This Magnificent Desolation (14 page)

Joshua says: Someone thought about calling one of the TBMs Brooke Shields, but the foreman, Minkivitz, put a stop to that. He asks the guy if he's one of those freaks who likes little girls. Hell, he
tells him, I've got a daughter older than her, what's the hell's the matter with you?

When Joshua catches Duncan staring, he nods and smiles, reaches out his hand to touch Duncan's, and his hand stays there tapping, as if to make sure Duncan is truly there or perhaps to reassure him.
My man
, he says, like a chant,
my man
.

February 1982

From his bedroom window Duncan watches old streetwalkers stumbling in their high heels on the broken slabstones before their house as they head down to the Wreck and the Barrows—and he thinks of the different types of men his mother brings home when she's drinking: Bob or Paul or Harry—sometimes Hi kid and a saw-buck or a candy bar or a comic but mostly a look of boredom or disinterest. Some of them can't even fake being interested and he thinks he likes that the best—neither of them have to lie.

For hours after they leave, his mother sits in a chair by the kitchen window looking blankly out at the night, one leg crossed tightly over the other. A Claymore burns slowly down in her hand, a large brown paper shopping bag, twisted and tightly wrung-marked from her worn but strong hands carrying them all the long way up the hill, on the small ash-burnt Formica table before her. A bare lightbulb
dangles from the cord and throws something that looks like her face onto the dark glass.

At this time of night there isn't anything to see beyond that square of black but the power lines and the train yards, where engines loudly join with their cars, so loudly it's like thunder amidst the startling screech of brakes. Perhaps she is thinking about where the trains are going and if she possibly might end up on one of them, or perhaps she is thinking about all the trains and all the destinations she had missed in her life. The reverberating echo of a horn and the clanging of the big joining rings, the BA-BOOOM! when they connected, tell of a journey about to begin once again without her, and the
Da dum-dum Da dum-dum
of the wheels striking the metal expansion joints and quickening as the train picked up speed until the sound is almost strung together like the syncopated roll of a snare drum fading into the distance—
Da dum-dum
,
Da dum-dum
—all these things a constant reminder of places she will never go and of a place she will never leave.

Duncan can't believe they have gotten used to the sound, but they have. Even those familiar strangers to the house, those small tall big fat thin men, all jumped the first time they heard it.

Before dawn Duncan shuffles into the kitchen and finds his mother sitting in there, smoking and staring through the window, watching the trains as they arrive at the rail yard and as they depart, chunting slowly between soot-gray row houses, triple-deckers, and industrial warehouses, and picking up speed as they move out into the open spaces and the east, where the first greasy light is trembling upon the horizon.

When she sees him, she looks up and smiles, says: It's still really early, honey. You should be in bed.

Can I stay up with you for a bit? he asks, and she nods and goes to heat milk on the stove.

He sits and looks through the same window: railway workers in the early morning, sluggish as they cross the rail ties, waiting, glancing dutifully at the rail signals, yet not quite awake, cigarettes flaring as they draw upon them, and the small sparks of light floating and flitting through the darkness like fireflies, lunch pails and thermoses swinging lazily in their hands. Half a dozen men have died crossing the rails in this way in the last two years, the older ones becoming inured to the danger of moving engines and locking cars, the younger ones never cautious enough. Often Duncan and his mother see them sprinting across the network of rails, between the power station's transformers, beneath the high charged cables, and toward the laborers' trailers and shacks, then turning and laughing, taunting the other workers who move from junction to junction, mindful of the signals, waving hello to the signal men, engineers, and security bulls at the end of their graveyard shifts.

Duncan stares at her and knows he needs to speak. Do I have a father? he asks. Joshua said he knew my father.

His mother picks up her smoldering Claymore from the ashtray, ash peppering the Formica, and squints at him as she inhales on it and then exhales slowly. The plume of smoke rises up to the tin ceiling and seems to hang there, churning and dark.

If I have a father, why do you never talk about him? What's so wrong?

His mother grinds the cigarette out in the ashtray. Nothing's wrong, sweetie, except there isn't anything to tell. You had a father—of course you had a father, but he died before you were born. I've told you that.

What did he die of?

She shakes her head. I don't know what he died of. He left us—okay? He left before you were born. I heard later that he'd died back east.

But you never made sure? You never wanted to find out? Perhaps he's still alive somewhere.

He's dead and there's nothing else to say. She picks up the blunted cigarette and then grinds it some more into the rust speckled tin then works at lighting another.

Duncan stares at her. You don't have any pictures of him, nothing at all?

No. If I had pictures, I would show you. We'd only known each other a short while when I became pregnant. I don't think he even knew.

Perhaps if he knew, he'd have come back.

I told you, he's dead.

What was he like?

Like I said, we only knew each other a short while. Okay, he was fine, just fine.

Well, what did he look like?

I don't know how to describe him. He was good-looking, I guess.

Do I look like him?

He has often tried to picture what his father looked like but can only imagine his own face as it stares back at him in the bathroom mirror—the mercury plating worn away so that the glass is pock-mocked with slivers of gray and black—as he brushes his teeth before bed or as he splashes cold water on his face in the mornings before school. The hollow points of large pupils dilating in dark blue irises, strawlike black hair sitting at all angles upon his head no matter how he combs it and no matter how the Spanish barber on Columbus tries to mat it down with sweet smelling pomade and brilliantine.

No. Perhaps. Jesus, I don't know, Duncan. This was over ten years ago. You look a little bit like him. You have his eyes, but then he had eyes like my father, so I suppose your eyes are from my side.

What was he like? You must have liked him to have me, didn't you?

I liked him just fine. Now will you stop with the questions? I'm sorry there isn't more to tell you, but that's just the way it is. I used
to be an opera singer, and I never thought things would change, but they did. If it wasn't for the war, Joshua might have made something of himself—he might have been anything he wanted to be. Sometimes things don't work out the way you want them to, and that's all there is to it. Your father died a long time ago, and the only thing I have to remember him by is you, and for that I thank God. She shrugs, and turns away, sucks on her cigarette.

His mother's eyes follow the next engine as it motors out over the trestle bridge above the narrow channel that divides San Listes from Mission Hill, its motor thrumming high and loud before the engineer opens it up, the halogens along the gravel rail cut glinting on the top of the engine's metal canopy and then on each successive rail car, shimmering like water flowing down their dark sides.

When you jump a train, she says suddenly, you must always make sure to move with the speed of the train, to jump and climb in one motion. If you merely reach for a handhold, the train will pull your arm out of its socket. They key is always to keep moving and to match your speed to the train's.

You jumped trains?

Maggie smiles wistfully. No, she says. Never. But I always dreamed of it.

At night Duncan sits by his bedroom window on the third floor with his copy of
The Collected Works of Douglas Graham Purdy: Tales of Horror and the Macabre
open on his lap and looks out at the same rail yard that his mother often does. He stares at the telephone lines that stretch like a jangle of dark snakes writhing toward the horizon, and he imagines the voices from all the surrounding houses and towns and cities that traveled along them and he hears hot water bubbling and gurgling in the pipes and the sounds of his mother's visitors rising with the sound of bursting bubbles—it is like listening undersea. He presses his ears to the pipes until they are too hot to stand
and the underwater voices rise and fall with the bubbles. His mother is usually quiet but sometimes he hears her offering words of comfort, encouragement, or, he guesses, whatever else they want and need to hear. And gradually those voices too meld into the eternal hum in his head, right along with the telephone lines and the electrical conducting towers and the trains thumping and banging in the rail yards beyond.

Nightly, he stares from that window and watches the strangers that pass beneath the streetlights and disappear beneath the awning of their porch; the footsteps on the wooden stairs echoing loudly, abruptly, after the soft hiss, spatter on the rain-washed street, then follows the knock at the door, and his mother's voice in greeting.

He watches them emerge at the far end of the street, these dark amorphous shapes twisting and twining themselves from shadow and molten cement, through the gray rain, rising up from the very fabric of the misty air and the sidewalk like phantasms, and he can tell, even then, by their walk, that they are coming to their house. At first it is a game he plays to pass the time, to see how often he can guess correctly, but in the end, he is always right. These men, even the way they move is predictable. He grows bored and stops counting but he continues to watch and listen, and often he falls asleep, head on his arms, arms folded on the hard surface of the windowsill and the angled surface of the radiator, half his skin cold from the cold night pushing the glass, the other half burning with the heat of the radiator he lies pressed against, and the image of men growing from the pavement and the sound of them below with his mother, and he imagines the distance from his room to the moon and of his body, disintegrated and reduced to subatomic particles, passed along a radio wave and shot out into the cosmos with the speed of a quasar, to where Michael Collins, his father, and all the lost astronauts waited in limbo.

Duncan stares out the window onto the avenue. From his mother's room down the hall he hears a man's gravel-rough voice followed by his laughter; the flick of a lighter, once, twice, butane igniting, and the inhale as a cigarette is lit; his mother's tights rasp like snakes coiling across her skin as she removes them, and then the scrape of clothing, the rustle of underthings. SQUEAK SQUEAL the beds springs shudder, BANG BANG the headboard hammers faster and faster and harder and harder, and then JESUS, FUCKING JESUS YEAH.

Water thrums in the pipes and bubbles in the radiators. The window blooms white with Duncan's breath; the cold from outside tightens the skin at the top of his brow. A door opens, closes. Urine splashing in the bathroom, the sound resounding off the porcelain and tiles. A man hacking phlegm and then flushing. Duncan closes his eyes. Footsteps recede, and he imagines they are going down the stairs, out the front door, down the street and the hill to the city,
and never coming back. But the front door never opens and then the bed begins to move again, the walls shudder, and his mother's voice calls out as if in pain. The man's voice rises, swearing at his mother, calling her all manner of terrible things, so that Duncan raises the volume on the Vulcanite radio as loud as it will go, places his hands over his ears, buries his head beneath the blankets, and tries to lose himself in the numbing, swirling dark.

110:08:53 COLLINS: Houston, Columbia on the high gain. Over
.

110:08:55 MCCANDLESS: Columbia, this is Houston. Reading you loud and clear. Over.

110:09:03 COLLINS: Yeah. Reading you loud and clear. How's it going?

110:09:05 MCCANDLESS: Roger. The EVA is progressing beautifully. I believe they are setting up the flag now
.

110:09:14 COLLINS: Great!

110:09:18 MCCANDLESS: I guess you're about the only person around that doesn't have TV coverage of the scene.

110:09:25 COLLINS: That's all right. I don't mind a bit. [Pause] How is the quality of the TV?

110:09:35 MCCANDLESS: Oh, it's beautiful, Mike. It really is.

110:09:39 COLLINS: Oh, gee, that's great! Is the lighting halfway decent?

110:09:43 MCCANDLESS: Yes, indeed. They've got the flag up now and you can see the stars and stripes on the lunar surface
.

110:09:50 COLLINS: Beautiful. Just beautiful
.

April 1982

Maggie sang Elizabethan madrigals and Catholic hymns and Baptist choruses and the low blue notes of Muddy Waters from the bottom of the Mississippi Delta. And in all of this she searched for the divine, those notes and measures that could hold the soul, make the heart ache, and break it in two. These songs shared a special grace, for in them, Duncan knows, she found her way to God and, perhaps, as she sang, imagined what she was once capable of.

I lost my voice, she says, and had to leave the opera. She runs a finger along her throat. And after
him
, I lost everything else. I was ruined.

Duncan cannot tell if she means his father, and, at times, he even wonders if she might mean him. After all, she's risked so much taking him from the Home and has sacrificed so much for him, including her career. If there is anyone to be blamed for where she is now, it is him; he is the one who has truly ruined her.