“Pa.”
Pa’s hair had abandoned his crown, established survival colonies on his neck and chin. This hard-times stranger, this fazed drunk with Charlie’s grayish eyes, was as still as statuary behind the counter. Then, as if forgetting the desk, he lunged in Charlie’s direction, the marble top striking his ribs. The man looked so delicate that Charlie listened for a popping sound. The player piano silenced for a beat, then resumed with that classic of vaudeville madness, playing “Flight of the Bumblebee” along with Charlie’s thumping heart.
“Here I am,” Charlie said.
He was just a few paces away now. Pa. The same man Charlie had vilified, longed for, counted as dead, now only stood there as this ordinary and weathered person, costumed in the purple-collared shirt of his work uniform. This was just another minute, and its ordinariness struck Charlie as the most desperate fact of all.
“Your ma told me you were back in town,” Pa said.
“She did?” Only one sentence between them and already Charlie was appalled. He had come to Lajitas, still playing the part of his mother’s dutiful son, showing his father the firewall of contempt she had taught Charlie to erect, but apparently she herself had already broken it?
“How are you?” Pa asked.
“Oh, just swell.”
Charlie crossed his arms, hugged himself as if to give some silent lecture on how he’d had to become his own father. It didn’t take long to collapse the false smile Pa was trying to work into his hollowed cheeks.
“Charlie. Jesus. You. You look so great. Grown-up. Handsome.”
“What the hell happened here?” Charlie said. “What is this place?”
“What do you mean?”
“Last time I was here it was a one-horse town. Now, voilà, it’s Disneyland. And where is old Clay Henry?”
“The goat?” Pa scratched his widened bald swatch, looking sorry, as if of course his son would demand to see the old mayor, and he had somehow failed to anticipate that request.
“What the fuck is this music? Listen, uh … can we please just find somewhere quiet to talk? Just for a few minutes? It’s important.”
Pa considered for a moment. He glanced furtively in the direction of a woman typing at a computer in the back office. Then, as if they had just completed check-in paperwork, he turned back to the desk in a businesslike way and grabbed a room key in a trembling fist.
Pa was silent as he led Charlie up the grand wooden staircase, down a long, velvet-trimmed hall to a door labeled THE BIGFOOT WALLACE SUITE. Inside, Charlie found an anonymous corporate hotel room, with a few “Texan” touches. A bronze cowboy riding a bucking bronco on the coffee table, a plaster replica of a longhorn skull over the bathroom transom. Double doors led out onto a terrace, with a view of the improbable rolling greens of a golf course. Distantly, a man in a cliché of a cabbie hat swung a golf club.
“But seriously.” Charlie turned. Pa was holding his hands together in the dim of the room. “This place.”
“Some telecom tycoon bought the whole damned town, put up all this.”
“Of which you are a faithful employee.”
Pa shrugged heavily, as if straining against the silly starched shirt he was made to wear. “Believe me, I looked for other work. But I guess a job like this, it’s all I deserve.”
Charlie felt his lungs constrict. Was this what Pa deserved, or was that idea just some kind of guilt trick he was playing? But Charlie knew now that this scene was what he deserved, breaking their six-year silence in the hope that his father might lend him some cash. Charlie stepped back into the room.
“You don’t have to worry, I’ll spare you a big scene.” Charlie wanted, very much, for his father to make a big scene. “I just came to ask you a question.”
“A question,” he said.
“That’s right. About Hector Espina.”
Pa shook his head in fast, startled turns.
“He was your student.”
“What?”
“Please don’t play dumb with me. That’s all I’m asking you to do right now, is to be honest with me. I know he was a student of yours. I know it. Mrs. Dawson told me so.”
“Mrs. Dawson? What were you doing speaking with Mrs. Dawson for?”
“Why didn’t you ever tell us?”
Charlie noticed that a dew of sweat had broken out on his father’s forehead. Even from a few paces away, Charlie could smell the familiar toxins, nicotine and ethyl alcohol, pushing out of his pores. “What was there to say?” Pa said. “That miserable little speck of a person I hardly even knew. A boy I could have killed myself, before it was too late.”
“Okay, fine. So you know nothing. Big surprise! Jed Loving knows nothing at all.”
Pa’s shoulders had lost their heft, but he could still work them into the what-can-I-do shrug Charlie remembered. “He was just another strange kid in my art class, Charlie. There were a lot of kids like him who passed through over the years.”
“Right,” Charlie said.
Pa’s shaking escalated a tick, and it seemed to Charlie that if he listened closely, he might have heard the man’s bones rattle, like seeds in a dried pomegranate.
“How about we try to start over here?” Pa said. “How about we try to just talk? I mean really talk. I want you to say whatever is on your mind. Doesn’t matter what.”
Pa had always been the head-nodder; Charlie had become the head-shaker.
“I’m still your father,” he said.
“I’m not so sure about that.” Charlie turned, lifted the statue of the bucking bronco, felt its heft, as if he might use it to brain this stranger who wore his father’s petrified face, and so liberate them both from this miserable reunion.
“Charlie…”
“My father was too sick to live with us,” Charlie said, repeating the lie that he’d told to so many strangers, the lie that, he’d learned from dozens of movies and novels, was practically expected of an angry, abandoned young man like himself. “And then he died.”
Charlie was feeling lit up now with the old righteous fury, the meaningless howl of the adolescent monster he’d gestated in all those silent years of homeschooling, all those years Oliver had spent in Bed Four, all those years when Pa never told Ma once, This is wrong, we can’t let things go on like this. Charlie didn’t mean to say what he said next, and yet out it all came. “What the hell is wrong with you?” he said. “How could you let yourself become like this? And never, not once do you even try to talk with me? For years. Years! Haven’t you been at all curious about where I’ve been living? What I’ve been doing? What it’s been like for me? And aren’t you curious about Oliver? About what is happening now?”
Pa nodded, oddly brightening a little to this tirade, as if Charlie had just conceded something. “Of course I’ve wanted to know,” he said. “You wouldn’t talk to me.”
“I wouldn’t talk to you? I think maybe you’ve got that backwards.”
“Okay, you’re right.”
“I never really knew my father at all,” Charlie said.
“Okay.”
“For fuck’s sake.” Charlie walked into the bathroom, for the relief of its sterilized closeness. After a time, the ghost of his father darkened the doorway.
“Look,” Pa said, and Charlie waited for him to say something more, he really did. But after tense, silent seconds, Charlie lowered himself to the closed lid of the toilet.
“At least my father taught me one good lesson,” Charlie said. “When it comes to my family, you have to get out when you can.”
To Charlie’s surprise, Pa raised a strict finger then, carried it into the bathroom, where he pointed it at his own chest.
“I’m the one who messed up. I’m the mess-up. Me. Me. Someday you’ll see it. Your mother has only done the best she could.”
“You really, truly have no idea what you are talking about.”
“I think I might.”
“I mean it.” As if Pa’s DTs were a genetic affliction, Cha
rlie was also vibrating now. “Who is this stranger who talks about my family like he knows us? No one I recognize. The best she could? Did you know that Ma never once got a good second opinion on Oliver? Did it ever occur to you that this so-called miracle everyone is going on about is really just a test that no one fought for, years and years ago? We buried him. Ma did. We all did.”
“We did what now?”
“Just what I said. But of course Ma probably would have made a different choice if she’d had a husband around.” Pa pushed his palms hard into his deeply socketed eyes. A few months before, Charlie had seen a news item about some nonagenarian Nazi they had rounded up to face his seventy-year-old crime. Half of him thinking, Let the devil burn; the other half thinking, Just let the old man die in peace.
“I’m sorry,” Pa said.
“Oh, right. The MO of Jed Loving: when angry, apologize. Please, Pa. Leave. Just leave me alone.”
“Leave you alone? Wasn’t it you who came here to see me?”
“I just need a minute to myself. I mean it. I really, really, really do.”
Pa shrugged again, even more heavily than before. “All right,” he said. “If that’s what you need.”
“If that’s what you need.” Charlie snorted. “You should get that printed on a business card. Chiseled onto your headstone.”
Charlie closed his eyes, and after a moment, he could hear Pa’s tentative footsteps, the door latching behind him. He emerged at last from the bathroom, paced the Bigfoot Wallace Suite, returned to the baronial balcony for a while, surveying the brown ancient mountains, reframed by the rolling fields, a few acres of Welsh heather transposed onto the great Chihuahuan.
Back on the Suzuki, Charlie tore down the tarmac, hot wind screaming over his face. He thought of returning to Lajitas, and the Suzuki dithered with his indecision, listing a little dangerously now. But then he balanced himself and picked up speed. Charlie was taking the long way home.
* * *
He’d had the scene in mind for weeks. Perhaps, Charlie had considered, his book would open not with the night of November fifteenth, but with this: the wayward son, walking the tumbleweed streets of his ancestral hometown. It all would look diminished, of course, and Charlie knew that the whole town, deprived of the primary economy of the old school, had fallen on hard times. The young man from the city would see that the center point of his boyhood universe was now just another town withering on the high plains.
And yet, Charlie now felt that he had another to add to the considerable list of his imagination’s failures. As the Suzuki made a dusty progress, Charlie saw that Bliss, Texas, was more than diminished. The half-shuttered Main Street he remembered, under the harshness of sun and wind, had already made significant progress toward joining all those various miners’ camps, those myriad ghost towns that dotted the desert. Bliss Pies N’ Stuff was now an oversized tin can with pimples of rust, plywood for windows. The frontage of the only other business in Bliss—the Made in Texas! factory, which had once turned out those kitschy Old West knickknacks—was half busted in, its walls grayed and buckling. Charlie slowed for a better view of some movement he glimpsed within. A family of javelinas, it turned out, those wild hogs of West Texas, his country’s attempt to offer up an archetype of ugly. Their tusked, anal snouts snuffled through the shattered ceramics that littered a rotted field of carpeting.
This was the town generations of his ancestors had built; the twenty-odd structures of Main Street were the setting for the lore, the ancient rivalries and romances, that had formed Charlie and his brother, or at least their paternal halves. But the only living citizens of Bliss that Charlie could locate now were the javelinas and a couple of mohawked roadrunners, zigzagging manically across the cracked asphalt of Main Street as if they too had just returned from a long time away and had gone a little crazed with grief.
And so Charlie could not bear to do what he had imagined; he did not dismount the Suzuki for the mythic hometown stroll. He rode on, as slowly as he could without tipping. And, at last, there it was. The redbrick husk of Bliss Township School, each pane of window methodically shattered, the western portion of the roof staved in, as if from aerial strike. Charlie could see a slice of the Bliss Mountain Lions football stadium. Zombie grass, high and dead at the fifty-yard line. The flagpole was gut-punched, doubled over. The only traces of the flowers and wreaths and tributes once attached to the rust-furred bars of the gates were little bits of wire, gathered near the ground, and a badly faded, laminated sheet of paper with a couple of cursively scrawled, English-version lyrics from “Besame Mucho,” a song Mr. Avalon’s theater club never got to sing that night: Oh, dearest one, if you should leave me, my little heart would take flight and this life would be through. All it had taken to end the town of Bliss, Texas, was one demented boy’s decision. Manuel Paz was right: the horror was absolute and unacceptable. Someone else must be accountable. Someone must still be made to pay. And yet, Charlie knew his Texas history. He was thinking of the ancient Mogollon, the Apache, the Comanche, the Spanish, and the Mexicans, the hundreds who had perished on all fours, crawling to America. All those history-crushed people. His own ancestors, trying to establish human time in the eternity of a desert that so quickly brushed it away. A wind rose from the west, a ghostly abstraction of dust lifting through the air, depositing itself over Bliss, sanding a few more grains from the façades of Main Street. Then the dust sucked up into the immaculate blue overhead, sighed off into the nothing to the east.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Back at Desert Splendor that evening, Charlie spent a whole hour hiding out from his mother in the bathroom, his legs going numb on the toilet seat. Just now, he couldn’t stand to be in a room with Ma, not for another minute.
Over the cool hollow of the porcelain bowl, Charlie was thinking about his father, from long before. The hard scrape of his shoes, chasing him up the dirt road of Zion’s Pastures. The callused weight of his father’s hands, ink stained. Sitting there together, on a special “boys only” trip to the rodeo in El Paso, Pa pinching sprayed bits of cow patty from Charlie’s nacho cheese. Pa making the whistling sound of artillery falling as his fingers soared through the air to Charlie in bed.
“Every story in the Western canon is, in one way or another, the story of the fall from paradise,” Professor Waters once told Charlie’s Masterpieces of English Literature class at Thoreau. “But isn’t the loss of the garden just a metaphor?” Charlie had asked. “That we all feel we lost something in childhood, some thoughtless, innocent state before we knew better?” Of course Charlie knew that the Lovings of before had never been a paradise, but Charlie felt that they had at least lost an idea of paradise, the other family that they still might have been. The family that suggested itself in a wad of gathered money at the Bliss Township Jamboree, in the exhilarated darkness of the many bunk bed stories his brother had begun, in the vertiginous view on a family hike to the top of the Window waterfall, its limestone-framed image of a tan and lavender expanse looking like a doorway to another country entirely. It wasn’t only those five people who died that night. It was also the other future that could have been theirs that Hector Espina had murdered at a school dance when Charlie was thirteen years old. Ten years had passed, and despite his best efforts Charlie was exactly who he’d been in those first days after, a disgruntled son, accompanying his mother each day to Crockett State, hardly saying a word. What had changed? Only the year.
How to explain the rash decision that Charlie crafted that night on the toilet? He knew he had no real excuse, even then. He had only the hours and days ahead with a family there that he could not bear, the incalculable burden of all the debts each of them could never repay. Why? “The detective itch,” the question that knocked at the walls of all their days, Ma’s, Charlie’s, the town’s. With no way to open that door, some had shouted at the sound, others had tried to speak back to it. Charlie had locked the door, covered his ears, pretended not to hear. But the knocking came at irregular int
ervals, loud, then soft, then vanished, then loud again; there was no way to ignore it. Charlie thought of the next test, the one in El Paso. He thought of everything he still did not know, might know. There was much Charlie couldn’t bear about his homecoming, but nothing was as horrible as that hope. The nearness of his brother’s voice to at last answer that rapping. Hope: Charlie had watched his mother waste a decade inside of it, and so he resolved again to banish the word.
* * *
A few hours later, Charlie was back in the unhoused basement down the street, surveying the grim scene in the dim luminance of an old kerosene lantern. From the look of the febrile, halting notes Charlie had scratched onto printer paper and scattered across the room, it appeared that he had bludgeoned a manuscript to death. Hefting his bag over his shoulder, Charlie paused for a long while, trying to take it all in. As if he had deliberately arranged to offer himself a little piece of dispiriting symbolism, Charlie found, trampled and ash-stained on the floor, the very page on which he had written the words Tell the TRUTH!
“That’s it, Weens,” he said—Charlie still found himself, in certain dark moments, speaking out loud to his pug. He thought of Edwina there with Rebekkah, on Eighth Street, the answers to everything that would always be beyond him. Edwina’s warm potato of a body, curled against the crook of Charlie’s leg all through his one New York winter. “The end,” he really did say out loud, and he tried to believe it this time.
Dear Mother, Charlie began on a page plucked from one of his journals. I think we both know that this arrangement of ours isn’t working for either of us.
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