The Late Child

  “I must be losing it,” she added. “That’s two cowboys in two days who haven’t paid the slightest attention to me.”

  “Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” Neddie said.

  “Why should I?” Pat asked.

  “What is wrong with my aunts?” Eddie asked. “They’re always quarreling.”

  “See, you two should try to be a little more pleasant,” Harmony said, as they walked along the road, back toward their car.

  10.

  While they were having burritos at a small taco stand in Gallup, Pat’s addiction began to act up.

  “I wonder if there’s anybody in this town I could run off with,” she said, while munching a cheese-and-bean burrito.

  “Pat, we’re just going to ignore you when you say things like that,” Harmony said. “Can’t you try to be a good influence on Eddie? He’s your nephew.”

  Pat ignored her. “Let’s see if we could get a car phone,” she said.

  “She wants a car phone so she can have phone sex with Rog, if he survived,” Neddie said.

  “Pat, you can’t, Eddie’s just five,” Harmony said.

  “I just said I wanted a car phone,” Pat said. “I didn’t say a word about phone sex.”

  Neddie drove straight out of Gallup, without giving Pat a chance to search the Gallup yellow pages for a place that might sell car phones.

  Harmony found that the loss of all her worldly possessions didn’t bother her as much as she had supposed it would. In fact, when she looked out the back window of the car and saw no trailer, she felt a kind of relief. All her possessions were in a canyon in Arizona—it was like a statement from God or something. If she had been meant to continue life with all those possessions, surely the trailer wouldn’t have chosen an inaccessible spot in a famous national park to come loose and go off the road. It occurred to her that eagles and hawks might make good use of some of her stuff—her bras might make bird nests for little birds.

  Now, when she looked out the back window, she was likely to see Iggy, who liked to have Eddie lift him into the little space above the back seat. There Iggy could stretch out in the sun and take naps. Sometimes he made little belching sounds, when he was napping.

  “What do those sounds mean?” Eddie wondered.

  “He’s dreaming,” Pat said.

  “What would a dog’s dreams be, Mom?” Eddie asked.

  “Well, he might dream that he was rescued from an evil witch in Hopi land by a nice little boy named Eddie who’s going to take him to live in a Christian community in Oklahoma,” Neddie said.

  “Slow down, Neddie,” Pat said. “New Mexico is a pretty state. Why should we have to watch it hurtling by at such a high speed?”

  “We could go to New York,” Harmony said, somewhat to her own surprise. “We could all meet Laurie.

  “We don’t have the trailer,” she added. “We wouldn’t have to worry about having to park it in a tight space.”

  “I want to see the Statue of Liberty, Mom, and so does Iggy,” Eddie said. “Maybe that’s what he’s dreaming about, when he makes those sounds.”

  “Why would a dog dream about the Statue of Liberty?” Neddie asked. “He’s never heard of the Statue of Liberty.”

  “I dream about things I’ve never heard of,” Eddie said. “Why couldn’t Iggy?”

  Neddie was passing eight trucks at once. Pat seemed lost in thought. Eddie listened to his dog make dreaming sounds. To the north there were some reddish bluffs. Harmony looked back, over Iggy, out the back window. A trucker, not far off their bumper, gave her a big smile and a wave. He had evidently taken a liking to her from looking at the back of her head.

  “Don’t encourage him, Harmony,” Neddie said. “If you give him much encouragement he’ll follow us all the way to Tucumcari.”

  Eddie stood up in the seat, turned around, and looked back at the trucker.

  “I don’t think you should smile at him, Mom,” Eddie said. “He looks too much like Jimmy.”

  Harmony had smiled at the trucker, a little. She couldn’t help it. During her years as a showgirl it had been her job to smile a lot. Naturally she smiled while she was on stage but she also did a good bit of smiling when she wasn’t on stage. It relaxed her to sort of wander through the casinos, smiling at people—guys, mainly, but not always guys. It certainly didn’t hurt business in the casinos to have a friendly showgirl passing through.

  It wasn’t a professional smile, though—not really. It was just the way she felt. She smiled a lot. It hadn’t been a provocative smile she gave the trucker, either—it was just a normal smile, one human being indicating that she had at least a little goodwill for another human being.

  “Go away, farter!” Eddie said, to the trucker—of course the trucker couldn’t hear him and had no idea that Eddie had made such a horrible remark.

  Harmony herself was shocked—Eddie had never taken such a negative attitude toward anyone before—or, if he had, he hadn’t expressed it to her.

  “Eddie, why’d you say that?” she asked.

  “Well, he looks like Jimmy, he might fart too much if he was in our home,” Eddie said, more mildly. “I don’t think you should let him be your boyfriend.”

  “How could he be my boyfriend, he’s in a truck?” Harmony asked, nervous. She was getting the feeling that Eddie might have been suppressing low opinions of several of her boyfriends.

  “Eddie’s right, casual smiles when you’re not even thinking about sex is how things get started,” Pat said.

  “Speak for yourself,” Neddie said.

  “If that truck gets any closer he’ll squash Iggy,” Eddie said. “I don’t think he has consideration for dogs. Since we have Iggy now, that’s important, Mom.”

  Harmony didn’t look around again. The trucker even tooted his horn gently, once, hoping for some response, but he didn’t get one. When he finally gave up he passed them easily, though Neddie was holding steady at eighty-five.

  “I doubt Gary realized what a good automobile he was giving us,” Neddie said. “This car just kinda floats on down the road.”

  The words were scarcely out of her mouth before the car ceased to float. There was a horrible sound from inside the hood—it sounded as if a dishwasher had just blown apart, breaking all the dishes and itself besides. The car lost speed rapidly.

  “Uh-oh,” Neddie said.

  As the car slowed, it began to buck and lurch; Neddie floor-boarded it, but to little avail. The car lurched like a sick animal of some kind. Neddie had been in the passing lane when disaster struck, but she managed to wrestle it across to the right shoulder, slipping right between two speeding trucks.

  “It ain’t good for cars to be driven eighty-five and up,” Pat said. “What do you think happened?”

  “I don’t think what happened was good,” Neddie said. “That’s as far as I’ll go.”

  “Are we going to have to live here, Mom?” Eddie asked. They were on the outskirts of Grants, New Mexico. A few tumbleweeds were blowing across the road; they hung in the barbed wire surrounding the little shacks on the edge of town.

  “No, we won’t have to, Eddie,” Harmony said. “But maybe we’ll have to get a motel room until the car gets fixed.”

  “We won’t be getting the car fixed,” Neddie said. “This car is shot.”

  “Who shot it, Aunt Neddie?” Eddie asked. “I didn’t hear any shots.” He quickly pulled the sleeping Iggy off his warm but exposed spot above the back seat.

  “I mean shot in the sense of being too damaged to repair,” Neddie said.

  Near the road, two teenagers were pitching a basketball at a hoop that had no net. Two skinny goats were watching them play. Every time a truck whizzed by, the car rocked for a moment from the force of the truck’s passing. Harmony remembered her urge just to take Gary’s car and run away from her life, as far as she could get. Probably Grants, New Mexico, was as far as she would have got, had she followed that impulse: she would have had to begin whatever life was left to he
r in some place pretty much like Grants, New Mexico, a place where the goats were skinny and the basketball hoops without nets.

  The thought didn’t really depress her. It would have been pretty much what she deserved. Only here she was, with Grants to deal with, and her sisters and her son and Gary’s ruined car as well.

  “Do you think God tests us, to see how much shit we can survive?” Neddie asked, smoking.

  “I think God has better things to do than to heap shit on little puny human beings just to see how fast they can shovel it,” Pat said.

  “My teacher doesn’t believe in an anthropomorphic God,” Eddie said. Iggy was licking his face.

  “Eddie, if you say one more big word I don’t know the meaning of and don’t even want to know the meaning of I’m gonna scream and run berserk through the bushes,” Pat said.

  “Pat, he was just contributing to the conversation,” Harmony said. She felt very nervous when the conversation veered around to religion. Sooner or later it was going to come out that Eddie had never been inside a church in his life.

  “But there’s no bushes around here, Aunt Pat,” Eddie pointed out.

  “There’s enough for me to run berserk through,” Pat said. “This is a crazy trip. It’s not doing any of us any good.”

  “It is too,” Eddie said. “It’s doing Iggy good because he’s not an orphan anymore. He has a family now.”

  “That can be a blessing or it can be a curse,” Pat said. “Right this minute it feels like a curse. Here we are broken down in some godforsaken part of the world and I don’t even know whether my fiancé is dead or alive.”

  “If he survived, maybe this will teach you to appreciate him,” Neddie said.

  “I have a good idea,” Harmony said. “I’ve been thinking about it ever since the car blew up. Why don’t we just leave the car and take an airplane to New York?”

  “No, what about my stuffed animals?” Eddie said. “What about Iggy?”

  “They let dogs on airplanes, Iggy can come,” Harmony assured him.

  “Mom, I have many stuffed animals, they depend on me,” Eddie said. “We’ll have to take them all on the airplane—every one.”

  “It seemed like a good idea when I had it,” Harmony said.

  “Look around you,” Pat said. “Does this look like an airport?”

  “I think Harmony just wants to meet Laurie,” Neddie said, in a kindly tone, “She wants to find out about Pepper. That’s a natural thing.”

  “I don’t want to leave a single stuffed animal,” Eddie said, in a very firm voice.

  “You should have let me smile at that trucker,” Harmony pointed out. “If you’d just let me smile at him he might have given us a ride to the airport.”

  “She’s got a point,” Neddie allowed. “We’ve got a ruint car here—a friendly trucker might come in handy.”

  “Truckers aren’t a scarce breed,” Pat reminded them. “This is good old I-40 we’re stranded on. A truck goes by every two or three seconds. Harmony can just get out and stand on the shoulder and smile her famous smile. In ten minutes you’ll have trucks lined up all the way back to L.A., wanting to help her get her hubcaps off.”

  Even as she said it six or seven eighteen-wheelers swooshed by, rocking Gary’s car six or seven times.

  “Maybe the car isn’t as ruined as you think it is, Neddie,” Pat said. “Maybe it’s just a minor problem with the fan belt. Maybe some genius mechanic could have us back on the road in thirty minutes.”

  “Maybe, but don’t bet your virtue on it,” Neddie said, dryly.

  “Why not?—I’ve bet it on longer shots than that,” Pat said.

  11.

  “I think Gary will understand,” Harmony said. “Even when Gary gets mad at me he always forgives me, later in the day.”

  “Just tell him we ran into a deer or a cow or a buffalo or something and totaled his car,” Pat said. “After all, we are out here in the country where the buffalo roam.”

  Harmony was feeling a little guilty for having given Gary’s car away in exchange for a ride to the Albuquerque airport. A nice Navaho man had stopped to help them. About that time Harmony had begun to feel desperate. She didn’t feel stable enough to continue driving around America in Gary’s car, with Eddie and Iggy and her sisters and Eddie’s stuffed animals. She felt she might crack up at any moment. She might jump out at a stoplight and run away. She was very conscious of her responsibility to Eddie, but even her sense of responsibility might not be as strong as the cracking-up feeling.

  When the nice Navaho man offered to take the ruined car off their hands and give them a ride to the airport to boot, Harmony said yes at once, even though the man’s Toyota pickup only had one seat in it, meaning that most of them had to ride in the back of the pickup all the way to Albuquerque.

  Eddie spent most of the ride obsessively counting his stuffed animals, to make sure none of them had been left in a crevice in Gary’s car.

  “I have thirty-two stuffed animals,” Eddie said. “And I have Iggy, who’s not stuffed.”

  Fortunately he was able to charm a woman at the airline out of a box big enough to hold all thirty-two stuffed animals. The woman’s name was Rosie. Eddie immediately and articulately convinced Rosie of the necessity of having a secure container for his animals. When his Aunt Pat suggested they just send the animals straight to Oklahoma Eddie chilled her out with one look.

  “No way,” he informed her. “The hundred-year flood might come and wash them all away.”

  “It’s pretty dry in Tarwater,” Neddie said. “I doubt the hundred-year flood will happen in the next few days.”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t take the risk,” Eddie said.

  “Harmony, can’t you reason with your son?” Pat asked. “What are we going to do with thirty-two stuffed animals in New York City?”

  “Having his animals with him gives Eddie a sense of security,” Harmony replied.

  Actually, being in the pleasant Albuquerque airport gave her a sense of security. The terminal was airy and bright and there were nice designs on the tile floor. Harmony particularly liked the airiness. With a little space around her she didn’t have to deal with the constant sense that everyone around her was just waiting for her to crack up. They could spread themselves out, in a way that had not been possible in the car. Eddie sat by himself, having a conversation with a stuffed porcupine. It was not uncommon for him to hold long conversations with his stuffed animals. Harmony wondered if that was a sign of anything bad—that Eddie didn’t like being an only child, maybe, or that he resented her boyfriends because they left hairs in the bathtub or had problems controlling their wind.

  In only twenty minutes it would be time to get on an airplane and fly to New York, a place Harmony had never been. The best reason Harmony could think of for going there was that there had to be something you did next. You couldn’t just stop in an airport and sit there forever. You couldn’t drive a car forever, or do any one single thing forever. Already her sister Pat had made the “Life must go on” statement to her several times. Harmony didn’t feel that the statement was strictly true. Eddie’s life would probably be a lot better if her own went on for a while, but life didn’t have to do anything. It could go on for eighty-three years, as it had with Myrtle, or it could stop a lot sooner, as it had with Didier one morning, and with Pepper, and with Wendell’s son, and many others. Jackie Bonventre’s had stopped one morning while he was putting a bag of laundry in his car; Mel’s had stopped in a hospital, after months of suffering that even the best drugs couldn’t really dull.

  Harmony supposed hers probably would go on: she just had no idea how the details would resolve themselves. Would she ever have a job again, or a boyfriend? If she did have a new boyfriend someday, would he have a violent side, or just be careless about hairs in the bathtub? Would Laurie be glad to see them, when they got to New York? Would her mother disown her because Eddie had never been inside a church?

  “I wish I knew a little more
about the details,” Harmony said—meaning the details of the rest of her life. For no reason it popped into her mind that her brother was in jail.

  “Why does Billy have to make phone calls?” she asked. “He’s nice. Why can’t he just find a girlfriend?”

  Neither of her sisters had an answer.

  “I guess some people would just rather get on the phone,” Pat remarked.

  “Billy don’t think he deserves a girlfriend,” Neddie said. “He’s got low self-esteem.”

  “So do I,” Harmony said. “But I still feel like I deserve a boyfriend once in a while.”

  “You just don’t think you deserve a very good one,” Eddie said, hopping on his mother’s knee.

  “Eddie, I just don’t realize they aren’t very good until it’s too late,” Harmony told him; she was feeling worse and worse about her record with boyfriends.

  “That’s still better than Billy’s situation,” Pat said.

  “I don’t feel like I deserve much better than Dick, myself,” Neddie said.

  “Shit, what’s wrong with all of you?” Pat said. “I feel like I deserve Warren Beatty. I just don’t happen to know where he lives.”

  “You’re too old for Warren Beatty,” Neddie said, in an unsympathetic tone. “You’ll be lucky if you’ve still got Rog. He’s more your speed.”

  “Rog don’t have a speed—neutral ain’t a speed,” Pat said.

  “When we get to New York what will we do first?” Eddie asked.

  Harmony looked at Neddie, who looked at Pat. None of them had an answer.

  “Eddie, can’t we just play it by ear?” Harmony asked. “Maybe we’ll call Laurie first. Laurie was a good friend of your sister’s.”

  “If she’s not home I think we should go to the Statue of Liberty first,” Eddie said. “I need to get postcards and the Statue of Liberty would be the perfect place to get postcards.”

  “I wouldn’t have no more idea how to get to the Statue of Liberty than I would of how to get to China,” Neddie said.

  When they called the flight, Harmony started to cry. Her son and her two sisters ignored her. She felt sad that she was leaving the West. It had always been her home. When the plane took off she looked out the window at the beautiful sunny sky. For most of the flight Eddie kept his finger poked into Iggy’s little cage, so Iggy would feel reassured. When they served the meal Eddie gave Iggy his potato.