The Late Child (57 page)

“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 highway 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.

“He's on his break, I'll see if he's around,” the voice said. Then, bad luck, it turned out that it
was
Denny, and the neutral tone didn't work, he immediately recognized her voice.

“Hey, is this who I think it is?” he said.

“Denny, can I just speak to Ross, it's real important,” Harmony said. The last thing she needed was a telephone conversation with Denny. As she was talking she remembered that she had caught a glimpse of Denny on his motorcycle, not long ago. He had put on a lot of weight, which fit with what she had heard from Gary, which was that Denny had become a bouncer in a titty bar somewhere on the outskirts of town. Sure enough, she had called a titty bar and who had picked up the phone but Denny?

“Well, you can speak to Ross if I can find the little wimp, but why would you want to when you can speak to me?” Denny asked. He had always been vain. “Better than that, you can come on out here and suck my dick, it would be like old times, wouldn't it, babe?”

“Denny, my daughter is dead, would you go get Ross?” Harmony said; she was wondering why Denny and Ross had to be working in the same titty bar.

“Oh,” Denny said. “Okay. I think he stepped outside for a minute, I'll go see if I can find him.”

There was a pause, as if Denny was maybe considering apologizing for his remark about her sucking his dick; but he didn't make the apology, he had never apologized for anything, that she could remember. It was true that he was obsessed with blow jobs; one of the things that flashed through her mind when he made the remark was that he had once asked Pepper to give him a blow job; Pepper had been no more than sixteen at the time. Harmony felt a twinge of guilt for having brought her daughter into contact
with such a man; it was one of the many puzzles of her life, that she had had such a big attraction for a man who had so few redeeming qualities. Gary just put it that she liked bad boys; he told her several times that she wouldn't be interested in Denny for five minutes if he reformed and became a decent citizen; of course, it never happened, Denny didn't have the slightest interest in becoming a decent citizen. Whether that had prompted all that sex she didn't know—but she did feel a little wistful for the days when she could get attracted to a guy. It had been a while since anything that compelling had happened to her in the romantic area.

Then she heard footsteps on the other end of the phone; probably Ross was coming. She felt a strong urge to hang up—why should she have to stand in the airport, in the middle of the night, charging a long-distance call to her parents, in order to tell a man who hadn't even been interested enough in Pepper to make her birthday parties that she was dead? When Pepper had been a lead dancer at the Stardust, Ross had never once come from Reno to see her show. It was no big deal to get from Reno to Las Vegas, either—the bottom line was, no interest.

“Harmony?” Ross said—he sounded tentative, probably he had not been expecting to get a phone call while he was on his break. From the way he said her name she could tell that it was not an entirely pleasant surprise, either.

“Ross, Pepper is dead, she died of AIDS in New York, she's already cremated,” Harmony said—it seemed best just to get it out.

“You mean our daughter?” Ross asked. “Our little girl?”

“Ross, she was in her twenties,” Harmony said. “You should have kept in touch.”

“What? I guess I lost her phone number,” he said. “Oh my God. You mean our little girl is dead?”

“Ross, she died of AIDS in New York City,” Harmony said. Then, to her own surprise, she just hung up. What was the point of telling Ross or any man that he should have kept in touch? Ross had never particularly been in touch. The only
touch that mattered to him was the sex act—long forgotten by both parties involved—that produced Pepper in the first place.

This time she got out of the airport and into the pickup as fast as she could go. She didn't like all the memories that were crowding into her head—Denny and the sex and Ross never making it to the birthday parties, and a lot of others, most of them not nice memories. It was even disturbing to her that Ross and Denny were working in the same titty bar now. Ross had always hated Denny. He knew about Harmony's big attraction and was very jealous, since her attraction to him had never been that big—it was more of a chum thing with him.

She didn't have too much trouble getting out of Tulsa—north turned out to be easy to find; she didn't do ninety like Pat, but she kept up a good speed and pretty soon the sign for the Best Western appeared. She didn't go to the Best Western, though; she cruised on into Tarwater and parked at the jail.

Billy and Peewee were right where she had found them the night before, drinking beer and watching old Dick Van Dyke reruns. Harmony felt a little speedy, she was really ready to get home to Las Vegas and get Eddie back in school.

“Hi, Sis, where you been?” Billy asked. “Me and Peewee been hoping you'd show up. We've seen this episode of Dick Van Dyke about twenty times apiece.”

“Yep, we've nearly got it memorized,” Peewee said. His eyes lit up when he saw her, but Harmony wasn't in the mood to welcome the lighting up. It wasn't Peewee's fault that he reminded her of Ross, but he
did
remind her of Ross; just then it was hard for her to be very welcoming to anyone who reminded her of Ross.

“Billy, could you lend me money for three air tickets?” she asked. “I need to take Eddie home.”

“Plenty of money available,” Billy said. He seemed cheered a little, to think that he could be of some help to his sister.

“Who's the third ticket for?” he asked. He was pretty alert, for someone who had chosen to live his life in the local jail.

Harmony started to lie and say the third ticket was for Laurie. Her motive for the lie was that the minute she mentioned that
her father was leaving her mother it would be all over town. The fact that Sty was leaving Ethel would be all anyone would talk about, in the beauty parlor, in the filling station, or at the grocery store.

“I'm taking Daddy,” she said. She didn't want to start concealing family things from her brother.

“You're taking
Dad?
” Billy said. He looked delighted and even sat up straighter on the couch.

“That's the best news I've heard in years,” Billy said. “If there was a bottle of champagne in the icebox I'd break it out and we'd drink it. This might give Dad a new lease on life. He's been slipping fast, as things stood.”

“I wonder what Ethel will do, without Sty to torment,” Peewee said. “That's always been her main occupation, tormenting Sty.”

“She'll turn it on you, hoss,” Billy said. “She'll probably sue the city, claiming you ain't taking proper care of me—which you ain't, by the way.”

“I ain't?—what ain't I doing?” Peewee asked. He seemed startled by the thought that Billy considered him remiss in his duties.

“Well, the vacuum cleaner ain't worth a shit,” Billy said. “Also, we could use a VCR. I'm getting tired of memorizing these reruns.”

Billy went to his cell, came back with his checkbook, and gave Harmony a check for five thousand dollars.

“Billy, I don't need this much,” Harmony said.

“Take it for Dad,” Billy said. “I hope he finds a girlfriend and gets a new lease on life, out there in Las Vegas.”

“Couldn't you come out to the motel with me, again?” Harmony asked. “I'd like you to meet Eddie.”

“Sure, I'd like to meet Eddie,” Billy said.

“Take him, Harmony,” Peewee said. “Just don't let him near a phone.”

When they got to the Best Western, Pat was in the parking lot, talking to a man in an older-model Cadillac. The man had
the door of the car open, but when he saw them he closed it and drove away.

“There's Pat, meeting her pusher,” Billy said. He seemed a little annoyed.

“Billy, I've taken drugs, don't be judgmental,” Harmony said. Pat looked a little forlorn, standing there waiting for them.

“Oh, I ain't judgmental,” Billy said. “It's the law that will be judgmental, when they finally pull the plug on her embezzling. You could have two siblings in the same jail, if you ain't careful.”

“Hi, Billy,” Pat said. “Peewee must have lost his mind to let you come out here to a motel full of telephones.”

“Peewee's too in love with Harmony to deny me anything,” Billy said.

“Eddie woke up about half an hour ago and he's wired,” Pat said.

When they went inside Eddie was wearing the long T-shirt that he preferred to sleep in, and he was using the bed as a trampoline again, bouncing as high as he could. Iggy was snarling and trying to catch the end of Eddie's T-shirt—he thought it was a game.