying I'd done from Lincoln Park. I tried to tell her what I had tried to tell Daniel. That my memories were the most she could ever have of her father, and I would give her what I could. You don't have to consider me family. That isn't what this is about for me right now either. I'm asking you for him, and I'm asking you for you. Let's sit down
together and talk about Tommy, or all I knew of him dies with me.

Then I had closed with the phone number for the chief of police in Grand Isle. From here on out, I wrote, if I ever do the slightest thing to alarm you, complain to that man and he'll have some ideas as to how to squash me. I'd be an easy knot to tie, but I hope you'll call my number instead of his.

A metal ladder fixed to the backside of my building ran from the yard to the roof, and though I don't like heights, I was on that ladder, then, finally, the roof. To the east-southeast, over the tops of the houses across the way and the trees of Golden Gate Park, were the lights of the antenna tower I could spot from all over the city. Sutro Tower, I would come to learn—a gigantic red-and-white fork that sat atop a high hill maybe four miles away, ruling the skyline. Sutro Tower looked a lot like the derrick of a drilling rig, and those lights seemed to be for me. A San Francisco oil rig saying, Go back where you belong.

W
HEN I WOKE I WENT STRAIGHT TO KAREN
Yang's computer, but Joni hadn't written me back. I was picking Marina up at seven, and how that went, and whether Joni ever wrote me, might determine if in two days I'd be leaving San Francisco as winner or loser of this cosmic chess match I'd found myself engaged in. And unless I wanted to taxicab my date with Marina, then hitchhike out of the city on Thursday, I needed to get the LeBaron running again. I imagined my name being typed into warrants. Forces descending. A strike team assembling down by the Safeway. Big, steel-toothed gears grinding me into bits. Sam will rot in a San Francisco pound while
The People of the State of California v. Roy Joseph
unfolds.

THE FORT MILEY
parking lot lay atop a cliff in the northwest corner of San Francisco, at a place called Lands End that looked from on high at the entrance to the Golden Gate. Across all that glittering water began the tan hills of Marin County, and far to the right I could see the Golden Gate Bridge. To the left, the endless shine of the Pacific. Fort Miley was about the last piece of lofty, Lands End ground before the city fell down into the ocean, and at one time all of this—the dirt beneath the asphalt of the parking
lot, the acres of surrounding forest—was part of a military post. I wondered what it would have been like to be stationed there, on the lookout for submarines and U-boats, Japanese fire balloons. War without war. Punch a few weeks watching the horizon, then head into town on leave to assault the dance halls and bars, have an affair with some overseas hero's girl.

Coronado Tommy. My brother on the phone telling me how unbelievable San Diego women are. Hurry up and hit puberty so you can come visit me. I could use a good wingman, Maverick.

And it was there, on that sunny Tuesday at Fort Miley, that I went to talk with Joni. I'd just bought a battery at a Geary Boulevard auto-parts store when she called—a short, tongue-tied exchange that concluded with me agreeing to meet her in thirty minutes. She probably should have been in a classroom, but that wasn't for me to worry about. There was no time for a clean T-shirt, no time to do anything but hurry. I caught a bus to the stop at Forty-Eighth Avenue, then lugged my goddamn battery a quarter mile to that magnificent parking lot, not sure what to expect.

A wide concrete walkway capped the northern, cliff-top end of the car-sprinkled lot, and when I arrived Joni was waiting there, on a long wooden bench that faced the Golden Gate. Her back was to me, and except for a few sightseers we seemed to be alone. Still, this could very well have been some sting operation, and I scanned the wishbone of tree line corralling us for lawmen, Nancy, assassins. Daniel with his hammer, perhaps. Nothing appeared out of sorts, so I came up behind her, scuffing my Red Wings on the blacktop so she would hear me approaching. At five paces she glanced over her shoulder.

Jesus Christ. Those heavy bangs. That perfect, makeup-free face. It was only Joni's green eyes I couldn't make sync with Tommy in that moment—and they were fixed on the battery now. Me carrying a fucking battle-ax wouldn't have been much more off-putting. The Car Battery Killer.

“You caught me in the middle of some chores,” I explained.

“Oh,” said Joni, as if just then remembering that biological uncles toting DieHards strolled cities everywhere. “Okay.”

“Thank you for calling.” I circled around the bench, thumping the battery down next to a coin-operated tower viewer that was aimed at the water. She was wearing jeans and a denim shirt, newish Nikes with an aqua swoosh, and her long hair was in a loose bun. I wouldn't ask, but my guess was Daniel didn't know she was here after all.

Joni took in a deep breath, inflating herself until she was sitting up straight and looking at me. “I've decided not to be afraid of you,” she said.

Much of what had been pressing against my chest fell away.
My
fear. Was what she said possible? Could you simply choose not to be afraid? If she knew the trick to that I wanted to learn it from her.

“You don't need to be,” I said. “I'm sorry for surprising you yesterday. You do know I'm not a child molester, right? That I was in college, and the girl was in high school? That in December the whole thing will be behind me?”

She nodded. “We know all of that.”

“Good. Did you tell your mom what happened?”

“Yikes. No.” A wisp of hair had escaped from her bird's nest of a bun, and she pegged the fallen strand behind a multipierced ear. Silver hoops at the top and bottom, a couple of gold studs between them. “And I'm sorry too,” she said. “It was me who started this.”

I shook my head. “Don't apologize. If you hadn't written I never would have known you existed.”

But maybe that was her point. I sat down on the bench. I had no idea how to make conversation with any sixteen-year-old, much less this one. All I remembered from that age was feeling as if my real life was being lived in private daydreams. Beneath
Joni's teenage shell was a person, a personality, but by now I understood that I'd be lucky to come away from this meeting—or San Francisco, period—with even a vague sense of the actual her. There was almost a yard of space between us, and it was hard not to picture Tommy sitting in that gap, looking back and forth from brother to daughter, following our awkward talk and coaxing us both to plow forward, to not shut down and run.

“Did you call me in October?” I asked. “In the middle of the night? Was that you? Not your mother?”

The cuffs of Joni's tomboy shirt were frayed, and she pulled at one of the threads, unraveling some seam until she thought better of it and stopped herself. “Me,” she said. “I wasn't thinking. Same as when I wrote you.”

“But then I wrote
you.
Twice.” I tried to smile. “Crickets.”

In front of us, just beyond our bench, the land fell in a hard and thicketed slant to a shoreline we couldn't see. I positioned myself so I was facing Joni, and she turned my way too. “I know you did,” she said. “But I'd promised Mom.”

“So with that investigator she told me about, y'all really were seeking me out only for medical history? That's all?”

“At first.”

She crossed her legs, then uncrossed them, tucked her foot behind her knee. For a girl who had decided not to be afraid she seemed pretty nervous—as nervous as me, I'd say.

“I'd been sick all spring,” she continued. “Mom was worried there might be some genetic problem or something, and she wanted to learn as much as she could. And I'm still sick, but we didn't for sure know why until right before I sent you that e-mail.”

“Sick in what way?”

“I have Crohn's.”

“Crohn's?” Clear skin, white teeth. But Joni was a Joseph, so I braced myself for the worst. Cancer. Rabies.

“A kind of bowel disease.”

“But you'll be okay?”

“Yeah. Mainly I have to be careful what I eat, what I drink. I'll deal. At least we know what's going on.”

“Jeez, though. Are you in pain a lot?”

She put her thumb to her mouth and bit at the nail. “Can we change the subject?” She mumbled the question into her fingers, but then her voice became forceful. “I'm fine.”

“Sure. Of course.” A bowel disease. That's what it had taken for me to encounter my final living relative. “It's just so great to meet up,” I said. “Properly, I mean. Imagine what this is like for me, sitting here with you.”

“Unreal?”

“There's the word.”

A day-roaming moth landed on Joni's wrist, wings flexing, lapping at salt, and she cupped her hand over it. “And my mom and your brother. Like, did she even tell you she's gay?”

“No.”

“She says he was her last guy. Calls him her omega man.”

“Do you know anything more about them?”

“Only that she was at a party and asked him for a ride home. It embarrasses her to go into it. I've never experienced
that
Nancy.” Joni moved her hand, and the moth fluttered off. “She was twenty-nine, but I'm only four years younger than he was when he was with her. That's so insane.”

This slightly more relaxed Joni had a sleepy, laid-back way of talking, but if she would have grown up with us in north Louisiana she'd have had an altogether different type of drawl. And that bothered me somehow. “My parents should've been told about you,” I said.

Joni dipped her head as if to tell me I was preaching to the choir, but the behavior of adults was beyond her control. Look at
you, Roy. My cross-country-driving uncle. “Mom really believed it was the best for everybody,” she said. “Please don't be angry with her.”

“I wouldn't say I'm angry,” I lied. “Don't think that.”

“It was a car accident with them?”

“It was. I guess you were five when that happened.”

But I couldn't go down that road with her on this trip. Speaking about Tommy would be difficult enough. This was the communion I'd come all those miles to have, yet the suspense and intrigue of my quest to find her was leaking out of me like air from a worn tire, and I was already feeling a little blindsided and buckled. The thirteen-year-old on a porch once more. The nineteen-year-old in a dorm room.

I rattled my pack of Winstons, dropped them on the bench, picked them up. I'd yet to see Joni with a cigarette, but she asked me for one now. She was trying to make a connection, I realized, and an odd memory came to me: my father telling of Civil War sentries in no-man's-land, of Rebs and Yanks trading tobacco and news. The history teacher in him had been fascinated by that sort of thing. Richard the Lionheart losing his horse in the fighting at Arsuf and Saladin sending two replacements. The Christmas Truce on the Western Front.

“Should you?” I asked. “With the Crohn's?”

Joni began to fiddle with her shirt cuff again, then peeked at me. “Probably not.”

Still, it would have been weird for me to say no, so I lit hers, then mine, watching as she took a quick drag and exhaled. I could tell she didn't smoke much, if at all. Pot perhaps, but not cigarettes. “You don't have to finish that,” I told her.

I don't think she even heard me. She was focused on my hand, her eyebrows in a confused scrunch. The
is he a mutant?
look I get sometimes from children and strangers. Whenever I forget about
that lost finger someone comes along and reminds me.

“A wire cut it off,” I said. “I work offshore, on oil rigs—but maybe you knew that?”

Her mouth tightened and she nodded, solemn as an empress. “Do you really have a friend in San Francisco? That's for real why you're out here?”

“Yep. Viktor. I rented an apartment over by him for a week. Near Golden Gate Park.” But she wouldn't get the unabridged version of my cover story. A marriage broker? A Russian bride? I couldn't share any of that with her. “Got my dog with me,” I added, wishing I had Sam now.

“Okay. I was just—” She didn't complete the thought. “A dog?”

“A yellow Lab. Do you like dogs?”

“Definitely.” She tapped her nose. “But I'm allergic. Sucks. No puppies for me.”

“Oh. Gotcha.”

“You said you have to leave soon?”

“Thursday.” I couldn't admit the entire truth on that front either, couldn't humiliate myself like that. “It's about the finger,” I said. “Workers' comp stuff.”

Then came the rattling clatter of a diesel. I twisted around on the bench and saw a beaten school bus roll into the parking lot. Some hippie or other species of wanderer had converted the bus into a camper and painted it black. The bus stopped in the center of the lot, engine dying as a pair of long, buggy-whip arms unfolded a sunshade and blocked out the windshield. There were more cars in the lot now, people gazing at the infinite, unfathomable view like it was an enormous drive-in movie.

I turned to Joni again, watching as she reached into her shirt pocket and took out the photo I'd asked Daniel to bring to her. Seventeen-year-old Tommy was staring at me from her lap.

“Thanks for this,” she said. “Everything changed when I saw it.”

“You'd never seen a picture of him?”

“No, I had—but yours was different than the ones our investigator found. With yours I could see . . . me. Does that make sense?”

“Sure it does.” Same as how I'd felt in Café Sun, basically, seeing
her
up close for the first time.

“We both only have one dimple.” She held the photo next to her face, forcing a grin as she pointed at her cheek. The cherry of the cigarette I'd given her was inches from her eye. “Here on the left,” she said.

I hadn't noticed that, but she was right. Before today I'd mostly seen my mother when I looked at Joni—but Mom and Dad were also the Josephs I remembered best. Upstream from that river of pain was the River Tommy. The master river. He was sitting on a heart-of-darkness bank, waiting for me to reach him.

“You could almost be his twin,” I said.

“That's what Daniel thought. And you look like him too, we agreed.”

“Still?”

“Yeah. I bet this could have been you in high school.”

She put the photo back in her pocket, and as she pecked at the cigarette I envisioned me and Tommy and her somehow all young—triplet teenagers living in San Francisco together. My brother and I pay a visit to Daniel, tell him to leave our green-eyed sister alone.

“Daniel said you have a photo album?”

I pushed my hair back and nodded. “Mom had us settle on three pictures from each year of his life. She wanted a book like that. Something we could keep out.”

“Wow,” said Joni, speaking more to herself than to me. “I'd love to see it.”

“I thought you might. Sorry, but I was at the store when you called.” Though, to be honest, I was somewhat glad for that. Sixty
photographs of Tommy to walk her through? Fuck. “Maybe tomorrow?” I offered.