“Your dad was so kind to invite me and all. He’s nice.”
You shrugged. “Sometimes I wonder if there is some alien out there,” you said, paraphrasing the substance of a sonnet you entitled “The Light from Distant Stars.” “Some alien with a very, very good telescope. So good that he can see the whole surface of Earth perfectly. He is maybe watching our medieval period now, knights and wars and castles in Europe, the Mogollon people and bison out here. It’s kind of comforting, isn’t it? Like our own history is still happening somewhere else. Like it’s not really over. Like everything that is happening right now, tonight, won’t reach him for a thousand years. Ten million maybe. But he’ll be up there, trying to figure us out.”
The stadium was a halo of brightness in the distance. The sound of warfare: the Mountain Lions must have breached the end zone again.
“‘Look,’ the alien will say. ‘Another touchdown for Bliss Township.’”
And that was how it happened, all the students and faculty of a school that would not exist in a year—the victims and the survivors—all howling when the miraculous moment arrived. And though you couldn’t have known what was in your future, it did feel like a culmination of something even then, as if your hand’s bravery beneath the Perseid shower and all the labors of your before-school sessions with Rebekkah really had been adding to this. As if this night, your fruitless nut-selling, Pa’s amateur astronomy and painting, the poor state of your skin, your loneliness—as if all those glum variables somehow equaled the greatest gift, the rapture (a too poetic word? there wasn’t any other) that only a solitary boy like yourself could have known, as his gaze met with his beloved’s for too many unblinking seconds to count. There couldn’t have been any doubt about what was about to happen. Who moved first? There was a collision of teeth, like an awkward unlatching of a jammed door, and then you were in some other place together.
The incredible wetness; the oddly familiar interior of another mouth; the animal taste, like your own taste doubled; your first good sniff of the truer, deeper Rebekkah smell, as if someone had extinguished matches beneath her skin. Why had she suddenly decided to kiss you? You knew, for once, better than to ask questions. The kiss complete, both of you oddly turned back to the stadium, walked silently through the gates, your hands still clutching.
“Well,” Rebekkah said.
“Well.”
“I—”
“You what?” you asked, but Rebekkah never answered. Because now the game had come to an end, and the stadium’s crowd began to spill out the exits. At this growing tide, Rebekkah tossed away your hand. “I have to—” Rebekkah said, but did not say what she had to do, only walked off in the direction of the bathrooms. Why did you not ask why? Why did you not follow her? You were only seventeen, freshly first kissed; you were a meek, shy, indoor kid, a book lover, and you failed the moment. You watched her march away.
However. Just before Rebekkah vanished into the thickness of the crowd, she paused. Not just paused. She turned, to look back over her shoulder. And before the masses swallowed her, Rebekkah found an instant to give you one last gift. Just a faint smile, and it was all over in a second. But it would linger. A little knowing grin that suggested—what? You didn’t know what, exactly, but a grin that seemed at least to promise something more.
You would spend the following weekend writing poems. In your creekside cave, you would press play on your Casio boom box, cuing up your other muse, as recorded on Blood on the Tracks. Oh, sing to me, Bob Dylan! I came in from the wilderness, a creature void of form / Come in she said I’ll give ya / shelter from the storm. But on Monday, you would wait in your seat in Mrs. Schumacher’s classroom for a full hour. Just five minutes before the school bell rang, you would at last admit that Rebekkah wasn’t coming to see you.
But there was still that backward grin. Of all the many horrors, bad decisions, missed chances that would follow, that would become the moment that perhaps would torment you most. The undelivered joy of that second at the football stadium, the question you would come to live inside—it would take a near decade, and the boy presently turning out a small nut fortune in the rafters, to find an explanation that could bridge the abyss. But at last, there he was: nearly ten years later, your brother taking his own first wobbly tightrope-walker steps over that crevasse, to come find you.
Charlie
CHAPTER SIX
“If you want to know the story of Charles Loving,” Charlie often liked to tell the guys he saw in Brooklyn, “here is a good introduction for you. One of my first memories is of a city I did not actually see.”
It was true. One of Charlie’s first lucid memories—a memory with clear lines rising out of the blurry brown phantasmagoria of his desert childhood—was of New York City, an impossible island of towers hovering over the plains.
Reason would later tell Charlie that it must have been downtown Houston that he actually saw that night, when he blinked his eyes open in the backseat of his family’s old VW. But in a picture book Pa had recently given him for his fifth birthday, Charlie had studied images of Manhattan’s towers, and when he saw that gleaming bank of lights, he knew the name for it. “New York City!”
“Ha ha!” Pa laughed. “There it is my boy, New York City! And ain’t she a beaut?”
New York City, a miracle! And a miracle was what Charlie needed that night. Actually, all the Lovings were in need of a miracle, if only an invented one, to redeem the week they had just endured.
It had been a miserable little road trip, that July. It was Granny Nunu’s seventieth birthday, and for her present she had insisted that “the whole damned clan” accompany her on a trip to the beaches of Galveston. She wouldn’t hear her son’s apprehension. “After seventy blasted years of dust,” Granny said, “don’t you think it’s time I deserve a little water?”