This was the town generations of his ancestors had built; the twenty-odd structures of Main Street were the setting for the lore, the ancient rivalries and romances, that had formed Charlie and his brother, or at least their paternal halves. But the only living citizens of Bliss that Charlie could locate now were the javelinas and a couple of mohawked roadrunners, zigzagging manically across the cracked asphalt of Main Street as if they too had just returned from a long time away and had gone a little crazed with grief.
And so Charlie could not bear to do what he had imagined; he did not dismount the Suzuki for the mythic hometown stroll. He rode on, as slowly as he could without tipping. And, at last, there it was. The redbrick husk of Bliss Township School, each pane of window methodically shattered, the western portion of the roof staved in, as if from aerial strike. Charlie could see a slice of the Bliss Mountain Lions football stadium. Zombie grass, high and dead at the fifty-yard line. The flagpole was gut-punched, doubled over. The only traces of the flowers and wreaths and tributes once attached to the rust-furred bars of the gates were little bits of wire, gathered near the ground, and a badly faded, laminated sheet of paper with a couple of cursively scrawled, English-version lyrics from “Besame Mucho,” a song Mr. Avalon’s theater club never got to sing that night: Oh, dearest one, if you should leave me, my little heart would take flight and this life would be through. All it had taken to end the town of Bliss, Texas, was one demented boy’s decision. Manuel Paz was right: the horror was absolute and unacceptable. Someone else must be accountable. Someone must still be made to pay. And yet, Charlie knew his Texas history. He was thinking of the ancient Mogollon, the Apache, the Comanche, the Spanish, and the Mexicans, the hundreds who had perished on all fours, crawling to America. All those history-crushed people. His own ancestors, trying to establish human time in the eternity of a desert that so quickly brushed it away. A wind rose from the west, a ghostly abstraction of dust lifting through the air, depositing itself over Bliss, sanding a few more grains from the fa?ades of Main Street. Then the dust sucked up into the immaculate blue overhead, sighed off into the nothing to the east.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Back at Desert Splendor that evening, Charlie spent a whole hour hiding out from his mother in the bathroom, his legs going numb on the toilet seat. Just now, he couldn’t stand to be in a room with Ma, not for another minute.
Over the cool hollow of the porcelain bowl, Charlie was thinking about his father, from long before. The hard scrape of his shoes, chasing him up the dirt road of Zion’s Pastures. The callused weight of his father’s hands, ink stained. Sitting there together, on a special “boys only” trip to the rodeo in El Paso, Pa pinching sprayed bits of cow patty from Charlie’s nacho cheese. Pa making the whistling sound of artillery falling as his fingers soared through the air to Charlie in bed.
“Every story in the Western canon is, in one way or another, the story of the fall from paradise,” Professor Waters once told Charlie’s Masterpieces of English Literature class at Thoreau. “But isn’t the loss of the garden just a metaphor?” Charlie had asked. “That we all feel we lost something in childhood, some thoughtless, innocent state before we knew better?” Of course Charlie knew that the Lovings of before had never been a paradise, but Charlie felt that they had at least lost an idea of paradise, the other family that they still might have been. The family that suggested itself in a wad of gathered money at the Bliss Township Jamboree, in the exhilarated darkness of the many bunk bed stories his brother had begun, in the vertiginous view on a family hike to the top of the Window waterfall, its limestone-framed image of a tan and lavender expanse looking like a doorway to another country entirely. It wasn’t only those five people who died that night. It was also the other future that could have been theirs that Hector Espina had murdered at a school dance when Charlie was thirteen years old. Ten years had passed, and despite his best efforts Charlie was exactly who he’d been in those first days after, a disgruntled son, accompanying his mother each day to Crockett State, hardly saying a word. What had changed? Only the year.
How to explain the rash decision that Charlie crafted that night on the toilet? He knew he had no real excuse, even then. He had only the hours and days ahead with a family there that he could not bear, the incalculable burden of all the debts each of them could never repay. Why? “The detective itch,” the question that knocked at the walls of all their days, Ma’s, Charlie’s, the town’s. With no way to open that door, some had shouted at the sound, others had tried to speak back to it. Charlie had locked the door, covered his ears, pretended not to hear. But the knocking came at irregular intervals, loud, then soft, then vanished, then loud again; there was no way to ignore it. Charlie thought of the next test, the one in El Paso. He thought of everything he still did not know, might know. There was much Charlie couldn’t bear about his homecoming, but nothing was as horrible as that hope. The nearness of his brother’s voice to at last answer that rapping. Hope: Charlie had watched his mother waste a decade inside of it, and so he resolved again to banish the word.
*
A few hours later, Charlie was back in the unhoused basement down the street, surveying the grim scene in the dim luminance of an old kerosene lantern. From the look of the febrile, halting notes Charlie had scratched onto printer paper and scattered across the room, it appeared that he had bludgeoned a manuscript to death. Hefting his bag over his shoulder, Charlie paused for a long while, trying to take it all in. As if he had deliberately arranged to offer himself a little piece of dispiriting symbolism, Charlie found, trampled and ash-stained on the floor, the very page on which he had written the words Tell the TRUTH!
“That’s it, Weens,” he said—Charlie still found himself, in certain dark moments, speaking out loud to his pug. He thought of Edwina there with Rebekkah, on Eighth Street, the answers to everything that would always be beyond him. Edwina’s warm potato of a body, curled against the crook of Charlie’s leg all through his one New York winter. “The end,” he really did say out loud, and he tried to believe it this time.
Dear Mother, Charlie began on a page plucked from one of his journals. I think we both know that this arrangement of ours isn’t working for either of us.
But that struck Charlie as too passive-aggressive, with a vaguely Oedipal note. He wadded it.
Dear Mother, I’ve come to see that it is impossible for me to be my own person in this place, where the past and its horrors and confusion are like cobwebs growing over my body, not letting me move. I know how selfish that must sound.
True enough, perhaps, but to Charlie it did sound selfish indeed. And he imagined the red ink of Lucas Levi’s handwriting in the margins: Overwrought. Was it possible, Charlie wondered, that he could not even write so much as a decent runaway note?
Dear Ma,
I think it will not come as a surprise to tell you that I couldn’t bear it here another day longer, and I’ve left. Someday, I’ll be in touch again. I’ll be thinking of you and Oliver every minute of every day.
Love,