Some Can Whistle

by McMurtry, Larry

  “Mr. Deck, come quick,” the boy said again.

  “Yes, I will,” I said, hanging up.

  “What?” Gladys said. “What?”

  “The kid at the filling station in Thalia says he’s killed them all,” I said. My thin voice seemed to come from another person.

  “Oh, no, Buddy was with them!” Gladys said, her face a knot of agony. “Buddy was with ’em! Here we just got in love and he was my last chance. Now I won’t never have no other chance again as long as I live. Oh, no!”

  Jesse, shocked and puzzled by the sudden change-ability of adults, stopped giggling and put her small fist in her mouth.

  16

  It was only about seven minutes into Thalia. Muddy and I could see the crowd gathered at the filling station long before we got there. Hay trucks and cattle trucks and trucks with oil rigs on them were parked along the road almost to the city limits sign. With the exception of the local deputy, who looked pale and horrified at the responsibility that had been suddenly thrust upon him, the crowd around the bodies consisted mostly of truckers, cowboys, roughnecks, a few storekeepers, a stunned housewife or two.

  The only person in the crowd who seemed to be acting with any presence of mind was Duane Moore, a local oilman I knew only slightly. Apart from Jim, the terrified gas station attendant, Duane had apparently been first on the scene, and what little he could do—call ambulances, for example—he had done.

  As soon as we stepped out of the van Duane came over and tried to prepare us for what we would have to see. He told us that T.R. and Godwin were still alive, but his look was not reassuring.

  “I’m not a doctor, but it looks pretty bad, Mr. Deck,” he said. “Your English friend’s shot to pieces and your daughter’s been shot in the head.”

  “I should have come, I should have come,” Muddy said; he could scarcely speak and was already descending into the deep pit of self-accusing remorse where he would dwell for years.

  T.R. lay in the front seat of the Cadillac; she had been behind the wheel—Earl Dee had shot her in the head at point-blank range. Her eyes were closed and to me she looked much smaller and younger than she had looked only twenty minutes earlier. I couldn’t see her wound, though there was blood on her forehead and blood on the seat. I wanted to sob but the arrow held my throat closed. Despite her shallow breathing, T.R. seemed gone: a dead bird, its flight over, small and limp on the ground.

  Buddy lay between the gas pumps, quite dead; Godwin was stretched on the oily cement behind the car—though shot three times, he had managed to get Buddy’s pistol and had fired several shots at Earl Dee before collapsing. He was fully conscious.

  “I wish I’d killed that piece of pigshit,” he said weakly, when I knelt beside him. “I did fire rather rapidly, perhaps I wounded him at least.”

  “Godwin, don’t talk,” I said. “The ambulance is coming.”

  “But I’m dying,” Godwin said, recovering a bit of his strength. “I want to talk. Why should the dying be denied their last chance to speak? It’s just a fucking literary convention. You find a dying man in a novel and the first thing the bloody author does is have someone tell him not to talk. What kind of behavior is that?

  “I guess I shan’t be buried beside the weedy Cam,” he added wearily, as an afterthought.

  “Godwin, talk, I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize what I was saying. It’s just that if you shut up and save your strength you might not die.”

  “Where’s Bo?” Muddy asked, remembering the child. “Bo was with them. Where’s Bo?”

  No one in the crowd had any idea, but he was not in the car and he was not in the crowd. The only logical inference was that Earl Dee had taken Bo with him, though no one could recall seeing this happen.

  I left Godwin and went to kneel by the open car door, as close as I could get to T.R. She was no different. I watched her face, hoping, hoping, hoping that she would open her eyes and look at me. Muddy crawled into the back seat, reached over, and took her limp hand. I’m sure he was hoping the same thing.

  “She might come to,” he said. “She might come to.”

  Then we heard the distant whirr of a helicopter.

  “I called for the ambulance chopper,” Duane said. “I figured, since it’s this serious, you’d want to take them to Dallas.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Someone covered Buddy up. I thought of poor Gladys, terrified and desperate, at home with Jesse. The body of her last chance was lying dead between the leaded and the unleaded.

  The helicopter eased down in the street, blowing dust over us all. Muddy and I tried to shield T.R. Then we had to stand aside while the young men of the ambulance crew expertly eased her out of the car and strapped her onto a stretcher. It took some time. The crowd around us had grown, but it was a silent crowd. The only ones who spoke were the ambulance men and Godwin, who did what he could to make theater out of this blood-soaked occasion. He chatted urbanely with the ambulance man, with me, with Duane Moore, in the best Gunga Din/Four Feathers tradition, as they got him onto a stretcher and lifted him into the helicopter. I resisted several impulses to tell him to shut up, though indeed I had never admired him more.

  When the two were in the ambulance helicopter Muddy and I prepared to climb in with them but one of the young men stopped us.

  “I’m sorry, we just have room for one,” he informed us politely.

  Muddy and I were startled. I didn’t know what to say, but Muddy did.

  “You go, you’re her daddy,” he said, with a look of desperate sadness on his thin face. “I got Jesse to take care of, anyway.”

  I got in, but I was not really convinced I was the one who should go. T.R. and Muddy were close; he was good to her. Perhaps he would be better than me at helping her rally, persuading her to live. I felt it was mostly a matter of persuasion, too. Once she opened her eyes, one of us would have to start persuading her. Better me, or better Muddy? I didn’t know, and the sight of Muddy, standing in the dusty street, looking hopelessly at the helicopter that was about to carry his true love away, was almost too much to bear. I felt I should jump out and let him go, but I delayed my decision too long, and the young man shut the door and the helicopter rose. I sat numbly, looking at the upturned faces below us. Soon they blurred like images in a dream; then I couldn’t see them at all.

  Both of the young attendants were busy doing things to Godwin and T.R. They were giving them transfusions, attaching monitors—I don’t know. I felt sick, partly from shock and partly from the conviction that I had erred in getting into the helicopter. Muddy was almost her husband; Muddy would probably have been more help; Muddy had a better right.

  I sat blank for a moment or two, blank and sick; it was with difficulty that I could get Muddy’s face out of my mind and bring my attention back to T.R.

  “Uh-oh,” I heard one of the ambulance men say. He looked at me in a curious way; he didn’t elaborate. His look made me uneasy.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked. “How long will it take us to get to Dallas?”

  “Oh, we’ll be there pretty soon,” the young man said softly. “We might get there in time to save the Englishman, if he’d just quit talking, but the bad news is we can’t save your daughter, sir. Your daughter is dead.”

  “No,” I said, trying to reject it. “No, she can’t be—just hurry.”

  The young man sighed, took the seat beside me, and put his arm lightly around my shoulder.

  “I remember you,” he said. “You rode with us that day we came and got that little guy who blew up the oil tanks. That was him back at the filling station, wasn’t it?”

  “That was him,” I said. I could see T.R.’s feet. They weren’t moving. One of her sandals had fallen off, one foot was bare.

  “Please check the monitor,” I requested. “Please do that. It might be a mistake.”

  The young man stayed where he was, his arm around me. He said no more. I felt like leaping out of the helicopter. It would be a re
lief to plunge downward toward the brown plain. I would then be waiting for T.R. in the earth to which she would soon have to go. For a moment it seemed the only available loyal thing to do.

  “Daniel, are you very distraught?” Godwin asked.

  “Godwin, you really shouldn’t talk,” I said.

  “I’m very distraught too,” Godwin said.

  17

  The young man had not been wrong—the years had come to T.R. That was how I thought about it when they gave up in the emergency room, when they told me again what the young man had told me in the helicopter. I couldn’t say the accurate word, not over the phone to the grief-stricken Muddy or the anguished Gladys. I wanted it to be that something had come for my daughter—the years, or the wind, or the rain, or the earth, or the heavens or time itself—something had come for T.R. and taken her on.

  Godwin was taken on too, but not at once. The emergency-room staff was amazed that he was alive, yet he babbled on for half an hour or more, though wounded in several major organs. The nurses kept trying to make him be quiet, but the young doctor in charge was in complete agreement with Godwin about the conversational rights of dying men.

  “Of course, let him talk,” he said. “Why not?”

  Some of his babbling was regret at not having killed Earl Dee. For several minutes he was out of his head, but then his mind seemed to clear and he looked at me quite lucidly and said something in what I took to be Greek.

  “Godwin, I’m sorry, I don’t know a word of Greek,” I said.

  “Iliad, Sixth Book,” Godwin said. “I always thought it rather florid. Odd it should occur to me now.”

  “I guess I’ve just forgotten the passage,” I said, though I had never really read The Iliad.

  “Daniel, would you mind putting together my book?” Godwin asked. “I’m afraid it’s mainly a mass of notes at the moment, but some of the notes are rather good and I’d hate for them simply to be lost.”

  “Of course I’ll put together your book,” I said. “I’ll try, anyway.”

  “I’m sure you can hire some bright young thing from Harvard to do the Greek for you,” he said. “The only thing is, you mustn’t let Gladys throw it all away. She’s been trying to for years, you know.”

  “I won’t let her throw it away, Godwin,” I said.

  “Poor old thing, she has a kind heart,” Godwin said. “Is T.R. really dead?”

  “Yes, she’s gone,” I said.

  “What a magnificent girl,” he said sadly. “I never got to fuck her.”

  I began to cry, but Godwin, always either a step ahead of me or a step behind me, seemed quite lucid.

  “She brought you her children just in time, didn’t she?” he said. “What an admirable thing. You’re sometimes a little slow in your perceptions, Daniel. I do hope you recognize what a great gift that was.”

  I didn’t answer—couldn’t. At that moment I recognized nothing. Godwin squeezed my hand. He began to talk in Greek again.

  “It’s really an odd comeuppance,” he said. “I spent years with Euripides and now I can’t remember a line of anything but Homer. It’s rather a joke on me, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, I guess so,” I said. He let go my hand. A minute or two later the young doctor came in and led me out. It occurred to me once I was in the hall that Godwin must be dead.

  Near midnight that day, as I waited in Dallas for the bodies of my daughter and Godwin Lloyd-Jons to be released to me, Earl Dee shot a highway patrolman who had stopped him near Bartlesville, Oklahoma. A few minutes later he surrendered without a fight outside a convenience store in Pawhuska. Bo was with him. The patrolman he shot was only slightly injured.

  FOUR

  1

  I never saw Earl Dee—didn’t want to. My imagination was not interested in endowing him with any human traits; I did better if I simply thought of him as a dark force out of the Southern underclass, someone who might resemble Steve Cochran as he looked in Storm Warning: a sexy lout with a smirk. During the trial, when I happened to see a picture of him in a newspaper, he did have such a smirk. He received three life sentences.

  When Bo was ten, he began to ask to visit his father. After giving it some thought, I let him, sending him to Texas with Hilton, a driver and man-of-all-work who had replaced Buddy in Bo’s—though never in Gladys’s—affections. We were living in California then, but Bo wanted to see his father, and I let it take place. Bo never reported on the visits; Bo never reported on anything. What he and his father said to one another, only they knew. Earl Dee was killed by an inmate when Bo was fourteen. After that, Bo disappeared for seven months, the first—but not the last—of his disappearances.

  The first years, of course, were terrible for us all. Muddy Box and I spent three years endlessly trying to reverse the clock with our minds—to get back beyond the moment when T.R. danced out of the house and drove off to her death. Hundreds of times, privately and together, we reenacted her last half hour at Los Dolores, trying to rearrange events so that she didn’t leave, and therefore didn’t die. Muddy couldn’t eat for a month; he shrank away to almost nothing. His particular torture was that he had let his stubborn desire to see Lake Louise separate him from T.R. at such a critical moment.

  “But we didn’t know what was going to happen,” I told him, over and over. “We didn’t know. Nobody could have known. She wasn’t mad at you, either. She gave you a big kiss just before she left.”

  It didn’t help.

  “I knew he wasn’t in Huntsville,” Muddy said, over and over and over. “I knew he wasn’t in Huntsville. I shouldn’t have argued with her. I should have just done whatever she wanted, ’cause now I won’t never have the chance.”

  My own tormented regret—amply justified when the facts came out—was that I had been lulled into a careless sense of security by the assurances of the sheriff of Palo Pinto county that Earl Dee was under heavy guard and could not possibly escape. How could I have been so ignorant of the conditions that actually prevail in small-town jails? My ignorance was every bit as inexcusable as Muddy’s fixation on Lake Louise.

  In fact, Earl Dee had already escaped when I had my conversation with the sheriff—the sheriff just didn’t know it. The “heavy guard” consisted of an inexperienced deputy who had been having sex with a fat teen-age shoplifter in the cell next to Earl Dee’s when the jailbreak occurred. Earl Dee had made up to the girl and promised to take her with him if she’d help him get out—a promise he immediately broke. Whose idea it was to have sex, the girl’s, the deputy’s, or Earl Dee’s, was never made clear, but a sex act occurred on the bunk in the girl’s cell and the girl passed Earl Dee the deputy’s gun and his keys. On the way out Earl Dee also took the deputy’s hat, and drove away in the deputy’s police car; he left the car and the hat in a town about forty miles north, stealing a Buick from behind a dentist’s office.

  I told myself that as a novelist and student of human behavior I should have predicted some such chain of events; but who really could have predicted that the fat teen-ager would get arrested for shoplifting just in time to succumb to the deputy’s advances (if it was the deputy who made advances; he claimed he had been seduced, the teen-ager claimed that she gave in because the deputy promised to bring her a milkshake from the Dairy Queen across the street)—just in time to help Earl Dee escape?

  Balzac himself could not have predicted that.

  Later, there was a cry in the local paper for lawsuits. I was urged to sue Huntsville, the warden, the prison system, the probation officer, the sheriff of Palo Pinto county, the deputy, and even the teen-age shoplifter; it was on her already hopeless young shoulders that the heaviest blame fell. It was only her second arrest for shop lifting, but the well-publicized knowledge that she screwed the deputy for a milkshake branded her as a hopelessly lost soul in local eyes.

  Not in my eyes, though. The minute I saw their pictures in the paper—the skinny, bewildered deputy and the fat, sad girl—I was reminded that there were people worse off than
me. Far from suing them, I got them both lawyers, good lawyers who eventually whittled the charges against them down to almost nothing. In time I came to feel sorrier for Melinda than for anyone in the whole grim affair. I guess the milkshake was the haunting detail, though Melinda told me it had really been a banana split and admitted that she had always had a crush on the deputy anyway and didn’t mind being in jail if it meant she could be near him. She had done it for love, after all, and not for the banana split. His name was Dan.

  I offered to put Melinda through college; she went for a semester and then got a job clerking in the drugstore where she had been caught shoplifting cosmetics. Two years later, shunned by almost everyone except one another, Melinda and Dan married, a one-day story in the local papers. I went to their sad little wedding, paid for their honeymoon to Lake Tahoe, and wept on the way home from the ceremony. I think they themselves never entirely got over the fact that their moment of indulgence, their tiny grab for pleasure, had played a part in ending my daughter’s life. After the wedding I stopped keeping up with Melinda and Dan. I couldn’t bear to keep up anymore—it was too sad.

  The sheriff of Palo Pinto county was voted out in the next election. A year later he shot his wife and her lover, who happened to be the new sheriff. Then he tried to shoot himself, did a poor job, recovered, and served a term in Huntsville himself.

  At that time, though, in the first months after the tragedy, I paid only fitful attention to the various trials. Every day was a plain that had to be crossed; every day Muddy and I played the hopeless game of trying to reverse time. Our minds would not stop trying to rearrange that last hour, or last afternoon, so as to make it all come out differently. Even when T.R. had begun to blur in both our minds, when painful dreams and hopeless fantasies had made us both half-crazy, we still spent far too many hours discussing Muddy’s stubbornness about Lake Louise and my casual acceptance of the sheriff’s assurances.