The Other Joseph

by Skip Horack

  “One?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Sorry. I know I’m pushing it.” There was a bar in the back, and a black man with wild white hair was washing glasses at the sink. I pointed at him. “Can I just eat up there?”

  Mindy dealt me a menu from the stack on her podium. She seemed relieved. “Absolutely,” she said, before sliding around

  me to flip the sign on the door. “Mr. Charlie will take good care of you.”

  I made my way to the bar and settled onto a stool. The bartender Mr. Charlie dried his hands slowly with a towel, but he didn’t acknowledge me. He was staring off into space while I read through the menu. “All right, then,” I said. “Hi.”

  Mr. Charlie was wearing a black bow tie and vest, a white shirt, and had a flat boxer’s nose. He looked exhausted. He was too old to be up that late, much less tending a bar. “You ready?” he asked.

  On the Gulf rigs Tuesdays and Saturdays are steak night. Friday, seafood. But I was a free man now, could eat steak whenever I wished. “So I guess I’ll have that T-­bone,” I said. “Medium rare, please. And I can pass on the salad.”

  “It’s free.”

  “I don’t want to keep you any longer than I have to.”

  “Naw. What dressing you like? Italian?”

  “Sure. I appreciate it.”

  Mr. Charlie took the menu and went into the kitchen. When he came back he put the salad in front of me. I thanked him again and asked for a double bourbon and an ice water.

  He started to grab a whiskey glass but then stopped himself. “ID?” he said.

  Jack Hebert’s sister-­in-­law/concubine Tricia hadn’t put blades to me since before the Loranger Avis —­my hair was to my eye­brows, halfway past my ears and lapping at my collar —­so I lifted my bangs off my forehead so Mr. Charlie could truly see me. My squinting roughneck face. “Come on, sir,” I said. “I’m just about thirty.”

  He shrugged. “That’s a kid to this gramps. I don’t take chances no more.”

  I almost told him to forget the bourbon, but finally I pulled out my wallet. I handed him my driver’s license, and his eyes jumped when he saw the SEX OFFENDER printed in orange letters under my photo. A recent development. Nearly every year the Louisiana legislature came up with some new degradation, and as of 2006 I had a pervert driver’s license to go along with the sex offender identification card I was required to always have on my person. They love me at the DMV.

  I got my well bourbon and my ice water, but Mr. Charlie fixed them in silence. I asked him to just go ahead and box up the T-­bone when it was ready, and he disappeared into the kitchen. There was a TV behind the bar. I watched an NFL week-­in-­review while I picked at my salad, all my appetite gone. The Saints had beaten the Falcons in the Dome on Sunday, but that only put them at two and four for the season. The Saints. It was heartbreak every year with them.

  After a while Mr. Charlie brought the T-­bone, then he took my money and returned to the kitchen, still playing the mime. Mindy was gone as well, and I stepped out onto the sidewalk with my steak, looked left and right down the street. The LeBaron was the only car around, but I thought I heard music. I glanced up. There were speakers fastened atop the cast-­iron lampposts that lined both sides of the road, and I walked into the middle of the street and listened. It was calliope music. The paddleboat and circus kind. Those lamppost speakers seemed like something the government would install in anticipation of a disaster, a way to help calm the masses and keep them from rioting. In a deserted downtown that campy music was eerie as hell, made me think the world had ended while I’d been inside. That the four riders from my dream had actually been the horsemen of the apocalypse. I drove to the hotel, and that was the night I first called Viktor Fedorov.

  Viktor Fedorov was an international marriage broker. He also owned a car ser­vice. Years back, long before Joni’s e-­mail, I’d learned of him from the captain of one of the crew boats that sometimes motored me to and from certain rigs. Captain Terry had a Russian wife who was a celebrity among us hands. Larissa was her name. She would always see Terry off from the dock —­often making her the last flesh-­and-­blood female we’d lay eyes on for two weeks —­and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who kept a mental picture of her filed away for the shower. I’m not saying Larissa was a goddess (fried blond hair, old-­world teeth), but she was definitely out of Terry’s league. Some of the guys had taken to calling her the Coke Bottle on account of her figure, and what always ate at me most was when, returning to Grand Isle at the end of a stint, I’d spot her waiting along Bayou Rigaud for Terry. There I’d be with nothing to look forward to but Sam and my empty Airstream, now stuck having to think on rat-­faced Terry getting to go home with a woman. Another reminder that a matrimony of any sort might be forever out of the question for me.

  But, to his credit, Terry wasn’t shy about the truth behind that marriage of his. There’s this Viktor out in San Francisco, he told me on the crew boat one day. Viktor runs a first-­class operation. None of that mail-­order-­bride bullshit. No flying all the way to an ass-­fuck corner of Russia to meet a roomful of white-­slave farm girls. Viktor matches his clients up with gals already here on work visas. Intelligent, pretty gals like Larissa. Women who know the language. Women who will ink a prenup and are less likely to get homesick. Sure, she’s in it for the permanent visa, but everybody wants something out of a marriage.

  Terry was aware of my past, of course. He knew the reason I lived half of each month offshore, the other half holed up on Pearl Lane. The reason I had few friends and kept so much to myself. The reason why on occasion I’d receive anonymous letters warning me to leave Grand Isle. But Viktor will work with you, Terry assured. Just be up front, because the feds will be checking on that if y’all make it to the marriage-­visa stage. Full disclosure for foreign brides. That’s the law these days, Roy.

  Indeed, Terry knew so much about the law it made me wonder about his past. At the time I’d told him I wasn’t interested —­but now I was bound for San Francisco, and I was feeding most of a twenty-­five-­dollar steak to Sam inside that Vicksburg hotel room, lonely and depressed, when one Terry story rose up in bits from the dark depths of my memory. Something about a homeless guy who challenged him to a footrace through Golden Gate Park. Town’s like a cereal bowl, Terry had said to me. Fruits and nuts and flakes.

  Except for the Russian who’d introduced him to Larissa, that is. Terry could have been president of his fan club. And though in Grand Isle we made our share of cracks about Terry and the Coke Bottle, I’d seen something once that came bubbling to the surface next. They were parked in Terry’s truck at the Sureway. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Larissa was laughing, flashing the new braces on her tangled teeth, and there was nothing fake about it. They were happy. And alone in my hotel room, I wanted that too. Suddenly the coincidence of Terry’s marriage broker and Joni both being in San Francisco felt almost like a sign.

  So I called Terry and woke him, asking for his man’s number, and that same night, before I could change my mind, I introduced myself to Viktor Fedorov. He was an Ivan, all right. Spoke with the same gruff accent and short, to-­the-­point sentences as a helicopter pilot Russian I knew from the oil patch. I told Viktor I was coming out to San Francisco for a week of vacation and would like to have a sit-­down, and things took on their own momentum after that. I e-­mailed him a webcam photo from a computer in the hotel lobby —­one of a roughneck sitting at a computer in a hotel lobby —­then wrote a humiliating little essay explaining both my circumstances and my plans for the future. Viktor said to check back in a ­couple of days, before I even reached the city, and he would rustle up a few women who were willing to consider me. I’d pay him $250 for each one I met. An actual marriage would cost five grand.

  On Friday morning I hopped the Mississippi River into Louisiana, then pulled into the welcome center to slap myself in the face. Well rested and lucid,
I could see the foolishness of the night before. Had I really thought I’d meet some Russian woman and, in a week, fall in love? Marry her? Have her shipped to Grand Isle? Move her into the Airstream? Look, wife. Right across the highway is the beach. You can sunbathe on our dirty sand. You can sit yourself down among the debris that has drifted ashore from the Gulf. You can even fish and crab, if you want. Did you ever notice I only have nine fingers? I’m not rich yet, but I will be come January. You’ll just have to trust me on that.

  So from the welcome center I sent Viktor a text asking him to call off his search, and since this blunder seemed easy enough to put the brakes on compared to some of my former sins of impulse, I was able to shake my head and advance. I got back on I-­20, and as north Louisiana miles rushed by I was almost feeling eager. A stubborn and excited curiosity to see the old home and let the hurt come.

  Dry Springs. Population 582. A hundred miles west of Mississippi, a hundred miles east of Texas. Sam was standing on the bench seat. Usually he was happy to just stretch out and relax, but now he was showing great interest. Ronnie’s Quickstop had evolved into a Chevron that also housed a Subway, but otherwise Dry Springs seemed much as I’d left it. The town hall, the post office, the volunteer fire department. A ser­vice station and a Dollar General. Carrington’s Seed, Feed, & Hardware. The Bank of Dry Springs. Doolittle’s Diner. All clustered around the sleepy four-­way intersection where Elmer Street crosses the Dixie Overland Highway. I turned right, and soon we passed the high school where my parents had taught. Pinewoods, fields, and pastureland now. Farms and nurseries, the chicken hatchery and some timber operations.

  My family’s old farm was just outside Dry Springs proper, at the end of a mile of gravel that, the year after Tommy died —­and on the same day as his memorial ser­vice at the high school —­went from a no-­name stop on Rural Route 4 to being christened Thomas Joseph Road. That hadn’t been our idea, but we couldn’t refuse. Fifty balloons sailed into an oystery Louisiana sky that afternoon as we were all leaving the gym. One for each state, I guess. Before night fell I’m sure most of them were lost to pines and power lines, but I imagined a sort of resurrection. Something better than a sainthood sign on a dead-­end road. A single balloon catching an air current and traveling farther than anyone might believe. To a place well beyond where America ends and the seas begin. Finally the limp, latex corpse of that balloon settles atop blue waters, a mock jellyfish to be eaten by an ancient loggerhead —­yet somehow it brings the turtle no harm, and together they swim on.

  I turned off the highway and drove my brother’s gravel road. Our barn was standing, but the house was gone. A blacktop driveway began at an electronic gate and passed straight through the grassed-­over foundation where our house once stood, then continued on to the far end of the property. There was a new house back there. A bantam mansion, really. It had high, white columns, wide porches across the first and second floors. Iron letters on the gate read RES IPSA PLANTATION.

  I’d sold the farm to a young lawyer ­couple from Ruston with a toddler son. I was ripe to be picked, a freshly minted felon, yet they paid about what I was asking, didn’t try to take advantage of a bottomed-­out kid. It was hard to accept that now, a decade later, the farm was as much their home as it had ever been mine. Other families had lived here before the Josephs came, and before all of us, Caddo, maybe mound builders. I’d been nothing but a minute to these eleven acres. At best this land had merely tolerated me.

  I got out of the LeBaron, then climbed onto the blotched hood. The lawyers had also taken down a fence and sacrificed a pasture in order to accomplish their Gone with the Wind fantasy, and what at one time had been a ryegrass field seeded here and there with turnip was now as smooth and clipped as the fairway of a private golf course. I stared out over the sole remaining pasture like a meerkat, half expecting to see cotton and slaves, but no, about two hundred yards off was a herd of brown-­and-­white somethings huddled by the bank of the pond. Not far from the rise in the land where my father collected the dirt still trapped in my vial. I stood there until I realized what I was seeing. Jesus Christ. Llamas.

  Back at the four-­way I turned south onto Elmer Street, then just before the train tracks I made one left, then another. Eliza Sprague’s house would be to my right on the odd-­numbered side of Ballpark Drive, and I let off the gas and began reading mailboxes, pushing Sam flat on the bench seat so he wouldn’t block my view.

  My high school was so small we didn’t even field a football team, and though I had a handful of friends growing up, I’d done nothing to keep in touch with them. In fact, the only person from Dry Springs I’d had any contact with since running away was Eliza, of all ­people. I’m not sure how she found me, but not long after my move to Grand Isle she sent a letter to Pearl Lane. She told me she wanted to say she was sorry. That what had come down on me was her parents’ doing. That she wished we could go back to how it was before anybody knew about us but us. That part of her loved me and probably always would.

  I held on to that letter, but I didn’t write Eliza. My probation officer had made it clear I’d better stay away from her —­insofar as the law was concerned, Eliza’s feelings about what had happened wouldn’t alter my situation. But her words did bring me some comfort. I didn’t love her, and I doubted she actually loved me, but maybe that could have come in time. Maybe all we had needed was to be allowed to figure things out for ourselves. In a parallel life Eliza and I are married and living in Dry Springs. We had that kid and are beating the odds.

  It was over seven years before I heard from Eliza again. I’d evacuated from Grand Isle for Katrina, come back to a war zone, then repeated the whole damn drill a few weeks later for Rita. After I returned for good a letter from Eliza Hayes appeared in my bent-­crooked-­by-­tidal-­surge mailbox. Apparently Eliza had found the Lord, and she claimed writing me had been her preacher’s idea. A tollbooth on her road to salvation, was the way he’d put it to her:

  I looked online and saw you were still living down south. I was praying so hard for you during those storms, Roy. I really hope you made it through them okay.

  She also wanted to tell me that I should forget her and forgive myself for what I’d done, turn to the Bible if I hadn’t already because we are all sinners. I’m married, she added. My husband Carver is a wonderful man, and we have two precious boys —­three-­year-­old twins. Smile upon the Lord, Roy, and He will surely smile upon you as well.

  So the strangest Dear John letter the world has ever seen: a homework assignment for an evangelical. I’d known a Carver Hayes in high school. He was a year or two older than me, and not the sort to venture far from Lincoln Parish. And despite having promised myself I wouldn’t be making this detour, after my visit to the farm I had pulled onto the highway and called information for an address. The puppet of some sick god, on a homework assignment of my own.

  The house was a one-­story red-­brick with three tall pines in the front yard. And behind those longleafs, a very pregnant woman in gingham, bandanna in her dark hair. She was on her knees, pruning an azalea bush, two young boys sitting in the grass with her. Eliza, but an adult Eliza. She was sideways to me, the long dress a puddle around her. A shepherdess with lambs, and soon another would come. And I wondered what the outcast creeping his shitty car down Ballpark Drive might have lost by not ignoring his probation officer. If I could have been Carver. A home-­owning, churchgoing man. The father of twins, plus one, with a She’s the real boss of this family wife. Hearing a car approach, Eliza sat back on her heels and raised a casual hand. A hello or a good-­bye, she really wasn’t paying me any mind. To her I was just a passerby. To her I could have been anyone. A final, parting fuck you from Dry Springs.

  And later, on my way to Ruston and Peach City Self Storage, a text from Viktor Fedorov: No? I have women wanting to meet you. You are sure?

  I searched through my storage unit while Sam patrolled a climate-­controlled labyrin
th of humming, fluorescent-­lit hallways. Seeing all that furniture, all those boxes, always makes me feel like a pharaoh reviewing a ten-­by-­twenty burial chamber. Like I should curl up with Sam and my possessions and wait for the afterlife. Being reminded I still have so many things to be responsible for pricks at me. I hope I will have use for them someday, but then why do I daydream about a fire at Peach City Self Storage? A raging blaze that will take that weight off my shoulders? I love the sound the rolling door makes when it rumbles down, the snap of the padlock.

  Finally I found the photo album I was hunting. It was about an inch thick and bound in oxblood leather, FOR OUR TOMMY pyrographed into the calfskin by my father. The album went into my duffel bag unopened. I would show Joni her father, but I wouldn’t be looking at those photos before I absolutely had to.

  Oak Crest Cemetery had once been a hardwood forest, and though the land lacked any sort of crest, enough of the trees had been spared for the name to make some sense. At a flower shop in town I’d bought three bundles of carnations, and the petals were already starting to wilt at the edges. There was always a lengthy gap between these visits —­and here I was, thinking it might be years and years before I returned —­but I could never bring myself to buy plastic-­and-­silk roses and calla lilies. Even dying flowers aren’t as gloomy as those fake ones.

  I’m sure Dry Springs had been expecting a big double funeral, but I buried Mom and Dad without any kind of ceremony. Though that probably came across as cold, they’d both drawn up wills and that was what they had requested. They didn’t explain, but I understood. Tommy didn’t get a proper funeral, so they didn’t want one themselves. My parents now lie on either side of Tommy’s vacant grave, and to the left of Mom is the spot reserved for me.