After ending the call, Rebekkah at last put the Byron on a table, and she squinted at him. Through the pain, Charlie worked to grin up to her, a twinkly rascalish expression he had perfected at Thoreau, a face he hoped translated into something along the lines of This is very shameful, but aren’t you, at some level, also charmed by my pluckiness? Rebekkah, however, did not look charmed. From this angle, she hardly even looked like Rebekkah anymore, not the freckled girl who had seemed to draw a special sort of light as she passed through the halls of Bliss Township School, who could not fail to attract even the attentions of a ninth grader whose rudimentary love life was limited to the boys from his classes he’d conjure in his mind as he felt himself in his family’s claw-foot tub. Rebekkah was only in her late twenties now, but Charlie saw more closely the face he had so often imagined, her lovely celtic features dulled a little by the years.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Rebekkah said. “I could have you arrested, you know. You can’t just break into people’s fucking houses.”
But Charlie sensed there were two Rebekkahs there: the frightened, angry woman with her wrinkle-webbed mouth and unruly threads of premature gray, and also a distant observer of these events, the younger Rebekkah for whom the horrors she’d seen that night had lowered a muted scrim of numbness between the world and her. His grin dropped.
“I can’t take care of Edwina anymore. She’s not well. She’s really sick, do you hear how she’s breathing? And I just can’t afford to help her. And so I brought her back to you.”
“You could have come in the front door, like a human being. I mean it. What were you—trying to scare me?”
“I tried the front door. I tried to call. You didn’t answer. And you wouldn’t have taken her. You wouldn’t have spoken to me.”
“Well. You’ve got that last part right.”
“You could have talked to me, just once,” Charlie said, without the fury he’d packed into those exact words in his many imaginings of this conversation. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
“What you have wanted? Why does what you want count more? I think I’ve made it pretty clear what I want. What I need. Pretty abundantly fucking clear. So what is it? Huh? What is this thing you have to say to me? Just say it.”
Charlie sucked a little groan down his throat. “I just wanted to talk about Oliver,” Charlie said. “Just that. To talk.”
Rebekkah knelt, as if to assess his wounds, but she was only greeting Edwina. “Edwina,” Rebekkah whispered, and she used the pug’s sable coat like a tissue. She carried Edwina from the room, and Charlie sat there for a long while on the bottom step, looking with muted horror at the wrong angle of his littlest finger. At last the erratic foghorn blare of the siren split the silence, and the ambulance lights turned the hallway into a discothèque. The doorbell rang, six or seven times over, and Rebekkah reappeared to open it.
“Rebekkah.”
She paused but wouldn’t turn. “What?”
It had always seemed to Charlie that he’d know just what to ask her if she would let him speak with her for only a minute. But that minute was ticking by now, and Charlie found that he couldn’t remember.
Rebekkah shook her head, and went to let the ambulance men into her apartment. After they had led Charlie to a seat in the rear of the van (despite his vehement protests, affably ignored by one of the men, who told him, “Well, take a gander at that finger of yours. And you never know about head injuries, and not like we got anything else going on tonight”), Rebekkah appeared at the back doors, holding his bag, weighted again with the journal. “You forgot something,” she said. “And Charlie? Next time, it’s the police I’m calling. I mean it, I really do.”
“Please,” Charlie said.
“Please what?”
Edwina was still pressed to her chest. “Please take care of her for me?” Rebekkah nodded to one of the men, who shut the doors. The vehicle pulled away at a lazy speed. A case like Charlie’s apparently did not warrant the emergency lights.
The clock in Charlie’s room at New York Methodist now showed 4:15. He craned his head to see his doctor flirting with the night-shift nurse behind the counter. A young woman in a hijab paced the hall with a murmuring infant in one arm, a video-streaming phone in the other. No one seemed in any hurry at all.
With a miserable little gasp, Charlie lifted himself from the bed and went to the pile of clothes he had kicked to a corner when he changed into his paper gown. He grunted as he stooped to retrieve his phone from his jeans. Lighting its screen, he saw that he had missed one more call from his mother. Charlie inhaled sharply. He couldn’t bear another second of not knowing, and so this room at New York Methodist—another hospital room not wholly unlike his brother’s cell at Crockett State—would be where it would happen. At last he put the device to his ear and listened to the first of her many messages.
Later, Charlie would marvel at how he had done it. With a right arm mannequin-like in its cast, with his swelled brain pinging painfully in his ears, he tore away his hospital gown, buttoned himself back into his street clothes, slipped out of the room, and—when the nurse puttering in the hallway noticed him—“Mr. Loving?”—he ran. Down the emergency stairs, through the hospital lobby, up Seventh Avenue to the subway station, where he took the first train into the city. At Port Authority, Charlie spent half his remaining cash on a Greyhound bus ticket, and as he waited in the deep-pocket smell of the station’s basement, he vomited from pain, twice, into a garbage can that appeared, from its spattered stains, to have been put to that purpose more than once. But if there was one place where a battered, vomiting young man would not seem so out of the ordinary, it was The Port Authority Bus Terminal.
Still, when Charlie would later consider how he managed the dire forty-hour odyssey that followed, a transcontinental crawl, in which he slowly depleted a plastic barrel of pretzels as the pain and poor nutrition sometimes made his vision go dark and narrow, Charlie would think it was borderline miraculous that he made it all the way to the Big Bend without further medical assistance. But then he would play again Ma’s first message, he would listen to the very simple and wholly impossible thing she hardly managed to choke through her tears, and he would know that it had been a night of miracles.
Many hours later, as the bus slammed through Midland and south into the desert, Charlie’s exhaustion fluttered around the soft edges of a cozy dream: that he was back in his Zion’s Pastures bed, that his brother was still there beneath him, in the bottom bunk of a bedroom in a house that was no longer theirs. Oliver was seventeen, and he was done conjuring spirit worlds with his brother. Oliver had just discovered a more marvelous hidden land, on a blanket just next to him, beneath the Perseid meteor shower. All it took was a single phone message from Ma: as on that morning with his brother’s journal years before, Charlie could hear the spectral inhale of one of their ancient, magical portals torn open again, the feeling that their old bunk bed tales had in fact been a kind of prophecy, at last come true. Charlie looked down into that darkness, a hole in the land. Ten years. What words were there for it? “He’s there,” Ma said in her voice mail. “That’s what I need to tell you. Oliver. They can see him now. On the computer screens? Charlie, he’s there. He’s here.”
Oliver
CHAPTER NINE
A portal torn open, but it would take more than your brother and your mother and the latest medical technologies to see into that lost place. It would take, also, the assistance of law enforcement professionals. It would take a man named Manuel Paz, Presidio County captain of the Texas Rangers, a ranking officer in that antiquated band of law keepers.
At dusk one evening, three or so years after, Manuel Paz was in the evening-blued stillness of a far corner in Big Bend National Park, looking into a different sort of hole in the earth. He was standing in the ruins of the Mariscal cinnabar mines, for which his grandfather and father alike had worked themselves stooped. Among the wreckage of the old mine camp and the rock-baking
ovens that hadn’t been stoked in half a century, the warning signs loomed around him: these mines were still gravid with the mercury his forebears had ored from the earth, the same quicksilver that had engendered the cancer that had taken his father and grandfather both. Manuel Paz twisted the wedding ring on his finger.
Once, ten years before, Manuel had taken his young bride, Lucinda, for a visit to this same mine. Lucinda had just arrived to Texas then, fleeing the narco warfare in the streets of Honduras, escaping with her two sisters, and no small element of their early romance had been Manuel’s attempt to serve as a kind of tour guide to her life on this side of the river. This site seemed a particularly potent example of county history, a place where generations of Mexicans had toiled to an early grave at near slave wages, now just a ghost town, like so many others. “But they couldn’t get rid of us that easy,” Manuel had told Lucinda, and she grasped his hand. He’d brought a bottle of wine and a picnic basket, and he and Lucinda dined together in a roofless shed. An unusual spot for a romantic excursion, perhaps, but Manuel brought her here not only to tell the sad plight of his forebears but also because the national park, in whose far reaches the old mine was situated, held the promise of a more humane kind of border. Out in that park, there was no fence to demarcate Mexico. You could wade back and forth across the Rio Grande.
It was, after all, a new century, and Manuel had let himself believe that perhaps the ancient antipathies into which he had been born might ease. As a young man, he had signed up for the Rangers with the hope that, in his official capacity, he might make life a little easier for the Latinos coming over the river. Over the years, he had become friends with a number of Border Patrol officers, and they often let Manuel serve as first responder when a drone or concerned citizen spotted a figure hiking northward through the desert. Rather than cuffing these parched travelers, Manuel offered them maps, bottles of water, and the wrapped sandwiches that Lucinda had prepared, which he kept in a cooler in the trunk. And Manuel might have continued on like that for an entire career, glad to help in his own little ways, if not for the events of the night of November fifteenth.
Manuel had been in his Marfa office when the call came in, and once the impossible horror had sunk in—“three children?” he repeated several times over—he discovered there was yet another horror packed inside it. “Young Hispanic male,” the arriving officer had described the shooter over the CB and even before he had learned the specifics, Manuel had a lucid, ominous foreboding of what was to come, a premonition that time would bear out. It wouldn’t matter that Hector Espina had been an American-born citizen or that an Ecuadorian named Ernesto Ruiz stopped the kid that night. The fact was that Hector was a Latino with a firearm. He was a demon of white imaginings let loose.
Three dead children: Manuel Paz might have been only one of the many officers who had converged on the town of Bliss in the aftermath, but he carried that number like a mythical affliction, an itch he would forever scratch, the sting of it only growing more insistent, bothering his sleep. Three dead children. The itch asked for an explanation, and Manuel scratched and scratched. Manuel had spent hours playing wallflower in the meetings of the task force investigators. He had talked to all of those poor Theater Club kids. He had spoken to any person who had ever known the killer. And still the devilish irritant at the base of his affliction, a boy named Hector Espina, resided beneath his skin. Manuel could scratch himself raw and might never reach down to that boy’s reasons.
And in the years that had followed, Manuel’s worst fears had come to pass. Despite his peacekeeping entreaties to U.S. Representative Craig Armison, the deportations only ramped up. Despite his pleas to Otto Coop, superintendent of schools for Presidio County, the schoolhouse—the last reason anyone still came to the old town of Bliss—closed for good. “No one wants those memories,” Otto told him.
But Otto was wrong. Manuel still had memories he wanted. He remembered his childhood in that same school; he remembered generations of his family scrapping for this spot of earth. “They can’t get rid of us that easy, right?” Manuel said again to his wife one night.
“But don’t you understand,” Lucinda said with a sigh, “that there’s nothing here worth staying for?”
Certainly Lucinda had a point. Their street, just west of Bliss, had nearly emptied. The few places of employment had long ago closed. Lucinda faced the ill will of the last residents, and she worried for her sisters, who had no green cards of their own. This, then, was how it happened: a few actual deportations, a generally hostile atmosphere, and a paucity of hope.
“You can’t see,” Lucinda had told him just a month ago, “that you are part of the problem. An old man, grasping at lofty ideals.” The fact was that Lucinda’s sisters were heading for better prospects to the north, and she had delivered what amounted to an ultimatum to Manuel: leave with me or I leave alone. But Manuel Paz was a man who didn’t take well to ultimatums. She had departed for Chicago three weeks ago, and now, standing over the mine shaft, Manuel tugged the ring from his finger.
But he paused, even still thinking, Why not follow Lucinda? Certainly he could transfer to a different office. Leave the force for good, get some plum private security job. What was there to stay for? Manuel spent his days filling out paperwork, filing reports for violations of laws he hardly believed in. And yet, Lucinda must have known the man she had married, mustn’t she?
Three years after, Manuel was still putting in after-hours bouts poring over the old task force dossiers, still speaking to the grief-sickened parents of the dead. Once, he had even driven down into Mexico, on a futile hunt to locate Hector’s father. There had been a time, for the first year or so after, when Manuel had felt the only possible way he might forestall the unthreading of his old town was to locate some answer for what Hector had done that night, some very specific reason to ward off the vagueness of jingoistic nightmares. But still there was no explaining that madness, and it was already too late to make much of a difference, Manuel knew that. And yet, that was the nature of the itch: the more you scratched, the worse it grew. The very futility of his attempt was what made it into an obsession.
But as Manuel now held the wedding ring over an open mine shaft, it was poor Eve Loving that he was thinking of. Eve Loving, with her lovely, troubled dark eyes, the rare way that she, like Manuel himself, was able to blinker herself against all that had already been lost, limiting her view only to what each day required of her. They shared a stolidness, a kind of persistence that Lucinda never appreciated, though perhaps Lucinda had been right in her judgment, perhaps the brand of doggedness he and Eve Loving had in common had made them both a little unhinged, blinding them to the damage they wrought. Manuel, for example, had never once talked with Eve about that little sad habit of hers, never mentioned the several shopkeepers Manuel had talked out of filing charges against her. As with the immigrants he had helped, Manuel just did what he could and never spoke of it. Truth be told, Manuel would sometimes consider the woman’s taut shape under the oversized clothes she wore, and he couldn’t resist entertaining a fantasy or two.
And of course, Oliver, Manuel was also thinking of you. He was thinking of Oliver Loving, voiceless in his bed, a silence to answer the questions that even still bit at Manuel’s skin. Often, perched over Bed Four, Manuel would put his hands to your shoulders, your forehead, and it could seem to him that he could nearly feel it: an explanation that was still somewhere out there, in that impassable otherworld of your memory, that place where you were still the same wholly whole Oliver, bumbling your way to the answer Manuel couldn’t know. Manuel had only set eyes on you a few times before, but he often conjured an image of you as you must have been in those last weeks, the ordinariness of the life that had been taken from you. Just a seventeen-year-old boy, strolling down the streets of the doomed town of Bliss on a cool October morning. Manuel held his wedding ring over the mine shaft in his pinched fingers, and he let it loose. He turned his ear to the void, listening for the so
und of its report.
* * *
It was October thirteenth, a Friday, just over a month before the beginning of your town’s demise, but as you made slow laps up and down the streets, everything about Bliss seemed immutable and ancient to you. Your family’s history in Bliss might have extended into the nineteenth century, but you felt no sense of belonging in the diminutive town your ancestors had helped to build. Those redbrick buildings, that flat of desert, the purple mountains in the distance—it all seemed alien.
Alien: that unfortunate word, often applied to half the school’s population. Like some kind of bureaucratically veiled threat, the local chief of the border patrol, Officer Wallace Van Brunt, had been invited to speak at that month’s school assembly, telling his dire work stories to the student body seated in the gymnasium’s bleachers. Through a thick, woolly mustache, Officer Van Brunt employed that term often—not only alien but illegal alien—as he held forth about the many horrors and misfortunes he’d witnessed in his work. Children dying of thirst in the desert, women ODing from the erupted baggies of heroin they’d swallowed. The message of these grim tales: Tell your families, Mexicans, to stay out! The Latino half of the school sat quietly through that assembly, but just the next morning another big fight erupted when David Garza smashed Scotty Coltrane’s head into a locker. Striving for fairness, Doyle Dixon suspended both boys for a week, but it did little to quiet the growing animosity. The Latino gathering on the schoolhouse steps had taken on a vaguely political air. That human wall of commotion near the front doors now stretched to the side door, too, forcing white students to enter the building from the back. You bypassed the whole scene that morning, ambling your way down Main Street.
Three buildings down from the school was a failing company called Made in Texas!, which used the long-defunct Bliss Hotel, a near perfect double to your schoolhouse, as a factory to manufacture little western tchotchkes, pewter longhorn key chains, bull scrotum coin purses. The kind of future garbage tourists pick up at the airport for their loved ones back home. Over those last weeks, the stale, manic, tense halls of Bliss Township had come to seem a sort of factory, too, the machinery through which you were daily processed, slowly rendered from a boy into a man-shaped sadness. It had been a month since Rebekkah had spoken more than a few words to you.
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