Good luck with that: the last words Charlie had spoken to him.
Six years had passed, and now Charlie straightened his spine, steeling himself for a performance of faked confidence. Charlie walked into the main entrance of the complex’s largest structure, a grand replica of a Wild West brothel, its lobby all mahogany and stained glass, the sort of place where a poker winner might blow his wad in a Hollywood western. It smelled of Lysol and the new-house zip of fresh plaster. A player piano banged out a staccato barroom jig, but the lobby was empty except for a slumped janitor in coveralls, sweeping the glistening marble floor.
“Charlie.”
Charlie knew to look for Pa behind the desk, but the man who spoke his name was not his father. This was a no one, like one of those any-men you could see smoking outside a public rehab facility, with their wiry bodies and shot nerves, their drinking and cigarette habits having cured their faces into uniformly shiny, textured masks. Charlie took a few steps closer, needing a clear view of Pa’s eyes to convince him. They were, after all, Charlie’s own eyes, if diluted; Charlie’s own eyes reflected back to him in day-old rainwater.
“Pa.”
Pa’s hair had abandoned his crown, established survival colonies on his neck and chin. This hard-times stranger, this fazed drunk with Charlie’s grayish eyes, was as still as statuary behind the counter. Then, as if forgetting the desk, he lunged in Charlie’s direction, the marble top striking his ribs. The man looked so delicate that Charlie listened for a popping sound. The player piano silenced for a beat, then resumed with that classic of vaudeville madness, playing “Flight of the Bumblebee” along with Charlie’s thumping heart.
“Here I am,” Charlie said.
He was just a few paces away now. Pa. The same man Charlie had vilified, longed for, counted as dead, now only stood there as this ordinary and weathered person, costumed in the purple-collared shirt of his work uniform. This was just another minute, and its ordinariness struck Charlie as the most desperate fact of all.
“Your ma told me you were back in town,” Pa said.
“She did?” Only one sentence between them and already Charlie was appalled. He had come to Lajitas, still playing the part of his mother’s dutiful son, showing his father the firewall of contempt she had taught Charlie to erect, but apparently she herself had already broken it?
“How are you?” Pa asked.
“Oh, just swell.”
Charlie crossed his arms, hugged himself as if to give some silent lecture on how he’d had to become his own father. It didn’t take long to collapse the false smile Pa was trying to work into his hollowed cheeks.
“Charlie. Jesus. You. You look so great. Grown-up. Handsome.”
“What the hell happened here?” Charlie said. “What is this place?”
“What do you mean?”
“Last time I was here it was a one-horse town. Now, voilà, it’s Disneyland. And where is old Clay Henry?”
“The goat?” Pa scratched his widened bald swatch, looking sorry, as if of course his son would demand to see the old mayor, and he had somehow failed to anticipate that request.
“What the fuck is this music? Listen, uh … can we please just find somewhere quiet to talk? Just for a few minutes? It’s important.”
Pa considered for a moment. He glanced furtively in the direction of a woman typing at a computer in the back office. Then, as if they had just completed check-in paperwork, he turned back to the desk in a businesslike way and grabbed a room key in a trembling fist.
Pa was silent as he led Charlie up the grand wooden staircase, down a long, velvet-trimmed hall to a door labeled THE BIGFOOT WALLACE SUITE. Inside, Charlie found an anonymous corporate hotel room, with a few “Texan” touches. A bronze cowboy riding a bucking bronco on the coffee table, a plaster replica of a longhorn skull over the bathroom transom. Double doors led out onto a terrace, with a view of the improbable rolling greens of a golf course. Distantly, a man in a cliché of a cabbie hat swung a golf club.
“But seriously.” Charlie turned. Pa was holding his hands together in the dim of the room. “This place.”
“Some telecom tycoon bought the whole damned town, put up all this.”
“Of which you are a faithful employee.”
Pa shrugged heavily, as if straining against the silly starched shirt he was made to wear. “Believe me, I looked for other work. But I guess a job like this, it’s all I deserve.”
Charlie felt his lungs constrict. Was this what Pa deserved, or was that idea just some kind of guilt trick he was playing? But Charlie knew now that this scene was what he deserved, breaking their six-year silence in the hope that his father might lend him some cash. Charlie stepped back into the room.
“You don’t have to worry, I’ll spare you a big scene.” Charlie wanted, very much, for his father to make a big scene. “I just came to ask you a question.”
“A question,” he said.
“That’s right. About Hector Espina.”
Pa shook his head in fast, startled turns.
“He was your student.”
“What?”
“Please don’t play dumb with me. That’s all I’m asking you to do right now, is to be honest with me. I know he was a student of yours. I know it. Mrs. Dawson told me so.”
“Mrs. Dawson? What were you doing speaking with Mrs. Dawson for?”
“Why didn’t you ever tell us?”
Charlie noticed that a dew of sweat had broken out on his father’s forehead. Even from a few paces away, Charlie could smell the familiar toxins, nicotine and ethyl alcohol, pushing out of his pores. “What was there to say?” Pa said. “That miserable little speck of a person I hardly even knew. A boy I could have killed myself, before it was too late.”
“Okay, fine. So you know nothing. Big surprise! Jed Loving knows nothing at all.”
Pa’s shoulders had lost their heft, but he could still work them into the what-can-I-do shrug Charlie remembered. “He was just another strange kid in my art class, Charlie. There were a lot of kids like him who passed through over the years.”
“Right,” Charlie said.
Pa’s shaking escalated a tick, and it seemed to Charlie that if he listened closely, he might have heard the man’s bones rattle, like seeds in a dried pomegranate.
“How about we try to start over here?” Pa said. “How about we try to just talk? I mean really talk. I want you to say whatever is on your mind. Doesn’t matter what.”
Pa had always been the head-nodder; Charlie had become the head-shaker.
“I’m still your father,” he said.
“I’m not so sure about that.” Charlie turned, lifted the statue of the bucking bronco, felt its heft, as if he might use it to brain this stranger who wore his father’s petrified face, and so liberate them both from this miserable reunion.
“Charlie…”