Some Can Whistle

by Larry McMurtry

  I sent him to Texas, and a month later he filed a meticulous report, complete with Polaroids of house, school, little girls twirling batons, etc. Those Polaroids, so reassuring in their middle-Americanness, had formed my vision of T.R.’s childhood all these years. When I handed them to T.R., she immediately began to shake her head.

  “That’s me with the baton,” she said. “I did have a baton. It wasn’t my bike, though, and that sure wasn’t our house. That was Annie Elgin’s house. We was best friends for a while—her daddy owned the bank. I went to lots of slumber parties in that house till I got a bad reputation and didn’t get asked no more. Annie’s folks weren’t so bad. They knew Big Pa and Big Ma were crooks, but they let Annie have me over anyway, for a while.”

  “You didn’t live in this house?” I asked, although she had just told me she hadn’t.

  T.R. shook her head. “We lived two blocks from nigger town,” she said. “We were about as close to being niggers as you could get in Tyler, considering that we were white.”

  She looked at me with some concern to see how I was taking this news, and then began to read the report. She didn’t hurry. I was beginning to feel horrible. I felt like apologizing over and over, although T.R. was reading the report calmly enough, occasionally stopping to take a thoughtful swallow of vodka. When she finished she closed the folder and handed it back to me.

  “Isn’t any of it true?” I asked.

  “It’s all true,” T.R. said. “It’s just a report on Annie Elgin’s life, not mine. Big Pa ain’t dumb—that’s why he’s never been in jail, despite being a crook his whole life. He always expected you to come looking for me. He told me how horrible you were a million times—how you took dope and didn’t believe in Jesus. He knows every cop and every little courthouse secretary in East Texas. He pays off cops—gives them free body work in one of them crooked body shops he works with. He gets them silly old women in the courthouse to believing he’s about ready to divorce Big Ma and run off with them. He probably knew that detective was in Tyler before the man even found a parking place. I bet he bribed him before he even got unpacked.”

  “It never occurred to me,” I said. That was the humbling truth.

  “Oh, well,” T.R. said, “I don’t see that it matters a whole lot now. Big Pa just fixed it so you thought I was living like Annie Elgin. He’s fooled smarter people than us, I guess.”

  “I only saw the man once,” I said. “I never suspected he’d be that cagy.”

  We sat in silence for a bit. T.R. didn’t seem either surprised or disturbed by the fraud we had just discovered. I was surprised and disturbed, though. I felt horrible.

  “I haven’t been thinking about Annie Elgin lately,” T.R. said. “She was a real good friend to me. It’s nice she got to have a good childhood. These pictures just reminded me of how nice she was.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She was killed in a car wreck last year, with both her little boys,” T.R. said. “A truck just kinda drove over them—at least that’s what I was told. So don’t look so gloomy about that stupid detective. Annie had a nice childhood, and I didn’t, particularly, but I’m alive and my kids are perfect, and she and her kids are dead. That’s a lot sadder than what happened to us.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “But I still hate it that I was such a fool.”

  “Show me the presents,” T.R. said. “If you’ve really got the presents, then maybe you weren’t such a fool. Maybe you just didn’t know what else to do.”

  That was certainly true—I hadn’t known what else to do. For the first year or two after T.R. was born, when I was back in Hollywood and at my lowest ebb, I often called Sally, hoping she’d have softened toward me. She hadn’t, though; at the sound of my voice she always immediately hung up. Then she began to get unlisted numbers. The first little presents I got T.R. were refused at the post office. I probably wouldn’t even have known where the two of them were, had not Sally continued to expect me to pay for her life. She got my address off the packages I sent, and soon bills would arrive, mostly for car repair. She seemed to be continually wrecking cars; I always scrounged up the money and paid the bills because it was a way of keeping some kind of track of Sally and my child. I suppose I nourished the hope that someday Sally would come back to me, bringing our daughter. She didn’t, but she sent the bills, and I was able to keep up with the two of them through several moves—Lake Charles to Lufkin, Lufkin to Sherman, Sherman to Tyler. Jose Guerra hadn’t been forced to start from scratch. I had always known where to send T.R.’s presents.

  I took her to the closet where I kept them. From time to time I had been tempted to throw them away or give them to the children of friends. The thought of them, unopened and unseen in their closet, more than forty of them now, seemed too weird, even for me. Its weirdness had become oppressive—sooner or later, I imagine, I would have just told Gladys to get rid of them, but fortunately that day didn’t come. T.R. had come instead.

  Buying those presents on her birthday and at Christmas every year was a ritual I couldn’t let go of—it was the statement of my parenthood—though often I writhed inside when the saleswomen at the fancy toy stores I went to in Beverly Hills innocently asked me what my little girl liked. The worst part of buying the toys was having to deal with the salespersons’ questions—that and having the presents arrive back in the mail. I sent each of them off with hope—surely sooner or later Sally would let her keep one—and received them back with despair, but I went on buying them.

  I think T.R. hadn’t really believed me—not until the moment when she stepped into the closet where the presents were. She was fairly drunk, but I think it wasn’t vodka that caused her hands to tremble when she lifted the first present off the shelf. Except for the ten-speed bike, all the presents were still in their original gift wraps—some of which now looked as if they belonged in a museum of gift wrapping.

  She looked at me, a kind of fright in her eyes.

  “I never really thought this would happen, Daddy,” she said. “I’m shaking like a fuckin’ leaf. What am I supposed to do?”

  “You’re supposed to open your presents,” I said. “Let me get you a chair.”

  I got two chairs—fortunately it was a large walk-in closet. I sat in one, T.R. in the other, and we had a combined birthday party and Christmas morning, deferred for twenty-two years. As the fetus recapitulates the history of the species, T.R. and I recapitulated her own history and mine, a history that had floated unborn in both our consciousnesses until that hour. We progressed from stuffed animals—raccoons, possums, a giant koala that filled half the closet, to Barbie dolls and dollhouses, doll dishes, toy phones, radios, makeup kits, a rabbit-fur coat suitable for a ten-year-old; we went from preteen to teen to young woman, as represented in the styles of the times: tote bags, Walkmen, leather jackets, necklaces, bracelets, watches, ending with garments of the sort my girlfriends sent Gladys from the most advanced boutiques in the world.

  At first the unwrapping went solemnly, with very little talk. “Look at that sweet possum,” T.R. said, without conviction; I think she still found the fact that the presents were there hard to believe. I felt awkward too: I had never developed much confidence in my choice of presents; having to be confronted with the wavery decisions of ten and twenty years ago did nothing to calm my cranial pulses. Probably we both felt somewhat awed, so awed that for a bit it looked as if the whole thing was backfiring. We spoke very formally; instead of bringing us close at last, the fact of the presents, or the lost life they represented, was making us feel hopelessly separate. I got more and more nervous; T.R. spent more and more time not looking at me; she meticulously untied the ribbons around each present.

  Then who should wander up but Jesse, dragging her dirty old Cabbage Patch Doll. At the sight of the toys and stuffed animals her wide eyes widened further; she popped a thumb into her mouth. She started with wonder at the koala for a moment, but concluded it was more than she could cope with. Instead
, she dropped her Cabbage Patch Doll and grabbed the possum, bringing T.R. to life. For a moment motherhood was forgotten; she whirled on Jesse as if she were a sibling.

  “You put that down and get out of here!” she snapped. “You got plenty of toys. That’s my possum.”

  I was horrified—it was just a stuffed possum, the least of the presents—but no more horrified than Jesse, who dropped the possum as if it were hot and instantly took to her heels, wailing loudly as she ran to find Gladys, her bulwark.

  “It was just a possum,” I said, as mildly as possible.

  T.R. looked confused by her overreaction.

  “I don’t know what’s the matter with me, I must be drunk out of my mind,” she said. “Now I’ve bit Jesse’s head off too. See what you’ve done to me? It’s all this stuff! It’s this . . . stuff.”

  Before I could answer—I don’t know what I would have answered—she buried her face in the giant koala bear’s lap, sobbing loudly. When I put my hand on her shoulder she shrugged it off and clung more tightly to the koala. Her knee knocked over her drink and I had to snatch the rabbit coat off the floor to keep it from being soaked with vodka. At this point Bo appeared with his toy AK-47. He seemed to feel that the koala bear, not me, was the cause of the trouble; he began to pepper it with imaginary bullets. T.R. didn’t let this interrupt her sobbing. Muddy Box, wherever he was, sensed that something was amiss. He came cautiously down the hall and peeked into the closet.

  “Looks like what you all need is some paper towels,” he said calmly, and went to the kitchen to get some. I stood up and helped him make a carpet of paper towels. They soaked up most of the vodka, but a little stream had run under the koala bear.

  “Let me lift him up just a minute, T.R.,” Muddy said. “We don’t want this old bear to get his balls wet.”

  T.R. released the bear and grabbed Muddy, squeezing him tightly as the emotion broke out of her in gulps and snorts. Muddy calmly began to whisper to her, stroking her neck and back.

  Then Gladys showed up, carrying a wet-faced Jesse, who looked ready to hide her face in Gladys’s bosom if her mother yelled at her again. But T.R. didn’t yell; under Muddy’s patient ministrations she was calming down. Bo squeezed past me into the closet and began to inspect the loot, little of which held any interest for him. He leaned on my knee while he made his inspection; he even briefly handed me his machine gun while he tried out the toy phone. Seeing this, Jesse immediately wiggled out of Gladys’s arms and recaptured the possum. She tried to get the raccoon too, but Bo forestalled her by sitting on it. Jesse, keeping one eye on her mother, decided not to press her luck. Clutching the possum, she retreated to a safe position between Gladys’s legs before giving the possum the careful inspection she felt it merited.

  “Hi,” she said, after a moment, holding the possum up for Gladys to see.

  T.R. looked around at that moment, and Jesse froze.

  “Hey, what does a possum do, Jesse?” T.R. asked, sounding tired but sane.

  Jesse looked at the possum and shrugged, as if to say she had no idea what a possum did. “Hi,” she repeated.

  “A possum curls up and acts dead, so T.R. won’t be tempted to beat the shit out of it,” Muddy said. Then he proceeded to curl up on the floor of the closet in imitation of a possum.

  “Get up, Muddy, you’re gonna break my doll dishes,” T.R. said, but Muddy, charmed by his own imitation of a possum, kept silent until T.R. began to tickle him, whereupon he wiggled and sat up.

  “A possum can’t afford to be as ticklish as you are,” T.R. informed him. “Come on, I want to go in the bedroom and try on some of these weird clothes Daddy gave me. Some of them look like they were made to fit a boy—if you’re good I might give you a few.”

  “I may not be good, though,” Muddy reasoned.

  Bo stood up, got his machine gun, and annihilated the raccoon loudly, from point-blank range.

  “Wah!” Jesse said angrily, annoyed by this savagery.

  “She’s right, don’t be shooting raccoons, they’re cute,” T.R. said.

  She stood up and gathered up all the most recent presents, two or three of which were still unopened, stepping over Muddy and a mountain of wrapping paper on her way out of the closet.

  “You come too, Gladys, Muddy don’t know nothing about women’s clothes,” she said. “You better get some sleep, Daddy. You don’t look so good.”

  “Some of this wrapping paper looks older than me,” Gladys said. “I don’t usually see nothing that’s older than me.”

  “I’m older than you,” I reminded her, but I don’t think anyone heard me. Just then, Bo tried to climb the koala bear, which fell over, causing him to split his lip. Gladys picked him up and carried him screaming to the kitchen to wash the blood off. Taking advantage of her brother’s injury, Jesse quietly made off with her possum, plus the raccoon, and T.R. and Muddy departed for the bedroom, carrying large armfuls of clothes.

  No further notice was taken of me. I turned off the light in the closet and sat in the chair for a few more minutes, while the backwash of the crisis subsided. Perhaps it had been no worse, or really any different—no more climactic or anticlimactic—from a normal birthday party or an ordinary Christmas morning. I had no way of judging; I was just glad we had all survived it.

  Then I went to bed, and no sooner did I lie down than the migraine, that watchful Comanche, came screaming in the window.

  7

  I always sleep facing east: if you’re likely to have a Comanche camped in your skull much of the night, the first hint and tint of light is important. The sun was the one power that could force the Comanche into retreat; the reddening horizon out my window seemed to infuse my cells with hope.

  On the other hand, a gray dawn with clouds zipped to the horizon was bad news if I happened to be having a headache. Instead of the optimism sunlight brought, I wallowed in pessimism, depression, morbidity; I became like a sad Balt, as heavy with my headache as if I were living in Göttingen or Königsberg or someplace Kant or Hegel might have lived—somewhere in northern Europe where thought trod heavily under perennially leaden skies. My own thoughts hardly stirred at all on cloudy days.

  Unfortunately the day dawned in the Baltic mode, squally and dark gray. I felt the Comanche settling in. He had not whooped and hollered too much during the night, had contented himself with a campfire near my right temple, but he showed no sign of being inclined to depart.

  I kept my eyes shut for a while, hoping I had misread the morning. Perhaps when I opened my eyes again the sun would have made some headway; perhaps the clouds would have cracked, let a ray or two through.

  The clouds stayed put, my headache stayed put; but fortunately T.R. and Jesse were up and moving around. T.R., holding Jesse, peeked in the door.

  “Are you sick?” T.R. asked.

  I gave a weak wave; I wasn’t sure.

  “Come on in,” I said.

  She sat down rather cautiously on my bed. Jesse, still clutching her possum, indifferent to me at the moment, was angling for a breast, and, after much wiggling and pawing at T.R.’s gown, she eventually got one. T.R. slumped against the headboard of the bed, while Jesse sucked greedily, waving one foot in the air.

  “Slow down, I ain’t a gas pump,” T.R. said. She looked depressed—perhaps she had inherited my sun-dependency.

  “Did the clothes fit, more or less?” I asked.

  “Yeah, it’s like a miracle,” T.R. said. “All of a sudden I got a bunch of weird new clothes. Thank you.”

  She said it in a tone of such clear discontent that I winced, and she saw me wince.

  “I guess saving the presents wasn’t such a good idea after all, was it?” I said.

  “No, but I can’t figure out why not,” T.R. said. “You didn’t lie. You got me the presents. It makes me mad at Momma. She could have let me have one or two—then at least I would have known you were there, somewhere.”

  “She should have let you have all of them,” I said. “But sh
e didn’t, and it was stupid of me to think they make up for anything. It’s just stuff, like you said last night. There’s no way it can be the same as having a father.”

  Jesse abruptly switched breasts, which took some rearranging of T.R.’s gown, my pillows, etc. I looked at Jesse and saw her watching me through half-closed lids. T.R. adjusted her automatically; her mind was still on the birthday presents. She idly brushed Jesse’s light hair.

  “Sometimes I wish I was Jesse,” she said. “There’s a happy one. She’s not thinking about nothing except titty. She don’t waste a minute on all this depressing old stuff.”

  “Nobody’s Jesse except Jesse, though,” I said. “You and I can’t help but think about depressing things. We’ll never make up the time we missed, but on the other hand we’re not very old—even I’m not very old—and we’ve got a lot of time ahead of us. I bet our future’s going to be a lot happier than our past.”

  Jesse sat up, looked inward for a moment, and burped.

  “Hi,” she said, picking up her possum.

  “Hi, Jesse,” I said.

  T.R. didn’t look cheered by my optimistic prediction. She looked young, uncertain, and forlorn. I felt like taking her in my arms, but she didn’t look like a woman who felt like being taken into any man’s arms just then.

  “Muddy thinks you’re the weirdest man he’s ever met,” she said. “That don’t mean he don’t like you—he just says he never expected to meet anyone as weird as you. Have you still got that sick headache?”

  “Oh, I’ve got it,” I said.

  “Rich as you are, looks like you could get some pills for it,” she said.

  “I have pills,” I said. “But I don’t like to just whop these headaches with drugs. Now and then I do, but it’s not a smart idea. If you don’t manage to kill the headache completely, it’ll just wiggle off and hide until it can come back and bite you all the harder.”