Some Can Whistle (17 page)

“You see, we have an international flight to catch,” I said. “We have to be in France tomorrow. My daughter’s film starts production next week. I assure you we won’t take Mr. Box away from his mopping for more than a few minutes, and we’d be immensely grateful if you could possibly facilitate this visit.”

Not merely the officer but the whole room was stunned. Several
other jail clerks, including two matrons who had been picking their noses and killing time behind the grille, came over to take a look. The sound of my voice seemed to send them all into mild shock. From the look on their faces as they examined my passport, it was clear that a passport from a Martian couldn’t have surprised them much more.

The officer who had been so engrossed in
Teen World
seemed to have been struck dumb by my feeble Gaullism. He fingered my little French honor as gingerly as if it were a letter bomb.

“Uh, what relation are you to Mr. Box, sir?” he asked, after exchanging several glances with his colleagues.

“I’m his putative father-in-law,” I said, gaining confidence. I was beginning to sense that I could win this one-sided contest on vocabulary alone.

“We want to arrange for him to come to France when he’s released,” I went on. “There are some technicalities to discuss—you know the French.

“We’ll be staying in Cap d’Antibes,” I added as a flourish.

I doubt that any of the people inspecting my meaningless documents really did know the French—it was not evident that they even knew one another—but the mere fact that I had offered the documents caused them to abandon all efforts to push T.R. around.

“Go get Muddy,” the skinny officer said to one of the matrons. “He’s got all day to mop them drunk tanks.”

Then, as the matron shuffled off, he put his thumbs in his ears, wiggled his fingers, stuck out his tongue, and made a silly face at Jesse, who was not charmed. She responded by instantly emitting a squeal far more serious than any of her previous efforts in the squealing line. Everyone in the waiting room, visitors and jailers alike, clapped their hands over their ears in shock. Jesse held the squeal for perhaps ten seconds, by which time the unfortunate jail clerk had become the most hated man in the room. If there had suddenly been an uprising in the jail, his own colleagues would probably have strangled him.

“I was just trying to make a funny face,” he said lamely, when Jesse stopped squealing.

“She hates people who stick out their tongues at her,” T.R. said. “Looks like you’d learn—she does that every time we come in here.”

“She looks so cute,” the jail clerk said. “Look at them little spit curls. I was just trying to make friends.”

“I told her it was your fault her daddy ain’t livin’ with us now,” T.R. said. “She’s gettin’ revenge on you for breakin’ up our family. I’ll be glad when we get to France so I won’t never have to come in this crummy jail again.”

“Well, you wouldn’t have to anyway if Muddy would just earn an honest trade, like being a janitor,” the clerk said defensively. “Here he comes now.”

At first glance the young man who came into the room looked like what Gladys and I called Godwin-bait. He was short, slight, and blond. He was pushing one of those mop buckets on wheels that janitors used, and he was no taller than the mop. He sported a wisp of blond mustache—the fact that his jail pajamas were several sizes too large only made him look smaller.

At the sight of him Jesse began to coo. She almost wiggled off the ledge she was seated on in her excitement. Her immediate happiness was infectious; the dulled faces of the people in the waiting room brightened for a moment at the sight of Jesse’s pleasure.

“I thought I heard my little squealer and I
did
hear my little squealer,” Muddy said, scooping Jesse off the ledge.

She immediately became shy, holding her face in her hands.

Muddy stood on tiptoe and tried to give T.R. a big kiss, but she looked aloof and only offered him a cheek.

“I need to talk to you,” she said, “and I don’t like having to do it in front of a million people.”

After a glance at the clerk, who had lost interest, and at the matrons, who had never had any, she linked her arm in Muddy’s and started for the open door.

“We’re just gonna sit on the steps a minute so we can have a little privacy,” T.R. told the clerk, who was once again absorbed in
Teen World
.

“Okay, but leave the mop,” he said, without looking up. “There’s people in this town who’d steal a mop, and he’s one of them.”

“This is Daddy,” T.R. said, brusquely, dragging Muddy past us. “If it hadn’t been for him they’d have made us wait all day.”

Muddy offered a small, limp hand. He had the kind of dreamy face that betrayed no energy of any kind.

It was hard to believe that such a slight man had had the strength to burgle a TV set, much less the energy to father a child on my large energetic daughter—but apparently he had. A squib from a famous poem came to mind, the one about fine women eating a crazy salad with their meat. Muddy Box was a human version of one of those limp little salads you get served in country cafés throughout the West and South—a few leaves of tired lettuce, a shred or two of radish, an exhausted tomato.

But then I knew well enough that it was impossible to account for the confusing chemistries that sometimes combine in this life. Boys who looked as harmless as Muddy had more than once beaten Godwin to within an inch of his life and left him penniless in airport parking lots or beside remote roads.

When we stepped out of the jail the warm Gulf sun was beaming down on an empty street. Bo had escaped from the Cadillac and was sitting on its roof. Elena stood by the car, trying to coax him down. Dew, Sue Lin, and Granny Lin were just waiting. Muddy sat on a step with Jesse in his lap and began to try to charm her out of her shyness—her hands still covered her eyes. He would carefully pry loose a finger or two and she would immediately put them back. He and Jesse seemed totally absorbed by this game, but T.R. wasn’t. She was looking up and down the street, practically crackling with tension.

“This street’s totally empty,” she said. “There’s not a soul in sight except us.”

“Well, it’s a jail,” Muddy pointed out. “We don’t get too many tourists passin’ through.”

T.R. snorted at him—sometimes she exhaled disgust and frustration in a kind of violent snort.

“He don’t have no ambition,” she said, looking at me but referring to Muddy.

Muddy looked helpless in the face of what seemed to be her rising fury. He gave a tired little shrug. “I only finished sixth grade,” he said.

“Oh, bull, you went to vocational school after that!” T.R. said. “You told me you did, or was that just another of your lies?”

“Well, I went a few days,” Muddy said. “I was gonna learn diesel mechanics and try to get on at the truck stop, but shoot, that stuff’s hard. I can usually fix a regular engine but I ain’t worth a shit with a diesel.”

He had abandoned his efforts to pry Jesse’s fingers off her eyes, whereupon she dropped her hands and flashed him a brilliant smile.

“Aw,” Muddy said, overcome.

“If you had any ambition you’d escape right now,” T.R. said. “Nobody would care. I doubt you’d even be missed for a week or two.”

“That ain’t so,” Muddy said. “I’d be missed tomorrow when they need somebody to mop the drunk tanks.”

“So is that all you want to do with your life, live in jail and mop drunk tanks?” T.R. asked.

“No, but it’s better than a lot of things,” Muddy replied, trying to be reasonable.

“Oh, come on,” T.R. said, grabbing his arm. “Come on, let’s just go. We could be halfway to France while we’re standing here arguing.”

Muddy looked horrified. “But I’m in jail, you swore out the complaint yourself,” he said. “
You
had me arrested.”

“I was pissed off,” T.R. said. “You oughtn’t to have sold the TV. At least the kids could watch cartoons on Saturday morning, it’s the one time I get to sleep late. Okay, that’s water under the bridge, let’s go. I’ll just have Daddy’s lawyer write them a letter and say I dropped the charges.”

“Yeah, but that ain’t the whole problem,” Muddy said. “They pulled up that time when I walked off the dope farm. I got six months to do on that one before they even get to this one.”

“Come on, I wanta go while there’s nobody in sight,” she said, half-dragging him down the steps of the jailhouse. “Daddy’s lawyer can get it all fixed once we’re in France.”

It was clear that Muddy’s heart was not in escaping, but his resistance was halfhearted and it took more than half a heart to apply an effective brake to T.R.

I was as appalled at T.R. as he was, probably because in the short time that we’d been together T.R. had developed the habit of taking everything I said at face value. She had not grasped the fact that I was a novelist, at least to the degree that I constantly improved on reality by inventing little scenarios that, if enacted, would make life better. The unfortunate truth, though, was that few of them
were
enacted. It seemed to me that our sudden trip to France might fall into that capacious category.

Muddy still held Jesse, who was now flirting madly with her father, all shyness gone. T.R. soon had us on the sidewalk by the Cadillac.

“Get off that roof and into that car, we’re leaving!” she said, snapping her fingers at Bo. Her finger snap was so emphatic that, after a quick glance to determine that she meant it, he obeyed, leaping off the car into Elena’s arms.

“T.R., are you sure this is a good idea?” I asked. “Maybe Muddy and I would be better advised to wait a day or two until my lawyer can look into things and get him out on bail. That way he won’t be making his legal problems worse.”

“Shut up, who asked you?” she said, whirling on me. “If he sticks around they may discover six or eight more crimes he’s committed—they got them computers now that keep track of millions of old crimes.”

“For that matter, I could probably find a bail bondsman and get him out right now,” I said. The whole block across from the jail consisted of bail-bond offices.

“Won’t work, it ain’t the new charge, it’s the fact that I walked off the dope farm,” Muddy said. “I’m servin’ out a sentence at the moment, that’s how it works.”

“How it works is everybody shut your stupid mouths and get
in that car!” T.R. said. “You don’t stand around arguing when you’re making a jailbreak.”

My imagination was making scenarios a mile a minute, none of them involving Cap d’Antibes. They involved smelly jails filled with sadistic deputies in places like Buffalo, Texas—my imagination calculated that would be about as far as we’d get before they caught us. A passport, an airline ticket, and a French visa might count for nothing in Buffalo, Texas.

But T.R. had already stuffed Bo and Elena in the backseat and was handing Jesse to Dew.

“We’re up to nine,” I remarked nervously. “It’s gonna be pretty crowded.”

“Muddy don’t weigh nothing, he can sit on my lap,” she informed me with a grin. The street was still empty, her jailbreak was working, and her mood had improved.

They squeezed in, Muddy indeed installed on her lap. The Cadillac was crammed, and when I finally got behind the wheel it was even more crammed. I felt pretty jumpy, expecting sirens to start sounding at any moment. Three or four tries failed to fit the key into the ignition—finally Granny Lin tapped my arm, took the keys, and fitted the right one into the elusive slot.

“See, Muddy fits fine on my lap,” T.R. said, delighted with the success of her venture. She goosed Muddy a couple of times, causing him to grin with embarrassment.

“I’ve even sat in Muddy’s lap once or twice,” T.R. said, passing Dew a stick of gum. “That works pretty good too, otherwise there wouldn’t be no Jesse.”

“Oh, is
that
what happened?” Dew said, and she and T.R. laughed heartily, unwrapping their gum. Muddy looked even more embarrassed.

“Whee, let’s go, this is like Bonnie and Clyde,” T.R. said. Bo once again began to run his little truck up and down my neck, saying, “Vroom, vroom!”

I expected sirens, the SWAT team, handcuffs, headlines. We met three police cars between the jail and the freeway, but none of them paid the slightest attention.

“How about that, Muddy? You’re a free man,” T.R. said.

“Free till they catch me, then I won’t be,” Muddy said, a certain weariness in his tone.

T.R.’s spirits were rising higher and higher. She squeezed Muddy back against her and gave him three or four noisy kisses on the neck.

“You ain’t the least bit free,” she informed him. “You’re outa jail, but now I got you, and you know what
that
means.”

Muddy may have known, but he wasn’t saying.

“It means we’re gonna have some fun up at Daddy’s place, or over in France or wherever Daddy wants to take us,” she said.

“I hope you brought some dope,” Muddy said. “There was plenty of it in jail but I couldn’t afford the prices.”

The most eventful thing that occurred early on in our drive was that Bo threw his truck out the window in a fit of pique. T.R. finally got tired of hearing him say “Vroom, vroom,” which he said without interruption all the way from Houston to Madisonville. She ordered him to stop, he didn’t stop; the backseat by this time resembled a battlefield, but T.R. managed to reach across the battlefield, grab her son, turn him around, and give him a brief but decisive spanking, whereupon he threw his truck out the window.

By this time I had learned to drive with one eye on the road and the other on the rearview mirror, though so far the only thing occurring was that T.R., Muddy, Dew, and Sue Lin were smoking marijuana, occasionally passing a joint forward to Elena and Granny Lin. Everyone seemed to be enjoying the ride—even I was sort of enjoying it though I still expected justice to catch up to us somewhere around Buffalo.

When I saw Bo throw the truck out the window I immediately braked, but T.R. wouldn’t hear of stopping.

“He done it, let him live with it,” she said. “I hate that truck anyway.”

Bo’s way of living with it was to emit a series of earsplitting screams.