The Late Child

  “If I leave jail but don’t leave town Jack might shoot me with his hunting rifle,” Billy said. “Jack’s a pretty fair shot, too. He gets a deer just about every season.”

  “Who’s Jack?” Harmony asked.

  “Mildred’s husband—he owns the Exxon station,” Peewee said. “He says he won’t shoot Billy as long as he stays in jail, which is why Billy’s still here. Watching Dick Van Dyke with me beats being shot by Jack.”

  “But Billy, you can’t stay in jail all your life,” Harmony said. “Can’t you just promise Mildred and Jack not to do it anymore?”

  “I could, but it would be a lie, and they know it,” Billy said.

  Harmony found herself wondering what her brother actually said, in his phone calls.

  “If I’m out wandering the streets, once in a while I get the urge to call up Mildred and make suggestions,” Billy said.

  “Billy don’t want to be cured,” Peewee said. “That’s the whole problem.”

  Actually, the jail seemed pretty comfortable—at least it was neat. Harmony had never been in Billy’s house, but she understood from her sisters that he wasn’t a neat housekeeper; Billy had always had a tendency to let the chores go. So maybe it wasn’t entirely bad that he was in jail, but it wasn’t entirely good, either. Billy was sweet and nice—what was he doing spending his life in a small-town jail?

  Harmony suddenly had the urge to see her brother alone. Peewee was behaving, but Harmony could tell he still had some of the crush he had in high school. The fact of the crush made it hard for her to relax and enjoy her visit with her brother.

  “Peewee, would it be against the law for me to take Billy for a walk?” she asked. “We haven’t got to visit in a long time. Maybe we could just take a walk, or ride around a little.”

  Peewee and Billy exchanged looks—neither of them had been expecting the suggestion. “Well, I guess that would be all right, Harmony,” Peewee said. “You got to promise not to give him no quarters, though—or let him get hold of a screwdriver. If Billy has a screwdriver he can make a pay phone work in no time.”

  “Do you want to go, Billy?” she asked. After all, maybe she shouldn’t disturb him; maybe he would be more comfortable just staying where he was.

  “Sure, let’s take a cruise,” Billy said, getting up. “We’ve about run out of beer, anyway. Maybe I can pick up a twelve-pack or two, while I’m out.”

  “Jack opens the Exxon at four a.m.,” Peewee said. “If you ain’t back by then kind of avoid the main drag, if you can. Jack gets pretty hot when he sees Billy.”

  “He keeps that deer rifle right by the cash register, too,” Billy said. “Remember that time he shot old Pete Rutherford’s tires out because the old fart tried to drive off without paying Jack for the gas?”

  “Yep,” Peewee said. “I doubt old man Rutherford done it on purpose, though. He was probably just addled in the head.”

  “I don’t know, that old man is sly,” Billy said. “I think he meant to sneak himself a tank of gas while Jack was in the john.”

  A minute later Harmony and Billy were out on the sidewalk. Billy hadn’t even had to sign out. At first, Billy took a cautious approach. He looked around carefully before he stepped off the curb.

  “Billy, are you afraid he might kill you, even at night?” Harmony asked.

  “It could happen,” Billy said. “Jack’s pretty crazy about Mildred.

  “Of course, so am I,” he added. “Let’s just slip into the pickup and move on out.”

  Harmony was thinking about Eddie—it would have been nice to have him along.

  11.

  A mile from the Best Western there was an all-night convenience store, where Billy could buy beer. He came out with two twelve-packs.

  “One for now and one for later,” he said.

  “I wish you’d stop letting Momma stuff you with bacon,” Harmony said. “That much bacon is not good for anybody.”

  Billy smiled, and didn’t answer. Billy was driving, though it turned out that he didn’t have a driver’s license, either. He too had failed to renew.

  “Why waste money on a driver’s license when I’m mostly gonna live in the slammer anyway,” Billy said.

  “Could we get a room at the Best Western in case we get sleepy?” Harmony suggested. “This pickup doesn’t have but one headlight. If we get stopped and neither of us has licenses I don’t know what will happen.”

  “Back to the slammer, that’s all that would happen,” Billy said.

  He drove to the Best Western and waited in the pickup while Harmony got a room. It was a ground-floor room way at the back of the motel. Crickets were singing in the grass, and the stars overhead were bright. The brightness of the stars reminded Harmony that Billy had once wanted to be an astronomer. He liked looking at the stars, and knew where all the constellations were. When Billy went on the wheat harvest he had used all his money to buy a telescope. He bought it the summer she went away to Las Vegas. In the late summer, just before she left, she remembered that Billy would sit outside until very late, studying the stars through his telescope. He already had a football scholarship to the University of Tulsa, but he wasn’t that excited about football. He just intended to stay at the University of Tulsa for two years; then he meant to transfer to the University of Arizona and major in astronomy. At the time, Billy had notions about discovering a new planet; if he managed to discover one he wanted to name it after her. She was close to her brother, that summer. They talked a lot about the planet named Harmony. Billy thought it might be hiding behind one of the other planets. Billy even thought it might be warm enough to welcome life-forms; the fact that it was welcoming was the reason he wanted to name the planet after her.

  At that time Harmony expected to finish high school and maybe go to college herself; she had no way of knowing that she was just suddenly going to swing onto a bus and head west.

  Of course, it was easy to have big dreams about going to college, or even discovering planets, when you were young. The big dreams got harder to have once life had sort of swept you away.

  The night was so nice that she and Billy brought a couple of chairs out of the room and sat in them. Their room hadn’t been rented for a while. It smelled musty, like Billy’s clothes.

  “Remember the telescope you had?” Harmony asked. She was hoping maybe Billy still had it; maybe if she hung around Tarwater another day or two Billy could get out of jail at night and show Eddie some of the constellations. Maybe he would talk to Eddie a little about the planet named Harmony—the planet he never found.

  “Oh yeah,” Billy said. “That little telescope was my downfall. I stopped watching heavenly bodies and started watching Mildred’s body.”

  Then Harmony remembered that Billy had been a Peeping Tom for a few years, before he became an obscene phone caller, which didn’t make the whole thing any easier to understand. Billy had been a star quarterback in a place where quarterbacks were like movie stars. Billy had dated lots and lots of girls—probably he slept with at least a few of them, even though things were a little more strict in those days. What made him switch to the telescope? Of course, she loved her brother, whether he was normal or not. It was just a puzzle she would have liked an answer to; of course there didn’t have to be an answer to all of life’s puzzles. She would just have liked to know what the deal was with her brother, sexually. But it wasn’t easy to ask him questions. After all, he had a right to his privacy.

  “What are you going to do next, Sis?” Billy asked. “Surely you aren’t going to try and live your life in Tarwater, are you?”

  “No,” Harmony said. That much she knew. It was nice to sit behind the Best Western with her brother and look at the stars and listen to the crickets. And it was nice that Eddie was getting some time with her father. But if there was one thing she knew about the future, it was that she wouldn’t be spending much of it in Tarwater. A day or two would be plenty.

  “I guess you lost interest in astronomy,” she said; real
ly she was just remembering his promise. Astronomy had just been one aspect of it.

  “Nope, I still like to fiddle with it,” Billy said. “I subscribe to all the magazines, still. But they took my telescope as evidence in the first trial. It’s in the jail. If there’s anything interesting happening up there Peewee lets me set it up behind the jail. We had a nice lunar eclipse about a month ago. I took a look at that.”

  Harmony was trying to come back in memory to the days when Billy had been a sports hero. She was pretty sure she remembered a Mildred somebody—Mildred had been one of Billy’s girlfriends, then. As she remembered her, Mildred was a skinny brunette with an overbite. She had a cloudy memory of her mother railing at Billy about Mildred—her mother thought Mildred only wanted to marry Billy in order to get all the money he was going to have. Of course, that was her mother’s response to every girl Billy got involved with.

  “Billy, didn’t you date Mildred, when you were a senior?” she asked. “Wasn’t she a brunette?”

  “Yeah, the skinny one with the buck teeth,” Billy said. “We started to run off to Kansas and get married, but we waited a week too long and Mom chased her off.”

  “Why?”

  “Same reason she ran Neddie’s boyfriends off,” Billy said. “She didn’t want none of us to have sex.

  “Mildred and I were pretty crazy about one another,” Billy added. He didn’t sound wistful, just matter-of-fact.

  “But she married somebody else,” Harmony pointed out.

  “Yep, she married Jack,” Billy said. “About all we have left is the phone calls, and Jack don’t approve of the phone calls.”

  The way he said it sounded a little sad.

  “Billy, does Mildred want you to call her and make suggestions?” Harmony asked—after all, stranger things had happened. She had once had a boyfriend who liked phone sex better than he liked real sex—or as much, at least. His name was Pete; even after he got married he would still call her from time to time and try to have phone sex. Pete had a deep, froggy voice; it was the perfect voice for getting a little phone sex started. More than a few times Pete’s froggy voice had cajoled her into doing things.

  “Sure, Mildred gets a kick out of it,” Billy said. “I make suggestions and then she does whatever I suggest with Jack. We’re kind of a threesome, in a way.”

  “Yeah, but it’s not funny that you’re in jail,” Harmony said. “If Mildred likes it that you call why do you have to be in jail?”

  “Because Jack’s too dumb to figure out that it works to his advantage, pussywise,” Billy said. “Jack don’t have no imagination. It ain’t dawned on him yet that he wouldn’t be getting half as much if it wasn’t for me.”

  “I still don’t think you should be in jail,” Harmony said. It was a real sore spot with her. Why should her brother, who was kind and gentle, have to be in jail for having phone sex with a woman who enjoyed having phone sex with him? So what if she had a husband who ran an Exxon station?

  “Oh well,” Billy said, “Mildred’s a slave driver. Jack’s already had one heart attack. The way she works him it wouldn’t surprise me if he dropped dead. I’ve lived in the jail so long Peewee and me are like a married couple, ourselves. I probably get along with Peewee better than I would with Mildred, anyway. It ain’t so bad in the lockup when Momma leaves us alone.”

  Harmony felt her tiredness coming back, but she didn’t want to go in and go to bed. It had been years since she had got to sit outside with her brother at night, in Oklahoma. It would give them a chance to catch up.

  “Mildred’s one of those people who have to have the lawn mowed and the driveway swept and every sock folded and put in the right drawer before she can relax,” Billy said. “I doubt we would have worked out, if we’d married. I ain’t the type to mow lawns and fold socks. Half the time, when I’m home, I can’t even find two socks, much less make them a mate and get them in the right drawer.”

  “It’s hard to be happy when you get older, isn’t it?” Harmony said. She was remembering how easy it had been in earlier years—almost as easy as breathing.

  “Sis, I ain’t unhappy,” Billy said. “I’d like to be able to call Mildred a little more often, but other than that I don’t have too much to complain about. I got a roof over my head and I ain’t living in Sarajevo—that’s a big plus, right there.”

  “Pepper died of AIDS, I don’t know if I told you,” Harmony said.

  “Well, Pat told me,” Billy said. “That’s bad, but it’s over.”

  “Billy, did you have a baby with that woman you knew in New Mexico?” Harmony asked. “I’ve always wondered.”

  “Stillborn—little girl,” Billy said. “She would have been about Pepper’s age, if she’d lived.

  “You look sleepy, Sis,” he added. “Maybe you’d better run me back to the jail, before you fade out.”

  They didn’t say much on the way back. Driving into Tarwater, she sort of woke up. Billy hugged her and went back in the jail—the minute he did Harmony started having a sense of a missed opportunity. She and her brother hadn’t really caught up. Maybe they had just started the evening too late.

  Or maybe it was just that you could never catch up, once you reached a certain age. She and her brother had started life in the same house, with the same parents and the same two sisters, and the same plains out the window; they rode the same school bus, had the same teachers, listened to the same radio stations; they even went to the same dances, even though Billy was three years older. But Billy had chosen to stay at the original point, and she hadn’t. She had had one husband and so many boyfriends that she had long ago lost count. Billy had never married, and he clearly didn’t want to talk about the relationship that had produced a stillborn child. The two of them could never catch up, any more than she could ever catch up with Neddie and Pat. The years of different experiences had put a continent between them; the bus that took her away, across America, far from her brother and sisters, would never be bringing her back.

  When she got back to her own room at the motel, there was a Western on TV, with Rory Calhoun in it. There had been a time when Rory Calhoun frequented the casinos a lot. He had even come on to her, once or twice. Even as sleepy as she was, she watched a little of the movie. The truth was, seeing Rory Calhoun in a movie made her feel more at home than actually being at home. She was wondering, as she dozed off, why she hadn’t taken Rory up on it—maybe it was just the tan. She had never gone for guys with the real deep tans.

  12.

  “Mommy, Mommy, open now!” Eddie said—Harmony could also hear Iggy, yipping just outside her door. It was early; she was so deeply asleep that she wanted it to be a dream, she didn’t want to have to deal with Eddie and Iggy just then. Besides that, if they were there, it meant someone else was with them. But she quickly gave up on it being a dream and stumbled to the door. Sure enough, all her nephews and nieces were there, plus a couple of their wives and husbands, or boyfriends and girlfriends, plus the little children they had produced, plus Laurie and Pat.

  “Mom, I met all my cousins and I know their names,” Eddie said. “Now we’re going to go to breakfast and eat pancakes at the waffle house.”

  He was a little breathless, from excitement. Definitely it was exciting to Eddie to have a large family all of a sudden, and not a pretend family, either.

  “Eddie, can’t I meet you there? I haven’t even washed my face yet,” Harmony asked, but Eddie rejected her plea almost before it was out of her mouth.

  “No, we’re all going to the waffle house together,” he said. “I want you to come with me and all my cousins and Laurie and Aunt Pat.”

  “They kidnapped me,” Laurie said. She was looking fresh and rested. “It’s just as well, too.”

  “Right, Ethel was getting mighty nosy,” Pat commented. None of the nieces and nephews had gotten out of the pickup; they were all just clumped there. She could see Davie, the one who became Bonzo, peeking over the top of the cab.

  “She was n
osy from the word go, it was just that she was zeroing in,” Laurie said. “She’s cranky but she’s not dumb.”

  “I wish you’d brought Dad,” Harmony said—now that she had seen him again, she realized how much she missed her dad.

  “Grandpa had to plow, but I went with him to milk this morning,” Eddie said. “I milked three times—it was like squirts. Grandpa taught me how, only the cow swished her tail and it had poop on it and a little of the poop got in my hair.”

  Eddie was very excited; the effort to get all his adventures into one statement was making him breathless.

  “We fed the chickens too,” Laurie said—it seemed to Harmony that Laurie and Eddie were quickly becoming competent farmhands.

  “We fed them and they didn’t peck me but a rooster did look at me!” Eddie said. “I think he was an evil rooster and I think he would have pecked me if Laurie hadn’t made him go away.

  “And we went up a ladder into the loft, and I saw a rat,” Eddie continued. “It was gray and it went under the hay, when we came.”

  “Dad’s kept him jumping,” Pat said. “Dad’s the most chipper I’ve seen him in years. I guess all he needed was for Eddie to show up.”

  Harmony felt stumbly. Her head was beginning to wake up, but the rest of her was still asleep, especially her legs. They just didn’t seem to want to move. She sat on the foot of her bed and tried to hug Eddie, but he was much too keyed up to be in a hugging mood, all he could think of was his cousins and the waffle house.

  “We have to hurry because David has to go to work and he needs to eat because he has to work very hard in the oil fields,” Eddie said.

  Through the open door Harmony could see all her nieces and nephews, waiting to spend a little time with her. It was a big responsibility—she knew she had to make some effort to pull herself together and go with them.

  Somehow, she managed it—she got in Pat’s pickup. Eddie and Laurie rode with the cousins.

  “It’s all over town that Peewee’s in love with you,” Pat said, as they left the motel. “I guess you blitzed him.”