The Other Joseph (7 page)

O
N 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 labyrinth 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.

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.