Oliver Loving

by Stefan Merrill Block

  And after that worst night, Charlie had still tried. He had tried and at last utterly failed to enter into the tacit agreement with Ma that had been made by his brother before him: that he would always be present and that he would consign any hard truths to silence. “There are those people who can be alone together,” Ma had said, and here was the darkest thought of all, the awareness Charlie glimpsed that day on the sofa but understood clearly now, as he ripped down the highway: a quietly receptive, forever present son was all Ma had ever wanted, and in the worst tragedy of her life, she’d had her insane prayer answered.

  * * *

  A half hour later, with the pleasing hiss of automated doors, Charlie was back in the deep time, the placeless place of Crockett State Assisted Care Facility. He waved at Peggy, who showed him the usual jazz hands.

  Once more at Bed Four, he followed his familiar routine, clicking on the Bob Dylan, pulling up the plastic chair, trying and failing to avoid the panicked sight of the eyes beneath him, awake, searching as ever. The crossed tin bowie knives of the wall clock showed 6:45. Charlie had at least an hour to fill, and he knew now it had been a mistake to come early.

  “Why didn’t you ever stand up for me?” Charlie heard himself say. The words opened a courage or rage, and Charlie found that he now wanted to look Oliver right in the eyes. He clutched his brother’s face by the ears, and in quick birdlike snatches, his gaze met Oliver’s. “Stand up to Ma, I mean.”

  Part of Charlie felt he was being ridiculous, cruel, maudlin. The other part thought, This is why I’m here now. “Why didn’t you ever once tell her it was wrong? To treat me like your lousy shadow.” This anger was very old; it had done erosion’s slow work, carving ancient fissures to conduct that fury. It sluiced through him, bearing the rotten things he was saying now. “Why did you always let me be her big disappointment?”

  There was a pack of American Spirits in the pocket of his jeans, and he jostled a smoke free, lit it, exhaled gray plumes into the room. “And then you just leave me there,” he said. “Leave us there, to rot. And you know what? I tried, I did. I’ve tried to give her another you, to let my whole life become nothing but you, you, you. Do you know what it was like? What it is still like?”

  The cigarette grew a crooked finger of ash that self-amputated, falling on the pillow. Like a little streak of excrement against the starched whiteness of the linens. He brushed the ash away, unlatched the window, tossed the butt outside.

  Charlie slumped back into the plastic chair, said nothing more to his brother for the half hour that followed. Bob Dylan sang and moaned his way through another spinning of Blonde on Blonde. The heat and smell of baked creosote cleaned the last tang of the cigarette from the room.

  “Charlie,” Margot said, arriving at the door just shy of seven fifteen. “Always the early bird.”

  Charlie saw, as soon as Margot passed the door, that something had shifted, as if the cheery bright curtains of Margot’s God-fearing manner had parted just a bit, showing some illegible darkness behind. “Couldn’t stand to wait,” Charlie said.

  Margot nodded. “Your ma told me everyone wouldn’t be here till eight. What’s this all about, anyway? I thought your ma said mum’s the word, and now all of a sudden we have another meeting with Manuel Paz.”

  “I’m not so sure myself.”

  She smacked her fresh maroon lipstick. “Well. I guess we’re gonna find out.” The hand-holder, the fast-talking, buxom-smothering Margot seemed wholly absent now, spooked off perhaps, given way to this second Margot, the sort of Texan ma whom Charlie knew very well, with that long hard stare into the country’s emptiness, something lofty and possessive and damningly maternal in her eyes, as if she’d already told the world how to behave and she wouldn’t tell it again.

  Margot grunted as she pulled her equipment from her pack. Her wish that Charlie leave her alone with her patient was palpable, a risen temperature in the room. Mothers, Charlie thought. Mothers, always staking their claims. The voice of his brother—and not just Oliver’s voice, it now seemed to Charlie, but also the story of their family, the whole story of Bliss, Texas—belonged now to another clinging, imperious, grief-wracked mom. It struck Charlie, for some reason, as hilarious. He tried not to laugh, but the attempt at suppression only made the laugh come out in an audible, hiccupping way. Margot, clamping a touch screen to a swivel arm, turned to scowl at Charlie. “What could possibly be so funny?”

  “Nothing. I was thinking of something else.”

  “Um.” Margot had the touch pad in position now. “I don’t mean to be rude, but it could take a while to finish setting up. Maybe you could go somewhere to wait?”

  “I’ll be quiet.”

  Charlie was very patient there, in the chair beside Bed Four. As Margot attached the EEG sensors, Charlie could feel her straining to ignore him, like a hand pressing his face away. Ten minutes passed, and the displays were glowing as Margot coordinated her fingers into the place where she did her palm reading.

  “Good morning, Oliver. A? B? C? D?”

  “Good,” the robot voice eventually said. “Morning.”

  “Look who came to visit you early today.” Margot gestured toward Charlie. “A? B? C?”

  “Hi Charlie,” the computer spoke.

  Hi Charlie, as if he had not been there for an hour, as if he had only just arrived. Hi Charlie: but that strangeness was only the final nudge, the little upsetting breeze that brought the whole rotten roof of things crashing down on him.

  “Oliver,” Charlie said, “what did I just do?”

  “What do you mean?” Margot asked.

  “What did I do after I woke you up?” Charlie leaned over the bed to speak into Oliver’s face. “What was I doing until I stopped and opened the window?”

  “What were you doing?”

  “I’m asking Oliver a question.”

  “This is ridiculous.”

  “Why ridiculous?”

  Margot relinquished Oliver’s palm. “What is this, some sort of a test?” She looked down her nose at Charlie, with the sourest glare of disappointment.

  “It’s just a simple question.”

  “Please leave us alone.” Margot’s voice was proprietary, not unlike Ma’s voice, as if Margot and her patient shared a love the world couldn’t possibly comprehend.

  “Oliver,” Charlie said again, his voice crackling now. “What was I doing before Margot came in here?”

  “Charlie—”

  Oliver’s face was just inches away. His breath fogged Charlie’s glasses. “Please tell me. Tell me something. Anything. I don’t know, our cow. What was the name of our steer at home?”

  Charlie turned to Margot, who just kept her trembling hands folded in her lap. “Let him answer,” Charlie told her. “Pick up his hand and let him answer.”

  Margot shook her head in slow, sorrowful turns. “I can’t,” she said. “I won’t. Not like this, with you yelling at me.”

  “Please,” Charlie said. The devastation of an understanding collapsing upon him, Charlie perceived now what a truly shoddy, desperate house it had been. The poverty of Charlie’s pages, Ma speaking to this shell of a son, all he and his mother had never said about the events of that night. “Faith,” Margot had often said, as she fingered the cross on her chest. “We must have faith.” Faith: maybe that was the name for it, the cheap, cracking adhesive that bound their desperate lives together. A ridiculous, outrageous, and unending faith. Like one of those holy rollers pitifully babbling away their sorrowful past under the sway of pure illusion, might Margot have pressed her fingers to her patient’s left thumb and believed that she found what she needed to find? Might Charlie and Ma have, too?

  “Listen to me,” Margot said.

  But Charlie bolted from his seat, spent a while staring into the framed vintage poster for Calamity Jane. “You know I have to tell them.”

  Margot wouldn’t look at him, but Charlie could see her panic, flushing into her neck. She was still for a moment, the
n she scooted her chair right up to the bed, planted her fingers firmly to their spot. Charlie still had some reckless, careering hope that he might be wrong. And yet, a moment passed and another. Margot stared intensely at the neurofeedback monitor, readjusted her grip several times, an EMT searching for a flatlined pulse. From down the hall, Charlie could hear Peggy shrieking with laughter at someone’s joke.

  “I can’t find anything,” she said, “just now.”

  “No.”

  “It’s not perfect!” Margot’s expression was fierce, which only made the fact more apparent: the furious, pent-up denial of someone who expects accusation. “It’s not a perfect science, but I promise you.”

  “Did you really think no one would find out?” Looking at the woman, Charlie really did now feel a kind of pity for her. “How long did you think you could go on like this?”

  The heat out the window plumed into the room. “Please,” Margot said. “Please just leave us alone.”

  * * *

  Ma was climbing from Goliath when Charlie stepped back outside. Manuel Paz was out there, too, sipping at a coffee against his squad car at the far side of the lot, the Ranger’s right boot hitched up against the fender. It was not even eight, but Charlie could already feel the heat penetrating his skull. Manuel, eyeing Charlie, sauntered up in his roomy, West Texan amble, arrived in time to hear the substance of the short exchange between mother and son.

  “Where are you going?” Ma asked. “Are you leaving?”

  Later, Charlie’s guilt for how he acted that morning would drive him half-mad. That he would ask her right there, in front of Manuel Paz. That he did not consider the repercussions, that if he had just pulled Ma aside to speak with her alone, Charlie might have spared her a world of hurt. But, just then, Charlie felt avid, canny, powerful as Shiva with the destructive power of the truth. As if with one act of truth telling in the parking lot of Crockett State Assisted Care Facility, he might have unveiled the chimera, the cheap smoke and mirrors of faith and delusion, under which they had been laboring all those years. “You knew, didn’t you?” Even then, Charlie could hear how aggrieved, how vindictive his own voice sounded. “Some part of you must have known.”

  “Known what exactly?”

  “Known that it wasn’t really Oliver we’ve been speaking to.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” But Ma looked at Charlie as though, at long last, they had arrived to the point.

  “What I’m talking about? I’m talking about Margot Strout,” Charlie said. “I’m talking about the fact that neither of us ever once stopped to ask whether this magic trick of hers could actually be true.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “My God,” Charlie said. “And here I thought we’d finally gotten somewhere, like we were starting to be honest with each other. But, no no no, because you never could listen, could you?”

  “Oh, screw you, Charlie. I mean it. Just leave, then, if that’s what you want.” Ma’s voice was quaking, but hers wasn’t a very convincing brand of outrage—at least not to one who had grown up under its various tones. This, like so much of Ma’s Oliver-related fury, Charlie saw, was her anger in its porous mode, her doubt seeping through.

  Charlie glanced at Manuel, read his tight sad grimace as a kind of solidarity. “I’ll tell you what,” Charlie told his mother. “Why don’t you just let me know when you are ready to tell me the truth for once?”

  “I have no idea what you could possibly mean.”

  “Oh, Ma,” Charlie said.

  * * *

  The sun ended that day with none of its false morning timidity, igniting a firestorm of reds and oranges. Charlie had one last plan for his day, but he’d had the good sense to wait until the evening, hiding out in his basement “studio” with a bottle of rotgut whiskey he’d bought, trying hard not to think of the scene he had initiated back at Crockett State. Less than sober at sunset, Charlie took the roads slowly, and when he kicked the Suzuki’s stand, he paused to let the twilight dim a few clicks deeper. At last, he was alone in the pale blue of a gibbous moon, in a stand of grama grass a quarter mile outside the gates of Zion’s Pastures.

  The air out there, tangy with the mesquite and cedar that grew along Loving Creek, his family’s tributary of the Rio Grande, was the same air Charlie’s lungs had first learned to breathe. A deep inhalation of this healing stuff of his home planet, and he was feeling sharp, bright, a little brilliant. If he had at all doubted this last excursion, he knew now that he would see it to the end. He followed the loony song of whippoorwills to the gates of Zion’s Pastures.

  Charlie knew now how badly he would have tolerated any change to the place, and he was relieved to find the old gate, that same lattice of wrought iron with its sprays of rust, standing there as it was the last time he closed it, more than five years before. The same sign, too, the one his great-grandfather had made, the words ZION’S PASTURES written in a bumpy Olde English font, an arrow pointing up the potholed stretch of road. The gate was held shut with a new length of chain and a padlock, and so Charlie took a look around, percussively tiptoed over the bars of the cattle grate, and hopped the fence. Then, serene as a pilgrim, he began to walk. A mule deer shuddered through a thicket of agave. A milk snake crossed his path.

  A long, eulogistic stroll into the valley. Charlie understood that the gnarly live oak by the road, the battered shed of his father’s studio, the squat cliff faces into which Oliver and he once scratched crude cave art had existed very long before his family and would outlast them to take on new meanings. But so thoroughly had Charlie and his brother mythologized every inch of that land that even a leonine-looking boulder or a particularly cartoonish patch of prickly pear still seemed symbolic, portentous. He passed over the low-water crossing at Loving Creek. Just a droughty, sluggish trickle now, but it was also a deluge of memory, of crawdad hunts, of fishing trips, of water moccasin evasions, of occasional floods that kept them happily stranded for long days of movie watching and book reading at the house just over the rise. Of Oliver and he running thoughtless and giddy, to present the gift of the fistfuls of thistle heads and Indian paintbrushes they had just picked for Ma.

  Charlie knew, of course, that his early childhood was not the little utopia that this return visit was now urging him to edit it into. His parents, after all, were mostly silent with each other; Pa suffered gray nights, blinded by the inimitable gleam of dead artists’ masterworks; Oliver was a pimply teen, hopeless in love; Ma was anxious and obsessive, as if she alone could invent a cure for the disease of time and the trip wires it sprung in her family’s genes and keep her children with her forever. It was true, what Charlie had told Oliver at the hospital. For their mother’s benefit, Oliver had gladly donned the role that Ma had brought him into this world to play, offering his daily performances of unquestioning devotion in exchange for the bouquets and plaudits of Ma’s favoritism. But hadn’t Oliver offered something to Charlie, too? An escape, and not only in the stories they had told together. As Oliver had given himself as the silent receiver of Ma’s worry, as he had made himself the heir to Pa’s thwarted hopes, Charlie had, in the theater of his family, been able to costume himself for a role of his own choosing. The cheery one, the jokester, the clown. And maybe that was the real reason Charlie needed to keep Oliver’s story, his poems, close to him. Charlie’s own existence without Oliver felt like too sorrowful a thing to live in alone.

  Under the shade of the cottonwoods that lined the road, Charlie did a little reenactment of his nice memory, sprinting up the last turns to the house. He almost stumbled on the ruts, made a loud bang on the second cattle grate, the one installed by some ancestor to keep cows from wandering into the front yard.

  But now he halted, frozen by an impossible vision. So impossible, in fact, that he did a couple of spins, certain that somehow he must have gotten lost. It was disorienting to the verge of nausea; it was like a door from a dream, which you open not onto another room but an entirely different time.


  The house of his childhood had been demolished and replaced. Was it even a house that stood there now? It seemed less an actual home than a magazine spread of a design concept in which it was hard to imagine actual people spending their days. Spotless squares for windows, white stucco for walls, something between a house and a work of minimalist sculpture.

  “Whoa there.” A man’s voice.

  The voice drew Charlie’s attention to the people he hadn’t noticed in his bafflement at the rectilinear architecture behind them. Four shadows, a mother and father, two children, looking like an old-fashioned silhouette portrait of a family, black against the decidedly new-fashioned blaze of halogen porch lights.

  “This is private property,” the man called. “You’re trespassing here.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Charlie said.

  The man took a few steps toward him, but Charlie seemed to be screwed to the spot.

  “You have to leave now,” the man said across the new, chemical-lush lawn. “Joyce, call the police and get me my gun.”

  “No. I—”

  “I advise you to go back where you came from,” the man said, and at last Charlie flinched and bounded away, like a startled deer.

  In his panic, his lostness in time, Charlie thought of the ancient escape route his brother and he once mapped “in case of invasion.” Now Charlie was the invader, but he took this trail anyway, sliding into the dense grasses that had overgrown their old machete work. By the time the lights of the impossible house had vanished from view, his arms were nicked and bleeding from the thorns and abrasive branches of the flimsy mesquites. He continued, through the sludge of Loving Creek, and pressed his way forward until he came to a clearing, a little swatch of knee-high bunch grass, where he caught his breath.