This Magnificent Desolation (40 page)

His medals.

Medals? Medals for what?

For bravery in the war. For uncommon valor. Joshua was a hero.

Hero? The man smiles in the darkness, his teeth flashing. And then he laughs but it is a sad, defeated sound. Shit. My Joshua was no hero, boy. Did he tell you that?

No, sir. But these are his medals. He left them behind. When he left.

Duncan stares at the screen door, searching the man's eyes. The street grows darker, and when more and more streetlamps come on, everything beyond their glare—the sidewalk, parked cars, and front
yards—disappears into blackness. Duncan squints into the light and then turns back to the door, losing his hold upon the man in the doorway and his sense of him. He has returned to an amorphous, barely formed shape. For a moment Duncan cannot even be sure that he is still there. His arm begins to tremble and he lets it drop to his side and then he hears the man's breathing, the sickly sweet warmth of cheap beer, the sound of his lips as they come together. He swallows hard.

Where did he go, my Joshua? Where did he go?

Duncan thinks of Joshua swimming across the bay, beneath the bridge and out to the Pacific, and he sees him, his strong stokes churning him through the water and farther and farther from everything he has known. Duncan hears his voice singing still in his mind, reverberating and echoing in the high, hollow metal spaces of the bridge's iron balustrades and stanchions and the cars tires' hissing on the cross-sections four hundred feet above his head, moving back and forth in their endless journey through the night from Oakland to the city and back again. When he imagines this, he imagines that Joshua is still swimming and that he has made it all the way to the Pacific and he hears his voice singing out at the stars and this is what he want to tell this man who is his father.

I watched him swim out into the bay, he wants to say. I waited but he didn't come back.

But instead he shrugs. I don't know, sir, he says. He just went away.

Duncan reaches out his hand to the door again. He left these behind, he says. They're for you.

Large winged insects throw themselves at the dim glow beyond the screen door; they tap the screen like heavy drops of rain and then fall to the concrete, dazed.

The screen door opens with a groan and the man calls out to him: Jesus, boy, get in here then. And with Joshua's father shaking his head, muttering to himself, There must be something the matter
with you, Duncan steps into the hall and follows him to the living room.

He watches the man's bowed back swaying from side to side, shoulders brushing the plaster walls, the pain evident in every movement. In the living room he can see him more clearly. His brown skin is sallow and stretched-looking. His legs and arms are thin, the muscles clinging tightly, feverishly to the bone. Only his stomach protrudes, a large belly that, when he brushes past Duncan, feels as hard as cement and makes Duncan touch his arm with surprise, unsure of what he has felt.

He eases himself onto a couch before a coffee table stained with white rings from the bottoms of beer cans and upon which tattered, dog-eared paperbacks and a few framed photographs sit, and points impatiently for Duncan to do the same.

On the television the Oakland A's are playing: a pitcher in his windup and the runner on first breaking for second. The muted banter of announcers talking to one another about their weekend plans and the oppressive heat of the city and how difficult this must be on the Oakland batters tonight.

With a sigh Joshua's father reaches for his beer, puts it to his lips, and tilts his head back. When he's done, he looks at Duncan, pulls the tab on another can.

How you know my Joshua?

Eyes narrowed to slits, he looks at Duncan over the rim of his beer can and drinks. And then he closes his eyes, his throat convulsing, the Adam's apple bobbing up and down. Necrosis, he says, and his eyes remain closed. The long-term effects of tunneling in a compressed environment.

You worked in a tunnel?

I worked on the Midway tunnel. Was one of the first men up the other side. When I was a boy they called it caisson's disease, he says and slows the round, aspirated syllables of both words as if it is some alien contaminant, as if even in pronunciation it has to be handled
carefully: Cay-sss-on dis-eee-ease. He crushes the empty can in his hand and opens his eyes: corpuscles bright and enlarged from the rush of blood and alcohol and, at the edges of his eyes, the pinched sallow-brown skin. Duncan can see the damage that Joshua did to the eye socket, the way one eye seems to be glazed and the lid partly paralyzed.

Over time it destroyed my bones. Shit, everyone thought they knew everything back in the sixties. Now people just seem confused. And at least there seems to be some God-respecting humility to that.

Most people think the excavations were all done by machine and that the sections were lowered into place by machines, and that was that. Hell, machines and engineers are blind without men. We had to dig the first conduits, and then the trench lines and exhaust shafts. We had to work in sections two hundred feet down, moving from one conduit to another all across the bed of the bay. We had air locks and decompression chambers—they told us we were safe. We thought that it didn't matter how long we stayed down there, that the chambers would flush everything bad out of our systems, y'know, like a goddamn sonafabitch hangover.

Joshua's father reaches for another beer, tears it from the six-pack's plastic ring. It's a hangover that's lasted me my entire life.

As he drinks, he looks at a framed picture on the table before him—a group of men in battered metal hard hats smiling at the camera, eyes squinting into sunlight, the half shell of a tunnel entrance in the foreground and the blurred suggestion of water shimmering with refracted light like steel—gestures with his beer can toward the image.

It was early October and Joshua and his momma were there waiting. He had a little sister too. Sarah. She's dead now.

He nods and drinks some more.

I walked out the west entrance of the shaft with the other workers carrying the statue of St. Barbara and all the press in San Francisco
were there. Newspapermen were snapping photos and there were television cameras as well. Our families were standing behind a gold ribbon waiting for the mayor to cut it. We was all on the news that night, and not just local neither. It was national television.

They took a picture looking back over the bay with our crew and three crew bosses standing before the entrance to the shaft, and then they cut the ribbon, and Joshua, little Sarah, and their mamma came down and had lunch with me on the banks of the bay.

He smiles and turns his head slightly so that the side of his neck is bared. Duncan imagines that in reliving this moment Joshua's father is feeling the sun on him again and how on that day it warmed all of them as they ate their lunch on the bank above the shore and watched men emerging from below the sea into the sharp brightness of day, but he knows that when Joshua's father came west from Boston, he was alone: His wife had left him and Joshua would soon and little Sarah was already dead.

Joshua works—worked—on tunnels too, Duncan says, as he picks up the picture and searches for some resemblance of Joshua in the young man's face.

Yeah?

Duncan nods and puts the picture back on the coffee table next to the six-pack, but Joshua father sweeps it aside when he reaches for another beer and yanks it from the plastic.

What tunnels did he work on?

The San Padre Tunnel—

Shit, heard they canceled funding for that after the accident.

He was also in the army. In Vietnam. He was a war hero—

When you see my Joshua, he says, you give him my best. Tell him his daddy did the best he could. The best he could. And that's no lie. I did the best I could.

Joshua's father gulps from his beer can and then lays his head slowly back on the couch, watches the television through slitted, clouded eyes.

After, Duncan stands on the dirt lawn and watches Joshua's father through the window, the blue flicker of his television in the dark room, and upon the wall behind him, above the couch, the phosphorescent blue nimbus of wings, and he sees an angel there, squatting just over the man's shoulder. A black angel whose giant wings unfurl and spread back blotting out all light in the room, the humerus and carpometacarpus bones built to hold such heavy plumage shattering the plaster from the walls and suddenly sweeping about Joshua's father. And within that blackness what seems to be the convulsive, shuddering ripples of a violent struggle.

A car horn sounds down the street and Joshua's father is sitting upon his couch, staring blankly at the television before him, a can of beer clutched in his hand, and foam dribbling down his fingers.

Through the window the blue of the television flickers ashen and cobalt—a dusk light, as in that moment before night. In this small frame of cobalt-hued light Duncan feels momentarily safe and does not wish to move, yet he knows he has to, and as he thinks about the journey back home across the bridge, the sounds of the neighborhood and of the night come to him, magnified: of shouting and of banging screen doors, a car roaring into life and screeching down the street, its hubcaps a Catherine wheel of fireworks and multicolored light.

Later that night Duncan stares out across the bay at the lights that show through the darkness and crepuscular fog and thinks of Joshua's father sitting alone in the dark before his television imagining his son a boy again and then as the man whom he has never known. Duncan wonders if the medals make a difference in the way he thinks of his son, or merely make their distance and his son's absence all the greater, all the less retrievable, unfamiliar and so strange as to not even be recognizable, familiar, as if his son were not his own and these things happened to someone else's child and occurred in someone else's lifetime.

Perhaps, Duncan thinks, he looks toward the window or stares out at the night just as Duncan is doing now, or stands and turns the knob of the television to another station or adjusts the volume, and then with a beer settles himself back into the deep settee, raising the volume even further so that the thoughts, memories, emotions in his mind might be drowned out, so that he can return to a time of days or weeks before he thought of his son in such a way that threatens each of his nights with sleeplessness and guilt and despair. Or perhaps this is merely what Duncan would wish for if this man were his father, and what he would wish for from his own if he were to find him and call him by his name.

October 1985

Dusk is falling over the street and Maggie is doing her makeup and preparing for, as a memorial to Joshua, a weekend of performances at the Windsor. From their house comes the sound—strange and melancholy—of her practicing her scales and arpeggios. Every morning and evening she opens her throat, preparing it for song, and her music fills the quiet of the street. Duncan sits on the stairs outside listening and lowers his head against the cold wind coming in off the bay. Wind moans beneath the eaves, shears particles of old paint off the clapboard and sends it drifting down the walkway; it whistles across the tops of Maggie's empty liquor bottles stacked in their recycling bin—since the night of Joshua's funeral, when he threw out all of her bottles, she hasn't had a drink, and told him she no longer had the taste for it.

The old parts of the city push and pull and wrestle slowly, inexorably beneath them, and he feels he can almost hear the stone embankments,
the pressing asphalt of the bowed street crumbling and widening in the chill. A single gray cloud, like a wispy ball of damp cotton, tumbles slowly across the sky, barely seeming to move, but when he looks moments later, still transfixed by his mother's voice, it has traveled across the horizon and looks shriveled and shrunken in the eastern corner of the sky.

In the corners of the bar, candles flicker from ancient cast-iron candelabras, and at the front of the stage, shaded by scalloped reflectors, small candles glow and cast their golden, yellow light upon Maggie in her blue sequined dress standing before an old microphone stand—their shadows dance upon the ornately painted drop cloth at the back of the stage against which the bar's revolving fans whisper and tremble.

The performance is highlighted by the simple beauty of her voice, even as damaged as it is. For hours she could sustain it. On Friday and Saturday people from Oakland and Santa Clarisa, come over the bridge to listen to her. They sit on the folding chairs that Clay has arranged around the low stage and dream of far-off places and lost lovers as Maggie sing songs of unrequited love from a hundred years before, of dead lovers calling to their darlings from beneath the ground, and how they will wait for them, however many years it takes, before they too give up the mortal coil. And so they wait as the seasons change, as petals fall from blossoms and snow covers the ground and the first warm days of spring bring the green grass from cover once more and hope that they might be reunited. When she begins Sissieretta Jones's “The Last Rose of Summer,” she looks to Duncan briefly and smiles, and Duncan knows she is singing this just for Joshua and it does not surprise him when she ends her first set with a strange, sad version of Bill Withers's “Ain't No Sunshine.”

And as she sings, Duncan watches his mother's hands, pressed tightly against her dress, then gesturing at the air as her voice rises,
and her belly, suddenly exposed, hard and bulging as if with child. But it is her face, her eyes, her voice, with its intense, plaintive yearning, that averts eyes away from her stomach so that, mostly, no one seems to notice, and if they do, and consider it, it passes unconsciously across their faces and disappears just as quickly.

Near the end of her show Maggie moves seamlessly into old revival numbers, those she'd learned as a child, and the audience sways and nods, closes their eyes and reaches out with their arms, almost unconsciously. Ray Cooper and the Hi-Fidelity Blu-Tones strike up the horns. An accordion moans and the Hammond organ harmonizes with the accordion's low, dirgeful notes and the bursts of trumpets. A snare drum fills the silence before the chorus with a frenetically fast, loud, thumping roll, which has the audience singing and moving in their chairs. They are smiling and beaming, shouting aloud the chorus, and Duncan sings with them, imagining Joshua here. When the song ends, many are bright-faced, looking at one another and laughing, and Maggie is laughing also, with joy and happiness and, finally—Duncan likes to believe—some manner of redemption.