This Magnificent Desolation (38 page)

I don't know.

Joshua nods. I keep thinking about Jamie Minkivitz, he says. I keep thinking about Javier and the others … my friends … I can't seem to stop thinking these days. He sighs, throws his cigarette butt out to the water, puts his long arms wide and something in his back cracks. He rolls his shoulders, stretches his head upon his neck. Too many thoughts, my man. A man isn't made to think so much.

He sighs. I need to go on a little recon, he says, and when he grins, his teeth flash. I won't be long. Keep the home fires burning, kiddo. His face looks lean and taut in the gray light, the skin pulled tight over his brow.

What are you doing? Duncan asks, and Joshua pauses and something comes across his face—fear? Confusion? Sadness?—and he reaches for Duncan's hand and pulls him close. My man, he says, my man. You're going to be a better man than me, a better man than your father. In a while this will all make sense to you. Just don't be angry with me, okay? You'll know that this is what I had to do, you'll know that. He squeezes Duncan hard and then lets go.

When Joshua turns, shadows play upon his back, and as he walks toward the guardrail, Duncan's throat tightens: Below large, rounded shoulders his back is scar tissue, the color of blackened meat. Joshua pads down the stones as if they are hard on the soles of his feet, and he might have been a child at the beach about to take a midsummer dip but for the arcs of the halogens, the cars humming over the metal dividers, the empty beer cans lining the wall, the smell of butane and gasoline exhaust, and his wound from the war.

Joshua eases himself over the edge and slips slowly down into the murky black. He begins stroking his way out into the bay: strong, fluid strokes that seem effortless. His skin glistens in the dark waters and then he is almost lost in it. He turns, and for a while floats on his back. He raises a hand and waves and the current carries him farther and farther out. Sound comes on the air, Joshua singing
O au o. The lights in Sai Gon are green and red, the lamps in My Tho are bright and dim. O au o.
High up and out over the bay cars hiss over the bridge; high-density sodium bulbs glitter along its length. Upon its towers airway beacons flash on and off. A foghorn blows out in the bay and the top of the water bends with shuddering parabolas of silver.

Duncan cups his hands together and shouts his name—
Joshua!
—once, twice, and a third time, but there is no reply. He climbs over the guardrail, races up and down the embankment, stumbling and slipping on the slick shale, hollering Joshua, Joshua, Joshua, and tears of panic come streaming down his cheeks and still Joshua does not call back to him. The waters lie unbroken but for the sharp black edges of the towers emerging from the strait, as beneath the far bridge everything churns relentlessly toward the Pacific.

On Joshua's bike seat, wrapped in the center folds of his greasy bandanna, he has left behind the mangled bullet that had been shot through his family's home in Brighton and six medals. Beneath the halogens, the tarnished metal gleams dully. Only later will Duncan
learn that one is the Medal of Honor, one the Distinguished Service Cross, and another the Silver Star, the highest commendations a soldier can be awarded: all for uncommon valor. Another is the Purple Heart. Duncan folds them back into the cloth and holds them tightly in his hands. In Joshua's field jacket pocket vials of doxepin, prazosin, librium, and diazepam, their seals closed, and the date on the prescription from a month before. When it grows cold, Duncan slides his arms into the jacket and zippers it to his neck so that he is lost in the size of it. He smells engine oil and Brilliantine and Old Spice; he smells Joshua's tannic sweat.

The constellations turn slowly in their orbits: a satellite flickers at the close edge of space. It's a full moon and Duncan can see its craters and its rippled hills, almost see where Neil Armstrong's boot prints remain perfectly preserved, just the same as when he'd first touched its inviolate surface two decades before. On the moon nothing changes. Neil Armstrong is sitting at the bar of the Windsor Tap in his spacesuit, drinking a Budweiser, and Duncan's father sits next to him, great wings draped over his bowed and bent shoulders and spread on the bar before them and tremoring impotently upon the scarred and burnt wood. Joshua strides barefoot on the moon, and Michael Collins waves from the window of the command module as he passes above the Sea of Tranquility at the perigee of his orbit, but Joshua pays him no mind: He is all alone and far from God. Duncan's mother, locked in her bedroom, listens to the Magnificat on their Victrola, finishes her bottle of Old Mainline 454, and dreams of a time when she sang like Maria Callas, and somewhere out in the dark, like a spark of dimming light, Elvis sings a halting version of “Blue Moon,” and angels are falling with hundreds of dead astronauts through space and no matter their struggles never any closer to God.

Duncan sits on the bike and watches the moon track across the sky and the light bruise in the east. And still he stares out at the water, waiting. But there is nothing there. Joshua is gone. Dawn
comes slowly up over the rooftops of the factory, and when the lights on the bridge wink out, one by one, Duncan walks to the twenty-four-hour diner and calls his mother to come get him and take him home.

Days and then weeks pass and there is no word of Joshua. After work each day Mother is too drained to eat and merely wants to collapse upon the sofa bed in the living room but Duncan heats some lasagne that Magdalene left at their door earlier in the day, tinned vegetables or chicken soup and perhaps makes pasta or rice—dishes he'd learned from Joshua on those nights when mother worked the second shift at St. Luke's or was singing at the Windsor. The gas has been cut off for the last month and he cooks on a small Primus stove, oil from the butane cylinders flickering small and blue in the dark of the room. When the food is ready, he sits with her at the table in the kitchen, watching her eat—masticating a small mouthful of food until it is mush—and urging her to eat more.

Swallow, Mom, he says, and take another bite.

She puts her knife and fork down on the table. I can't, she says. I'm full. Look how much I've eaten.

You've barely touched it. C'mon, another four bites. You can do it.

He scans the channels on Brother Canice's radio for music, but nothing comes except a low hum and brief static. He listens for the beep and squeak frequency of passing satellites, for the voices of the astronauts, for Michael Collins, but although he knows they are up there somewhere a hundred thousand miles distant, tumbling and cold and lost in their numb revolving halfsleep, the San Francisco night sky is empty, and when he peers from the greasy front window, even the stars seem to have collapsed into the void.

When he can no longer urge her to eat more, Maggie pushes back her plate and climbs onto the fold-out bed, the thin mattress sinking and the frame groaning beneath her, and Duncan turns on the black-and-white to
Dallas
, the sound of it somehow comforting, reverberating off the faux-wood paneled walls, and Maggie leans toward the picture, watching until her eyes grow heavy. On the table by the bed, like a bottle of medication, sits her whiskey, its umber liquid half finished.

After a moment, he looks to the fold-out. Mother lies there, staring at the ceiling, hands crossed over the hard stone of her swollen belly. Every so often the Primus stove gives off small belches of liquid fuel, startling him.

He turns down the volume on the television set and watches her. She's as still as a corpse. What does she see on the ceiling, on the tin? Angels perhaps. Bearing her up to that place where Joshua has already gone. Perhaps Joshua, now with the wings of an angel, is carrying her. The black-and-white images flash silently on the screen. He listens for the sound of her breathing.

Mom? he says, and she turns briefly in his direction, her eyes glassy and unseeing.

Are you okay?

Her face contorts in silent, anguished pain. Wind trembles the room, like some small boat pitching upon a sea; a soft rain patters upon the windows.

No, she groans. I don't feel so well.

Mom, you need a doctor.

Finally: I'm okay. But then, as pain grips her gut, she grimaces, turns onto her side.

Mom, I think you need a doctor.

No, she shakes her head. No, Duncan. I'll be fine in the morning. I just need to sleep.

And then more softly: I'll be fine.

Mom?

Mom?

But she is asleep again, and after a moment, Duncan looks back to the television, stares vacantly at is flickering black-and-white images, turns the volume loud so that he doesn't have to hear the empty silence and his own fear churning in his head and belly. He climbs onto the mattress next to his mother, places his arms about her and his ear against her heart, listens to it thumping meekly in her chest.

After twenty-nine days the harbor patrol and police finally give up their search for Joshua and declare his death a drowning: body unrecovered. Once he's pronounced dead, Maggie arranges a funeral service, and the Veterans Administration sends a group of three army riflemen to Joshua's funeral at the St. Mary of the Wharves graveyard, which sits on the small, grass-covered hill overlooking the Barrows and from which Duncan, Maggie, Magdalene, and the other mourners can see the narrow channel of water undulating as dark and sinuous as muscle on this gray, overcast morning.

The soldiers lift their guns and, at the command, fire, then again, three times in all. A group of young, clean-shaven Rangers, in their field colors, stand at rigorous attention, saluting. In various straggling groups about the grave stand Vietnam vets. Magdalene, holding a small bouquet of wildflowers, keeps her head lowered; her mouth moves silently in prayer. Maggie grasps Duncan's hand and stares
blankly at Joshua's coffin, plain particleboard painted brown, all that she could afford, although it so pained and shamed her to give Joshua so little that Duncan could hear her weeping after she got off the phone with the funeral home.

When the soldiers are done, the sergeant withdraws the American flag from the coffin and, folding it into a triangle, hands it to Maggie, who moves to the bottom of the grave, where Duncan imagines Joshua's feet lie, or would have lain had the coffin not been empty. Magdalene lays her bouquet on the wood and Maggie mouths, Thank you. A recording of “Taps” plays from a tape recorder that the soldiers have brought, sounding tinny and slow, as if the batteries are dying, and then it ends and the tape recorder loudly clicks off.

At the Winsdor Tap the bar and dance floor are thronged with people, laborers from the second and third tunnel crews, a shop steward and BA from the union hall, veterans, their girlfriends and wives, and workers from the VA. There are also dockworkers and stevedores, local shopkeepers from along Divisadero, and auto mechanics Joshua had, at various times, worked for. Duncan watches Father Brennan from St. Mary of the Wharves moving amongst the crowd, shaking hands.

Clay has left tin buckets on the bar, at the entrance, and by the toilets for donations to help pay for Joshua's burial fees, and within a short time these are brimming with five- and ten-dollar bills. After a petition by Clay and the San Francisco Veterans of Vietnam Community, the VA had provided five hundred dollars toward his burial, and Clay holds up the check so that everyone can mock and laugh at it.

The jukebox is playing but around dusk, when a pale yellow light seeps in through the thick glass cubes that pass for windows and twilight takes hold of everyone's mood, a type of sluggishness comes
into the room, the heady and often loud talk of a few hours before has died and now the words spoken are subdued and muted by the clinking of glasses and the clatter of beer bottles. Some friends of Joshua's are drinking shots of tequila at the bar, lining them up and turning them on their ends as they empty them, shouting together in Spanish and nodding passionately with each shot and as the empty glasses tumble across the wood. Duncan watches as one begins to cry and reaches out to hug another. The smell of backup from the toilets seeps through the room and mingles with the heavy, eye-burning clouds of cigarette smoke. Mother's band, Ray Cooper and the Hi-Fidelity Blu-Tones, begin to assemble their gear upon the stage. And amidst all of this, his mother sits at the bar wearing her blue sequined stage dress. Joshua's field jacket is draped about her shoulders and she keeps tugging at it as if she is cold.

You know, Mags, you don't need to sing tonight, Clay says. He reaches across the bar to hold her hand, takes it between his, and rubs briskly. Thanks, she says. You know, Clay, I don't think that I can. Not right now. If it's all right with you, tonight perhaps I'll just let the band do their thing. Tomorrow night I'll sing, tomorrow night or the next night I'll sing for Joshua.

Sure, Mags, sure. Whatever you want. Just let me turn up the heat in here before you freeze to death.

But the room is already warm. Duncan sways, suddenly lightheaded, the heat of so many people pressed against him that he has to focus on breathing deeply through his nostrils. The smell of grease from the grill as Clay cooks some burgers puts his stomach roiling. His mother drains the whiskey in her glass but Clay doesn't refill it. She stares, eyes red-shot and unblinking, into the mirror behind the bar and quietly taps the empty glass upon the wood. Duncan looks at her reflection in the mirror, searching for her eyes. He puts his arm about her shoulder, and when she looks at his face in the glass, he mouths the words: It's okay, Mom. Her eyes blink and look through him and she continues to tap the bar
sharply with her glass until Clay brings her a bottle of Old Mainline 454.

Late that night they stagger home, with Duncan holding tight to Maggie's waist and Maggie seeming to lean her full weight upon his shoulder, as they lurch stumbling up Ipswich Hill from the Bottoms with a quarter moon glinting like a scythe suspended above them.