Some Can Whistle

by Larry McMurtry

  Not only was he alive, but he was at the address on the letter, a small frame house in the poor white part of Lufkin. When I knocked at the screen door an amiable young black woman appeared and asked me what I wanted.

  “I was wondering if Mr. Bynum was in,” I said. “My name is Deck.”

  “Deck?” she asked, her face brightening. “Are you the one who wrote the TV show?”

  “I’m the one,” I said.

  “Yeah, he’s in,” she said, unlatching the door. “He’s always in, except when I take him for his walks. He talks about you all the time.”

  “About me?” I asked, surprised.

  “You, if you’re the one wrote the TV show,” she said. “He says you was part of his family. He don’t have much to be proud of these days, but he’s real proud of you.”

  At one point the irony of such a remark would have caused me to turn and leave, but I was older and had often drunk the dark milk of irony. I followed the girl out to a small screened-in porch at the back of the house, where a gaunt old man wearing khakis and an undershirt sat on a faded couch, holding a flyswatter.

  “Here, gimme that flyswatter,” the girl said. “What you think you’re doing? You can’t see to swat no flies anyway.”

  “Aw, let me keep it, I might get one of them accidentally,” the old man said. “I need something to do with my hands.”

  “You got company,” the girl said.

  “Hope it’s female company, I could use some female company,” the old man said, attempting a toothless leer. His false teeth sat on a small table beside the couch.

  “It’s that man who wrote the TV show—you know, your son-in-law,” the girl said.

  “Danny Deck, Mr. Bynum,” I said.

  “Well, I swear,” the old man said, attempting to stand up. He made it to his feet but wobbled so badly that he had to sit back down almost at once, and he sat so heavily that he knocked his false teeth off the table. It was clear that he couldn’t see me at all, but he was waving his big old hand for me to shake, and I finally managed to catch it and shake it.

  “Gosh, I’m glad you came, Dan,” he said at once. “I’m feeble but at least I ain’t got the Alzheimer’s. Want to hear what I think would make a good story for the TV?”

  It was not the opening I had expected—though I don’t know why not. Virtually everyone alive has a story they think would be perfect for TV.

  “See, I knew them all,” the old man said. “I could tell you things about them that ain’t never got in the papers. I could tell it and you could write it and we could make a show that wouldn’t quit.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “Who was it you knew, Mr. Bynum?” I asked. “I’m confused.”

  “Why, the oilmen,” he said. “The wildcatters. I knew Hunt. I knew Getty. I knew Dad Joiner. Hunt owes me money to this day, although I’ll never collect it. I beat him in a poker game and it made Getty jealous, because Getty could rarely even take a hand from Hunt.”

  “Goodness,” I said. “I bet you do know some stories.”

  “Dad Joiner was the best,” the old man said. “Hunt was plenty smart, and the first smart thing he did was latch onto Dad Joiner and stick to him like a tick. Hunt found Dad Joiner, and Dad Joiner found the oil.”

  The amiable young black girl brought us both glasses of lemonade. The old man quaffed his in two swallows, eager to get on with his stories about the great days of the East Texas oil fields, when legends on the order of Hunt and Getty walked the earth. He was perfectly friendly and also perfectly selfish. All he wanted was to get his oil-boom stories on TV and make a fortune—a common dream.

  As he talked I began to grow sad. This was the man my daughter had grown up with—no monster, just a normally selfish old man; a child of the boom who had nonetheless missed the boom and turned to a life of petty crime instead. He had known the great ones, but he himself was not great. I had hoped, I suppose, to hear him talk about T.R., to gain a sense of what her childhood had been like; but he never mentioned T.R. He had raised her, but she was gone, and he had forgotten her; she didn’t haunt him as she haunted me. I couldn’t hate him, and I had found out nothing from him. The trip had been a miss.

  Abruptly he began to tire.

  “Lord, it’s tiresome not to be able to see,” he said. “I can’t even see that nigger gal. I don’t even know if she’s pretty or not.”

  “She’s pretty and she’s also nice,” I assured him.

  “I think I’ll take a little nap, Dan,” he said, swinging his long legs onto the couch. “I’ll just keep this flyswatter. Let me know when you do the show.”

  “You oughta hear him snore,” the young woman said, as I was leaving. “That old man sure do snore.”

  7

  I took three years to write the novel. I thought it would be about my daughter—about T.R. Perhaps I thought that in writing it I would discover some of the things about her that I didn’t know; perhaps I thought the book would bring some of her back to me. By truthful imaginings I would find my daughter.

  I worked hard and in time regained a certain art, but the art refused to be used as I had hoped to use it. It took its own path, and the path led not to T.R. but to the old man. It became a book about a lecherous, criminal old preacher who seduced half the wives in his congregation and sold dope out of his parsonage. The girl, his granddaughter, figured in the story only slightly; Lloyd Bynum had deflected me once again.

  The book was a modest success.

  From time to time Lloyd Bynum called, to see how our show was progressing, and to ramble on about Hunt, Getty, and Dad Joiner. Once or twice I sent him money. The nice black woman, Amy, called the day after he died to ask for a job. I needed someone to look after Los Dolores, so I hired her; she lives there with me still. Her husband, Otis, comes and goes, but Amy stayed and raised a fine family. I helped send all her kids to college. Her oldest boy, Robert, was one of the few people Bo could be said to like.

  8

  I tried with Bo, Gladys tried with him, Muddy tried with him, Elena tried with him, Amy tried with him, Hilton tried with him, but it’s fair to say that with the exception of his mother, his sister, and Buddy, nobody ever really liked Bo. We all lived with a kind of low-grade anxiety when Bo was around, never really knowing what he might do. When he was five or six, I had to banish all firearms from the house because Bo managed to load a shotgun and killed Elena’s cat.

  “I don’t like old cats,” he said, without remorse, when asked to explain.

  Over the years Bo broke hundreds of objects: dishes, glasses, toys, TVs, lawn mowers, fishing equipment. The objects he destroyed got larger and more expensive as he got older, but the pattern of destruction hardly varied. One day, when we were in town, he carried out six hundred videos and threw them in the swimming pool, apparently just so he could watch them float. When he was big enough to mow the lawn, he set Jesse’s favorite doll on the grass and sliced it to shreds with the mower.

  I thought maybe Buddy had the right idea when he got him interested in fishing, so I took him fishing a few times. Unfortunately I was a terrible fisherman; only turtles took my bait.

  “You can’t catch anything but turtles,” Bo said disgustedly. He walked back to the house. I don’t think he ever took me seriously again.

  If there was a good Bo, Jesse was the only person who saw it. She saw plenty of the bad Bo too—throughout their childhood he was constantly punching her, knocking her down, sitting on her, trying to run over her with tricycles or bikes, trying to drown her in the pool; he disrupted her birthday parties and immediately broke most of her favorite toys. Thanks to him, Jesse had a more-or-less permanent fat lip. But Jesse, though she wept, squealed, grieved over decapitated dolls and disemboweled stuffed animals, was not one to hold grudges. Occasionally she would even manage to engage her brother in peaceful pursuits for a few hours—coloring, secret clubhouses, or (as they got older) listening to records. When he got expelled from schools, as he did fre
quently, Jesse would immediately insist on being withdrawn too; often she was able to secure him another chance. When he got arrested in Pacific Palisades for stealing stereos out of cars, Jesse did tireless liaison work, pleading with his probation officer to overlook his constant infractions and give him one more chance. When he disappeared, it was Jesse he called when he needed money; when he reappeared it was in her apartments near the various campuses where she studied that he chose to crash. Twice he stole her boyfriends’ cars, one of which he totaled, but Jesse managed to persuade the boyfriends not to press charges.

  When Bo was sixteen I finally did something for him that worked—which was to get him flying lessons. My motive was partly selfish. As I became more and more reclusive, I developed a horror of airports: of the noise, the waiting, the crowds. I would begin to hyperventilate at the mere thought of an airport; having to mix with masses of people made me shaky. For days before a trip I would get headaches far more intense than my normal headaches. Once or twice, for minor trips, I chartered planes, at vast expense, just to avoid airports.

  It occurred to me that if Bo could become a pilot I could buy a small plane and he could fly me home to Texas whenever I needed to go. Flying lessons proved to be the one thing I ever suggested that Bo was enthusiastic about. He soon became an adept small-plane pilot. I bought him a nice Cessna and he flew me to Texas in it exactly once. Then he flew away in the Cessna and essentially never came back. Jesse told me he was working at a flying school in Mexico somewhere. I didn’t hear from him for two years; then he called, needing money for some repairs to the plane. I sent the money. It was the last time he ever asked for money. It was also the last time I heard from him. Presumably he was still working for the mysterious flying school in Mexico. Sometimes he flew into whatever city Jesse was studying in at the time and stayed with his sister for a few days. I assumed he was flying dope, but I made no effort to confirm my assumption. When asked about her brother, Jesse became uncharacteristically vague.

  Mostly I don’t think about Bo, but when I do think about him I feel guilty. When he was not yet three, T.R. had expressed the hope that he would not become a criminal; I raised him and he became a criminal. It was not a triumph. I wished, for T.R.’s sake, that I had known how to do a better job.

  9

  Six years after T.R.’s death, Jeanie Vertus got married. Her husband was a director named Eric Roth. Eric, a few years younger than Jeanie, was gifted, lively, appealing, nice. The marriage was unusually happy. Once you saw the two of them together it became hard to imagine how they could have lived apart.

  I seldom again heard the tragic note in Jeanie’s voice—the note that had defined her for so long both as a woman and an actress. One might have thought that that note was the mark of her greatness, but it wasn’t true. She worked just as well happy as she had worked unhappy, and, in some cases, better.

  I got fewer and fewer calls from Jeanie, as the years passed. At first, when she did call, she would be guilt-stricken; it would occur to her that she hadn’t called me in a month, or two months, or more. Fortunately some quirk allowed me to take a comic approach to Jeanie’s inadvertent desertion on these occasions. I made little comedies of the mishaps I might have sustained during her periods of inattention; my comedies were so successful, such brilliant inventions in their own right, that Jeanie always hung up relieved, convinced that I was holding my own without her.

  It was neither entirely true nor entirely a lie. I missed Jeanie deeply, yet I was glad she had got lucky, and I didn’t really expect her to call that often. The rules of happiness are as strict as the rules of sorrow; indeed, perhaps more strict. The two states have different densities, I’ve come to think. The lives of happy people are dense with their own doings—crowded, active, thick—urban, I would almost say.

  But the sorrowing are nomads, on a plain with few landmarks and no boundaries; sorrow’s horizons are vague and its demands few. Jeanie and I had not become strangers; it was just that she lived in the city and I lived on the plain.

  10

  When Jesse was ready for college—it seemed to take her only a few years to grow up—I left L.A. for good and went back home to Texas. I settled back in at Los Dolores, replaced the ocean with the plain. I made reading lists for Amy’s very bright children; I used my still-considerable influence to get them into good schools. Occasionally I drove to Houston, to attend a benefit, see a show at a museum.

  Always, when in Houston, I drifted over to the Lawndale area, an Asian barrio by this time. The Mr. Burger was gone, replaced by a spiffy little restaurant called The Wok.

  Sometimes I visited Sue Lin; she and her husband owned a computer store, staffed mainly by their lively children.

  I tried to find Dew, but no one was sure where Dew had gone.

  Apart from having a larger Asian barrio, Houston had not changed much. The dance halls along Telephone Road and over by the ship channel were as sleazy as they had been in T.R.’s time or in my own youth. The city still had its funkiness, its odors, its beautiful clouds. Sometimes I drifted aimlessly in the older parts of town—the Heights, the Third Ward. Always I dreamed of my lost daughter, who had so loved to kick up her heels in just such places.

  Sometimes I drove on down to Galveston and walked by the sea, dreaming of T.R. My mind continued to be tormented by the lost years; it wouldn’t just let them go; it picked at them. They had become an obsession with me.

  In my obsession I remembered the name of the nice girl who had been killed in the wreck—Annie Elgin, T.R.’s high school friend. She was dead, but her mother was alive. I went again to East Texas and found Mrs. Elgin living in the same lovely, well-kept house the detective had sent me pictures of. She was a pleasant, courteous woman, but so plainly horrified by my appearance—I looked pretty weird by this time, I guess—that I excused myself after fifteen minutes and never bothered her again. I learned as little about T.R. from her as I had learned from Lloyd Bynum. Accepting this lesson at last, I never went to East Texas again.

  The last source that might have told me something about T.R.’s youth was the man who killed her, Earl Dee. Several times, before he himself was killed, I contemplated visiting him in prison. But if Lloyd Bynum and Annie Elgin’s mother weren’t really interested, could I expect better of Earl Dee? After all, she was just an old girlfriend to him, and a treacherous one at that. Probably he had forgotten her two weeks after he killed her. A visit with him might just make matters worse; in the end I let it go, and with it the hope of knowing very much about T.R.’s early years.

  I remained obsessed, but my obsession was sterile; I never learned any of the things I wanted to know about T.R. It was as if she had risen unexpectedly from the dark sea of time, walked with me on the beach for a few bright moments, and had then gone quietly back to the long waters. But a critical human ability—the ability to let the lost be lost, the dead be dead—was another of the several I turned out not to have; not, at least, in any healthy measure. To this day I spend a lot of time just staring out the window, hoping to see a girl who isn’t there.

  11

  Into the rubble of this broken life stepped Jesse. Never as beautiful as her mother, never as brash, never as vivid, Jesse had in full T.R.’s dauntlessness, her absolute resolution. Only twenty months old when T.R. was killed, she forgot her mother quickly and set about making the most of what she had—in her case a rough brother and three crushed adults.

  In my blackest days, when all I could really do was sit on the bed and look out the window, Jesse sat with me. She would push a chair over to the bed and climb up. Then for an hour or two she would be up and down, assembling doll families, stuffed animals, coloring books, scissors. Once she had everything she needed, she would stay on the bed with me for hours, coloring, cutting, discussing weighty matters with her doll families, reprimanding the stuffed animals. When I napped, Jesse napped with me; when I fell silent, Jesse talked.

  And talked and talked and talked: to me, to Gladys, to her father.
She padded through the house tirelessly, ever hopeful; she wouldn’t let any of us alone. Rearranging furniture was her passion from the age of three on—we were soon predicting a great future for Jesse in interior design. Any piece of furniture small enough for her to lift or push would soon be traveling from room to room, being frequently repositioned. Jesse made up her mind quickly and changed it just as quickly.

  She was six when we moved to Santa Monica and had a whole new house to furnish. Jeanie came out for a week. She and Jesse disappeared; a day or two later, truckfuls of furniture began to arrive.

  Interior decoration was not Jesse’s only passion, however. As she grew older a month scarcely passed without her plunging into a new enthusiasm: architecture, movies, vintage clothes, surfboarding, dancing, hang-gliding, photography, girlfriends, boyfriends, anthropology, Mexico, the world. Guided by excellent teachers in excellent schools, often accompanied on her various journeys by Jeanie—one of the few people as hard to keep up with as Jesse—it soon seemed Jesse was everywhere, doing everything. I began to worry; I gave her lectures on the necessity of discipline and focus; I warned her solemnly of the danger of spreading herself too thin.

  Jesse ignored my lectures and kept spreading, but by the time she was seventeen and a freshman at UCLA it seemed that either filmmaking or anthropology was most likely to capture her. She helped out a bit one summer on a commercial some friends were making; then she and a boyfriend took off for Nepal and made a film about the honey-hunters—old men who harvest honey from beehives up on the cliffs. It was called High Honey and got a lot of notice from both documentarians and anthropologists.

  I watched with pleasure, with amazement, and finally with joy as my granddaughter’s mind expanded. Six months after returning from Nepal, not yet eighteen, she decided that what she needed was more education. In rapid succession she left UCLA for Berkeley, Berkeley for the University of Chicago, Chicago for Columbia, Columbia for the Sorbonne. I visited her occasionally in several of her schools, marveling at the way she took what she wanted from each of the available brain pools; the great universities were like intellectual furniture warehouses to Jesse. She rushed through them with bright eyes open, made her selection in a few weeks, and went on to the next warehouse. After one look at Jesse, or one talk, many great brains made themselves available, more or less, for whatever Jesse had in mind.