by Skip Horack
So I was biding my time, but I still had that storage unit. Though I stayed clear of Dry Springs, every April, on my way to Lake Claiborne, I’d pass through Ruston and go by Peach City Self Storage to check on my survivor spoils. I assumed one day I’d want at least some of what I was holding on to. The family photos and a lot of the furniture, sure —but also Mom’s homemade quilts and framed Audubon prints, Dad’s coffee tins full of musket balls and Caddo arrowheads, Tommy’s yard-sale pedestal globe and the flag America traded us for him.
I’ll always remember what I was thinking on that helicopter ride to Lady of the Sea. Hang in there, I was telling myself. You’re not quite thirty yet, but in three months your scarlet letter can be burned, and in four months, yes, happy birthday, you’ll be an honest-to-God millionaire. You can start a new life in some new place.
And though I hadn’t decided where that new place would be, there was one thing I did know for certain about my future. That I was finally through with the oil patch. I was done. Retired. They took my finger, but they wouldn’t take me.
Convalescence. Healing, one-handed days spent hoping Joni would resurface. Almost every night, the same nightmare. I’m bleeding on the Loranger Avis, but this time no one can help me. I am pale and then dizzy and then dead. A doctor had warned me anxiety and even flashbacks wouldn’t be uncommon after such an injury, but I’d made it to twenty-nine without going down the therapy-and-Prozac rabbit hole, and I was afraid to start now.
Then, October. I was asleep in the Airstream and never heard my phone ring, but in the morning I saw a missed, 2 A.M. call from an area code I didn’t recognize. Nearly two weeks had elapsed since I wrote that e-mail to Joni behind her mother’s back, the short note urging her to get in touch with me if she wanted. To the Cybermobile. I reverse-searched the number on a white pages site and found out it belonged to a San Francisco cell phone, then $4.95 on my credit card bought me a person. Nancy Hammons. But “Joni” might have been an alias, I realized. Then again, Nancy Hammons might be the mother. Maybe she hadn’t said all she wanted to say to me. Or maybe it was Joni who called, but her phone was in Mother Nancy’s name. Or maybe it was only a misdial.
I hardly knew more than a fence post about social networks, but there were MySpace and Facebook accounts for a lives-in-San-Francisco Joni Hammons. The profile pictures were just of a sunset, or a sunrise, and security locks excluded outsiders and the uninvited. But I was like Sam on a scent trail by that point, and though I didn’t find anything else encouraging for “Joni Hammons” San Francisco online, “Nancy Hammons” San Francisco brought better luck, some credible hits. I learned there was a Nancy Hammons who taught poetry at San Francisco State and had published a few books of poems. That a Nancy Hammons ran lots of Bay Area 5Ks. That, as a concerned parent (a concerned “single” parent, in fact), a Nancy Hammons had once written a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle complaining about budget cuts affecting George Washington High School. Then, eureka. She mentioned her daughter Joni in that letter —horrifying the teenager, I’m sure, but abetting me. An English department faculty page and a literary journal’s website both led me to the same photo. This Nancy Hammons seemed to be in her later thirties, just as Tommy would have been, and had boy-short hair dyed to an extreme blond. Attractive, but in a leave-me-the-fuck-alone way. I typed Nancy Hammons and San Francisco into the white pages site, and that gave me a phone number and address for a house on a street named Marvel Court.
After that phone call —maybe from Nancy Hammons, maybe from Joni Hammons —I waited for someone to write or call me again. Joni was pretty much all I could think about, but I didn’t know what else to do. I could have tried that cell phone or Marvel Court number and pled my case to mother and/or daughter, but what if they told me to leave them be? What move would I have left then? But I wasn’t beaten yet. I had her last name, and I had her address. And thanks to my lost finger I had the free time. If Joni wouldn’t come to me —if she was through with e-mailing and calling, that is —maybe I could come to her.
First, however, I had to find out a few things about California law. As best I could deduce, as a nonresident, visiting registered sex offender, RSO Roy Joseph would be required to register locally, or at a minimum report to a police station to be “assessed and cleared” should I remain in any California city or county for more than five “working” days. So I could have one week in San Francisco without being notched and branded. Five working days, plus a Saturday and a Sunday, to locate Joni and meet her. And though by the middle of December I wouldn’t have to worry about such legal bullshit in Louisiana or anywhere else, December was too far away to wait on. That missed phone call had revved an engine that must have been idling quietly inside me, and I didn’t want second thoughts and excuses to shut me down. As soon as my hand was healed, my post-op appointments through, I had to solve the mystery of this supposed niece of mine —even if that meant sidestepping Nancy Hammons.
Go, Tommy whispered in that smooth voice of his. Go.
Years back, once I’d gained an appreciation of the Internet and its capabilities, every so often I would try looking for Navy SEAL Lionel “your brother went out like a hero” Purcell on the computers in Grand Isle’s pre-Cybermobile library. And in 2003 I was directed to a crude, slapdash website. Apparently someone by that same name ran a guide service out of Battle Mountain, Nevada. I scrolled through photographs of hunters with bloody-mouthed antelope and mule deer, and then I saw him. Older and heavier than the SEAL I’d met when I was fourteen, but even behind the gunslinger mustache I could tell it was him. He was sitting astride a collapsed buck and frowning at the camera. There was an e-mail address, but I could never get past the idea that writing Lionel Purcell might result in him doing some where has life taken that guy? sleuthing of his own. Orion’s little brother, the sex offender. Not too long after I first came across the website it disappeared, and I took that as a warning I should remember what Tommy’s old sweetheart Camille had told me way back when about how some things are best left alone.
But then Joni happened. That e-mail of hers couldn’t have been easy to send, and I felt ashamed for having put Lionel Purcell on the shelf. He knew things, and if a teenager could be brave enough to hunt for news of Tommy, I could do the same. I imagined Joni would be asking a lot of questions if and when I found her, and I wanted to be able to give her more than my foggy boyhood memories of my brother. The Battle Born Outfitters website was still missing, but I pulled a map up and finished hatching my plan —on the drive to California I’d stray north, then take I-80 west to Battle Mountain. I would stop there and see what came of it. Nothing perhaps, but at least I could tell Joni I’d tried turning that rock over. Eventually I would need to find a place to stay in San Francisco, yet that could wait. I just wanted to be on the highways that would begin taking me to Nevada and Lionel Purcell, California and Joni Hammons. And with all that decided, those bleeding-out-on-the-Loranger-Avis nightmares came to an end.
The LeBaron was a maroon ’94 model with over two hundred thousand miles on the odometer, but she’d also been a gift from my parents and that had made her hard to part with. The frame was well rusted due to the salt of Grand Isle, and there was a gray patch on the center of the hood where the paint had burned away from the primer. Counting on the LeBaron to get me all the way to Nevada, much less California, was a gamble, but I reckoned if I was meant to ever reach either place I’d make it okay.
Though, before that, north Louisiana. In Ruston:
A raid on Peach City Self Storage to grab a photo album I wanted to bring to San Francisco with me.
A dutiful-son appearance at the Joseph plots in Oak Crest Cemetery.
A face-to-face, state-of-my-finances meeting with accountant/adviser Mr. Donny Lee. Assuming Mr. Donny Lee had no surprises for me, in January I’d be thirty years old and rich and no longer an RSO. After San
Francisco I intended to take the quickest and easiest route back to Grand Isle, then spend the next two months preparing for the beyond-Louisiana place where I could begin my third act.
And the drive to Ruston would take me past the exit for Dry Springs. I’d avoided Dry Springs altogether since my exile, but now I would make my return. Already I was recalling things I hadn’t mulled over in years. What it had been like to help my parents take apart Tommy’s bedroom. What it had been like for me to take apart theirs. The guilt I’d felt when I sold. Those first lines from my mother’s journal, the two sentences I couldn’t read past —words buried somewhere in my storage unit. To be a parent is to always wonder whether the world sees your children the way you see them. My son is gone.
The farm was the only real home Tommy or I had ever known. And though in some ways the thought of visiting Dry Springs had me feeling more uneasy than pondering Battle Mountain or even San Francisco did, it was an embarrassment that I hadn’t been there in ten years. My brother was whispering to me again. Go, Roy. See, feel, learn. Before the month was out the stump on my left hand was fully healed, covered by an itchy patch of marbled skin, and I crossed over Caminada Pass at dawn on an October Thursday, Sam lying beside me on the LeBaron’s bench seat like a roll of yellow rug, some clothes and a sleeping bag stuffed into my offshore duffel bag.
Sam slept and I drove, following the Highway 1 two-lane through the low, chartreuse and khaki sponge-lands of flat marsh and open water between Grand Isle and Leeville. On shell and asphalt shoulders, families fishing blue crab and redfish, five-gallon buckets and tailgates and folding chairs, thawed chicken necks and soggy shrimp, popping corks and cast nets, jean shorts and rubber boots, white people and black people and more, the last names often the same or similar save for the Vietnamese over three decades here now, refugees like me, all of them close enough to blow a wake of hot wind over as I rocketed past in the LeBaron, the phone and the radio and the thoughts of my maybe niece and of Tommy and of a SEAL called School all distractions threatening to make me slip from the road and become a sideswiping killer of fishermen. And when others speak of Louisiana as backwater or third-world they usually mean places like these, places that are falling, sinking, eroding into the suck of slinking salt waters, and nowhere as badly or as quickly as the fading fifteen crow-fly miles between my island and the harder ground that finally appeared after the Bayou Lafourche lift bridge. All that was behind me would one day be gone. The marsh, the highway, Grand Isle. But I was safe now. Acadiana. Some trees. Oaks, even. Commerce and industry and telephone-pole signs. INJURED OFFSHORE? . . . I BUY GARFISH . . . PROP REPAIR. Homes and businesses and solid ground, yes, but now that dark bayou to follow as well. Diesel rainbows, eddies of foamed trash. Ahead: Golden Meadow, Galliano, Cut Off, Larose, then another big bridge. The crossing of the Intracoastal. Agriculture, sugarcane. The backwater becoming a banana republic here. Some of the farmers burning their fields preharvest. The land all around me on fire and smoking.
PART II
The Road Notes
Stand by your brother, for he who is brotherless is like the fighter who goes to battle without arms.
—ARAB PROVERB
West of New Orleans Sam and I quit the highways for the interstates. I-55 took us up to Hammond, and we left crawfish and boudin and the Catholic majority behind. In Louisiana you drive north to get South, trading Cajun Country for Dixie somewhere just below here —in Ponchatoula, maybe Manchac —and we were in the hardpan pinewoods now, sweet tea and barbeque country, Bible Belt towns that looked and felt like the Dry Springs I remembered.
In Tangipahoa Parish, three enormous white crosses in a dairy pasture, and billboard after billboard. AIDS: JUDGMENT DAY HAS COME . . . ORIENTAL SPA AND MASSAGE: TRUCKERS ENCOURAGED! Then, gas in Kentwood, where a sign welcomed me to THE HOME OF BRITNEY SPEARS. For over a year Malcolm had us believing her mom gave him a Jesus-camp hand job once, back when Britney was still a Mouseketeer. A lie, but a good lie. The interstate again. Into Mississippi. We passed a caravan of dove hunters on their way to rain lead onto sunny fields of sorghum and millet. Two retrievers were slithering in the bed of a Ford, jockeying for the best wind, while a third sat stone still and watched me and Sam go by. A black Lab staring at us like a dog of war.
It was a bit past noon when I hit Jackson and hooked onto I-20, and forty miles later I arrived in Vicksburg, on the east bank of the Mississippi River. Vicksburg is across the bridge from the upper part of Louisiana, lies along the usual route I’d take each April to call on Lake Claiborne with the Airstream. Tomorrow I’d be in Dry Springs and then Ruston, and though I’d never spent the night in Vicksburg before, this was a good place to break for the day. I hadn’t made it very far, but the most necessary step, actually leaving, had been accomplished.
I checked into a hotel near the interstate. I had an ice chest filled with dry dog food in the trunk, as well as another containing tennis balls and towels and pet shampoo, bowls and a few jugs of water, and once Sam was situated I sat down on the bed in our room. But I wasn’t tired yet. I wanted out. I needed to come up with something to help eat away the hours, and in Vicksburg that meant either the casino boats or the military park —site of the forty-seven-day siege of that fortress city on the Mississippi. Pemberton had ridden beyond the works to meet with Grant under an oak soon to be butchered by souvenir-seeking soldiers, then surrendered on the Fourth of July, one day after Lee retreated from Gettysburg. “The Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea,” said Lincoln. I get no thrill from stabbing at a draw-to-deal button on a video poker machine, so I had a hamburger and a beer in the hotel restaurant before driving off for Civil War parkland.
If it was my mother who taught me the most about science and nature, it was my father who taught me about history. When Tommy was a boy Dad used to take him to Vicksburg, and after Tommy got too teenage cool for those trips it was my turn. My father loved exploring that park, at least until the sad times came, and there was one spot in particular he always brought me —a big grassy hill on Confederate Avenue. All through the park the states that had troops at Vicksburg erected separate monuments in memory of their fallen soldiers, and atop that hill I could see Louisiana’s memorial to its cannon fodder. An eighty-foot column of granite crowned with a carved-stone flame.
I left the LeBaron and hiked to the top of the hill. It was well into October, but still fairly hot outside. I was breathing heavy from the climb, wearing jeans and my Red Wings because I almost always wear jeans and my Red Wings, and a T-shirt was pasted flat to my back. I looked around and saw black vultures or maybe turkey buzzards circling off to the west. This seemed to be the highest point in the entire brother-against-brother park. Good ground, those dead generals might have called the hill, same as Cemetery Ridge. You’d think there would be a constant breeze in such a high place, but there wasn’t, not on that day.
A slice of shade had sundialed out from the monument, and I stood within that long shadow and lit a cigarette. My head started to spin, but I kept smoking. Another drag and I gagged. I dropped the Winston and pressed my hand against the monument to steady myself. The granite was warm, and my eyes focused on where stone met grass. Much of that cut rock lay underground, hidden like the substructure of an oil rig beneath the surface of the Gulf.
I stayed that way, nauseous and propped up by a memorial stone, until I heard someone yell. I turned to look. A platoon of after-school Boy Scouts was charging the hill. I wiped the spit from my lips and watched them come. A dozen or more boys with bright, beautiful, wiseass faces like Tommy’s. All of them running, all of them attacking.
After the military park I walked Sam back and forth on the hotel’s parched kidney of lawn. I was obsessing over what my north Louisiana tomorrow might bring, and I took a nap that brought the first dream, good or bad, I’d had in weeks. Instead of the Loranger Avis, instead of a nightmare, I’m on the farm
in Dry Springs. Four riders on four horses are moving across our land, waving as they come, and though I am apart from them and watching I think they are us, the Josephs, my family. That there are two versions of me. One who carries on, and this one who waits.
So, not a nightmare —more like something inside me was in fact trying to fix itself while I’d been sleeping. Or maybe I just woke before things could get ugly. It was nine o’clock when I opened my eyes, and I swapped my T-shirt for an oxford, then went by the front desk to ask where I might still be able to find a decent dinner. A girl with a canary-yellow handkerchief tied around her neck was working the counter, and she was somehow both freckled and tan. Besides the casino boats, all she had to recommend was a place downtown that had charbroiled steaks. She scratched out directions. “But you should hurry, sir,” she said. “Have a blessed evening.”
Downtown was quiet and had the stepping-back-in-time, movie-set look of many a downtown in my reconstructed South. A look that suggested it had once been prosperous and flourishing, but long ago withered. Still, Vicksburg’s seemed to be doing better than most, and that was probably due to the money and the people those casinos brought in. A portion of downtown had been cleaned up, restored, and along the brick-paved and lamppost-lit main drag there were closed-for-the-night antique shops and art galleries, that sort of thing. Riverboat gambling, the answer to all our problems.
The steak restaurant I was searching for sat on the river side of the street, and I was able to park at the curb. The hostess did her best to smile when I came in, but I could tell her heart wasn’t in it. That her thoughts were on the punch clock already. Her name tag said Mindy, and she could have been the cousin of the girl at the front desk of my hotel. I envisioned their common ancestor, an Irish cotton buyer.