This Magnificent Desolation (34 page)

Who did this to you?

It's nothing Maggie. No one did anything to me.

Who did this? Is it someone from this bar? Is it because of you and me? Is that why?

Maggie. I'm a grown man. I can take care of myself. He laughs—a bright, forced sound. You should see the other cat. Man! I fucked him up!

Mother looks to Clay as he slides the glass of Old Mainline across the bar. Who did this, Clay? Who did this to him?

Clay steps against the back of the bar, his round stomach distended, and raises his hands in an expression of utter helplessness. He shakes his head. Beats me, Mags. I know nothing about it and this shit-for-brains won't tell me. I'm as angry as you are.

Well, doesn't anyone care? Has anyone called the police?

Maggie, Maggie, Maggie, Joshua says softly, and it is the voice Duncan hears when he sings. Please, sit down. You and Duncan, sit down. I'm too tired to get into it right now. I just want to have a quiet drink and be with my two favorite people. Please, just sit down.

Mother refuses to look at him and instead stares hard at Clay and, after a moment, something seems to pass between them.

He's good, isn't he, Clay? He has all the answers in the world.

Clay nods. All the answers, Mags. All the answers.

And what do you do with a man like that?

Clay takes his bar towel and throws it over his shoulder, raises his hands helplessly again, and shakes his head as he makes his way down the bar to a customer at the far end who is tapping his bottle aggressively against the countertop. Beats me, Mags, he says and looks back toward Joshua, who is sitting clench-lipped and sweating even though the room is cold. I'm just a freaking bartender. What the fuck do I know?

Before Maggie's shift at St. Luke's, she drags Duncan to Mass at St. Mary of the Wharves, and they sit for Vespers in the dark pews smelling of linseed and wood soap and the stale sweat of old women, and they pray. Duncan closes his eyes and tries to offer up words to God but can only see Joshua's mangled face, swollen and purple and bloodied. Beside him Mother's mouth moves fervently, almost desperately in prayer. Unable to sit any longer, he stands, upsetting the kneeler, which bangs loudly against the pew, and walks to the rear of the church, where he begins the Stations of the Cross. After Vespers, Maggie blesses herself and, when she sees Duncan standing at the font watching, she comes and kneels before him and softly touches his brow, heart, his left shoulder and then his right, with something like desperation. Before she stands, she places her hand back upon his heart and closes her eyes, and her hand rests there in recognition of His sacrifice.

You're scared for Joshua, Duncan says.

His mother stares into his eyes as if she is attempting to see what he sees. Her first impulse is to lie, but they are in a church and she has just prayed. He thinks that she'll begin to cry but she doesn't. Her lips press firmly together; her jaws bunch as she grinds her back teeth. Yes, she finally says, I'm scared for him.

As they exit the church, she looks back at the portrait of the Savior in the clerestory, at the artist's rendition of the Lord nobly displaying his pierced and bleeding heart. Duncan wonders what his mother sees in it, if she sees the pain and suffering, the pain and humiliation, some manner of salvation and blessed protection for Joshua, some promise of illumination or reward in His Kingdom or simply the hope of better things to come.

At home Joshua is sitting at the kitchen table with the
Chronicle
spread open to the article about Jamie Minkiwitz and the mangled bullet from his childhood rolling slowly in and out of his callused fingers, twining over and under, seen and unseen. A cigarette smolders at the edge of the page, burning the Formica.

Joshua, Duncan asks. Are you okay?

Okay? Joshua says, as if he has never been asked this question, and stares at the bullet. Duncan has seen him do this before, when he's overmedicated or when the meds have simply stopped working, and Duncan fears that he is losing him again.

Joshua's mouth works and the words come hoarse and as soft as a whisper: They say it was a suicide. It wasn't any fucking suicide.

Duncan nods and sits down beside him. Minutes pass, and because Joshua says nothing more and darkness is pressing against the windows and in the amber glow of the kitchen's single lamp they cannot see their reflections in the dark glass and everything beyond seems to be pressing in at them and Duncan feels the need to hear his voice, he asks him again: Joshua, are you sure you're okay?

Okay? Joshua says and shakes his head and stares at the mangled
bullet he is rolling over and over in his callused hands, its copper and zinc gilding sparking like a tinder flint in the dim light of the kitchen and he begins to rub his thumb along its foreshortened shank, burnished umber by years of such friction, and Duncan reaches for his hands and holds them until the bullet is still and Joshua is here with him again.

Joshua's eyes flutter as if he is waking and he looks at Duncan. I have to go, he says suddenly, urgently. My man, I have to go. And he rises, clambers from the table, which shudders violently, and stomps toward the door. A moment later Duncan hears the engine of the Indian turning over, rumbling into loud life, and then Joshua roaring down the hill toward the Bottoms.

May 1985

Tonight, his mother's face is the moon, as he remembers her above Stockholdt, the night he ran away from the Home with Billy: shining beatifically, casting her white light into his room so brightly that he cannot sleep. The trees outside his window stretch and bend black upon the wall—dark shapes of men running crouched through tall whispering grass—and he thinks of Joshua, who has yet to come home and who, he knows, has returned to the boardinghouse in Oakland.

In his room across the bay, Joshua is dreaming again of angels lifting him up through the wreckage of the tunnel as it collapses a quarter of a mile beneath the sea, lifting him up through the black, rushing waters crashing so hard down upon him that they are like iron beams shattering his bones, and finally bursting into the dark skies over San Francisco, dangling exhausted and broken, and very near death, but such a welcome death, with the angel's wide wings beating the air above him as they rise higher and higher still.

Below them a derrick tower collapses in a grinding scream of twisted metal into the churning waters, and Joshua's sodden clothing clinging in tatters to him is suddenly engulfed in heat as flames burst and billow in orange blossoms upon the oil-black sea.

It's a miracle, Joshua says, eyes fluttering now and clouding in pain, and there is the face of the fry cook looking down at him, pale and shimmering wetly between the dark V of outspread wings.

Didn't believe I was an angel, did you? He shakes his head. I told you it would hurt, didn't I?

Up they sweep into the churning strata of clouds above the bay, Joshua glancing wearily back at the city, its blinking lights growing dim and farther and farther distant below them until he is engulfed in cloud. Joshua's head lolls upon his chest as merciful darkness takes him and the fry cook carries him higher and higher into the ether and to the place of his dreams, where he has so often prayed that nothing be allowed to harm him and his loved ones ever again.

From Duncan's mother's room the startling loud clatter of an empty bottle of Old Mainline 454 striking the floor and then rolling upon the wood. He sees her outstretched hand and her mouth parting in sleep. There is a mumbled accusation or prayer and then her snores and Duncan stares at the moonlit walls searching for and trying to retrieve some tender image of her face.

High on a four-day binge at the Windsor Tap, Joshua grabs Duncan by his jacket sleeve and pulls him close, tells him that he loves him and Maggie. His gaunt face is bruised. Swollen flesh and broken blood vessels pool darkly beneath his skin.

Your face, Duncan says, but Joshua shakes his head and takes Duncan's hands in his and tells him that there isn't another woman in the world like Maggie Bright and he's going to ask her to marry him. His eyes blaze with passion; his forehead gleams with sweat. Duncan looks down and sees the raw pink, blood-encrusted skin upon Joshua's knuckles.

Do you believe it, my man? he asks, and Duncan nods, does his best bug eyes, stretching them as wide and as incredulously as Joshua's, even though he is on the verge of crying—What has Joshua done to himself? Who has done this to him? Duncan fights against the tears and the fear that threatens to overwhelm him, and Joshua looks at the clock over the bar, puts back his beer, and slams the
empty upon the table. Goddamn it! I've got to get to work, he says. I've got to get to work.

And then he is gone, stumbling out the back door of the bar and into the dark alley, as if Duncan were not there, and Duncan supposes that now he will not see him for a week or more. On the table before Duncan sit two empty tequila glasses, lime rinds folded in their centers, a glass of frothy beer and a bottle of Oakland Depot, the gin that Clay sold to the down-and-outs, mostly homeless vets who moved from one shelter or hospice to another.

When Duncan looks up, Clay has placed a cheeseburger before him and is taking the glasses from the table. You all right, Duncan? You want me to call Maggie?

Duncan shakes his head, wipes at his eyes with the back of his jacket, and begins to shovel the burger into his mouth so that he will not have to talk.

Clay looks at the bottle of Oakland Depot in his hand and grunts. No one else will buy this stuff, he says. I've got crates and crates of it in the basement stacked against the wall of the old coal chute bunker. It came with the place when I bought it after the war. Must've been there for at least a decade before that, because the distillery from across the bay closed in the early sixties, when I was fourteen. Something else.

What's wrong with Joshua? Duncan finally manages through a mouthful of bun.

I don't know, Duncan. I wish I did, but even if I did, I doubt I could make it right.

Clay's words trouble Duncan. Was Joshua so damaged that he was incapable of being saved? And if he couldn't be saved, redeemed, what did that mean for Mother and him?

But what about my mom? Duncan says. What about Joshua saying he's going to marry her?

Clay purses his lips, wrings the bar towel in his hands. Color seeps into his thick, benevolent face, and he swallows. Son, that's just what
it takes with these guys. A good woman, and your mother is the best. He nods as if he can convince the both of them. If anyone can turn Joshua around, it's your mother. Don't you worry about that.

Clay looks about the room, at the brick walls, the greasy, smoke-stained wallpaper and paneling, the few grizzled men in the booths and on stools, a drunk stumbling, sliding from his stool at the far end of the bar where two men are loudly swearing at each other, and another tottering to the toilets.

The bar is no fucking place for a kid, he says softly. I should call goddamn social services.

He blinks as if taking it all in—the sight and the stink of it, and pushes out his lips as if to rid himself of something foul-tasting. He wipes at his eyes and sighs. I'll call Maggie, he says. It's time you were home.

There is a full moon and Duncan climbs to the rooftop to see it better. Back in the Home he would merely have to look from his window and the open plain would lay the whole sky before him. This time of year the farmers of the pasture country would have laid rills of silage upon their fields. The scent of it would come to the children in the mornings, when they stepped from the main house and walked the courtyard to the chapel. Perhaps snow has fallen during the night, and the wind pushes it in now in drifts among the alleys between the buildings as their footfalls clatter on stone swept clean by one of the novitiates at dawn; the snow covers the plough ridge and hangs in heavy frozen lumps from the tops of the pine and yellow rod, and if he could see the distant Iron Range through the low, churning storm clouds, he would see snow on its top as well.

From this height upon Ipswich Hill, the moon's bright reflected light illuminates the city's skyscape, throwing other roofs, with their chimneys, exhausts and fans, pigeon coops and transplanted garden
sheds and rainwater barrels, into stark black, sharply outlined relief. Planes coming in from the west emerge from the darkness over the bay like suddenly materializing stars, blinking into shimmering, unsure life. A satellite, flashing from a mile above, curves over the arc of the world in its lonely trajectory and Duncan thinks of Michael Collins in his lonely vigil aboard the command module, circling the moon and, as his orbit decays, falling slowly through space, and though his mouth is opening and closing, he is falling without sound. He thinks of angels lifting Jamie Minkivitz high above the bay and then dropping him only, it is no longer Jamie but Joshua instead, for he can put no other face to the man falling from the sky.

He hears the screen door creak open behind him, soft footsteps upon wood and then upon tar, and mother's voice: Are you counting the stars, Duncan?

She carries two blankets and she lays one over his shoulders, squeezes him tight, and steps away to look out over the city.

My, it's beautiful, she says. No wonder you come up here.

I couldn't sleep, he says, but his heart tightens with sudden anxiety that he cannot explain and a strange hollowness like a vacuum of air hardens in his gut as if he, too, is falling and he doesn't trust that his mother will catch him. He searches the air about them for the scent of liquor, for the heat of it on her breath.

As if reading his thoughts, she says: I'm trying.

I know.

Well? I've been good, haven't I?

Yes, he says, and then adds grudgingly and because she's waiting to hear him say it: You've been good. He wants to smile, wants to let her know that he believes in her, but in this moment he can't, even though he knows it is such a simple thing and perhaps what she most needs to hear.