On a sofa fifty-five miles to the northwest, at 14 Paisano Lane in Marfa, Jed blinked from his nap, looked at his piebald hands, his grimy fingernails. For six nights straight, Jed had been battling angels. The archangels, the garbage angels, his latest so-called series.
Last night, fueled with a liter of Dickel and two orange Adderall pills he had scored off Francisco, the fifty-year-old hotel bellhop, the battle had raged beyond reason. Jed vs. the angels, and the angels had won. He had taken chain saw and blowtorch to the metal scraps of a great winged behemoth, but the angel’s face only grew more damning, his wings spreading more gloriously. Moonlight on rusting metal; a burn in his throat; steel and wood and plastic taking strange shape. His fight with Eve at the dump, all he had said and had never said. Metal filings burst into his goggles. He had burned through the night, the next day, too.
At 5 P.M., Jed was extinguished. The substances had made their gloomy exit, and his gums were bleeding from the clenching of jaws on dental negligence. Jed was nearly asleep again when some alarm cut through his fog, like a sharp smell in the air. His phone, screaming him back to the late afternoon in his Marfa bungalow. The state of Jed’s house: he had to search his phone acoustically, waiting for the next ring to suggest its location. The thing was beneath a wadded grease-stained sack, atop a pile of old newspaper he was saving for poor man’s drop cloth. On the seventh ring, he found the cheap purple plastic, lifted the receiver. He tried to collect himself, mask his exhaustion with volume. His voice ended up coming out like some television announcer. “Hello!”
“Jed? You’re there. Good. This is Manuel Paz speaking.”
Jed could hear, in the voice of this officer, a strange tone competing with Manuel’s old Texan formality. An unsteady undertow pulling at the vowels, drawing them out. Why had Jed answered? For days now, since Dr. Rumble called with the news of the bad test with Margot, Jed hadn’t turned up to work. He’d played possum both times that he had heard Manuel’s car in the drive.
“What? What is it now?” Jed was catastrophically sober, his eyes not working in parallel.
“I wanted to talk to you about this in person,” Manuel said, “but I couldn’t find you at the hotel, and nobody answered the door when I came by.”
“Doorbell’s busted.”
“Ah.”
Silence. Jed, a man who had lived inside of silence for fifty-seven years, felt all this particular silence might hold, all he still might not know. He thought of Manuel Paz, the boy he’d grown up with, the men they’d become.
“Manuel. Speak,” Jed said.
Sometime later. Jed was driving his pickup against the sunset, to the east. He didn’t know where he was going, but the need for movement was the first clear thought his wobbling sobriety could shape after Manuel had told him too much: Eve’s shoplifting, Margot still at work with Oliver, questions and questions about Hector, Rebekkah, and his son, those weeks, that night. “I know what you’ve been going through, and I’ve been trying to keep you out of it to spare you the agony, but I just can’t get my mind off it, and I need to know,” Manuel had said.
“I don’t know,” Jed had told him, several times over. As if, even now, even still, he could plug the black groundswell by pretending. By pretending that he could not still hear the ice river sloshing beneath every hour of his life, a time and place he had tried so hard to cover with flimsy material, with George Dickel No. 8, Pall Malls, white canvas, garbage. It hadn’t worked, not for long. Down there, Jed was still years younger. Seeing, not speaking.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Rebekkah was seventeen years old, standing outside her family’s house that August. Her third-period theater teacher, Mr. Avalon, had given her a ride home. Oddly, when Rebekkah stepped from his Cadillac, he exited, too, as if she had invited him into the house. This was how it began.
“They’re gone a lot, aren’t they?” Mr. Avalon asked. “I’ve seen you walking home a few times.”
Rebekkah shrugged. She tried to project the confidence she affected at school, the up-for-anything girl, but a half pint of her mother’s gin, which she had been rationing through the school day in her thermos, had gone to her head. The act of trying to straighten her spine was exhausting, and Rebekkah was chagrined at the sound of her own childish, teary sniffles.
“Poor thing,” Mr. Avalon said. He slung an arm over her shoulder as if this were how teacher and student were supposed to touch. What did Rebekkah know? Maybe it was. “I know how that goes, my folks were the same way. But listen, if you ever need anyone to talk to…” Mr. Avalon said, and Rebekkah nodded.
No denying it, when Rebekkah was near Mr. Avalon the air felt glamorized. Twenty years had passed since Mr. Avalon had found and lost a little fame playing Latino standards on the Tejano circuit, but still a strange halo of renown hung around the lean, aloof, olive-skinned man. “He looks like a rock star, doesn’t he?” the girls in her class asked, and Rebekkah had to agree. Mr. Avalon must have been near fifty now, but still some kind of feckless teenageness clung to him, in his lank, shining hair, his unbuttoned black shirts, the schoolboyish way he’d kick back at his teaching desk, sneakers crossed on the tabletop. Reginald Avalon’s Theater Club had an aura unknown to other school clubs. People treated a spot in his biannual Bliss Township Tejano Espectacular like a Broadway casting. His club offered only two performances a year, at the Homecoming Dance and at Prom, and the tryouts for this fall’s show had been a big drama. Even a newcomer like Rebekkah couldn’t fail to notice the deep antipathy in the way the school self-segregated, the gibberish Spanish that the showoff white boys barked at their Hispanic classmates, the menacing jocularity of the Latino guys who hung around the front gates, the occasional shoving matches that broke out in the halls. But, apparently, to get your heart broken by Mr. Avalon was one of the few activities for which the Hispanic and white students would line up together. Rebekkah couldn’t blame her fellow classmates for hating her a little. Rebekkah had a spot in the show, and she hadn’t even tried out. Mr. Avalon had just heard her sing a selection from Les Misérables in his theater class and simply insisted that she join.