Oliver Loving

by Stefan Merrill Block

  “Pea-nuts!” you lamely corrected Scotty Coltrane, but your words were drowned in the tide of screams. The Mountain Lions had just put up their third unanswered touchdown. “Pea-nuts!”

  Continuing on with your impecunious nut hawking, you thought, for the thousandth time, of quitting the Young Astronomers. But you also knew that, as one of two permanent members, if you quit, the club would cease to exist, and Pa had already suffered too many heartbreaks, ruined dreams, lousy canvases for you to bear to resign. Your club presidency, like your long-ago jamboree purchase of your father’s painting, had become your sturdiest notion of familial love: the effort required of you to maintain a loved one’s necessary illusion. Still, among the revelry of Bliss Township’s hysterical fandom, you were in a particularly rotten mood, and when you passed your brother, high up in the rafters, you showed him an aggrieved frown.

  “This is the worst,” you told Charlie. “And I’ve made about six dollars. Subtracting the cost of supplies, I’m at negative thirty-two.”

  “What are you talking about? This is fun. You just got to work it.” Charlie did a slithery thing with his hips, batted at an imaginary hairdo. You were appalled to find his own tray nearly empty, a suggestive nut-metric for the difference between you. How was it that in the west of Texas, your little brother, gay as a box of birds, was so vexingly popular?

  Until very recently, you had known a big-brotherly obligation to protect Charlie from the glum truths of your family life—you described the work Pa did in his many liquored nights in his studio as “potential masterpieces”; you called your mother’s obsessive worry “just normal Ma behavior”; you many times tried to attribute her obvious favoritism for you as “only a kind of trick she does, to encourage you to get your grades up”; you performed for Charlie many of the ordinary parental tasks yourself, driving him to the movies, taking him for long hikes through the desert. There was a time, not so very long ago, when the two of you could sometimes feel like a sort of better second family, nested inside the larger one. But in recent months, it was Charlie who often tried to lift your mood, suggesting impromptu dance parties and movie soundtrack sing-alongs, flicking at your downturned face until you cracked a grin or at least comically swatted him away. But you saw less and less of him those days. Back at Zion’s Pastures you continued, as ever, in your creekside reading, your wistful cacti strolls, but Charlie was always off with one friend or another or another.

  “C’mon. Here. I’ll take care of your nuts.” Charlie emptied half of your tray and really did skip his way back down the stairs.

  It was halftime now. Out on the field your school’s principal and band director, Doyle Dixon, pumped a baton in front of the Bliss Township Marching Band, leading a spiraling medley performance of the Eagles’ greatest hits.

  You spent a while there, leaning against the chain link behind the last row, looking into the sea of school-spirit-reddened faces. A football game, in Bliss Township’s tacit racial distinctions, was a decidedly white event, but out beyond the stadium, you observed the loud, boisterous activity of a group of Hispanic kids you recognized from school—an old recess-hour tormentor of yours, David Garza, among them—gathered around someone’s pickup, whose subwoofers reverberated in your own chest. Was this a kind of halfhearted protest, the way they congregated near the stadium but did not enter, or were they only drawn to that bright activity on an otherwise silent town night?

  You turned back to the rafters, straightened your nut offerings, and that was when you saw Rebekkah Sterling. Not only saw her: through the flittering of paper Mountain Lion paw-mark paddles and jumbo foam fingers, your gaze latched onto hers and held. You had read, again in one of Pa’s Scientific Americans, that if two people maintain eye contact for six unblinking seconds it means they want sex or a fight. This wonderful hypothesis was on your mind when you started counting, all the way up to seven, which—combined with the first two awestruck seconds—must have totaled at least nine. The school’s theater teacher, Mr. Avalon, was sitting next to Rebekkah, and he apparently mistook your gaze as directed toward him. He put a hand to his light beard, lifted it and waved faintly. You replied with an awkward Boy Scout’s salute. You nearly stumbled in your hurry to get to the bathroom, where you could be alone to marvel at those nine seconds.

  Rebekkah might not have joined the Young Astronomers for good, you might not have touched again since that brief grazing of hands, but her one-night attendance at the meteor shower over Zion’s Pastures somehow set in motion a wondrous sidereal phenomenon. Rebekkah and you, without ever actually mentioning your standing date, now met each morning in Mrs. Schumacher’s literature classroom, empty before school began. For the rest of the day, under the mocking glare of your classmates, you knew that Rebekkah would not have dared to keep your slouched, socially poisonous company. But in those solitary, quiet minutes before Mrs. Schumacher’s literature class? In those minutes, your words couldn’t come quickly enough.

  In that empty classroom, you had already told Rebekkah many things, things you had never tried before to put into language. Your parents’ silence with each other, how your mother’s love worked like an elaborate and efficient contraption, how your father’s love was more like a puddle. You told her about the books you had read and reread, the adventures Charlie and you had invented, the Old Texas tales Granny Nunu told you when you were a kid, the ones that became nearly scriptural to you after she passed. Rebekkah hardly said anything in reply. In truth she usually spoke only when you asked her outright for an answer. “What do you want to do when you graduate?” you asked once. Her face went pensive, as if she’d never before considered the question. “Maybe a musician,” she said. “I want to be a musician and live in New York. But is that even a job anyone can really have?”

  And it seemed to you that she held whole albums, all those songs she’d one day write, in what she didn’t say. Her silence was your greatest inspiration. In the twenty-three and a half hours of your own muteness that constituted the balance of your days, you tried to continue the conversations via the moody, baroque poems you wrote in your journals. You had never known you had so many words in you, that sudden urgency you felt, that need to empty yourself of your entire past, to lay it out and arrange it for her. You talked as rapidly as you could, but your mouth felt too narrow to convey the rush. When you told your stories to Rebekkah, she nodded and listened, and it could seem you had discovered a purpose for your solitary years. An unlikely theory, perhaps, and you were prone to believe other unlikely theories as well. You knew you might never have Rebekkah Sterling, at least not how you envisioned in this universe, but in those parallel universes Pa described? You borrowed from your father’s ideas, the very ones you had initially silently disparaged. Every one of the poems you wrote offered a tour of a different place in the multiverse, a physics equal to what your heart required of it. You wrote: There is another universe / where we do not need a single word / no need to try to converse / when our every thought is heard.

  But even in this universe, after many days subjected to the erosive sunlight of your many diatribes, Rebekkah’s silence began to fissure. You couldn’t see what lay beneath, but she did offer you dark glimpses.

  “You know, the thing about West Texas is that it was the state’s last Indian territory, did you know that?” you were telling her one morning, playing the historian again. “The Apache might still be out here if the Mexicans hadn’t had the idea that there might be silver up in those mountains. Of course there wasn’t, but that didn’t stop them from slaughtering the tribe.”

  “That’s men for you,” Rebekkah said. “Not unlike my father, really.”

  “Your father?”

  “With his fracking. Apparently it’s not going well. Business as usual, for him.”

  “But you know what? My granny, she said that there really might be some silver the Mexicans stashed away up there. Supposedly they buried some huge treasure in a drought crack in the earth, but then rain came, the crack closed,
and no one could remember where.”

  “There’s a metaphor if I ever heard one,” Rebekkah said. “Precious things buried and lost. I should write a song.”

  You looked at her for a long while. “What things?” you ventured.

  “Maybe someday I’ll show you, if I can find the map, ha ha.”

  Rebekkah would never show you that map, but after a couple of weeks in that classroom, you had made a different kind of map, an astonishing mental chart of all the cities in which she had lived, which included impossibly exotic places: Singapore, Rio de Janiero, Dubai. (“Exotic?” she asked. “Not really. For me it’s basically just the same McMansion everywhere I go. The same oil people. Only the weather changes.”) You knew, also, that she was a great fan of the music of Joni Mitchell, the novels of the Brontë sisters. From her morning snack selection, you saw she was a lover of cinnamon toast. She said little in response to your long lectures, but you learned that she had a habit of chewing at the curling tips of her hair when she was interested in a topic, and also that she had a habit of drumming her chin with her fingers when she was not. Like ripe stone fruit, she was easily bruised, her skin faintly mottled from various light bumpings. And, of course, you knew what everyone knew, that she had a great singing voice, that Mr. Avalon had cast her as the lead vocalist in his Theater Club’s annual Homecoming Dance performance, The Bliss Township Tejano Espectacular, a selection of Spanish-language standards. And yet, to be honest, you knew little more than that. All Rebekkah had offered to you was her daily early arrival to Mrs. Schumacher’s classroom. But you couldn’t stop yourself from getting carried away. You couldn’t keep yourself from imagining a future with her so unlike your last years. A future that mattered, because she would be there to witness it.

  At night, when you considered yourself under the unsparing bulbs of your bathroom mirror, for once you let yourself imagine what your face could be. Someday. You looked at the angular dimensions of your jaw and the pleasingly gray eyes you inherited from your father. You let yourself fill in the blanks of your future with all sorts of imagined promises.

  You couldn’t help it: all this emboldening possibility had made you, for the first time, a little surly with your mother. Just last week, as Ma spoke of a new skin-care remedy she was hatching for you, something involving massive dosages of vitamin A, you had scowled. “Doesn’t sound likely,” you told her.

  Your acne was a particular concern for Ma, as if a much greater affliction than just an adolescent dermatological stage. The sight of those zits seemed to break her heart, proof that you were growing older, leaving further behind the best moment of her life, when you had needed her entirely. But when, that night, she reached across the sofa to probe your particularly hellacious forehead zit with her finger, you slapped her away.

  “You can’t lose faith, Oliver,” she said. “We just have to keep trying, don’t we? Keep trying and trying until we come up with the solution.”

  “You don’t know that my body is separate from yours,” you told her.

  Your mother then reached once more for the pulsating mass on your forehead. “That’s the sweetest thing you’ve ever told me,” she said.

  But your body was your own, and at last you had refused to submit it to further humiliations up in the stadium rafters. You were hiding out in the sweet-foul stench of a bathroom stall, gazing emptily at the scratchitti of various sexual positions someone had etched into the aluminum, as you tried to hold fast to the sweet image of Rebekkah’s eyes on yours. And yet, as ever, the murkiness of your doubt seeped in, clouding that happy picture. You thought: she just likes attention. You wondered if perhaps your daily conversations with Rebekkah were, after all, part of some elaborate prank. Preparing yourself for likely heartbreak, you tried to feed yourself some glib hokum, telling yourself that someday you would be a great poet and make beauty out of whatever might come to pass. But then you remembered a few lines of the last poem you’d tried to write, and you cringed.

  You refastened your nut holder, emerged from the bathroom, and walked so quickly for the stands that the tray nearly beamed her in the chest.

  “Whoa,” Rebekkah said, “hey there.”

  “Hey,” you managed to make your mouth say out loud.

  “I was looking for you.”

  “You were?”

  “I thought maybe you’d come say hi, but then poof, you vanish.” This was a sentence whose meaning and implications you could have spent a whole weekend deconstructing, reworking into rhyming verse.

  “Heavily lays the crown.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “All part of my duties as Astronomy Club president.” You gave the nut tray a too-vigorous shake, the Coke shooting up through the straw holes in the plastic lids.

  “You are? How did I not know you were president?”

  “Oh, yeah,” you said. “Commander in chief of all the stars in the sky.”

  “Can’t see many tonight. The lights are too bright, I guess?”

  “Do you want to?” you asked. “See some stars, I mean.”

  Rebekkah turned back to the thunderous noise of the rafters, as if considering an obligation there. “What about your job?”

  “No one wants my nuts anyway,” you unfortunately replied.

  You led her past the commotion of the Hispanic kids, presently cheering the bass-thumping pickup as it did donuts in the drive, and made your way to the silent parking lot, where your family’s dented Hyundai, Goliath, sat in the back row. Your parents had let you borrow the car for the game, and you felt manly indeed as you brandished your father’s key chain, with its little pewter longhorn charm. The hatchback popped, you exchanged the nut tray for the one piece of new technological equipment belonging to the family Loving, Pa’s thousand-dollar Celestron telescope in its black Pelican case.

  “Geez. You people really are serious about this stuff, aren’t you?”

  “Very serious.” You tried to strike a workmanlike air as you set out into the black flat of desert, the stars above winking back into view. Five minutes later, after making fine adjustments to the Celestron’s setting circles, the oblong shape of Saturn, like a ball squeezed from either side, was in the viewfinder. “Look.”

  “Is that Saturn? Holy shit. You can see the rings. Well, sort of. It looks squished.”

  “The light you are looking at is already an hour and a half old.” Trying to imitate a man, it was Pa’s teacherly voice that came to you. “It took an hour and a half to get here. The light from those stars behind? Thousands of years old. Millions. You are literally looking into the past.”

  “You know,” Rebekkah said, “I’ve been meaning to come back to your astronomy club. I lost track of the schedule, I guess. But I’m sure glad I got to see those meteors. Never seen anything like that before.”

  “You should,” you said. “You should come back.”

  “Your dad was so kind to invite me and all. He’s nice.”

  You shrugged. “Sometimes I wonder if there is some alien out there,” you said, paraphrasing the substance of a sonnet you entitled “The Light from Distant Stars.” “Some alien with a very, very good telescope. So good that he can see the whole surface of Earth perfectly. He is maybe watching our medieval period now, knights and wars and castles in Europe, the Mogollon people and bison out here. It’s kind of comforting, isn’t it? Like our own history is still happening somewhere else. Like it’s not really over. Like everything that is happening right now, tonight, won’t reach him for a thousand years. Ten million maybe. But he’ll be up there, trying to figure us out.”

  The stadium was a halo of brightness in the distance. The sound of warfare: the Mountain Lions must have breached the end zone again.

  “‘Look,’ the alien will say. ‘Another touchdown for Bliss Township.’”

  And that was how it happened, all the students and faculty of a school that would not exist in a year—the victims and the survivors—all howling when the miraculous moment arrived. And though you couldn
’t have known what was in your future, it did feel like a culmination of something even then, as if your hand’s bravery beneath the Perseid shower and all the labors of your before-school sessions with Rebekkah really had been adding to this. As if this night, your fruitless nut-selling, Pa’s amateur astronomy and painting, the poor state of your skin, your loneliness—as if all those glum variables somehow equaled the greatest gift, the rapture (a too poetic word? there wasn’t any other) that only a solitary boy like yourself could have known, as his gaze met with his beloved’s for too many unblinking seconds to count. There couldn’t have been any doubt about what was about to happen. Who moved first? There was a collision of teeth, like an awkward unlatching of a jammed door, and then you were in some other place together.

  The incredible wetness; the oddly familiar interior of another mouth; the animal taste, like your own taste doubled; your first good sniff of the truer, deeper Rebekkah smell, as if someone had extinguished matches beneath her skin. Why had she suddenly decided to kiss you? You knew, for once, better than to ask questions. The kiss complete, both of you oddly turned back to the stadium, walked silently through the gates, your hands still clutching.

  “Well,” Rebekkah said.

  “Well.”

  “I—”

  “You what?” you asked, but Rebekkah never answered. Because now the game had come to an end, and the stadium’s crowd began to spill out the exits. At this growing tide, Rebekkah tossed away your hand. “I have to—” Rebekkah said, but did not say what she had to do, only walked off in the direction of the bathrooms. Why did you not ask why? Why did you not follow her? You were only seventeen, freshly first kissed; you were a meek, shy, indoor kid, a book lover, and you failed the moment. You watched her march away.

  However. Just before Rebekkah vanished into the thickness of the crowd, she paused. Not just paused. She turned, to look back over her shoulder. And before the masses swallowed her, Rebekkah found an instant to give you one last gift. Just a faint smile, and it was all over in a second. But it would linger. A little knowing grin that suggested—what? You didn’t know what, exactly, but a grin that seemed at least to promise something more.