Oliver Loving

by Stefan Merrill Block

  Charlie arrived at the address Doyle had given him to find a gathering of parked cars, one police cruiser. Even from the outside, Charlie saw that Doyle was right to warn Charlie about his place. Slabs of the stucco façade had fallen away in mangy patches, and the leaking AC units had made pouches beneath the windows, like heavily bagged eyes. “Charlie!” Doyle greeted him, and in the bright morning light, Charlie noticed how aged Doyle looked, his skin gone a little loose in the jowls.

  In a flurry of hugs, shoulder squeezes, handshakes, and cheap perfume, Charlie entered. Manuel Paz extended a thick, chapped hand. “Welcome to your arraignment,” he said.

  “Ha,” Charlie grunted, already starting to like the man a little.

  The state of Doyle’s domestic existence, inside that house, was dire, like its own little ghost town, cramped ruins amid the empty infinity of the plains. The word for what Doyle had become, Charlie sadly recognized, was hoarder. Some of his things were quite nice—Charlie noticed a mint-condition frame to an Eames chair, an intricate kilim rug that could have fetched a few hundred dollars at the Brooklyn Flea, a fanciful mantel made entirely of interlocked longhorns—but Doyle piled these fantastic objects in unruly heaps. Charlie had to swallow hard to hide his shock when, hanging directly over Doyle’s many-quilted sofa, he noticed Pa’s painting, which they had secretly helped Doyle purchase in that other life before.

  “I know, I know, this place. I can’t seem to stop buying things. It’s like I think I’m shopping for the mansion I’ll someday inhabit,” Doyle said, waving his cane.

  Doyle had made for his visitors a big egg casserole. After years of witnessing Ma turn away the flotilla of casserole trays that had once sailed for the front door of Zion’s Pastures, Charlie downed the sodden, half-cooked stuff like a kind of victory. As they ate on the space Doyle had cleared on a Georgian Colonial dining room table, the school’s former faculty had many questions about Charlie’s Brooklyn life. “And is there anyone special?” Mrs. Schumacher asked. “Can you explain to me how any couple ever stays together in a place like that, with so many options?” added Mrs. Henderson.

  Charlie was relieved by their questions, then delighted, then a little regretful. He had spent the last ten years carrying around this persuasive story that a willowy, sway-gaited boy like himself had never belonged in a school like his anyway, that his “homeschooling,” whatever its questionable motives, had provided a kind of merciful escape. Of course, Charlie had never felt too much familial danger because of his romantic life, that much he could say for his parents. Charlie merely grew up, and the fact of his inclination became as apparent as his taller-than-average height, his thinner-than-average frame. But the citizens of West Texas were not all as progressively minded. At thirteen, when the boys in his classes had begun to perform their bellicose swagger, mocking the most obviously mockable as if denigration itself lent them some manly cred, Charlie had sensed that he was at a steep precipice, the end of his easy popularity as a younger kid. By the time Charlie left Bliss Township for the Zion’s Pastures Homeschool for Lovings, a certain group of loutish, zit-stricken boys had begun to infiltrate the packed lunchroom table where Charlie sat with his many friends. Trying out the bitter flavor of the trite slurs they’d learned from their older brothers, these boys rechristened Charlie “twinkle-toes,” “gaywad,” “fudge packer,” “queergayhomo,” and plain old “fag,” on a near daily basis. Charlie had been relieved not to have to descend into the hormonal inferno of the ninth and tenth grades. And yet, maybe Charlie had underestimated the people of his hometown? Or perhaps the cities’ rainbow-flagged protests had at last crashed upon these shores?

  “And please,” Mrs. Dawson added, “tell us about the food. I want to know what a New Yorker eats.”

  Even Manuel Paz looked on with a grin as Charlie obliged the teachers’ questions, extolling a New York existence substantially more glamorous than his own. He described a successful young writer, the object of a glut of professional and romantic attentions. Playing the part of hometown hero, Charlie looked upon those women’s heavily blushered, wetly lipsticked faces as if they were some kind of authentic article he had forgotten.

  “So what is it you are working on up there now?” asked the pleasantly wrinkled Mrs. Henderson.

  “Actually,” Charlie said, “I’m trying to write something about all of this. Oliver. Our town. The whole story.”

  The room fell silent as Charlie pushed around a limp white mushroom.

  “Wow,” Mrs. Schumacher said after a time. “I don’t know how you could bear to think about it every day. Must be a brave boy.”

  Charlie shrugged. “Writing things down, writing it all out, it’s about the only way I can have some sense of control in this world. Though, of course, I know it’s likely an illusion.”

  Doyle Dixon looked at him pityingly, pressing his lips together.

  “Actually,” Charlie said, “while we’re on the topic, I do have a few questions I’d like to ask.”

  Charlie strained to face Manuel Paz, feeling profoundly fraudulent. Big hat, no cattle, an old Texan like Manuel would say. “Really?” Manuel asked. “Like an interview? You gonna make me famous?”

  “Hardly. But it’s hard to imagine telling Oliver’s story without you in it. I mean, you are definitely a character in this. An honest-to-goodness Texas Ranger.”

  “Har. Can’t argue with that,” Manuel said.

  “How does a person even become a Ranger in the first place?”

  An awkward moment ensued, Charlie’s biographical question disrupting the chatty flow over Doyle’s table. But Manuel just tipped back in his chair, crossed his boots, striking the atavistic Texan storytelling posture, an old man recalling youthful days by a fire at dusk. “We Rangers like to say it’s a calling, like the priesthood or something, though I’ve come to suspect that we all just watched too many episodes of Gunsmoke as boys.” Manuel then offered a short version of his own story, telling the assembled brunchers how joining the Texas Rangers, the legendary band of dragoons that had kept safe—from invasion, thievery, and the maraudings of bandits—the West Texan expanse, now struck him as a childish, ridiculous dream. “People want drugs,” Manuel said. “The Latinos want a better life in America. I’m just the rule keeper. My job is to enforce the law insisted upon by the hundreds of millions to the north, who couldn’t know the first thing about the truth of life down here on the border. Hardly more than a glorified paper pusher.”

  Manuel frowned, his whole bad story written in his face. Over the years, as November fifteenth had become just more waterlogged jetsam deposited by the ghastly tide working its way back and forth across the continent, Manuel’s life had stalled, and not only in his career. Charlie knew, from Ma’s gossip, that his wife had left him long ago.

  “You must be more than that,” Charlie offered. “Back when it happened? You were all over the news.”

  “The news. Suppose that’s true.” The man grimaced, mined his teeth with a fingernail. “Just over nine and a half years ago, but feels like a lifetime now and also just like yesterday.”

  “Preach,” said Mrs. Dawson. “Truth.”

  “You know, those poor kids’ parents still show up,” he added. “A few times a year, they still drop by the office, to check in. To howl at me, really, instead of at their own empty rooms. And I just sit there and take it. I get it. It’s like the assassination of JFK, impossible for folks to believe that a tragedy like that could be caused by nothing but one twisted young man. Honestly, it almost made me quit altogether. I used to think that all it took was a good strong mind, a Sherlock-type person, and every answer could be known. But to think that fellows like that exist, that maybe for some things there could be no reason—”

  “That’s just it,” said Mrs. Dawson. “No reason! You know, I had that boy in my class?”

  “You did?” Charlie asked.

  “Sure. So did Mrs. Henderson here.” Mrs. Dawson gestured to her grimly nodding colleague. “And I think y
our pa taught him, too, right? In his art class.”

  “He what?” Charlie slapped at his arm, like he’d been stung.

  “Ah.” Mrs. Dawson touched her mouth. “Well, could be that I’m misremembering. Anyway, that was all years before, and how could anyone have known? What was there to say about a boy like that? All mumbly and angry. I, for one, never believed any of that political talk. He wasn’t some freedom fighter. He was just, I don’t know—off.”

  “I have to say,” Manuel said, “I’m inclined to agree with you.” When Manuel paused, Charlie could perceive the charged oxygen in the room, Doyle and his former staff hanging on the officer’s words. Manuel put two fingers to his lips, as if sucking at the memory of a cigarette. “But I suppose I’m like all those parents, too, in the end. This thing sometimes still keeps me up at night, honestly. All these questions. Why Hector, why that particular room, why Reg Avalon. Or even, for example, why on earth your poor brother was down there, too. Why, why, why. The detective itch, I like to call it, it only gets worse the more you scratch at it.”

  “Reg!” Doyle cried. “I can hardly bear to hear his name, even still. Dear man.”

  As Mrs. Henderson rubbed a hand along Doyle’s spine, Charlie felt himself giving up his reporter act. It wasn’t an alleged writer who blurted out his next words; it was just a brother. “I always thought he must have been there for Rebekkah,” Charlie said. “That night. Oliver must have been looking for her. Did you know he used to go see her? A couple of times. A study group or something. And has my ma ever told you about the journal I found?”

  “The journal,” Manuel echoed.

  “Yeah, that journal where Oliver wrote a whole bunch of these—I’d guess you’d call them love poems. For her.”

  Manuel nodded, but in the distant way he looked at Charlie now, Charlie wondered whether this journal’s existence might have been a new fact for Manuel. The Ranger was silent for a moment, considering Charlie, considering the teachers. “These questions,” he said at last, “truth is, there probably is no bottom to them. And sometimes I wonder why the why even matters anymore. But, sure, I’m just like anyone else. More so, even. It’s crazy, I know it, but when I heard about that test in the fancy new machine, and Mrs. Strout working with your brother—well, I don’t got much left to hope upon.”

  Mrs. Schumacher’s breathing began to strain. “Do you really think they’ll find a way to let him speak?”

  Charlie shrugged. “Miracles can happen.”

  “They sure can,” Doyle said. “They already have, sounds like.”

  “Yeah, it sounds like,” Charlie said.

  “Did the doctors say what the chances are?” Mrs. Dawson asked.

  “I don’t know that I’d be likely to believe the doctors anyway.”

  “But they wouldn’t even say? If there really is a chance?” added Mrs. Schumacher. “If that Strout woman is really making any sort of headway?”

  “Honestly, I have no idea.”

  “What do you think he’d say?” Mrs. Schumacher’s voice was thin, as if trying to speak into a driving wind. “I’ve been wondering and wondering.”

  “Me, too.” Charlie nodded.

  Something faintly tightened in Manuel’s face. “And how’s your ma doing with all this?” he said. “I worry about her.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t do that.”

  “You’re probably right,” Manuel said. “But that’s my job now. Professional, deputized worrywart.”

  “Ha.”

  “And what about your father?” Doyle asked. “How is he these days? Still working at that new hotel over in Lajitas? Haven’t seen him around much.”

  Charlie shook his head, as if to a bad flavor in his mouth.

  “Look,” Doyle added, in a tone to suggest that this line of conversation had been planned in advance. “I can guess how things are between you. But the man is hurting. Won’t even hardly talk to us. We’re worried about him. He’s not as strong as you or your ma.”

  “There’s the understatement of the year.”

  “See him when you’re ready,” Doyle said, showing Charlie his palms.

  “Easier said than done.”

  Manuel scraped his plate with a knife. “I’m sure you’re right.” Manuel bent forward to rest his elbows on his knees. “But take my advice, Charlie, and here’s a quote for that book of yours. When it comes to family, that’s a mystery no detective in the world, not Mister Sherlock Holmes himself, could hope to crack.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “Where were you last night?” Charlie asked idly the next morning, just after dawn, when he found Ma combing through a mound of walnuts at the kitchen table. “I didn’t hear you come in until—it must have been near midnight.”

  “Peggy gave me a few more hours with Oliver. They’ve been nicer to me lately. All those nurses and doctors, just wanting to shuffle into Oliver’s little halo of fame. It’s twisted, but that’s people for you.”

  Charlie wasn’t too exhausted to miss that Ma likely intended twisted as a dig, but he was too exhausted to muster a comeback. Charlie had hardly slept, had spent the greater part of the night watching a blue square of moonlight scroll across the cheap drywall, spotlighting delicate fissures and a perfectly still scorpion. The old Navajo blanket smelling of mothballs, his brain a monstrous contraption, thumping, grinding, beating away, unable to process what Mrs. Dawson had told him. Hector had been one of his father’s students? Even now, at the kitchen table, Charlie was wondering how he might relay this information to Ma. But this new variable seemed, in some calculus Charlie couldn’t quite grasp, bound up with something unspoken between his mother and him.

  Ma consulted her plate, pulverized the meat of a nut. “Hey, where are your glasses? I thought you wore glasses now.”

  “Oh, right. Thanks. I forgot.” Charlie did not really need the glasses he now retrieved from his milk carton nightstand. He was only a tiny bit nearsighted. In his solitary Brooklyn days, the glasses often stayed on the secondhand bookshelf for whole weeks. Charlie knew his mother suspected the truth, that he wore them mostly for the professorial air of legitimacy their thick tortoiseshell frames lent him.

  “Big plans for this morning?” Ma asked. “I hope you are being careful out there. And, I hope you won’t feel—what was your word for it? Infantilized. I hope you won’t feel infantilized when I tell you that I really don’t love the idea of you riding around on that ridiculous motorbike.”

  “Actually, I was thinking I might go for another hike today.”

  “Oh?”

  Last night, Charlie had powered down his phone, shoved it into a drawer, but now he was imagining Jimmy Giordano’s many calls going straight to voice mail, imagining the man in his grimy Gowanus office, plotting his Plan B. Charlie swallowed, nodded, wondered if he really could do the thing he had in mind.

  * * *

  Lajitas, when Charlie was a kid, had been home to a bona fide national celebrity: the town mayor, the Honorable Clay Henry, who was a goat who drank beer. “A beer-drinking goat!” The friends Charlie made at Thoreau had always said this at some point in the first day or two of their acquaintance. It was a story to dine out on in preppy New England, that folksy, yokelish charm. “Hand to God, I’m telling the truth,” Charlie would say, his voice slipping a little Texan for effect. Charlie never mentioned the sad fact that a town could elect an alcoholic goat for mayor because it was no longer technically considered a town, an unincorporated municipality, and that the half-ghosted settlement’s primary economy came in the form of the bottles of beer tourists bought from the Lajitas Trading Post, feeding the booze to staggering, gaseous Clay Henry, before they headed down into the park. But many years had passed since Charlie had been to Lajitas, and, even with Ma’s warnings, Charlie couldn’t quite believe what he found.

  Like so many of the county’s Mexican-owned businesses and an entire Hispanic neighborhood of trailers that once sat west of Bliss, whole streets had been razed. Where Clay Henry’s pen on
ce stood was now a manicured cactus garden. And, across the street: an astonishing, fantastical sight. Behind a laser-etched placard that read LAJITAS GOLF RESORT spread a compound arranged as a faux–Wild West street scene, complete with a bank that advertised Texan trinkets, a corral that ran with chlorinated water, a swing-door saloon. A sort of Texas theme park.

  Pa, Charlie thought. As Ma had instructed him to do at his first return to Bed Four, Charlie tried to imagine the worst. Cheeks of exploded capillaries, skin gone slack, eyes blinking and red. But the only image of his father that Charlie could hold in his mind belonged to the last time he’d seen him in Marfa, in that tuna-can-and-bottle-cluttered archive of sorrows Pa called “the new place,” when the man had run a hand through the matted shag of his hair as they said good-bye at the front door. “What I want to say?” Pa had told Charlie then. “All I really want to say is that I promise you. There is fight in the old beast yet, right? I just need to find my way back to—”

  “To what?” Charlie had asked.

  “I don’t know. You. All of you.”

  Good luck with that: the last words Charlie had spoken to him.

  Six years had passed, and now Charlie straightened his spine, steeling himself for a performance of faked confidence. Charlie walked into the main entrance of the complex’s largest structure, a grand replica of a Wild West brothel, its lobby all mahogany and stained glass, the sort of place where a poker winner might blow his wad in a Hollywood western. It smelled of Lysol and the new-house zip of fresh plaster. A player piano banged out a staccato barroom jig, but the lobby was empty except for a slumped janitor in coveralls, sweeping the glistening marble floor.

  “Charlie.”

  Charlie knew to look for Pa behind the desk, but the man who spoke his name was not his father. This was a no one, like one of those any-men you could see smoking outside a public rehab facility, with their wiry bodies and shot nerves, their drinking and cigarette habits having cured their faces into uniformly shiny, textured masks. Charlie took a few steps closer, needing a clear view of Pa’s eyes to convince him. They were, after all, Charlie’s own eyes, if diluted; Charlie’s own eyes reflected back to him in day-old rainwater.