The Late Child (56 page)

Laurie didn't answer. She just got tears in her eyes.

“Mom, please ask her to stay,” Eddie said. “We need her.”

Laurie just looked at him. Now the tears were on her cheeks.

“Eddie, here's a deal,” she said, in a small shaky voice. “From now on, no matter what, I'll come to visit with you four times a year—and if I can't get to Las Vegas because of my job I'll send money and you and your mom can come see me in New York.”

“But are you leaving
right now?
” Eddie asked, bereft. “I wanted you to be a member of my family.”

“I
am
a member of your family now, Eddie, and I always will be,” Laurie said. “But your Aunt Neddie and your Aunt Pat and all your cousins are members of your family, and they don't live where you live all the time.”

Eddie said nothing. His face made it clear that reasoned argument wasn't making him like the fact that Laurie was leaving one bit better.

“Guess what, though, Eddie?” Harmony said.

“I don't want to guess if it's bad news,” Eddie said.

“No, it's good news—very good news,” Harmony said. “The good news is that Grandpa is going to come to Las Vegas and live with us.”

Eddie shrugged. “But Laurie still won't be with us,” he said. “I want my Grandpa to come but I want Laurie to be with us too, sometime. If Grandpa can live in Las Vegas Laurie can live there too, and we'd be a family.”

“What about your grandmother living there, then?” Laurie asked. Harmony could tell she was mainly trying to put a lighter cast on things.

“No, Grandma has to stay here because she's too gripy,” Eddie said. “And she doesn't like Iggy and she hates Eli, so she
cannot
live in Las Vegas.”

“But it'll be fun to have Grandpa, won't it?” Harmony asked. “He can meet all your friends. You'll probably be the only person in your school who has your Grandpa living with you.”

Eddie still didn't like the fact that Laurie was leaving. He flung himself on her lap and hugged her tightly, Laurie had tears in her eyes as she held him. Iggy climbed up in her lap, too. Eddie yawned a few times, glanced at the TV, and fell asleep.

“Harmony, could you just take me to the airport?” Laurie asked. “I don't think I'm up to parting with Eddie unless I do it right now.”

“I wanted you to meet Billy,” Harmony said—she was upset that Laurie was leaving so abruptly.

“Maybe we could go by the jail and say hello to him on our way to the airport,” Laurie said. “I'm just afraid that if I stick around another day I'll be too chicken to leave—and I know in my gut that it would be better for all of us if I go back for a while.”

“I don't know why,” Harmony said. “I was hoping we could take care of one another.”

“I know,” Laurie said. “Maybe we can, in our way. I just think it's too soon for me to totally throw in my lot with you and Eddie. I'm afraid I'll get so far out of my other life that I can never get back, even though I don't really know what I mean when I say my other life. I don't know what life I have that I'm so afraid of getting out of.”

She stroked Eddie's hair. Iggy licked her fingers.

“You've got all that stuff with your family to deal with,” Laurie reminded her. “And all that stuff came up just in one day.”

Harmony thought she knew what Laurie was saying. She was saying that life was going to push them on, past Pepper. There was Eddie and Neddie and Pat and her father to think about. Pepper was quiet in her death, past all pain and hurt. But those who still lived were loud. Their cries were carrying her on, past Pepper's silence. Pepper had stopped, but she and Eddie and Laurie couldn't stop—the only stopping they could have, where Pepper was concerned, was in memory.

“It would be selfish to stay together now,” Laurie said. “I have people who need me, too, you know. I kind of have a little set I ran off from. Maybe some of the cousins would come and stay with Eddie while you run me to the airport. I better just make some reservations.”

Laurie got a reservation from Tulsa via Chicago to New York; then Harmony got on the phone and called Pat, to see if either of her daughters wanted to come and sit with Eddie. Pat volunteered to come herself.

“I've been sitting here climbing the walls,” Pat said. “I was about to head out to the oil rigs.”

“Why the oil rigs?” Harmony asked, when Pat showed up at the motel.

“Because there's always pills around an oil rig,” Pat said. “Sometimes the roughnecks work two or three days straight—they have to have a little speed to help them stay awake.”

“Pat, I thought you said heroin,” Harmony said. “I didn't know you took speed.”

“Harmony, I'm sort of a general drug addict,” Pat admitted.
“If I can't get one drug I'll take another, particularly when there's no sex on the horizon, and there's no sex on the horizon right now, not in smelling distance anyway.”

“What about Rog?” Harmony asked.

“No message from Rog,” Pat said. “I expect that means he's found a new love.”

Harmony and Laurie didn't go by the jail, after all. They turned off the freeway, toward town, but then they looked at one another and decided they'd rather just spend Laurie's last hour or two together.

“I'm sure your brother's nice, but I don't think I can stand to look at any more sadness, right now,” Laurie said. “I suppose there's just as much sadness everyplace as there is here, but somehow it seems more concentrated when you're in a place where there aren't many people. At least in New York there are millions of people—it sort of spreads the sadness out.”

Harmony agreed. Lots of times, in the casinos, watching all the little old ladies pulling the handles of the slots and watching the money they had worked for all their lives wash away, Harmony had got a sense of the sadness of things, but at least it was spread out among all the people in the casinos. In Tarwater it was sort of more tightly packaged.

“I miss Eddie already,” Laurie said, when they were back on the highway, heading toward Tulsa. “That little boy sure tugs at your heartstrings.”

Harmony was trying to imagine how it would be if Laurie changed her mind at the last minute and decided to stay with them—would it work, or would it mean that Laurie had had an odd life, of the sort she herself had lived, a life in which nothing emotional had ever quite worked?

“Laurie, do you think I have to find a man so Eddie can have a male role model?” she asked. They could already see the lights of Tulsa, glowing in the distance. Harmony had no idea where the airport was, although Pat had tried to give good directions. Suddenly Harmony felt she had to hurry up and ask Laurie all the questions she had meant to ask her over the next few years.

“I'd think just having your dad there would provide enough of a male role model,” Laurie said. “Your father is a really fine man.

“I don't know that Eddie even needs a male role model,” she added. “Eddie sort of
is
the model—you know what I mean?”

Then they were suddenly at the exit to the airport—Harmony knew that her time with Laurie was slipping away real quickly. The biggest block of time they got that wasn't frantic was in the ticket line. The old woman in the line just ahead of them turned out to be going to Russia, and there were quite a few things wrong with her ticket. All the people behind them in the line began to get huffy. They were incensed that an old fat lady was taking so long to get her ticket changed.

“The truth is, Pepper was only interested in me for a few months, Harmony,” Laurie said. “I kept on wanting her but she stopped wanting me.”

“Did it make you sad?” Harmony asked. She was taken aback by the comment and felt she had to say something.

“Make me sad—it broke my heart,” Laurie said. “I mean, she still liked living with me and everything—she just didn't want to have sex. I didn't get it then, and I'll never get it. She just stopped wanting me.”

“Did it make you want to leave?” Harmony asked. She noticed that there were several rodeo cowboys in the ticket line—maybe the rodeo in Tulsa had just ended or something.

“Yeah, I wanted to leave, but I didn't leave—I didn't have the guts,” Laurie said. “I pretended it was just a phase. I kept telling myself that one day Pepper would want me again. Maybe it would be a year, maybe it would be two—but one day we would have sex again. I mean, it's not like our whole lives were gloomy—we'd go out and eat and stuff, or go see some comedy. We'd have fun. I spent a lot of time pretending things would change, but they didn't.”

When the old woman who was going to Russia finally got her ticket worked out, there was only time to buy Laurie's ticket and rush for the plane.

“This is happening too quickly, but maybe it's better,” Laurie said. They only had time for a kiss and a hug and a few tears; then Laurie was on the plane and gone; gone away.

Harmony took a seat by the window where the plane sat. She didn't want to leave the airport until she knew for sure that Laurie's plane was actually taking off. Also, the running and the emotion had left her feeling a little weak in the knees. She felt she could use a little rest before she had to face the task of trying to find her way back to Tarwater. She knew it was north, but that was about all she knew. Fortunately the Best Western was right on the highway—if she could find north, then she probably wouldn't miss it.

While she was resting, waiting for the plane to move off the gate and fly Laurie back to her life in New York, Harmony noticed a young cowboy, sitting a few seats away. The cowboy was short and skinny. When she glanced at him she saw that he was bent over, with his face in his hands, crying. His skinny shoulders were shaking, and his black cowboy hat had fallen off his head and was on the floor, by his boots.

Harmony had never been able to ignore distress, even if what was causing the distress was totally none of her business. Maybe the boy's mother had just died. Maybe his girlfriend had just left him for his best friend. Maybe someone had stolen all his money. All he had with him was a small duffel bag, with a pair of spurs dangling from the handle, and a rope. His boots were dusty and his pants legs were a little too long—he had stepped on the cuffs and left them pretty frayed. Since he had his face in his hands it was difficult to tell exactly how old he was, but he looked to be only in his late teens.

Harmony saw Laurie's plane backing away from the gate. For better or worse, Laurie was gone. She got up and started to walk on past the young cowboy—maybe he would prefer to be sad privately. Then she stopped and went back to him. After all, she was soon going to have to start dealing with all the problems in her family, why not get a little practice in the airport?

“Can I help you, sir?” she asked, sitting down beside him.

The boy, his face wet with tears, looked up at her—his look was blank.

“I just saw that you were upset,” Harmony said. “I'm sorry if I intruded.”

“Jody's dead,” the young man said, simply, as if it should be obvious to any passerby why he was sitting in the Tulsa airport at midnight, crying.

“That old pickup of ours didn't have no seat belts on the driver's side,” he went on. “Jody always drove like a bat out of hell even when there wasn't no hurry. She missed a curve and flipped. Got thrown clean out of the window and broke her neck. Kilt instantly. The kids weren't hurt, though.”

Then he paused, as if a new fact had just dawned on him.

“Oh, God,” he said. “How am I gonna raise them without Jody?”

“Jody was your wife?” Harmony asked.

“Yep, only she ain't no more, she's dead, and I got two kids to raise and not a cent to my name. I sure can't make enough calf roping to support two kids, so I guess that's the end of rodeoing.”

“You were in the rodeo?” Harmony asked—mainly she was just trying to absorb the fact that this child with the red, tear-streaked face already had children of his own—children who were now without a mother.

“By the way, I'm Harmony,” she said. “I hope you don't mind if I sit with you for a while.”

“No, ma'am, I don't,” the boy said. “I'm Wesley Straw. I come all the way up here from Lubbock and didn't win a cent. I don't know how we'll even scrape up the money to bury Jody. Her pa just had his leg amputated—he drunk so much whiskey it shriveled up his leg. Her folks don't have a cent, and my folks don't think I should have married Jody in the first place. I don't know whether they'll help me bury her or not.”

He sighed and dropped his head back into his hands. The deep sobs came again. Harmony put her arm around him. She wasn't sure that he would accept it, but he did; he clung to her gratefully. Wesley Straw was so skinny that hugging him was a little
like hugging Pepper—every time she had hugged her daughter in her life she felt her bones.

“Oh God, ma'am, I just can't believe she's dead,” Wesley said. “All she was doing was driving home. They estimate she was going better than ninety and there wasn't a thing to do once she got home except sit there with the kids and watch cartoons.”

“Maybe you can get back to rodeoing a little later, Wesley,” Harmony said, still hugging him—she was trying to say something that might make him feel at least a little hopeful.

But Wesley Straw shook his head.

“I should have give it up already,” he said. “It was just a dream I had, when I was growing up. I wanted to be a world's champion cowboy so bad—or at least to get to the national finals. But I can't afford my own trailer, so when I enter a rodeo I have to borrow a horse to rope off of. But that's no good. I ain't familiar with the horse, and the horse ain't familiar with me. Sometimes I'll be riding a different roping horse every time I rope. You don't get nowhere that way. All the good ropers got their own trailers and their own horses.