by Skip Horack
“Yep. Viktor. I rented an apartment over by him for a week. Near Golden Gate Park.” But she wouldn’t get the unabridged version of my cover story. A marriage broker? A Russian bride? I couldn’t share any of that with her. “Got my dog with me,” I added, wishing I had Sam now.
“Okay. I was just —” She didn’t complete the thought. “A dog?”
“A yellow Lab. Do you like dogs?”
“Definitely.” She tapped her nose. “But I’m allergic. Sucks. No puppies for me.”
“Oh. Gotcha.”
“You said you have to leave soon?”
“Thursday.” I couldn’t admit the entire truth on that front either, couldn’t humiliate myself like that. “It’s about the finger,” I said. “Workers’ comp stuff.”
Then came the rattling clatter of a diesel. I twisted around on the bench and saw a beaten school bus roll into the parking lot. Some hippie or other species of wanderer had converted the bus into a camper and painted it black. The bus stopped in the center of the lot, engine dying as a pair of long, buggy-whip arms unfolded a sunshade and blocked out the windshield. There were more cars in the lot now, people gazing at the infinite, unfathomable view like it was an enormous drive-in movie.
I turned to Joni again, watching as she reached into her shirt pocket and took out the photo I’d asked Daniel to bring to her. Seventeen-year-old Tommy was staring at me from her lap.
“Thanks for this,” she said. “Everything changed when I saw it.”
“You’d never seen a picture of him?”
“No, I had —but yours was different than the ones our investigator found. With yours I could see . . . me. Does that make sense?”
“Sure it does.” Same as how I’d felt in Café Sun, basically, seeing her up close for the first time.
“We both only have one dimple.” She held the photo next to her face, forcing a grin as she pointed at her cheek. The cherry of the cigarette I’d given her was inches from her eye. “Here on the left,” she said.
I hadn’t noticed that, but she was right. Before today I’d mostly seen my mother when I looked at Joni —but Mom and Dad were also the Josephs I remembered best. Upstream from that river of pain was the River Tommy. The master river. He was sitting on a heart-of-darkness bank, waiting for me to reach him.
“You could almost be his twin,” I said.
“That’s what Daniel thought. And you look like him too, we agreed.”
“Still?”
“Yeah. I bet this could have been you in high school.”
She put the photo back in her pocket, and as she pecked at the cigarette I envisioned me and Tommy and her somehow all young —triplet teenagers living in San Francisco together. My brother and I pay a visit to Daniel, tell him to leave our green-eyed sister alone.
“Daniel said you have a photo album?”
I pushed my hair back and nodded. “Mom had us settle on three pictures from each year of his life. She wanted a book like that. Something we could keep out.”
“Wow,” said Joni, speaking more to herself than to me. “I’d love to see it.”
“I thought you might. Sorry, but I was at the store when you called.” Though, to be honest, I was somewhat glad for that. Sixty photographs of Tommy to walk her through? Fuck. “Maybe tomorrow?” I offered.
I paused, waiting, but she didn’t say anything. I was making her uncomfortable by letting the question hang there, so I figured I’d move on, get another subject out of the way.
“You probably want to know about his death,” I said. “But I’m afraid that’s in large part a mystery.”
She shook her head, then leaned over to slip the cigarette into a Coke can someone had left on her end of the bench. “I want to hear about his life first. About what he was like.”
Yes, Joni had Tommy’s looks, but he didn’t have patience like that. So maybe I was seeing her mother in her then, the soul of a poet’s daughter. It was good I wouldn’t have to begin by choosing between some he went out like a hero line or the facts Joni deserved to leave there with, yet now I was worried I was going to disappoint in other ways. She wanted to dig at bones I’d kept buried since I was a boy —but I was a roughneck, not a poet.
I took a drag from my Winston. “Here’s the thing,” I said slowly. “I was younger than you are when it happened. I’ve been more years without him than with him.”
But her bit was fixed, and she was ready to drill. She shrugged. “Just tell me as much as you can. I’m sure you know plenty.” Then she produced a small notebook and an ink pen from under her thigh. A good-student truant, Joni. “I have questions written,” she said, flipping the notebook open. “They’re kind of lame, but would that be okay?”
I looked away from her. A massive container ship was churning toward the Pacific. A floating, Golden Gate city-state trailing a westward-bound rainbow of catamarans and sloops, ketches and cutters. If Joni could have sung across miles she would have been a turn around, turn around siren-on-a-cliff to those speedy sailors. “Fire away,” I said. But I felt like I was on a witness stand.
“Cool,” she said. “So, ugh, what were some of his favorite foods? See? Lame.”
“No. That’s easy. Fried fish. Fried chicken. About anything fried, really.”
She had the pen in her hand, and she jotted that down. A small marble notebook for her, and a big gray binder for me. So somewhere there is another page containing the words: Fried fish. Fried chicken. About anything fried, really. You live a life and get reduced to what you might order at a Shoney’s in heaven.
Joni finished writing. “What about movies?”
I thought for a second. “Red Dawn. Russians invade America, and these high school kids are fighting them.”
She frowned as she wrote. “I don’t know that one. How about books?”
“Stephen King. Or maybe Deliverance. The book, not the movie. I remember that being in his room, at least.”
“Oh my God.” Her eyes were wide. “I was Carrie for Halloween. I had a bloody prom dress and everything.”
I smiled, now feeling more like a contestant on a game show than a witness in a courtroom. Maybe I could do this after all. Maybe the worst that might happen would be me being exposed for the moron I was when it came to the topic of Tommy.
More scribbling, then: “What did he like to listen to?”
“Music? Loud bands. Def Leppard, Black Sabbath, Mötley Crüe, Guns N’ Roses.”
She kept on asking her questions, and I tried my best. Some answers were true, but some were just guesses. Some were out-and-out lies.
His first word was probably “Mama,” either that or “Daddy.” But how would I know? I don’t think he took any longer than usual to start walking, and his eyesight was better than average. He was into baseball and football, but hated basketball. He was right-handed. He swam really well and could run for days. He drank RC Cola and liked to hunt and fish. He was smart, and his grades were a lot higher than he let on to his friends. He was a whiz at geography because he loved looking at maps. His car: a ’72 Beetle he bought and fixed up with money he made working at a plant nursery. He didn’t have any nicknames until the navy —the other SEALs called him Ahab because he once spotted a sperm whale during a training exercise.
This continued for a good while, and it was only when Joni was out of prepared questions, when her pen had been speared into her bun, her notebook closed and set aside, that I realized she hadn’t written down a single thing about me. I’d forgotten I wasn’t the one she wanted to know, and I felt all my budding optimism being replaced by the sober reality that I had indeed become my brother’s gospel-preaching disciple, spinning my own unreliable account of the life of Tommy Joseph. An answerer of questions and teller of stories in the service of a long-dead man. And though in the beginning that was exactly what I’d
wanted to be for Joni, I hadn’t appreciated how lonesome that job would prove.
I crushed my cigarette against the heel of my Red Wing, but before I could toss the butt Joni moved closer on the bench and set the Coke can by my foot. A hiss, then a curl of genie smoke rose up from the can.
“Did he always plan to go in the military?” she asked.
I almost laughed before explaining that, decent grades notwithstanding, in high school Tommy was more troublemaker than Eagle Scout. “He had a temper. He was about my size, but he was always getting into fights.”
“Was he a jock or something? A bully?”
“No, not a bully,” I said, frustrated I’d given her that impression. “And, I mean, he was very athletic, but he quit playing sports in eighth grade. After that I never saw him join much of anything till he signed with the navy.”
“Then why did he?”
The wind slacked off, and I thought I could hear faint barkings coming from somewhere far below. Tommy was down there along the shoreline now, the immortal frogman weaving himself in and out of the rocks with the sea lions and the seals. The game show was over. These were the witness-stand questions, and I was wishing I could sprout wings and take a running leap from our cliff. That Joni would let me glide into the cold ocean and swim with my brother toward the warmth of a setting sun, currents and sharks and hypothermia be damned. That I could meet the Underwater Panther once and for all.
“Okay,” I said, “first you need to know that Tommy’s senior year he had this girl pierce his ear with a safety pin, so now he’s the only guy in Dry Springs with an earring. Every morning he’d drive me to the elementary school, and one day he went to grab smokes from this gas station on the side of the highway. He bought me a candy bar, and we were walking back to that VW of his when an older guy standing over by the pumps called him a faggot. Tommy told me to go on in the Bug and stay there no matter what, then that guy took off his shirt and beat the piss out of him. Ripped his earring out and didn’t stop hitting him till I ran over there crying.”
Joni put a finger to the silver hoop at the top of her ear. “Whoa,” she said.
“Tommy could scrap, but that was a grown man. A big, mean guy. Prison tats, Oklahoma tags. Never saw him again. Tommy picked me up from school that afternoon. He’s got purple eyes, a split earlobe. As soon as I graduate I’m joining the navy, he says. You watch, Roy. I’m gonna be a Navy SEAL.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that. Ever see that old show Magnum, P.I.? Before your time, but reruns?”
“With the detective in Hawaii?”
“That’s the one. He’d been a SEAL in Vietnam, Magnum. I think that’s how they got on Tommy’s radar.” I shook my head. A death made possible by a TV show. “Tommy was a different person after that fight. There was no talking him out of it. My parents tried, believe me.”
Joni sat there stone-faced, and I regretted I hadn’t lied again and concocted some nicer story, one that displayed how tender, how incredible and brotherly, Tommy could be. And I was about to start telling her how he’d walked back into that gas station, beaten and bleeding, and bought us both an RC to calm us down, when I saw she was smiling. Not the fake grin she’d flashed to show me her dimple. A real one this time.
“What?” I asked.
“That is great,” said Joni. “Really awful, but really great.” She reached over like she was going to touch my arm, then pulled her hand away. “Thank you. What you said in your e-mail —you were right. You’ve told me things about him I never would have known.”
True enough. I’d been there with Lionel Purcell. Compared to nothing, anything is something. Even the bad. Even the half-truths. Even the lies. I’d scored points, and so, hoping for a break from Tommy, I tried interviewing her some.
“Daniel, he’s your boyfriend? He said your mom doesn’t know about y’all.”
Joni sighed. “He dropped out of school. That’s all she needed to hear. To her it’s like he’s a murderer.”
“So you knew him from school?”
“No. Right after I was diagnosed I went to a support group at the hospital. Daniel was there working, installing cabinets in the hall, and we started talking. I was really upset back then, about what Crohn’s was gonna mean, and he helped.”
The sunlight hit Joni’s face a certain way, and I saw crescents like ash smudges under her eyes.
“But I’m a lot better now,” she said. “I need to figure out how to tell him that.”
“That you’re better?”
“That I’m not a mad person anymore. That I’m a different person and doing fab.” She rapped at the bench twice with her knuckles, deafening the wood gods. “And he said I shouldn’t call you. I didn’t like that.”
I nodded. Apparently Daniel’s jettisoning was on an even faster schedule than I’d thought. “Is he a murderer?” I asked.
She laughed. “No.”
“So you should just tell him. Date a boy you can go to prom with, Carrie.”
She winced like I’d cursed at her. “I’ve never had to dump someone,” she said. “It’ll be horrible.”
Her guard seemed to be lifting. That was enough about Daniel. “It’s only you and your mom?”
“Yeah. One parent, one child, she always says.” Joni turned sideways and brought her Nikes up on the bench. “I need to ask you for a favor.”
I told her to go ahead, but then she was quiet for so long I began to worry Lionel’s trailer prediction had been correct. She was going to beg me for a kidney. She needed Roy Joseph for parts.
“Could we meet somewhere tomorrow too?” she said finally.
I smiled, both surprised and relieved. Though I was also questioning how much more of it I could take: speaking about my brother to a someone who looked like my brother. I was her link to Tommy, but what was she to me? This teenager who never knew him? She was a bucket I was being forced to pour myself into. How long before the well went dry? Forget the law —could I even last until Thursday, regardless?
“Of course,” I said. “I’d like that.”
“But we can’t tell my mom about any of this. We will, but not yet.”
“Works for me. Hell, we should probably wait till you’re in college for that.” I thought suggesting this might relax her again, but she was still sitting there like a clenched fist. “Not that I’d bring up Daniel,” I added.
She rubbed at her shins. “It’s not just him. Mom can get very stressed. What she found out about you . . . that frightened her.”
I sighed. All that talking only to circle back to this. “I was wrong,” I said. “But I was a kid. A dumb kid. I can say that and still be sorry for what I did.”
“Okay. But I don’t think Mom would be able to handle it right now. I know she wouldn’t, actually.”
I’d given that same tiny I was a kid speech on a hundred occasions over the years, but as always with everyone, she hadn’t heard anything but an excuse. Joni never once touched me that day, never even shook my hand, but having her so close and studying me, inspecting me, was like having that sweet girl grow vampire fangs and sink them into my neck.
“There was another question I had,” she said. “It’s sappy, but will you to tell me your best memory of him?”
Lawyer Joni again, springing the oh, by the way question that nails the witness to the wall. “Do you want that today or tomorrow?” I asked.
She began to rock from side to side in her cannonball squinch, deciding, and I just knew bolts were working loose from the concrete beneath us. That everything would roll forward. We would bounce a few times, then shatter onto the shoreline rocks before I could catch her or she could catch me. “Well, today, if you can,” she said. “Pretend there won’t be a tomorrow.”
“I can try, I guess.”
“Great. Thank you.”
It made me s
elf-conscious to look her in the eyes and scroll through memories, so I stared off at the Golden Gate Bridge like Tommy’s daughter wasn’t right there beside me. What I wanted to tell her was that even my happiest memories of him come served with a powerful dose of pain. That when people die all your memories of the snuffed-out become depressing if you think on them long enough. That when you know the sad end of a story, bittersweet is the best you can hope for. One man sees a beautiful red bridge —another, the most popular suicide spot in the country.
But I couldn’t tell a kid those things. “I was twelve,” I said. “It was a couple of months before Tommy deployed. He was home visiting, and we were poaching a neighbor’s catfish pond when a storm rolled in. There was lightning striking on top of us, and there we are, caught in the open. I thought we’d be killed.”
Joni was hugging her knees now, and I tried my hardest to meet her gaze.
“But there was this big concrete culvert lying in the center of Mr. Russell’s pasture. I don’t know how come. It had never been there before, and when I went back later it was gone.”
Then, the rest. How Tommy and I had set off sprinting for that culvert. How he was a lot stronger, so he was carrying everything. The tackle box, both our fishing poles, the stringer of gasping channel cats we’d spent the morning catching. How he stayed beside me. How lightning split a shade oak ahead of us and toppled two cows. How my shoes were caked with mud. How I felt as if I was running in place. How the entire racing way I was imagining the hit, the moment when some dark cloud would put a yellow finger on us.
Joni shook her head. “That sounds so scary.”
“More than scary, at least to me. I can’t do it justice. The storm got even worse, and we huddled there in the culvert for what seemed forever. Like we were about to be flushed down a pipe.”
“But you guys were also safe. Maybe that’s what you remember most?”
“Sure,” I said. “Maybe. Not much of a best memory, but I think that might have been the last time we were together, just the two of us.”
Joni was patient and listening, her green eyes twinkling as she waited for me to finish.