“Where are you going?” Ma asked. “Are you leaving?”
Later, Charlie’s guilt for how he acted that morning would drive him half-mad. That he would ask her right there, in front of Manuel Paz. That he did not consider the repercussions, that if he had just pulled Ma aside to speak with her alone, Charlie might have spared her a world of hurt. But, just then, Charlie felt avid, canny, powerful as Shiva with the destructive power of the truth. As if with one act of truth telling in the parking lot of Crockett State Assisted Care Facility, he might have unveiled the chimera, the cheap smoke and mirrors of faith and delusion, under which they had been laboring all those years. “You knew, didn’t you?” Even then, Charlie could hear how aggrieved, how vindictive his own voice sounded. “Some part of you must have known.”
“Known what exactly?”
“Known that it wasn’t really Oliver we’ve been speaking to.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” But Ma looked at Charlie as though, at long last, they had arrived to the point.
“What I’m talking about? I’m talking about Margot Strout,” Charlie said. “I’m talking about the fact that neither of us ever once stopped to ask whether this magic trick of hers could actually be true.”
“Excuse me?”
“My God,” Charlie said. “And here I thought we’d finally gotten somewhere, like we were starting to be honest with each other. But, no no no, because you never could listen, could you?”
“Oh, screw you, Charlie. I mean it. Just leave, then, if that’s what you want.” Ma’s voice was quaking, but hers wasn’t a very convincing brand of outrage—at least not to one who had grown up under its various tones. This, like so much of Ma’s Oliver-related fury, Charlie saw, was her anger in its porous mode, her doubt seeping through.
Charlie glanced at Manuel, read his tight sad grimace as a kind of solidarity. “I’ll tell you what,” Charlie told his mother. “Why don’t you just let me know when you are ready to tell me the truth for once?”
“I have no idea what you could possibly mean.”
“Oh, Ma,” Charlie said.
*
The sun ended that day with none of its false morning timidity, igniting a firestorm of reds and oranges. Charlie had one last plan for his day, but he’d had the good sense to wait until the evening, hiding out in his basement “studio” with a bottle of rotgut whiskey he’d bought, trying hard not to think of the scene he had initiated back at Crockett State. Less than sober at sunset, Charlie took the roads slowly, and when he kicked the Suzuki’s stand, he paused to let the twilight dim a few clicks deeper. At last, he was alone in the pale blue of a gibbous moon, in a stand of grama grass a quarter mile outside the gates of Zion’s Pastures.
The air out there, tangy with the mesquite and cedar that grew along Loving Creek, his family’s tributary of the Rio Grande, was the same air Charlie’s lungs had first learned to breathe. A deep inhalation of this healing stuff of his home planet, and he was feeling sharp, bright, a little brilliant. If he had at all doubted this last excursion, he knew now that he would see it to the end. He followed the loony song of whippoorwills to the gates of Zion’s Pastures.
Charlie knew now how badly he would have tolerated any change to the place, and he was relieved to find the old gate, that same lattice of wrought iron with its sprays of rust, standing there as it was the last time he closed it, more than five years before. The same sign, too, the one his great-grandfather had made, the words ZION’S PASTURES written in a bumpy Olde English font, an arrow pointing up the potholed stretch of road. The gate was held shut with a new length of chain and a padlock, and so Charlie took a look around, percussively tiptoed over the bars of the cattle grate, and hopped the fence. Then, serene as a pilgrim, he began to walk. A mule deer shuddered through a thicket of agave. A milk snake crossed his path.
A long, eulogistic stroll into the valley. Charlie understood that the gnarly live oak by the road, the battered shed of his father’s studio, the squat cliff faces into which Oliver and he once scratched crude cave art had existed very long before his family and would outlast them to take on new meanings. But so thoroughly had Charlie and his brother mythologized every inch of that land that even a leonine-looking boulder or a particularly cartoonish patch of prickly pear still seemed symbolic, portentous. He passed over the low-water crossing at Loving Creek. Just a droughty, sluggish trickle now, but it was also a deluge of memory, of crawdad hunts, of fishing trips, of water moccasin evasions, of occasional floods that kept them happily stranded for long days of movie watching and book reading at the house just over the rise. Of Oliver and he running thoughtless and giddy, to present the gift of the fistfuls of thistle heads and Indian paintbrushes they had just picked for Ma.
Charlie knew, of course, that his early childhood was not the little utopia that this return visit was now urging him to edit it into. His parents, after all, were mostly silent with each other; Pa suffered gray nights, blinded by the inimitable gleam of dead artists’ masterworks; Oliver was a pimply teen, hopeless in love; Ma was anxious and obsessive, as if she alone could invent a cure for the disease of time and the trip wires it sprung in her family’s genes and keep her children with her forever. It was true, what Charlie had told Oliver at the hospital. For their mother’s benefit, Oliver had gladly donned the role that Ma had brought him into this world to play, offering his daily performances of unquestioning devotion in exchange for the bouquets and plaudits of Ma’s favoritism. But hadn’t Oliver offered something to Charlie, too? An escape, and not only in the stories they had told together. As Oliver had given himself as the silent receiver of Ma’s worry, as he had made himself the heir to Pa’s thwarted hopes, Charlie had, in the theater of his family, been able to costume himself for a role of his own choosing. The cheery one, the jokester, the clown. And maybe that was the real reason Charlie needed to keep Oliver’s story, his poems, close to him. Charlie’s own existence without Oliver felt like too sorrowful a thing to live in alone.
Under the shade of the cottonwoods that lined the road, Charlie did a little reenactment of his nice memory, sprinting up the last turns to the house. He almost stumbled on the ruts, made a loud bang on the second cattle grate, the one installed by some ancestor to keep cows from wandering into the front yard.