The Late Child

by Larry McMurtry

  “Ooops, I think Eli may have crawled under the seat,” Laurie said, reaching under one of them. “He’s sensitive to argument.”

  “Get him out before he pees, we’ll have to trade this Buick in if an old turtle pees in it,” Ethel said. “We won’t get much trade-in either, not with the dirty oil.”

  As soon as Laurie got the turtle out from under the car seat, Ethel began to back up. As everyone watched, she backed all the way across the parking lot and kept on backing until she was way out in the middle of the field that the young man had just mowed, a little earlier in the day.

  “She’s cracked—she don’t even know she’s going backward,” Sty said. “Let’s all get inside before she starts coming forward again. Ethel makes real wide turns. She’ll mow us all down if we stand here and give her a target.”

  Eddie leapt into Harmony’s arms and gave her a kiss. “It’s fun here, Mom,” he said. “My cousins all like me and I like them. Iggy tried to swim but he bogged and got himself muddy and Grandma hates him and she hates Eli too.”

  Ethel got the Buick into a forward gear and was executing a wide—very wide—turn through the little field. They all stood and watched as she drove across the field, in the general direction of the highway.

  “Maybe she’ll get lost and drive to Oz, and the Wicked Witch of the West will get her, only the Wicked Witch won’t get me and she won’t get Iggy and she won’t get Eli,” Eddie said. As soon as they went inside he began to bounce on the king-sized bed, bouncing as high as he could. Sty sat in a chair, Neddie smoked, and Laurie lay down on the bed despite the fact that Eddie was bouncing on it. She put the turtle on the bed but it soon crawled so close to the edge that she had to put it on the floor.

  “I’m tired,” she said. “We swam a lot.”

  Harmony had the sense that Neddie was watching her closely—probably she wanted to know whether Harmony had promised Rusty that she would tell Dick that she wanted a divorce. At times Neddie could be pretty intent on getting her way.

  “Riding around with your mother always wears me to a nub,” her father said. “I can’t keep up with Eddie anyway, and I sure can’t keep up with him if I have to ride around with Ethel very much.”

  “Just rest, Grandpa,” Eddie said. “She’s gone.”

  He stopped jumping on the bed and climbed up in his grandfather’s lap. Sty smiled.

  “What a boy,” he said.

  Harmony had a sort of “What next?” feeling; it was a time when the pieces of life just didn’t fit together too well. Maybe they never had—probably they never had, but definitely they weren’t at the moment.

  Just as she was having the “What next?” feeling the phone rang. Harmony thought it was probably Gary calling back; he hated to have his phone calls interrupted, no matter what the circumstance. Gary always preferred long phone conversations, an hour or two was nothing to him. She was a little nervous about picking up the phone, he was probably going to bawl her out for cutting him off so abruptly. At the very least he was apt to be a little moody—Gary’s interpretation would be that he wasn’t getting enough attention. Still, the phone was ringing and it was her room. She finally picked it up.

  “Harmony, I have a confession to make,” Pat said. “I’m a heroin addict. I got on them pain pills after Debbie was born and I’m still on them. I’ve been embezzling a little bit from the bank, just enough to pay for the drug, but it’s beginning to add up. I’m afraid they’re going to catch me and put me in jail with Billy. It’ll disgrace my whole family. What should I do?”

  That’s why she wouldn’t let me touch her purse during the whole trip, Harmony thought—it had seemed weird at the time but in view of the heroin addiction it made perfect sense.

  “Well,” Harmony said—she still had her “What next?” feeling and was not in a good position to advise her sister about heroin addiction.

  “Harmony, can’t you do better than ‘Well’?” Pat asked.

  “No, everybody’s in the room,” Harmony said.

  “Oh, gotcha, bye,” Pat said. “Think about it, though. I think the auditors are zeroing in.”

  “That was Pat,” Harmony said. “She was just checking in.”

  “I worry about Pat,” Sty said. “I don’t think she’s happy. She looks too pale, to me. Happy people ain’t usually that pale, especially not here in Oklahoma, where there’s plenty of sunshine.”

  “The reason Iggy is brown on his stomach is because he bogged in the mud,” Eddie explained. He held Iggy up for inspection. Iggy wiggled.

  Harmony felt very confused. The sisters who had come to Las Vegas to help her out in her grief now turned out to have massive problems of their own; both of them needed her to help them, though only an hour ago she had been naked and crazy herself. Besides, there was the question of their privacy. Should she tell Pat that Neddie wanted a divorce, so she could marry her brother-in-law? Should she tell Neddie that Pat was a heroin addict and an embezzler? Did they already know these things about one another? Did she dare inquire, or would that just make things worse? She had been stuck in the driver’s seat and the car was moving, but she had no map and no idea where she was supposed to go.

  As if that wasn’t enough, her father was looking at her a little strangely. He looked needy, just as Neddie had, before she made her unusual request. Her father was looking at her with longing and hope—but longing for what? Hope for what?

  “Daddy, if you want me to drive you home, I will,” she said. “I didn’t mean to keep the pickup all day.”

  “Mom, it’s okay,” Eddie said. “Grandpa wanted to stay with me today. He wanted to tell me a lot of stories while we were here visiting in Oklahoma.”

  “We had a good day, too,” Sty said. “But maybe you ought to run me on home. Keeping up with Eddie’s kinda got me tuckered out.”

  “You two run along,” Laurie said. “Eddie and Iggy and I could use a nap.”

  “I’ll catch a ride too,” Neddie said. “Dick’s plowing, he’ll expect me to milk.”

  “Where’s the remote? I want to see if there’s cable,” Eddie said to Laurie, as the rest of them went out the door.

  Once they got on the highway, Harmony had to ask directions to Neddie’s farm—she hadn’t been there in so long she didn’t know the way.

  “I’ll talk to you later, Neddie,” Harmony said, when she let Neddie out at her back gate. She tried to sound reassuring—of course she would break the bad news to Dick, if that was what her sister needed. She didn’t want Neddie worrying while she took her father home.

  “Okay,” Neddie said—she took a deep breath, as if she were about to dive into deep water.

  When they started back down the dirt road toward the home-place, Sty didn’t speak for a mile or two. Then he looked at Harmony and smiled.

  “Well, what do you think of our big happy family?” he asked.

  “It’s big but it’s not too happy, is it, Daddy?” Harmony said.

  “Nope, it’s a mess,” Sty said. “I guess once things start slipping in a family, they just keep slipping.”

  “I guess they do,” Harmony said.

  “When was you planning to go home?” he asked.

  “Daddy, I thought I was coming to stay when I came here,” Harmony said. “But I don’t think I can stay. Las Vegas is the only place where I know how to survive.”

  “Honey, I know you’re grief-stricken,” Sty said. “That’s normal. But you know something? You’re doing better than us. Eddie wouldn’t be the wonderful child that he is if you weren’t doing a good job being a mother.”

  “I think I’m just lucky,” she said. “He’s always been that way.”

  “It’s not just luck,” her father said. “I guess Pepper got away from you, but Eddie’s a well-brought-up boy.”

  “He never sees his Dad,” Harmony mentioned—she didn’t want to gloss that over.

  Her father looked at her, started to say something, sighed, and then said it.

  “Honey, when you go
back to Las Vegas, do you think you could take me with you, for a while?” he asked. “It might give me a new lease on life if I could be with you and Eddie for a month or two.”

  Harmony was startled—it was the last thing she would have expected her father to ask. At the same time, she wasn’t sorry he had asked.

  “Sure you can, Daddy,” she said. “Eddie would love that. But what’s Mom gonna say?”

  “She’s gonna think I’ve left her and she’s gonna be right,” Sty said. “It’s that or lay down and die.”

  “Is it that bad, Daddy?” she asked.

  “You’ve been home a day and you haven’t heard her say a nice word yet,” Sty said. “If you stayed here for the rest of your life you still wouldn’t hear her say a nice word. Ethel hasn’t said a nice word to me in ten years, and she don’t intend to, either.”

  “She never did say many nice words,” Harmony said. “If she did, I can’t remember them.”

  “No, she’s always been negative,” Sty said. “It can’t be a nice enough day for Ethel. It can’t be safe enough for her—and I can’t work hard enough to please her. And none of her children or grandchildren can please her. I can’t go to church often enough, or drive well enough, or garden well enough, or please her at all, no matter what I do.”

  “Why do you think she’s so hard to please?” Harmony asked.

  “I used to ask myself that question, when I was young,” Sty said, looking out the window. “I asked it when I was middle-aged too. I even asked it when I began to get old. But now I’m old and I’m tired of asking it, because I don’t care anymore. Ethel’s not hard to please, she’s impossible to please. She don’t like anything I do and I’ve stopped caring why—it don’t matter to me now. I’ve spent nearly fifty years of my life trying to please her, but I failed, so I’m giving up. I want to come live with you and Eddie—me and Eddie just hit it off right away. You can’t know what a lift it gives an old man, to have a boy like Eddie who wants to know all the stuff his grandpa knows.

  “It’s not just a pleasure,” he said, looking at her kindly. “For me, it’s life.”

  “You can come, Daddy,” Harmony said again, in case he missed it the first time she said it. “You can live with Eddie and me for the rest of your life, if you want to.”

  “I guess it’s a shame,” her father said. “Me and Ethel have been husband and wife for nearly fifty years. It’s nice to think of us going on to the end together, like an old married couple should. But thinking about it and living it are two different things. The fact is, it’s a living death and I’ve lived it as long as I can.”

  Then Sty leaned forward, put his head against the dashboard, and began to sob. He didn’t make a lot of noise as he cried; he had always been a quiet man. But he was sobbing, nonetheless. Harmony took one hand off the steering wheel and reached over and rubbed her father’s neck, a little. She was hoping he wouldn’t cry for too long because she was more or less lost. She had taken a left turn at a little crossroads and now she was beginning to feel that the left turn might have been a bad idea. Instead of seeing the farm and the pond and the stump all she saw ahead was empty prairie.

  “Dad, is this the way?” she asked; but her father, crying out his sadness, didn’t hear her at first. He had probably waited years to let his feelings out, and he couldn’t immediately choke them off.

  Harmony stopped the pickup. She didn’t see any reason to go farther astray, and also she wanted to hug her father, comfort him a little for his sadness.

  “Daddy, just leave her,” she said. “Just leave her. Come and live with Eddie and me.”

  Her father sniffed a few times, took out an old cotton handkerchief, and carefully dried his eyes. Then he looked around.

  “My Lord, this ain’t the road,” he said. “We’re over here by the Harrises? You’re going to have to turn around.”

  It was a pretty narrow dirt road—Harmony didn’t feel confident that she knew how to turn the pickup around; normally she would just have whipped into a parking lot to do it, but there were no parking lots in sight.

  “Maybe you should drive me now, Dad,” she said. Even though he was red-eyed he seemed calm again.

  “Maybe I better,” Sty said. They both got out, walked around the pickup, and traded places.

  Harmony felt curious about the woman her mother had mentioned, the one in the old folks’ home in Bartlesville. It was obvious her father was starved for affection. Harmony decided she couldn’t resist asking; he didn’t have to tell her if he didn’t want to.

  “Momma thinks you have a girlfriend,” she said.

  Sty was carefully turning the pickup around. He was so meticulous about it that he didn’t get even one tire in the ditch.

  “She thinks what?” he asked.

  “She thinks you have a girlfriend,” Harmony repeated. “Some woman in an old folks’ home in Bartlesville.”

  “Oh, May,” Sty said. “She died seven years ago. That’s how cracked Ethel is. She can’t keep it in her head who’s dead and who’s alive.”

  “Do you miss May, Daddy?” Harmony asked—she was still curious about the woman; also she was curious about her father’s life.

  “I sure do miss her,” Sty said. “She was the wife of our banker—he keeled over in church about fifteen years ago. May and I had been sweethearts, back in the thirties. After Joe died we got in the habit of having coffee, whenever I was in town. Both of us were lonely, you know. Ethel was jealous of May all her life and she’s still jealous of her, although May’s been dead seven years.”

  “You better just come on and live with us, Dad,” Harmony said—it was terrible that her mother wouldn’t even let him enjoy a few memories of his friend May.

  Sty looked at his daughter and smiled. “That’s a relief,” he said. “I’m an old worn-out man. Not every daughter would have me.”

  “Dad, you might not feel so old and worn out once you leave Mom,” Harmony said.

  “Well, maybe I won’t,” Sty said.

  14.

  After Harmony dropped her father off at the farmhouse he looked at her quizzically.

  “Think I ought to tell Ethel what we decided tonight, or should I wait till we’re about ready to leave?” he asked.

  “I’d put it off until we land in Las Vegas, if I were you,” Harmony said. “That’s how I left, remember? If I’d told Mom I was getting on that bus she’d have rammed the bus.”

  “Rammed it, she would have bombed it,” Sty said. “She cussed the bus company for five years, after you took off. She’s not above killing fifty or sixty innocent people, if that’s what it takes to get her way.”

  “Daddy, she’s not that bad,” Harmony said.

  “That’s what I said for the first forty years,” Sty said. “That’s not what I say now.

  “The thing is, I don’t think I could stand being without Eddie now,” he added. “I just don’t want to be without that kid.”

  “You won’t have to, Daddy,” Harmony said.

  “I know exactly what your father means,” Laurie said, an hour later. Harmony had rushed back to the Best Western and told her everything: about Neddie and Rusty, about Pat’s addiction and embezzlement, about her father’s desire to leave her mother and start a new life in Las Vegas. Laurie was a good listener, too. She didn’t even seem surprised, though she did reveal a deep uncertainty about what she herself should do next.

  “I don’t really have any business tagging along with you and Eddie,” she said. “I should have stayed in New York, like Sheba and Otis did.”

  “But Sheba and Otis didn’t know Pepper,” Harmony reminded her.

  “That’s right—they didn’t know Pepper, and they weren’t in love with her,” Laurie said. “I was too lonely to stay. I needed to be with you and Eddie as much as your father does now.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?” Harmony asked. With so many lives falling apart, including her own, she felt a little apprehensive. She wasn’t sure what p
oint Laurie was trying to make.

  “Nothing’s wrong with it for now,” Laurie said. “But at some point we have to let Pepper go on and be dead. Because she is dead, you know. And we’re not. At some point I have to go back into the world and make a life—so do you. It’s going to be hard. I’ll be missing you and I’ll be missing Eddie … I’ll miss you both a whole lot.”

  Eddie had been in the bathroom, brushing his teeth in the correct manner—the manner he had been shown in a film at his dentist’s office. He finished and came back into the room just in time to hear Laurie say she would miss him and his mother very much.

  “But why would you miss me?” he asked. “You’re with me.”

  “I know, Eddie—I’m with you now,” Laurie said. “But the sad fact is that people being together can be temporary.”

  She made the statement nervously—she had not meant for Eddie to overhear her.

  “It cannot be temporary,” Eddie insisted—his face got instantly red. “You came with me and Iggy and my mother and now I want you to stay with us forever so we can be a family.”

  Laurie didn’t answer. She just got tears in her eyes.

  “Mom, please ask her to stay,” Eddie said. “We need her.”

  Laurie just looked at him. Now the tears were on her cheeks.

  “Eddie, here’s a deal,” she said, in a small shaky voice. “From now on, no matter what, I’ll come to visit with you four times a year—and if I can’t get to Las Vegas because of my job I’ll send money and you and your mom can come see me in New York.”

  “But are you leaving right now?” Eddie asked, bereft. “I wanted you to be a member of my family.”

  “I am a member of your family now, Eddie, and I always will be,” Laurie said. “But your Aunt Neddie and your Aunt Pat and all your cousins are members of your family, and they don’t live where you live all the time.”

  Eddie said nothing. His face made it clear that reasoned argument wasn’t making him like the fact that Laurie was leaving one bit better.

  “Guess what, though, Eddie?” Harmony said.