The Other Joseph (9 page)

“No. As his nickname.”

He shook his head. “No way anybody would ever get called that. We weren't X-Men.”

“You told us it was Orion. I'm not wrong.”

“Who's
us
?”

“Me and my parents.”

“Nice folks, your parents. They know you're here?”

I told him about Mom and Dad, and he winced.

“Fuck, man. Orion? Don't recall ever saying that. Sorry. Sixteen years is a long time.”

I was getting frustrated. “Tell me about
Ahab,
then. Why that?”

A Peterbilt had rolled into the gravel lot behind Rhonda's Ranch. I watched the rig's rawboned driver walk around to the front door of the windowless building and go inside. A long while passed before Lionel spoke. Long enough to make me wonder if he was about to lie to me.

“Okay,” he said. “You need to understand, those names some of us got pinned with, they didn't mean jack, not really. School, they called me. As in Old School, because I was older. Before that it was Cowboy.” He plucked his finger against the brim of his hat. “So I want you to know it's not rocket surgery.”

Just then, beneath a
WIFI AVAILABLE HERE
sign, a side door to Rhonda's Ranch opened and a grown woman in pigtails waved at us. She was wearing a short plaid skirt and white knee socks.

“Trick or treat,” said Lionel.

“That's tomorrow.”

“Every day be Halloween over there. They got costume after costume.”

The trucker came out with the woman, and they walked to his rig, climbed up into the cab. The door slammed shut, and Lionel
spit. “If the gal's willing, some dudes prefer that,” he explained. “Don't like making it on a whorehouse mattress.”

I didn't say anything. I was thinking about that lingerie girl Sierra. What a world. A place where money can buy you pretty much whatever. A bride, even.

The Walker hounds were at it again, but this time Lionel didn't hush them. “I'd been nine years on the West Coast when your brother was awarded his Trident and assigned to my platoon in Team FIVE,” he said. “Then the kid was on operator fast track once Saddam invaded Kuwait. Most of the already-deployed SEALs were stuck in the Philippines or floating on amphibs with Marines, and none of them were gonna be sprung for the desert. So uncommitted, on-deck stateside platoons were the first ones to go, by and large, and we got sped through the final phases of our pre-deployment workup so we could head over.” Lionel turned his chair to face mine. “He was my baby boy. I was the one who dubbed him Ahab.”

“Ahab like in
Moby Dick
?”

“Nah. Ahab like in ‘Ahab the A-rab' by Ray Stevens.”

“The country singer who had all the joke songs?”

“They weren't all joke songs. The man recorded ‘Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down' before either Kristofferson
or
Cash.” Lionel made double fists and started punching them together. “So there was a one-star carrier group commander up at North Island, old Vietnam jet-jock type, uglier than a hat full of assholes, but he had this daughter. Misty. Crazy gal, but a fine thing. She came home from college for the summer and was living with Daddy in Coronado. Ahab wouldn't ever talk about it, but rumor was MPs caught him and Misty somewhere they had no business being, doing the deed. They decided to spare him from having his balls cut off—but then one of them told me, and from then on, I'd see your brother, especially around any officers, I'd sing a Ray Stevens
song. Not ‘Misty,' that would've been too obvious, but the rest of them. ‘The Streak,' ‘Harry the Hairy Ape,' that one about the squirrel getting loose in the church.”

“And ‘Ahab the A-rab.'”

“Bingo. Before long we all just settled on that. He pulled chicks, Ahab. He could get laid in the middle of Temple Square.”

I waited for Lionel to keep going, but he was through. It was only the hounds now. They worked themselves into one last frenzy, then shut down as well.

“Yup,” said Lionel. “It's a nothing story. I probably thought Orion would seem bigger.”

I nodded, but in truth I did like hearing about Tommy sneaking around with a girl. The chapter of his life that came after Dry Springs but before he was summoned to war. There were two Tommys. The rural, bangs-in-the-face rebel I am so afraid of forgetting, and the on-top-of-the-world, cut-from-iron SEAL I barely even knew.

“Okay, but that wasn't all you said to me. You remember?”

He shrugged. “I did a lot of drinking that trip. I remember
that
.”

“You said he went out like a hero. Those were your exact words, more or less.”

“Really?”

“If there's stuff you're not supposed to tell, I understand—but I swear it would stay with me.”

Lionel crossed his arms and leaned forward. “There's nothing to tell. It was after dark, and we were on a mission rehearsal when a chip light came on in our helo. Mayday, autorotation. But the pilots still had some control over her, so the crew chief ordered us out with him before they'd have to ditch and do their egress. Ahab must've hit the water too hard and blacked, got swept off by the current. I don't know.”

“That's the same as what the navy told us.”

“Well, that was what happened. I'm sorry, man. You were just a kid. It's like me saying his name was Orion, I'd wager. My drunk ass thinking something bigger might be better for you.”

I made a quick, laughing sound. “For half my life I've been carrying around what you told me that night.”

“Fuck.” Lionel stomped his boot on the plywood of the deck. “Still, that don't mean he wasn't a hero—having it go like it did.”

He seemed upset, and I doubted he was acting. Not now, at least. His eyes were on the deck, and he looked as if he was waiting to be sentenced. This wasn't what I had wanted. I had no intention of crossing the country just to spread poison. Lionel had been Tommy's friend. For all I knew he had told me what I'd needed to hear back then.

“It's all right,” I said. “You didn't do anything wrong.”

I PASSED MOST OF THE DAY
in the shed with Lionel, helping him install KC lights across the hardtop of a jeep he kept parked in there. A two-seater military Willys from the forties, about as simple to monkey with as a lawn mower.

It was nice to take it easy and work at a problem I knew could be solved. Earlier Lionel had pointed to a far range of high mountains and told me they were the Rubies. Apparently he spent a lot of time with his Willys in those mountains, and I'd been lucky to catch him in town. He said he paid a kid down the road to collect his mail and tend to the hounds whenever he was away—his own little Jack Hebert—and besides monthly bills to send out and retirement checks to deposit, that was about it for Lionel's obligations and responsibilities.

I've heard some say that there are water people and mountain people, and though a man might certainly enjoy both, his soul is forever aligned with one or the other. If that is true, then with me it's water. I appreciate the beauty of mountains, but after a while
among them I'm sure I would ache from an awareness of being landlocked, hemmed in. Even on an oil rig, with all of us living on top of one another, no real privacy to be found, I could look at Gulf waters and feel a loosening.

Lionel, on the other hand, clung to mountains. He'd let on that he was almost two years sober thanks to AA, and that once he got sick and tired of always being sick and tired, nature— more specifically, the Ruby Mountains—had been his choice for a higher power. Something greater than himself. He told me he found solitude without loneliness in the mountains, and I remember the way he squinted at those distant Rubies while we talked. Like he couldn't wait for our conversation to end so he could bolt up there before winter snows came. I sensed he had gotten more than his fill of water during his career in the navy, and I'll admit that what freedom I see in sparkling depths is mostly an illusion. That water traps me more than it liberates me. That gazing from some island or some rig, I'm not any more free than a man staring out the window of a jail cell. But you are what you are.

IT WAS MAYBE
five o'clock when we finished installing and wiring the KC lights. The temperature was dropping, and I went with Sam to let him run the scrubland. When we returned I saw Lionel standing at his property line. He was talking to one of the women from Rhonda's Ranch. Despite the cold she was dressed as a pink genie, had on a bubble-gum-colored veil and so forth. Platform heels. Lionel waved when he saw me, then said something to the genie. She rubbed her naked arms and hugged him before wobbling back inside.

I waited on the deck of the trailer as Lionel came striding over. “You hungry?” he asked.

“Starved.” Except for a few strips of venison jerky he'd given me
in the shed earlier, I hadn't eaten since breakfast. “Can I buy you dinner somewhere?”

“We just got invited to supper at Rhonda's.”

“Was that Rhonda?”

“There's not a Rhonda. Not no more.”

“They serve food there?”

“Microwave pizzas and shit. Jell-O. Whipped cream.”

“I'm not looking for anything but dinner.”

He laughed and climbed the steps to join me. “You think I am? I get to see all the mouth breathers coming in and out of there.” He went to the edge of the deck. The sun was setting, and he went quiet to watch. For a moment the world was red. “San Francisco. You're sure you wanna go?”

“Yeah. Thursday. That girl, you know? I feel like I've got to.”

Lionel nodded, then vaulted off the deck, spreading his long arms like he was a batman. His boots landed hard in the dirt, and he stumbled. I could tell he'd hurt himself. It was a dumb thing to do; he wasn't a young guy. He turned and started limping sideways toward the shed. “Then forget Rhonda's,” he said. “Let me show you my mountains.”

L
IONEL HAD PAINTED THE WILLYS DULL BROWN AND
mounted electric winches to the front and rear bumpers. The tires were wide rock-crawlers, and there was a spare and a fuel canister anchored to the swinging tailgate. The Rubies lay to the east of Battle Mountain, back the way I'd already come, and when we were through eating at an interstate McDonald's Lionel drove seventy I-80 miles to the city of Elko. The hardtop was fairly light-gauge steel, and though the Willys could only do about sixty, tops, between the wind and the whine of those off-road tires it was too noisy for much talking. Instead I just sipped my hot coffee as every car passed us.

In Elko we left I-80 and went south for a long stretch. It was a black night, and once the lights of the city were behind us the sky became pinholed with stars. The highway, then a road, then another road, one that kinked and twisted as it rose into the Rubies. It was very cold out now, at least for my Louisiana blood, and the Willys didn't have a heater. Before we left I'd put on a flannel shirt, tugged a pair of sweatpants over my jeans, and Lionel had given me a knit hat and a heavy Carhartt coat to wear as well. I thought about Sam, locked in a kennel beside one of those rangy lion dogs. Stay warm too, buddy. Try to eat your
food, and I'll be back tomorrow. This is just something I think I need to be doing.

We made sharp turn after sharp turn, then the headlights of the Willys played across the smooth white trunks of aspens. Lionel slowed down, and we left the blacktop for a narrow dirt road that led into the aspen grove. We were surrounded by Forest Service land, but Lionel told me this road, and the mountaintop acreage it would take us to, had belonged to the Purcell family for generations. He was like me. A rich poor man or a poor rich man, depending on how you wanted to look at it.

“My sod,” he said. “My birthright.” He flipped his new KC lights on, and more of the aspens were revealed. “And away we go. Hold on, little brother.”

We started off all right, but as the grade steepened the dirt road gave way to rocks, the Willys bucking and bouncing as we crept over them. I could see then why Lionel had said we shouldn't bring Sam. He'd have hated the hell out of this.

After a breakneck fifteen minutes the aspens thinned and pines appeared. My ears popped, and Lionel told me we were pretty high now, around eight thousand feet. “Not much farther,” he said.

There was a final series of hairpin switchbacks, followed by a straight climb that pinned my head against the seat. I couldn't see past the hood of the Willys, and lying back like that—feeling the weight of my own body as we pushed directly up the slope, watching stars slide across the windshield—I felt like an astronaut. The Willys churned along, and on either side of us the ground fell away into blackness. On neighboring mountains a few campfires were burning.

“Deer hunters,” said Lionel, and when at last we leveled he looked at me and smiled. “We're here. Come sunup you'll shit seeing what we just did.”

We drove on through pines and came to a small meadow.
It was close to ten o'clock, and I was sapped. Lionel killed the engine but left the KC lights on. I helped him make camp. He unfolded two plastic ground cloths from the back of the Willys, then we set up a pair of one-man tents that were like neon cocoons. He punted my sleeping bag to me.

“There you go,” he said. “I'm gonna build a fire.”

I freed the sleeping bag from a stuff sack and squared it out inside my tent—but now, with my bed all situated and waiting, for some reason I wasn't as tired as before. Lionel was hunched down next to a ring of stones, organizing logs atop kindling within, and I went over to him. He handed me a long black flashlight and pointed off into the darkness. “Follow that trail till you reach the first pine tree,” he said. “I've got a cache of wood under some Visqueen. Grab us another armload?”

By the time I returned a fire was crackling, softening the cold, and Lionel had shut all the lights on the Willys. I dumped my wood beside the fire and sat on the ground. “So,” I said.

“Yup,” he said. “So.” He had his boots off. The grass around the fire ring had been beaten down, and he lay back, tilting his cowboy hat until the brim covered his eyes. “I fall asleep you let me be. I'll make it to my tent.”

I nodded and lit a cigarette from the punk end of a kindling twig. Peaceful, calm. I watched the fire for a while, the sparks chasing sparks as Lionel began to snore, and pretended Tommy was asleep in some third tent and would see me in the morning.

He took me camping once. We were in Arkansas, near a place Hernando de Soto was said to have sojourned the summer before his men sank his corpse into the Mississippi River. I was no more than nine, Tommy's hair was still long, and a girl in my class had died that same week. Meningitis. She was a friend, but either I didn't want to go to the funeral with my parents, or Mom and Dad thought I was too young to be there. So instead I went with my brother to Arkansas, and that night, by a fire that looked a
lot like this fire, Tommy taught me how to whistle. Teasing me until I had it down. And though we talked about everything but death, I knew he was watching me. That the whole reason we'd come was so he could make sure I was okay.

THE NEXT DAY
I woke confused. I'd shed my Red Wings and sweatpants, Lionel's canvas Carhartt, but I was still in my jeans and flannel shirt. I felt greasy and feverish. My head was killing me due to the altitude, and even my hair reeked of stale wood-smoke. Then there was a sound like quiet thunder. It was only when I heard a second far-off and echoing boom that I realized someone was firing a high-powered rifle. Somewhere a mule deer was probably dead or dying.

I crawled out of the tent and pulled on my boots. The morning was gorgeous and crisp, but the thin, dry air was tough for me to breathe. Birds were calling, the sky as blue as I'd ever seen it anywhere. Our campsite was on the flat of a sort of plateau, and the snowcapped peaks of taller mountains crowded against us. We were in the last of the alpine tree line; our meadow was encircled by tart-smelling pines. Just six days ago I'd set off from the marshlands of Louisiana, and tomorrow I'd begin searching for Joni in San Francisco. America. Amazing.

Lionel didn't look to be stirring, so I walked to the Willys. Time to explore some. I followed our tire tracks into the pines for about a hundred yards, then stopped where the land dropped off but the jeep trail kept on, running down the slender backbone of a steep ridge. Deep gullies flanked the ridge, and the sheer slopes were scaled with loose plates of shale. A few feet to the left or right of those twin ruts and the Willys would have rolled, no problem. Rolled, then plummeted. Far below that Nevada ridge I thought I could see an asphalt ribbon of road, but from where I was standing it seemed no wider than the veins in my wrist.
Place me at the top of a ladder, or even the railing of an oil rig, my legs almost always get weak. It's like I don't trust myself not to lurch forward or fall. It's like that is completely out of my control. My stomach did a dizzy jump, and I turned away before my knees buckled. We would have to leave the way we came, but there was no point in fretting over that yet.

Lionel's tent was still zipped when I got back to camp, and I opened the lid of the steel box that took up the rear of the Willys. I'd brought a few things along with me, and Lionel had all sorts of supplies stored in there as well. I sat on the bumper, brushed my teeth and washed my face with water from a gallon jug—then stripped off my clothes and slapped on some deodorant, changed socks and jockeys before putting the same jeans and flannel shirt back on again. With nothing else to do I went over to the fire ring. Several orange coals were half buried in ashes, and I pushed them together with a machete Lionel had left stabbed into the dirt. Next, I cut slivers from a dry log, adding the shavings and blowing softly until I'd coaxed a flame. Once I had that good and going I fed twigs and then sticks and then logs.

For a thousand years or more, long before this meadow had come to be Lionel's, men had maybe lazed hereabouts doing what I was doing then. And I was musing on that when I saw Lionel emerge from the pines. He was walking toward me, and strapped to his back was a coffin-shaped camouflage bag that looked big enough to hold golf clubs. I guess he'd brought that bag with us in the Willys, but I hadn't seen it before now.

“Happy Halloween,” he said.

I rose and swatted the ash and dust from my jeans. “I thought you were still asleep.”

“Been up since dawn.” He shrugged the bag off, then hung it from the nub of a broken pine limb. “Pretty here, right?”

I nodded. It was.

He came and stood by the fire. “I'll brew us some coffee. And there's eggs and bacon in one of them Igloos.”

“What's that?” I asked, pointing over at the bag.

“You call that a drag bag. But inside, hooyah, an SR-25. My precious. Semiautomatic, .308 sniper rifle. Almost eight grand she cost, pimped and scoped.”

I watched him to see if he was kidding, but he didn't appear to be. “That was you shooting earlier?”

“Just keeping sharp, sending a few downrange. Target practice.”

“Two shots were all I heard.”

He laughed. “Don't need much practice. Not at a buck a blast.” He went to the Willys and began digging around in the back. “Let's eat. I'll give you a demo later.”

AFTER BREAKFAST
we hiked about a half mile from camp. Lionel still seemed to be limping slightly from his batman deck-leap at the trailer, and though, as a felon, playing gun bearer made me nervous, I'd volunteered to lug his sniper rifle. With gun, gear, and ammo, the drag bag weighed at least thirty pounds, but the shoulder straps and waist belt allowed for easy enough carrying.

A little after nine o'clock we came to a shelf of granite that looked down onto a deep valley separating us from the next mountain over. We were even with the spot on that other mountain where its own trees petered out, surrendering to a steep, rocky summit dotted with patches of green grass and dirty snow. Lionel took the drag bag from me. Stacked boughs of recently snapped pine had been arranged along the rim of the rock shelf, and I realized this was a blind of sorts he must have built that morning. He opened the drag bag. The SR-25 was about four feet long, and except for the rifle scope, the matte-black .308 resembled a machine gun.

Lionel danced his fingers across a length of steel tubing that
had been fixed to the muzzle. “A suppressor,” he said. “Helps knock down the recoil, but also hides the muzzle flash and cuts back on my dust signature, that and toys with the sound of the report quite a bit.” He gave me a look like a patient teacher. “So then no one knows where you're shooting from.”

“I take it you wouldn't want them to?”

“I surely wouldn't.”

“That's legal? A suppressor?”

“Is in the Silver State.”

He pushed a box magazine into the bottom of the rifle, then slammed one of his dollar rounds into the chamber. Unzipped, the drag bag had butterflied into two padded shooting mats, and he positioned the .308 between them, propping it up on the legs of a folding bipod.

“Ever hear of a snow cock?” he asked.

I stood watching as he removed a large pair of binoculars and a handheld spotting scope from a day pack he'd brought along. “Snow cock?”

“A Himalayan snow cock. It's a bird. About the size of a chicken.” He told me to lie down, and we both wriggled onto a shooting mat. Him to the left of the rifle, me to the right. “They're from Asia,” he said. “When I was a kid the state got some from Pakistan and started releasing them all through the Rubies. They reckon we have upwards of a thousand now. Our own resident population here in Nevada.”

“And you like to shoot them? Is that what we're doing?” Snipe hunt, I was thinking—but I'd let him clown me.

“
At
them. I miss way more than I hit, if we're being honest. A chicken at six, seven hundred yards? Wind blowing? Good luck.” He took out his can of Copenhagen. “Beats paper targets, though. Look around you, dude. Sweet as anything still left in this country.”

“No doubt.”

“Then tell me, tell me what breed of man sees these mountains and says to himself, Shucks, we don't have any Pakistani birds—who thinks that way?” He worked a pinch of tobacco into his mouth, then returned the can to his shirt pocket. “People need to learn how to leave things alone. And if they can't do that they should be putting wolves back in the Rubies. Even the elk and bear are all gone. Grizzlies and blacks, both.” He spit into the pine boughs bunched around us. “But wolves and bears would be too fucking real. It's all got to do with creating the illusion of wilderness now.”

“You ever been married, Lionel? Have children?”

“Nope. You?”

“No.”

“Why you asking?”

“Just wondering.” I pointed across the valley. “That your land too?”

“You know it's not.”

“But what about the law? I know
this
can't be legal.”

He glanced over at me. “You on the lam or something? And what kind of law you mean anyway?”

“The kind with the badges and the guns.”

“Meh. On the one side there's the government and its piles and piles of laws, but on the other side you have what some call Natural Law.” He formed his hands into a V. “When they diverge I go with the Greeks. End of story.”

I nodded like I knew what he was talking about.

“Get comfortable.” He patted my shooting mat. “It's the right thing, trust me. This is a noble endeavor. Civil disobedience, Thoreau, et cetera, et cetera.” He sighed. “They'll find a way to steal it from me one day, Roy.”

Again I nodded, only this time I understood exactly what he was saying. That in the end they will take whatever they want.

FOR THE BETTER PART
of an hour we lay in the sniper's nest, glassing above the tree line on the opposite mountainside with the binoculars and the spotting scope. Lionel swore that while I'd slept that morning he had seen a half-dozen snow cocks on the mountain we were watching, claimed he'd let loose at two of them before the flock scattered. He thought they should be in the area still, that the birds might return to resume feeding as the day wore on.