The Late Child (28 page)

“No, I would not have been squashed like a bug,” Eddie said. “I would have been squashed like a boy.”

Sheba and Otis were holding hands, by the Dumpster. Laurie came walking back. One of the pimps by the pay phones whistled at her, but she ignored him.

Harmony thought Laurie looked lonely—a nice tall girl, but sad.

“Harmony, we can't be adopting everybody,” Neddie said, as if reading Harmony's thoughts.

“Think what Mom would say if we brought this whole gang home,” Pat said. “It'd almost be worth doing, just to hear her.”

Just then a grimy white school bus came veering into the parking lot, honking loudly.

“Good, here is G.,” Omar said. “Now plenty of room for everybody. We can go to Statue of Liberty boat.”

“That's a good-looking bus driver,” Pat said, when the man, who had a handsome black beard, parked his bus and stepped out. “What did you say his name is?”

“His name is G.,” Omar said. “He is Sikh man from Delhi.”

“Uh-oh, just my luck,” Pat said. “What's he sick with?”

“No sick, Sikh!” Omar said. “He is my cousin.”

“He could be your cousin and still be sick,” Pat said.

G. got back in the bus and began to honk. He was listening to a Walkman.

“G. is listening to Pink Floyd,” Abdul said. “He is always listening to Pink Floyd.”

“It's weird that his name is G.,” Pat said. “Is it G-e-e or what?”

“No, is spelled G.,” Omar said.

When G. got back on the school bus he closed the doors behind him. Omar, Salah, and Abdul began to bang on the doors but G. sat behind the wheel listening to Pink Floyd. He paid no attention.

“I don't want to get on his bus anyway, till I find out what he's sick with,” Pat said.

“I think Omar just meant he's a Sikh—it's a sect,” Laurie said. “He's a Sikh like you're a Baptist—if you're a Baptist.”

Eddie was walking around in circles, holding a new red dog leash Laurie had bought him at the Shop and Sack. Iggy had chewed the old leash in two. Eddie sometimes walked around in circles when he was in a happy mood.

Harmony was glad her son was in a happy mood. She herself was beginning to feel a sinking of spirits. For a few minutes she had enjoyed having so many people around—despite the squalor of the streets it had been kind of fun to walk around New Jersey, with her sisters and Laurie, and Sheba and the turban men. But somehow the fun had begun to have little cracks in it, little cracks through which she couldn't help seeing the real facts of her life: Pepper was dead, she and Eddie had left Las Vegas, she really didn't know where she might have to live or how she would make a living for herself and her son. Having all the people there, even Eddie, made it impossible to do what she really wanted to do, which was be alone and cry.

“Mom, don't look that way,” Eddie said, noticing that his mother's face had a sad look on it. “We're going to get Iggy and we're going to the Statue of Liberty
right now.
”

“Okay, honey,” Harmony said. Sometimes the easiest thing
was just to obey Eddie, if she could. She knew it wasn't fair to make a five-year-old be the boss—but there were times when it was the best she could do.

“Hard to get to the Statue of Liberty if G. won't open the bus,” Sheba said.

“Eddie can fix that,” Laurie said. She picked Eddie up, took him around to the driver's side of the bus, and lifted him high, so his face would be at the level of the bus driver's. Eddie rapped politely on the window of the bus, near the driver's head. G., still listening to Pink Floyd, gave no sign of noticing.

“Wave your arms, Eddie,” Laurie said. “Maybe he'll see you.”

“But they're just little short arms,” Eddie said. “I'm very small, really.”

But he waved his arms anyway and G., the bus driver who liked Pink Floyd, suddenly noticed that a child with curly hair was waving at him.

Very methodically, G. turned off his Walkman and opened the window.

“Hi,” Eddie said.

“You the spokesman, Bright,” Sheba said. “Do some of your good talking.”

“Hello,” Eddie said, to G. “Could you open the door so we can all get in and go get my dog, Iggy, and then go straight to the Statue of Liberty?”

G. looked down at Eddie, and smiled. His teeth were very white, against his black beard.

“I am waiting for Omar,” he said, in a very deep voice.

“There's Omar,” Eddie said. “He's beating on your door
right now.
”

G. looked, and saw the angry faces of Omar, Abdul, and Salah, all pressed against the glass of his door.

“They are looking angry, always looking angry,” G. said. “I am happy man, no fuss.”

“So do you know where the Statue of Liberty boat is?” Eddie asked. “We've come from Las Vegas, Nevada, and we need to go now.”

G. opened the door of the bus and Omar, Abdul, and Salah all spilled in, all talking at once.

When Laurie set Eddie down he immediately began to herd everyone onto the bus.

“Come on, we need to go now, right
now!
” he said. “It's time to see the Statue of Liberty.”

He grabbed Harmony's finger and began tugging her toward the steps of the bus.

“Come on, Mom, hurry,” he said. “The Statue of Liberty might close, if we don't hurry.”

“Eddie, it won't close,” Harmony said.

I wish I could be anywhere on earth but where I am, she thought. I wish it could be another day. I wish I could be in a faraway place where I don't know anybody. I wish nobody at all was with me. I wish I could just be in bed alone, with my head under the covers.

But she wasn't in a faraway place, of course, she was just in the parking lot of a Shop and Sack in Jersey City. She wasn't alone, either. She was with a lot of people, some of them people she had just met. There was no chance at all that she was going to get to be alone.

“Come on, Mom, we need to go now,” Eddie repeated.

Omar was still yelling at his cousin G. when Harmony allowed her son to lead her onto the bus.

On the ride to the Statue of Liberty boat, Harmony sat alone. Even Eddie abandoned her.

“She's too sad about my sister,” Eddie said. “Let's just let her ride in the back seat until she feels better.”

He himself spent the trip happily chatting with Laurie and Sheba, and admiring Iggy's new red leash and black collar.

“Laurie bought them just for Iggy,” he said.

Pat sat on the front seat and flirted, as best she could, with G., but G. kept turning around and flashing his beautiful white teeth at Neddie. It made Neddie uncomfortable and Pat mad.

“That man's mixed up, I don't care what his religion is,” Pat said. “I'm the one flirting with him, not you.”

“Don't blame me,” Neddie said. “I'm ignoring him for dear life.”

Despite little irritations, on the order of G. flirting with the wrong woman, the group was mostly a happy group. They were all so cheerful that Harmony wished her part of the bus would just drop off—just detach itself, like a railroad car that had come unhooked, and coast to a stop somewhere with her in it. She didn't have the spirit to be part of a happy group; she felt she had more in common with winos and derelicts and aging people of every sort, quite a few of whom were visible on the streets of New Jersey.

Even on the boat to the Statue of Liberty she found a place on the rail by herself, near the stern. Cold spray from the harbor hit her face and mingled with the tears she cried from time to time. Eddie, proud of Iggy and his new leash, walked all around the boat, letting all the tourists see what a nice dog he had.

None of them knew at the time that Iggy was about to become the most famous dog in America, if not the world, the only dog in history to fall from the top of the Statue of Liberty and live.

“He did not
fall
, he
jumped
,” Eddie was later to insist: he
insisted it, with mounting indignation, on
Larry King Live
, on the
Today
show, on Good
Morning, America
, and, finally, on Letterman, on all of which he and Iggy appeared in the space of two whirlwind days. During most of those days Harmony holed up in Laurie Chalk's bedroom on East Ninth Street, looking at pictures of Pepper in Laurie's scrapbook.

Looking through the scrapbook was actually good—it was a little cheering in some way. In many of the pictures Pepper looked happy; the pictures helped convince Harmony that Pepper had mostly had a happy, not an unhappy, life. In many of the pictures Pepper was with dancers or other show people; she was invariably the most beautiful girl in the picture, too. In most of the pictures, Pepper was smiling. She was a beautiful girl with her brights on. Harmony wished she had worked up the nerve to override Pepper's prickliness and come east and see her; she would have liked to meet some of the people in the pictures—Pepper's friends.

Meanwhile, while Harmony sipped tea and spent time with her regrets, Eddie and Iggy were on all the talk shows. They were even on the cover of
People
magazine. Laurie and Sheba, who sort of started new careers as Eddie and Iggy's business managers, were even getting calls from manufacturers who wanted to make Eddie and Iggy dolls. All this was because Iggy hated sea gulls and had tried to bite one that happened to be flapping off the topmost parapet of the Statue of Liberty. When they got off the boat Iggy had tried to run off and bite a couple of sea gulls but Eddie hung on to the new red leash and wouldn't let him. Iggy bided his time until they were on the very top of the statue, looking across New York Harbor to the great towers of Manhattan, before he went after another sea gull, in this case the one that happened to be flapping off the parapet.

Eddie was looking away at that moment, at the Hudson and America beyond it, when Iggy suddenly jerked the leash out of his hand and made a leap at the gull, after which he disappeared, plummeting straight down toward what should have been his death.

“Oh no, he can't fly, Mom, he's not a bird!” Eddie said. “Will he be deaded forever when he hits?”

Nobody answered the question, because they all certainly expected Iggy to be deaded forever. It was a long drop from the top of the Statue of Liberty. The only optimist in the crowd was Eddie, and Eddie was only half convinced.

“But somebody could catch him, he's a very small dog,” Eddie said, to reassure himself, as they were hurrying down. The only person who wasn't crying was G., the driver, who had only known Iggy for an hour. Everyone else was trying to think of what they might do to console Eddie, who, though he had tears on his cheeks, was still trying to think of optimistic outcomes.

“A tourist could catch him,” he said, in the elevator. “A professional football player might be standing there—Iggy is shaped like a football. I'm sure a professional football player could catch Iggy if he was standing in the right spot.”

It seemed a forlorn hope, to everyone else in the crowd.

“That would be a long shot, Bright,” Sheba said. “It ain't even football season.”

“Don't say sad words to me,” Eddie said. “I don't want to hear sad words right now.”

But there was not much energy in his complaint; the force of his optimism was waning.

“We bit off more than we can chew, coming up here to New York,” Neddie said. “We should have gone straight to Oklahoma, where we belong.”

“What do you want us to do, turn back the clock?” Pat asked. She was annoyed with Neddie anyway, because of G., who was still peering at Neddie with big soulful eyes.

Harmony was thinking that she was cursed. Probably she should never have attempted motherhood. Her son had had to wait many months to get a puppy, because of Jimmy Bangor's conservative views on the upkeep of wall-to-wall carpet, and then the little puppy Eddie finally got had to fall off the Statue of Liberty. What could be more like a curse?

Then the miracle that soon captured the hearts of America: Iggy was alive. Before they even got out of the Statue of Liberty they heard Iggy barking, just outside.

“Iggy!” Eddie said, wiggling out of Sheba's arms. “See! I told you someone could catch him.”

Iggy was outside, yipping at some tourists. An old man with freckles on his bald head was attempting to feed him a cookie.

“No thank you, he's not allowed sweets,” Eddie said, politely grabbing Iggy's leash. “Besides, he just fell off the Statue of Liberty and his stomach might be upset.”

Iggy was a little muddy, but otherwise seemed to be entirely unharmed. He had fallen into some mud at a construction site behind the statue. Several tourists, who had seen a small dog plummeting downward, were muttering and shaking their heads.

“It's a miracle, God done it, that puppy ain't got a scratch on him,” an old lady from somewhere said. “Where's the TV cameras when you need them?”

“I've heard that more than three hundred people have fallen out of airplanes and lived,” the old man with the cookie said. “I guess there's no reason it couldn't happen to a pup.”

“He was an orphan, I found him in Arizona,” Eddie said, happily holding Iggy in his arms.

Pat burst into tears. “It's just relief,” she said. “I couldn't have stood another tragedy right now.”

Soon little disposable cameras began to flash their flashes. In no time more than a hundred tourists were trying to take pictures of Eddie and his dog. Eddie giggled and smiled, as he explained that for some reason Iggy had a strong dislike of sea gulls.

“He was after one when he jumped off,” he said. “It's very lucky that he isn't deaded.”

“Is that kid happy, or what?” Laurie said. She came close to Harmony and put her arm around her. Harmony leaned close to Laurie. She didn't want to reveal her shameful secret, which was that she had felt only a kind of distant flicker of sadness when it seemed certain that her son's puppy had been killed. The sadness had flickered, but it had only been like a quick flare of lightning
on the far horizon. If Iggy really had been dead, she wouldn't have known how to comfort Eddie. Sheba or Laurie or her sisters would have had to do it.