Some Can Whistle (16 page)

“By the way, how is your mother?” I asked, to ease the moment.

“I thought you said you’d talked to her,” she said. “I thought you said she told you she’d burn my presents.”

“I did, but that was several years ago,” I said. “I just wondered how she was.”

“She died when I was twelve,” T.R. said. “Cancer got her.”

“Oh, dear,” I said. “I guess it was longer ago than it seemed when we had our conversation. I’m sorry, T.R.”

“My dad, he’s got cancer now,” Elena volunteered conversationally.

T.R. put her face in her hands and began to sob. Tentatively I put my arm around her. In a moment she turned and clung to me, sobbing. For the first time in my life I felt my daughter’s tears on my neck. That was fine, but in shifting position slightly, I almost dislodged the slumbering Jesse; she began to slide out of my lap. I raised one knee a little and just managed to stop her. T.R. sobbed and sobbed, seeming to grow larger and wetter the more tightly she clung to me. I felt as though I were embracing a giant, while at the same time trying to keep a midget—Jesse—from falling to the ground. The leg that I used to stabilize Jesse soon began to cramp.

Also, Jesse kept sliding—her movement was almost imperceptible, but she was sliding. Fortunately, T.R. stopped sobbing just before Jesse went over the trembling precipice of my knee.

T.R. wiped her face on the bottom of her T-shirt.

“I wanta go to your house,” she said. “I wanta see if you really got me all them presents.”

“I got them, they’re there,” I assured her. “As far as I’m concerned, we can go right now.”

“First I gotta finish my onion rings before they get cold, though,” T.R. remarked. “That’s one delay. Then we gotta go by the jail and see Muddy, he’d never forgive me if I moved away without lettin’ him have one last glimpse of his baby girl. I know Dew will wanta come, Dew’s always ready to go places, but Sue Lin’s a different matter. Sue Lin may take a little persuading.

“They live with me, you know,” she went on, offering me another onion ring, which I took—I was getting the sense that my new family life was going to require more fuel than my old lonely life.

“We’re sharing the rent, I can’t just run out on them,” she added. “How big’s your house?”

“Oh, it’s quite large,” I said gamely. “There’s room for everyone.”

“In that case you better come too, Elena,” T.R. said. “You’ll need some help with that kid, when it comes, and anyway Jesse loves you, she ain’t gonna like going off and leavin’ you.”

“Okay, I can be the baby-sitter,” Elena said happily.

The rest of the teen-agers had skipped off to talk to some somber young men who were bouncing a tire in the back of a pickup near by. If they had stayed around I felt sure T.R. would have asked them too.

“I’m gonna go ask Sue Lin,” T.R. said. “It would be pretty hard to do without Sue Lin. She’s about the only person Bo likes.”

“Bring her, by all means,” I said. Bo was still asleep, but he was beginning to twitch. T.R. was right that I didn’t like him, although I knew it was ridiculous to judge a grandchild on such short acquaintance. Perhaps he’d grow up to be a theologian rather than an armed robber, but I doubted it. At first blush the
thought of taking Dew, Sue Lin, Elena, in addition to T.R. and the kids, had seemed a bit much, but a moment’s reflection persuaded me there might be safety in numbers.

Besides, what a stunning surprise it would be for Godwin and Gladys when I drove up with four young women, one of them black, one of them yellow, one of them brown (not to mention pregnant), and one of them my daughter.

“The problem’s Granny Lin,” T.R. said, when she came out. “She’s kind of fuzzy in the head from all them days floating around in a boat and starving and stuff. I think we better just take Granny Lin too, she’s not much bigger than a chicken. Otherwise Sue Lin will never budge and Dew won’t either. I sure ain’t up to leavin’ every single person I know, even if there is that closetful of presents. And if I stay down here, Earl Dee will kill me, or if he decided to hold off on killin’ me he’d try to put the kids to work making child porn or something—that’s the direction Earl Dee’s mind runs when he ain’t off beatin’ the piss out of some poor turkey working in a 7-Eleven somewhere. Seems like we oughta just gather up Granny Lin and go. It’s a pretty good bunch of us—that’s why I was hoping you’d bring the airplane.”

By my count we were up to eight passengers, but Dew, Sue Lin, and Elena were skinny, and the kids were tots. Granny Lin was said to be no bigger than a chicken. Only T.R. and I were large. It seemed to me we might all fit in the Cadillac.

“We can fit,” I said. “We just might have to send a moving van for your possessions.”

“There ain’t no possessions,” T.R. said. “Muddy just stole everything we had three days ago. See that pickup where those kids are bouncing the tire? He hauled off the bed and the TV set in that—the bed his own child was sleeping in—that’s how good a burglar Muddy is. He brought Jesse back, but not the bed. We’re lucky he left us the clothes on our backs.”

“This is the person you want to visit in jail?” I said.

“Sure, so what?” T.R. said. “He was just out of money and needed to buy some marijuana,” she said. “Muddy gets real bad headaches if he don’t smoke marijuana. Our old TV only got
two channels anyway—it was all just junk, what he stole. So far I never owned nothing in my life that wasn’t junk. If I didn’t have Muddy to steal it, I’d have to pay somebody to haul it off, sooner or later.”

“I guess that’s a healthy attitude,” I said.

“It’s a don’t-give-a-fuck attitude,” T.R. said in her flat voice. “I got more to worry about than a few crappy possessions. I got Earl Dee to worry about. I don’t even want to work my shift, I’m gonna see if I can get one of the girls to take it. What if Earl Dee got out yesterday? He could come walking right up any time.”

She reached down and scooped Bo out of the dirt, where he was napping. He began to whine and rub his eyes.

“Elena, you take Jesse, Daddy ain’t learned how to hold her yet,” T.R. said. “Dew and Sue Lin will be off in a minute—I’ll go tell Maria and Josefina that they’re the new crew at the Mr. Burger. What I’d like to do is mobilize before that cocksucking Earl Dee wiggles out of the woodwork.”

“I like your command of the vernacular,” I said—and I did. The way T.R. put things had charmed me from the first.

But T.R. was mobilizing; she scarcely gave me a glance.

“Where’s your car?” she said.

An hour later we were all mobilized. Dew and Sue Lin had taken off their aprons and cheerfully hitched their fates to T.R.’s star. The Dismuke Street Mr. Burger proved to be a spongelike entity; it absorbed the two Mexican teen-agers and remained a fully functioning cheeseburger outlet. Everyone waved as we drove away.

T.R. had been right to describe her possessions as minimal. She, Sue Lin, Dew, Granny Lin, and the kids had been living in two rooms over a pet store on Telephone Road. Their possessions consisted of a few secondhand toys, an army cot, two mattresses, a few skirts and blouses, and a wok. Granny Lin, a very
tiny and very ancient Vietnamese woman, sat on one of the mattresses, squinting at an old issue of the
National Enquirer
when we trooped in.

“Granny never gives up, she’s tryin’ to learn English,” Sue Lin explained.

“From that?” I said, horrified at the thought of the conclusions the old woman must be drawing about our culture if she was really managing to read the
Enquirer
.

“Now don’t you be runnin’ down our reading matter,” T.R. said. “I found it in the trash, and it’s better than nothing.”

Packing consisted of T.R. and Dew staring at the closet for a few minutes as they tried to decide if any of their clothes were worth taking.

“I say we junk this shit,” T.R. said. “Daddy can buy us all a lot better clothes than these. Let’s just go.”

“And leave my sequins?” Dew said, grabbing a pair of profusely sequined pants. “If we was to go dancing I’d feel naked without my sequins. Reckon they dance out in the Wild West?” she asked, looking at me.

“Oh, sure,” I assured her. “People up my way dance constantly.”

T.R. was for abandoning the toys, too, but the children screamed and turned red at the mere suggestion that we leave them behind. The wok, the clothes, and a collection of dingy toys took up most of the Cadillac’s trunk space. Jesse retained a stained Cabbage Patch Doll, and Bo kept a small green truck, which he raced up and down the back of my neck as we drove through town.

“Vroom, vroom, vroom!” he yelled—at least it seemed to me he was yelling. No one else seemed to notice.

Granny Lin had been assigned the seat next to me. She still clutched her copy of the
Enquirer
—the fateful issue whose cover carried a famous picture of Nema Remington and her then beau, Pinky Collins, a diminutive Irish terrorist, embracing in the surf at Malibu. The embrace itself was an echo of the famous Burt Lancaster-Deborah Kerr surf-fuck in
From Here to
Eternity
, except that Pinky Collins was only about one-third the size of Burt Lancaster.

At that, he was probably larger than Granny Lin, who was humming a haunting if almost inaudible tune. The sound she made when she hummed was as faint as memory, in this case Asian memory. It caused me to imagine a misty village in the delta in a peaceful era, with rice paddies and dutiful water buffalo—but while we were stopped at a light Sue Lin informed me that her granny had grown up in Paris and had only returned to Vietnam in the fifties, to run a travel service.

“My goodness,” I said—one more bucolic fantasy shattered.

I parked about a block from the downtown jail. T.R. spit on her finger and created a couple of curls out of Jesse’s wispy hair.

“Muddy likes to think he’s got a little curlyheaded angel,” T.R. said. “That Muddy’s a dreamer.

“You coming?” she asked, looking at me across the humming head of Granny Lin.

“Sure, if you want me to,” I said gamely, though I hated going into jails. I had been in a number of them in the last few years, always to get Godwin released after some embarrassing and marginally criminal escapade.

“I thought we was in this together,” T.R. said, a little belligerently. “I don’t call it together if you’re just gonna sit in the car. Them cops are horrible to me—they think I oughta be sleeping with one of them instead of a little crook like Muddy.”

“I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to come,” I said, popping free of my seat belt.

From the backseat, Dew laughed.

“If you wasn’t supposed to come, you wouldn’t be here,” she said. “From now on, you
always
supposed to come.”

“That’s right,” T.R. said.

I got a little nervous going into the jail. My imagination, not active enough to get my new novel written, was active enough to imagine the life in jails. It was a ridiculously fastidious imagination,
with a snobbish selectivity. Where jails were concerned, it skipped over the things you usually read about—gang rapes, knifings, suicide, beatings—and focused on the seemingly trivial matter of dirty hair.

I hate dirty hair. I wash mine constantly, sometimes twice a day. The state most likely to propel me into immediate insanity is a state of tonsorial filth. Clean hair is a bedrock condition for civilization, in my view—a view shared, of course, by shampoo manufacturers and many members of the classes among which I traveled in my years of celebrity.

It is not a view shared by the people who work in jails, much less by the incarcerees, if that’s the word for the people whose fate it is to be locked up. Hair care is not a priority for most of them; obviously it’s absurd of me to wish it were, but I wished it nonetheless. I no sooner enter a jail than I begin to imagine how horrible I would feel if my hair were as dirty as the hair of the people in the waiting room, not to mention the people in the cells.

This happened almost as soon as we entered the Houston jail. The waiting room smelled of mildew and ammonia. The air conditioner was off and the outer doors open, so the mildew may have been Houston’s contribution. Most of the women in the waiting room were black, but there were five or six Hispanics and one or two poor whites. Several children were waiting, most of them clutching toys at least as dingy as those my grandchildren owned. A lot of lank, discouraged, none too clean hair could be seen in the waiting room—the tonsorial equivalent of those pictures of ravaged gums particularly insensitive dentists sometimes put in their waiting rooms.

T.R. charged into the waiting room, Jesse in her arms, but by the time she actually reached the grille where visitors had to make obeisance to the law, her charge had lost a lot of its force.

“I need to see Muddy Box,” she said to an officer who was reading an old issue of
Teen World
with a semiotician’s concentration.

The officer glanced up resentfully.

“Muddy’s mopping,” he said. “He’s cleaning up the drunk
tanks—they’re mostly knee-deep in puke. Muddy’s our best mopper. If he’d quit stealing he could get on as a janitor any time.”

“Hoorah for Muddy. Can I see him?” T.R. asked.

She sat Jesse on the little ledge in front of the grille, hoping that the sight of an angelic curlyheaded child would soften the officer’s heart, but it didn’t. He was more interested in
Teen World
.

“Fill this out and take a seat,” he said, pushing a form toward her. “Muddy won’t be available for a while.”

“You ask,” T.R. said, turning to me. “Otherwise we’ll have to sit around here for three hours and we’ll all get depressed.”

Her look said okay, we’re in this together, start being a daddy
right now
.

I’m as timid as most people when confronted with even the most low-level representative of the powers that be, but it was clear that I had better, for once, make an effort to be a little more bold.

“Officer, I’m sorry to trouble you, but we’re in an unseemly hurry today,” I said.

Fortunately, I had my passport with me: I always do. Better yet, I also had a ticket, an open first-class ticket, Dallas-Paris, for those times when Godwin, Gladys, Texas, and America simply became too much. I extracted my passport and my ticket from an inside coat pocket and thrust them through the grille. I also had a meaningless little honorific visa the French government had given me as a return for my once having chaired a jury at the Cannes Film Festival. It had no real diplomatic validity, but it looked impressive, particularly for a jail clerk whose reading skills barely sufficed for
Teen World
. I gave him the visa while trying to imagine that I was Charles de Gaulle.