The Late Child

  “I thought he was from Lebanon or somewhere,” Pat said.

  “He is my uncle,” Abdul said.

  Harmony drowsed off for a while—it seemed to her, as she drifted into her doze, that she heard Abdul, Salah, and Omar proposing to Pat. She had a great wish to be out of the taxi and into a large soft bed, with no one in it but herself and Eddie or, at most, Eddie and Iggy.

  When she came out of her little doze she smelled something sweet in her face. To her shock it turned out to be Omar’s breath. He was trying to help her out of the cab, in the process stealing a kiss or two. Iggy was yipping at him loudly.

  “Omar, what were you eating?” Harmony asked. His breath was unusually sweet.

  “Is betel nut,” Omar said, fluttering his breath in her face again. “Big joke on Salah. He was looking for No-Tel Motel in Bayonne but all the time motel was in Jersey City.”

  Harmony could see big flares, flaring into the sky, not far away. On the ground, closer to hand, she saw several young black women with very short skirts on. The skirts were so short she could see their underpants below their skirts; the underpants were Day-Glo colors, pink and orange and aquamarine. Eddie was still sleeping like an angel, unaware that they were now at their destination, the No-Tel Motel in Jersey City. Two or three of the young black women seemed to be yelling at Abdul, who cowered behind Salah. There was no sign of Neddie or Pat.

  “Omar, what happened to my sisters?” Harmony asked.

  “Don’t worry, they are not marrying Salah,” Omar said. “They are looking over No-Tel Motel—has cable and other excellent facilities.”

  “What are those flares—are they oil refineries?” she asked. There had been oil refineries around Tulsa, in her youth.

  “Refineries of oil, yes,” Omar said. “That is why No-Tel Motel is economical facility. If refineries blow up, very big boom. Then there will be no business at Newark Airport.”

  One of the black girls in the very short skirts wandered over and peeked into the taxi—she looked very young and had legs like toothpicks. When she saw Eddie and Iggy she gave a big, lipsticky smile.

  “I was just lookin’ to see if there was any guys in this cab,” the girl said.

  “No, but did you see my sisters?” Harmony asked. “I was asleep and they disappeared.”

  “They’re inside, fighting off the pimps,” the girl said. “They didn’t look like they live anywhere around here.”

  “Nope, Oklahoma,” Harmony said. “Would you hold my little boy for a second, miss?”

  When the girl picked him up Eddie came wide awake.

  “Hello, my name is Eddie,” he said. “Are you going to the Statue of Liberty with us?”

  “Wouldn’t mind a little trip to the Statue of Liberty with you, blue eyes,” the girl said.

  “What’s your name?” Eddie asked.

  “Oh, well, I got about thirty or forty names,” the girl replied. “Some days I use one, some days I use another.”

  “What if you have so many names people forget who you really are?” Eddie asked, smiling angelically.

  “Good question, blue eyes,” the girl said. “But maybe it’s good to have people forget who you really are.”

  “No!” Eddie said. “It’s not good. I don’t want people to forget who I really am. I want them to remember that I’m Eddie every minute of their lives.”

  “Ma’am, you got a live one here,” the girl said, when Harmony finally managed to drag Eddie’s box of stuffed animals out of the back of the cab.

  “Just tell me your best name,” Eddie said, looking at the girl.

  “Sheba,” the girl said. “That’s my best name. But, like I say, I got a few others.”

  “Are those girls your sisters?” Eddie asked, looking at the other women lined up by the curb.

  “Yeah, baby, my sisters,” Sheba said.

  “I wish I had as many sisters as you do,” Eddie said. “I only had one sister and she died.”

  “Honey, we mustn’t bother Sheba with our problems,” Harmony said. Iggy had somehow entangled himself in his leash and was squirming around in her arms, yipping.

  “It’s okay, let him be friendly,” Sheba told her. “We don’t get live ones like him over here in Jersey City every day.”

  “I would like to meet some of your sisters—I don’t know anyone in New York except you,” Eddie said.

  “Baby, you still don’t know anyone in New York, because this ain’t New York, this is New Jersey.”

  They were standing under a streetlight; Harmony could see that Sheba was young, eighteen maybe, or less. She was about the age Pepper had been when Pepper left for New York. Harmony felt a sadness, that the girl would have to be hooking, so young. It was not a question of blame; she was a woman herself, and knew that it was a world in which women had to get a living as best they could. Still, it saddened her that this nice, friendly girl had to offer herself to men who drove up in cars. At the curbside, not half a block away, several of the women she had called her sisters were negotiating with men who had just driven up in cars.

  “Where do you live?” Eddie asked. “I’d like to come to your home. Is it too far for Iggy to walk?

  “Iggy’s my dog,” he added.

  “Honey, it ain’t that it’s too far for Iggy to walk,” Sheba said. “It’s just that it ain’t anywhere. I one of those girls who just live where I am.”

  “But this is a parking lot,” Eddie pointed out. “People don’t live in parking lots. Cars live in parking lots.”

  “He’s always been this way,” Harmony said. She knew that Sheba meant she was homeless. Eddie figured it out almost at the same moment.

  “Mom, she’s homeless,” he said, putting two and two together in ways that no one expected him to. “I want her to stay with us and I want it because I like her.”

  “Honey, Sheba might not want to stay with us,” Harmony said—but it seemed that when she said it a light went out in Sheba’s eyes.

  “Nice try, Bright,” Sheba said to Eddie. “I’m calling you Bright because of those eyes. Your momma don’t want no trash like me staying with a cutie like you.”

  “Sheba, I didn’t mean it that way,” Harmony said. “You can stay with us as long as you want to.”

  Nothing troubled her as much as taking away hope from people who didn’t have much to spare. She had no reason in the world to let a young black hooker from Jersey City stay with her and her son—but her son wanted it, and so did the girl named Sheba.

  “Can she stay with us, Mom? She doesn’t have a place,” Eddie said.

  “Sure, honey,” Harmony said, remembering some of her own hard times in Las Vegas, in the year after she tried and failed again with Ross. She was in her forties by then; she couldn’t get a job in any show, and even the junkets didn’t want her as a hostess. There had been a month or two when she was only one step short of having to hook herself, or else sleep in the bus station. Fortunately Gary and Jessie and Myrtle had all been true friends. They had all let Harmony stay in their places, when she was at a low ebb; then, finally, she got a job in the recycling plant.

  She knew quite well, though, that she could have been standing where Sheba stood, only at a later age, when it would have been a big adjustment to have to stand at a curb all made up and hope some guy with a hard-on would like her looks well enough to give her a little money for a minute or two of sex.

  Looking past Sheba, Harmony could see where the minutes of sex were taking place for Sheba and her sisters: in the parking lot of a big, all-night grocery store across the street. When one of the girls would get in a car, the driver would just do a quick U-turn and whirl into the parking lot and park over by a bank of pay phones, where the lot wasn’t too brightly lit.

  Harmony looked at Sheba and saw something in the girl’s eyes that reminded her of Pepper; of times when Pepper had been acting as if she expected something good to happen when really she wasn’t expecting anything good to happen, or anything at all to happen, for that matter
. It was the look of a little girl trying to be brave; Harmony couldn’t bear it.

  “I mean it, honey,” she said to Sheba. “You come in with me and Eddie. We’ll all get a room and stay together tonight.”

  “Thanks, Mom, I like Sheba,” Eddie said. “She’s my first friend in the New York area.”

  The light came back into Sheba’s eyes as quickly as it had gone. Eddie held up Iggy for her inspection.

  “Okay, Bright, now let’s have a look at this Iggy person,” she said.

  “I’m glad you think he’s a person,” Eddie said. “My aunts just think he’s a dog.”

  Eddie and Iggy and Sheba started walking toward the office of the motel, chatting happily.

  Watching them, Harmony felt too shaken to take a step. Eddie and Sheba were young; but she herself had become old. Even if she wasn’t particularly old if you just counted by years, the fact was years were no way to count. Happenings were the way to count, the big happening that separated her from youth or even middle age was the death of her daughter, Pepper. That death made her realize that life, once you got around to producing children, was no longer about being pretty or having boyfriends or making money—it was about protecting the children; getting them raised to the point where they could try life as adults. It didn’t have to be just the children that had come out of your body, either. It could be anyone young who needed something you had to give. Some grown men were children; some grown women, too. Harmony knew that she had spent a good part of her life taking care of just such men. But now that she felt old she didn’t think she wanted to spend much more of her energy protecting men who had had a good chance to grow up, but had blown it. If she never had another boyfriend—something she had been worrying about, on the plane—it might be a little dull in some areas, like sexual areas, but it wouldn’t be the end of the world.

  What would be the end of the world would be to let some little girl like Sheba get in the car with a bad man who would make a U-turn across the street and kill her right there in front of the pay phones, where pimps and crack dealers were making their calls.

  With that thought in mind, she started into the No-Tel Motel. Just as the three of them were approaching the office, Neddie came out, followed by Omar and Abdul. Then Pat came out, followed by Salah. They all looked a little startled to see Eddie holding Sheba’s hand while Sheba led Iggy on his leash.

  “Hi, this is Sheba, does our room have a king-size?” Harmony asked. “Sheba is Eddie’s first New York friend and she’s spending the night with us.”

  Omar and Abdul took this in stride, but Salah looked horrified.

  “But, is unclean woman!” he protested.

  “Mind your own business, raghead,” Sheba said. “I’m as clean as you.”

  If either Neddie or Pat was surprised to see Eddie walk up with a young black whore they hid it well.

  “Hi, Sheba, he makes friends real quick, don’t he?” Pat said.

  “Bright, he’s the quickest,” Sheba said.

  “I hope you’ve been watching the Discovery Channel for most of your life, otherwise it’s hard to hold a conversation with him,” Neddie said.

  “Where’d you get all these ragheads, honey?” Sheba asked Eddie.

  “They came at the airport,” Eddie said. “Would you like me to introduce you?”

  Sheba giggled appealingly, like a little girl.

  “You don’t need to be bothering, I know them pretty good myself,” she said. “Omar, he’s tricky.”

  “This is a funny motel, they rent them rooms by the hour,” Neddie said. “We took twenty-four hours, I hope that’s enough.”

  “That’s plenty, I think we should just go to bed,” Harmony said.

  “Good idea, I will be security man,” Omar, Abdul, and Salah said, in a breath.

  “What is this, the Muslim Tabernacle Choir?” Pat said. “None of us are marrying any of you so why don’t you just shove off?”

  “Very important to have security man at the No-Tel Motel,” Salah said. “Otherwise everything vanish, never see again.”

  “Many bad people, thugs and lawyers come here,” Omar said. “Should be called Take Your Chances Motel.”

  “Listen, they don’t need no raghead security men, they under my protection tonight,” Sheba said. “Why don’t you ragheads go wash your turbans?”

  Eddie thought Sheba’s remark was hilarious. He laughed so hard that Iggy began to yip and jump around. Iggy had taken a dislike to Salah; he snarled every time Salah came near him.

  “My mom is really sleepy, she’s sort of wobbling,” Eddie said, when he got through laughing at Sheba’s wit.

  He was right. Harmony suddenly felt so sleepy she couldn’t think, talk, or even listen. It was as if her eyelids were shades that someone very strong was trying to lower. She knew she was in a strange place and that it behooved her to be especially watchful of Eddie, but Sheba was still holding Eddie’s hand. He seemed okay.

  “This is her key, honey,” Pat said, handing a room key to Sheba. “I don’t know if the bed is king-sized, though.”

  “I don’t care about king-sized, I’m just looking for inside,” Sheba said. “Come on, Bright.”

  The room didn’t have a king-size, but it had two doubles, a fact Harmony didn’t discover until she woke up, several hours later, to go to the bathroom. Eddie, Iggy, and Sheba were on the other bed. Sheba had taken the trouble to put Eddie’s pajamas on, but had fallen asleep before she got around to turning the TV off—a Bob Newhart rerun was on, casting a blue glow into the dark room. Harmony watched it a minute, and went back to sleep.

  14.

  Harmony had never liked waking up to no sun. In Las Vegas it was almost never a problem; once in a while there would be clouds, but the clouds over Nevada were usually moving along, toward somewhere else; they seldom obstructed the sunlight for a whole day.

  When she got up to go to the bathroom for a second time and peeked out to see what a day might look like in New Jersey, what she saw was so horrible that for a moment or two she had a lot of trouble locating her optimism. Even in the worst of times she had usually been able to wake up with the feeling that it might turn out to be a good day. Looking out the window and seeing lots of sunshine definitely helped. She liked to see the sun shining on houses across the street, on little kids riding their bikes, on the men washing down the driveways of filling stations—there would be little rainbows in the spray made by their hoses. A little sunlight sort of jump-started the day—if she happened to be headachy, or hung over, or not getting along too well with her boyfriend of the moment, at least there would be the sunlight and the bright sky.

  New Jersey in the morning was a shock. Not only was there no sunlight, there wasn’t really even any sky. Where the sky usually was, there was only a kind of gray murk, with, here and there, a ring of brightness from the oil flares over the refineries.

  Her window happened to look out at the parking lot of the all-night grocery store across the street. A skinny black teenager was lining up the grocery carts that had been left in the parking lot the night before. He was an expert at his job, too. He had about seventy-five carts shoved together and was weaving them across the parking lot in a kind of conga line. A boom box on top of the carts provided the music. Other than that, the only activity in the parking lot was the bank of pay phones, every one of which was in use, most of them by skinny young black men not much older than the boy pushing the grocery carts.

  When she came out of the bathroom Eddie was sitting up, holding Iggy. He had the remote in his hand and was working his way through many cable channels. Sheba was curled up in a ball, sound asleep.

  “Mom, she wears a wig,” Eddie informed her.

  He was right about the wig. Sheba was thin—too thin, Harmony thought—a very skinny black girl with her hair cut very short. It wasn’t cut just any old way, though—it was cut nicely. When Harmony bent to get a closer look Eddie shooed her away, even frowning a little. He was determined that Sheba get her sl
eep out.

  Somewhere in her purse Harmony had Laurie’s number. The piece of paper the number was on was a little crumpled, but Harmony smoothed it out and put it right on her bedside table, near the phone. She would have no trouble reading the number when she finally felt the moment was right to give Laurie a call and let her know that they were in New Jersey.

  But the moment didn’t come immediately. The number stayed right by the phone, visible and accessible, but Harmony didn’t call it. Now and again she looked at it, thinking it might be a good idea to memorize it, in case the little piece of paper got lost; but she didn’t memorize it. She just left it there, by her phone.

  In the course of switching channels with the remote, Eddie came upon a veterinary show. It seemed to be a twenty-four-hour cable channel devoted entirely to veterinary concerns. At the moment, a young vet was explaining what to do if your dog didn’t want to put all four of its paws on the ground at the same time. The vet was explaining that this behavior didn’t necessarily mean the dog had a broken leg. There were various other occurrences that might cause a dog to walk on only three legs from time to time—sprains and stickers and bites of various kinds.

  Eddie, a dog owner, was fascinated.

  “Mom, this is important,” he said, crawling over into her bed. “It could help us know what to do for Iggy if he got sick. It’s a good thing we didn’t have Iggy when we lived in Las Vegas.”

  “Why?” Harmony asked.

  “Because we didn’t have this channel in Las Vegas,” Eddie said. “I thought they had all the channels in the whole world, but they didn’t. New York has a lot more channels.”

  “Eddie, would you do me a big favor?” Harmony asked.

  Eddie wrinkled his nose. He liked having his mother ask him favors.

  “How big?” he asked.

  “Big, big,” Harmony said.

  “Just big big?” Eddie said. “That’s not very big.”

  “What would be very big?” Harmony asked.

  “Fourteen bigs—that’s as high as I can count,” Eddie said.