“So, Charlie Dickens,” Ma said on a Friday, on another drive back from Crockett State, “how goes the writing?”
“Hard to write,” Charlie said, “when the story is still ongoing. But I’m sticking to it.” He looked for a long time at his mother then, took in the wrinkling around her eyes, her lips thinned by age to near nothingness, the gauntness of her neck, the way her gaze could never seem to land on his, as if in all those years alone she’d become just a little touched, a little unwell in ways not immediately apparent. She was halfway on a journey to become the kind of tiny, cranky old lady Charlie had often encountered on Brooklyn streets, elbowing her lonely way through the crush of her days. And so wasn’t it pathetic, what he still wanted from her? From his mother, teacher, principal, only friend, and loving jailer of his high school years—from that Supreme Being of his neuroses—he still wanted, needed, validation.
“It’s not a story, Charlie. It’s our lives. This is real life. And please stop making that face at me.”
*
A half hour after leaving Margot and his brother at Crockett State, Charlie was straddling his motorbike, speeding through the desert, its veins of fossilized flooding, its million stones showing their blank, sunny faces, a geriatric audience. Charlie was on his way to a brunch.
“A brunch in your honor,” his old principal, Doyle Dixon, had said, the city word brunch sounding silly in his mouth over the phone.
“Brunch?” Charlie had asked.
“A bunch of people would love to see you,” Principal Dixon told him. “If you’d be willing. I know it’d make their day. Their whole month, really.”
“What people?”
“A few of my dear old teachers. Manuel Paz, too. We all were hoping for a better chance to talk. And I thought a brunch would maybe be a nice occasion to shame me into straightening up my place.”
“Manuel Paz?”
“That’s right.”
Charlie had paused, thinking of that balding, old-Texas holdover he’d seen at Crockett State. The idea of a brunch with Manuel Paz and those gossipy teachers was unsettling in the extreme, but Charlie thought of his directive to himself. Tell the TRUTH. A brunch, he decided, might be endurable, but only as research.
“I’d like that,” Charlie had said.
Doyle’s house was just beyond the western edge of the park, and Charlie chose the scenic route. He passed beyond the Austin-stone gates into the twelve hundred square miles of immaculate desert, alpine mountains, and Rio Grande–gorged canyons that constitute Big Bend National Park. Just beyond the ranger station, Charlie passed a grim gathering: a couple of Minutemen conferring with a police officer near a Hispanic guy seated on the curb, bowing his head over his handcuffs. And beyond this forlorn scene, the view before Charlie could have been a sepia-tinted photograph of Mars. It was no surprise, he thought, that this desert spawned so many amateur astronomers, that it made telescope people out of his father and brother. Nowhere more than in this desert had Charlie ever felt himself so clearly on a sphere of rock hurtling through the cosmos.
Charlie arrived at the address Doyle had given him to find a gathering of parked cars, one police cruiser. Even from the outside, Charlie saw that Doyle was right to warn Charlie about his place. Slabs of the stucco fa?ade had fallen away in mangy patches, and the leaking AC units had made pouches beneath the windows, like heavily bagged eyes. “Charlie!” Doyle greeted him, and in the bright morning light, Charlie noticed how aged Doyle looked, his skin gone a little loose in the jowls.
In a flurry of hugs, shoulder squeezes, handshakes, and cheap perfume, Charlie entered. Manuel Paz extended a thick, chapped hand. “Welcome to your arraignment,” he said.
“Ha,” Charlie grunted, already starting to like the man a little.
The state of Doyle’s domestic existence, inside that house, was dire, like its own little ghost town, cramped ruins amid the empty infinity of the plains. The word for what Doyle had become, Charlie sadly recognized, was hoarder. Some of his things were quite nice—Charlie noticed a mint-condition frame to an Eames chair, an intricate kilim rug that could have fetched a few hundred dollars at the Brooklyn Flea, a fanciful mantel made entirely of interlocked longhorns—but Doyle piled these fantastic objects in unruly heaps. Charlie had to swallow hard to hide his shock when, hanging directly over Doyle’s many-quilted sofa, he noticed Pa’s painting, which they had secretly helped Doyle purchase in that other life before.
“I know, I know, this place. I can’t seem to stop buying things. It’s like I think I’m shopping for the mansion I’ll someday inhabit,” Doyle said, waving his cane.
Doyle had made for his visitors a big egg casserole. After years of witnessing Ma turn away the flotilla of casserole trays that had once sailed for the front door of Zion’s Pastures, Charlie downed the sodden, half-cooked stuff like a kind of victory. As they ate on the space Doyle had cleared on a Georgian Colonial dining room table, the school’s former faculty had many questions about Charlie’s Brooklyn life. “And is there anyone special?” Mrs. Schumacher asked. “Can you explain to me how any couple ever stays together in a place like that, with so many options?” added Mrs. Henderson.
Charlie was relieved by their questions, then delighted, then a little regretful. He had spent the last ten years carrying around this persuasive story that a willowy, sway-gaited boy like himself had never belonged in a school like his anyway, that his “homeschooling,” whatever its questionable motives, had provided a kind of merciful escape. Of course, Charlie had never felt too much familial danger because of his romantic life, that much he could say for his parents. Charlie merely grew up, and the fact of his inclination became as apparent as his taller-than-average height, his thinner-than-average frame. But the citizens of West Texas were not all as progressively minded. At thirteen, when the boys in his classes had begun to perform their bellicose swagger, mocking the most obviously mockable as if denigration itself lent them some manly cred, Charlie had sensed that he was at a steep precipice, the end of his easy popularity as a younger kid. By the time Charlie left Bliss Township for the Zion’s Pastures Homeschool for Lovings, a certain group of loutish, zit-stricken boys had begun to infiltrate the packed lunchroom table where Charlie sat with his many friends. Trying out the bitter flavor of the trite slurs they’d learned from their older brothers, these boys rechristened Charlie “twinkle-toes,” “gaywad,” “fudge packer,” “queergayhomo,” and plain old “fag,” on a near daily basis. Charlie had been relieved not to have to descend into the hormonal inferno of the ninth and tenth grades. And yet, maybe Charlie had underestimated the people of his hometown? Or perhaps the cities’ rainbow-flagged protests had at last crashed upon these shores?