Oliver Loving

by Stefan Merrill Block

  When Charles Goodnight Loving was born (yes, the name another concession to Nunu, but there was, after all, some folksy charm in giving her boys the names of their state’s legendary cowboy partners), Nunu grew suddenly gaunt, prone to those monthlong “Nunu time” stays in the Thunderbird Hotel in Alpine, which became her permanent residence in the last years before her death. Back at Zion’s Pastures, Eve and Jed, at last with a great topic in common, began to talk more. This, after a half decade of marriage, was how she learned something more of his childhood. “My goodness,” Jed said, calming himself after his son emptied a jar of applesauce down his shirt, “they say when you have kids you become your father, but it turns out that having kids is all about trying not to be your father. Takes real oomph.” Whatever it was that Jed had to muscle down into the garbage chute of his history, he kept it contained in a way that Eve, with her own bad stories, could still appreciate.

  But somewhere down the line, the river monster rose to his beshitten haunches; The Thing That Comes came back for Jed. Jed’s artistic voyages into his cabin became weeklong binges. Sometimes Eve pitied him, sometimes she upbraided him, always he nodded. By the time Charlie enrolled in kindergarten, she was raising their boys practically on her own.

  And yet, even then, Eve still had something of the pioneer spirit, and she thought that they might find a way to battle The Thing, if only he agreed to try. Once, she brought home from Dr. Platz, their avuncular family physician, a pamphlet entitled Overcoming Depression, and she told Jed, “I think you should read this and give it some thought.” Lunacy! As if she did not know just what her husband would do with that pamphlet—exactly what he did with any of her directives. He looked at it and nodded.

  “I can’t do all this alone,” she told Jed. “I can’t raise two boys by myself.”

  “You’re right,” Jed said. “And it’s pathetic. I’m pathetic. You win.”

  “I win? I don’t want to win. This isn’t a competition,” Eve said. “I don’t even want to fight. I just want you to tell me. Why do you never tell me? What is it that makes this life so horrible to you? Help me understand it.”

  But there, once more, was that Jed face, almost-spoken confessions darkly clotting his eyes. “Please,” Eve said.

  Jed was nodding again, of course, as if to validate her need for an answer. But the actual answer Jed offered that night? “I can’t understand it myself.”

  The years went by. The cottonwood tree in the front yard spread its arms, the ocotillo put forth its red flowers, the century plants shot their stems. Nature, too, stretched out her sons, elongating legs, cracking voices, darkening hair, ruddying cheeks. The lines around Eve’s eyes deepened; silver threaded from her scalp. Can’t understand what? She was still arguing with Jed, but only in her mind.

  And even still she missed the shape of Jed’s body when it failed to materialize next to her in bed. How was it that his distance from her only made her miss him more? Wasn’t it pathetic how, even into her late thirties, she carried on like some nervous teen, taking Jed’s disappearances as rejection, then wanting so badly to prove that she was worth staying with? She truly hated this thing in her, that attention-starved girl, for whom no closeness could ever disprove the intensive education in unlovableness her father had delivered to her.

  For years, her sons—their tiffs, their homework assignments, their wounding by forces beyond her control—were enough to occupy her. Jed’s noddings, his disappearances, she never forgave, but the cumulative effects of time and routine could feel not unlike forgiveness. Her boys were the shape of her days, and behind each hour was the impossible prayer that they never grow away from her.

  Like some demonic genie, out to prove a cruel point, fate granted Eve her wish, in the most hideous way imaginable, on the night of November fifteenth. Eve clung, with both hands, to Bed Four, but Jed? His alcohol-shaky fists were powerless to battle the monster. He let The Thing carry him off into its mud. He no longer tried to fight his way home. Emptied bottles filled his shed.

  “You’re right,” Jed told her one night. “I should go. I’ll leave. Just for a little while, at least.”

  And even still she wanted to scream at him, Leave? Why not fight? Why not fight for yourself? Why not fight to stay here with me? But after half a life, after nineteen years of marriage, she knew her husband well, didn’t understand him at all. This time, Eve had been the one to nod.

  Eve couldn’t remember exactly where Jed lived now. She had driven Charlie to Jed’s miserable new place a few times in the first years after, and her memories were of a downtrodden ranch house, its chipped siding thronged by a snake nest of vines, somewhere on the west side of town. Eve turned Goliath up and down the same streets half a dozen times before she realized she had been passing it, again and again. It was easy to miss, hidden by a dense and terminal foliage. The vines had spread wildly and died, as if they had choked the house to death, leached all its vital nutrients, and expired. It was the sort of house whose doorbell young boys might dare one another to ring.

  But when Eve herself pressed that doorbell, a dozen times over, she heard no report from within. Her knocking produced no reply. She could practically hear it echoing off the tired furniture, the stacks of unread magazines, the empty liquor bottles she imagined inside. Something twinkled in the blue sky overhead. A surveillance drone, bound south for the desert. Eve was turning back for the car when a great mechanical sound erupted from the shed ensconced in the dun tufts of grass that crowded the backyard.

  “Jed, Jed! Hey there! Jed!”

  Glimpsed through the open door of the shed, Jed appeared to be reenacting a scene from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. An industrial ventilation mask covered his mouth like a muzzle; his goggles gave him the eyeless face of an automaton; he wore a thick headset over his ears. Jed drew back the roaring chain saw and drove it deep into whatever metallic material was before him, a swarm of sparks fireflying through the room. Eve had the irrational notion that she had to stop him before he did something drastic. She entered the dank, ferric space, black against the combustive glitter coming off his workbench. She pressed a hand between Jed’s shoulders. He startled, and the chain saw slipped his grip, gnawing a few inches across the concrete floor. Jed stooped over it, flipped a kill switch and unmasked himself.

  “Eve. What on earth are you doing here?”

  Jed moved around awkwardly, as if trying to conceal with his body the contents of the shed.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I thought you might like an update.”

  Jed wiped his forehead with a filthy denim sleeve, slouched into the wrecked posture of the man she recognized. As her eyes adjusted to the grimed light seeping through the gaps in the shed’s wooden slats, Eve received a glimpse of the actual art Jed had been working on. As it turned out, it was not at all like the glum abstract canvases she had imagined. Nothing like his old second-rate van Goghs and Munchs. Suspended from the rafters of the shed were human forms, rendered from strange materials. The rusted bumpers of cars, bones of dead desert animals, barbed wire, food containers. The sort of refuse that littered the region, what the Chihuahuan Desert left behind after the wind and sun, turkey vultures and hyenas all took whatever they could. And no, not just human forms, Eve saw. From the crushed, rotten scapulae Jed had fashioned, each body sprouted rusted wings.

  “You’re a sculptor now.”

  “Not really,” Jed said. “I don’t know what you’d call these things. Sculptures? I’m not so sure. Garbage.”

  “Garbage angels,” Eve said.

  “Couldn’t have said it better myself.”

  “These are really quite beautiful. I had no idea.”

  “The seven archangels.”

  “It looks like you’ve got at least two more than that.”

  “I guess I couldn’t stop,” Jed said.

  The mauled sheet of scrap Jed had been working at—it appeared to be the door to an old-fashioned refrigerator—emitted a strangled moan.

&nb
sp; “What are you going to do with them?”

  “Do? I don’t know.” Jed gave Eve a grateful look, full of sad knowledge. “I can’t see how anyone would be interested.”

  “Hey, guess what? Heeee’s baaack,” Eve said Charlieishly, a line from some campy old horror film.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Charlie. I called to tell him the news. About the test. Would you believe it? The boy finally bought a bus ticket.”

  “My God.” Jed looked at his angels, shook his head. “Charlie. How is he? I’ve been wondering and wondering.”

  “Why don’t you go see for yourself?”

  Jed didn’t reply. The question just hung there for a while between them, like another strange object suspended from the ceiling, the meaning of which neither of them spoke aloud.

  “This update,” Jed said. “What is it? Something new? With Oliver.”

  She tried to come up with a few sentences to explain why she had come to Marfa. But Eve’s thoughts flew sixty miles southeast, to Margot Strout’s second day palpating Oliver for some sign. Words that were no longer words.

  “I guess it’s not really an update. They are working with him, trying to find a way for him to communicate. No update, really. But I thought I should tell you anyway.”

  As Jed returned his chain saw to a hook, an odd kind of nostalgia overtook Eve, a nostalgia unlike the usual, not for the sun-bright years when her whole family was with her at Zion’s Pastures, but for the glum quietude of her life spent between Desert Splendor and Crockett State, her leftover life that the results of Professor Nickell’s fMRI had just ended. That recent time when Eve hadn’t had anything very specific to hope for and so her hopes could be vast, a life that was nothing but mother and son and the wild hopes that still bound them together. That time when Oliver had still been all her own. The wind outside the shed rose, whistled through the gaps between the walls’ wooden planks. When it passed, the silence was immaculate.

  “We’ve done everything we could for him, haven’t we?” Eve heard herself say.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oliver. Sometimes I just don’t know. Sometimes I wonder if he might have been better off if we had just let him go. Do you ever wonder that? What it must be like for him. Even now.”

  Eve watched Jed pinch a loose corner of the metal on his table, bend it back. When he turned to her, his face was transformed with a beautiful kind of rage. But standing there with Jed, Eve understood that her question also held another question. The thought that had, from time to time, haunted her from the shadows of her days. Had Jed ever wished Crockett State would do to their son what Crockett State was built to do, to let some infection or act of medical incompetence free them of the decision, free them from the spiral of doubt, self-recrimination, and the arduous numbing grief that was their every day? “You can let go,” Eve tried telling Oliver once, repeating that line she’d heard in dozens of movies, horrified to hear how the words sounded in her own mouth. But the part that truly shamed her, and shamed her still, was the corollary that came to her lips as this avowal’s logical conclusion: she had added, “please.”

  “You’ve done everything you could.” Jed made a gavel of his fist, disturbing the little metallic shards on his table. “What else could you have done? What choice did we have? Tell me. I’m all ears.”

  Eve shrugged. A part of her wanted to shout her agreement, the other part wanted to give him her own silent treatment, so that his rare anger would escalate further. How was this her husband? Was this at last what the bad years and heavy drinking had done to him? And now a very old tension ratcheted behind her face, like a sneeze that wouldn’t quite come. She had an irrational, feverish sensation that Jed might hit her. But Jed loosened his fist, and in lieu of a fight, Eve chose the next best thing. She walked the three paces to him, pressed her fingertips against the grimed meat of his hand, the skin quite shockingly tough. She wove their hands together, and they both looked at them for a long while, like another sculpture they had just made. What was it they had made? Two boys, of course, but what was the strange form they had taken together, before their children even came along? Something abstract, not exactly beautiful but certainly what an art critic might call arresting, the unlikely transformations they both could undergo only in each other’s presence. Those brief few years, at the start of their marriage, when their better selves prevailed, before their fugitive, hidden other halves—her need to have everyone near her, Jed’s need to have no one near him at all—won out. And how was it that even still—even still!—she received a few seconds of Jed’s unbroken attention like a precious gift? Even still, as soon as she saw Jed, her appropriate anger vanished and she found herself wanting only for Jed to tell her how very much he had missed her, how much he needed her still.

  “I know I’m right, I know that,” Eve said. “But why do you always let me be so alone in it all? Am I so horrible?”

  “No,” Jed said. “I am. Me.”

  It started again as simply as that. Like the logical progression of the held hands in the fMRI wagon days before, like their few “dinners” in her barren house at Desert Splendor, pressed fingers became pressed bodies and mouths. It wasn’t, at first, particularly sexual. Sex happened, but that seemed to be only the best way Eve could think to get Jed as close as she would have liked, and still he could never get quite close enough. The better part of her, after all, was far away, in the hands of Margot Strout.

  With the moan of a man cracking a beer after a long day, Jed climbed on top of her. Eve would many times replay that particular instant. Her sigh carried both grief and relief, and also a pang of pity for using her husband this way. But he was, after all, still her husband. And his eyes, in the dimness of the shed, were not as red and swimming as they had appeared under Crockett State fluorescents. They were the eyes she knew, crystal gray and fixed on her, asking the same question they asked in her long-ago apartment above the bank in Marathon, as if decades and so much silence were not between them now, as if he were still only the hopeful stranger she had just met that night at the Marfa Lights. What was the question? Something having to do with beginnings but also (she had sensed, even way back then) with merciful endings. Is it possible?

  But when it was all over, and they were lying there in the starlit purple of the evening that filtered through the roof cracks, it was Manuel Paz that Eve was thinking of. And now Eve was wondering whether her hands, which had always known her own needs better than herself, had in fact spent that day operating under a motive she hadn’t considered. Perhaps the madness of the way her fingers had behaved over the last hours had only been an attempt to outrun the old memories brought on by the way Manuel had looked at her today at Crockett State, his expression as stolid and unblinking as the face of the moon. Over the years, in Manuel’s many visits to Bed Four, in the most unlikely town theories that Manuel nevertheless “investigated,” she’d come to see that Manuel really meant what he had said. He truly could not stop. There was something mechanical about Manuel, all old-fashioned gears and cogs, the Southern Pacific that wouldn’t stop trundling down the tracks until it reached its destination.

  There is no why: over the years, Eve had offered herself countless ritualistic recitations of that mantra, a spell to ward off the worst thoughts that still sometimes came back to her, of Rebekkah Sterling and of her son’s broody last weeks before, of all she had never told Manuel. How many times had she convinced herself that she was wrong, that her grief had made her a little paranoid, that nothing she could have said to Manuel Paz could have made any difference? And yet, Eve had read Oliver’s “Children of the Borderlands” a hundred times, her astonishment at it dimmed only by the you whom the poem addressed. And one day, near the end of his homeschooling, Charlie showed her a book he had found: Oliver’s old journal, containing even more poems that she saw—in the few glimpses Charlie forced upon her, before the sight of the handwriting overwhelmed her completely—that in those rhymy, adolescent lines Oliver gav
e that you a name: Rebekkah. And so was it not also a kind of lie that she had failed to mention any of this to Manuel Paz, in his many Bed Four visits? Eve’s dread set her back on her feet.

  “I’d better get going,” she told Jed. He nodded.

  Back at Desert Splendor, Eve discovered that Charlie was already asleep, and she was touched to find he still dreamed in his profound boyish way, emitting a little “uh” sound before each exhale. Moving around silently, on the sides of her bare feet, Eve located Charlie’s phone in the pocket of the jeans he’d heaped next to his bed.

  Eve had been so certain that she was right on that long-ago day with Manuel in the conference room, that an explanation couldn’t really change anything, that the only answer for the impossible affliction that the universe had handed to her son could never possibly lie with any one person or any rational accounting. If there was any meaning to be found, Eve had felt, it would forever hover beyond her, in the unknowable force that lay beneath forces, the mystery that birthed gravity and set the stars to spin. But time had proven that Manuel had been right, and that she had been wrong. Why? That silent cry into the scrubbed desert sky, the question that had become her life and Charlie’s life, too, that terrible project of his, shuffling around the lightless rooms of the past, and what else might he find? Eve watched her fingers flip through the contacts in Charlie’s phone until she located the name Rebekkah Sterling. She copied the girl’s number into her own device.

  In her bed, Eve held the phone to her face, listening to it ring and ring, until a computer answered and asked if she would like to leave a message. Like some reenactment of her many calls to Charlie, just a few days prior, Eve ended the call and then she called again. At last, on the fourth attempt, the ringing clicked to silence, and Eve could hear the faint stirring of breath. And then, for the first time in all those years, she heard the actual, still-living Rebekkah Sterling speak: too stunning for Eve to muster a reply before Rebekkah ended the call. “You have the wrong number, please stop calling me,” a young woman’s smoky voice told her. And now Eve was wishing for another, different conversation she had also held in silence all that time but needed badly. She was thinking how she might be able to explain any of this to Jed.