The Late Child

by Larry McMurtry

  “Gary, don’t look that way. I want to make enough money to buy a car, otherwise Eddie’s going to be embarrassed,” Harmony said.

  The truth was, the people in her house—although they were her dearest friends—were beginning to depress her. Jasmine had passed out on the couch—her makeup was all runny.

  Meanwhile, Gary had gone to the bathroom and taken several pills. Gary had never been able to stay off speed; he claimed it was working odd hours that made him need it but why he needed it didn’t really matter; the fact was, Gary took a lot of speed. It made him bitchy when he was on his way up and even bitchier when he was on his way down. Pretty soon he was going to start bitching out Jessie, who had been crying continuously ever since she heard the news. If there was such a thing as a contest for continuous crying, Jessie would win hands down.

  Juliette had finally worn out and gone to sleep in a chair, and Myrtle, very drunk, was sowing disorder in Harmony’s kitchen. She was so drunk she couldn’t tell a clean dish from a dirty dish; she took a whole dishwasherful of unwashed dishes and put them back in the cabinet on top of the perfectly clean dishes that were already there.

  “Myrtle, those dishes haven’t been washed, please leave them in the dishwasher,” Harmony said.

  “Harmony, I was washing dishes before you were born,” Myrtle said. It was pointless to argue with her when she was drunk. Reason was the last thing Myrtle wanted to listen to; even when she was sober, she wasn’t crazy about listening to it.

  Harmony decided she couldn’t stand to be at home anymore. Of course, it was several hours before her sisters would be arriving from Tulsa, but she didn’t care. Several hours of sitting in the Las Vegas airport was preferable, in her view, to even one hour of watching Jessie cry or Jasmine smear her makeup or Myrtle sow disorder in her kitchen.

  So she drove Gary down to the Stardust, where he worked. He was in love with a Chicano boy who was a janitor there. Gary was happy to loan Harmony his car; his new love was on his mind, not his old Mercury.

  On her way to the airport, Harmony remembered Ross, Pepper’s father. She knew it was up to her to start looking for Ross; Gary had said he would ask around, and maybe he would, but Gary had never thought much of Ross. He had even sort of opposed the effort Harmony made to get back with Ross, seven years earlier, when Ross was working as a light man in Reno.

  Gary had been right about that one, her effort to hitch up with Ross again had been El Floppo, as Myrtle would say. Harmony knew before she went to Reno that Ross was involved with a young woman named Linda, who happened to be pregnant by him at the time, but she had allowed herself to be convinced that Ross’s relationship with Linda was just kind of a roommate thing. Then Harmony got to Reno and found out that the relationship with Linda wasn’t just a roommate thing—it was closer to being a mad passion; why Ross had even urged her to come to Reno she never knew. On the whole, that venture had been pretty discouraging—so discouraging that she hadn’t talked to Ross a single time since she got herself back on the bus and limped back to Las Vegas. For the next year or two her self-esteem was at a low ebb, which is probably why she ended up getting pregnant by Webb.

  Still, getting pregnant by Webb had produced Eddie, just as getting pregnant by Ross had produced Pepper: Harmony was not willing to think of either guy as just a total mistake.

  “Harmony, never go out with a guy with sideburns like that,” Gary had said, in disgust, the first time he met Webb. “Those sideburns are from another age.”

  It was true that Webb had biker sideburns—he had mainly been a biker until he got in the tow-truck business.

  “Gary, I guess my standards are just different,” Harmony said. She couldn’t imagine rejecting a guy with a shy grin like Webb’s just because his sideburns were a little long—that was before she knew about the impatience, of course, or any of Webb’s other bad habits, such as having five or six girlfriends strung out up and down I-15, from Las Vegas to San Bernardino.

  Speaking of impatience, Gary himself didn’t have much room to talk; he was becoming more and more intolerant of her boyfriends, although quite a few of his boyfriends were really nothing to write home about.

  “Your standards are the standards a doormat would have if a doormat wanted to claim it had standards,” Gary said. He was on his way down from taking too much speed and was unusually bitchy—later he apologized for that remark. It had hurt Harmony’s feelings; she didn’t feel she was exactly a doormat because she tried to be accepting of things about her menfolk that maybe she wasn’t too fond of, such as Jimmy’s digestive condition or Webb’s impatience; after all, nobody was perfect and if you weren’t willing to put up with a little imperfection in a guy, here and there, then the alternative was to have no relationship, and be alone.

  Harmony had gone to see Pepper’s rich husband, Mel, in the hospital in Tulsa, a few days before he died of pancreatic cancer. Mel was very weak at the time, he was on his way out and he knew it, but being weak didn’t make Mel less smart. Even if Pepper and Mel hadn’t actually lived together very long, before Pepper went to New York, Harmony considered that her daughter was lucky to have been married to a man who was so smart. Mel’s eyes were tired when Harmony visited him the last time; she could tell that he had had about enough of the pain and the struggle. Harmony was feeling apologetic about Pepper. After all, Pepper and Mel were still married and Mel was dying, but Pepper didn’t come to visit him—it seemed to her that Pepper ought to make a little more effort to be a wife in Mel’s last days as a living person.

  But when Harmony tried to apologize for her daughter, Mel smiled his sad little smile—it had been a sad little smile even before he got cancer of the pancreas—and shook his head.

  “We choose our lovers for their flaws, you know,” Mel said. “People would be bored shitless if they had to love only the good in someone they care about.”

  The comment took Harmony by surprise; it was not something you would expect a dying man to say—or any man to say, for that matter.

  “Pepper’s very very selfish,” Mel said. “You know that and I know that. Yet you and I are mature people, Harmony, and we both love her deeply even though we both know she’s totally selfish. She’s not going to walk around the block for either of us, but I’ll be thinking of her when I die, and I’ll be lucky that I had someone in my life who was flawed in such a way that I could love her that much.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t die, Mel,” Harmony said. He was such a kind man, and so wise, and he had been so good to Pepper.

  But, less than a week later, Mel did die—maybe it was better. At the end it was clear that he had been in too much pain, despite all the drugs they gave him. The pain still showed in his eyes.

  As Harmony was trying to ease Gary’s car into a parking space at the airport, she thought of Mel’s remark, about loving people for their flaws; she decided it was probably true. Most of the guys in her life had flaws you could drive a truck through; even so, she loved them. The one man who hadn’t seemed too flawed was Didier, her first lover, a Frenchman who produced the floor show at the Tropicana—Didier had died in a suite, upstairs at the Trop, one morning while waiting for his breakfast.

  Of course, Harmony had only been sixteen then; had she been older, she might have detected a few flaws in Didier; but she hadn’t been older, and she remembered her time with Didier as the one perfect love of her life. It was still all she could do not to cry when she thought of him, he had been so kind.

  There had been something in Didier’s kindness that reminded Harmony of Mel; she wished she could remember Didier better, so she could compare the kindnesses.

  In Mel’s kindness, it seemed to her, there was a kind of defeat—though it wasn’t that Mel wasn’t cheerful. Lots of times, after Pepper left for New York, Mel would ask Harmony over for dinner; maybe they’d just have soup or a salad or something and then play rummy or some simple card game. They would tell jokes, and reminisce about Las Vegas in the old days. Mel had even known Didi
er, for example.

  Still, Harmony thought she had at least a little intuition—there was some defeat lurking in Mel’s kindness; maybe there had been defeat in Didier’s kindness too; but, at sixteen, she had known nothing of the defeats that haunted men—what could she know? It was only remembering Mel’s remark about loving flaws that got her thinking about it; that, and the fact that Pepper and Mel were both dead.

  Harmony didn’t have a confident feeling about there being a heaven; somehow the descriptions she had heard didn’t ring true; but she did like to think that something of a person survived. She wanted to hope that Pepper and Mel would make some kind of contact in the afterlife, if there was one. Mainly she hoped it for Mel’s sake. He truly loved Pepper and really, in Harmony’s opinion, deserved more contact with her than he had got to have in life.

  When she and Gary walked out to his car that morning, the letter about Pepper was still there in the yard. One page was over in a corner of the yard, one page had sort of curled up, and the third page was under the little cactus. Harmony was for keeping on walking at that point, but Gary noticed the letter right away.

  “Is that the letter?” he asked.

  “Yes, let’s hurry, I don’t want to be late to the airport,” Harmony said.

  “Harmony, it’s at least five hours before your sisters will be here,” Gary said.

  “The plane could be early,” Harmony said—it was just a dodge, and she knew it. No plane was going to be five hours early. But she was afraid there might be something in the letter that was too upsetting—reading it might cause a bomb of grief to go off inside her, disabling her permanently. The bomb might damage her so badly that she wouldn’t be able to be a stable mom to Eddie—and being a stable mom was her one duty, now. Pepper was dead, there was no more to do for her, but there were years and years of waffles to make for Eddie, birthday parties to give, puppies to housebreak; someday there would be Little League, and trips to Disneyland, and thousands of meals involving macaroni and cheese and the other foods Eddie liked to eat.

  Gary, though, was oblivious to her worries about the bomb of grief. He gathered up the three pages of the letter and handed them to Harmony.

  “You’re going to have a long wait at the airport,” Gary said. “Maybe you’ll feel like reading this then.”

  “I’ll never feel like reading it, Gary,” Harmony said, but she put the letter in her purse anyway. Gary seemed to think she ought to preserve it.

  One thing Gary was right about was that she was going to have plenty of time on her hands once she got to the airport. It was four and a half hours until her sisters’ plane came in, but Harmony felt a little relieved at the prospect of the wait. It was nice of everybody to gather around at the time of tragedy, but it also took dealing with.

  At the airport, she didn’t have to deal with anything. She went straight to the bar and had five Bombay martinis—probably she had not consumed five Bombay martinis in her whole thirty years in Las Vegas. She didn’t feel them at all, either—the only problem was that the bartender looked familiar and actually was familiar; his name was Wendell, and he had once been a boyfriend of Myrtle’s.

  It wasn’t that Harmony didn’t like Wendell. She had always liked him—but the fact that he was a bartender made the airport a little less of a neutral zone. The last time she had seen Wendell he had been working at an Exxon station on the Strip; it was a shock to see him behind the bar at the airport lounge, serving her Bombay martinis at eight-thirty in the morning.

  “Harmony, that’s gin you’re drinking, not water,” Wendell commented—he seemed a little disapproving. Probably he just didn’t want her to drive, if she was drinking. It was good of Wendell to be concerned, but it didn’t explain why he had stopped being a filling station attendant on the Strip and become a bartender in the airport lounge.

  “Wendell, did you always want to be a bartender?” Harmony asked. She was curious about people who suddenly made big changes in their lives. The big changes that had come in her life had mostly been made from the outside; being fired from her job as a showgirl, for example, or getting pregnant by Webb.

  “I went to bartending school,” Wendell informed her, with some pride. “The thing was, I got tired of being greasy, and having to use that strong soap to get clean. That strong soap ain’t good for the skin.”

  By this time Harmony’s memory had begun to work a little. She remembered that Wendell had a son, and the son had died of AIDS. That Wendell had had a tragedy in his life made her feel sorry for him. Many times, in the old days, Harmony had defended Wendell against some of Myrtle’s wilder charges.

  “Wendell, do you remember my daughter?” Harmony asked—in those years she and Pepper had shared a duplex with Myrtle.

  “Pepper, why sure I remember her,” Wendell said. “Who could forget a girl that pretty?”

  “She’s dead,” Harmony said. “I just found out. I’m here to meet my sisters.”

  “My Lord, don’t tell me,” Wendell said.

  “That’s why I’m drinking, but it’s okay,” Harmony said. “My sisters live in Oklahoma, they’re both good drivers. They can drive me home.”

  “You’re in shock, no wonder you don’t feel that gin,” Wendell said. “How old was she?”

  “Twenty-two,” Harmony said. “Nearly twenty-three.”

  “Well, my Lord,” Wendell said. “My boy was twenty-three when he passed on.”

  Wendell had big, sad eyes. Harmony thought it said something good about his character that he had wanted to improve himself badly enough that he enrolled in bartending school. Not many men who were older and who had a big sorrow would keep trying to that extent.

  Harmony had several more Bombay martinis—now that he knew the circumstances Wendell had stopped being disapproving. Then she realized she might not have enough money to pay for so many drinks. Fortunately she had just enough cash, but it meant she had no money to leave Wendell as a tip, though she would have liked to tip him.

  “Don’t worry about no tip,” Wendell said, seeing her dilemma. “Couldn’t we have a date sometime? I’ve been moony about you all these years.”

  That was a bolt from the blue—she had been right to feel that the airport wasn’t as much of a neutral zone as she had hoped it would be.

  “Wendell, you have?” she asked, sort of stunned.

  “Sure, you remember how good I used to do your windshields?” he said.

  Harmony was flabbergasted, she hadn’t even seen Wendell in six or seven years, though now that he mentioned it, she did recall that he had done a very thorough job of cleaning her windshields if she happened to gas up at the Exxon where he worked.

  “I know Myrtle was mean to you, maybe that’s why,” Harmony said.

  “No, it’s because you’re beautiful, that’s all the why there has to be,” Wendell said.

  All of a sudden Harmony felt drunk. She was having trouble even closing her purse, and Wendell seemed to be hovering over her, waiting for some form of answer about the date. She was regretting that she didn’t have enough money just to leave him a tip, it would make things so much simpler. What made it all complicated was that it had just occurred to her that when people died there was a funeral, but Pepper was already cremated, could there be a funeral for a person who was cremated?

  “Wendell, Pepper’s cremated, can there still be a funeral?” Harmony asked; maybe Wendell would know—even if he didn’t it might sort of deflect the question of the date.

  “Sure, you can have any kind of service you want, we had a real nice one for Johnny,” Wendell said.

  Harmony was about to ask him if she could think about the date for a day or two, but that was just a slow way of saying no. His big sad eyes would just get sadder, and, anyway, Jimmy Bangor was gone; there was no particular reason why she shouldn’t have a date with Wendell. After all, they had something in common: a dead child.

  Later, Harmony couldn’t exactly remember how they left it about the date; the next thing she k
new, she was standing in front of a picture of herself with Mr. Sinatra—a picture made long ago. The walkways that led to the boarding lounges were lined with photographs of famous celebrities who had performed in Las Vegas. There were showgirls in quite a few of the pictures, and, down one of the walkways, there was a picture of her with Elvis, another of her with Liberace, and one of her with Mr. Sinatra—that was the one she had just happened to stop in front of. He had been a perfect gentleman and had even sent her flowers once.

  The problem was, she looked like Pepper, standing there with Mr. Sinatra. All through Pepper’s girlhood people were always telling Harmony how much Pepper looked like her, but Harmony could never see it. Pepper had always seemed so much more beautiful. But, looking once more at the picture of her standing with Mr. Sinatra, Harmony suddenly saw what people had been talking about. She had looked a lot like Pepper, just as beautiful, only with a good deal more bust. The woman in the picture with Mr. S. could have been Pepper, although she hadn’t even been born when the picture was taken.

  Mr. Sinatra was still alive, she herself was still alive, Wendell was still alive, but Pepper, her beautiful daughter, had come and gone. Pepper never would be photographed with Mr. Sinatra, though he was probably still a perfect gentleman and would probably even send Pepper flowers, too.

  While Harmony stood in front of the photograph, several people stopped to ask if she was all right—it must be clear even to strangers walking by that she was pretty upset; she couldn’t help it, she felt as if she were looking at her daughter, though really she was looking at herself, in a time when she was young and had not known loss.

  Thinking about it gave Harmony the feeling that the bomb of grief was about to explode inside her, so she stumbled into the ladies’ room and shut herself in a stall, to wait for the explosion. Instead of the bomb going off, though, she just began to feel tired. Probably it was all those Bombay martinis—she had never been able to drink huge amounts without fading out at some point.