The roads between the shopping center and Crockett State Assisted Care Facility traversed an emptiness so vast it was claustrophobic. The same five chaparral plants—the goofy heads of grama grass, the Gothic tangling fingers of ocotillo, the low paddled clusters of prickly pear, the surreal candelabras of century plants, the spiny, landlocked sea urchins called lechuguilla—repeated themselves all the way to the deadness of the mountains to the south and the horizon to the north. Thirty years she had been living in the state’s westernmost notch, and Eve still had not gotten over the strangeness of all that Texan earth, the extraterrestrial aspect of the empty space that lay in the triple-digit mileage between the Big Bend’s few towns. Now shakily powering through the Chihuahuan Desert at a hundred miles an hour, Goliath was like some sci-fi vessel, one of those battered spaceships plundering the galaxy on the covers of Oliver’s old paperbacks.
Eve was not a daughter of Texas. She was a daughter of nowhere in particular, the only child of a single-father car salesman, Mortimer Frankl, who had schlepped her around the American West in his maroon 1976 Cutlass Supreme. After her father’s death put an end to an unhappy childhood spent mostly in crestfallen hotel rooms and musty sublets where there was never enough space, when Eve met Jed Loving, she had thrilled to the freedom promised by his home’s two hundred acres. She could not have suspected how little those acres would hold for her. The Apache, Jed’s mother once told her, thought this desert was what remained after the world’s creation. The spare raw materials, the leftovers of better places.
“People go to New York to become something,” Charlie theorized once. “But they go to the Big Bend to become nothing.”
Nearly a decade had passed and even still she couldn’t graft this ruined life onto the simple linearity of time before. In a single instant, a twenty-one-year-old boy named Hector Espina had shattered time. More than nine and a half years ago Eve had been a full-time mother, already in the twilight years of that profession, staring down the lonesome ambiguities of the forty or so unclaimed, childless years unfurling from the front door of Zion’s Pastures. A decade later, she was a de facto (if not yet de jure) divorcée, the mother of one son lost to violence, the other to his own selfishness. She lived alone in the erstwhile “show home” of an abortive neighborhood complex called Desert Splendor, a failed subdivision of unoccupied homes and half-built house skeletons on a high desert flat. Her new house was plagued. It longed to become a ruin. That April, when she tried to start her air conditioner, it spoke its fitful last words and died. “Maintenance,” the management company said over the phone, “per our agreement, is your responsibility.”
Eve shifted with a grunt in the threadbare driver’s seat, unsettled by the grinding pain in her lower back. Having two children with a West Texan had given Eve a vocabulary moralistically devoid of expletives, but now she let loose a hot torrent of them. “Fuck!” Eve shouted. “Fuck, fuck, fuck you!”
She pulled Goliath to a stop fifteen miles shy of Crockett State Assisted Care Facility, into a square of tarmac that framed Se?or Buddy’s Filling Station. Outside, on a high metal column, stood the old billboard tribute to Reginald Avalon, a faded photo of Bliss Township School’s slain theater teacher, back in his youth as a locally famous Tejano musician, in his mariachi getup, singing to the scrubbed blue heavens, a biblical scroll unfurling beneath him: REG AVALON, REST IN PEACE, BELOVED TEACHER. And Eve knew that a couple of lines of Oliver’s poem were there, too, just to the right of Mr. Avalon’s portrait, and she was glad they were there, but it was just too much to look up at them today.
Oliver’s poem, “Children of the Borderlands,” had become a kind of anthem for the grieving town of Bliss. It was something that Oliver had written for his English class in the last weeks before, and its lines had been reproduced dozens of times now, in local papers and commemorative materials; “Children of the Borderlands” had even appeared once in the pages of a statewide magazine. Though it was true that her son had evinced a startling way with words, Eve understood that the reason for this poem’s celebration was mostly just the sentimentalizing sorrow of her town. But, apparently, the highly localized literary renown that tragedy had lent to Oliver had inspired something in his younger brother. Today, somewhere in a benighted apartment in New York City, Charlie was following in Oliver’s footsteps, giving his early twenties to some book he was supposedly writing, telling the tragic tale of his brother, the doomed bard of Bliss.
Still trembling a bit from the adrenaline rush of the scene in Ron Towers’s office, Eve pushed through the door of Se?or Buddy’s. When she saw the face of the cashier, Eve felt betrayed. Why did the universe wait until today to place Abbie Wolcott behind the counter? But if it were any other day, Eve would already have arrived at Crockett State for visiting hours. How long had Abbie, her husband’s old colleague, her son’s old calculus teacher, been working the Se?or Buddy’s daytime shift? Desert Splendor sat fifty miles from what was left of the town of Bliss, and for the sake of eluding the dreadful heart plunge that was happening now beneath her ribs, Eve tried, as best she could, to avoid the places she knew the old Blissians still frequented.
“Eve! My God!”
“Abbie. You work here now.”
Abbie Wolcott’s once handsome, blockish frame had expanded to linebacker proportions. Her face, beneath her feathery, bleached bangs, had the blank innocence of a collie. Eve nearly pitied her for a moment, sympathy that a bright burst of Abbie’s cheer instantly atomized.
“I do! It ain’t glamorous, but it gets me out of the house.”
“That’s great.”
“Plus I get to chat with people all day long. You know me, a regular chatterbox.”
“Sounds perfect for you then.”
Abbie made a big cartoonish shrug, something from a Cathy comic strip.
“How are you?” Abbie asked. “It’s been forever.”
“Yeah, forever.” Both women fell silent, considering the last time they’d met, years ago, when Eve turned Abbie away at the door to Oliver’s room, declining the casserole that Abbie clearly hoped she might exchange for insider gossip. But Abbie had been only one of a great many visitors to Bed Four. For the first year or so after, a few blackly dressed classmates, many teachers, the parents of the dead, the stooped principal Doyle Dixon, and the occasional religious leader would still show up, uninvited, at visiting hours, to put their hands on the one boy for whom the tragedy was still not yet at an end.
“How is he?” Abbie asked now. Eve could see the great effort it took Abbie Wolcott to dim her sprightliness to match Eve’s face.
“Advil,” Eve pointed to the rows of packaging behind the counter. “He? You mean Oliver? He’s fine, Abbie. Just fine. I’m sorry, but I’m in a hurry. Six dollars?”
“Five ninety-five.” Abbie Wolcott’s voice was glum and empathetic.
“Right.”
“You know,” Abbie said, “I still keep Oliver in my prayers every night.”
Feeling in her purse for the money, Eve pressed the edges of a coin until her fingertips began to ache. “All right.”
“And all of you, too. Charlie. Jed. Poor Jed.”
“Poor Jed,” Eve said.