The Late Child

by Larry McMurtry

  That was about the time when she was beginning to see Ronnie, who did a lariat act at some of the smaller casinos during the afternoon lull. In fact, she began to have regular dates with Ronnie—he had a blue pickup with a campershell where he kept his ropes, and he was very proud of the fact that he had been able to squeeze a waterbed into his pickup. The waterbed even had a wave mechanism. Harmony wasn’t too fond of the wave mechanism; in her experience sex on waterbeds was tricky enough even without the wave mechanism. Particularly it was tricky if you had a guy who had gymnastic expectations of the sex act, as Ronnie did. Still, she and Ronnie had regular dates for a while; crawling into the campershell with Ronnie was pretty exciting—exciting enough at least that the question of whether Sonny had a girlfriend was not uppermost in her mind. She had always been of the live-and-let-live persuasion, herself; one of her problems was that she had never run into a man who was of the same persuasion. Ronnie certainly didn’t have a live-and-let-live attitude—he just couldn’t take Sonny seriously as a rival, Sonny was too chipmunky. Anyway, Ronnie was totally vain about himself as a lover, so vain that it never dawned on him that a woman who could sleep with him on his waterbed with the wave mechanism would have the slightest interest in sleeping with anyone else at any time for any reason.

  “Are you real upset about leaving Sonny on the street?” Laurie asked.

  “No,” Harmony said. She had begun to feel very tired, though—what she really wanted was to sit down. She felt sort of saggy.

  “How far is the subway?” she asked, so tired that she felt like she might be stumbling in a few more steps.

  Laurie stopped her for a moment, and felt her forehead.

  “I think you’re feverish,” she said. She immediately waved for a taxi. Before the taxi even started moving again, Harmony closed her eyes.

  “I wish we hadn’t met Sonny,” she said, as they were walking up Laurie’s stairs. “I know I’m going to think about him now.”

  When they got to Laurie’s apartment nobody was there. While Laurie was making tea Harmony took off her clothes and wrapped up in an old bathrobe Laurie loaned her. She lay down for a minute, to wait for the tea, and when she opened her eyes again Eddie was sleeping in the bed with her—he had his pajamas on, too. She awoke to a New York morning, and the smell of tea. Laurie had put a big cup of tea on the bedside table. Eddie was still asleep, and so was Sheba. Laurie sat in a rocking chair by the bed. She had just washed her short brown hair and was rubbing it with a towel.

  When Harmony was a little more awake she noticed that there were tears on Laurie’s cheeks.

  “What’s the matter, honey?” she asked.

  “Just the same thing,” Laurie said. “Just the same thing that’s always going to be the matter.”

  She rubbed her wet hair again, and then put her face in the towel for a moment.

  “Don’t mind me, drink your tea,” she said. “Everyone said Eddie was terrific on Letterman.”

  Harmony felt surprisingly rested. She felt like it might be a day when she could get Eddie dressed, and make him a waffle, if Laurie had a waffle iron. She also felt it was time to have a few goals. One goal—the main goal, at the moment—would be to go home.

  “Laurie, could we go to Oklahoma today?” she asked, whispering so as not to wake up Eddie and Sheba.

  Laurie looked a little startled by the question.

  “Have I upset you?” she asked. “I was really hoping we could have more time. We haven’t got to talk about Pepper very much.”

  “Laurie, I didn’t mean go without you,” Harmony said. “I want you to come too.”

  Then she remembered Sonny Le Song.

  “Laurie, can I get the number of that old folks’ home?” Harmony asked. “I think I better call Sonny. If I don’t I’ll feel guilty all day.”

  “You don’t have to feel guilty, and you don’t need the number,” Laurie said. “Look out the window.

  “I’ll go with you to Oklahoma,” she said. Then she put her face in the towel again.

  Harmony got out of bed and hugged her. Laurie made room for Harmony in the rocking chair—fortunately it was a large rocking chair. Harmony hugged Laurie real close, while Laurie sobbed. Laurie was too thin—probably she hadn’t been eating correctly since Pepper’s death.

  While she was rocking Laurie, Eddie opened his eyes and took in the scene. Harmony put her finger to her lips, to let Eddie know that she and Laurie were sharing a private moment. She hoped that Eddie would be patient and not pop up and start making breakfast demands until Laurie had had an opportunity to pour out a little more of her sorrow. After all, that was why they had come to New York and accidentally made it possible for Iggy to fall off the Statue of Liberty: so she and Laurie could grieve together about the girl they had both lost.

  Eddie seemed to understand perfectly—he lay very still, with a solemn look on his face. Iggy was sleeping at his feet, which was a good thing. With Eddie and Iggy both awake there was going to be some noise: they were little boys, after all.

  Finally Laurie calmed, and just in time too, because Eddie reached the end of being able to be still. He began to tickle Sheba on the neck, pretending that his fingers were a spider. Sheba twitched and kept on sleeping but Harmony knew it wouldn’t last long; pretty soon Sheba would have to accept the fact that Eddie wanted her to wake up.

  “Did you see them?” Laurie asked, when she wiped away her tears with the wet towel that smelled of shampoo. Laurie even managed a smile at Eddie.

  “See who?” Harmony asked. Then she remembered that she had forgotten to look out the window.

  “Don’t ask me how he found us, but he found us,” Laurie said.

  Harmony looked down: Sonny Le Song was sitting on the steps of a building across the street. Her sister Pat sat on one side of him, and her sister Neddie sat on the other. All three were smoking, and all three had Styrofoam coffee cups in their hands.

  About that time Eddie popped out of bed and looked out the window too.

  “Who’s that person, he looks like a chipmunk, Mom?” Eddie asked.

  “His name is Sonny,” Harmony said. “I used to know him before you were born.”

  “Oh, then it was a real long time ago,” Eddie said. Then he wandered back to the bed and did some more spider fingers on Sheba’s neck. After he had done the spider fingers for a while, Sheba began to twitch. Finally she rolled on her back.

  “Who doing spider fingers on me?” she asked, without opening her eyes.

  Harmony stood at the window, looking down at Neddie, Pat, and Sonny Le Song.

  “I guess your Aunt Pat has started smoking again,” she said.

  4.

  When Neddie and Pat brought Sonny up to Laurie’s apartment Harmony got a little irate for a minute; if there was one thing she wasn’t going to tolerate it was the idea that some little jerk of a lounge singer, who could only get gigs by singing at old folks’ homes or for the openings of gas stations, was following her around.

  “Sonny, I never thought you’d turn into a stalker, if you are one I never want to see you again!” Harmony informed him, to the astonishment of everyone, even G., who was so impressed by the anger in Harmony’s voice that his black beard began to twitch. Otis had been dozing behind a chair; he didn’t really wake up but he did pull the hood of his parka over his head.

  “No, no, no,” Sonny said, in response to the stalking charge.

  He said no several more times before he could get Harmony calm enough so he could explain how he happened to be sitting across the street from Laurie’s place, with Neddie and Pat. His explanation was that when he found out Pepper was in town he waited outside one of her rehearsals and introduced himself and walked her home.

  “Then how come she didn’t mention it to me?” Laurie asked, skeptically.

  “If she walked home with a friend of her mother’s I think she would have mentioned it,” Laurie said.

  “Not if it was me,” Sonny said. “I’m the kind of guy who
seldom gets mentioned.”

  Before anyone could stop him, Sonny Le Song sank into despair, mainly at the thought of his own lack of mentionability.

  “I haven’t been mentioned in years,” he said, his face growing longer and longer. Even with his face at its longest he still looked a lot like a chipmunk.

  “Mom, you made him sad,” Eddie said. “Say something so he won’t be sad.”

  But it was too late.

  “I haven’t been mentioned since my mother’s funeral,” Sonny said. “Even then the minister got me mixed up with my half brother.”

  “Well, you poor soul,” Neddie said. “That’s awful.”

  “I do have nine half brothers,” Sonny said. “I know it’s a lot to remember.”

  To everyone’s horror, he began to cry. Soon tears were dripping off his chin, onto the lapel of his trench coat.

  “Oh, Sonny, I didn’t mean it, I know you’re not a stalker,” Harmony said. She went over and hugged him—what else could she do? Even while she was hugging him she felt a little annoyed, though—not so much at Sonny as at life. Why, with all her troubles, and no certainties in sight anywhere except Eddie, did she have to be the one to make it up to Sonny Le Song because he wasn’t mentionable? The truth was, he seemed even less mentionable than he had been when he was working in Las Vegas. What was she supposed to do about it?

  “Not only that, I lost my clippings,” Sonny said. “Now I don’t even have my clippings. At least when I had my clippings I had something to show to groups that might need an entertainer.”

  “I see what you mean—just showing them yourself probably wouldn’t convince them,” Pat said. Harmony suspected that she was in one of her surly moods.

  “Pat, why do you have to kick him while he’s down?” Harmony asked.

  “Where did you lose your clippings?” Eddie asked. “Maybe we can just all go and find them. It can be like an Easter egg hunt.”

  “Hey, he’s like his mother—tries to be helpful,” Sonny said.

  “So how did you lose them, Sonny?” Harmony asked. She herself had drifted off from her own clippings several years earlier. For a while they had been in the bottom drawer of her chest of drawers, which she usually kept in the bedroom. But her bedrooms kept shrinking once she wasn’t working steady; it became harder and harder to fit a large chest of drawers into her apartments. Finally, at a time when she was approaching the eight-dollar level in her bank account—that was the time when Eddie had a bad infection; doctor bills were mounting up—she agreed to let Myrtle put the chest of drawers in her permanent floating garage sale, just to see if anybody wanted it. To everyone’s surprise an old man heading home from Wisconsin stopped by the garage sale and bought the chest of drawers. He just put it in the back of his pickup and headed on to Wisconsin.

  After that, two or three weeks passed before it dawned on Harmony that she had forgotten to remove her clippings from the chest of drawers. For about an hour it was a terrible shock—after all, those clippings were a record of her whole life in Las Vegas. They were the sort of thing Eddie might have wanted to look at someday, when he was in the mood to know what his mother had been like when she was younger.

  But then a few days passed and instead of feeling sad about the loss of her clippings, she began to get a little perspective; in a way it was a relief not to have the clippings anymore, she would be less likely to be reminded of what a comparatively glamorous life she had led before she got too old to be a showgirl and had to go to work at the recycling plant. After all, she still had quite a few scrapbooks that she kept on a shelf in her closet—she could always look at the scrapbooks if she wanted to remember what she had looked like in the years of her youth and beauty. Eddie could look at them too, and in fact did, from time to time, if he happened to be using the bar in her closet as a jungle gym or something.

  Then a miracle happened: The old man got home to Wisconsin and started to put his socks or his underwear or something into the bottom drawer of the nice chest of drawers he had bought at a garage sale in Las Vegas. There were Harmony’s clippings. The old man wrapped the clippings in brown paper and tied them neatly with a string and sent them to the Stardust casino—by a miracle Jackie Bonventre’s daughter, Josie, was working in the mailroom the day the package came in—Josie was kind enough to bring it to her.

  The clippings were doomed, though; during their short stay in Wisconsin, Harmony had stopped caring whether she had them or not. By chance she had a very jealous boyfriend at the time, named Monty; it was hard to describe Monty other than to say that his nose had been broken four times and he was very jealous. He hated the fact that Harmony had had a time of youth and beauty and had spent some of it with other men; thanks to his feeling that all her years of youth and beauty and sex—particularly sex—should have been his, Monty developed a resentful attitude toward her clippings and one day while she was at the recycling plant the whole package of clippings got mixed up with a couple of months’ accumulation of racing forms, all of which he threw out. Harmony didn’t exactly hold it against Monty; it was only thanks to a miracle that the clippings had made it back from Wisconsin anyway.

  It was plain from the look on Sonny’s face that he had not yet acquired a good perspective on his own lost clippings, though.

  “It’s hopeless,” he said. “I lost them over a year ago—left them on a bus in Utica. I was up there entertaining at a bowling tournament.”

  Harmony had a brief vision of Sonny trying to sing his little off-key ballads over the sound of crashing bowling pins. It would be even worse than customers at the Chevron station slamming down hoods or revving up their motors to see if their radiators were sturdy enough to make the trip across the desert.

  “I went home with this girl I met,” Sonny said. Harmony was hoping he wouldn’t launch into graphic descriptions of his love life, not with Eddie standing there five years old and all ears.

  “We were taking the bus, she didn’t have no car, she wasn’t really a girl, she was a little bit older,” Sonny went on, recalling the tragic scene of the bus ride in Utica, and the girl, and his clippings. But the memory became too difficult; he began to gulp and his eyes watered again.

  “I guess I left them on the bus, it’s what I get for chasing skirts,” he said, and then he sort of collapsed in Harmony’s arms and sobbed and sobbed.

  “Saddest man I’ve met in a while,” Otis said.

  Omar seemed to agree. “Saddest mans in town,” he remarked.

  Eddie was walking around in circles, wearing the goofy look he often wore when he walked around in circles. Iggy, thinking something must be up, was walking around in circles, too, right at Eddie’s heels.

  “Mom, I know what might cheer him up,” Eddie remarked. “We could take him to Washington with us and maybe he could sing for the President and Mrs. President.”

  “I don’t think so, Eddie,” Laurie said, horrified at the prospect of Sonny Le Song arriving unannounced at the White House, expecting to sing.

  “You have to have a very special invitation before you can sing at the White House,” she added.

  “Honey, couldn’t we go in the bedroom?” Sonny asked, lifting his face to Harmony. “I hate to cry my eyes out in front of all these people—some of them don’t even know me.”

  Harmony had a different interpretation of why Sonny suddenly wanted to go in the bedroom, and it wasn’t because he wanted to hide his tears. After she had been hugging him for a few minutes she felt something male bumping against her lower thigh. The little jerk was actually taking advantage of her sympathy hug to the extent of getting a hard-on, never mind that her son and most of her family were three feet away. Of course he still had his trench coat on, nobody was going to notice that Sonny was bumping himself against her leg.

  What she could do about that was end the hug, which she did. If Sonny had recovered enough to be thinking about going to bed with her, then it was time all of them forgot his lost clippings and went on with their day. After al
l, there were some big decisions to be made—for example, who was going to Oklahoma and when and how.

  “Sonny, just have some tea,” she said. From the look on his face she could tell that he was a good deal more upset by her refusal to go into the bedroom with him than by the knowledge that he had left his clippings on a bus in Utica.

  “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I need to get started home on the plains today,” Neddie said. “I may have to hitchhike but I’m heading that way. I’m getting the urge to smell the prairie breeze.”

  “We already said we were going, you don’t have to clobber us with sentimental speeches,” Pat said.

  “Can I come?” Sonny asked—Harmony knew he was just thinking of bedrooms he might get her in down the road.

  Harmony did a quick head count, arriving at the figure of twelve.

  “There’s twelve of us, if we all go,” she said.

  “The whole population of Tarwater is just two hundred and thirty-five,” Neddie said. “They’ll have to do a new census, once we get there.”

  “This is absurd,” Laurie said. “What are all of us going to do in Tarwater?”

  “Some of the titty bars in Tulsa don’t have much in the way of singers,” Pat observed. “Maybe Sonny could support us by singing in titty bars.”

  “Pat, he lost his clippings, he might not be able to get a job,” Harmony said. The thought of Sonny tagging along made her nervous. Her sisters didn’t know him like she did; if she even relaxed for a moment and put her arm around him he’d be bumping his hard-on against some part of her.

  “First of all, we should ask G.,” Laurie said. “It’s his bus. What if he doesn’t want to take us to Oklahoma—then what do we do?”