The Evening Star

by Larry McMurtry

  “That’s a surprise I can’t deal with right now,” he admitted to his sister.

  “Why not, what’s happening?” Melanie asked. Teddy was trying to sound calm, but in his voice she heard reminders of a time when he had not been calm.

  “Jane wants to spank Bump and I’m arguing for clemency,” Teddy said. “I have to hang up or there won’t be clemency—she’ll spank him. I’ll call you back later.”

  Jane had just come in from work at the 7-Eleven and was not in a serene mood. An asshole had hassled her about change just before her shift ended, and then had had the gall to follow her for almost a whole block, trying to get her to go out with him. The man had looked like a Cajun, though he claimed he was from Florida.

  “You have the most beautiful long legs I’ve ever seen,” he said, as he was following her. “I know how to do the dirty dancing.” He was combing his hair as he walked.

  “I know how to squirt you in the eye with my Mace, too,” Jane said, taking her Mace out of her purse. He made so bold as to touch her elbow, so she pointed it at him, a threat that immediately cooled his ardor.

  “Don’t Mace me, goodbye,” he said, departing. “I just fell in love with your beautiful long legs.”

  Jane did have beautiful long legs and was a little bit vain about them, but her legs pretty much got taken for granted by Teddy; it annoyed her that a Cajun who couldn’t even count his change paid more attention to them than her husband. Then she got home and started to make tea, only to find a sopping-wet Sanskrit grammar in the sink. For the past few months she and Teddy had been working on Sanskrit together. Bump’s main flaw was that he craved attention—indeed, he craved it so much that he would attempt to destroy anything that distracted either of his parents’ attention from him for long. Although he liked his own books, and usually kept five or six of them in his bunk bed with him so he could look through the stories whenever he wanted to, he didn’t like his parents’ books, any one of which was likely to distract his parents’ attention for long periods of time.

  Lately, though, his main rival had been the Sanskrit grammar. His parents spent long hours poring over it or talking about it; when they were devoting themselves to the book he would have to have a fit or scream to get their attention at all. First, he tried merely hiding the book—he hid it under a shoebox in his mother’s closet, but she soon found it. Then he managed to tuck it under the washing machine, but again the book was found. Bump was ingenious at wiggling into places a parent couldn’t go, pushing the book ahead of him to hide it as far away as possible, but there weren’t that many good hiding places in the apartment, and his parents always found the book. They seemed to find it amusing that he was jealous of the book and wanted to hide it—also they seemed to enjoy letting him know that they were Bigs and he was a Little, which meant that they could always find anything he tried to hide.

  Bump didn’t find this amusing at all, but he thought he had solved the problem of the book one day when his father was napping. It was raining hard and the window was open, so he pushed the book over the windowsill and watched it fall into the rain. When his parents discovered the mushy book lying in a puddle below their window they shook their heads at Bump and looked sort of pleased. The fact that he had so cleverly disposed of his rival, the book, seemed to convince them all over again that he was a child with a quite high intelligence.

  Bump was glad he had pushed the book out the window. He assumed that he had disposed of it forever and became very annoyed when his father came home, a few days later, with a book that seemed to be exactly like the one he had pushed out the window. He immediately tried to stab the book with a pencil, but his mother just took the pencil away from him and put the book on a high shelf where he couldn’t reach it.

  Then the old, annoying pattern started repeating itself. Every day his father or mother or both spent too much time looking into the book, ignoring him completely at such times unless he threw a tantrum or hurt himself in some way. He tried to stab the book with pencils and knives and once even made a small cut in it with a kitchen knife he had snatched, but none of these attempts really worked. Once, trying to climb up the bookshelves in order to get the book, he fell and split his lip; this got him some sympathy but didn’t mean that the book was gone. Bump watched it on its high shelf and intended to attack it again if he got the opportunity, but no opportunity had come until that afternoon, when his father, who was making a phone call, momentarily relaxed his attention and left the book on a chair. Bump grabbed it and took it to the bathroom, and threw it in the big people’s toilet. His father discovered it there only a few minutes later, but a good deal of damage had been done. The book was almost as mushy as the one Bump had pushed out the window. His father merely looked at him in a funny way, twisted his mouth a bit, and shook his head. His father didn’t grab him or shake him or anything; his father never did such things, even when Bump ignored his potty and peed wherever he happened to be.

  “This isn’t going to keep us from learning Sanskrit, you know,” his father said, carrying the dripping book to the sink.

  Bump didn’t know why they liked the book so much—it didn’t have pictures in it, as his own books did—but he knew that they wouldn’t like it as much, now that it was wet through and through. He ignored his father’s remark and sat at the foot of his bunk bed, studying his book with a tiger in it—the tiger book was one of his own favorites. He felt happy, now that his parents’ bad book had been disposed of again, and when his mother came home he ran to meet her and got picked up and kissed. Bump loved the way his mother smelled and was happy for a while, cuddling and smelling her.

  But when his mother saw the wet book in the sink, the atmosphere immediately changed.

  Bump saw her face grow angry—he immediately ran and burrowed into the closet amid his mother’s shoes. It was the safest place in the apartment, but this time it wasn’t safe enough. His mother just kicked away the shoes and pulled him out. Bump began a silent resistance; he kicked at her as hard as he could, but kept a smile on his face. His mother was not very gentle, though. She held him and shook him; she was very angry and didn’t smell nice anymore.

  “Don’t you dare ever hurt one of my books again, Jonathan!” she said. “It wasn’t your book and you mustn’t get it wet.”

  His father came and tried to take him away from his mother. Bump stretched out his hands to his father but his mother refused to let his father have him. Then the phone rang and his father turned to answer it. Bump really wanted to get away from his angry mother. He wiggled as hard as he could in an effort to demand that his mother release him so he could run to his safe father, but his mother imprisoned him in her lap and ignored his kicks and wiggles. Bump could hear her breathing like a beast—when she became angry enough to use his other name, Jonathan, she often breathed hot breath on him like a beast—like some of the big dogs they met on the sidewalk during his walks. Sometimes when she held him as she was holding him now, and breathing hot breath, he wondered if his mother was really a tiger. She didn’t have stripes and a tail, but Bump thought she might be some sort of tiger anyway because of the way her teeth looked and her eyes looked and her breath came when she was angry. Perhaps the tiger in his book was only one kind of tiger and his mother another kind. He felt himself to be a match for his father but he knew he wasn’t a match for his mother, and he thought it was probably because she was really a tiger. “You little fucker, that’s two Sanskrit grammars you’ve ruined!” she said—she often spoke in such tones to him when she became angry enough to use his other name.

  “Yes, but it’s just a book, after all,” Teddy said, hanging up the receiver so quickly that he dropped it and had to fumble a bit before he got it back on the hook.

  “Please don’t spank him,” he added.

  Jane had been holding Bump on her lap, watching him struggle and wiggle, while he eyed her with a kind of maddening calm that replicated Teddy’s own maddening calm in every way. When Teddy asked her please not t
o give Bump the spanking he deserved, she immediately flipped the child over like a pancake and whopped him twice on his behind with her open hand. Then she sat him on the floor and watched him flee. In seconds he was back in the closet amid her shoes, hiding.

  “I wish you hadn’t done that, but you did it,” Teddy said.

  “Yeah, I did it, and it’s over,” Jane said, still very angry. In a detached part of her brain she was wondering what sort of place the Cajun would have taken her to if she had gone with him. Would he have paused at a dance hall for a little dirty dancing? Or would he have just made straight for some crummy apartment?

  “Maybe it’s over and maybe it isn’t,” Teddy said, a little angry himself. “Maybe twenty years from now he’ll murder us both because of what you just did.”

  “Oh, fuck you,” Jane said. “Do you think I’m going to sit here and practice the Socratic method with a two-year-old? Anyway, I’m sick of the Socratic method, and the reason I’m sick of it is because it’s the only method you know.”

  “I don’t think I practice the Socratic method, particularly,” Teddy said. “I just don’t believe in spanking kids. Do you really think swatting him on the behind is going to make him respect our Sanskrit grammar?”

  Jane didn’t say anything. She was wishing, just for a moment, that she had a different mate. She always thought of Teddy as a mate, not a husband. A mate was easier to get rid of, but harder to replace. She thought again of the Cajun, who, for all his obtuseness, had an attractive smile. There would have been no problem about the Socratic method with him—he had clearly been a disciple of the Warren Beatty method.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Teddy asked. “You came in looking annoyed, and now you’ve spanked our child.”

  “I’m tired of your concern, Teddy,” Jane said. “Mind your own business.”

  “Well, but Bump is part of my business,” Teddy pointed out.

  “Look, I was spanked, and I didn’t turn into a murderer,” Jane said. “How many Sanskrit grammars do you propose to let him ruin before you put a stop to it? You know perfectly well he just does it because he doesn’t want us to study. He wants all our attention, and he can’t have it.

  “When I want to study Sanskrit, my child is not going to stop me,” she added. “I don’t want him to be one of those children who has total control of his parents.”

  “I still don’t think it’s a good idea for parents to hit children,” Teddy said, feeling a little sad. He wasn’t going to win the argument, and for an old reason: Jane might not have more conviction than he did, but she had more emotional energy to put behind whatever conviction she was pressing at a given moment. He could hear Bump in the closet, beating a shoe against the floor. He hadn’t really been hurt, or even particularly scared, and the two splats Jane had given him on his bottom probably hadn’t even registered with him —they bore no comparison to the stinging spankings Teddy’s father had given him when he had been five or six. His father had spanked him as if he had been responsible for everything bad: his mother’s death, the Vietnam war, you name it; and, if anything, the spankings Tommy got were even worse. Teddy remembered the spankings as a vague but ominous turning point, though, in talking to many shrinks, he had never been able to define the nature of the turning to his own satisfaction. Mainly, it was at that point that life became frightening, and it had continued to be frightening ever since.

  “I just don’t want him to be scared of us,” Teddy said, seeing that Jane was still looking at him angrily. “Besides, I’m the one who caught him red-handed.”

  “Right, and you should have spanked him on the spot, only you didn’t,” Jane said. “You left the dirty work to me.”

  “Do you think he knows you spanked him because of the book?” Teddy asked.

  “Look, I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” Jane said. “Are you ever going to learn just to let things happen and be over?”

  “Not when it involves justice,” Teddy said. “I’d like for Bump to know he’s been treated justly, that’s all.”

  At that moment the doorbell rang. Bump crawled out of the closet and ran to the door—he loved to answer the doorbell. He peered through the bamboo screen that hung on the door and saw his Big Granny and Rosie standing on the steps.

  “Oh, gosh,” Teddy said. “I forgot that Granny said she and Rosie might drop by.”

  Jane went to the door and let the two women in. Aurora swooped Bump up and gave him many kisses before passing him to Rosie, who did the same. Aurora noticed tear tracks on the little boy’s face.

  “Has he been laughing so hard he cried, or is it the other way around?” Aurora asked.

  “I spanked him,” Jane said. “Teddy doesn’t approve. You two look experienced—what do you think?”

  “What was the crime?” Aurora inquired, fanning herself—the air conditioner on her old car had chosen a bad moment to stop cooling. She noticed that Teddy looked somewhat on the defensive. It was her instinct to side with her own whenever possible, and Teddy was her own, but common sense had not exactly been his strong point; frequently, in matters of domestic judgment, she found that she was more likely to agree with Jane.

  “He drowned our Sanskrit grammar for the second time in a month,” Jane reported. “He hates for us to study.”

  Bump, noticing that his mother was no longer breathing like a beast, reached out his arms to her and was taken back.

  Teddy felt relieved and a little silly.

  “Well, I was a jealous child myself,” Aurora said. “I didn’t like for my mother to play the piano, although she played it beautifully. Still, I suppose I felt I was even more beautiful. I used to stick pencils between the keys. So I’m afraid Jonathan comes by his jealousies honestly. It’s this business of genes.”

  “Shoot, if I hadn’t spanked mine, they’d have been in jail before they started kindergarten,” Rosie said. “I spanked and I spanked. I doubt I’d ever spank this little boy here, though. He’s too full of sugar.”

  “Maybe I overreacted,” Teddy admitted. He was glad his grandmother and Rosie had arrived when they did. Jane had stopped being angry.

  Aurora watched Jonathan making up with his tall, beautiful mother in the middle of the small apartment that always seemed to be a trifle too orderly. She wondered if the bedroom was too orderly too—perhaps one reason the door to it was always shut when she came was that it was a total mess. She rather hoped it was a total mess, as her own bedroom often was. She never felt quite comfortable in Jane’s and Teddy’s apartment because some element of orderliness put her slightly off balance.

  The decor was simple—just an old couch she had given them, a plain table they had bought at a garage sale, a good if well-worn rug they had brought back from a trip to Afghanistan, and bookshelves filled with books—and she could never quite figure out why the place put her off balance. Perhaps it was because in the simplicity there was too much of a suggestion of restraint—and restraint was a quality she had never been drawn to, although she was brought up around Yale, where there was plenty of it.

  “How about some iced tea?” Jane asked. “You two look a little overheated.”

  “We accept, or at least I do,” Aurora said. “My car has betrayed me again, just as Rosie predicted it would.”

  “I’m still trying to talk her into a Datsun pickup, but I ain’t making no headway,” Rosie said.

  It disturbed Aurora to note that Teddy had a slight case of tremors. He appeared to be calm, but if one looked closely one could see that his hands were shaking just the slightest bit. She noticed it when Jane brought the iced tea and Teddy reached for his glass.

  Bump, more curious about his Big Granny than he was about Rosie, walked over and showed her a block he had with four Greek letters on it. Rosie he felt no hesitation with—he was sure of Rosie’s approval—but Big Granny was not someone he felt he could be quite sure of. He offered her the block with some diffidence—if she wasn’t interested, she didn’t have to take it.


  “You should be talking, young man,” Aurora said, accepting the block and pretending to study it closely. “Carrying around a block with Greek letters on it is all very well for a one-year-old, but you are no longer a one-year old. I do think it’s time you faced up to your conversational responsibilities.”

  Bump looked to his mother for guidance. His Big Granny was a lot of fun and could blow amazing bubbles out of a magic jar she kept in her bathroom, but there were times when he didn’t know quite what to make of her. She always talked to him as if he were a Big himself, when it was obvious that he wasn’t. He was just a Little. Sometimes his father also talked to him as if he were a Big, but his father never kept it up for long. His father would soon drop back into tones the Bigs customarily used when they talked to little people—tones Bump preferred. His mother spoke to him in those tones too, except when she was angry and became a beast.

  But Big Granny had old eyes, and old eyes were different from the eyes of his parents. Big Granny’s eyes seemed to look all inside him, even when she was being playful. Often when she looked at him, Bump felt like hiding in the closet, and sometimes he did hide in the closet, although he liked Big Granny, mostly. He particularly enjoyed visits to her bedroom, when she would bring out the magic bubble jar, and also let him bounce on her bed. The old Big that lived in Big Granny’s bedroom didn’t approve of Bump’s bouncing, but Big Granny ignored him and went on blowing bubbles or talking on the phone. Bump was allowed to bounce until he wore himself out.

  “It will serve you right if this child starts speaking Greek,” Aurora said, handing Bump back his block.

  “You never gave us your views on spanking,” Jane pointed out. “Do you think it will ruin Jonathan if I whop him on the butt once in a while?”

  “Of course not,” Aurora said. “Hasty spankings have little effect on the child, but they often make parents feel better. There’s nothing wrong with it—parents often need some way to feel better.”