by Skip Horack
The search for Roy Joseph was called off the next day. There were no ransom demands or hostage videos, and Simms was considerate enough not to mention sharks to me. He said only that he believes my brother drowned trying to save the life of a pirate.
Like Roy, I too have known the ends of the earth. And during the summer of my year one as a prisoner in the desert, already driven desperate by agonizing solitude and boredom, but also seeking to perhaps earn some sympathy from my invisible and enigmatic captor, I persuaded a guard to submit my request to receive instruction in Arabic and Islam. For this I expected to be ignored or even punished, a return to the terrible months that had followed my arrival at that remote, secluded compound, but a week later a man in a blinding white head scarf and thawb appeared in front of my cell. Ahmad. My tutor was much older and spoke crisp, perfect English. And he was kind. Ahmad whispered that it would be prudent if I didn’t tell him anything I wouldn’t want passed along to “others” beyond those sands, and then we began to talk. A single visit that was never repeated. Not once did I meet the fiend who held the key to my cage, but early on such seemed to be his psychopathic way. To give and then take. To find amusement in relayed accounts of my sufferings.
But I did get that lone visit. Ahmad told me he had been pleased to learn my name, explaining that the Joseph of my Book of Genesis and the Yusuf of his Quran were one and the same. Consequently, he announced, we shall open your lessons there. Over the next hour, the first pleasant hour of the twenty years I would spend in that earthbound limbo, I listened as he shared the story of the prophet Yusuf with me. The story of a dreamer who was thrown into a well by his own brothers, enslaved and then imprisoned for many years before becoming favored by a king and set free, reunited with his family. Yusuf’s life was a splendorous life, my tutor contended, and as he said this I knew he was trying to give me what I needed. A way to look at my circumstances and not lose hope.
Neither my brother nor I have been very likely prophets, and no one would call our lives splendorous, but I see us both as that dreaming brother of legend. As that Joseph in a well, waiting for what might come next. That day in the culvert, Roy, you were shaken and afraid, but what you did not know, what I wish you could have known, was that I was also so afraid. And the only thing keeping me stable was having you there with me, riding out that storm. “Be careful, Tommy,” you said to me then, a soaked twelve-year-old speaking not of a storm but of war, and I should have done more than act brave for you. That wouldn’t have changed our destinies —destiny is destiny —but there in that culvert, yes, I should have given you more.
After Ahmad I found strength in meditation and in books, in the scattershot prayers of an agnostic, in the eventual, startling gentleness and even friendship of my guards, but above all it was the dream of my homecoming that sustained me during my years of captivity. The dream I might one day hobble down the steps of a plane and see my family on the tarmac. On the final night in my cell I heard the explosions of mortar rounds, then the rat-a-tats of firefights, and in the morning the compound was taken by rebels. With the Arab Spring my dream seemed inevitable. There was the crossing of that golden desert on motorcycles and in cars for a rendezvous with amazed CIA spooks, and three days afterwards, like an offering from a god, nighttime helicopters filled with brother SEALs descended onto a road near a seaside date palm grove to help bring a long-haired and bearded scarecrow home. A C-17 flew me from a secured airfield directly to Germany, and I was a week at Landstuhl before the med/psych experts came clean about my parents, then Roy. As I wept I remember feeling as if the world had finally broken me. I was the last of the Josephs, and having a sense of the loneliness my little brother had been living with felt like more than I could bear.
Then, later . . . America, Walter Reed, and the visit from Margaret Mokwelu. Poring through Roy’s binder introduced me to a new level of pain, frustration, and anger. And there was astonishment but no joy even in knowing Joni and Nancy were out there because, unfortunately, I was famous by then, so this much was clear: they must have heard about my return from the dead, yet they had chosen not to contact me.
But Margaret was persistent. Due to those notes she knew things about me and my family no one else knew, so in certain ways she was my only friend. For several days she would come and we would talk, and she pleaded with me to summon the strength to do what Roy had done and go to Joni. The strength to eventually make the San Francisco phone call Margaret had never been able to make. I failed in that, she said, but that was also not my place. Please take this burden from me. Then she asked me the question Roy once asked himself. What would your brother want from you?
My reassimilation and reintegration was meant to be a long and ongoing process of closely supervised mental and physical healing, but after three months of military bases and medical centers —and a time-served, photo-op promotion conferred by the president —I’d had enough. Following my surgery and rehab at Walter Reed, and another month as an outpatient, I was allowed to walk away, and since then I’ve been an expeditionary, retired-navy traveler and tourist, moving through this country and this ghost story. I remain astounded by the Internet and the price of gas and the phones in everyone’s pockets, but otherwise I still recognize America.
In Louisiana I found Sam. His muzzle was gray, his body stiffening, but when I spoke his name he rose and came to me like a fighter answering the bell. Get yourself an address and send for him, Malcolm said. Have some time with the old rogue —even if it’ll make this coon-ass cry to give him up.
And in Nevada, Lionel Purcell. Battle Born Outfitters is in business again, and he says his outlaw days are over. Almost all of my SEAL platoon had been through Walter Reed to see me at least once, but Lionel just waited patiently until I wrote him, in that knowing and reclusive way of his. Yup, Ahab, your brother was out here. Yup, you might have a kid. When I arrived in Battle Mountain he brought me to the Rubies, and I told him that what happened to me in the Persian Gulf —the agony I’ve caused for so many, the guilt I’ll live with forever —was not anyone’s fault but my own. This first Joseph to jump before he should have.
But I also told Lionel that on my swim I had felt something with me in the dark water. Something that had awoken me from my slapped sleep. Something the fishermen who found me on the beach seemed to have a name for. And although I’ll never know what he was, exactly, that something was definitely there. Confusing me, watching me. A panicked, disoriented boy, alone and swimming. A boy mistaking the lights of an underway trawler for the lights of a search vessel. A boy realizing his mistake too late for that mistake to be corrected. Too late for him to do anything but push on for the shore.
California. I regret Nancy Hammons probably comes off as the villain of Roy’s pages, as a shadowy presence to be avoided and feared, because the actual Nancy is thoughtful and caring. A woman who once kissed me on a beach and told me I was too much of a kid to be the warrior I thought I was then. A mother who would lay down her life for her daughter. She was dumbfounded to hear from me, could never have expected that binder, showing me the way, but she has been a lighthouse in all of this as well. I retraced Roy’s pioneer trail, driving from a trailer in Battle Mountain to a hotel in San Francisco to meet her, and we talked in my room for hours. My memories of our night in San Diego seemed to be from another lifetime, but I did remember her. She was the last woman I’d been with, just as I had been her last man.
In San Francisco Nancy told me that, as reports of Thomas Joseph began to flood the news, she and Joni had read of Roy’s death in one of the many articles written about me. And they had been as surprised to learn of that as they had been to learn of my resurrection. Even the fact Roy had been in Africa was a revelation to them. Nancy explained that after months and then years passed, Joni finally accepted Roy had decided to turn away from her. No private investigators this time, only trust, a conviction Roy would find her again when he was ready. But
Joni knew the truth now, and Nancy said they’d still been discussing how to best approach me when, instead, I had called them. Nancy insisted all blame for their delay lay on her. She had been worried I’d never be able to forgive her for shunning my brother.
So it was for me to tell Nancy to put that aside. I wish she would have told my parents about Joni, that they could have known her and loved her. And yes, Roy had deserved better. But any bitterness I might have been holding on to went away when Nancy drove me to the yellow house on Marvel Court. A star-spangled WELCOME HOME balloon was tied to the tucked balcony. The same balcony where Roy first saw Joni.
“No more secrets,” said Nancy. “This can be our beginning.”
And then: Joni. She was standing in the center of a living room with two framed photographs in her hands, pictures Roy had given her. “Hey,” she said, shy and shaking, and I told her that one of the photos was of a day I still remembered. A bright hospital room where brothers are meeting. I am a child, and Roy is the infant cradled in my skinny arms. And, blurry in the background yet certainly there, a mother and father are watching their sons.
But the other photograph, the other photograph was Roy’s notes come alive. He and Joni are sitting on a bench, a photo album resting between them. A young man and a teenage girl looking about as related as an uncle and a niece can look. My brother’s hair is untamed, his brown eyes shining, nervous, and wild.
As it had been for Roy, seeing Joni was enough to assure me she was mine —but Nancy wanted me to have no doubts, so we’d already confirmed it with a DNA test. I had a daughter, and suddenly nothing seemed more important to me than that. Joni is the same age now as I was when I swam off the face of the earth. A twenty-year-old college student who loves children and intends to be a pediatrician someday. Things are still clumsy between us, but I can feel that changing. On my most recent trip to San Francisco she brought me to some of the places Roy spoke of in his notes, places he once wandered himself. The Outer Richmond and Baker Beach. Fort Miley and Golden Gate Park. The Monarch Bear Grove. For now he is what we have in common, but that has provided us with a foundation to build on, a history. I’m limping into middle age with poor health and a bad leg, but Joni has given me a purpose. And Roy is to thank for that, of course. For bringing us together. He carried the torch for his older brother for as long as he could manage, and ultimately that did as much for me as any Arab Spring.
I wrote Peach City Self Storage as soon as I found out about the unit Roy had rented, but the contents were sold at auction when his checks stopped coming. The buyer was a man from Grambling, and all I can hope is that by some miracle he is indeed the hoarder the owner of Peach City described in her e-mail to me. Please don’t hang up, I told that Grambling man. I will pay you five times what you paid for whatever is left.
Although I’ll never have that reunion of Josephs I had longed for, I have an updated dream to sustain me. I like to think of a morning when my new family will gather at a cemetery in north Louisiana. A small ceremony. Joni and Nancy and I in the shade of a water oak saying words for my mother and father —then, for Roy. I’ll stand at attention by that empty space between my parents as workers, laborers like him, replace one stone for another so our switch is made complete.
And I will drive to Dry Springs for a pilgrimage to the old home. Res Ipsa Plantation llamas will watch me and Sam pick our way across the pasture to the Panther Mound, and there I’ll make it known to the Underwater Panther that my own vial of stolen dirt has been lost, taken from me like that dirt was once taken from him. I will apologize for us ever having disturbed him, and I’ll pray the curse has been transferred, the Josephs’ debt satisfied. That perhaps he will finally let us rest.
I should stop there, but I won’t. Because if Roy’s notes taught me anything it is that things aren’t always as they appear, and that lesson, that gift —a religion, almost —has given me the faith to believe whatever I choose to believe. For example, still another dream. The dream of a stubborn and hopeful disciple that my brother is alive. He was pulled from the water by pirates who treat him as a hero. The good man who fell from the sky to rescue their friend. Roy is with them but not as their prisoner. The pirate life. One of his escape fantasies made real. He’s free to leave, yet for these three years he has remained. Often thinking of Joni, but seduced by adventure.
But maybe news of me will somehow reach him and give him a second reason to emerge from the mangroves of that sweltering delta maze. A half-land, half-water place where hundreds and hundreds of creeks flow into the sea. He will steal a boat and slip down one of those tributaries, his journey resumed until we are reunited at last.
Or maybe you are already here, Roy, watching over me from afar. I can settle for that dream, if I have to. Brothers. I am for you as you are for me. My past, my present, and my future. My past, my present, and my future.
—T.J.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author wishes to thank Lee Boudreaux, Megan Lynch, Janie Yoon, and everyone at Ecco/HarperCollins and House of Anansi Press. My deepest appreciation also to Kimberly Witherspoon, David Forrer, and the team at Inkwell Management, as well as to the Stanford University Creative Writing Program, Florida State University, Auburn University, the University of New Orleans, Halawakee H.L., and the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies at San José State University.
In addition, thank you to the following individuals: Molly Antopol, Lyndsey Blessing, Eavan Boland, Steven Boriack, Suet Yee Chong, Meredith Dees, Gabriella Doob, Jim Gavin, Lauren Groff, Dan Halpern, Scott Hutchins, Adam Johnson, Jamie Kornegay, Eleanor Kriseman, Sarah MacLachlan, Tom McGuane, Michael McKenzie, Emily Mockler, Ted O’Brien, Allison Saltzman, Jack Shoemaker, Pauls Toutonghi, David Vann, Greg Villepique, Ryan Willard, Charlie Winton, Tobias Wolff, and Craig Young.
This book never would have been possible without the knowledge and guidance of my cousin John Burnham, retired U.S. Navy captain and SEAL, as well as that of my old friend Avis Bourg and Bobby St. Pierre of Offshore Marine Contractors, Inc. in Cut Off, Louisiana. A huge debt of inspiration also to Andrew Holzhalb and my brother Matt Horack, who both left us too soon. Finally, as always, my deepest thanks to my parents, family, and friends—and most of all to Sylvia, my amazing wife, for always shining so bright.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Author photo: Sylvia Horack
Skip Horack is a former Jones Lecturer at Stanford University, where he was also a Wallace Stegner Fellow. His story collection The Southern Cross won the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Bakeless Fiction Prize, and his novel The Eden Hunter was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. A native of Louisiana, he is currently an assistant professor at Florida State University.
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
House of Anansi Press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored books, a mandate that continues to this day even as the list has branched out to include internationally acclaimed thinkers and writers. The press immediately gained attention for significant titles by notable writers such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, George Grant, and Northrop Frye. Since then, Anansi’s commitment to finding, publishing and promoting challenging, excellent writing has won it tremendous acclaim and solid staying power. Today Anansi is Canada’s pre-eminent independent press, and home to nationally and internationally bestselling and acclaimed authors such as Gil Adamson, Margaret Atwood, Ken Babstock, Peter Behrens, Rawi Hage, Misha Glenny, Jim Harrison, A. L. Kennedy, Pasha Malla, Lisa Moore, A. F. Moritz, Eric Siblin, Karen Solie, and Ronald Wright. Anansi is also proud to publish the award-winning nonfiction series The CBC Massey Lectures. In 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011 Anansi was honoured by the Canadian Booksellers Association as “Publisher of the Year.”
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