After twenty-nine days the harbor patrol and police finally give up their search for Joshua and declare his death a drowning: body unrecovered. Once he’s pronounced dead, Maggie arranges a funeral service, and the Veterans Administration sends a group of three army riflemen to Joshua’s funeral at the St. Mary of the Wharves graveyard, which sits on the small, grass-covered hill overlooking the Barrows and from which Duncan, Maggie, Magdalene, and the other mourners can see the narrow channel of water undulating as dark and sinuous as muscle on this gray, overcast morning.
The soldiers lift their guns and, at the command, fire, then again, three times in all. A group of young, clean-shaven Rangers, in their field colors, stand at rigorous attention, saluting. In various straggling groups about the grave stand Vietnam vets. Magdalene, holding a small bouquet of wildflowers, keeps her head lowered; her mouth moves silently in prayer. Maggie grasps Duncan’s hand and stares blankly at Joshua’s coffin, plain particleboard painted brown, all that she could afford, although it so pained and shamed her to give Joshua so little that Duncan could hear her weeping after she got off the phone with the funeral home.
When the soldiers are done, the sergeant withdraws the American flag from the coffin and, folding it into a triangle, hands it to Maggie, who moves to the bottom of the grave, where Duncan imagines Joshua’s feet lie, or would have lain had the coffin not been empty. Magdalene lays her bouquet on the wood and Maggie mouths, Thank you. A recording of “Taps” plays from a tape recorder that the soldiers have brought, sounding tinny and slow, as if the batteries are dying, and then it ends and the tape recorder loudly clicks off.
At the Winsdor Tap the bar and dance floor are thronged with people, laborers from the second and third tunnel crews, a shop steward and BA from the union hall, veterans, their girlfriends and wives, and workers from the VA. There are also dockworkers and stevedores, local shopkeepers from along Divisadero, and auto mechanics Joshua had, at various times, worked for. Duncan watches Father Brennan from St. Mary of the Wharves moving amongst the crowd, shaking hands.
Clay has left tin buckets on the bar, at the entrance, and by the toilets for donations to help pay for Joshua’s burial fees, and within a short time these are brimming with five- and ten-dollar bills. After a petition by Clay and the San Francisco Veterans of Vietnam Community, the VA had provided five hundred dollars toward his burial, and Clay holds up the check so that everyone can mock and laugh at it.
The jukebox is playing but around dusk, when a pale yellow light seeps in through the thick glass cubes that pass for windows and twilight takes hold of everyone’s mood, a type of sluggishness comes into the room, the heady and often loud talk of a few hours before has died and now the words spoken are subdued and muted by the clinking of glasses and the clatter of beer bottles. Some friends of Joshua’s are drinking shots of tequila at the bar, lining them up and turning them on their ends as they empty them, shouting together in Spanish and nodding passionately with each shot and as the empty glasses tumble across the wood. Duncan watches as one begins to cry and reaches out to hug another. The smell of backup from the toilets seeps through the room and mingles with the heavy, eye-burning clouds of cigarette smoke. Mother’s band, Ray Cooper and the Hi-Fidelity Blu-Tones, begin to assemble their gear upon the stage. And amidst all of this, his mother sits at the bar wearing her blue sequined stage dress. Joshua’s field jacket is draped about her shoulders and she keeps tugging at it as if she is cold.
You know, Mags, you don’t need to sing tonight, Clay says. He reaches across the bar to hold her hand, takes it between his, and rubs briskly. Thanks, she says. You know, Clay, I don’t think that I can. Not right now. If it’s all right with you, tonight perhaps I’ll just let the band do their thing. Tomorrow night I’ll sing, tomorrow night or the next night I’ll sing for Joshua.
Sure, Mags, sure. Whatever you want. Just let me turn up the heat in here before you freeze to death.
But the room is already warm. Duncan sways, suddenly lightheaded, the heat of so many people pressed against him that he has to focus on breathing deeply through his nostrils. The smell of grease from the grill as Clay cooks some burgers puts his stomach roiling. His mother drains the whiskey in her glass but Clay doesn’t refill it. She stares, eyes red-shot and unblinking, into the mirror behind the bar and quietly taps the empty glass upon the wood. Duncan looks at her reflection in the mirror, searching for her eyes. He puts his arm about her shoulder, and when she looks at his face in the glass, he mouths the words: It’s okay, Mom. Her eyes blink and look through him and she continues to tap the bar sharply with her glass until Clay brings her a bottle of Old Mainline 454.
Late that night they stagger home, with Duncan holding tight to Maggie’s waist and Maggie seeming to lean her full weight upon his shoulder, as they lurch stumbling up Ipswich Hill from the Bottoms with a quarter moon glinting like a scythe suspended above them.
He leads Maggie into her bedroom, lays her upon her bed, unconscious and snoring, it seems, from the moment he lets loose her hands and she drops to the mattress. After he pulls off her shoes and spreads the comforter over her, he sits at the kitchen table beneath the yellow glare of the bare bulb and stares at the black windows. Hours pass like this, time in which he is not conscious of sound or thought or physical discomfort. But then slowly he becomes aware of the room about him; it is a sensation he has experienced once before—when he’d first woken in the Home and heard the sound of Elvis Presley. The washer on the faucet over the sink needs replacing and water drips methodically upon the tin basin. As he becomes aware of it, the sound seems to grow—a singular loud, incessant hammering—and only as he becomes aware of other sounds and sensations about him does this sound decrease and fade to the background.
He rises from his chair and begins to open the kitchen cupboards, slamming and banging open the doors, finding one of his mother’s bottles almost immediately, and then another and another, and slamming and banging the doors with more and more vehemence with each bottle he discovers. He looks beneath the sink and under the trash can lining and then moves to the St. Vincent de Paul sofa bed, where amber-colored bottles lie between the rows of rusted springs, and when he looks up, he sees Maggie standing in the doorway, swaying.
I’m sorry, she says, hiccuping and holding a hand to her mouth. I don’t feel so well.
She goes to wash but halfway across the room she clutches her stomach, doubles over, and upon her knees vomits onto the bright blue shag carpet. She vomits until there is nothing left to vomit, her mouth agape over the floor, gagging and retching painfully, a thick thread of mucus hanging from her nose and mouth.
Oh, Duncan, I’ll clean that up as soon as I’m able. Don’t touch it, sweetie. I’ll get to it in a moment. Just give me a moment. And then rocking on her heels, gagging some more, and finally rising to her feet, she makes her way to the bathroom, closes and then locks the door behind her.
The faucet runs and he listens as she splashes water upon her face, rinses her mouth, then lowers the toilet seat and sits down. Duncan stretches back on his bed and stares at the ceiling. Stares through it, up through the plaster and Sheetrock, through nails and joists, up through the crawl space and ventilation shafts between the headers, up through the roof joists and the plywood and shingles to the night beyond with Michael Collins and all the angels and astronauts and perhaps Joshua up there with them, and then he is simply gone, gone from his bed and the room and the house and everything it contains.