Tonight, his mother’s face is the moon, as he remembers her above Stockholdt, the night he ran away from the Home with Billy: shining beatifically, casting her white light into his room so brightly that he cannot sleep. The trees outside his window stretch and bend black upon the wall—dark shapes of men running crouched through tall whispering grass—and he thinks of Joshua, who has yet to come home and who, he knows, has returned to the boardinghouse in Oakland.
In his room across the bay, Joshua is dreaming again of angels lifting him up through the wreckage of the tunnel as it collapses a quarter of a mile beneath the sea, lifting him up through the black, rushing waters crashing so hard down upon him that they are like iron beams shattering his bones, and finally bursting into the dark skies over San Francisco, dangling exhausted and broken, and very near death, but such a welcome death, with the angel’s wide wings beating the air above him as they rise higher and higher still.
Below them a derrick tower collapses in a grinding scream of twisted metal into the churning waters, and Joshua’s sodden clothing clinging in tatters to him is suddenly engulfed in heat as flames burst and billow in orange blossoms upon the oil-black sea.
It’s a miracle, Joshua says, eyes fluttering now and clouding in pain, and there is the face of the fry cook looking down at him, pale and shimmering wetly between the dark V of outspread wings.
Didn’t believe I was an angel, did you? He shakes his head. I told you it would hurt, didn’t I?
Up they sweep into the churning strata of clouds above the bay, Joshua glancing wearily back at the city, its blinking lights growing dim and farther and farther distant below them until he is engulfed in cloud. Joshua’s head lolls upon his chest as merciful darkness takes him and the fry cook carries him higher and higher into the ether and to the place of his dreams, where he has so often prayed that nothing be allowed to harm him and his loved ones ever again.
From Duncan’s mother’s room the startling loud clatter of an empty bottle of Old Mainline 454 striking the floor and then rolling upon the wood. He sees her outstretched hand and her mouth parting in sleep. There is a mumbled accusation or prayer and then her snores and Duncan stares at the moonlit walls searching for and trying to retrieve some tender image of her face.