by Skip Horack
The closest thing I had to a will was a business card from Mr. Donny Lee I kept in my wallet, and on the back of the card I’d written:
If I’m dead please call this man.
Bury me at Oak Crest Cemetery in Ruston.
I have a plot there.
I did that years ago, after Malcolm got a FUCK YOU, TOE-TAGGER! tattoo on the bottom of his foot. It was dumb, a joke of my own really —but that note was also perhaps the only way anyone would know what to do with me.
The Joseph plots were near the front, by the sprawling water oak. I left Sam in the LeBaron so he wouldn’t piss on any headstones, but I didn’t last much longer at Oak Crest than the ten minutes or so it took for me to smoke a cigarette. I rarely did. Some people find solace in cemeteries, some people don’t. And the thought of spending forever planted in the same quiet place made me glad, if my brother had to die, he at least escaped that infinite finale. Even if that means the grave between Mom and Dad is a sham. That we never got to press our hands atop a coffin and know he was home. That even now I’ll sometimes see his young face in crowds.
I left Oak Crest weeping in the LeBaron, hoping all three of them understood why this had to be farewell for a while, maybe a long while. Sam had his head on my thigh, and I put my knuckles to his wet nose. None of them are here, buddy. I need to keep telling myself that. I can be anywhere and think of Tommy’s arm around my neck. Mom’s warm smile. Dad’s ever curious eyes.
A feeling, then —not freedom, exactly. More like a sorrowful slackening. And as I was driving away I reflected on the note in my wallet and wondered, not for the first time, if it would be too huge of a betrayal if I just asked to be burned and scattered.
My last stop in Ruston. It had been a couple of years since I’d met with Mr. Donny Lee in person, but he was locking the door to his office downtown as I pulled up. We did most of our business on the phone or through the mail —me giving him permission to do this or that with my money; the signing of tax returns, disclosure forms, and the like —and when I called to him from the LeBaron it was clear he didn’t recognize me any more than Eliza had. He looked like a very different man himself. A dove-gray Stetson and lizard boots, a bolo tie with a silver clasp. Mr. Donny Lee was dressed as an oilman.
I stepped out, one hand on Sam’s collar. “Roy Joseph,” I said.
He grinned at me from the sidewalk, his confusion gone. “Don’t I know! Roy Boy and Lil’ Yella Sambo! Gaw, sonny, get a haircut. You’re a Huckleberry Finn.”
“Sorry for not calling ahead. You off somewhere?”
“Not at all. Lunch with a seventy-year-old woman.” He checked his watch, removed his Stetson. His hair seemed shoe-polished, jet-black now instead of possum hoary. “Let Miss Linda wait. I can always spare clock for an old friend like you.”
His office was sandwiched between a defunct clothing store and a place that bought gold. There was no receptionist or waiting area, just a carpeted and wood-paneled room. A veneer desk occupied the end of the office like a glued-maple altar, separating a pair of fabric armchairs from a burgundy wingback, and I took a seat as he powered up his computer. Standing there, behind that massive desk, he could have been a captain at the controls of a ship.
“Okay,” he said, finding whatever he was looking for. “You want the State of the Union or something more specific?”
There were a row of filing cabinets and a gurgling water cooler against the far wall. And above them: a framed Louisiana Tech diploma and various certificates; a greenhead in flight but cupped to land, duck call hanging by a lanyard from its yellow bill. Entering, Sam had barked at the full-strut wild turkey in the corner. So now he was on his belly under the street-front plate glass, chin on paws and eyeing that longbeard, daring the puffed tom to move or even cluck.
“State of the Union,” I said. “You remember how I —”
“What happened to your goddamn finger? That new?”
I told him the story, then explained I was through with working. That as soon as I turned thirty I’d be ready for him to start freeing up some of my money. “I think I’ll need, I don’t know, forty or fifty grand a year to live on,” I said. “And a bunch more than that early on to buy a house with. Wheels too, probably. Basically, I need it to be where I can settle down somewhere and retire.”
“Retire! Been working since I was eleven.”
“Yes sir. But all the same.”
He nodded and began tapping at the keyboard, pausing sporadically to punch numbers into a desk calculator. I held my breath and waited, nervous as hell that at any moment he would look at me and apologize, tell me my January dream was a delusion. That my Airstream, Pearl Lane, Grand Isle days wouldn’t be coming to an end.
But instead he whistled.
“Something wrong?” I asked. “About two million, right?”
“Afraid not.” On a stand next to his desk was a football he’d once showed me that had been autographed by a college Terry Bradshaw. He picked the ball up, smiled, then pump-faked. Spry for his age, my accountant/adviser. “Try two and a quarter,” he said.
“What?” I was smiling now too. “Really?”
“You watch TV? Dow’s been breaking records lately. Even my grandkids know that. But thank Gil Bean, not me. Busy as a dog with fleas, Bean. He’s aggressive, but he’s safe. Bean wears suspenders and a belt.”
“Who’s Gil Bean?”
“Come now.” He shook his head. “That Dallas guy I told you about in the spring? Got most of my fat cats with Bean. He’s done well by us. Very well. You want me taking your money out his hands? Beanie doesn’t play with less than two million.”
“Well, do thank him for me.” I shrugged. “But, you know, I have all these plans.”
“With respect, that’s small thinking.”
“Yes sir. Again, nothing needs to change till January. But beyond that, I’ll be needing income. I can’t live on a number.”
Mr. Donny Lee came around from his desk. He smelled like saddle leather. “And the tax men shall rejoice. They’ve been a-waiting.” He laughed, said he would leave trying to sway me for another day. “Call me after your thirtieth, and we’ll sort this all out. I’ll quit making you richer if that’s what you really want.” Then he slapped me on the back. He was done with me, and now I was done with Ruston.
I would spend the rest of the afternoon hiking green pinewoods with Sam. My good memories of Lake Claiborne State Park —a smiling me walking barefoot along a concrete bulkhead, tagging behind Tommy and wishing I was him; jars full of fireflies; hot dogs dangling from coat hangers; my family happy and together and sucking at honeysuckle —had kept me coming up there for Tommy’s birthday every April, so after Ruston I bought groceries and drove the twenty-five miles northwest.
With summer over I had the park pretty much to myself, and I dropped a hundred bucks for a cabin on the lake. The water was shining in the sun, and I imagined Tommy swimming around and around forever, a frogman crossing salt waters to ascend Louisiana rivers. The Atchafalaya and then the Red, the Black, and the Ouachita. Bayou D’Arbonne, finally. Bass, bluegill, catfish, sacalait. My brother slipped through a dam conduit to bring himself to Lake Claiborne, close to his home and with me, and he was staged in those six thousand man-made acres of blocked-up bayou, waiting for my next move, safe even among occasional gators, the Underwater Panther always somewhere, but not here, at least not now.
Sam and I saw wood ducks and deer, a coral snake and a roadrunner, and though I usually try to keep an even keel, tending to view too much happiness and hopefulness as dangerous, as a setup for a fall, that last evening in Louisiana —grilling corn and onions and country ribs on the back porch with Sam, listening to the trillings of toads and the chirpings of crickets, the booming Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all? of a hoot owl as I planned to sleep, not in a travel trailer or on a rig or in
a hotel, but in something like a house —I stared up at the star-splashed sky and was certain I was getting my first taste of how life would one day be for Roy Joseph, millionaire.
I rode through Texas and Oklahoma with the radio off, and though I spent plenty of time pondering Lionel Purcell —and of course, Joni Hammons —Viktor Fedorov had come to dominate my thoughts. Which is to say I passed most of the drive thinking about women. Russian women. Marriage. A wife. Viktor had rung me twice already that day. He was harder to blow off than I’d thought. No messages, but those calls could only mean he was hoping I would reconsider.
For so long the main focus of my life had been to keep to a routine and avoid the unexpected by clinging to my island and my oil rigs. Yes, maybe it was foolish to have ever dialed Viktor’s number, but when I reached Kansas I was actually starting to see the wisdom of giving myself a non-Joni motive to explain my presence in San Francisco. I wasn’t violating any laws just by looking for her, but it couldn’t hurt to have a verifiable, cover-my-ass story as to what I was doing in that city. I came to find a wife, officers. Nothing more, nothing less. Five working days, says the law. Five working days.
From a Holiday Inn in Wichita, I called Viktor and flip-flopped. Again. He had three candidates for me to meet. “It might be very difficult to pick,” he kept telling me. “I have done a good job for you.” I told him I’d make California on Thursday, and then I took care of the rest. Step One: A computer in the Holiday Inn’s business center. Step Two: Select a dog-friendly San Francisco studio apartment on Craigslist to sublet. Step Three: Swap some e-mails with the current tenant, Karen Yang, negotiating seven nights of Thursday-to-Thursday rent (six hundred dollars, plus a three-hundred-dollar damage deposit —good Lord). Step Four: Overnight Karen a two-hundred-dollar check so she’d hold the place for me.
Two days later, somewhere in Wyoming, I swung into an I-80 rest stop to let Sam run around. Morning still, a dandelion sun. It was only me and a couple of truckers who were napping in their rigs. A dry, chill wind was lashing the parking lot, but the barren and brown land stretching all around us was as level as the Gulf before a storm.
The rest stop itself was brick restrooms and some picnic tables, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that horrible crimes had happened there. That after miles of lonesome but beautiful scenery I’d arrived upon a murder stadium, a rape arena. It was as if, with no obvious place to visit evil on each other, man had to go blueprint one. I walked to the edge of the parking lot and watched Sam snake through the sagebrush and clump grass. To my right a slanted signboard sat bolted to a rusting pedestal, and sealed beneath dusty Plexiglas was a photo of an antelope and a drawing of a gaunt man dragging a two-wheeled handcart. Science for my mother, history for my father. Positioned between antelope and man: a paragraph informing me I was standing in the largest unfenced area in the Lower 48. The Red Desert. Millions of acres of high-altitude desert that separated the southern Rockies from the central Rockies, home to over fifty thousand pronghorn antelope, as well as a rare desert elk herd. Shoshone and Ute had roamed here, and later, passing through like me, mountain men and pioneers, Pony Express riders and Mormons.
On the drive I had often fixed on some solitary house I could see from the interstate. A clapboard two-story walled in by Great Plains cornfields. An assembly-line modular anchored in the shadow of a western butte. A nation of immigrants, sure, but the exploring days of most Americans are well behind them, if they ever even explored at all. Perhaps some eccentric forefather had been a nomad, but now there his children remained. The shy kittens of a legendary alley cat. The Roy Josephs to that brave man’s Tommy, wasting away in their own versions of my Airstream. Pioneers. It’s easy to forget that even in the old times such venturesome spirits had been the exceptions. The vast majority kept on with their lives in well-settled lands —scratch-farming, drafting contracts, making hats —but you don’t hear much about the shopkeepers and whatnot who never left home. Those trailblazers we celebrate, the ones chasing after someplace better, were outcasts, outliers, and outlaws.
Then came the Google car. I watched a white Chevy Cobalt veer onto the exit for the rest stop, eventually pulling into a spot a few spaces over from the LeBaron. The car had a contraption periscoping from its roof like the mast of a sailboat, and a logo on the door read GOOGLE in a rainbow of letters. A chinless, balding man wearing khakis and a lime-green polo stepped out. I was at the edge of the lot still, waiting for Sam. The man nodded at me and I nodded back, then he started walking toward the restrooms. I heard the Cobalt give a quick yelp as the doors locked.
I called Sam in, and once the man was gone we went over to his car to see what was what. The roof contraption was a kind of steel boom, and atop it were cameras aimed in all different directions. A bright glare was coming off the passenger-side window, and I touched my forehead to the glass so I could peer inside. A laptop computer was attached to the console, and the backseat was buried under crumpled fast-food bags and popped cans of Red Bull. The laptop was open, but I couldn’t read the screen. There was a metallic tick issuing from under the trunk —the exhaust system, cooling.
When I turned around I saw the Google man approaching. I put my hands up to let him see I meant no harm. He smiled. He was older, and a tube of fat ran above the waistband of his khakis. Something about him made me think family man, nice guy.
“My bad,” I said.
“Part of the job,” said the man. “Folks are always curious.”
“So this is how it’s done?”
He chuckled, but then the phone on his belt holster chimed. “Just a sec,” he told me.
Sam had wandered. He was back in the desert, investigating, making discoveries, and I jogged over to get him while the man dealt with his phone call. That didn’t take me long, but maybe some all-seeing, Silicon Valley royal was tracking his knight’s progress and telling him to quit fucking around. Get on with it, make new friends on your own time. Whatever the reason, the man was in a hurry now. I watched from the desert as the Google car went gliding to the interstate, those cameras ready to tame everything. To continue shrinking the world even as I was trying to explore it.
Battle Mountain sat on a high-desert highway that ran along I-80 in northern Nevada. There wasn’t much there, and what was left looked to be fighting for its life. A railroad cut through town before continuing on west with the interstate, and the businesses I saw were mostly what I’d expected. Gas stations and trucker motels and baby casinos, some sad bars and a few dingy restaurants. No shortage of trailers in Battle Mountain, and on the slope of a faraway hill some irony-deficient crew of civic-proud dolts had spelled BM in enormous block letters fashioned from whitewashed rock. The work that must have gone into that. These are my people, I was thinking. I didn’t know what battle was ever fought atop that brown hill, but if this town held the victors I never wanted to see the place the defeated were sent to live.
I spent my first BM evening in a motel-casino-restaurant-bar in the center of town. It was Monday, so I had two full days to devote to Lionel Purcell before I was due in San Francisco. In the nightstand I’d found a tattered Lander County phone book lying between the Bible and the Book of Mormon, but no Purcells were listed. In the morning, after some breakfast in the restaurant, I went and saw the leathery woman at the front desk to see if she could help.
“What you wanting with Lionel?” she asked.
“It’s a private matter. So you know him?”
She sniffed and gave me an I-can-be-that-way-too look. “Sorry, mister,” she said. “That’s a private matter.” Her nose was shriveled like a dried fig, as if God had cursed her for sticking it in everyone’s business.
To hell with her. There were over three thousand other people living in Battle Mountain, no need to keep matching wits with this sphinx. I went back to my room to take a shower, and I’d just toweled off
and dressed when there was a knock at the door.
Lionel Purcell. He was as big as I remembered him. Tall —every bit of six four —and built like a steer-dogger. And indeed, he was outfitted for a rodeo. Black Justin Roper boots and a straw cowboy hat. Dark blue Wranglers and a starched turquoise shirt.
“You’re Lionel,” I said, dumbstruck.
The man looked past me, searching the room with flat gray eyes. He had the same mustache I recalled from the photo I’d seen online four years ago —a thick yellow horseshoe like the one Hulk Hogan sports —but there was some silver in it now, and he was in the neighborhood of fifty. Those eyes settled back on me. “I am, I am,” he said, his voice deep and gravelly. “And I’m betting you’re Ahab’s kid brother.”
I’d thought Tommy’s nickname was Orion —that was what Lionel himself had told me and my parents —but when he was alive my brother never said anything to us about a nickname, Orion or Ahab or otherwise. “You mean Tommy?” I asked.
“Right. Ahab. So are you or aren’t you?”
I nodded.
“You echo him, dude. An older, civilian model. Great to see you again.” He held out his hand, palm up, and I shook it. Sam had been asleep on the bathroom linoleum, but now he came out to see who was at the door. Lionel dropped to a knee and pulled him close, started jingling the tags on his collar. “Heya, prowler. I like a Lab. What’s his handle?”
“Sam . . . how’d you know I was here?”
“Bev called about twenty minutes ago, said a Roy Pickett Joseph with Louisiana plates was asking after me. Curious as a bag of cats, tough as a pine knot, Bev. I reckoned you might be some kin of Ahab’s. He was the only Joseph I ever knew.”
Small towns are all the same, in certain respects. I told him I was passing through Battle Mountain on my way to visit San Francisco. That I’d seen his website years back and was hoping to talk to him.
