Oliver Loving

by Stefan Merrill Block

  Oliver

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Oliver, do you remember your father telling you about a phenomenon called Spooky Action at a Distance? That was how Einstein described the troubling behavior of entangled particles. Those little fuckers stumped Einstein; they broke down the equations with which poor Albert tried to describe the universe. Apparently, once two particles entangle, they move in tandem, even when separated by light-years. One particle zips upward and, a million light-years away, its partner zips in the same direction. What strange force binds them together? Einstein couldn’t make sense of it. But perhaps a similar force blind to the galactic distances was at work in the years after, between your family and you. After all, you were not the only one trapped in a sightless prison, vibrating against the narrow walls.

  Your father. For years, he stayed at the periphery of your family’s story, out in that dim shed, beating away at his garbage. A painful truth: he chose to exempt himself, as far as he could, from your tragedy. But the other truth is that, in measuring the effects of Spooky Action at a Distance, its influence was perhaps strongest on Jed Loving. Perhaps no one shared more fully your imprisonment.

  Take, for example, one random night from your father’s life, a year or two into your confinement. His place was in a bad way, a house self-made into a jail cell. His little bungalow in Marfa had become like the home-sized version of his old painting shed, a collection of abandoned things: half-drunk bottles of soda, half-eaten carryout, a television set to mute. And yet there in Jed Loving’s lousy house, this was a Sunday night to be celebrated.

  Your father unbuttoned his denim shirt, threw himself gratefully onto the butt-cratered mold planet that passed for his sofa. On this particular Sunday, Jed had just completed his second full week of work as floor manager of a new gallery, Gotleib & Krav, which a German couple had established in Marfa’s renovated abattoir. Jed did not understand all the galleries of Marfa—that whole strange art culture seemed somehow a sarcastic joke at the expense of the rubes of West Texas—and he did not care much for the pieces peddled by Gotleib & Krav, a series of wind chimes made from dismantled Nazi artillery. But he arrived to this sleekly modernized slaughterhouse sober and bright each morning. Your mother and your brother had not spoken to him (or was it he who had failed to speak to them?) for nearly three months, but your father had a plan.

  Step one in the rehabilitation of Jed Loving was to prove himself a competent adult human, capable of holding down a decent position. With the first full month’s paycheck in hand, Jed would venture into the terrifying, less certain territory of step two, returning home and proving himself a competent human father. But on that warm Sunday evening, he looked around his lousy bungalow as if it were a molted skin he might slough off. He envisioned dinners at the rutted table of Zion’s Pastures. He imagined coming to your bed hand-in-hand with wife and son. Two more weeks.

  Jed scratched his age-thinned belly, traced the widening circumference of his bald spot with a thumb. For almost a month, he had not once ventured out to the Marfa version of his art studio, a lean-to in his weed-choked backyard, but on this sober, electric night, he was feeling bold, capable of transformation, and he thought he might just take a peek out there, see if his last bout of work—a series of utopian seascapes he had painted onto scrap metal from the dump—had in fact turned out as miserably as he remembered.

  It took less than five minutes for the sight of his work to rub the shine from his mood. He had initially thought the aesthetic juxtaposition would be interesting, a little romantic beauty atop the rust-pocked sheets of aluminum and steel. Instead, the stuff looked like Thomas Kinkade had fallen on very hard times.

  Ridiculous. He knew it. Jed knew it was ridiculous that even still he thought he might make something valuable, something perhaps even sellable, something that was at the very least not shameful, from those last, worst years. And yet, for the one thousandth time in his life, your father told himself that it was now or never, that he was, perhaps, very close to making something he could proudly call his own, that to return in the way he must, he needed not only to play at being a functional adult, he needed to become one. Thus began, in the painting shed, the collapse of your father’s latest step one. He blanked out the seascapes, painted strange biblical scenes (angels and demons, à la Bosch) until dawn, at which point he allowed himself a drink, just to steady his fingers. He downed the three inches of bourbon, the heat and head rush offering him five kind minutes. He poured himself another. What happened after? Jed could hardly remember when, on Monday afternoon, he blinked awake to a phone call from Michel Gotleib, informing him that he’d missed the private showing scheduled with a collector passing through town. “Just your third week on the job. Needless to say, this isn’t going to work out.”

  The story of your father’s thwarted plan at Gotleib & Krav was the story of his life in miniature. “On the verge of something,” he really had believed what he’d told his family all those years. “Maybe a breakthrough.” Even into his ruinous fifties, your father could hike out to the shut door of his “studio” and look at the building the way he once looked upon his marriage to Eve, imagining that within that chrysalis he really might break through his own leathering skin. Become a different man entirely.

  And your father’s transformation and self-improvement schemes were not only art related. In those first weeks at the hospital, Jed told himself that once the worst was over, once a single test result to hope upon came back, he would at last quit his long whiskey sessions out in the pickup, become the father his wife and son had watched him fail to be. When your mother expelled him from the property, he told himself it was only a temporary separation, that he would return very soon. Once the horrors of that night stopped playing on repeat on his closed eyelids, he would put down the bottle for a couple of weeks, regain the steadiness in his step, and then he could go home. Or he would write a long apologetic letter, an explanation of all the things he had never said, and then he could go home. Or he would wait until the worst of the summer heat passed, and then in the brisk mercy of autumn, he could go home. Or he would wait until Charlie was gone for college, when he could talk to Eve alone, and then he could go home. Or he would wait until Charlie came home from New England, when enough time had passed that his own failings were practically historic, and then he could go home.

  Considering the specifics of the latest scheme, as he worked himself into a different spirit, it wouldn’t seem so difficult. Home was just a forty-five-minute truck ride away. Yet each time he tried to take a few steps in that direction, the ground would go uncertain beneath him, and he’d allow himself the one quick drink. But the little finger of George Dickel rye Jed let himself imbibe did nothing to dim those memory flashes on his closed eyelids: the way the school cafeteria lights had suddenly blinked on over the Homecoming Dance that night, the crush of teenage bodies in sequins and oversize suits, the confusion of shouts, cresting in a wave of panic. The way Jed, baffled at the cause, had nevertheless done his duty as dance chaperone, throwing open the gymnasium doors, shouting at the emptying room for the children to stay calm and make a line. But in the mass of bodies and the chaos of vehicular emergency lights outside, his son was nowhere to be found. A mad sprint back into the old schoolhouse, toward the distant corridor where the shouting escalated. And then, splayed there in a spreading puddle, an unfurling red flag, the body unseeable, crowded out by uniforms. At last Jed did see, would always see. Oliver. Two, five, nine years later, Jed allowed himself a second drink. Another drink led to others, to another ruined scheme, to another swollen-eyed, tooth-aching rebirth, to a whole new plan.

  And so, as you endured the desiccating sameness of days and years in Bed Four, so too, in the prison of his Marfa bungalow, did your father’s life pass like a montage of decay, a time-lapse of a man shriveling in his skin, passing images of his artwork morphing in its futile directions. Landscapes became portraits, became clay busts, became scrap metal fused by a secondhand blowtorch,
became trash left out at the end of the drive for the garbagemen to collect. A hundred times, he staggered out into the purple kindness of a desert dawn, looked in the direction of your mother’s house. But he’d never make it all the way. Because your father had come to understand this: the walls of his prison were different than your own, but hardly less confining. He might have walked the floor of the world, but it was an illusion. Your prison was your own body, but your father’s? It was the unfillable, unforgiveable place that lay beneath. It was his whole history, an unspoken and unspeakable force that cracked the rock, swallowed the arid substratum, shook your father off his uncertain footing.

  Jed marched out to the shed, began hammering apart his new sculpture, as if the thing he made were a kind of Frankenstein, a monster that might destroy him when it woke.

  A lonesome, pitiable man, it’s true, but even then, the effects of Spooky Action at a Distance bound your father to you. Somewhere, in a galaxy far away, in your last months before, you were still there with him, in your own studio of failures, wondering over a silence of your own. Somewhere, it was still just that overheated October morning, years before, your body still squirming beneath you.

  * * *

  It was October fourteenth, the morning after your stalker routine outside the Sterling house, and you had retreated to your solitude at Zion’s Pastures, your secret lair. The weather inside your own head matched the day: a lazy, intolerable atmosphere, too hot for October even in West Texas. In your creekside cave, with its card table and folding chair, you were attempting to whittle down your worries, chipping away at their sharp edges. A bruise on Rebekkah’s leg—it was true, it was much worse than the little faint bruises that often mottled her pale skin, but it was absurd, the stories you had let yourself spin. What evidence did you have that Rebekkah did not just take a hard fall? And what reason to believe that that strange bald guy who had shown up at her place had anything to do with her? Likely, you told yourself, he just worked for Rebekkah’s father. And what could you really know about her father himself? Your sum total experience of the man was just a bumbling shape, arguing with his wife as he stumbled across the lawn. Yet the events of the last day, the last weeks, were stubborn materials, and your blade ran dull. You couldn’t whittle away her vaguely pleading expression as you had held forth about your family, your astronomy, your tall tales. It was a sensation familiar to you from your faltering attempts at poetry: like some perfect, revelatory line whose existence you could sense but not quite fix into words, you could perceive the existence of some other unnamable, clarifying fact about Rebekkah just beyond reach. But why was it up to you to try to understand her, anyway? Wasn’t she the one who had stopped talking to you? These were the excuses you gave yourself for not doing the obvious, scary thing, the one that would most likely subject you to further heartbreak, just to beg Rebekkah to speak with you again.

  Outside, the upraised wire arms of a stand of ocotillo swayed, creaking like a ship at sea. Crickets made their ornery, orgasmic percussion, rising to a clicking fever and falling silent. You had not, as was customary, brought your Casio boom box to the cave; Bob Dylan had no mystical fate to sing to you that Saturday. Distantly, through the lifeless flat that lay beyond the ocotillo, you noticed the plodding, aggrieved movement of your family’s one remaining longhorn, the steer your father named Moses. “Just like the real Moses,” Pa had said. “A desert drifter, a survivor of a dying clan.” Once upon a time, according to Granny Nunu, your ranch had thundered with the hoof falls of Moses’s many ancestors. Moses turned to you now, and you shared a long stare. Tell me about it. The day smelled of skunk.

  In the late afternoon, your father stopped by the cave. “Dinner in an hour,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “Your Ma has been cooking your favorite. Lasagna.”

  “That’s great news.”

  “So,” Pa said. “How was the big date?”

  “It wasn’t a date. It was a study group.”

  Your father gave you an obnoxiously knowing grin, as if he recognized this sort of boyish ruse.

  You turned away, studied your hands. It didn’t take much to fight the urge to tell him the truth. The summery languor made all the words you would have to use feel too weighty and cumbersome. Instead, you offered a Moses-like shrug, slow and suffering, your head slung low.

  “Welcome,” he said, “to the world of women.”

  “Ha.”

  He put an inky and unsettled hand on your shoulder. “It’s a very mysterious world, and believe me when I tell you that you can never hope to know all the answers.”

  “You mean with Ma?” you asked.

  “Well,” he said. “No, not with your mother, I guess. That particular woman will tell you all the answers herself, ha.” You had never once before spoken with your father about his marriage, and this little conversation now seemed like a decent consolation prize for the loser in love. In your recent glum weeks, you had fallen far indeed from your hallowed place as your mother’s most perfect boy. You had come to grunt monosyllabic replies to her questions, and she replied in kind, hardly asking you any questions at all. But as you now showed Pa a wondering look, your father thumbed his chin regretfully, as if remembering the order of things, this life in which he was able to carry on with his many failings in exchange for his silence on the topic of Ma’s absolute authority on all matters Loving.

  After he went, you leaned back in your chair, relaxing gratefully into your poor mood. Was this the nature of love? This lopsidedness, one always in the lead, the other always in pursuit? The light was dimming in the sky now, and the heat no longer dulled your foulness. Cooling, it came unsettled. You thought up a final stanza for a poem you had been trying to write, “The Endless Roundup.” Nearly every poem you had ever written you had kept to yourself, but for this particular poem you had an outlandish idea: on Monday mornings, Mrs. Schumacher offered bonus points to any student willing to read out loud a short creative work. Thus far, the only takers to this offer had come from the class’s collection of moody girls: plump Betty Greene, who wrote an ode to chocolate cake as if it were a devious lover to be spurned; Cara Stimson, whose five-page ode to her mother’s needling Cara did not manage to complete before puddling into her own tears. Only one boy—Carlos Ramirez, your honors class’s only Hispanic kid—had taken the bait, reading aloud an essay about his parents’ entanglement with the cartels in Guadalajara, their abandonment of their little grocery, and their flight to America. “Ah-MARE-ee-ka!” The boys in your class mocked Carlos’s accent for so long that they began to call him by that name. “Hey, Am-mare-ee-ka, you know where I could score some bud?”

  But “The Endless Roundup,” in your first blush of composition, seemed a thing that perhaps you might summon the courage to read for ears other than your own—to read, more specifically, for the ears of the one girl who otherwise now seemed wholly uninterested in what you had to say. “The Endless Roundup” was a riff on one of Granny Nunu’s favorite old tales, a little fable that the graying minister had repeated at her tiny, December afternoon memorial service. Nunu’s story held that the booming reports of the very occasional thunderstorms in the Big Bend were not thunder at all but the sounds of ghost cowboys forever in pursuit of ghost cattle. You imagined yourself in a world like that, a boy turned to a cloud. You wrote:

  Sometimes I wonder,

  Will I live like that too?

  A body of thunder,

  Endlessly hunting for you?

  You furiously scratched away every word. Once complete, the poem seemed suddenly pitiful to you. And what sort of poet could the writer of those cornball lines ever hope to become? Your future, you were fretting now, was bound to be just like Pa’s. You would inherit this land, you would marry a girl you did not quite love, you would toil under the shadow of dead masters. The only difference would be that you would produce bad poetry, not bad paintings. You would work in the cave, not the shed.

  And so you resolved to put the whole b
usiness to an end. Rebekkah, poetry, your future imaginings in Mrs. Schumacher’s classroom. You would not be a poet, you told yourself, but you would be something else. What? The only professions that came to you now were just a child’s trite replies to the question of grown-up plans: a doctor, a lawyer, a fireman.

  You were still trying to convince yourself, by very early Monday morning. But a resolution was not enough. Internal revelation, everything outside unchanged: that was poet thinking, and what you needed was action. And so, as the sky outside the bedroom window grayed with the sunrise, you crept out of your lower bunk, careful not to wake your brother. You stashed your journal of poems in a bottom drawer of the old accountant’s desk, buried it there. But a journal in a closed drawer did not offer the closure you needed, so you found a fresh sheet of paper, lifted a pen, and began to compose a closing coda to your failed future, a sort of epitaph to your young life as a poet. One last poem, about your factory of a school, your ruined future with Rebekkah, everything you would never be. Unfortunately, it was only as you wrote your retirement poem that you began to see what made all your other poems so lousy. Like the shape-shifting creatures of the fantastical worlds you had described, you were always trying to put on new skins, but in this last poem you wrote as yourself, unchained from rhyme scheme. This poem, in the end, would become the first and only poem of yours to be published. In fact, one year from that morning, its concluding lines would appear on that memorial billboard off Route 10. But at the moment of composition it was just a thing you dashed off in less than thirty minutes.

  Two hours later and with no hope left in your heart, you arrived on time for Mrs. Schumacher’s English class. Later, you would wonder at the boy who had shown up that day, who had looked directly at Rebekkah on the far side of the room, who had hoisted his arm when Mrs. Schumacher asked, “Any takers for this week’s Bonus Point Salon?” Who had then—unbelievable!—stood before the assembled classmates, grasped a page in a shaking hand, and read aloud from the contents of his soul. Was it just exhaustion? Desperation? You became practically a different person then. You completed your reading. You dropped the page onto Mrs. Schumacher’s desk. Fingers snapped sarcastically. You sat. As Mrs. Schumacher began her lecture on Odysseus’s journey through the underworld, you returned to the Oliver Loving you had been, aflush with shame, watching Rebekkah, in her desk chair, straining not to look at you as she drummed her chin.