The Late Child

by Larry McMurtry

  “Don’t you think there is a limit?” she asked Laurie, when she caught up with her.

  “A limit to what?” Laurie asked, turning.

  “A limit to how many people I can collect so I won’t be without company?” Harmony said. “We only got here last night and I already have five or six new people that I know.”

  Laurie stopped and looked at her.

  “I guess you can collect as many as you can find,” she said. “The main problem with sort of letting it grow is transportation. Maybe the guy who is supposed to bring the bus is our solution for the moment. If he actually shows up to take us to the ferry, then I guess a busload is probably your limit.”

  Harmony walked on and Laurie linked her arm in hers.

  “Do you mind?” she asked.

  “No, Laurie,” Harmony said. “I don’t mind.”

  “I guess I have the opposite way of dealing with it,” Laurie said. “I’ve been mostly alone since Pepper died. I find even talking to people very wearying. Some friend will come by and I’ll think I’m glad to see her at first and then within a few minutes I’m so tired I can hardly talk. It just wears me out to be with even my best friends now.”

  “Laurie, you really don’t have to go to the Statue of Liberty,” Harmony said. “Not if it’s that bad.” There was a weariness in Laurie’s face that made her feel that she should make helpful suggestions, if she could.

  “Oh, no, I don’t mean you guys,” Laurie said. “I love being with you guys. It’s like the young give me energy or something. I mean, just being around Eddie for a few minutes charges me up. Sometimes I volunteer at a day care and it works the same way. When I’m with the kids I’m hardly depressed at all. Energy just sort of flows off them, or something.

  “I don’t know why I’m telling you that, though,” Laurie added. “You live with Eddie.”

  “He’s up on the motor scooter and he doesn’t want to get off,” Harmony said. “Sheba had to grab him. He must have really liked Otis.”

  Indeed, Eddie and Sheba were faced off in the parking lot, and the lid of the Dumpster was still closed. Harmony and Laurie strolled over. Eddie did not appear to be angry, but he did appear to be sad. The look he wore was the look he only got when his sensibilities had been bruised.

  “Bright, don’t you cry on me,” Sheba said. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

  “But you did—you made me sad,” Eddie said. “I want Otis to be my friend.”

  “I didn’t say he can’t be your friend,” Sheba said, squatting down so as to bring her face closer to Eddie’s. “I just said I ain’t ready to let him out of the Dumpster yet.”

  “You called him a creep and you said he had bat teeth,” Eddie said. “Those words aren’t very nice. If he’s my friend you shouldn’t say such words about him.”

  Sheba looked at Harmony.

  Eddie’s lip trembled. His eyes had tears in them.

  “What do you do with him when he gets like this?” Sheba asked.

  “She’s my mom, she doesn’t make me sad,” Eddie said. “Only other people make me sad.”

  Harmony picked up her son. “Eddie, I do too make you sad, sometimes,” she said. “Remember when I made you leave Las Vegas without saying goodbye to your friends?”

  Eddie didn’t speak; his lip still trembled and his eyes were filled with tears.

  “That made you sad,” Harmony said, again.

  “It still makes me sad,” Eddie admitted. “It made me sad because it was rude.”

  “He’s right,” Harmony said. “It was rude. We should have waited till morning to leave. I guess I was just too upset to wait.”

  “I miss Eli very much,” Eddie said. “I really miss Eli.”

  “Aw,” Laurie said.

  “I miss Otis, too,” Eddie said, tears on his cheeks. “I wish you’d let him out of the Dumpster now.”

  Sheba was so horrified by Eddie’s tears that she looked as if she might cry herself.

  “You got it, Bright, he’s coming out,” Sheba said. “Somebody want to help me get the lid up?”

  “Sure, I’ll help you,” Laurie said.

  Neddie and Pat helped too, and soon the lid was up. Eddie wiped his wet cheeks with the back of his hand and a smile immediately came back to his face.

  “That’s nice,” he said. “I’ll just dry my tears and we’ll go help Otis out.”

  “He don’t need no help,” Sheba said. “He’s in and out of that Dumpster all day and all night.”

  “But you made him a prisoner, he might be scared,” Eddie said. He climbed back up on the yellow motor scooter and peered into the Dumpster.

  “Hi,” he said, to Otis. “Do you want to come out and meet my mother?”

  A very small black man, with a soft face, hair that was combed straight up, and a wispy Fu Manchu mustache, peeked cautiously over the edge of the Dumpster.

  “Hi, white folks,” he said.

  17.

  “Ain’t you gonna say hi to me?” Sheba asked immediately. “I’m here, but I ain’t white folks.”

  “No, because you call me too many names,” Otis said. “I ain’t as bad as you say I am.”

  “You worse,” Sheba said.

  But she walked over to the Dumpster and helped her husband out.

  “Baby, I didn’t mean to make you so mad,” Otis said, looking at Sheba anxiously. His front teeth were rather pointed. Harmony decided it was probably that his family couldn’t afford an orthodontist.

  “I always making her mad,” he said to the group, with a little smile. “Don’t know how it happens.”

  “It happens because you don’t never think of nobody but yourself, you little jerk,” Sheba said.

  “Jerk isn’t a very nice word to call Otis,” Eddie said. “I want everybody to say nice words, just for one day.”

  “That’s a good idea, Ed,” Otis said. “Sheba always be saying these ugly things to me. It kinda gets me down, you know.”

  She turned her back and walked off, into the center of the parking lot. The boy whose job it was to gather up the grocery carts was just coming through the lot with an even longer conga line of carts. He was pushing hard, and the carts were undulating like a long shiny snake. On impulse, as the carts were passing, Sheba jumped on top of them.

  The boy pushing the carts was not pleased.

  “Get off, girl,” he said. “You making me wobble.”

  The parking lot was slanted slightly. When Sheba jumped on the carts, the whole long line of grocery carts began to veer downhill, toward an exit onto a busy street.

  “Uh-oh, Sheba’s gone wild again, she’s headed right for the exit,” Otis said.

  He began to race across the parking lot, angling so he would be able to intersect the line of carts before they shot into the street. Just then the line of carts broke in two. The boy pushing the carts was left with about twenty, and Sheba sailed along on the rest. She managed to get to her feet, and did a little dance as she sped past the pay phones. The pimps at the bank of phones looked around in amazement.

  “She’s like Lillian Gish on the ice floe,” Laurie said.

  Then she started running herself, to help Otis. The two of them fell in beside the carts and began to slow them down. They turned them just enough to make them miss the exit to the street, and coasted them to a halt behind the Dumpster.

  “That’s fun,” Eddie said. “I wish Sheba had taken me with her.”

  “Yeah, and if she had, and if those carts had gone into the street, you’d have been squashed like a bug,” Pat said.

  “No, I would not have been squashed like a bug,” Eddie said. “I would have been squashed like a boy.”

  Sheba and Otis were holding hands, by the Dumpster. Laurie came walking back. One of the pimps by the pay phones whistled at her, but she ignored him.

  Harmony thought Laurie looked lonely—a nice tall girl, but sad.

  “Harmony, we can’t be adopting everybody,” Neddie said, as if reading Harmony’s thou
ghts.

  “Think what Mom would say if we brought this whole gang home,” Pat said. “It’d almost be worth doing, just to hear her.”

  Just then a grimy white school bus came veering into the parking lot, honking loudly.

  “Good, here is G.,” Omar said. “Now plenty of room for everybody. We can go to Statue of Liberty boat.”

  “That’s a good-looking bus driver,” Pat said, when the man, who had a handsome black beard, parked his bus and stepped out. “What did you say his name is?”

  “His name is G.,” Omar said. “He is Sikh man from Delhi.”

  “Uh-oh, just my luck,” Pat said. “What’s he sick with?”

  “No sick, Sikh!” Omar said. “He is my cousin.”

  “He could be your cousin and still be sick,” Pat said.

  G. got back in the bus and began to honk. He was listening to a Walkman.

  “G. is listening to Pink Floyd,” Abdul said. “He is always listening to Pink Floyd.”

  “It’s weird that his name is G.,” Pat said. “Is it G-e-e or what?”

  “No, is spelled G.,” Omar said.

  When G. got back on the school bus he closed the doors behind him. Omar, Salah, and Abdul began to bang on the doors but G. sat behind the wheel listening to Pink Floyd. He paid no attention.

  “I don’t want to get on his bus anyway, till I find out what he’s sick with,” Pat said.

  “I think Omar just meant he’s a Sikh—it’s a sect,” Laurie said. “He’s a Sikh like you’re a Baptist—if you’re a Baptist.”

  Eddie was walking around in circles, holding a new red dog leash Laurie had bought him at the Shop and Sack. Iggy had chewed the old leash in two. Eddie sometimes walked around in circles when he was in a happy mood.

  Harmony was glad her son was in a happy mood. She herself was beginning to feel a sinking of spirits. For a few minutes she had enjoyed having so many people around—despite the squalor of the streets it had been kind of fun to walk around New Jersey, with her sisters and Laurie, and Sheba and the turban men. But somehow the fun had begun to have little cracks in it, little cracks through which she couldn’t help seeing the real facts of her life: Pepper was dead, she and Eddie had left Las Vegas, she really didn’t know where she might have to live or how she would make a living for herself and her son. Having all the people there, even Eddie, made it impossible to do what she really wanted to do, which was be alone and cry.

  “Mom, don’t look that way,” Eddie said, noticing that his mother’s face had a sad look on it. “We’re going to get Iggy and we’re going to the Statue of Liberty right now.”

  “Okay, honey,” Harmony said. Sometimes the easiest thing was just to obey Eddie, if she could. She knew it wasn’t fair to make a five-year-old be the boss—but there were times when it was the best she could do.

  “Hard to get to the Statue of Liberty if G. won’t open the bus,” Sheba said.

  “Eddie can fix that,” Laurie said. She picked Eddie up, took him around to the driver’s side of the bus, and lifted him high, so his face would be at the level of the bus driver’s. Eddie rapped politely on the window of the bus, near the driver’s head. G., still listening to Pink Floyd, gave no sign of noticing.

  “Wave your arms, Eddie,” Laurie said. “Maybe he’ll see you.”

  “But they’re just little short arms,” Eddie said. “I’m very small, really.”

  But he waved his arms anyway and G., the bus driver who liked Pink Floyd, suddenly noticed that a child with curly hair was waving at him.

  Very methodically, G. turned off his Walkman and opened the window.

  “Hi,” Eddie said.

  “You the spokesman, Bright,” Sheba said. “Do some of your good talking.”

  “Hello,” Eddie said, to G. “Could you open the door so we can all get in and go get my dog, Iggy, and then go straight to the Statue of Liberty?”

  G. looked down at Eddie, and smiled. His teeth were very white, against his black beard.

  “I am waiting for Omar,” he said, in a very deep voice.

  “There’s Omar,” Eddie said. “He’s beating on your door right now.”

  G. looked, and saw the angry faces of Omar, Abdul, and Salah, all pressed against the glass of his door.

  “They are looking angry, always looking angry,” G. said. “I am happy man, no fuss.”

  “So do you know where the Statue of Liberty boat is?” Eddie asked. “We’ve come from Las Vegas, Nevada, and we need to go now.”

  G. opened the door of the bus and Omar, Abdul, and Salah all spilled in, all talking at once.

  When Laurie set Eddie down he immediately began to herd everyone onto the bus.

  “Come on, we need to go now, right now!” he said. “It’s time to see the Statue of Liberty.”

  He grabbed Harmony’s finger and began tugging her toward the steps of the bus.

  “Come on, Mom, hurry,” he said. “The Statue of Liberty might close, if we don’t hurry.”

  “Eddie, it won’t close,” Harmony said.

  I wish I could be anywhere on earth but where I am, she thought. I wish it could be another day. I wish I could be in a faraway place where I don’t know anybody. I wish nobody at all was with me. I wish I could just be in bed alone, with my head under the covers.

  But she wasn’t in a faraway place, of course, she was just in the parking lot of a Shop and Sack in Jersey City. She wasn’t alone, either. She was with a lot of people, some of them people she had just met. There was no chance at all that she was going to get to be alone.

  “Come on, Mom, we need to go now,” Eddie repeated.

  Omar was still yelling at his cousin G. when Harmony allowed her son to lead her onto the bus.

  18.

  On the ride to the Statue of Liberty boat, Harmony sat alone. Even Eddie abandoned her.

  “She’s too sad about my sister,” Eddie said. “Let’s just let her ride in the back seat until she feels better.”

  He himself spent the trip happily chatting with Laurie and Sheba, and admiring Iggy’s new red leash and black collar.

  “Laurie bought them just for Iggy,” he said.

  Pat sat on the front seat and flirted, as best she could, with G., but G. kept turning around and flashing his beautiful white teeth at Neddie. It made Neddie uncomfortable and Pat mad.

  “That man’s mixed up, I don’t care what his religion is,” Pat said. “I’m the one flirting with him, not you.”

  “Don’t blame me,” Neddie said. “I’m ignoring him for dear life.”

  Despite little irritations, on the order of G. flirting with the wrong woman, the group was mostly a happy group. They were all so cheerful that Harmony wished her part of the bus would just drop off—just detach itself, like a railroad car that had come unhooked, and coast to a stop somewhere with her in it. She didn’t have the spirit to be part of a happy group; she felt she had more in common with winos and derelicts and aging people of every sort, quite a few of whom were visible on the streets of New Jersey.

  Even on the boat to the Statue of Liberty she found a place on the rail by herself, near the stern. Cold spray from the harbor hit her face and mingled with the tears she cried from time to time. Eddie, proud of Iggy and his new leash, walked all around the boat, letting all the tourists see what a nice dog he had.

  None of them knew at the time that Iggy was about to become the most famous dog in America, if not the world, the only dog in history to fall from the top of the Statue of Liberty and live.

  “He did not fall, he jumped,” Eddie was later to insist: he insisted it, with mounting indignation, on Larry King Live, on the Today show, on Good Morning, America, and, finally, on Letterman, on all of which he and Iggy appeared in the space of two whirlwind days. During most of those days Harmony holed up in Laurie Chalk’s bedroom on East Ninth Street, looking at pictures of Pepper in Laurie’s scrapbook.

  Looking through the scrapbook was actually good—it was a little cheering in some way. In man
y of the pictures Pepper looked happy; the pictures helped convince Harmony that Pepper had mostly had a happy, not an unhappy, life. In many of the pictures Pepper was with dancers or other show people; she was invariably the most beautiful girl in the picture, too. In most of the pictures, Pepper was smiling. She was a beautiful girl with her brights on. Harmony wished she had worked up the nerve to override Pepper’s prickliness and come east and see her; she would have liked to meet some of the people in the pictures—Pepper’s friends.

  Meanwhile, while Harmony sipped tea and spent time with her regrets, Eddie and Iggy were on all the talk shows. They were even on the cover of People magazine. Laurie and Sheba, who sort of started new careers as Eddie and Iggy’s business managers, were even getting calls from manufacturers who wanted to make Eddie and Iggy dolls. All this was because Iggy hated sea gulls and had tried to bite one that happened to be flapping off the topmost parapet of the Statue of Liberty. When they got off the boat Iggy had tried to run off and bite a couple of sea gulls but Eddie hung on to the new red leash and wouldn’t let him. Iggy bided his time until they were on the very top of the statue, looking across New York Harbor to the great towers of Manhattan, before he went after another sea gull, in this case the one that happened to be flapping off the parapet.

  Eddie was looking away at that moment, at the Hudson and America beyond it, when Iggy suddenly jerked the leash out of his hand and made a leap at the gull, after which he disappeared, plummeting straight down toward what should have been his death.

  “Oh no, he can’t fly, Mom, he’s not a bird!” Eddie said. “Will he be deaded forever when he hits?”

  Nobody answered the question, because they all certainly expected Iggy to be deaded forever. It was a long drop from the top of the Statue of Liberty. The only optimist in the crowd was Eddie, and Eddie was only half convinced.