The Late Child (52 page)

Pat slowly started the pickup and drove down the road to the exit by the Best Western; then she drove Harmony around to the back of the motel.

“If there's anything I can do to help, I will,” she said, as Harmony was getting out.

“No, just tell Eddie his mother will see him later,” she said. She knew it sounded formal but it was the best she could do.

“I like Laurie, for what it's worth,” Pat said. “I think she's a real nice young lady.”

“She is, bye,” Harmony said, getting out.

Once she was in the motel, Harmony only sank lower. She felt she was going to die of the tearing and splintering feeling inside. I can't die, she kept telling herself. I can't die, I've got Eddie. Who would he have if I died?

She didn't get an answer to that one. Whether Eddie would be lucky enough to get anyone good to raise him if his mother died
was a question there was no one to answer. Little boys all over the world lost their mothers, without having any replacement ready. She knew that. It could be a war that took the mother; or it could be a fire, a flood, an earthquake, a tornado, even just a disease or a divorce. It was a thing that happened constantly, wherever there were mothers and children; then the little boys or girls would just have to get by on whatever guts or strength they had. Probably luck was what they needed most; not too many little children could be expected to be strong enough to deal with the loss of a mother particularly well. Harmony didn't want Eddie to have to try. At least she was in her room; she had managed not to get run over on a four-lane in Oklahoma.

After Harmony had been in the room a minute or two she thought she still heard the pickup, so she looked out. Pat was just sitting there; probably she was concerned. Even so, Harmony checked to be sure the door was locked; she even put the little chain across it. She didn't want Pat or anyone else coming in. She sat on the bed, expecting to cry her eyes out, but no tears came. She just sat there, trying to cope with the terrible sense that she was lost. There was no way back to where she needed to be. She needed to be the self she had once been, but she couldn't. That self had gotten shattered; there were just pieces of it floating around, she didn't think she had much hope of getting the pieces to fit together into a person again. She didn't know what her next step was; she had no clue.

She heard the pickup turn slowly in the motel parking lot; then it left. Probably Pat had just lingered because she dreaded showing up at the barbecue without Harmony. Evidently it was a very big deal that Dick had taken off work in order to cook.

After Harmony sat for a few minutes on the end of the bed, feeling crazy, so crazy that she could not predict her next action, she began to take her clothes off. Her mind was whirling. She began to have the fantasy that a lover was coming to sleep with her, to hold her and help her be a little less upset. Even while she was having the fantasy she knew she had been dislodged from sanity: there was no lover coming, there was no one coming; what
sickness or sadness was loose inside her to make her suppose or even imagine that a lover was coming? The fantasy kept flickering, though. She even went to the bathroom and combed her hair.

The fantasy was evidence that she had broken down. No man in Oklahoma even knew she was there, unless you counted Peewee, and Peewee was very unlikely just to show up in the middle of the morning, expecting her to be sitting naked on the bed, with her hair combed, expecting to make love.

Harmony stood up and paced around the room; then she stopped and rubbed some lotion onto her hands. She was trying hard to think of normal activities, such as rubbing the lotion on her hands; anything that might slow her thoughts down long enough to allow her to slip back into the mode of sanity. If she could just get past the crazy whirling feeling maybe she could get enough of a grip to be a little bit helpful to her loved ones again.

Then she heard what sounded like a big lawn mower, which seemed odd. The parking lot was paved, why would they be mowing it? When she peeked out the window she saw that she had been right, it was a lawn mower, only it was the area behind the parking lot, a sort of weedy field, that was being mowed.

In the field the weeds and Johnson grass grew so tall in places that they hid the mower, which was on the backside of the field. When the mower came in sight—it was a big riding mower—she saw that the guy riding it was young, maybe about twenty. He had long hair and was mowing with his shirt off; the mower threw up a lot of grass and chaff that would have got inside his shirt and made him itch, if he'd kept his shirt on. As he mowed around the edge of the parking lot the mower spewed up the remains of several Styrofoam coffee cups that people drinking coffee in the parking lot had been careless with. Little pieces of white Styrofoam and stems of weeds spumed into the parking lot, in the wake of the big mower. The young man was sweaty—mowing was hot work. Still, Harmony thought he looked good. She had not thought about a guy, young or otherwise, in that way in a while; certainly Jimmy Bangor, the last man she had been with, had never on his best day looked half as good as the young man on the
mower. Jimmy had some pretty unattractive tattoos—also he had not bothered to watch his weight.

Harmony peeked out the window and watched the young man mow for a while; she liked the confident way he steered the mower, clipping just the patches of weeds he wanted to clip. It was nice to see a young man with smooth muscles doing his work. But, after a while, she closed the curtain and got in bed. In the old days she might have thrown something on and gone out and chatted with the young guy for a bit. She could at least have given him a smile—something might have happened, or maybe not. In those days, with her perfect figure, sex appeal was just something that was always there, available; if it didn't work with one guy it would soon work with another.

In bed, Harmony slowly began to feel a little better—no reason, but the feeling that she had gone haywire was easing a little. She looked at her motel room. Clothes were strewn everywhere, as if she were in the midst of torrid love or something. She felt she had better try to get ahold of someone from her old life—maybe they would assure her that she wasn't crazy. Who would that be but Gary?

“Who is it? I'm asleep,” Gary said, picking up after only about six rings. Probably he had had a late night and was not in the best of moods.

“Gary, it's me, I'm in a motel,” Harmony said. “I went crazy a minute ago. I think I cracked up.”

“Harmony, I was up very very late,” Gary said, reproachfully.

“Gary, what else is new?” Harmony said. This was a man who had been up late every night of his life and would undoubtedly be up late the day he died unless he happened to die around nine o'clock in the evening or something.

“All I meant is, don't rush me,” Gary said, backing off from the reproachful tone a little. “I'll get in synch with you as soon as I get my eyes open—I tried tanning yesterday and my eyelids are sticky from all the goo.”

Harmony held the receiver and waited. Probably Gary had
several drugs coursing through his body; she knew she should try to be a little patient.

“Now then, I'm getting awake, how are you?” Gary asked. “Life out here just isn't the same without you.”

“Gary, I miss you—I don't know what I'm going to do,” Harmony said.

“I'm naked,” she added, just to kind of fill him in on the scene. Gary liked details. She looked at the clothes strewn all over the room—she had taken off every last stitch—and tried to remember why she had started taking clothes off in the first place. She had sort of torn them off in the minute or two when she had felt the craziest.

“My God, naked?” Gary said. “I don't think you've been naked since you left the show. I wonder what your boobs look like now.”

“Gary, they're bigger,” Harmony said—the sound of his voice was really reassuring; it was deeply comforting in fact. The sound of Gary's voice drew her back into his world, which had been her world too, most of her life.

“I wish I could see you,” Gary said. “Naked, I mean. I haven't seen you naked since you left the show.”

“I don't think you'd want to look at me now,” Harmony said. “I let myself go.”

“You had the best figure ever seen in Las Vegas,” Gary reminded her—probably he was just trying to cheer her up. “It was glory. But nobody gets to keep glory forever, though, sweetie. Why do you have all your clothes off, anyway? I hope you're inside, at least. I read that the ozone layer is very thin in Oklahoma.”

“I'm inside a motel, calm down,” Harmony said. “I lost it today, Gary. Dick took off work to barbecue chicken for me and I lost it on the way to Neddie's house and didn't go. I came here to be alone and I took off all my clothes.”

“Does that mean you're thinking about being a nudist, or are you in love, or what?” Gary asked. “I don't get it about the naked part. You were usually pretty modest for a showgirl.”

“I felt like my clothes were strangling me,” Harmony said. It was the only explanation she could offer.

“I think you should come right back today and get started with your shrink,” Gary said. “You and Eddie can stay with me until you get on your feet.”

“Don't you have a boyfriend?” Harmony asked.

“No, the little prick left me for a Salvadoran drug dealer,” Gary said. “All those greasy creeps do is corrupt American boys. Got a pencil?”

“No, why?” Harmony said; then she spotted one on the bedside table.

“Because I have Ross's phone number for you,” Gary said. “We should just bomb El Salvador and be done with it.”

“Gary, I don't think we have to bomb a whole country just because you lost your boyfriend—what's the number?” she asked.

Gary gave it to her, and she scrawled it down. Her handwriting was a little shaky, probably from the period of craziness.

“Ross is right here in Las Vegas—he's working the lights for a burlesque show,” Gary said.

Harmony didn't say anything, but it wasn't a big surprise that Ross had sunk to the level of burlesque. There was a lot of technology involved in doing the lights for the big shows now—probably Ross just hadn't kept up.

Gary could never stand it when there was silence on the line; he immediately rushed in with a question.

“What about your love life?” he asked. “Any swinging surprises on your trip? I've had a few lovers from Oklahoma myself.”

“Gary, I'm in mourning, I haven't been thinking about sex,” Harmony said, though the truth was, when she had seen the young guy with his shirt off, mowing the lawn, she
had
thought about it briefly—maybe if sex could have happened it would have distracted her from the tearing inside. It was a bad thought, though—he was just a young guy mowing a field. He probably had a little girlfriend or a little wife somewhere. Fortunately the worst of her pain had begun to ebb; she was in a state so awful that she would just have offered herself to a stranger—it
had only been a moment when she wanted to get her hands on the young guy.

While she was talking she managed to hook her toe under her underpants; she pulled them to her and quickly slipped them on. Her time of being naked was over.

“The thing is, Eddie loves my dad, and my dad is old,” Harmony said. “Eddie might not get very much time with my dad—I don't want to cheat him of a chance to know Daddy.”

“Who said you had to? Leave him for a few days,” Gary said. “You could stay with me and look for an apartment, and then bring all your stuff out.”

“Gary, I don't have any stuff, it all fell into a canyon,” Harmony said, remembering the accident.

“Then we'll just go to Kmart and buy you some more,” Gary said. “I'll borrow some money or something. It would be fun to help you select furniture. That stuff you had deserved to fall into a canyon, if you ask me.”

The thought of being without Eddie, even for a few days, caused a panic feeling to set in; she would have to be a lot more stable than she was to be able to be without Eddie.

While she was talking to Gary somebody knocked on the door. Her first thought was that it was the young guy on the mower—maybe he had caught a glimpse of her through the window and had come over to investigate; after all, he was of an age to be adventurous. Maybe he had caught sight of a tit or something.

She got into her clothes real quick; whoever was at the door knocked again. When she opened it there stood her sister Neddie and her brother-in-law Dick. Both had plates in their hands. One plate had barbecued chicken on it; the other had corn on the cob, green beans, and a sliced tomato.

“The tea's in a thermos,” Dick said—the first words he had spoken to her in a few years. Dick had a real slow manner of speaking. He sounded sort of gruff even when he was trying to be friendly.

“We wasn't about to let you miss out on all that good grub,” he added, handling her the plate of vegetables.

“Dick, I'm so sorry, I know you took off work to make me lunch,” Harmony said. “I just got too upset to come. I really am touched that you took off work.”

“It's happened twice, since we married,” Neddie said, in her dry way. “When it does happen we all have to buck up and take advantage of it, even if we feel like hanging ourselves at the time.”

Dick didn't react to Neddie's comment at all—Harmony thought it sounded a little sarcastic. He just walked back to the car and got the thermos of iced tea.

“We brought extra corn on the cob,” Dick said. “Neddie said you used to like it.”

Harmony felt she should hug Dick—after all, she hadn't seen him in nearly fifteen years. But she still had a few buttons to button; she had dressed hastily. Dick set the thermos down and stood there, with his hands in the pockets of his big overalls. Harmony had forgotten how large he was; his hair was white around the edges of his dozer cap. He still had the large wart on one side of his nose that he had had since he married Neddie. His big arms were brown, from working in the sun; the thick hairs on his arms were silver against his brown skin. He was just standing there, looking at her, planted, like a large tree. Harmony decided the moment for hugging had passed—maybe she would get a good opportunity later.