The Other Joseph (5 page)

“You think you could just lie next to me?” I asked.

“That's how it works.”

I gave the condom back to her. “And sleep, I mean. Just sleep. Maybe let me hold you.”

That stopped her. First she looked puzzled, but then she looked pissed. Seeing that transformation play out was like watching a snake coil up. “Listen here,” she said. “I don't give no refunds.”

“I'm not angling for one.”

“You a fag or something?”

“No.”

The nightie was too big for her, and one of the straps was hanging off her shoulder. She relaxed, then shrugged. “When I started doing this on the side everyone said that—that there'd be dates who'd only wanna talk—but I ain't never seen it till now. Congrats.” She brushed at the other strap with her hand, and the nightie dropped around her ankles. She was all bones and hard edges. The AC had cooled the Airstream way down, and her skin was splotchy and covered with goose pimples.

“I could maybe try,” I said.

“Up to you. I'm happy not to get dripped on.”

“But you'll stay?”

She collapsed behind me onto the bed, and I turned to look at her. She spoke into the space above her like some dying girl. “Fine. Hug on me, weirdo.”

“I've just got a lot on my mind.”

“That niecey, you mean. Did she call again?”

“Kind of. Earlier, back at the bar.”

“Told you not to talk to her, dummy.”

I lay down alongside Sierra, breathing her in, and after a few minutes of that I had a change of heart. I began to pull at myself with my good hand. My eyes were closed, but I could feel her watching. I heard a noise like cellophane crinkling, realized she was tearing at the condom wrapper. I opened my eyes.

“Oh well,” she said. “You're looking ready now. Lucky, lucky me. You got lube here? I lost mine.”

I shook my head.

“KY? Astroglide?”

“No.”

“Great.” She slipped the condom over me and fell back. The hair between her legs had been waxed away. “Let's go, but take it easy.”

I crawled on top of her, and she grunted. “Sorry,” I said. I got all the way inside, and her hip bones stabbed at me as we locked together. My bandage swiped across the headboard, and a shock of pain went racing up my arm. I flinched but kept on. “Is this okay?”

“Don't quiz me. Fuck me.”

I don't know if it was from the drinking or the Vicodin or what, but I didn't feel anything at all. I pushed against her and pushed against her for song after song, and though I thought talking would maybe help me get finished, every time I'd speak
Sierra would order me to shut up. Finally she told me we had to quit.

“You pumped your money's worth,” she said. “We're done.”

THE NEXT MORNING
Sierra left the Airstream wearing my raffle prize under an old long-sleeved work shirt I'd given her as well. The day was already on broil. Jack Hebert opened the door of his stilt-mounted trailer-in-the-sky and hollered down attaboy as Sierra and I walked to the LeBaron, his live-in sister-in-law, Tricia, smirking beside him. Tricia was a hairdresser in a past life. I'd pay her to trim my mop, shave my neck. Jack once told me they sometimes fooled around while Ada was off getting dialysis. Perfect neighbors for a guy like me.

I drove Sierra to the motel on Highway 1 where she said her crew of lingerie gypsies was staying. They toured around the parishes like that, hopping from dump to dump. I tried to talk to her, but she just stared out the window. She had scuffed heels on, and the rest of her clothes were in that pink backpack. She got out the LeBaron without saying good-bye, but I stayed parked there in the open. Like I wanted the whole island to know what I'd been at.

My mouth tasted like ashes, and I had a sour, empty stomach. It felt as if something was chewing on my brain. Dad had been a Catholic, but in name only. And though Mom raised her sons to be Methodists like her, after Tommy was taken from us our church-going came to an end. Still, I've always believed that somewhere Tommy is watching. My parents, too. I do a lot of shit I'd rather not have any of them see, but to believe otherwise would make my life unbearable. I'm lonely enough as it is. I used to feel certain a day had never passed without me missing Mom, Dad, Tommy, but eventually I saw enough sunsets to realize that couldn't be true. If heaven exists I'm sure the cloud-sitters smile at being
remembered, but the truth is I forget the three of them plenty. There's a betrayal in that, of course. Maybe Joni's mother didn't want me in their lives, but this extended beyond the living. Tommy was dead at twenty, yet in my head he will forever be older and wiser and braver than me, his odd little brother. Parked outside that motel, I asked the question I'd avoided asking ever since I'd read Joni's e-mail—Tommy, what do you want me to do?

So I drove from Sierra to the Cybermobile and typed another e-mail to Joni:

I spoke to your mother, and I'm glad y'all found me. I'm willing to trust you, and I thank you for reaching out. If you ever want to write me or call me, you do that. We don't have to kill this unless that's what YOU choose.

A
T THE TIME OF MY ACCIDENT ON THE LORANGER
Avis, I was at least secure in the knowledge that I would be a rich man fairly soon. I'm not talking about the injury. Since, for a roughneck, no disability could be attributed to the loss of a pinkie, I suspected I'd only bank ten to fifteen grand once I got around to filing my comp claim. No, my forthcoming fortune would be the result of people dying too young. I'd be a tragedy tycoon.

My parents had hired a personal financial specialist after Tommy's death was finally made official, a backslapping guy from over in Ruston. Donny Lee Scott, CPA/PFS. Sort of an accountant/adviser, Mr. Donny Lee helped them pool my brother's savings with the quarter million or so they received in death benefit and life insurance payouts, said he'd handle everything until they were ready to retire from teaching at the high school. Five years went by, then in '97 they died. I was a spring-semester freshman at LSU when a grief counselor knocked on the door of my dorm room. The guy told of a slick bridge and a flipped car and a deep creek, and then he tried to hug me. How do you describe how it feels to have everyone taken from you? To have no family left? To have no one to share the pain with except a fucking grief counselor? I won't even try.

I was devastated, wet-faced and sucking for air, yet there was also a flicker of something else beneath that crushing pain. Something I'm ashamed to admit, but here it is: at nineteen years old I also felt a stunned sense of relief. My parents were the kindest of people. I'd seen them destroyed by losing Tommy, and I didn't realize until right then in that cube of a dorm room that, ever since, I'd been living with only one real goal—just don't let yourself die before they do, Roy. They've had enough hurt.

AS FOR MY OWN HURT
, responsibilities called. There was nothing for me to do but stand up and stagger forward, so I dropped out of LSU and moved home to Dry Springs. Everything my parents left behind went to me, and I finished out that spring on the farm, sleeping and drinking and crying, boxing up things little by little, selling equipment and livestock and whatnot as I prepared to put the place on the market at some point. Our Catahoula, Rocky, soon vanished into the coyote pinewoods, wandered off as if searching for Mom and Dad, and after buyers came to trailer away our four Beefmaster steers, then a trio of Duroc hogs, all I had to keep me company was a pride of half-feral, unnamed barn cats and a coop full of chickens.

But then, as summer came on during that bad year, a sturdy brunette girl in a softball jersey rode up to the house on a quarter horse. Eliza Sprague. She was balancing a pan of lasagna on her wide thigh.

“No one ever sees you,” she said. “They're worried all you're eating is eggs.”

“Who's worried?”

“Everyone.”

“So they sent you?”

“I sent me.” Eliza's round face was pancaked with makeup, and she was staring at the beer in my hand. “Think I could have
one?” she asked. And instead of just taking the lasagna from her I invited her inside.

I didn't know Eliza well. For most of my life she'd been the pigtailed kid on the school bus who lived one dirt road over from mine off the highway. She was in high school now, but though I wish I could claim she was sixteen going on thirty or some such, that's not really true. She was sixteen and looked it, and nineteen is nineteen. I get that, and it seemed that way even when, eyes glistening, she dared me to kiss her a couple of beers later. That was before I let my hair become ratty, before I started hiding my own face behind patchy stubble for days at a time. Despite the depressed darkness of that summer I was still trying to look like Navy Tommy back then. Clean-cut, a bit of a pretty boy, to be honest. But due mostly to my shyness I'd also not yet managed to shuck my virginity.

All I can really say is I wanted her. That the hot months in Dry Springs could kill you with boredom. That I was out of my mind. Tommy made SEAL and died serving his country by twenty. Went out like a hero, according to Lionel Purcell. Me, at nineteen I had quick and clumsy sex with a minor.

From then on Eliza would often ride by after her parents left for work. We only let it happen all the way between us a few more times, and on each occasion I swore that would be the end of that. But maybe I also thought the universe owed me something in return for all my hardships. That's a dangerous line of thinking, and one August morning Eliza was standing in my kitchen, sobbing and telling me she was pregnant. She asked me to pray with her, but the dominoes fell swiftly. There was an ugly scene with her parents, then an abortion in Shreveport I didn't learn about until after the fact.

It was all supposed to have been kept a secret, but Dry Springs never did too well with those. Still, my brother had made the town proud by dying, and Mom and Dad had put in a lot of years
at the high school. For those reasons the Lincoln Parish D.A. had been willing to look the other way, but Eliza's parents were out for my head once everyone knew their business. The D.A. dragged his feet until December, but when the Spragues refused to forgive me, neither could the state.

Door number one: Cop to a single felony count of carnal knowledge of a juvenile in exchange for probation and, for the ensuing ten years, registration as a sex offender with local authorities, but no prison spell.

Door number two: Stand trial and risk being hauled to some gladiator camp.

My public defender struck the plea deal. I pulled six years of probation (two supervised, four unsupervised) and was marked down as a felon and a sex offender—and with that finalized I figured I should hurry up and split Dry Springs. That same week I rented a storage unit in Ruston and emptied out the rest of the house, and when I turned twenty that January I had the farm sold. I signed half the proceeds check and all my inheritance, as well as both payouts from my parents' life insurance policies, over to Mr. Donny Lee to transform into an “investment portfolio.” I wanted nothing to do with that blood money yet, and since thirty seemed like a nice, round, far-off age to a twenty-year-old, and the first new millennium birthday I'd be celebrating free and clear of Louisiana's sex offender laws and conditions, I asked if he could grow it for me until then. Mr. Donny Lee assured me he could indeed, said if I'd really let him tie that money up he'd make me a millionaire.

Don't rush the monkey and you'll get a better show, sonny. Just mind where you stick your pecker for a decade, and let's see what that century brings.

Then, because I knew it was what my parents would have wanted, I phoned LSU about starting up again in Baton Rouge following the winter break—but the university wouldn't let a threat
like me re-enroll. I was to be suspended pending the outcome of a student conduct hearing, and that first spit in the face, that first taste and dawning of how the world was going to treat a registered sex offender, left me terrified. Baton Rouge was the only place other than Lincoln Parish I'd ever lived. I wanted to run, yet I had nowhere to go except a Ruston hotel.

But one night, eating dinner alone at a Burger King, dreaming up escape fantasy after escape fantasy, I saw an ad in the
Daily Leader.
OFFSHORE VACANCIES: TERRIFIC PAY! NO EXPERIENCE NECESSARY!
The ad was by a drilling company down in Terrebonne Parish, and I had a what-the-hell moment. Anything different seemed good at that juncture, and demand must have been high because they called me in. I was given a physical and had my back x-rayed, pissed in a cup and got hired on as a roustabout. Next, I found a landlord in the bad end of Houma greedy enough to rent to my type, and three weeks later I boarded the crew boat in Grand Isle that would take me to my inaugural rig.

Grand Isle is the sole inhabited barrier island in the state, a seven-mile cigarette of terra firma connected to the mainland by the Highway 1 bridge over Caminada Pass. To a pinewoods, north Louisiana native Grand Isle felt like a lost colony, a hidden secret I'd heard about but never seen. And at the end of that maiden stint, on the hour-plus drive back to the month-to-month apartment in Houma, exhausted and aching but feeling like a man, I found myself missing the island. The sunrises and sunsets that scorched the horizon, the varnished sleekness of the dolphins feeding just beyond the surf, even the baby cries of gulls harassing shrimp boats. Apparently I was a water person without ever having known it, and after a few more stints I decided to simplify things. Not quite everything had been passed along to Mr. Donny Lee, and I used some of what farm-sale money I'd pocketed to lease the lot on Pearl Lane—then to purchase, from a dentist in Thibodaux, a twenty-five-foot 1988 Airstream Excella. This had
been his tailgating trailer for LSU games, but he told me he was looking to upgrade to an RV for football Saturdays. The LeBaron was useless for towing, and though the dentist wanted ninety-five hundred for the Airstream, wouldn't come off that price any, he was willing to haul it down to Grand Isle for me.

So the boy whose father once gave him a metal vial came to live in a metal vial. When I moved to Grand Isle—and before that, to Houma—the superintendent of the parish school district, as well as every residence and business within about a quarter mile of my new address, received a postcard from the state of Louisiana introducing me to my neighbors. Community notification. A thing like that will quiet any wanderlust in a man, and Grand Isle appeared to be as good a spot as any to pretend, at least for the ten years ticking away on my pariah clock, that no other worlds existed.

Such is the allure of living on islands, I suppose. Eventually I was bumped up from roustabout to roughneck, but on account of my record I was doubtful I'd ever rise any higher. Two weeks of breaking my back on a rig for about 3K a stint, to start; two weeks of no-paycheck rest and recovery in Grand Isle. The pretty boy evolving now, his features becoming drawn and wolfish and worn. He is never not red-eyed and tired, this sunned and sinewy man.

THE YEARS WENT BY
, then in the fall of 2003 I saw a puppy frolicking on the side of Highway 1. A duck dog—a purebred, and neutered, yellow Lab from the looks of him. He was four months old or so, and since he was the kind of dog assholes might steal, I figured I'd better grab him out of the puddle he was splashing around in. He wasn't wearing a collar, and they didn't have a pound on the island, but I stopped by the police station to tell the chief I had someone's pet. I was the only registered and reporting sex offender among the fifteen hundred residents of Grand Isle, so the chief
knew me well, made a point of staring me down every time we crossed paths. I always hated talking to the man, usually tried my best to avoid him, but the last thing I needed was to get pinched for a puppy theft.

Still, a week passed without anybody ringing to claim Sam— I'd already started calling him that—then the day came for me to go back offshore. Jack Hebert said (for a neighborly fee, of course) he'd watch him for me, and while I was on stint I began to hope that bungling Lab pup would be waiting when I got back. And he was. But that wasn't fair to Sam really, being stuck with me. He was never meant to chase tennis balls on Pearl Lane. He was born to spend cold and rainy mornings in a marsh blind, retrieving shotgunned teal and wigeon, gadwall and pintail. I was a hunter once, growing up that was maybe my favorite thing to do, but it wouldn't be until 2013 before the law might allow felon me to own a gun again, and whenever I threw a ball for Sam I was reminded of that. Made me feel like I had been neutered myself, not being able to take my hunting dog hunting, but at least I could give him somewhere to stay. Pearl Lane. The Airstream.

I'd torn out the stained carpets and put in hardwood floors that matched the Airstream's oak cabinets and paneling, then replaced the twin mattresses in the bedroom with a pillow-top full. Over time I bought new curtains and cushions, a better AC and a microwave and a TV, a DVD player and satellite television and a couch. I kept things more than tidy—constantly vacuuming and sweeping and mopping, polishing and dusting—and I would give the aluminum hull a monthly bath to prevent it from corroding. I had received permission to pour a concrete foundation out back for a shed that housed a washer/dryer and a hot-water heater, my tools and ice chests and so on. And later, after Sam joined me, I set up the chain-link kennel and a doghouse on a side slab. My sewage, gas, and electric were tied in with the town systems, but I could be ready to roll in a snap. Ahead of
Katrina and then Rita, as well as a number of hurricanes and storms before those bitch sisters, Malcolm drove down in his pickup and bailed me out, towing the Airstream to his deer lease near St. Francisville while I followed after him in the LeBaron. Otherwise, to ensure the moving parts stayed in working order, each spring I'd grease the wheel bearings and negotiate with Jack Hebert for the use of his F-250, then make a trip to Lake Claiborne in north Louisiana, one of the few places other than Grand Isle where I could feel anything like peace. I would spend an April week there before turning back, and on my last whippoorwill night at the lake I'd always empty a can of RC into its dark waters to mark Tommy's birthday.

The secret to living well in a trailer is in not letting possessions pile up on you. I bought my groceries one bag at a time at the Sureway, and each Christmas any pair of shoes or piece of clothing I hadn't worn in a year got boxed and left on the doorstep of this church or that church, me playing Santa whether the congregation wanted castoffs from Roy Joseph or not. Two plates, two forks, two glasses, etc. That's the discipline it takes, and for a long while that suited me. Life stayed simple, and as I waited for my thirtieth birthday—January 4, 2008, my windfall—I just accepted that, until then, I could do a whole lot worse than simple. After my six years of probation wrapped I could have left Louisiana, tried to find a more lenient, forgiving state, or even some foreign country, where I could avoid having to continue pervert-reporting annually with the police. And I'm not sure why I never did exactly that. Maybe because I was settled in Grand Isle and working. Maybe because Louisiana was the devil I knew.