Some Can Whistle

by Larry McMurtry

  “She’s coming, ain’t she, Daddy?” T.R. said firmly.

  “Of course she can come if she wants to,” I said gamely, trying to imagine what Gladys and France would make of one another.

  “I might go,” Gladys said tentatively. “On the other hand, what’ll I do about Chuck? If I run off to Europe he’ll head straight for that slut in Amarillo, and I’ll have that preying on my mind the whole time I’m gone. Then when we get back, the first thing he’ll do is ask for a divorce. That will be the end of that, and the kids will all blame me for running off to Europe and leaving Chuck to fend for himself. Not that he can’t fend. He’s probably off fending right now.”

  At that she burst into tears and buried her head in her arms. Gladys cried heartily. Godwin and I, inured to these cloudbursts, went calmly on with our breakfast.

  “Well, you two are mighty cool,” T.R. said. She herself seemed slightly awed by Gladys’s sobs.

  “They are, they don’t never even stop eating while I’m sitting here brokenhearted,” Gladys said.

  “If we didn’t occasionally eat while you were crying we’d both starve,” Godwin said. “Did it ever occur to you that you might be happier if you just divorced Chuck? After all, he’s not exactly Errol Flynn.”

  The thought that Gladys’s lot in life might be improved if she were married to Errol Flynn struck me as funny, and I laughed. T.R., who had probably never heard of Errol Flynn, thought this was inappropriate. She slammed her fist on the table.

  “Shut up, you two!” she demanded. “You’re just a couple of coldhearted old men. Gladys is having to get a divorce and you two sit there laughing.”

  “Right, I should never even have mentioned Errol Flynn,” Godwin said. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

  His new habit of apologizing three times every time T.R. got the least bit testy was beginning to irritate me.

  “One apology’s enough, Godwin,” I said.

  “L.J., I hate the name Godwin!” T.R. yelled. Her mood was not improving. “How many times have I told you to call him L.J.? Every time I hear the name Godwin I want to throw up.”

  “Sorry, I’ll learn,” I said. “I’ve been calling him Godwin for many years, it’s hard to switch overnight.”

  “It wouldn’t be if you concentrated,” T.R. insisted. “All he concentrates on is pussy, and all you do is make fun of Gladys. Now that I know Earl Dee is still in jail I’m beginning to wish I’d stayed in Houston. If it don’t mean being murdered I’d rather be someplace where people kick up their heels once in a while.”

  “Of course, you do have to be photographed to get a passport,” I said, desperately trying to come up with some diversions that might make T.R. less impatient. Passport photographs were the straw I grasped at. My impression was that T.R. checked few impulses. If she got much more discontented she might just go away, a thought I couldn’t bear. I had quickly grown to love her so much that the thought of being without her again was intolerable. If I could get her to Fort Worth we could at least have a shopping spree, and that might divert her for a day or two until the passports came through and we could get safely off to France.

  An hour later we were all crammed into the Cadillac, bound for Cowtown, as Fort Worth used to be called. Every inch of space in the car was thick with life, sound, smoke, cassettes, toys, bodies. Muddy and Godwin were quarrelsome and gloomy, Muddy because he hadn’t wanted to go at all, and Godwin because another scheme to isolate T.R. and seduce her had been thwarted. I knew how skillfully Godwin preyed on female impatience, and was determined to give him no chance in this instance.

  “Hi, hi, hi,” Jesse said, many times. She stood by me, wildly excited to be going someplace. Bo had taken a dislike to Muddy; after trying to hit him in the face with a toy truck, he bit his wrist. Muddy grabbed him and shook him for a bit, and Bo burst into loud shrieks.

  “Cut it out, that’s child abuse, dickhead!” T.R. yelled over her shoulder. She wore huge yellow shades and was listening to one of Godwin’s old Rolling Stones tapes. Gladys was chain-smoking furiously, intensely nervous at the thought of passport photographs, France, divorce, estrangement from her children, and varicose veins, her latest obsession. She had begun to work varicose veins into almost every conversation.

  “It’s one thing that would be a problem for me on them nude beaches,” she said. “Do them French women have varicose veins?”

  “Please, the nude beaches are not for elderly people,” Godwin said.

  “Are you saying I’m elderly?” Gladys asked. “If I’m elderly, what does that make you?”

  “Can’t you drive faster?” Godwin asked, skirting the question. “We’re merely creeping down the road.”

  Bo leaned over the seat and got a stranglehold on Jesse. He tried to pull her back over the seat so he could strangle her at his leisure. Jesse made strangling noises. T.R., inscrutable behind her shades, paid this atrocity no attention; neither did anyone else. I remembered how necessary it was to maintain a constant flow of oxygen to the brain and became a little panicky at the thought that Jesse’s flow might be cut off. I tried to break Bo’s hold with my free hand and almost smacked into the rear of a gravel truck. T.R., more tuned in to what was going on around her than she appeared to be, screamed.

  “We’ll all be killed, and I hope we are,” Muddy said. “I wanted to stay home and watch that all-day movie. Having your picture made’s a good way to get sent back to jail. They might get me and they might get you too.”

  “Buddy, would you sit on Bo?” T.R. asked.

  Buddy was horrified at the thought of having to go to a foreign country—Fort Worth was foreign enough for him—but I had insisted that he come along in case we decided to take him to France as a kind of male nanny.

  “Aw, he’s just playing,” Buddy said, carefully releasing Jesse, while Bo shrieked. Jesse immediately crawled down into the floorboards, under her mother’s feet. She whimpered for a while.

  We were several miles down the road before the import of Muddy’s last remark hit me. He had said the authorities might get him, and they also might get T.R.

  “Why would they get T.R.?” I asked. Fort Worth’s modest skyline had just come into view.

  “Because she’s a big criminal,” Muddy said. “Ain’t you even told your daddy about your crimes, T.R.?”

  T.R. remained inscrutable, deep behind her shades.

  “A criminal, really?” Godwin said. The thought that T.R. might be a criminal brought him out of his sulk. Criminals had always excited him.

  “T.R., tell me what he means,” I said. I felt wrong, asking such a question in front of a crowd, but I also felt anxious, suddenly. I had been rather complacently congratulating myself for handling the chaos in the car so casually—it seemed to me my ability to exist in close proximity to other humans was improving by leaps and bounds. But now, despite the proximity of a good many other humans, I became horribly anxious and couldn’t contain my anxiety. I had to know what Muddy meant.

  “Oh, T.R.’s a lot bigger criminal than me,” Muddy said nastily. He was getting revenge for having been made to leave his movie.

  I waited. I didn’t want to ask T.R. again what Muddy meant. Up to that point in the drive I had been feeling rather good. I didn’t have a headache and I was even rather calm, despite the presence of two children and six adults, including me, in the car. The mess and noise had not so far produced intolerable stress. Then Muddy dropped his bombshell, and intolerable stress made a comeback. There was a timpani roll in my temples as the blood vessels began to suck in blood. The mess and noise became immediately less tolerable. I felt as if I was in a riot rather than in a car; I wished I could just stop and ask everyone to step out except T.R. and Jesse. The latter, a refugee look in her eye, still sat on the floorboards, quietly chewing on a road map of Arkansas. The Little Rock—Hot Springs area had already been badly mulched.

  “She’s eating Arkansas,” I said, mainly to test my voice.

  T.R. reached down and picked Jesse up
. She faced me for a moment but didn’t lower her shades.

  “I been in a little trouble once or twice,” she said.

  “Little trouble,” Muddy chortled. “Little trouble. I’d say that’s a pretty good little understatement.”

  T.R. began to sing “Rockabye Baby” to Jesse. She did not elaborate.

  11

  Picking up passport applications took only two minutes, but getting the passport photographs almost destroyed us all. The thought of facing a photographer—even one as neutral as a passport photographer—caused an outbreak of vanity in both Buddy and Gladys. Buddy suddenly decided he wanted to look his best and went off to buy a necktie; Gladys decided she didn’t like her eye shadow and went off in search of some she liked better.

  “It’s just a passport photograph,” I pleaded.

  “I hate the way I look on my driver’s license,” Gladys said. “This is my chance to do better.”

  Both left and both got lost. Fort Worth, a city less than one hundred miles from where they had lived all their lives, was as foreign to them as São Paulo. An hour passed with no sign of either of them. T.R., Muddy, and the kids had long since been photographed. The photographer had to plead long and hard with T.R. before she would take off her sunglasses.

  “They’re going to want to see your eyes,” he explained.

  “I don’t see why,” T.R. said. “I guess I’m the one who decides who gets to see my eyes.”

  “Well, ma’am, not if you plan to go abroad,” the photographer said.

  “Just take off your dumb glasses,” Muddy said.

  “Fuck you,” T.R. said. “And I’ll tell you something else, Muddy—you’re never gettin’ to see nothin’ else, ever.”

  “Why not?” Muddy asked, convinced—and also alarmed—by this threat.

  “Because you can’t keep your big mouth shut,” T.R. said.

  She eventually took off her sunglasses but still managed to look like an international terrorist in her pictures, as bitter and sullen-looking as any dues-paying member of the Bader-Meinhof gang.

  Meanwhile, Bo suddenly developed a fever. Within minutes it was raging. T.R., from feeling his forehead, reckoned it to be in the vicinity of one hundred and four. Bo squirmed, whined, and abruptly vomited up a great many partially digested Crayolas.

  Jesse immediately made friends with the photographer, a skinny, lonely-looking man, who informed her that he had a little girl just her age. Then he made the mistake of leaving her in his chair for a moment while he went to position a family of missionaries who were about to depart for Lesotho. Jesse reached for a lens cap, fell out of the chair, and split her forehead. Godwin, who reached her first, got a good deal of blood on his hands; as soon as he noticed the blood he became glassy-eyed, slumped against a wall, and fainted.

  “Did L.J. just die?” T.R. asked, as Jesse shrieked and bled and Bo writhed and produced an occasional gobbet of Crayola.

  “He’s just one of those people who faint at the sight of blood,” I said, fanning Godwin with a copy of Newsweek.

  The missionary family looked as if they would be happy to leave us and get on with life in Lesotho.

  Somehow T.R. and Muddy and I got the rest of us in the car, Jesse bleeding, Bo heaving, Godwin wobbling, and raced off to the emergency room. T.R. summoned her capacity for command and marched us past a dozen or so sufferers, most of whom looked so locked into the deep apathy of emergency rooms that they didn’t seem to notice.

  “If my babies die I’m suing you for millions,” T.R. informed a perfectly nice doctor, who was so surprised by her vehemence that he did nothing but blink. Jesse shrieked so loudly when the doctor began to stitch up her gash that Muddy got a little faint himself and had to retreat to the waiting room to watch TV while T.R. and I held her down. Then the doctor, just to show T.R. that he was enthusiastic about his work, decided to pump Bo’s stomach, in case he had consumed something more lethal than Crayolas. Bo fought so hard that I began to feel a little faint myself, but T.R. stoically chewed gum, held him down, and occasionally even grinned at me.

  “How you doin’ over there, Daddy?” she asked. “Real life’s a lot more fun than writing TV shows, ain’t it?”

  “Sure,” I said weakly. I was being careful not to make excessive claims.

  A few minutes later, that part of our life over, we emerged into the sunlight of the hospital parking lot. Godwin, unfairly, it seemed to him, had been given no drugs, a fact that made him bitter.

  “Fucking puritanical country,” he complained. “If this had happened in Rangoon I could have had opium.”

  “Only you would think a thought like that,” I said. “Fort Worth’s very different from Rangoon.”

  “Yes, and more’s the pity,” Godwin said.

  T.R. gave him some marijuana as soon as we got into the car, but it didn’t lift his spirits very much. T.R.’s own spirits seemed to be bouncy, even rollicking, but she wasn’t getting much support from the rest of us in the car. Bo was listless; it seemed they had sucked his aggression out with the contents of his stomach. Jesse, her head bandaged, looked like a tiny war victim; she immediately crept back to her position on the floorboards and sat staring into space. Although I knew she wasn’t badly hurt, the sight of her staring into space, so small yet so forlorn, made me want to weep. Meanwhile, Muddy had sunk into a depression of his own. While in it he made the large mistake of saying once too often that he wished he’d stayed in jail.

  T.R., who was driving, turned and gave him the finger. Then she whipped into a gas station, jumped out, got directions to the jail, and took us there. She slammed on the brakes right in front of it, startling two cops who had been leaning on their police cars, gossiping.

  “Okay, Muddy, you’re gettin’ your wish,” T.R. said. “Get out and turn yourself in. I imagine they’ll take you back to Houston in a day or two.”

  “Aw, T.R., I never meant it,” Muddy said. “I’ve just got this low feeling in me right now.”

  T.R. turned in her seat and scrutinized him for a moment. Her scrutiny seemed pitiless to me, and I believe Muddy also found it pitiless. He seemed to be about to obey her stern order when T.R. switched her pitiless look to the two cops, who immediately wilted under it and got into their respective cars.

  T.R. winked at me.

  “Perk up, Muddy, but just keep in mind that you’re living on borrowed time,” she said. “All of you gloom buckets are living on borrowed time. Here we’ve got a pretty day and we’re in town for a change and nobody’s dead.”

  “We don’t have many drugs, though,” Godwin pointed out.

  “Shut up, L.J.,” T.R. said. “Here’s the deal. If you think you can get yourselves to looking alive, then we’ll go find Buddy and Gladys and go swimming out at that water wonderland we went to while Daddy was sick. If you can’t cheer up I’m dumping you all out and you’re on your own.”

  “On our own?” Muddy said, horrified. “What’ll you be doin’ while we’re on our own?”

  “I’ll be gettin’ laid if I can manage it,” T.R. said merrily. “And if I can’t manage the big number one I’ll be dancin’ or drinkin’ tequila or cutting up as best I can. What I ain’t gonna do is stay down in the dumps all day just to be one of the crowd.”

  “Swim,” Jesse said distinctly, startling us all. Jesse had never said “swim” before.

  “What did I just hear you say?” T.R. asked her daughter.

  Such a direct question was too much for Jesse—she hid her face in her hands.

  “Okay, if Jesse can learn a new word, the rest of you can cheer up,” T.R. said.

  We did cheer up, buoyed by her easy exuberance. Buddy and Gladys were soon found, sitting on a bus bench, Buddy wearing his new necktie, Gladys wearing an overabundance of eye shadow. Like Jesse, they too had a refugee look; they were so convinced we had abandoned them that it took them a while to accept their reversal of fortune.

  Within an hour we were all at the water amusement park in Arlington, city of cu
l-de-sacs. There we disported ourselves like porpoises, all except Jesse, who had to content herself with wading in the tot’s pool; I waded with her, under strict instructions not to let her get her bandage wet.

  “Swim, swim, swim!” Jesse shrieked, proud of her new word.

  T.R. and Muddy dived off every diving board and slid down every slide, only stopping occasionally to yell at one another or smooch. Muddy’s spirits had risen like an elevator, and Buddy and Gladys weren’t doing badly, either. They shot an artificial rapid in giant inner tubes and stayed in the pool at the bottom a long time, quietly bumping inner tubes and talking.

  Godwin watched them ruefully.

  He walked over to the kiddie pool. “Daniel, go make them get out before they fall in love,” he said. He was still in a sulk because Fort Worth was so unlike Rangoon.

  I thought it might be that Buddy and Gladys were falling in love, but I had no intention of interfering. Keeping Jesse from getting her bandage wet was a fulltime job, anyway.

  “Godwin, leave them alone,” I said. “Why shouldn’t they fall in love?” I said. “Maybe they’ll find a little happiness.”

  “I can’t bear your optimism,” he said. “More likely they’ll find despair, as I have. Besides, I can’t bear the thought of them fucking. Shut your eyes and try to imagine those two bodies in flagrante.”

  “Godwin, they just have normal bodies,” I said. “Not much worse than yours and mine—if any worse. I don’t think you’ve found despair, either. I think you’ve had a lot of fun.”

  “I’ve found substantial desolation,” he said. Then he noticed T.R. as she walked dripping out of the wave pool, and a light came into his eyes. Other eyes than ours were watching T.R. too. Her radiance at that moment cast a light that seemed to gladden all who saw it. Several couples who were lounging by the wave pool, some on towels and some in beach chairs, some skinny and some dumpy, all more or less sunburned, all looked at T.R. and smiled, but T.R. seemed oblivious to the aura her own beauty cast. She waited casually until Muddy caught up with her, and the two went off to get a hot dog.