Oliver Loving

by Stefan Merrill Block

  “Meaning what exactly?”

  Manuel held his stubble-white chin with three fingers, the posture of a man in distant theoretic discourse with himself. “Eve,” Manuel said, “why did you lie to me?”

  “Excuse me?” A wasp alighted on the table, then flew across the kitchen and hurled itself futilely against a window. “And what was it that I supposedly lied to you about?”

  “Charlie told me something interesting the other day. Says that Oliver wrote a bunch of love poems for that Sterling girl.”

  “Charlie told you that?” Eve managed to say these words as a question, pressing her fingertips to the desk to keep the shriek of betrayal in her chest. What did Charlie have—some list of people he might visit to inflict maximum agony upon her? “And so what? So what if Oliver wrote a few moony love poems years and years ago? What difference could that fact have possibly made? For God’s sake, Manuel.”

  “Sure,” Manuel said. “Maybe you’re right, maybe it couldn’t make any difference now. But if it didn’t matter at all, why not tell me about it? Doesn’t that seem strange?” Manuel renewed his grasp on his face, covering his mouth for a long moment, looking like the speak-no-evil monkey. “I’ll tell you what,” he added. “For years, I’ve been saying it to myself, that if I couldn’t ever offer you any real answers, the least I could do, after all y’all have been through, was to help you where I could. But maybe I’ve let that guilt of mine make me a little blind. Maybe I should have pressed you a little harder on this particular topic, all that time ago. Look. Maybe there’s no explaining Hector, or maybe all those folks are right, maybe he really was just trying to make some sort of point. But I still can’t believe it. I can’t believe there is simply no reason why a boy would just suddenly turn into a monster without warning.”

  “And so,” Eve spoke levelly, at the table, “what you believe is that some love poems my son wrote a decade ago are somehow going to explain away three dead children?”

  “My question, if you recollect,” Manuel said, “is why Oliver was at that classroom that night. And also why Hector let Rebekkah just walk away. That maybe Hector was jealous of what Oliver and Rebekkah—”

  “Oliver and Rebekkah! Oliver and Rebekkah, you keep saying, like they were some couple. They weren’t. They weren’t! Wouldn’t I have known about that?”

  “Apparently,” Manuel said, “there’s no telling what you might know.”

  Eve wouldn’t reply; she wouldn’t even shake her head.

  “You know that we have a term for lying to an officer don’t you?” Manuel said. “It’s called obstruction of justice.”

  “So you should really do it, then. You should arrest me! And while you’re at it, you should probably arrest Jed, too. Or was it apparently only up to me to describe every little detail of how Oliver used to spend his time?”

  Manuel pushed the end of his pen against his finger, twirled it as he spoke. “It’s been almost ten years now, Eve, and I’ve followed more dead ends than I care to admit, heard so much craziness. A good number of people dear to me have left town, treated like criminals because their folks came from the other side of the river. But still I can’t bring myself to quit this place. I just need to know how it happened. Whatever there is to know. Anything. I need to know. Don’t you?”

  Eve inhaled deeply. The image before her, that security photo of a rail-thin middle-aged lady dropping a computer into her bag, was like a vivid medical exhibit on the pathology of her own secret-keeping, so why not just tell Manuel at last? Between the moment Eve gathered her next thought and actually, finally spoke the oft-imagined admission out loud, there was just a single free-fall second of terror. “He tried to talk to me about her once,” Eve heard herself say.

  “Oliver? He tried to talk with you about Rebekkah?”

  Eve tipped her head slowly, up and down. “He tried to tell me something about her once, how he was worried about her, but I never let him explain it to me.”

  Manuel tilted back in the kitchen chair, its vinyl moaning. “I see,” he said.

  “But do you?” Eve looked up at Manuel now, as she had looked pleadingly at many security guys before him. “Do you see what it would be like, to spend ten years wondering what might have happened if only you’d listened one night? Do you see why I couldn’t, just could not, bear to talk about something like that?”

  Manuel didn’t answer. He only studied her, as if each word, the twitch in her nose, the way she felt for her bun of hair, might have suggested another conversation entirely.

  “He’s speaking!” Eve blurted. “Did you know that? If you have so many questions, you can just ask Oliver yourself.”

  “Speaking?”

  Eve did her best to calm herself and explain again about the thenar muscles, the alphabet. The latest miracle, which just now sounded, in Eve’s trembling voice, like some dubious lie she was inventing on the spot. Manuel certainly squinted at her that way, as if she was only telling more stories of the sort he’d learned better than to believe. “Well.” Manuel drew his mouth into a sideways pucker. “That is interesting.”

  “Interesting?” Eve asked. “It’s more than interesting. It’s the truth. It’s the wonderful truth.”

  “But didn’t it occur to you,” Manuel said, “that if this wonderful thing has suddenly happened, then that might also be a fact I’d be interested in knowing?”

  “I didn’t think it was any of your business. I mean, what do you have in mind now? You’re going to carry on some kind of interrogation with a boy who has to spend five minutes to type out a single word?” Eve was choking on her tears.

  “I really am sorry for you,” Manuel said. “I am.” And the horrible part was how truly sorry he really did look, the patronizing expression of a man speaking to an insane person. He reached across the table again, but this time she jerked her hands away. “I’ll tell you what,” he added. “How about I just go to Crockett State in the morning to see for myself?”

  “See for yourself what?”

  “I suppose,” Manuel said, with a wistful half grin, “to see for myself if we’ve got an honest-to-goodness miracle on our hands.”

  Eve did not look up at Manuel as he patted her shoulder twice in parting. She leaned forward in her chair and pressed her face to the cool of the table as the squeak of Manuel’s footsteps retreated.

  Eve had long ago learned how to make her anger a steadier, more dependable substance, how to smelt and recast it into a thin barbed wire she strung around her life. And yet, just now the perimeter did not hold. As the sound of Manuel’s squad car rumbled away, Eve was not thinking about that shameful security glossy or even about the fact she had at last admitted to Manuel. She was thinking, instead, of the uncertainty that had come into her voice when she related Margot’s work with Oliver. She was thinking, also, of Jed standing there in the crater at Tusk Mountain, the way he’d spoken Margot Strout’s name like some kind of curse. And she now let herself consider it, her one spot of bother, which her gleeful relief had happily skipped over. “Is there anyone you want to see? Anyone you want me to bring here?” Eve had asked Oliver. When the computer answered, it had said not her son’s name for his father, not Pa, but Dad.

  Eve clenched her fist, beat the table with a few quick raps, but it was still there, that worrisome little syllable from the computer speaker. Like that long-ago conversation she’d never let Oliver have with her, a tiny red stain on her certainty. Dad.

  And look: this day had one last indignity in store for her. Eve startled at the whine of a body shifting its weight on the floorboards. Apparently, there had been a witness to the scene she had just endured. A room away, Charlie sat in the dimness of the stairwell, palming his stubbled jaw. “We need to talk,” Charlie said.

  Oliver

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Oliver, the events of your final walking weeks might have become the defining details in the story of your life, but why suffer needlessly, dwelling solely on those last days of your upright existenc
e? There were more than a few happy memories there, in that distant ether on the far side of Bed Four, and before setting you back down amid the worst of your memories, why not first pause to return you to one of the best? Memories of hazy summer light, an inky paperback in your hand, a lingering smell of sandwich condiments. Your family.

  July in West Texas was a lot like deep February in four-season country. When you were locked inside for unending days, time became a slack, amorphous substance, the chiming of the clock like some hourly repeated sardonic quip. Truth be told, despite your complaints, Bliss Township’s early-August start to the school year was a relief. The air-conditioning at the schoolhouse was vastly superior to the single little wheezing window unit at Zion’s Pastures.

  But on that particular summer day, when you were fourteen, it was still blazing July, a drab 2 P.M. You were all there together in the living room. Lethargic from lunch, huddled around the AC, you hid behind your books. Often, you’d complain about the grunty rustle of your father’s breathing, your brother’s picking at his nose, the weird video game sounds he hummed. Your mother always seemed the least bothered by these forced confinements. When you could bear it no longer and would set off for a dip in the tepid, brackish Loving Creek, she would complain, “But we were having family time!”

  But those days were not, in the end, endless. Later, you would all do anything for another.

  “I have an idea!” Ma said, cueing the collective groaning that often greeted her inexplicable afternoon inspirations. “Let’s all draw a picture.”

  “A picture?”

  “Yes!” she said. “We’ll each draw one picture of Zion’s Pastures. The thing that we think about first when we think about home.”

  “Ugh,” you said. Yet you were too lazy from the heat to put up a protest when she came back to the living room with a box of colored pencils and four sheets of paper on schoolhouse clipboards. The effort of this activity would be taxing, but worse would be Ma’s silent-treatment punishment for not cooperating. You picked up a brown pencil and began to sketch.

  You were never much of a drawer, but the image materializing onto your sheet of printer paper didn’t look so bad to you. You hadn’t chosen a subject, you had only started to doodle an arching shape that, as the line extended, revealed itself to be the wide horns of your ranch’s last steer, Moses.

  You weren’t trying to make any sort of point to your mother that your one image of home was not of the meandering and ramshackle house, not the four of you standing portrait style on the lawn, but of your lonesome, wandering beast. It was simply what your hand wanted to draw, and the more you drew, the more surprised you were at the detail you could remember. You could call forth the exact pattern of Moses’s brown patches, the touch of mange on his rear haunches, and you thought you quite expertly captured your longhorn’s eyes, as Zen wise as an infant’s. “Okay,” your mother said. “Let’s compare. On three. One, two, three!”

  Laughter split the heat-thickened silence of the living room of Zion’s Pastures. It echoed off the bones hung on the walls, agitated the porcelain figurines of cowboys and stallions in the china cabinet. All four of your pages showed the figure of Moses, wandering the hills. Charlie’s was a crude, grinning stick figure, your mother’s was a hirsute and frenetic squiggle, your father’s was done up in his van Goghian eddying style, and yours looked less like a cow than some sort of cow-hybrid monster. But you were still laughing in bellyful gasps. Laughing and laughing because, in the drowning July heat, when the warmth had pooled between you like deep water, making you each an island, you still all shared the same unlikely idea of what was home.

  And yet, Oliver, it is unavoidable now: that pulled drain plug at the bottom of your story, that black hole into which time itself bends, that immeasurable heaviness to which all your memories return. No use in trying to fight its intractable sway. The night of November fifteenth.

  November fifteenth: it was just after 7 P.M., and there you were, looking at those portraits of Moses, cheaply framed on your bedroom wall, when the phone rang in the kitchen. Annoyed, you did not so much as turn from the pillow, and at last it fell silent before ringing again. The Homecoming Dance was a supposed privilege for juniors and seniors only, but even your freshman brother had big plans for the evening, another one of his massive friend gatherings, at the Alpine Cinemas. Your mother was off driving Charlie to the movie, which she had agreed to do only with Charlie’s dubious reassurance that he’d find some other friend’s mom to give him a ride home. You plodded into the kitchen, plucked the wireless phone from its cradle, and marched back to your bed.

  “Why don’t you just come?” Pa asked over the phone. He was serving as a school dance chaperone, and behind him you could hear the crowd noise, the bass line of some familiar but unplaceable pop hit. “You only get two homecomings.”

  “As if it’s not pathetic enough,” you told him, in an imitation of his own defeated voice, “that I have no date, now you want me to show up alone.”

  The fact of your datelessness had been on full display that day at Bliss Township School, a result of the miserable statewide homecoming tradition in which your school proudly took part. On the night before the dance, your school’s juniors and seniors had met in living rooms across Presidio County for the well-photographed exchange of mums and garters. Mums for the girls, garters for the boys. Both were bouquets of gaudy ribbons and silk flowers—lighting or sound effects often included—handmade by a special someone, to be worn at school the next day. And so, on November fifteenth, the divisions had become clear: the beloved strolling the halls, their dates’ names spelled in sparkling stickers, their toy cowbells ringing. The dateless made to wander undecorated and bereft.

  You were a little disgusted by yourself, wallowing in these teeny dramas. But a week had passed since the night at Mr. Avalon’s window, and the fact of what you’d witnessed was too big for you to know what to do with it. The monster wasn’t her father or some other boy. But was Rebekkah right, that your telling would only make it worse for her? And what did you know of romance, sex, love? It was not as if Mr. Avalon had pinned her down; she had lifted her head to meet his. But then why that bruise on her leg? Your muscles were too weak to make a fist around these combustive facts. The only action you had taken was to resume your pathetic stalker routine, stopping by the theater classroom after school to watch Mr. Avalon play the piano as Rebekkah and the other students sang their familiar tunes, “Besame Mucho,” “Amigo,” “Oye Como Va,” “Mambo No. 5.” Through the window, it all had looked so like an ordinary rehearsal, you could almost convince yourself you’d made up that night outside the teacher’s house. You were always a consternated boy, but even Ma had noticed this new register of your worry. “Can we just try to have an actual conversation?” she had asked you a couple of nights before, finding you alone on the porch. “It’s time.”

  “Time?”

  “I’m worried about you.”

  You shrugged.

  “All this moping of yours. The way you’ve been slumping around. I can’t just act like I don’t know who is the cause of it. Your new study friend.”

  “Ma—”

  “Don’t worry. I’m not going to give you the third degree. All I want to tell you is that—just that obviously you are suffering, and I just want to say that you really shouldn’t let a girl like that make you so blue.”

  “Okay,” you said.

  “I, for one, took one look at her the night she came over,” Ma told you, “and I knew she was trouble.” You couldn’t fail to notice that your mother used only pronouns, she and her, as if Ma wasn’t even willing to grant Rebekkah a name.

  “Trouble?” you said.

  “Just something in her eyes. That certain broody way she carries herself. Maybe not trouble, but troubled, at least.”

  “Troubled.” You felt for your neck, where the possibility of admitting the whole story to your mother broke coolly over your skin. “Rebekkah,” you said. “She just seems,
I don’t know. Ma? I don’t even know where to begin to tell you about her.”

  “Then maybe don’t,” she said. “Believe me. With certain people in this world, it’s better if you don’t even try to understand.”

  “But—” The firmness in Ma’s face warned you off telling her more. This conversation, you knew, was not really about Rebekkah, or even about you. It was about the untenable faith in which she had tried to raise you: that all you had ever needed was right there, in the very cramped but infinitely loving planet she could enfold in her arms, and that the world beyond could only corrupt that simple, beautiful vision.

  “I guess you’re right,” you had told her, because that was the easier resolution to that conversation. It had been easier not to say anything. It was still easier tonight. Easier to pity yourself, easier to hide out in your room, behind your tattered copy of Childhood’s End, when Pa had left for the Homecoming Dance.

  “I think there are lots of people here without dates,” Pa now told you over the phone. “Take, for example, that Rebekkah Sterling of yours. Didn’t see her wearing any mum today. But here she is, looking quite good in a little red number, I might add. Rebekkah was asking me about you, actually. If you were coming.”

  “No. Are you serious?”

  “As a heart attack.” You could nearly hear your father’s grin.

  * * *

  “What’s all this?” your mother said, an hour later, when she came into the house to find you buttoning yourself into one of your father’s ill-fitting suits.

  “I just thought I’d like to be there,” you said.

  “Really?” she asked. “Is that really a good idea? Going to a dance without a date? Maybe times have changed, but in my day that was a recipe for a truly bad night.”

  You shrugged. “I don’t know about that,” you said. “I think I could still have fun.” You didn’t mention your father’s phone call; you knew how angry your mother would be with him if she knew that it was he who had spurred you to this potential humiliation. Ma shook her head, and she made her protest known by remaining silent the whole drive, clicking her tongue at the windshield.