The Wild Man of the Navidad: one of her late mother-in-law’s favorite stories. Nunu had liked to relate this hokey legend about a supposed monster born of the filth in the Navidad River. A giant made of mud, a kind of Texan golem who, according to Nunu, had haunted the first settlers of West Texas, lighting out on midnight pillagings, murdering livestock and children, conducting sexual abductions, setting homesteads ablaze. Eve was never as interested as her boys in this sort of hoary lore, and she might not have remembered this tale at all had Nunu not mentioned another name for this Wild Man, the name given to him by the old slaves of Texas. “They called him The Thing That Comes,” Nunu said in her best spooky campfire voice, and that phrase had stuck. In Eve’s life before, The Thing That Comes was the name she’d come to give it, the monster of mud that often came for Jed, stealing him off to some sodden blackness from which it could take him weeks to fight his way free. Eve called it The Thing That Comes just as Jed called it “art,” just as a therapist might simply name it “clinical depression.” The Thing That Comes, of course, was a creature she knew well, from a childhood spent in the passenger seat of Morty Frankl’s Cutlass Supreme.
Indeed, after a past like hers, Eve had to consider that perhaps it was that same foul monster who had first delivered her to Jed. Even in their delirious first weeks together, in that space she had rented above a bank in Marathon, Eve had seen that there was something unpinnable, something aloof, something really quite sad about her new boyfriend; for whole hours, even in those best weeks, Jed would go mute, his eyes flitting about, as if spectating the harrowing daylong battle that took place in his mind. From the many similarly grim nights she had passed in her father’s company, these silences were familiar to Eve, almost homey. And that was only a small part of what they shared. They had both been their parents’ only children. Jed’s gruff and punishing father, like Eve’s, had died very young; Jed’s grandparents, like her own, were either absent or dead; like Eve, Jed didn’t want to talk much about the past. “Every girl I’ve tried to be with, it was like none of them really saw me,” Jed said. “Oh, I see you,” Eve told him, slipping her tongue into his mouth. It turned out that she would not have to wander the world alone, after all.
It did not occur to Eve, at least not for a long while, to wonder if Jed’s own sadnesses might be quite different from the brand with which she was familiar; she was young and grateful enough then not to consider that his history with the imperious mother he one night introduced her to, a lady dolled up in tulle who called herself Nunu, might be part of the cause. Well, she was only twenty.
But after three years in that far corner of America, her roots began to thread into the hardpan. She got pregnant, and though she worried that a child might double her new mother-in-law’s meddling—Eve had already, for example, agreed that if it were a boy, she’d name the child after the famous cattleman Oliver Loving, to whom Nunu claimed her husband had some distant ancestral linkage—when Nunu looked on her grandson for the first time, Eve saw the power had shifted, the crown passed.
“Meet Oliver Loving.” Eve propped the infant on her chest. For the first time, Eve recognized the pleasing homophone. All of Her Loving.
“Praise be,” Nunu said. “A king is born.”
When Charles Goodnight Loving was born (yes, the name another concession to Nunu, but there was, after all, some folksy charm in giving her boys the names of their state’s legendary cowboy partners), Nunu grew suddenly gaunt, prone to those monthlong “Nunu time” stays in the Thunderbird Hotel in Alpine, which became her permanent residence in the last years before her death. Back at Zion’s Pastures, Eve and Jed, at last with a great topic in common, began to talk more. This, after a half decade of marriage, was how she learned something more of his childhood. “My goodness,” Jed said, calming himself after his son emptied a jar of applesauce down his shirt, “they say when you have kids you become your father, but it turns out that having kids is all about trying not to be your father. Takes real oomph.” Whatever it was that Jed had to muscle down into the garbage chute of his history, he kept it contained in a way that Eve, with her own bad stories, could still appreciate.
But somewhere down the line, the river monster rose to his beshitten haunches; The Thing That Comes came back for Jed. Jed’s artistic voyages into his cabin became weeklong binges. Sometimes Eve pitied him, sometimes she upbraided him, always he nodded. By the time Charlie enrolled in kindergarten, she was raising their boys practically on her own.
And yet, even then, Eve still had something of the pioneer spirit, and she thought that they might find a way to battle The Thing, if only he agreed to try. Once, she brought home from Dr. Platz, their avuncular family physician, a pamphlet entitled Overcoming Depression, and she told Jed, “I think you should read this and give it some thought.” Lunacy! As if she did not know just what her husband would do with that pamphlet—exactly what he did with any of her directives. He looked at it and nodded.
“I can’t do all this alone,” she told Jed. “I can’t raise two boys by myself.”
“You’re right,” Jed said. “And it’s pathetic. I’m pathetic. You win.”
“I win? I don’t want to win. This isn’t a competition,” Eve said. “I don’t even want to fight. I just want you to tell me. Why do you never tell me? What is it that makes this life so horrible to you? Help me understand it.”
But there, once more, was that Jed face, almost-spoken confessions darkly clotting his eyes. “Please,” Eve said.
Jed was nodding again, of course, as if to validate her need for an answer. But the actual answer Jed offered that night? “I can’t understand it myself.”
The years went by. The cottonwood tree in the front yard spread its arms, the ocotillo put forth its red flowers, the century plants shot their stems. Nature, too, stretched out her sons, elongating legs, cracking voices, darkening hair, ruddying cheeks. The lines around Eve’s eyes deepened; silver threaded from her scalp. Can’t understand what? She was still arguing with Jed, but only in her mind.
And even still she missed the shape of Jed’s body when it failed to materialize next to her in bed. How was it that his distance from her only made her miss him more? Wasn’t it pathetic how, even into her late thirties, she carried on like some nervous teen, taking Jed’s disappearances as rejection, then wanting so badly to prove that she was worth staying with? She truly hated this thing in her, that attention-starved girl, for whom no closeness could ever disprove the intensive education in unlovableness her father had delivered to her.
For years, her sons—their tiffs, their homework assignments, their wounding by forces beyond her control—were enough to occupy her. Jed’s noddings, his disappearances, she never forgave, but the cumulative effects of time and routine could feel not unlike forgiveness. Her boys were the shape of her days, and behind each hour was the impossible prayer that they never grow away from her.
Like some demonic genie, out to prove a cruel point, fate granted Eve her wish, in the most hideous way imaginable, on the night of November fifteenth. Eve clung, with both hands, to Bed Four, but Jed? His alcohol-shaky fists were powerless to battle the monster. He let The Thing carry him off into its mud. He no longer tried to fight his way home. Emptied bottles filled his shed.
“You’re right,” Jed told her one night. “I should go. I’ll leave. Just for a little while, at least.”