The Late Child (37 page)

Finally Laurie calmed, and just in time too, because Eddie reached the end of being able to be still. He began to tickle Sheba on the neck, pretending that his fingers were a spider. Sheba twitched and kept on sleeping but Harmony knew it wouldn't last long; pretty soon Sheba would have to accept the fact that Eddie wanted her to wake up.

“Did you see them?” Laurie asked, when she wiped away her tears with the wet towel that smelled of shampoo. Laurie even managed a smile at Eddie.

“See who?” Harmony asked. Then she remembered that she had forgotten to look out the window.

“Don't ask me how he found us, but he found us,” Laurie said.

Harmony looked down: Sonny Le Song was sitting on the
steps of a building across the street. Her sister Pat sat on one side of him, and her sister Neddie sat on the other. All three were smoking, and all three had Styrofoam coffee cups in their hands.

About that time Eddie popped out of bed and looked out the window too.

“Who's that person, he looks like a chipmunk, Mom?” Eddie asked.

“His name is Sonny,” Harmony said. “I used to know him before you were born.”

“Oh, then it was a real long time ago,” Eddie said. Then he wandered back to the bed and did some more spider fingers on Sheba's neck. After he had done the spider fingers for a while, Sheba began to twitch. Finally she rolled on her back.

“Who doing spider fingers on me?” she asked, without opening her eyes.

Harmony stood at the window, looking down at Neddie, Pat, and Sonny Le Song.

“I guess your Aunt Pat has started smoking again,” she said.

When Neddie and Pat brought Sonny up to Laurie's apartment Harmony got a little irate for a minute; if there was one thing she wasn't going to tolerate it was the idea that some little jerk of a lounge singer, who could only get gigs by singing at old folks' homes or for the openings of gas stations, was following her around.

“Sonny, I never thought you'd turn into a stalker, if you are one I never want to see you again!” Harmony informed him, to the astonishment of everyone, even G., who was so impressed by the anger in Harmony's voice that his black beard began to twitch. Otis had been dozing behind a chair; he didn't really wake up but he did pull the hood of his parka over his head.

“No, no, no,” Sonny said, in response to the stalking charge.

He said no several more times before he could get Harmony calm enough so he could explain how he happened to be sitting across the street from Laurie's place, with Neddie and Pat. His explanation was that when he found out Pepper was in town he waited outside one of her rehearsals and introduced himself and walked her home.

“Then how come she didn't mention it to me?” Laurie asked, skeptically.

“If she walked home with a friend of her mother's I think she would have mentioned it,” Laurie said.

“Not if it was me,” Sonny said. “I'm the kind of guy who seldom gets mentioned.”

Before anyone could stop him, Sonny Le Song sank into despair, mainly at the thought of his own lack of mentionability.

“I haven't been mentioned in years,” he said, his face growing longer and longer. Even with his face at its longest he still looked a lot like a chipmunk.

“Mom, you made him sad,” Eddie said. “Say something so he won't be sad.”

But it was too late.

“I haven't been mentioned since my mother's funeral,” Sonny said. “Even then the minister got me mixed up with my half brother.”

“Well, you poor soul,” Neddie said. “That's awful.”

“I do have nine half brothers,” Sonny said. “I know it's a lot to remember.”

To everyone's horror, he began to cry. Soon tears were dripping off his chin, onto the lapel of his trench coat.

“Oh, Sonny, I didn't mean it, I know you're not a stalker,” Harmony said. She went over and hugged him—what else could she do? Even while she was hugging him she felt a little annoyed, though—not so much at Sonny as at life. Why, with all her troubles, and no certainties in sight anywhere except Eddie, did she have to be the one to make it up to Sonny Le Song because he wasn't mentionable? The truth was, he seemed even less mentionable than he had been when he was working in Las Vegas. What was she supposed to do about it?

“Not only that, I lost my clippings,” Sonny said. “Now I don't even have my clippings. At least when I had my clippings I had something to show to groups that might need an entertainer.”

“I see what you mean—just showing them yourself probably wouldn't convince them,” Pat said. Harmony suspected that she was in one of her surly moods.

“Pat, why do you have to kick him while he's down?” Harmony asked.

“Where did you lose your clippings?” Eddie asked. “Maybe we can just all go and find them. It can be like an Easter egg hunt.”

“Hey, he's like his mother—tries to be helpful,” Sonny said.

“So how did you lose them, Sonny?” Harmony asked. She herself had drifted off from her own clippings several years earlier. For a while they had been in the bottom drawer of her chest of drawers, which she usually kept in the bedroom. But her bedrooms kept shrinking once she wasn't working steady; it became harder and harder to fit a large chest of drawers into her apartments. Finally, at a time when she was approaching the eight-dollar
level in her bank account—that was the time when Eddie had a bad infection; doctor bills were mounting up—she agreed to let Myrtle put the chest of drawers in her permanent floating garage sale, just to see if anybody wanted it. To everyone's surprise an old man heading home from Wisconsin stopped by the garage sale and bought the chest of drawers. He just put it in the back of his pickup and headed on to Wisconsin.

After that, two or three weeks passed before it dawned on Harmony that she had forgotten to remove her clippings from the chest of drawers. For about an hour it was a terrible shock—after all, those clippings were a record of her whole life in Las Vegas. They were the sort of thing Eddie might have wanted to look at someday, when he was in the mood to know what his mother had been like when she was younger.

But then a few days passed and instead of feeling sad about the loss of her clippings, she began to get a little perspective; in a way it was a relief not to have the clippings anymore, she would be less likely to be reminded of what a comparatively glamorous life she had led before she got too old to be a showgirl and had to go to work at the recycling plant. After all, she still had quite a few scrapbooks that she kept on a shelf in her closet—she could always look at the scrapbooks if she wanted to remember what she had looked like in the years of her youth and beauty. Eddie could look at them too, and in fact did, from time to time, if he happened to be using the bar in her closet as a jungle gym or something.

Then a miracle happened: The old man got home to Wisconsin and started to put his socks or his underwear or something into the bottom drawer of the nice chest of drawers he had bought at a garage sale in Las Vegas. There were Harmony's clippings. The old man wrapped the clippings in brown paper and tied them neatly with a string and sent them to the Stardust casino—by a miracle Jackie Bonventre's daughter, Josie, was working in the mailroom the day the package came in—Josie was kind enough to bring it to her.

The clippings were doomed, though; during their short stay in
Wisconsin, Harmony had stopped caring whether she had them or not. By chance she had a very jealous boyfriend at the time, named Monty; it was hard to describe Monty other than to say that his nose had been broken four times and he was very jealous. He hated the fact that Harmony had had a time of youth and beauty and had spent some of it with other men; thanks to his feeling that all her years of youth and beauty and sex—particularly sex—should have been his, Monty developed a resentful attitude toward her clippings and one day while she was at the recycling plant the whole package of clippings got mixed up with a couple of months' accumulation of racing forms, all of which he threw out. Harmony didn't exactly hold it against Monty; it was only thanks to a miracle that the clippings had made it back from Wisconsin anyway.

It was plain from the look on Sonny's face that he had not yet acquired a good perspective on his own lost clippings, though.

“It's hopeless,” he said. “I lost them over a year ago—left them on a bus in Utica. I was up there entertaining at a bowling tournament.”

Harmony had a brief vision of Sonny trying to sing his little off-key ballads over the sound of crashing bowling pins. It would be even worse than customers at the Chevron station slamming down hoods or revving up their motors to see if their radiators were sturdy enough to make the trip across the desert.

“I went home with this girl I met,” Sonny said. Harmony was hoping he wouldn't launch into graphic descriptions of his love life, not with Eddie standing there five years old and all ears.

“We were taking the bus, she didn't have no car, she wasn't really a girl, she was a little bit older,” Sonny went on, recalling the tragic scene of the bus ride in Utica, and the girl, and his clippings. But the memory became too difficult; he began to gulp and his eyes watered again.

“I guess I left them on the bus, it's what I get for chasing skirts,” he said, and then he sort of collapsed in Harmony's arms and sobbed and sobbed.

“Saddest man I've met in a
while
,” Otis said.

Omar seemed to agree. “Saddest mans in town,” he remarked.

Eddie was walking around in circles, wearing the goofy look he often wore when he walked around in circles. Iggy, thinking something must be up, was walking around in circles, too, right at Eddie's heels.

“Mom, I know what might cheer him up,” Eddie remarked. “We could take him to Washington with us and maybe he could sing for the President and Mrs. President.”

“I don't think so, Eddie,” Laurie said, horrified at the prospect of Sonny Le Song arriving unannounced at the White House, expecting to sing.

“You have to have a very special invitation before you can sing at the White House,” she added.

“Honey, couldn't we go in the bedroom?” Sonny asked, lifting his face to Harmony. “I hate to cry my eyes out in front of all these people—some of them don't even know me.”

Harmony had a different interpretation of why Sonny suddenly wanted to go in the bedroom, and it wasn't because he wanted to hide his tears. After she had been hugging him for a few minutes she felt something male bumping against her lower thigh. The little jerk was actually taking advantage of her sympathy hug to the extent of getting a hard-on, never mind that her son and most of her family were three feet away. Of course he still had his trench coat on, nobody was going to notice that Sonny was bumping himself against her leg.

What she could do about that was end the hug, which she did. If Sonny had recovered enough to be thinking about going to bed with her, then it was time all of them forgot his lost clippings and went on with their day. After all, there were some big decisions to be made—for example, who was going to Oklahoma and when and how.

“Sonny, just have some tea,” she said. From the look on his face she could tell that he was a good deal more upset by her refusal to go into the bedroom with him than by the knowledge that he had left his clippings on a bus in Utica.

“I don't know about the rest of you, but I need to get started
home on the plains today,” Neddie said. “I may have to hitchhike but I'm heading that way. I'm getting the urge to smell the prairie breeze.”

“We already said we were going, you don't have to clobber us with sentimental speeches,” Pat said.

“Can I come?” Sonny asked—Harmony knew he was just thinking of bedrooms he might get her in down the road.

Harmony did a quick head count, arriving at the figure of twelve.

“There's twelve of us, if we all go,” she said.

“The whole population of Tarwater is just two hundred and thirty-five,” Neddie said. “They'll have to do a new census, once we get there.”

“This is absurd,” Laurie said. “What are all of us going to do in Tarwater?”

“Some of the titty bars in Tulsa don't have much in the way of singers,” Pat observed. “Maybe Sonny could support us by singing in titty bars.”

“Pat, he lost his clippings, he might not be able to get a job,” Harmony said. The thought of Sonny tagging along made her nervous. Her sisters didn't know him like she did; if she even relaxed for a moment and put her arm around him he'd be bumping his hard-on against some part of her.

“First of all, we should ask G.,” Laurie said. “It's his bus. What if he doesn't want to take us to Oklahoma—then what do we do?”

G. failed to respond. He was looking out the window, and wore an inscrutable expression.

“G. is not going, due to worries about leaving family,” Omar said. “G. has one dozen children.”

“By how many wives—is he one of them bigamists?” Pat asked. “Just from looking at him …”

“G. has only one wife,” Omar said. “He is not going to Oklahoma.”

“He is going to Oklahoma,” Salah said. “He is confiding in me a desire to see America. Will accept small fee.”

Omar was annoyed because Salah had contradicted him.

“Give me back my taxicab,” he said.

“Taxicab is in Bayonne,” Salah reminded him.

“Give me back the key,” Omar said. “Go be shoeshine boy. Abdul will drive the cab now.”

“Abdul is passionate boy, only wanting women,” Salah said.

Abdul, the passionate boy, had developed a terrible crush on Laurie Chalk.

“I am going to die when Laurie dies,” he said, to everyone's surprise.

“Abdul, you don't have to,” Laurie assured him.

Just at that moment Sheba danced out of the bedroom. She had already done her makeup, and looked snappy.