The Late Child

by Larry McMurtry

  “I don’t want to guess if it’s bad news,” Eddie said.

  “No, it’s good news—very good news,” Harmony said. “The good news is that Grandpa is going to come to Las Vegas and live with us.”

  Eddie shrugged. “But Laurie still won’t be with us,” he said. “I want my Grandpa to come but I want Laurie to be with us too, sometime. If Grandpa can live in Las Vegas Laurie can live there too, and we’d be a family.”

  “What about your grandmother living there, then?” Laurie asked. Harmony could tell she was mainly trying to put a lighter cast on things.

  “No, Grandma has to stay here because she’s too gripy,” Eddie said. “And she doesn’t like Iggy and she hates Eli, so she cannot live in Las Vegas.”

  “But it’ll be fun to have Grandpa, won’t it?” Harmony asked. “He can meet all your friends. You’ll probably be the only person in your school who has your Grandpa living with you.”

  Eddie still didn’t like the fact that Laurie was leaving. He flung himself on her lap and hugged her tightly, Laurie had tears in her eyes as she held him. Iggy climbed up in her lap, too. Eddie yawned a few times, glanced at the TV, and fell asleep.

  “Harmony, could you just take me to the airport?” Laurie asked. “I don’t think I’m up to parting with Eddie unless I do it right now.”

  “I wanted you to meet Billy,” Harmony said—she was upset that Laurie was leaving so abruptly.

  “Maybe we could go by the jail and say hello to him on our way to the airport,” Laurie said. “I’m just afraid that if I stick around another day I’ll be too chicken to leave—and I know in my gut that it would be better for all of us if I go back for a while.”

  “I don’t know why,” Harmony said. “I was hoping we could take care of one another.”

  “I know,” Laurie said. “Maybe we can, in our way. I just think it’s too soon for me to totally throw in my lot with you and Eddie. I’m afraid I’ll get so far out of my other life that I can never get back, even though I don’t really know what I mean when I say my other life. I don’t know what life I have that I’m so afraid of getting out of.”

  She stroked Eddie’s hair. Iggy licked her fingers.

  “You’ve got all that stuff with your family to deal with,” Laurie reminded her. “And all that stuff came up just in one day.”

  Harmony thought she knew what Laurie was saying. She was saying that life was going to push them on, past Pepper. There was Eddie and Neddie and Pat and her father to think about. Pepper was quiet in her death, past all pain and hurt. But those who still lived were loud. Their cries were carrying her on, past Pepper’s silence. Pepper had stopped, but she and Eddie and Laurie couldn’t stop—the only stopping they could have, where Pepper was concerned, was in memory.

  “It would be selfish to stay together now,” Laurie said. “I have people who need me, too, you know. I kind of have a little set I ran off from. Maybe some of the cousins would come and stay with Eddie while you run me to the airport. I better just make some reservations.”

  Laurie got a reservation from Tulsa via Chicago to New York; then Harmony got on the phone and called Pat, to see if either of her daughters wanted to come and sit with Eddie. Pat volunteered to come herself.

  “I’ve been sitting here climbing the walls,” Pat said. “I was about to head out to the oil rigs.”

  “Why the oil rigs?” Harmony asked, when Pat showed up at the motel.

  “Because there’s always pills around an oil rig,” Pat said. “Sometimes the roughnecks work two or three days straight—they have to have a little speed to help them stay awake.”

  “Pat, I thought you said heroin,” Harmony said. “I didn’t know you took speed.”

  “Harmony, I’m sort of a general drug addict,” Pat admitted. “If I can’t get one drug I’ll take another, particularly when there’s no sex on the horizon, and there’s no sex on the horizon right now, not in smelling distance anyway.”

  “What about Rog?” Harmony asked.

  “No message from Rog,” Pat said. “I expect that means he’s found a new love.”

  Harmony and Laurie didn’t go by the jail, after all. They turned off the freeway, toward town, but then they looked at one another and decided they’d rather just spend Laurie’s last hour or two together.

  “I’m sure your brother’s nice, but I don’t think I can stand to look at any more sadness, right now,” Laurie said. “I suppose there’s just as much sadness everyplace as there is here, but somehow it seems more concentrated when you’re in a place where there aren’t many people. At least in New York there are millions of people—it sort of spreads the sadness out.”

  Harmony agreed. Lots of times, in the casinos, watching all the little old ladies pulling the handles of the slots and watching the money they had worked for all their lives wash away, Harmony had got a sense of the sadness of things, but at least it was spread out among all the people in the casinos. In Tarwater it was sort of more tightly packaged.

  “I miss Eddie already,” Laurie said, when they were back on the highway, heading toward Tulsa. “That little boy sure tugs at your heartstrings.”

  Harmony was trying to imagine how it would be if Laurie changed her mind at the last minute and decided to stay with them—would it work, or would it mean that Laurie had had an odd life, of the sort she herself had lived, a life in which nothing emotional had ever quite worked?

  “Laurie, do you think I have to find a man so Eddie can have a male role model?” she asked. They could already see the lights of Tulsa, glowing in the distance. Harmony had no idea where the airport was, although Pat had tried to give good directions. Suddenly Harmony felt she had to hurry up and ask Laurie all the questions she had meant to ask her over the next few years.

  “I’d think just having your dad there would provide enough of a male role model,” Laurie said. “Your father is a really fine man.

  “I don’t know that Eddie even needs a male role model,” she added. “Eddie sort of is the model—you know what I mean?”

  Then they were suddenly at the exit to the airport—Harmony knew that her time with Laurie was slipping away real quickly. The biggest block of time they got that wasn’t frantic was in the ticket line. The old woman in the line just ahead of them turned out to be going to Russia, and there were quite a few things wrong with her ticket. All the people behind them in the line began to get huffy. They were incensed that an old fat lady was taking so long to get her ticket changed.

  “The truth is, Pepper was only interested in me for a few months, Harmony,” Laurie said. “I kept on wanting her but she stopped wanting me.”

  “Did it make you sad?” Harmony asked. She was taken aback by the comment and felt she had to say something.

  “Make me sad—it broke my heart,” Laurie said. “I mean, she still liked living with me and everything—she just didn’t want to have sex. I didn’t get it then, and I’ll never get it. She just stopped wanting me.”

  “Did it make you want to leave?” Harmony asked. She noticed that there were several rodeo cowboys in the ticket line—maybe the rodeo in Tulsa had just ended or something.

  “Yeah, I wanted to leave, but I didn’t leave—I didn’t have the guts,” Laurie said. “I pretended it was just a phase. I kept telling myself that one day Pepper would want me again. Maybe it would be a year, maybe it would be two—but one day we would have sex again. I mean, it’s not like our whole lives were gloomy—we’d go out and eat and stuff, or go see some comedy. We’d have fun. I spent a lot of time pretending things would change, but they didn’t.”

  When the old woman who was going to Russia finally got her ticket worked out, there was only time to buy Laurie’s ticket and rush for the plane.

  “This is happening too quickly, but maybe it’s better,” Laurie said. They only had time for a kiss and a hug and a few tears; then Laurie was on the plane and gone; gone away.

  Harmony took a seat by the window where the plane sat. She didn’t w
ant to leave the airport until she knew for sure that Laurie’s plane was actually taking off. Also, the running and the emotion had left her feeling a little weak in the knees. She felt she could use a little rest before she had to face the task of trying to find her way back to Tarwater. She knew it was north, but that was about all she knew. Fortunately the Best Western was right on the highway—if she could find north, then she probably wouldn’t miss it.

  While she was resting, waiting for the plane to move off the gate and fly Laurie back to her life in New York, Harmony noticed a young cowboy, sitting a few seats away. The cowboy was short and skinny. When she glanced at him she saw that he was bent over, with his face in his hands, crying. His skinny shoulders were shaking, and his black cowboy hat had fallen off his head and was on the floor, by his boots.

  Harmony had never been able to ignore distress, even if what was causing the distress was totally none of her business. Maybe the boy’s mother had just died. Maybe his girlfriend had just left him for his best friend. Maybe someone had stolen all his money. All he had with him was a small duffel bag, with a pair of spurs dangling from the handle, and a rope. His boots were dusty and his pants legs were a little too long—he had stepped on the cuffs and left them pretty frayed. Since he had his face in his hands it was difficult to tell exactly how old he was, but he looked to be only in his late teens.

  Harmony saw Laurie’s plane backing away from the gate. For better or worse, Laurie was gone. She got up and started to walk on past the young cowboy—maybe he would prefer to be sad privately. Then she stopped and went back to him. After all, she was soon going to have to start dealing with all the problems in her family, why not get a little practice in the airport?

  “Can I help you, sir?” she asked, sitting down beside him.

  The boy, his face wet with tears, looked up at her—his look was blank.

  “I just saw that you were upset,” Harmony said. “I’m sorry if I intruded.”

  “Jody’s dead,” the young man said, simply, as if it should be obvious to any passerby why he was sitting in the Tulsa airport at midnight, crying.

  “That old pickup of ours didn’t have no seat belts on the driver’s side,” he went on. “Jody always drove like a bat out of hell even when there wasn’t no hurry. She missed a curve and flipped. Got thrown clean out of the window and broke her neck. Kilt instantly. The kids weren’t hurt, though.”

  Then he paused, as if a new fact had just dawned on him.

  “Oh, God,” he said. “How am I gonna raise them without Jody?”

  “Jody was your wife?” Harmony asked.

  “Yep, only she ain’t no more, she’s dead, and I got two kids to raise and not a cent to my name. I sure can’t make enough calf roping to support two kids, so I guess that’s the end of rodeoing.”

  “You were in the rodeo?” Harmony asked—mainly she was just trying to absorb the fact that this child with the red, tear-streaked face already had children of his own—children who were now without a mother.

  “By the way, I’m Harmony,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind if I sit with you for a while.”

  “No, ma’am, I don’t,” the boy said. “I’m Wesley Straw. I come all the way up here from Lubbock and didn’t win a cent. I don’t know how we’ll even scrape up the money to bury Jody. Her pa just had his leg amputated—he drunk so much whiskey it shriveled up his leg. Her folks don’t have a cent, and my folks don’t think I should have married Jody in the first place. I don’t know whether they’ll help me bury her or not.”

  He sighed and dropped his head back into his hands. The deep sobs came again. Harmony put her arm around him. She wasn’t sure that he would accept it, but he did; he clung to her gratefully. Wesley Straw was so skinny that hugging him was a little like hugging Pepper—every time she had hugged her daughter in her life she felt her bones.

  “Oh God, ma’am, I just can’t believe she’s dead,” Wesley said. “All she was doing was driving home. They estimate she was going better than ninety and there wasn’t a thing to do once she got home except sit there with the kids and watch cartoons.”

  “Maybe you can get back to rodeoing a little later, Wesley,” Harmony said, still hugging him—she was trying to say something that might make him feel at least a little hopeful.

  But Wesley Straw shook his head.

  “I should have give it up already,” he said. “It was just a dream I had, when I was growing up. I wanted to be a world’s champion cowboy so bad—or at least to get to the national finals. But I can’t afford my own trailer, so when I enter a rodeo I have to borrow a horse to rope off of. But that’s no good. I ain’t familiar with the horse, and the horse ain’t familiar with me. Sometimes I’ll be riding a different roping horse every time I rope. You don’t get nowhere that way. All the good ropers got their own trailers and their own horses.

  “It don’t matter now,” he went on. “Jody was getting tired of me going off and never bringing home no money. I would have had to give up and go to work in the oil fields anyway, pretty soon. God, I hate the thought of spending the rest of my life working in the stinking oil fields.”

  “Wesley, I lost my daughter, recently,” Harmony said.

  “Aw, ma’am, that’s worse,” Wesley said, turning his anguished eyes to hers. “Losing Jody is hell, but if I was to lose one of my girls I’d take a shotgun and blow my head off.”

  On impulse he dug in his pocket and pulled out a sweat-stained wallet and showed Harmony small snapshots of his daughters, aged three and four.

  “That’s Jilly,” he said. “And this is Jane.”

  Then he pulled out a picture of his wife.

  “And this is Jody,” he said, offering Harmony a picture of a thin-faced, pretty brunette. The little girls both looked like their mother, except that their hair was in braids.

  Just then Wesley Straw’s flight was called. He popped up and put his black hat back on his head—it looked much too large for his small head and thin neck. He picked up his duffel bag, which made his spurs jingle a little.

  “It’ll be late when I get to Lubbock and I’ll still have eighty miles to hitch,” he said, pausing for a moment. “Jody was planning to get a babysitter and meet me but that plan’s gone with the wind.”

  Harmony reached in her purse and took out some bills—she had an urge to offer the young man something.

  “Please take this, Wesley,” she said. “Maybe you can get a cab to take you home.”

  Wesley Straw looked at her strangely.

  “A cab? In Lubbock?” he said. “They’d think I was crazy if I showed up at home in a cab.”

  “But you shouldn’t have to hitchhike, Wesley, if it’s late at night,” Harmony said. “Don’t you have a friend who could come and get you?”

  “I didn’t call none of them—rather hitch,” he said. “That way I won’t have to deal with it for an hour or two longer. I can try to pretend it didn’t happen.”

  He gave Harmony a little nod, and a grateful glance before getting in line to board the plane. Then he dried his eyes on his shirtsleeve and straightened his black hat on his head. There was something about his look that broke Harmony’s heart. He was only nineteen, he had said, and now he was flying off to try his best to be a brave cowboy and raise his little girls, letting go forever his dream of being a world’s champion calf roper and getting to compete in the national finals rodeo; all because his wife was driving too fast and failed to make a curve. Probably it had been hard for Wesley to keep up his hopes anyway, since he didn’t even have enough money to own a trailer and didn’t get to rope off his own horse. But he had still been trying, still flying to rodeos. Now it was over.

  Harmony walked out of the airport into the hot night, so devastated by Wesley’s tragedy that she couldn’t find the pickup. She had to walk back and forth in the parking lot for fifteen minutes before she found it. She wasn’t actually looking for it very hard, though—she was thinking of Wesley, his little thin-faced wife dead on the high
way at eighteen; maybe she had been a good mother to her little girls even if she did drive too fast.

  Harmony stood by the pickup a few minutes; then she went back into the airport and made a reservation for Eddie and her father and herself to fly to Las Vegas on the evening of the next day. She didn’t have enough money on her to buy the tickets just then, and she wouldn’t have enough tomorrow, either, but she thought she could probably borrow a little money from Billy, enough to get them all home. Billy, despite his problems, had always been good at making money—he owned property in Tulsa and seemed to mostly win when he gambled on sports. She had a great urge just to get her son and father and go right back to the place where she felt most at home.

  The fact was, it could all end in a minute, as it had for Wesley Straw. One moment his wife had been alive, the next he was a single parent of two little girls. All around her, even in the small airport in Tulsa, cords that had knitted lives together were being cut. Probably there were several people, sleeping now in Tulsa, who had lost loved ones but hadn’t even got the phone call yet, informing them of their loss; they didn’t yet know, as they slept, that they would wake to discover that their lives had changed forever, as hers had when she opened Laurie’s yellow letter and discovered that Pepper was dead.

  She walked back to the pickup and then returned to the airport for a third time; she dug in her purse and found the number Gary had given her—Ross’s work number, Gary claimed. She dialed and then realized she didn’t have enough change to make a call to Las Vegas, so when the operator came on she billed the call to her parents.

  The man who answered the phone definitely wasn’t Ross; in fact he sounded a good deal like Denny, an old boyfriend but not one of the better ones. It fit that it would be Denny, since the place she called was a burlesque house. Working in burlesque would certainly suit Denny, if there was one thing he liked it was tits.

  “Could I please speak to Ross?” she said, trying to make her voice sound neutral—if it was Denny she was hoping he wouldn’t realize it was her on the phone.