“My father was too sick to live with us,” Charlie said, repeating the lie that he’d told to so many strangers, the lie that, he’d learned from dozens of movies and novels, was practically expected of an angry, abandoned young man like himself. “And then he died.”
Charlie was feeling lit up now with the old righteous fury, the meaningless howl of the adolescent monster he’d gestated in all those silent years of homeschooling, all those years Oliver had spent in Bed Four, all those years when Pa never told Ma once, This is wrong, we can’t let things go on like this. Charlie didn’t mean to say what he said next, and yet out it all came. “What the hell is wrong with you?” he said. “How could you let yourself become like this? And never, not once do you even try to talk with me? For years. Years! Haven’t you been at all curious about where I’ve been living? What I’ve been doing? What it’s been like for me? And aren’t you curious about Oliver? About what is happening now?”
Pa nodded, oddly brightening a little to this tirade, as if Charlie had just conceded something. “Of course I’ve wanted to know,” he said. “You wouldn’t talk to me.”
“I wouldn’t talk to you? I think maybe you’ve got that backwards.”
“Okay, you’re right.”
“I never really knew my father at all,” Charlie said.
“Okay.”
“For fuck’s sake.” Charlie walked into the bathroom, for the relief of its sterilized closeness. After a time, the ghost of his father darkened the doorway.
“Look,” Pa said, and Charlie waited for him to say something more, he really did. But after tense, silent seconds, Charlie lowered himself to the closed lid of the toilet.
“At least my father taught me one good lesson,” Charlie said. “When it comes to my family, you have to get out when you can.”
To Charlie’s surprise, Pa raised a strict finger then, carried it into the bathroom, where he pointed it at his own chest.
“I’m the one who messed up. I’m the mess-up. Me. Me. Someday you’ll see it. Your mother has only done the best she could.”
“You really, truly have no idea what you are talking about.”
“I think I might.”
“I mean it.” As if Pa’s DTs were a genetic affliction, Charlie was also vibrating now. “Who is this stranger who talks about my family like he knows us? No one I recognize. The best she could? Did you know that Ma never once got a good second opinion on Oliver? Did it ever occur to you that this so-called miracle everyone is going on about is really just a test that no one fought for, years and years ago? We buried him. Ma did. We all did.”
“We did what now?”
“Just what I said. But of course Ma probably would have made a different choice if she’d had a husband around.” Pa pushed his palms hard into his deeply socketed eyes. A few months before, Charlie had seen a news item about some nonagenarian Nazi they had rounded up to face his seventy-year-old crime. Half of him thinking, Let the devil burn; the other half thinking, Just let the old man die in peace.
“I’m sorry,” Pa said.
“Oh, right. The MO of Jed Loving: when angry, apologize. Please, Pa. Leave. Just leave me alone.”
“Leave you alone? Wasn’t it you who came here to see me?”
“I just need a minute to myself. I mean it. I really, really, really do.”
Pa shrugged again, even more heavily than before. “All right,” he said. “If that’s what you need.”
“If that’s what you need.” Charlie snorted. “You should get that printed on a business card. Chiseled onto your headstone.”
Charlie closed his eyes, and after a moment, he could hear Pa’s tentative footsteps, the door latching behind him. He emerged at last from the bathroom, paced the Bigfoot Wallace Suite, returned to the baronial balcony for a while, surveying the brown ancient mountains, reframed by the rolling fields, a few acres of Welsh heather transposed onto the great Chihuahuan.
Back on the Suzuki, Charlie tore down the tarmac, hot wind screaming over his face. He thought of returning to Lajitas, and the Suzuki dithered with his indecision, listing a little dangerously now. But then he balanced himself and picked up speed. Charlie was taking the long way home.
*
He’d had the scene in mind for weeks. Perhaps, Charlie had considered, his book would open not with the night of November fifteenth, but with this: the wayward son, walking the tumbleweed streets of his ancestral hometown. It all would look diminished, of course, and Charlie knew that the whole town, deprived of the primary economy of the old school, had fallen on hard times. The young man from the city would see that the center point of his boyhood universe was now just another town withering on the high plains.
And yet, Charlie now felt that he had another to add to the considerable list of his imagination’s failures. As the Suzuki made a dusty progress, Charlie saw that Bliss, Texas, was more than diminished. The half-shuttered Main Street he remembered, under the harshness of sun and wind, had already made significant progress toward joining all those various miners’ camps, those myriad ghost towns that dotted the desert. Bliss Pies N’ Stuff was now an oversized tin can with pimples of rust, plywood for windows. The frontage of the only other business in Bliss—the Made in Texas! factory, which had once turned out those kitschy Old West knickknacks—was half busted in, its walls grayed and buckling. Charlie slowed for a better view of some movement he glimpsed within. A family of javelinas, it turned out, those wild hogs of West Texas, his country’s attempt to offer up an archetype of ugly. Their tusked, anal snouts snuffled through the shattered ceramics that littered a rotted field of carpeting.