The Late Child (42 page)

“All because little dog chase sea gull,” Omar said.

“What?” Harmony asked—she had been watching her son sprint across the White House lawn; after all, it might be the only time in her life she would get to witness that sight. So many sights
were sort of onetime sights. Probably that was why she felt wistful so much of the time; you usually only got one look and then you never got that look again. Maybe that was why certain sights were so sweet—the sweeter the sight the more likely that it would never come again: for example, the sight of Eddie and Iggy racing across the White House lawn, quite a distance ahead of the two tall blue-uniformed Marines. Even if Eddie made it back to the White House at some later date, he wouldn't be five and a half and Iggy might not be with him.

“Lucky boy,” Omar said.

“Lucky dog, too,” Harmony said.

“Lots of life is lucks,” Omar said. “I don't have very much lucks. If I have little dog, chase sea gull, fall off Statue of Liberty, just be dead dog, no TV, no Helicopter One. Just be dead dog, because I have no big-time lucks.”

Harmony thought she knew how Omar felt, but it was not a thought to dwell on, it could only lead to self-pity, and Didier Korn himself had warned her sternly against self-pity; his argument was that no one blessed with her good looks had any business feeling sorry for themselves. Life might not be perfect, it might even be tragic, but if you had looks enough to be voted Miss Las Vegas Showgirl three years running you should not be indulging in self-pity. Didier had been a foreigner too, like Omar; he didn't have a view of life; but Harmony had never known a man she respected more. For that reason she did her best to be loyal to his memory by avoiding self-pity. She tried to bat it away every time she felt it creeping up.

“Mom, we went right over the Washington Monument,” Eddie said, jumping up in her arms. “We went right over it and Iggy didn't fall out—Mrs. President was holding him.”

“Oh, Eddie, that was nice of her,” Harmony said. “What did she say?”

“Well, she said she wished she had curls like my curls,” Eddie said. “And Mr. President said he wished they had a dog like Iggy at the White House—they only have a cat.”

“Socks,” Omar said.

“That's right, their cat is named Socks,” Eddie said. “I didn't know if Iggy liked cats so they didn't meet.”

“Eddie, you should thank the Marines, they were very nice to walk with you—it might have been scary on such a big lawn,” Harmony said.

“No, it wasn't scary at all, it was the President's lawn!” Eddie said, with emphasis—but he marched back and thanked the two Marines anyway. Both Marines gave Eddie a salute and after it one of the Marines gave Harmony the eye; fortunately he was on duty, it was just a look or two. It made her remember Dave, a guy with a Marine background who had fed her K rations once before seducing her. She had survived plenty of not too successful seductions; the one preceded by the dinner of K rations was one never to repeat, and in fact she never had repeated it, although Dave had kept coming around for years, he had not expected the K rations to have such a turning-off effect. He himself liked them so much that he kept a pantryful, although he had not actually been a Marine for many years.

Neddie and Pat took their time getting coffee; long before they returned Harmony fell asleep on the back seat. As she was dozing off Eddie got out a tablet and began to play many games of tic-tac-toe with Abdul. Eddie won easily, too—Abdul had trouble grasping the essential principles of tic-tac-toe.

When she woke up, it was dark, she was hungry, and they were lost. Omar, Abdul, and Salah were yelling at one another, and G. was trying to keep driving while reading a map by the light of a small flashlight he held in his mouth. Laurie was trying to talk him into letting
her
read the map, but so far G. remained in firm possession of the map, the flashlight, and the wheel.

“Where are we?” Harmony asked, when she sat up.

Eddie sat beside her, quietly studying a story about an octopus.

“Some octopuses are very small, about the right size to be a pet,” he informed his mom.

“Where are we?” Harmony asked again—she was too drowsy to give much thought to letting Eddie have an octopus as a pet.

“Oh my God, we're lost in a crack neighborhood,” Pat said. “I knew this would happen if we hung around up here where people don't have lawns.”

Harmony looked out the window—she couldn't tell that it was a totally great neighborhood, but, after all, they were in a bus, there was no reason to panic that she could see.

“Pat, it's just a black neighborhood, calm down,” Harmony said. “Did we miss the freeway or what?”

“We're looking for the airport, the last plane for Oklahoma City leaves in forty-five minutes and we don't even have tickets,” Neddie said. “I was sure hoping to get home and smell the prairie breezes tonight but I don't know, it looks like another lost cause.”

“But we were supposed to be driving to Oklahoma, what happened while I was asleep?” Harmony asked. The thought of being in Oklahoma in a few hours brought her wide awake in a hurry.

“G. says it's too far to the giant redwoods, he doesn't want to go and neither does Salah or Omar or Abdul,” Eddie said. “They want to go back to New York and it makes me very sad.”

“Well, Eddie, they have families, I guess they miss them,” Harmony said, putting her arm around him for a minute.

“I wanted there to be a family that has us in it,” he said. “I wanted it to be Sheba and Otis and the turban men but if they have to go home we'll just have to find another family that has us in it, won't we, Mom?

“I guess it was just a pretend family anyway,” he added, with a sigh.

“Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between pretend families and real families, Eddie,” she said, giving him a hug. “Sometimes pretend families are even better than real families.”

“Well, but it would just be nice to have it settled, wouldn't it, Mom?” Eddie said. He seemed a little bit wistful.

“Just look at the road, we're almost there,” Laurie said, loudly, to G., pointing at a descending airplane. The plane seemed to be descending almost on top of the bus. But the plane didn't land on
them and they got to National Airport with thirty minutes to spare. Neddie was so anxious to get home and smell the breeze off the prairie that she dashed into the airport and put all their tickets on her Visa card.

“I'll take up a collection when I get home,” she said, but there was another setback. The flight to Oklahoma City was full. The best they could do was a flight to Dallas. Neddie was so anxious to get back that she booked them on the Dallas flight and didn't tell them about the little setback until they were actually in the air. They thought they were flying to Oklahoma City but they weren't. Then they had almost missed that flight too because Eddie talked the airlines out of another box and very carefully and slowly packed his stuffed animals in it. He didn't like to put incompatible animals next to one another; he even had a discussion with the airline woman about whether a buffalo and a sheep could ride together on an airplane happily. Finally he decided they could and the box was sealed and they all raced for the plane. They didn't have time for very much in the way of farewells with the turban men, but the turban men were distracted anyway. A Sikh taxi driver with a beard as big and black as G.'s came rushing up while they were getting the bags off the bus. He turned out to be G.'s brother-in-law. In a way it made the parting easier—at least they were leaving Omar and Abdul and Salah and G. with a family member, it was not as bad as just racing off from them at an airport. Even so Omar and Abdul cried; they had become attached. Salah had gone inside to compare baggage-handling possibilities at National Airport with those at La Guardia—they didn't get to say goodbye to him—and G. had his brother-in-law to deal with, the brother-in-law seemed to want him to come immediately and start driving a taxicab in Washington.

Once they were in the air, trying to catch their breath—it had been a pretty sudden departure, at least Harmony thought so—Neddie revealed that they were not exactly bound for Oklahoma City, they were bound for Dallas.

“Why would this many people want to go to Oklahoma City
in the middle of the night?” Pat asked, on hearing that the plane to Oklahoma City had been full.

“I guess as many people would want to go to Oklahoma as would want to go to Texas,” Neddie said, in an annoyed tone.

“Chill out, I was just wondering,” Pat said.

“Wait a minute,” Laurie said. “You mean we're on a plane for Texas?”

“Yeah, but it's just about fifty miles back across the river to them red Oklahoma hills,” Neddie said. “Dallas was as close as I could put us down.”

“No quarrels!” Eddie said. “My mom has had a very hard day and besides, quarrels disturb my coatimundi because we're in an airplane and it's
high
altitude!”

Harmony felt like putting her fingers in her ears—she almost felt like asking the stewardess for a parachute so she could jump out of the plane. Maybe she would float down on a nice little country road somewhere and a nice family would pick her up and let her live in a barn or a shed or something until she felt a little better. She had just been adjusting to the bus. She could lie on the back seat with Eddie, or sit with Laurie by a window and feel that she had found a little calm. She liked the turban men, they were all gentle men; she had confidence in G. as a driver, too. He was a patient driver who never took chances that might lead to an accident.

But now the turban men were gone, and they were squeezed into two rows of a hot airplane and Neddie and Pat were bickering, as they had bickered all their lives. Laurie looked anxious—she hadn't counted on going to Texas, and Eddie was sad from having to give up another pretend family on short notice.

It would be so nice just to float downward in a parachute, to that nice country road, in an area where nobody would be too shocked at her appearance. But of course that was just a fantasy, the stewardess wasn't going to give her a parachute and even if she would Eddie wouldn't want his mom just jumping out of an airplane in the might; he might think it had to do with too many stuffed animals or something.

“Neddie, it's a long way up there to Tulsa, what if your Visa's maxed out and we can't rent a car when we get to Dallas?” Pat asked. “We'll just be stuck down in Texas, with all them ugly Texans.”

“The Dallas Cowboys' cheerleaders ain't ugly, you have to admit that,” Neddie said. She always had an answer for anything Pat said—usually it was an argumentative answer too.

“Yeah, but I doubt the Dallas Cowboys' cheerleaders will be waiting for us at the airport in the middle of the night,” Pat said. “Even if they are, so what? It won't get us home.”

Eddie unbuckled his seat belt, stood up in his seat, and leaned over toward his aunts, who were across the aisle.

“Stop
bickering!
” he yelled, putting so much force into the yell that his face turned beet-red and a little vein in his forehead stood out.

“It's
very
inconsiderate,” he yelled, with only slightly less force.

An old man in a checked shirt, sitting on the aisle behind Neddie and Pat, looked up when Eddie yelled. The old man had bright blue eyes, a steelier blue than Eddie's, and he was reading a magazine called
Soldier of Fortune
, which had a soldier who looked a little bit like Rambo on the cover.

“Say, I know you, sonny,” the old man said. “You're the little boy whose dog fell off the Statue of Liberty and lived. I saw you on the Letterman show.”

“Hi,” Eddie said. “Excuse me for yelling, but my aunts were bickering.”

“Females, that explains it,” the old man said, turning to his wife, who wore a Baltimore Orioles baseball cap. “This one here that I've been married to fifty-one years would talk back to a fireplug if a fireplug could talk.”

“I guess you're a saint then,” his wife said, without looking up from the romance novel she was reading.

“Nearer to being one than you are, by a damn sight,” the old man said.

Then he turned back to Eddie.

“So how's that little dog?” he asked.

“Harmony, make your son sit down and tell him to mind his own business,” Pat said. “I can bicker with my sister if I want to.”

“Well, it's very inconsiderate,” Eddie said, again.

“The Bible says respect your elders—I think a few trips to a good Sunday school wouldn't hurt you,” Neddie said.

“The Bible said the whale ate Jonah and that's a lie,” Eddie reminded her. “Whales only eat plankton.”

“He's got a tongue on him, ain't he?” the old man said.

“It takes one to know one,” his wife said, again without looking up.

“See, I told you, talk back to a fireplug,” the old man said.

“This is my mom,” Eddie said, patting Harmony on the shoulder. Sweet as Eddie was, Harmony still kept having the fantasy of jumping out of the airplane. The only thing that had changed about the fantasy was that she no longer had the parachute—she just saw herself falling, free, through the darkness. The good thing about the fantasy was the darkness, not the falling. In the darkness no one would be able to see how she really felt. She could let her face show what it felt like showing, secure in the knowledge that no one, not her son, not Laurie, not her sisters, would see the sadness and be disturbed.

“I'm military, but even so I've been around my share of bickering women,” the old man said, at which point Pat got out of her seat, stood in the aisle, and glared at him.

“I'll bicker with my sister if I want to, mister,” she said. “Keep your fucking opinions to yourself.”

“Oh-oh, she said the
f
word, Mom,” Eddie said. “I think she's angry.”