Some Can Whistle (22 page)

T.R. and Muddy had quarreled all the way from Arlington, and T.R. was not in a good mood, to put it mildly. Before I could even help Granny Lin out of the Cadillac—she had stiffened alarmingly during her stay in Arlington—the delicious Jamesian moment occurred in which Godwin and T.R. first set eyes on one another: T.R., beautiful despite her terrible-taste new clothes, sailing up to the house with Jesse on her hip, the epitome of American youth, American good looks, American ignorance, American energy; and Godwin Lloyd-Jons, the ultimate Euro, drugged out, fucked out, arted out—nothing left but brain.

“Who are you? I bet I could get AIDS just from shaking your hand, don’t you kiss my babies,” T.R. said, momentarily taken aback by the skinny, toothless figure inside the door.

Actually, Godwin wasn’t quite so far gone as he should have been to fit the Jamesian equation I was placing him in. An immediate gleam came into his eyes at the sight of such a splendid young woman. Seeing the gleam gave me a powerful sense of
déjà vu
, for he had had just the same gleam for Sally, T.R.’s mother, a quarter century earlier; Godwin, in his disgusting way, was a sort of survivor.

“My dear, I’m Godwin, and I assure you I’ve led a life of chastity and scholarship these last few years,” he said suavely. “I knew your mother well, do come in, what beautiful children you have.”

“I’m Gladys, I do the cooking,” Gladys said, amazement in
her eyes. T.R. set Jesse down and Jesse, glad to be out of the car, toddled over to Gladys at once, winning her wizened heart in half a second.

“Well, look at this precious girl,” Gladys said. She hunched over like a shortstop and scooped Jesse up.

“You should get dressed, I don’t want to have to stand here counting your ugly ribs,” T.R. said to Godwin. “We’ve got a lot of stuff to bring in, you could help if you were dressed.”

“Righto,” Godwin said submissively and went to do as he was told. Gladys and I were both very surprised—we were constantly ordering him to get dressed, and he didn’t.

Before introductions could proceed further, Bo instigated the first crisis of our new lives by racing over to the swimming pool and installing himself with his AK-47 on the very end of the diving board. The problem with that was that the pool had been drained for cleaning; if he fell off it was a twelve-foot drop to the tile bottom.

“Muddy, get him!” T.R. commanded.

Muddy, carrying the real AK-47, was surveying his new surroundings apprehensively. Actually there was not much in the way of surroundings to see—the house sat on a bluff, with the great plains stretching away to the north, and a few blue knobby hills to the south. Mainly what there was to see was the deep western sky, a feature that apparently didn’t appeal to Muddy Box. He exhibited not the slightest interest in rescuing Bo from the diving board.

“This place is way out in the country,” he observed with surprise and dismay.

“That’s right, Daddy picked it just to keep you out of trouble, Muddy,” T.R. said. “No apartment houses for you to steal TVs out of, no malls for you to shoplift from. I don’t know what you’ll do for excitement.”

“I don’t know what any of us will do for excitement,” Dew said. She too looked a little apprehensive at the thought that she was going to live amid such empty vistas.

“Well, there’s lots to read,” I said nervously, realizing even as I said it that this was not a crowd likely to be won by my ten
thousand eclectically selected books. But maybe the thousands of records and hundreds of videos would keep their minds off where they were for a while.

Muddy, ignoring T.R.’s command to rescue Bo from the diving board, wandered off across the hill, his AK-47 slung across his shoulder.

T.R. looked disgusted, and her disgust was of a voltage to make everyone nervous. As soon as I helped Granny Lin into the house, T.R. turned her disgust on me.

“That’s your grandson out there about to fall off a diving board and crack his skull,” she said. “If he falls off and kills himself I’m gonna sue you for the whole three hundred million, I don’t care if you are my daddy. Why don’t you at least act like you can do something and get him off it? What do you mean leaving that swimming pool empty when there’s kids around who can fall into it?”

“I didn’t know they were cleaning the pool this week,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

I walked over to the pool. Bo was now lying on his stomach on the diving board and seemed to be in no immediate danger of falling off. He trained his toy machine gun on me as I approached.

“Hi, Bo, why don’t you come and see what’s in the house?” I said. “There might be something in there that you’d like to play with.”

“Bambo,” Bo said. Then he made his approximation of an AK-47 spitting out bullets—in this case spitting them out at me.

T.R. and the gang had vanished into Los Dolores; Muddy Box was already halfway across the long hill. I was alone with Bo for the first time in either of our lives. He showed no sign of wanting to leave the diving board.

Bribery occurred to me as a possible solution. Many times, wandering through the zoos and parks of the world, I had seen desperate parents trying to bribe their kids. The bribes weren’t always in the form of cash; they might be in the form of ice cream, cotton candy, or another trip to the small-mammal
house; but the fact that the parents had been driven to naked bribery was always evident from their guilty looks.

What was good enough for them was certainly good enough for me. I reached in my pocket, but all I had in my pocket was a wad of hundred-dollar bills. In an ideal world—that is, a world in which I didn’t have to account for my actions to anyone else—I would have given Bo the wad of hundreds in a second if I’d thought there was the faintest chance it would induce him to come off the diving board.

But it wasn’t an ideal world; it was a world in which complications multiplied like ragweed. Bo probably had no interest in one-hundred-dollar bills—after all, he was just three—and if he accepted them and transformed himself into an obedient little person, I would still have the problem of peer disapproval to contend with. I could just imagine the ridicule I would be in for if Bo marched into the house and let it be known that I had given him eighteen hundred dollars to come off a diving board. Everyone would think I was insane, not to mention inadequate, though in fact eighteen hundred dollars had no more meaning for me than it had for Bo, and any one of my critics might have done the same if they were as rich as I was and as hopeless with children.

“Please come back off the diving board,” I pleaded. Forced to reject bribery due to a lack of small change I fell back on groveling.

Unfortunately, that didn’t work. Bo continued to lie on his stomach, pointing the toy machine gun at me.

Then, to my surprise, I had a practical thought. Why not just fill the swimming pool? I had done that a few times and was pretty confident I could manage to get the water on. The swimming-pool man would show up and be annoyed, since it meant he would have to drain it again to finish the cleaning, but on balance I felt I would rather have him annoyed with me than T.R. I could just let three or four feet of water in, enough to prevent Bo from cracking his skull in case he fell.

I went over to the pumping apparatus and turned the big valve; to my delight water immediately began to gush into the
pool. Having a practical thought and being able to put it into practice gave me a sudden flush of confidence. It seemed to me I was developing; far from being defeated by the exigencies of grandparenthood, I was stimulated by them.

My euphoria lasted only a moment. Bo looked over the edge of the diving board and saw the water rushing in beneath him. To my surprise he reacted with shock and horror. He immediately got to his feet, clutching his gun, and began to scream and dance around on the diving board. Several times he seemed in danger of dancing off the edge. Of course there was not yet even an inch of water in the deep end of the pool, so he was still in as much danger as he had ever been.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” I said. “I’m just filling up the pool. Don’t you like to swim?”

Bo only screamed louder—he was hysterical with fear of the rushing water beneath him. I saw that in fact he
was
going to fall off because he was crying so hard he couldn’t see. I hadn’t been on the diving board in years, but I was on it in a second. I managed to grab Bo by one arm and pull him off it just in time; his gun fell in and was swept toward the shallow end of the pool. Bo continued to scream and punch and kick but I hardly noticed; I dragged him with me to a nearby chaise longue and sat down. He was in a blind fury, but he was also very small, and it was not that hard to hold him. I slipped into adrenaline shock so strong that I felt a little faint, but I still kept a good grip on Bo.

“Hey, Daddy, you’re doin’ better,” T.R. said. She had arrived poolside without my noticing, looking radiant. Beside her stood Godwin, but a Godwin transformed; he wore a clean seersucker shirt and immaculate white pants; if I hadn’t already been in shock, I would have gone into shock at the sight of him—in a matter of minutes he had transformed himself from a fading intellectual derelict into a model colonialist; he looked as if he could be running a teak plantation in Ceylon. Not only did he look better than he had looked since moving in with me, he had also quickly managed to make friends with T.R.—they were casually passing a joint from hand to hand.

“I take back what I said about your house,” T.R. said. “It looks like mud pies from the outside but it’s pretty nice on the inside—only a lot of them books need to go. Half the rooms have so many books in them you can’t see the walls.”

“I guess Bo’s scared of water,” I said, hoping to draw attention to my last-second rescue.

“I caught him just in time,” I added, but neither T.R. nor Godwin were paying the slightest attention. They seemed to be discussing post-New Wave rock bands, and took the fact that Bo wasn’t dead as a matter of course.

“I did have quite a few good heavy metal cassettes, but Muddy stole them,” T.R. remarked. “Muddy’ll steal anything that’s not nailed down, and if you give him time he’ll yank out the nails and steal them too.”

“We’ll have to watch him closely,” Godwin said gravely. “He seems a rather pleasant boy.”

“Pleasant unless you cross him,” T.R. said. “Then he swells up like an old frog.”

Bo tore loose from me and wrapped himself around one of his mother’s legs. He continued to sob, now and then pausing to point tragically at his machine gun, which had floated back near the middle of the pool.

“Speaking of the devil, where is Muddy?” T.R. asked.

“I guess he’s just taking a walk,” I said. “He wandered off with his machine gun.”

“Would you like a swim?” Godwin asked. “The pool will be full quite soon. I could make some Bloody Marys and we could have a swim.”

“Make that margaritas and I might just take you up on it,” T.R. said. “Me and Dew bought quite a few new bathing suits we need to try on.”

At that moment we heard the AK-47 begin to chatter from under the hill. Burst followed burst—the sound was loud enough and unexpected enough to cause Bo to stop crying.

“That’s Muddy,” I said. “I wonder what he found to shoot at. There’s not much below the hill except some oil tanks.”

A moment after I spoke, sound hit us like a tremendous slap.
The sound the training jets made was as nothing compared to this sound. “Slap” sounded right as a description of its sudden arrival, but slap hardly did justice to the force of the sound—even to call it “the sound” seemed wrong. Life, the world, were briefly nothing but sound—all other sensations were obliterated. We all instinctively turned our backs and hunched over, mute and hopeless before it. I closed my eyes, unable to think or move at all. When I opened them I felt detached from myself, as if I and my thoughts—if I had any—had been blown in opposite directions from one another. I noticed Bo clinging tightly to his mother’s legs. T.R. had her head in her arms. Godwin, hunched over, was still smiling insanely, not to mention toothlessly.

I saw T.R.’s lips moving, but the normal speed of sound seemed to have changed; it had slowed and been made deliberate by the force of the great sound.

“I think it’s the end of the world, Daddy,” T.R. said. “Don’t tell me if that’s what it is.”

A huge, tar-black pillar of smoke foamed up from the plain below the hill. It shot straight into the sky as if fired from a gigantic smoke pistol.

“It’s not the end of the world, T.R.,” I said. “It’s just the end of the oil tanks.”

“You better be sure, I ain’t opening my eyes unless you’re sure,” T.R. said, her eyes tightly closed.

I watched the black smoke pour into the sky; it rose over the hill like black foam.

“I’m sure, honey,” I said.

It was definitely the end of my oil tanks and almost the end of Muddy Box as well. Fifty-eight thousand dollars’ worth of West Texas Intermediate Crude, representing most of the monthly milking of my several little oil wells, went up in smoke—a lot of smoke. By the time Godwin and I had persuaded T.R. that the world had not come to an end, half the pumpers, cowboys, and fire companies from two or three surrounding counties had
gathered in my lower pastures. There was little they could do but scratch their heads and look awestruck. Fortunately one of them found Muddy, unsinged but also unconscious, in a chaparral bush. Local efforts at resuscitation failed, so an ambulance helicopter was radioed for. T.R. refused to fly in it or to take any responsibility for the unconscious Muddy at all. Somehow she and Godwin persuaded me that I was the logical choice to accompany Muddy to Dallas, where better-equipped resuscitators waited. I didn’t feel really right about going—I couldn’t rid myself of the haunting sense that events were sweeping me far downstream from where I wanted to be—but for all I knew poor Muddy was dying; someone had to go, so I climbed into the helicopter and we swirled up into the sky.

Most of the next three days I spent in a little waiting lounge at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, waiting for Muddy Box to regain consciousness. He was not brain dead, I was assured. When I phoned home to pass this good news on to T.R., she snorted.