Three years after, Manuel was still putting in after-hours bouts poring over the old task force dossiers, still speaking to the grief-sickened parents of the dead. Once, he had even driven down into Mexico, on a futile hunt to locate Hector’s father. There had been a time, for the first year or so after, when Manuel had felt the only possible way he might forestall the unthreading of his old town was to locate some answer for what Hector had done that night, some very specific reason to ward off the vagueness of jingoistic nightmares. But still there was no explaining that madness, and it was already too late to make much of a difference, Manuel knew that. And yet, that was the nature of the itch: the more you scratched, the worse it grew. The very futility of his attempt was what made it into an obsession.
But as Manuel now held the wedding ring over an open mine shaft, it was poor Eve Loving that he was thinking of. Eve Loving, with her lovely, troubled dark eyes, the rare way that she, like Manuel himself, was able to blinker herself against all that had already been lost, limiting her view only to what each day required of her. They shared a stolidness, a kind of persistence that Lucinda never appreciated, though perhaps Lucinda had been right in her judgment, perhaps the brand of doggedness he and Eve Loving had in common had made them both a little unhinged, blinding them to the damage they wrought. Manuel, for example, had never once talked with Eve about that little sad habit of hers, never mentioned the several shopkeepers Manuel had talked out of filing charges against her. As with the immigrants he had helped, Manuel just did what he could and never spoke of it. Truth be told, Manuel would sometimes consider the woman’s taut shape under the oversized clothes she wore, and he couldn’t resist entertaining a fantasy or two.
And of course, Oliver, Manuel was also thinking of you. He was thinking of Oliver Loving, voiceless in his bed, a silence to answer the questions that even still bit at Manuel’s skin. Often, perched over Bed Four, Manuel would put his hands to your shoulders, your forehead, and it could seem to him that he could nearly feel it: an explanation that was still somewhere out there, in that impassable otherworld of your memory, that place where you were still the same wholly whole Oliver, bumbling your way to the answer Manuel couldn’t know. Manuel had only set eyes on you a few times before, but he often conjured an image of you as you must have been in those last weeks, the ordinariness of the life that had been taken from you. Just a seventeen-year-old boy, strolling down the streets of the doomed town of Bliss on a cool October morning. Manuel held his wedding ring over the mine shaft in his pinched fingers, and he let it loose. He turned his ear to the void, listening for the sound of its report.
*
It was October thirteenth, a Friday, just over a month before the beginning of your town’s demise, but as you made slow laps up and down the streets, everything about Bliss seemed immutable and ancient to you. Your family’s history in Bliss might have extended into the nineteenth century, but you felt no sense of belonging in the diminutive town your ancestors had helped to build. Those redbrick buildings, that flat of desert, the purple mountains in the distance—it all seemed alien.
Alien: that unfortunate word, often applied to half the school’s population. Like some kind of bureaucratically veiled threat, the local chief of the border patrol, Officer Wallace Van Brunt, had been invited to speak at that month’s school assembly, telling his dire work stories to the student body seated in the gymnasium’s bleachers. Through a thick, woolly mustache, Officer Van Brunt employed that term often—not only alien but illegal alien—as he held forth about the many horrors and misfortunes he’d witnessed in his work. Children dying of thirst in the desert, women ODing from the erupted baggies of heroin they’d swallowed. The message of these grim tales: Tell your families, Mexicans, to stay out! The Latino half of the school sat quietly through that assembly, but just the next morning another big fight erupted when David Garza smashed Scotty Coltrane’s head into a locker. Striving for fairness, Doyle Dixon suspended both boys for a week, but it did little to quiet the growing animosity. The Latino gathering on the schoolhouse steps had taken on a vaguely political air. That human wall of commotion near the front doors now stretched to the side door, too, forcing white students to enter the building from the back. You bypassed the whole scene that morning, ambling your way down Main Street.
Three buildings down from the school was a failing company called Made in Texas!, which used the long-defunct Bliss Hotel, a near perfect double to your schoolhouse, as a factory to manufacture little western tchotchkes, pewter longhorn key chains, bull scrotum coin purses. The kind of future garbage tourists pick up at the airport for their loved ones back home. Over those last weeks, the stale, manic, tense halls of Bliss Township had come to seem a sort of factory, too, the machinery through which you were daily processed, slowly rendered from a boy into a man-shaped sadness. It had been a month since Rebekkah had spoken more than a few words to you.
In your solitary walks at Zion’s Pastures, in your days gazing unfocusedly at schoolhouse blackboards, in your nights beneath the grinning cow skulls that lined your bedroom walls, in the sad silence that had fallen over the bunks that you and Charlie once filled with your stories, you had addressed an imagined Rebekkah with a thousand variations on one same question: If she were only going to abandon you to your failed poems and the lonesome throb of your blood, why torture you with the hope of that kiss? “Rebekkah,” you very often sighed to no one in those weeks, her name involuntarily escaping your mouth. Each day, after school, you couldn’t resist turning a few extra hallways in the direction of Mr. Avalon’s theater classroom, for the chance to glimpse Rebekkah through the little wire-veined window in the door as the club rehearsed its selections for the Homecoming Dance. And as you trailed Rebekkah, a word trailed you as well, the word for what you were making yourself into. Stalker.
And so, what did a lonesome speck of a boy have to lose? Back at school that morning, you were doing a sort of stakeout, waiting a few paces down the hall from Mrs. Schumacher’s classroom. When Rebekkah brushed past, you surprised even yourself by the clarity of your anger, how forcefully you grabbed her shoulder.
“You have to at least explain it to me,” you said. “At least once.”
Rebekkah cocked her head. She did not seem just to be playing innocent; she looked truly innocent, as if she were oblivious to the devastation she could cause. “Explain what?”
“Explain what? How about the fact that you talk to me every morning for a month, that you even—and then, what? Nothing.” You were dismayed that the speech didn’t come out with the fury you intended. You said this with the full eyes, the cutely halting voice of a thwarted teen lover from some rom-com. All it took was one second of Rebekkah’s attention to restore you to the feeling that had begun in those mornings before school in Mrs. Schumacher’s literature class, brought to consummation, or at least your PG version of consummation, outside the football stadium.
“I’m sorry, Oliver.” Rebekkah’s eyes darted about, as if looking among the thinning crowds for someone to rescue her from this scene she couldn’t quite tolerate. “I don’t know what to say. I don’t like you like that.”
“You don’t like me like what?”