Further Joy

by John Brandon

  We are an area of unnamed, interchangeable churches. We decide things in church. Votes are taken and the losers are gracious. We decline to deem people ignorant. We don’t mind not knowing, don’t ask questions and then get angry at the answers. We don’t gather around anything that moves and beat it with sticks until money falls out. Our services aren’t an excuse to figure out who you hate and who you’re supposed to vote for and what you’re supposed to wear. We took all the fun out of religion, is what my mom says. She says it’s better than razor wire for keeping out bad elements.

  A kid who was in my class at school last year and his family were chosen. The kid was special at baseball. His arm was as skinny as anyone’s, but he could throw runners out from deep in centerfield. He was a switch-hitter. Eleven years old, switch-hitting doubles off the fence. I wonder sometimes if, wherever he is now, they have baseball.

  A family that ran a custom ball cap company was chosen. You still see people wearing the caps, each a one-of-a-kind.

  A woman who lived alone.

  A guy with a limp who ran a used-furniture shop.

  An old-timer who was an assistant coach for FSU before Bobby Bowden came along and cleaned house.

  The homes get tarped over right away by the church deacons. Since most everyone in the area has moved here from some other state, it takes the relations a couple days to arrive. They come and go without talking to anyone, carrying off the random remaining possessions. They are ashamed. They feel tricked. In the cold, crowded places these people come from, there is nothing more regrettable than being tricked.

  The college-age kids leave, and the old people when their health fails and they need to be near hospitals. The parents and the children, we stay. This was decided in the churches, and the votes were not close. We will all stay until we all leave. Common sense has been propounded—all places have their dangers, their earthquakes or tornadoes or robberies at knifepoint or government-sanctioned poisonings or avalanches or wildfires or schizophrenics with machine guns. And then there are some who believe that when fate calls you, it won’t matter where you are.

  People do ask why the little baseball star and his dimpled sister and his strict but patient parents were chosen, why before them it was the old lady who kept sweet-temperedly to herself, who spent hours and hours tending the citrus trees in her backyard. You can hear the unspoken complaint: Why not me?

  My parents are worn out, but also they’ve grown proficient at being worn out. They toughen as needed, like people throughout history. My father has always kept odd hours, but now my mom makes excuses to stay up at night too. She’ll say she just put a pie in, or that she’s going to finish a book. She’ll stay up and knit scarves far too warm for this part of the world, and in the morning I’ll find her kitchen chair over near the big floor-to-ceiling window in the living room. They’d gotten out of the crosshairs, as my father used to say, had made their escape from teeming vulgar commerce and my mother’s insufferable family and cold weather to boot. They’d found this sanctuary and made it home and had a child here. But now something else has found this place too.

  The guy at the motel is in his customary lounge chair. His T-shirt says NEVER SAY ALWAYS. I’m Huck Finning—interacting, which is a lot easier than reflecting. I’m a couple chairs down from the guy. He’s seen me plenty of times walking by, has eyed me through the chain link.

  “What’s it like in New Mexico?” I ask.

  He takes his time, tries to rub something off his lounge chair with his thumb.

  “I live in North Hollywood,” he says. “In a penthouse.”

  Now I think of vast, hazy views and bartenders in bow ties. Trees growing indoors.

  “The building calls the whole top floor the penthouse, but it’s the exact same apartments as the rest of the building. In the elevator the buttons say 1, 2, 3, and P and I get to push P.” The guy’s smirk brightens. “I have a more commanding view of the industrial park than the folks on the third floor.”

  “Why do you say you’re from New Mexico?”

  The guy produces a glass and pours me some tea. He explains that he’s a scout for a company that makes documentaries. They did one on the ivory trade, he says. They did one on these hundred-year-old Nazi officers that turn up now and then.

  “What does a scout do?” I ask.

  “Absorb and process the available narrative. Also make sure no one else is poking around. Make sure there’s no one to buy out or partner with.” After a moment he says, “We’re a relatively small company.”

  I sip the tea and it’s so sweet it makes me squint.

  “This isn’t far from where Errol Morris made that movie,” the guy says. “The one with the turkey hunter.”

  “That movie celebrates rednecks,” I tell him. “Not all turkey hunters are like that. My father’s best friend is a turkey hunter.”

  The guy smirks again. The way his face is, he’s always either smirking or failing to smirk. “There are religions way off in the Far East where shooting a turkey would be a sin,” he says.

  “I’ve heard of that.”

  “Sin isn’t the correct term, but ending another life is an act you’d be judged for. You’re not allowed to harm another creature.”

  “They’re innocent,” I put in. “Animals are innocent.”

  “Do you think that’s possible, to live your life without causing suffering in any other creature?”

  I know this is one of those questions that aren’t meant to be answered, so I don’t try to. I watch the guy extricate a pack of cigarettes from a pocket in his shorts. He wrangles a lighter out of there too. He pulls a cigarette out and rests it on the ground, and lays the lighter right next to it. I guess he’s going to wait until I’m gone to smoke.

  “My problem is getting caught up in earthly judgments,” he says. “It’s hard not to when you live in LA, and when you work in the entertainment industry.”

  “My mom says LA is no worse than anywhere else. I heard her say that one time.”

  “Well, that’s mighty generous of her.” He looks down at his cigarette and lighter. They seem to have a peaceful effect on him. “No matter what you do out there, they’ve got a prize for it. And if you don’t get nominated for these prizes, it’s the end of the world. The absolute end of the world. And if you get nominated and don’t win, that’s worth getting upset about too. That’s called getting snubbed. Awards, awards, prizes, prizes.” He looks upward a moment. There’s just clouds up there, but he seems surprised to see them. “As you can probably surmise, we haven’t won any.”

  “Prizes are demeaning,” I tell him.

  He stays with his thoughts a moment, still gazing upward, then he looks at me. “Who told you that? Is that your mom again?”

  “No, my father. He says children are motivated by prizes. ‘If you do real good, I’ll give you a candy.’ He says that’s kids’ stuff. He says I already should’ve outgrown it.”

  “Have you?”

  “I think so,” I say. “He says if you’re an adult doing adult work, having someone pat you on the head in approval is patronizing.”

  The guy nods. He presses his thumb against his front teeth. “It’s patronizing,” he says, “but it’s also how you secure patronage.” Then he leans forward and kills an ant in an expert fashion, cutting it in half with his fingernail. He watches the two halves of the ant continue to move, limping around in antic little circles, until they finally stop.

  “That ant was scouting your jug of tea,” I say.

  There are two women in our area who have both opened restaurants serving Northern Italian cuisine, and these are the only restaurants of note. The women are sisters who moved here after they got tired of Dallas. The competition between their restaurants is fierce. Most people don’t take sides. Most people dine in both. Each time my parents and I eat at one, the prices are lower and the ingredients more exotic. The sisters are wealthy, the daughters of a pioneer in the cable TV industry. My father says he brings me down to the re
staurants for one because the food is world-class, and for two to show me what kind of silliness can come of having siblings. He says a sibling is one more thing you’re tied to against your will, more toxic clutter in your life, more stale drama.

  Our churches are plain white buildings with piney, unpaved parking lots. Our men wear ties to church and our women wear whatever they want. Our preachers go on and on for hours, but never about right and wrong. They don’t want to hear about our shortcomings.

  A long-standing, moneyed Protestant church sent a guy down here to check things out. He’s been around the block. He’s not unfamiliar with the impossible. They sent him from Canada. He doesn’t stay at the motel. He stays down on the coast and drives up every day. He eats at the Italian restaurants, sits in the back row during church services, listens to the joyful noises raised by the young during the songs at the beginning and the end.

  My father designed memorials. His first one, when he was starting out, won him distinction. It’s on the campus of FSU, dedicated to a scientist who spent his life improving tomatoes. It’s a fountain inside a huge beaker. There are these transparent wires with copper tomatoes hanging from them, and the falling water is always nudging the tomatoes so they sway. A day of imagination and then a year of math. That’s what my father says about his job. He always has a pair of glasses in his shirt pocket and when he hugs you he does it with one arm so he can protect the glasses.

  There were others after that, in Florida and elsewhere. One was for a man who modernized the flower industry in Mexico. One was for a genius Mississippi bluesman. He hasn’t done a memorial in years, but he still goes out to his studio for hours at a time and returns looking exhausted.

  My father’s only friend now is the turkey hunter, a mason who spends all his time in the woods. He and my father were partners, years ago. My father doesn’t get on well with others these days, even at church. My mom is the one with all the friends, all the confidants. She told me once that she’d married my father because he didn’t have a phony bone in his body. It was the greatest thing about him, she said, and his biggest problem.

  Some people from the area instituted an all-night patrol a while back, attempting to be more vigilant than the heavens themselves, but it didn’t last. Too few folks participated. The patrollers got exhausted and started falling asleep on people’s porch swings and in cars that were left open.

  Someone else, a retired high school physics teacher, calculated a radius beyond which no one would be chosen. But then someone was. It happened barely outside the range he’d defined, as if to teach him a lesson. It was the furniture shop owner that time—his cottage found roofless and purified, not even his walking stick left behind. Some people said the physics teacher was responsible, that whatever was happening to the furniture shop owner, good or bad, in some unfathomable dimension, was the physics teacher’s doing. Maybe the furniture shop owner was being tortured. Then again maybe his limp was healed and he was drinking something cool in the shade. That’s why the TV channels lost interest, my father says—because they couldn’t prove anyone was suffering. He says when you get to the front of the traffic jam you want to be rewarded with stretchers and ambulances.

  The furniture shop is still here, on the edge of our area, looking like a museum exhibit, the furniture inside growing antique.

  The county police call it an ongoing situation, rather than a case. If not versed in the impossible, they’re at least practiced in the unsolved. Even folks who hold cops in the lowest regard agree that they’ve been graceful. The first couple times they swooped out in a fleet of lit cruisers and dusted every surface and put samples in zipper bags and stood around with coffee all day, keeping the reporters behind an orange ribbon. But they’ve wised up. Now they send a single deputy to do whatever paperwork is unavoidable. Sometimes the cops wait until the next night to sneak someone over—in part, I imagine, because they have comprehensible problems to battle, and in part because they don’t want to be asked if they’ve made any progress.

  I walk out of the corner store where they sell used books and homemade ice cream, and a man sitting on a bench speaks to me. I don’t recognize him at first because he’s wearing khaki clothes and a floppy hat. It’s the investigator, the one sent by the rich Protestants. He asks me about fishing, about where to get gear and bait and a permit, and I tell him we don’t believe in permits around here.

  “Have you decided anything?” I ask him.

  He removes his hat. Now he looks exactly like himself.

  “In fact, I have. I’ve decided nothing noteworthy is afoot, nothing worthy of further investigation. I think I’ll report insufficient findings. I’m going to recommend this area be left the hell alone. Close this baby up, as we say.”

  I don’t know whether to be glad about his answer. There’s a part of me that feels slighted. The investigator looks deeply unconcerned.

  “So you’re going back to Canada and you’re going to lie,” I venture.

  His face doesn’t change but I can tell he likes me. Old people always like me. “I’m going to fib all right, but I’m not going back up there. I’m staying. The natives are going to be even more outnumbered than they are now.”

  “You’re going to live here, just like that?”

  “Well, I’m retiring. When people retire, they head south.”

  “Yeah, but there are places more south than this,” I say. “Places that don’t have… what we have going on.”

  “Exactly,” he says.

  We’re under a few massive old pecan trees, birds flitting branch to branch above us. It’s the middle of the day but it’s dim here in the shade.

  “Isn’t it against all religions to lie?” I say.

  “First of all, there’s a lot of gray area in my line of work, religion or no. Second of all, yes, it is.”

  “If you were Catholic, you could lie and then go to confession and admit it and it’s like it never happened.”

  The investigator shifts on the bench. He’s not going to stand anytime soon. He’s probably not going fishing. He’s going to be one of us.

  “I’m a native,” I tell him.

  I watch him nod appreciatively. “I know it. And natives like you speak well of a place.”

  “I think confessing sounds fun,” I admit. “You go in that wooden booth and nobody knows it’s you.”

  “Somebody always knows it’s you,” says the investigator. “Someone’s always totting your omissions.”

  That night my parents head over to one of the towns to see a movie, an old-fashioned date sort of thing. I practice juggling for about an hour in my room, a skill I’ve been trying to pick up. Then I listen to music in the parlor for a while, a subdued jazz record my father is partial to, but I can’t get sleepy. I go to the kitchen for a glass of milk, but instead I find myself rummaging in the drawers for the spare key to my father’s studio.

  It’s a flimsy key, not full size, like a key for a file cabinet or something. I find it in a junk drawer underneath a calculator and a tape measure, and then I slip out the back and walk across our shadowy little yard and fit the key into the doorknob. There’s a palm tree growing right in front of the studio, leaning down over the entrance. When I open the door it shushes against the hanging fronds, and there’s the shush again when I close it behind me.

  I’ve been in my father’s studio many times, but not lately. I know there’s a pull cord for the light, and I grope around above me until I find it. With the place lit up, I can see that everything is the same as I remember. The walls are bare white. There’s a case of mineral water under the drafting table, pencil shavings scattered around on the concrete floor. The air smells like things heated, things overused—hot glass and leather and stale coffee.

  On the table is the book of all my father’s sketches. There must be a thousand of them, in clear plastic sheets. On the page that’s showing there’s a three-dimensional drawing of a clock tower. One wall of the tower is filled in—with irregular, soft-looking br
icks—but the others seem like they’re transparent, so you can see that inside the tower, on the floor, is a pile of heavy chain. I look closer and there are cuffs attached to the chain, like to hold a person prisoner in a fairy tale. The clock has numerals but no hands. I turn to the next sketch and it’s the same drawing. There are small alterations—the size of the clock face, the shape of the bricks. Next page, the same thing again, but now the tower is stouter and instead of a pile of chain there’s only the cuffs, moored directly to the wall.

  The studio is shaped like an L. I still my breathing and listen for a car out on the road. When I hear nothing, I go down around the corner, and what I see, arranged on a pallet of plywood, are a dozen identical metal eggs. They’re about two feet tall. They’re not eggs, though—they’re shaped more like tears, or a moon that’s begun to melt. They’re fashioned of a dull-colored metal. I step closer and see that they all have little holes punched into them, companies of tiny sharp punctures gathered around the tops. The moons, or the tears or whatever, are hollow. I put my hand on one and it moves easily, so I pick it up to assess it in my palms.

  There’s a candle underneath. Now I see. There’s a candle under each one. I put the one I’m holding back where it was and look around for matches, which I find handy on an otherwise empty shelf. Big camping matches.

  I get the candles burning, one and then the next and then the next. I pull the cord for the light, and when I come back around the corner I see, there on a screen my father has tacked to the ceiling, a host of wide-open eyes staring down at me, incurious and knowing at once.

  If you look under one of the tarps you’ll see that the roof of the house is gone—not caved in or blown over or burned to ashes, just gone. The big appliances are left, and some compact heavy objects like cans of beans or a bowling ball in a leather bag. The buildings look at once frozen and scorched. The walls are blackened as if by heat, the floors cracked as if by cold.