The Late Child

by Larry McMurtry

  5.

  “I guess you care more for your brother than you do for your old mother,” Ethel, Harmony’s mother, said the next morning, when Harmony finally worked up to calling.

  “Mom, it’s not a contest, is it?” Harmony asked. “It was too late to call you when we got in.”

  “Not too late to call the jailbird, though,” Ethel said. “My feelings are hurt so bad I spilled coffee twice and got egg on my new sweater.”

  “I’m sorry,” Harmony said. “Neddie just thought we ought to check on Billy.” Eddie was watching Sesame Street, Pat was putting on her makeup, and Neddie was having one last soak in the Jacuzzi.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t take Billy quite so much bacon for breakfast, Mom,” Harmony said—she was already a little bit at a loss for conversation.

  “Why not, what’s wrong with bacon?” Ethel asked. “I hope you ain’t raising your son on tofu and junk like that. He’ll never amount to much unless he gets his protein while he’s young.”

  “But Mom, Billy’s not really young, and he’s overweight,” Harmony said.

  “Stout, he’s a good stout boy,” Ethel said. “Billy’s stout.”

  “She won’t admit that Bill is fat,” Sty, Harmony’s father, said. Evidently he had been listening on the extension; hearing his voice made tears come to her eyes—he had a gentle voice; she had always loved her father most.

  “How are you, Daddy?” she asked.

  “Decrepit,” Sty said.

  Sty was short for Stuyvesant; no one knew why his mother had given him such a name.

  “He is not, he’s healthy as a horse,” Ethel said. “If he had half as many ailments as I have there’d be no putting up with him.”

  “You don’t put up with me anyway,” Sty said. “You stay as far away from me as you can get, night and day.”

  “That’s because you’re cranky and you snore like a bunch of Messerschmitts taking off from an airport.”

  “Messerschmitts don’t take off from any airport you’ve ever been in,” Sty informed her.

  “How would you know?—I was a plane spotter in World War Two and plenty of Messerschmitts were buzzing around here,” Ethel said.

  “She’s cracked,” Sty said. “There was never a Messerschmitt anywhere near Tulsa.”

  Neddie came in from the Jacuzzi, dripping on the carpet. She was wrapped in a bath towel.

  “If that’s Mom, be careful what you say,” Neddie said.

  “Who’s in that room with you, Harmony?” her mother asked. “I just heard a man’s voice.”

  “No, that was Neddie,” Harmony told her. “You might have heard Eddie’s voice, though—he’s up.”

  “You never married that boy’s father, did you?” Ethel said. “Now he’ll be illegitimate all his life. How could you put that terrible stigma on an innocent child?”

  “Mom, can we talk about it when I get there?” Harmony said. “We have to hit the road or we’ll never get out of Arizona.”

  “She won’t admit that Bill’s fat,” her father said. “Everybody can see it but her.”

  “I really don’t think that much bacon is a good idea,” Harmony said.

  “Who asked you?” Ethel said. “Billy’s just comfortably stout. He ain’t anorexic, like Neddie.”

  “She thinks you’re anorexic,” Harmony whispered, to Neddie.

  “What canyon will we see today?” Eddie asked. “Will there be a yellow canyon?”

  “She’s got that little boy in Arizona,” Ethel said. “Ain’t Arizona where they have the real bad AIDS?”

  “That’s Africa,” Sty said. “She’s so cracked she can’t keep the continents separate from the states.”

  “Why would you bring your little boy to Arizona if there’s all that AIDS out there?” Ethel asked.

  “Mom, I’m going now—bye, Daddy,” Harmony said. “Pat’s loading the car. We’ll see you in a few days if we don’t decide to visit New York first.”

  “New York, they’ll stab you in the subways if you go there,” her mother said.

  “Harmony, hang up, before you get us in worse trouble than we’re in now,” Pat said. “I need to call my fiancé anyway.”

  “Do you want to say hi to Grandma and Grandpa, Eddie?” Harmony asked. “You’re going to meet them in a few days.”

  “I’ll just say hi to them when I meet them,” Eddie said. “Right now I’m watching Sesame Street.” He didn’t take his eyes off the television.

  “He says he’s looking forward to meeting you,” Harmony said. “Bye, now.”

  “How’d you hear about the bacon?” Ethel asked. “I’d like to know who’s been tattling.”

  “It just came up in conversation—we’re all worried about Billy’s health,” Harmony said.

  “Forget his health and worry about his soul,” Ethel said. “He ain’t been inside a church house in twenty-two years—he gave me that figure himself.”

  “Bye, honey, see you when you get home,” Sty said. “We’ll be looking for you.”

  “I’ll be looking for them, you may be in jail too, by then,” Ethel said.

  “Momma, why would anybody put Daddy in jail?” Harmony asked.

  “Because he steals my social security checks out of the mailbox and spends them on his girlfriend,” Ethel said. “I’ve had enough of it.”

  “Don’t believe her,” Sty said.

  “She better believe me, I’m her mother,” Ethel said, just before Harmony hung up.

  6.

  As soon as Harmony put down the phone Pat grabbed it and called her fiancé on his car phone. When he picked up, a horrible roaring sound filled the motel room.

  “Rog, it’s me, Pat!” Pat yelled, over the roaring sound. “What is it, honey? Is it an earthquake or a tornado? Are you in a safe place?”

  “Gas well!” Rog shouted. “Nothing to worry about. Just a little blowout.”

  Then there was a spewing sound so loud and terrible that Eddie stopped watching Sesame Street and squirmed under the bed.

  “I think it’s the end of the world, Mom!” Eddie said. “I think it’s the Apocalypse. It’s coming out of the telephone.”

  “Where does a five-year-old get a word like ‘Apocalypse’?” Neddie wondered. “I’m nearly fifty and I couldn’t spell ‘Apocalypse’ if my life depended on it.”

  “Rog! Rog! Are you safe?” Pat yelled into the phone.

  The phone emitted horrible static for a few minutes and went dead.

  “Is it the ending of the world yet, Mom?” Eddie asked, from under the bed.

  “I don’t think it’s the ending of the world, but it might be the ending of Rog,” Pat said. The minute she hung up she seemed to lose all interest in her fiancé’s fate.

  “Oh well,” she remarked.

  “Oh well what?” Harmony said. “If he was my fiancé and he was being blown up I’d say more than ‘Oh well.’”

  “Pat ain’t the sentimental type, unless the gentleman’s brand-new,” Neddie observed. “The new wore off of Rog a good long while ago.”

  “Listen, people get blown up in the oil business every day,” Pat said. “It’s just an occupational hazard. Rog is a little too cocky anyway—if he gets his eyebrows singed off it might take him down a peg.”

  Eddie crawled out from under the bed and went to peek out the window.

  “Did the world live?” he asked. “Are we going to see the yellow canyon?”

  “If we can find one,” Harmony said. Pat’s casual attitude toward her boyfriend’s fate annoyed her, mainly because she was feeling like the chances of her ever having another boyfriend of her own were remote. It might be that her sex life was over, in which case she didn’t want to hear too much about Pat’s, or anyone’s.

  “I’m not on a hunger strike today,” Eddie informed them. “But I may be on one tomorrow if I don’t get to see a yellow canyon. I think it would be a good idea to have pancakes, just in case.”

  “That sounds like blackmail again,” Neddie said. “O
n the other hand a few pancakes wouldn’t hurt.”

  In the coffee shop a little Indian girl with coal-black braids began to smile at Eddie, who promptly smiled back.

  “I think she wants to be my friend,” Eddie said. “I better go offer her my juice.”

  He offered his orange juice to the little girl with coal-black braids, who took it and drank every drop, while her mother and father, both large, looked on shyly.

  “I guess I’ll just have to order some more orange juice for myself,” Eddie said, coming back to the table with his empty glass.

  “That little girl was really thirsty,” he added. “I asked her where the yellow canyon was, but she didn’t speak to me.”

  “I think she’s shy, Eddie,” Harmony said.

  7.

  At the filling station down a few blocks from the Heart of America Motel Neddie asked a young attendant with long black hair where the road went that they could see stretching away to the east.

  “It goes to Hopi,” the young man said.

  “Oh, is that a tribe?” Neddie asked.

  “It is a people,” the young man said. His hair was as black as the hair of the little Indian girl in the coffee shop.

  “I like this place,” Eddie said. “These people are good-looking. If we’re not going to live in Las Vegas could we live in Tuba City sometime? I want to be friends with that little girl.”

  “I don’t know, Eddie—it’s pretty windy here,” Harmony said. “Look how the dust swirls in the road. I think we’d get a lot of sand in our hair if we lived here.”

  “I like the way the sand swirls in the road, Mom,” Eddie said. “It reminds me of snakes. We could brush our teeth and shampoo our hair every day to get the sand out, if we lived here. Is that a good solution?”

  “I think it’s a great solution, Eddie,” Pat said. “I think you and your mom could be very happy, in Tuba City.”

  “Shut up, Pat,” Harmony said. “Eddie’s just having a fantasy.”

  “I’m always having fantasies,” Eddie said, as they wound their way up the plateau and drove across the great, empty plain toward Third Mesa.

  “From a car, this country looks a lot like the Oklahoma panhandle,” Pat observed. “A lot of country and not a whole lot of else.”

  “I think I see a cloud lying on the road,” Eddie said. He was in the front seat, on his mother’s lap, observing the scenery with interest.

  “What about my coatimundi?” he asked. “If we’re so high clouds are on the road my coatimundi might get altitude sickness.”

  “That ain’t a cloud, Eddie, that’s a herd of sheep,” Neddie said. “I think I see the sheepherder and his dogs, too.”

  They slowed down and eased through the cloud of sheep. When they were almost through them they saw that the sheepherder was an old woman, wrapped in many shawls. She trudged quietly along the wide shoulder of the road, taking no notice of the car. As they passed she turned to see that all her sheep were across the road.

  “Mom, she’s very wrinkly,” Eddie said. “I think she spent too much time in the sun.”

  “I think she’s probably spent her whole life in the sun,” Pat said. There was a quaver in her voice. She turned around to look at the old Hopi woman.

  “What’s the matter, Pat?” Harmony asked. “Are you worried that Rog might have got blown up in the blowout?”

  “I’m looking at that old woman,” Pat said. “What if I end up like her?”

  Neddie, too, had been somewhat affected by the sight of the old sheepherding woman.

  “I bet she’s eighty if she’s a year,” Neddie said. “Poor old soul.”

  “Why do you think she’s poor when she has so many sheep?” Eddie asked. “She owns hundreds of sheep.”

  “I doubt it, Eddie,” Pat said. “She may not own those sheep. She may be working for three dollars a day, for all we know.”

  “I lived in the Oklahoma panhandle for a while,” Neddie said. “I sure hope I ain’t out on the baldies with a bunch of smelly ewes when I’m her age.”

  Harmony felt a little of what her sisters felt. She had often wondered what there could be that she could earn a living doing when she reached an advanced age like sixty-five or seventy. She could imagine slipping so far that she would have to clerk at a Circle K. If she was lucky she could at least work the day shift, which was less likely to tempt armed robbers than the night shift. But there was always the chance that she wouldn’t be lucky.

  Twice more before they reached the first villages of Third Mesa, they saw women herding sheep. One of the women seemed to be about their age. She wore a sleeveless down vest, although it was summer. She only had about thirty sheep.

  “Why did we pick this road?” Pat asked. “I don’t want to see this kind of thing. It’s giving me a bad feeling about the future.”

  They passed through the village of Hotevilla and swooped downward, near the edge of the mesa, into Oraibi. For the first time they really looked across the great space beyond the mesa—the space to the east and south. The sight startled Neddie so that she pulled off the road, stopped, looked.

  “My God,” she said. “Look off there.”

  Eddie insisted on getting out of the car at once—soon he was standing on the very edge of the mesa, a tiny boy looking out into endless space.

  “There could be moons out there,” Eddie said, when he came back to the car. “Moons that are lost.”

  “There could be,” Pat admitted.

  Harmony had a bad fear of heights. Low heights, such as the height of the little platform she had been lowered to the stage on, when she was a leading showgirl, didn’t bother her—there were so many lights shining on her then that she didn’t even feel that she was high. She was just sort of swinging in lights.

  But being on Third Mesa, with the wind pushing her toward that endless space, was very different from descending on a platform toward her familiar stage. Even though her five-year-old son had walked fearlessly over to the edge of the mesa and was standing there, a dot against the deep heavens, looking for lost moons, Harmony became so frightened, when she got out, that she didn’t want to let go of the car door. Finally she did let go of the door but, after two steps, she lost confidence and grabbed the radio antenna, which bent but didn’t break. She felt that she didn’t dare turn loose of the antenna—she might be sucked away. She even felt afraid to open her mouth—the space might pour into her and blow her up until she was a balloon, floating far above the earth.

  She clung to the antenna so tightly that her knuckles were white. It embarrassed her, that she was so scared when no one else was. Eddie and her sisters were walking along the edge of the mesa, pointing out sights to one another, not at all afraid. Behind her, near one of the little adobe houses, two young Hopi women were hanging out a wash, managing the wind expertly, so that the wet sheets and shirts didn’t flap across their faces. They chattered happily as they dug the wet clothes out of a brown laundry basket.

  Soon Eddie and Pat and Neddie were nearly a hundred yards away. The old village, Oraibi, was very small, just a few old houses, some of them stone. Eddie seemed to be taking his aunts on a long tour. Now and then Harmony saw them stop and stare off into the mesa. Sometimes they simply stood for many minutes, looking.

  Harmony felt guilty, clinging to the antenna. She felt she should be with her son, sharing the experience with him. She was missing whatever he had to say, though perhaps he would say it again to her later. But she was too scared to take even a single step toward the mesa. Instead, she crept back into the car. She didn’t look out the window again; she looked at the floorboard, which had the crumpled wrapper of a Butterfinger on it.

  Eddie had eaten the Butterfinger the day before, just before he fell asleep on the drive to Tuba City. He was usually careful about litter, often lecturing his mother about putting things in the wastebasket or the dirty-clothes hamper or the dishwasher or her closet or the towel shelf in the bathroom, or somewhere. But this time he had faded very quickly an
d let the Butterfinger wrapper slip.

  When Harmony looked out again, she saw Eddie and Pat and Neddie coming around the far side of the village. They were taking their time. A small dog was with them, walking beside Eddie.

  Finally Harmony looked once more into the void that had frightened her so, when she got out of the car. She could not remember a fright so deep. She wondered if Pepper knew of her fear. Eddie thought there might be lost moons, out beyond the edge of the mesa. Harmony wondered if there weren’t lost spirits, too. She wondered if her daughter’s spirit could be drifting somewhere in that space.

  “Mom, why didn’t you come with us?” Eddie asked, when he and his aunts got back to the car.

  “We saw a ground squirrel and this little dog followed us,” Eddie said. “He licked my face.”

  “Well, that’s because he’s friendly,” Harmony said.

  Neddie and Pat took one look at Harmony and decided to let her be. But she was Eddie’s mother, and he was not in the habit of letting her be.

  “Mom, why didn’t you come?” he asked. “I think we can see to the end of the world.”

  “I was afraid I’d fall, Eddie,” Harmony said. It was a lie, though. She hadn’t really been afraid she’d fall. She had clung to the radio antenna because she was afraid she’d jump.

  The small brown dog stuck as close to Eddie as he could get. He looked up at Eddie often, and if Eddie moved he moved.

  Eddie squatted down for a minute, to pet him.

  “I don’t think this dog even has a home, Mom,” Eddie said. “Maybe we should take it with us.”

  “Oh, Eddie, I’m sure it has a home,” Harmony said. “It probably belongs to one of the families here.”

  “But what if it doesn’t?” Eddie asked. “It could be an orphan.”

  “Well, it could be, but it probably has a home and a family that loves it,” Harmony said.

  “I’ll just go ask those women,” Eddie said, meaning the women who were hanging out the wash. They had almost finished. Eddie raced up the short slope to their house, the brown dog right at his heels.