Some Can Whistle

  I soon convinced myself I shouldn’t even try to read Wittgenstein and went back to reading about him. While I was doing that I conceived the idea for a light book I might write. It would be called Forty-two Weeks in the Gulag and would be a rehash of my bitter experiences filming one season of “Al and Sal.” I went to the pay phone, called my agent, told him the title of the projected work and requested that he sell it immediately; the icy draft of financial paranoia, of the sort multimillionaires often experience, had just whistled through my brain.

  My agent got on the phone and promptly added a theoretical two million to my net worth; almost before he finished confirming the deal I felt my interest in the projected book declining. Why had I decided I wanted to write about that stupid television show? Why had I supposed anyone would want to read about my battles with executive retards of various descriptions?

  Attempts to curry sympathy for my own rashness fell on stony ears—Jeanie’s. She was still mad about the egg.

  “I think you should donate your whole advance to research on cholesterol,” she said crisply.

  “Cholesterol is just a myth,” I assured her, whereupon she hung up.

  The next light to shine in the waiting room, where it seemed to me I now lived, was the bright, almost blinding light of T.R., who arrived unexpectedly—copying Gladys, she had bought some orange parachute pants and a top to match. She was dragging Jesse, brilliant in Oshkosh-By-Gosh overalls, and the two of them were followed by a large, middle-aged man in the uniform of a Fort Worth-based security service, who led Bo by the hand.

  “Where’s Muddy? He’s sluffed off long enough,” T.R. said without preamble.

  “In his room—I don’t know if it’s visiting hours,” I said, thoroughly startled. Since I now felt I was living in the hospital, its routine had become mine—I never rocked the boat, since now it was my boat too.

  T.R. smacked into this particular boat like a thirty-foot wave. “It’s visiting hours now,” she said. “Come on, Buddy.”

  Buddy was the large security guard; he looked a little abashed.

  “Buddy Modine,” he said.

  “Hello,” I said. “Are we in danger?”

  “I am. Earl Dee’s out,” T.R. said, dragging Jesse down the hall, but not before Jesse had given me one of her famous grins. The fact that she even remembered me was heartwarming.

  When I got to the room, T.R. had already shaken Muddy awake and was questioning him closely about the business of the oil tanks.

  “I just shot at a rabbit,” Muddy said meekly. “I didn’t even know all them oil tanks was there.”

  “That’s horrible,” T.R. said. It was clear to me, and probably to Muddy, that one of the purposes of her visit was to make him feel as guilty as possible.

  The reason it was clear to me is that I’m a man who has spent much of his life being made to feel guilty by women, in many cases women I had been on the whole pretty nice to. I knew all the approaches to a little guilt-inducing session. Lacking my experience, Muddy did not immediately become guilt-ridden, or even hangdog. He just looked as if he wished everyone would go away so he could continue to watch TV.

  T.R. upped the ante by setting Jesse on the bed. Jesse hid her eyes behind her fingers.

  “Jesse loves bunny rabbits,” T.R. said coldly. “Why would you shoot at a bunny rabbit when you know your own daughter loves them? She’s got a stuffed rabbit right out in the car.”

  “Well, I missed it anyway,” Muddy replied. “It ain’t the end of the world.

  “That bunny rabbit’s still running around down there somewhere,” he added, to emphasize his point. Then he smiled at Jesse and carefully pried one of her fingers loose from one of her eyes.

  “Uh, ma’am, do you want me in or do you want me out?” Buddy asked.

  “Oh, just wait out in the hall, Buddy,” T.R. said. “If Earl Dee shows up at the window I’ll scream.”

  “Right, fine,” Buddy said. “Me and little Bo will just wait out in the hall.”

  “Whose idea was Buddy?” I asked. “Do you think Earl Dee is really that big a threat?”

  “In my book he is,” T.R. said. “I’m the one he’s promised to kill. L.J. decided to hire Buddy, at least till you got home, and so far it’s worked fine. Even if he don’t save me from Earl Dee, at least he’s calmed Bo down. Bo worships Buddy.”

  “He did seem calmer,” I admitted.

  “Hurry up, Muddy, let’s go—I’m parked in a no-parking zone,” T.R. said.

  “But I ain’t supposed to go,” Muddy said. “I’m in the hospital, sick.”

  “You’re just loafing, hurry up,” T.R. said. “I hate getting tickets.”

  “You ain’t got no respect for nothing, T.R.,” Muddy said, a little grimly. “First you yank me out of jail and now you’re yanking me out of a hospital. I don’t feel like I’m getting no say in my own life.”

  “Right, you ain’t, I’m tired of sleeping by myself,” T.R. said.

  Then her manner softened and she looked at him mischievously.

  “Not that I don’t mean to make it up to you, though,” she said. “If you’ll scamper out of here before I get a ticket, I might even make a little of it up to you tonight.”

  Muddy gave a wan grin before scooping up Jesse and kissing her several times on the neck, to her immense delight.

  “A sick man might not be able to handle too much making up at one time,” he said, winking at T.R. “We might have to kinda spread the fun over two or three nights.”

  T.R. was looking at me thoughtfully. Seeing me in the context of a hospital room, in the thoroughly rumpled state into which I had declined, seemed to have given her a new perspective on me—and, on the whole, it appeared to be a sympathetic perspective.

  She was looking at me, but listening to Muddy. Jesse broke into giggles, and T.R. smiled.

  “That’s a man whose tongue can get him into ten times as much trouble as his dick can get him out of,” she said. “Do you think most men are like that, Daddy?”

  “Quite a few seem to be,” I said.

  4

  My Cadillac, scarcely a week old, no longer looked like a new Cadillac. It looked like central Beirut, like Dog Day Afternoon; the Marx Brothers might have filmed the final scene of one of their wilder farces in it.

  T.R. didn’t ask me to drive. She took the wheel as if it were hers by right, and soon we were doing eighty-five, northbound on the Stemmons Freeway. Muddy Box had walked out of the hospital as easily as he had walked out of jail. He just walked out, still trying to get all Jesse’s sugar, and everyone who saw them smiled. No one on the hospital staff took the slightest notice of Muddy’s departure, but a nurse did try to stop me.

  “Excuse me, sir, has your doctor dismissed you?” she asked.

  “I’m not a patient here,” I explained.

  “Sir, have you paid?” the nurse asked, as if I hadn’t spoken.

  “I’m not a patient here,” I repeated. “I’ve never been a patient here. I was just visiting someone.”

  “Well, you look like you should be a patient somewhere,” the nurse said rather huffily.

  T.R. thought that was funny.

  “Fat people catch a lot of flack, I guess,” she said. “If you got skinny, people would probably think you were healthy.”

  The car was full of new toys, most of which were already broken; cassettes of various New Wave and post-New Wave rock groups were scattered on the floorboards, where they mingled freely with half-eaten sacks of Dorito chips, Cheesix, and other delicacies. Also, everyone except Buddy seemed to have changed clothes two or three times during the trip, with diapers predominating in the mix of discarded clothes.

  “This car looks as if a war was fought in it,” I observed.

  “That’s because living people have been using it,” T.R. said with a pointed look. “Living people have to fight the war of life. At least nobody’s accused me of being a patient in a hospital.”

  “You’ll be a patient in a morgue if Ea
rl Dee finds you, and so will I,” Muddy said. “I didn’t bargain for that son of a bitch getting out. When are we going off to France?”

  “I don’t know; when are we going to France, Daddy?” T.R. asked. “Think we could make a plane tonight?”

  “We could make a plane, but there’s the problem of passports and visas,” I said. “I’ve got one, but none of you probably have passports. If we all go to the passport office we might have them in about ten days—quicker if we tell them it’s urgent.”

  “I guess not being murdered is urgent,” Muddy said. Jesse was asleep in his lap.

  “Now, ma’am, you’re all worryin’ too much about this Mr. Dee,” Buddy Modine said rather formally. “I have no doubt that he’s a pure criminal, but a lot of what your criminal element says they’re gonna do is just mostly bluff. I’ve let the sheriffs of all these counties around here know about Mr. Dee, and I’ve let the Highway Patrol know, and I know. If he shows up actin’ nasty I guess we can corral him before he does much harm.”

  T.R.’s response was to increase her speed about ten miles an hour. It was clear she was not really reassured by Buddy’s remark.

  “How many criminals have you ever corralled?” Muddy asked bluntly. He had not warmed to Buddy, who looked mildly offended by this obvious challenge to his credibility.

  “I ain’t been countin’, but it’s a goodly few,” he said stiffly. “I was a deputy over in Wichita Falls for about eight years. I was on the robbery squad. I admit I didn’t have to get involved with too much of this aggravated assault, but we had a good record with the breakin’-and-entering element.”

  Muddy smiled his faint smile.

  “Shut up, Muddy, and you, too, Buddy!” T.R. said. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore at all, understand?” Let’s just all enjoy this nice drive home.”

  “How is everyone at home?” I asked, thinking how nice it would be to take a bath and stretch out in my own bed. Several days of failing to read Wittgenstein in a hospital waiting room had worn me out. I tried to get a grip on the problem of Earl Dee. If it was problem enough for Godwin promptly to hire a security guard, it was surely something I ought to get a grip on, but somehow I couldn’t. Earl Dee was a specter from T.R.’s past—a flesh-and-blood threat to her, but only a kind of philosophical abstraction to me, a proposition out of Wittgenstein or one of the many other philosophers I had been unable to read. Terms that seemed to convince everyone else, such as threats to kill people on sight, were no more than faint conceits to me, and in my tired state I couldn’t focus on them.

  “Well, Dew’s gone back to Houston and Sue Lin, too,” T.R. said. “Me and Dew drove around for two whole days in this part of the world and didn’t see more than one or two black people. It made Dew homesick and she went right back to Houston. Sue Lin got homesick too and went with her.”

  Her voice had a little droop in it when she mentioned Houston; she looked like a young woman who was about to cry, and indeed a tear or two did spill out and make its way down her cheek.

  “One thing about Houston, there’s lots of good places to go dancing there,” she said. “I might have gone back myself if it hadn’t been for that fuckin’ Earl Dee. I enjoy them old sleazy dance halls quite a bit.”

  “I’m sure we can find you some sleazy ones in Fort Worth,” I said.

  T.R. shook her head. “Already looked,” she said. “Shoot, me and Dew went up to Oklahoma City two nights ago, looking. We didn’t find a thing up there, so we came back and looked in Fort Worth, but the pickings were so slim we still got home just after breakfast. These towns are tame up this way. Too many cowboys. Nothing’s more useless on a dance floor than a cowboy.”

  “If you don’t like cowboys why’d you buy me them six-hundred-dollar boots?” Muddy asked.

  “Because it was your birthday, dickface,” T.R. said, offering him a stick of gum.

  “You could have bought me a motorcycle,” Muddy pointed out. “I’d be perfectly satisfied with a second-hand one.”

  “I bought you that machine gun you begged for and all you did with it was blow up fifty thousand dollars’ worth of Daddy’s oil,” T.R. said.

  “You ain’t sympathetic to me no more, T.R.,” Muddy said. “I also blew myself up, just about.”

  “Right, that’s why we’re on the way home from the hospital this very minute,” T.R. said. “And that’s the reason you ain’t gettin’ no motorcycle.”

  “What could I blow up with a motorcycle?” Muddy wondered.

  “How about your ugly skull?” T.R. said. “You’re Jesse’s father, you got some responsibility now. It’s your responsibility to stay alive.”

  “We better get over to France, then,” Muddy said.

  Then he had a thought. “Did they find my machine gun?” he asked. “If he finds out we got a machine gun Earl Dee might think twice.”

  T.R. laughed and flashed her lights seven or eight times at a slow-moving Corvette that had strayed into the fast lane.

  “Before Earl Dee could think twice he’d have to think once,” she said. “Thinking ain’t exactly one of his skills. If it was, he wouldn’t have a record as long as this car.”

  The Corvette quickly moved over and we shot past.

  5

  The most interesting thing that had happened at Los Dolores in my absence was that Granny Lin had formed a relationship with old Pedro and was living with him in his little house on the western hill. As usual, opinions varied as to what was really going on.

  “What’s the mystery? Them two are madly in love,” Gladys maintained. “I wish it could happen to me.”

  “Gladys, you’ve got a perfectly nice husband,” I said—I rarely missed a chance to extoll Chuck’s virtues.

  “Yuk, do you think Granny Lin and Pedro actually do it?” T.R. asked. The thought that they might do it seemed to have just crossed her mind and had given her an uncomfortable start.

  “They probably do it,” Godwin said, keenly interested in her reaction. He looked even more like a teak-plantation manager than he had when I left, and had even gotten a bridge for his missing front teeth. In some ways he now looked better than he had looked twenty years before, when he was courting T.R.’s mother. I regarded this long-delayed self-improvement as an ominous sign—the only conceivable reason he had cleaned up was that he hoped to do it with T.R. I meant to lose no time in informing him that that was an event that would only occur over my dead body.

  “What’s wrong with old people being horny?” Muddy asked. “It’s a good thing to be if you can manage it.”

  “Not if you’re that old!” T.R. said, still horrified. “If you’re that old it’s ridiculous. Look at Daddy. He’s a lot younger than they are and he ain’t horny. I think that’s sweet.”

  Godwin gargled over that one, while I entertained dark thoughts involving the revival of thuggee. My imagination now had Godwin lodged somewhere on the Asian subcontinent—a long way from T.R. but well within the reach of thuggee.

  “Well, if there’s a wedding, you’ll have to hire me some help,” Gladys said. “I ain’t up to no wedding; all I want to do for the rest of my life is play with Jesse.”

  Another home-front development was that Buddy seemed to be teaching Bo the gentle art of fishing. Buddy had a large rod and reel, Bo a tiny one; we had not been home twenty minutes before they set off with a tackle box for the nearest fishing hole.

  “Catch Mommy a fish and we’ll eat it,” T.R. said.

  “I’m going to look for my machine gun,” Muddy said. “A lot of good that guard’s gonna be if he’s off fishin’ when Earl Dee drives up.”

  “Buddy’s nice to Bo, though,” T.R. said.

  “Good, maybe he’ll adopt him after we’re dead,” Muddy said. “I’m going to look for my machine gun. I hope some stupid roughneck ain’t stole it by now.”

  My first task upon arriving home was to learn to play checkers by Jesse’s rules. The games took place in the kitchen, with Jesse comfortably ensconced in her high chai
r. I sat on a bar stool. Whenever I jumped one of her checkers Jesse promptly threw my checker on the floor. If I merely advanced a square her approach was more subtle—she extended a finger and delicately pushed my checker three or four squares back from where it had been.

  T.R. filled one of my large iced-tea glasses about half full of vodka and then topped it off with grapefruit juice. Godwin was pacing around nervously. Despite his dapper appearance he seemed a little on edge.

  “Will you stop trotting around?” T.R. snapped. “Go outside if you need to trot.”

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Godwin said, three times. Like me, he occasionally made massive apologies for small offenses if confronted with a woman in a bad mood. It was clear that T.R. was in a bad mood, but for the moment I concentrated on my checker game and let him bear the brunt of it.

  Then Granny Lin and Pedro came in. They seemed exactly as they had been, which is to say, silent and inscrutable, except that now they were clearly together. When Pedro got his six-pack of Budweiser out of the refrigerator he carefully opened the first can and handed it to Granny Lin. Then he opened one for himself, and they sat at the table a few minutes, just to be polite, I suspect. They quietly sipped their beers.

  “Hi!” Jesse said loudly—it was her new all-purpose word. But Pedro and Granny Lin were beyond the reach of even Jesse’s charms, a fact that Jesse recognized quickly enough. She looked at them solemnly for a minute or two. While she was studying them I quietly advanced one of my checkers. As soon as she completed her scrutiny of the old couple she extended her finger and quietly pushed my checker back.

  T.R. took her vodka and left the room without a word, trailing clouds of bad mood behind her.

  “She does drink quite a lot of vodka,” Godwin said.

  “Well, so do you, L.J.,” I said. “Are you trying to say she’s an alcoholic or what?”