This Magnificent Desolation (13 page)

Tonight Duncan is at the bar, sitting next to Joshua McGreevey, an old friend of his mother's from back east, and together they watch her as she dances by herself on the worn, amber-colored parquet. Charlie Pride plays on the jukebox, and the sound of “Kiss an Angel Good Morning” fills the bar. Maggie drinks her whiskey, Old Mainline 454, straight, and while she dances, she holds the glass tenderly, as if it is something incredibly fragile. When she relinquishes her hold upon it and puts it down on the bar, Clay refills it, as he always does, and because of this Duncan can never be quite sure of how much she has had to drink, but he has often tried to count.

Joshua is singing to himself, so softly and bent so low over the bar that at first Duncan can not make out the words—there is only the melody, a haunting soothing music whose strange familiarity makes Duncan at once feel at peace. Joshua stares into the glass at the back of the bar and only pauses in his singing to drink and wipe beer froth from his mouth. His eyes burn brightly in his gaunt, black face, on his hard-looking cheekbones.
O au o. The lights in Sai Gon are green and red, the lamps in My Tho are bright and dim.
The timbre sounds deep in his chest, much like Duncan's mother's voice when she sings “Roddy McCorley,” and yet from Joshua's lips it has a breaking, fragile quality filled with yearning and tenderness. It may have been the only song Joshua knew but still Duncan thinks he has one of the sweetest voices he's ever heard.

Joshua wears what he always seems to be wearing: an old, olive-colored field jacket frayed at the upturned collar and cuffs, but there are no markings on it. The jacket does not even seem as if it belongs to him. A dark blue bandanna pulls the skin tight at his scalp. Joshua works as part of a tunneling crew on the San Padre Tunnel project seventy feet beneath the bay and to Duncan he smells pleasingly of sea silt and shale, of damp and pungent muck and
loam, as if he had been dredged from the deep bottom of the world.

Joshua stares down at Duncan, glances at the NASA Apollo patches on Duncan's denim jacket sleeves.

Ahh, Duncan, man, you don't really believe that, do you?

Believe what?

That shit that they landed someone on the moon. That was all done in Hollywood sound studios. It was all a stunt. Joshua gulps his beer and Duncan watches his Adam's apple convulse.

I believed once, kid. I believed in JFK. I believed in doing for my country, never mind what my country did for me. I joined the Special Forces. Ever see John Wayne in
The Green Berets
? What a load of shit.

Here are some facts, kid, and maybe you can tell me what you make of it all. Maybe you can explain it to me. During the moon landing they managed to beam a live TV picture back to Earth, from over 240,000 miles away. That doesn't strike you as odd? You know what television was like in the sixties? And get this, there were no delays in NASA's TV broadcast to the American public—we're talking 240,000 miles here, kiddo, and there's no delay in the transmission? C'mon. Look, we just didn't have the technology. NASA said it in '68 when they gave the odds of completing the moon landings a 0.0012 percent chance of success. They were speaking the truth, man.

Joshua tips back his beer, and bangs the empty on the bar. He stares at Duncan, and Duncan stares back. Joshua sighs. How do you figure top Hollywood execs being on NASA's payroll, including Stanley Kubrick? How do you figure that many of the shots so closely resemble shots from Kubrick's
2001
?

And tell me kid, if landing on the moon was so easy for us twenty odd years ago, how come we haven't done it since? You know why? Because we can't. And the Russians can't. No one can. We failed, kid, and that's the truth.

They landed on the moon, Duncan says, but they never took off. They died up there.

They what?

They died up there. They're still up there. Duncan tilts his head slightly and eyes the ceiling of the bar. He holds his eyes wide as he stares at Joshua.

Up there, yeah? Joshua says like an echo and touches one of Duncan's patches with a finger. Shit, you're on better stuff than the crap they give me down at the VA.

He shakes his head. C'mon kid, don't be like your Daddy.

You knew my Daddy?

Of course I knew your Daddy.

Duncan glances up the bar to see if his mother is within earshot. She's looking back as if she'd already caught him in a wrongdoing, a skill that he marvels at, and that always leaves him frustrated and yet somehow glad. But in this moment he wants her to be elsewhere; he wants to know what Joshua knows about his father.

Joshua, Mother says, and her jaws clench. Do you want me to call Clay and get you kicked out of here? Leave my son alone. He knows nothing about any of your damn conspiracies.

A smile plays on Joshua's lips. He shakes his head. Buy me a beer, Maggie, and let's forget about it. I slipped, that's all. My mistake. I confused your boy with someone else—what's your name, son? Joshua looks at Duncan, feigning confusion, blinking as if seeing Duncan for the first time. He rubs his eyes hard and stares again, opening his eyes wide, and Duncan laughs.

Yeah, I know how it is. Mother gestures toward Clay, and, as she does, she asks Joshua: Do you have your bike with you?

Sure.

If I start buying you drinks, you have to promise me you won't ride.

Joshua holds two fingers to his breast. Scout's honor.

Why don't I believe you? I'm going to put some money in the jukebox. I'll just be gone a minute. Can I trust you with my son?

Sure, Maggie. You got it.

She strides toward the jukebox, and Duncan is aware of men's eyes following her. He glances at the sway of her hips, the straightness of her back. Joshua seems to be the only man not watching. He's staring at Duncan. Suddenly he tugs hard at the patches on Duncan's sleeve, leans his mouth close to Duncan's ear so that Duncan can feel the heat of his breath, the sour smell of cheep beer, and mouths:
Kid
,
don't be like your Daddy.

His beer comes and he lifts it to his lips. To America! he shouts. To Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins! The top of the beer is frothy and the froth spills white down his chin and darkens his T-shirt. From over the rim of the large glass he winks. His Adam's apple works up and down and then he slams the glass down upon the bar.

When he looks up his eyes are red and swollen; his breath comes in deep gulps. Another beer, he says, and Clay looks at him warily. C'mon, Clay. I'm fine. Give us a motherfucking beer, would you.

This time, when the beer comes, Joshua drinks it slow, leans forward on the bar.

Maggie has put in her money and the jukebox begins to play. The sound of Billie Holiday swells around the room. When Maggie returns, she touches Joshua gently on the shoulder and squeezes. Joshua nods, sips his beer, and stares into the bar mirror. They leave before her songs are done playing. When Duncan reminds her that they haven't heard all her songs and that she's lost her money in the jukebox, she looks sad. Finally she says: They weren't for me, Duncan. They were for Joshua.

Every Friday, Duncan and Maggie attend Vespers at St. Mary of the Wharves, and listen to the choir singing
De Profundis
, the psalm of the holy souls in purgatory:
Apud Dominum misericordia, et copiosa apud eum redemptio
. And Duncan sees astronauts, not just Michael Collins, but hundreds and thousands of men adrift throughout the cosmos—faceless men with the sun reflected in their golden, mirrored visors—all dead, all desanguinated and floating through the heavens, flashing through the crystalline, neo-chrome tails of fiery comets a hundred miles long, and always, the star-spangled banner across their left shoulder blinking in the crimson and blue haze of stellar ash a hundred million years old.

He thinks of the astronauts and cosmonauts sent on space missions that the world had never heard of or been told about because of their failures—and of all the astronauts thrust into space upon the pinhead of the great
Saturn V
rockets that were still out there somewhere, lost just like his father and unable to come home. He watches
his mother mouth the words, the wet clicking of her mouth like a metronome. She smiles, and reaches for his hand, and when he takes it, and closes his eyes, he hears the longing of all those exiled from Heaven, all that pain and suffering for which prayers, in the absence of God's embrace, Father Toibin always said, offered the only succor.

Later during Mass, when the priest shakes the aspergillum and sprinkles them with holy water, Duncan turns to the back of the church and sees Joshua there, his head lowered on his forearms as if he were at the Windsor Tap and dusk has just fallen outside.

When he and Mother rise, Joshua is still sitting in his pew: head bowed, eyes closed, and looking so peaceful he might have be sleeping. But Duncan knows it's the meds that he takes, that in the evenings he often lines up on the bar and puts back with his beer. Mother sidles down the pew, lowers her head, and whispers to him, asks him to come back to the house with them, but Joshua raises his head groggily and waves her away.

In the transept, Duncan places coins in the prayer box and they clatter loudly in its bottom. He begins lighting as many candles as he can, for suddenly he feels an emptiness so vast he can put no name to it. He thinks of all the souls in purgatory lost to God and he knows that if he and his mother were to die in this very moment, they would need such a powerful intercession of grace to be with Him in His Kingdom that he fears that they might be lost forever as well.
Purgatory
resounds in his head as if his skull were the inner chamber of a bell.

Honey, who are you lighting all those candles for? Mother asks. Leave some for other people, would you?

Duncan ignores her and rests his knees on the padded rest, places his forehead against his entwined knuckles, stares at the flickering flames muted through the blue glass, smells wax and lead wick melting. The lingering odor of incense. Cool air rushing up the nave. He hears an altar boy practicing his swing of the censer for the blessing of the Eucharist, the chain taut through its pendulous stroke, and
the slight rattle of the censer at the height of that arc. Mother kneels beside him and begins praying as well, and he takes comfort in this. As they pray, her voice surging beside him, thrumming beneath the bones of his chest as when she sang to him, his fears begin to fade.

On the way out of church she takes his hand in hers and swings her arm. That was nice of you, lighting a candle for Joshua.

Duncan looks at her, and she smiles.

You always light five. I assumed the extra one was for him.

He nods.

It's important that we pray for people, most especially for people who can't help themselves.

Why can't Joshua help himself?

Mother doesn't respond, and when he asks again, she sighs. It was the war. He's not the same as the Joshua I used to know. Sometimes he does things … it's not his fault. You would have liked the old Joshua.

I like this Joshua.

I know, honey, I know. She nods and looks toward the rooftops but there is only the dark blue sky with night sinking down through it like ink. The last of the sun has sunk into the bay.

What happened to Joshua in the war? he asks.

I don't really know, honey. He doesn't talk about it. Sometimes, though, I wish he would, just so I could understand him better.

She swings his arm and their footsteps sound on the tile as they skip, but he knows that she is thinking of the Joshua she once knew and the man he was now, and in the space of those years, everything that has been lost between them.

Sundays after Mass Joshua often joins them for dinner. Sometimes he shows up, and other times they don't see him for weeks, but always Duncan waits by the bay window watching for some sight or sound of his bike—a big old Indian Chief from the fifties—coming up the hills. When Joshua is there, the house seems like a different place. The Victor hums in the corner of the room in its mahogany cabinet and Maggie wears one of her fine stage dresses from
Lucia
or
Tristan und Isolde
, which she'd stolen from the opera company before her vocal cords had knotted like wood, and in amusement he watches them play out a romance from when they were teenagers and lived in the same neighborhood, just outside Boston.

She puts out the crystal-cut sherry glasses with dinner even when Joshua and she are only drinking Liberty beer. He has always shaved and washed his hair and put on a clean dress shirt and tie beneath his field jacket, and always he rings the bell and stands at the threshold as if he were a stranger to their house and might be turned away.

And he steps into the foyer in his clean dress shirt and tie as if he were a stranger in his own skin. Lose the tie, Mother always says, and that look on your face—as if someone just died.

But whenever Joshua returns for Sunday dinner he's wearing the tie again, and looking just as awkward and out of place as he looked the first time.

Today when Duncan hears the rumbling of Joshua's Indian from a block away, he rushes from the couch and waits by the door. It's been two weeks since they saw him at the Windsor Tap, and Duncan has missed him, his absence magnified by his mother's keeping company with other men. When Joshua comes to the door, Duncan waves at him through the glass and Joshua nods, his eyes bright in their sockets—when he's been without sleep, the skin beneath his eyes looks bruised and darker than the rest of his face—then smiles and pushes the bell.

Maggie comes running from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dish towel and shaking her head. You'd think he was crossing the damn enemy's perimeter. For God's sake. Joshua, the door's open—come in!

Duncan smells his sweat, a cloudy tobacco aroma on his shirt, and the faint scent of gasoline and engine oil. He's splashed on Old Spice, something Duncan figures all fathers wear, and when he raises the bottle of Liberty to his mouth as they sit down to dinner, Duncan watches the tendons in his forearm tensing like fine metal cables. He talks about the tunnel, tells them how they have three giant tunnel-boring machines that they've named after Saint Barbara, the patron saint of miners and tunnel builders; Saint Dymphna, the saint of mental illness, because they must be mad to do such work; and the Archangel Gabriel, to ensure should they die he will hold their place with God.