Some Can Whistle (25 page)

“What’s wrong with old people being horny?” Muddy asked. “It’s a good thing to be if you can manage it.”

“Not if you’re
that
old!” T.R. said, still horrified. “If you’re
that
old it’s ridiculous. Look at Daddy. He’s a lot younger than they are and he ain’t horny. I think that’s sweet.”

Godwin gargled over that one, while I entertained dark thoughts involving the revival of thuggee. My imagination now had Godwin lodged somewhere on the Asian subcontinent—a long way from T.R. but well within the reach of thuggee.

“Well, if there’s a wedding, you’ll have to hire me some help,” Gladys said. “I ain’t up to no wedding; all I want to do for the rest of my life is play with Jesse.”

Another home-front development was that Buddy seemed
to be teaching Bo the gentle art of fishing. Buddy had a large rod and reel, Bo a tiny one; we had not been home twenty minutes before they set off with a tackle box for the nearest fishing hole.

“Catch Mommy a fish and we’ll eat it,” T.R. said.

“I’m going to look for my machine gun,” Muddy said. “A lot of good that guard’s gonna be if he’s off fishin’ when Earl Dee drives up.”

“Buddy’s nice to Bo, though,” T.R. said.

“Good, maybe he’ll adopt him after we’re dead,” Muddy said. “I’m going to look for my machine gun. I hope some stupid roughneck ain’t stole it by now.”

My first task upon arriving home was to learn to play checkers by Jesse’s rules. The games took place in the kitchen, with Jesse comfortably ensconced in her high chair. I sat on a bar stool. Whenever I jumped one of her checkers Jesse promptly threw my checker on the floor. If I merely advanced a square her approach was more subtle—she extended a finger and delicately pushed my checker three or four squares back from where it had been.

T.R. filled one of my large iced-tea glasses about half full of vodka and then topped it off with grapefruit juice. Godwin was pacing around nervously. Despite his dapper appearance he seemed a little on edge.

“Will you stop trotting around?” T.R. snapped. “Go outside if you need to trot.”

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Godwin said, three times. Like me, he occasionally made massive apologies for small offenses if confronted with a woman in a bad mood. It was clear that T.R. was in a bad mood, but for the moment I concentrated on my checker game and let him bear the brunt of it.

Then Granny Lin and Pedro came in. They seemed exactly as they had been, which is to say, silent and inscrutable, except that now they were clearly together. When Pedro got his six-pack of Budweiser out of the refrigerator he carefully opened the first can and handed it to Granny Lin. Then he opened one for himself, and they sat at the table a few minutes, just to be polite, I suspect. They quietly sipped their beers.

“Hi!” Jesse said loudly—it was her new all-purpose word. But Pedro and Granny Lin were beyond the reach of even Jesse’s charms, a fact that Jesse recognized quickly enough. She looked at them solemnly for a minute or two. While she was studying them I quietly advanced one of my checkers. As soon as she completed her scrutiny of the old couple she extended her finger and quietly pushed my checker back.

T.R. took her vodka and left the room without a word, trailing clouds of bad mood behind her.

“She does drink quite a lot of vodka,” Godwin said.

“Well, so do you, L.J.,” I said. “Are you trying to say she’s an alcoholic or what?”

“Oh, no, she’s a wonderful girl,” Godwin said. “Truly wonderful. I find her a credit to the race. She has a heart, unlike her dreadful mother, and quite a good brain. Every time I venture some little observation about the human condition, I find that she’s far ahead of me. She makes me feel rather shallow, I suppose.”

I found what he said, and the tone in which he said it, quite moving. He was still nervously pacing back and forth across the floor.

“If you thought her mother was so dreadful, why did you try to take her away from me?” I asked.

“Who tried to take her away from you? Not me,” Godwin said, looking horrified. “From the moment I first bonked Sally I thought of nothing but escape.”

“Bonked?” I said. “Bonked? When did we start saying bonked?”

“Oh, well, we can’t very well just continue to say the F word in front of your grandchildren,” he said. “You
do
recognize the impropriety of that, do you not?”

“I guess,” I said. “I just never expected you, of all people, to help me clean up my language. Anyway, the word bonk reminds me of all those cartoon sound effects I used to write when I worked for Hanna-Barbera. For me it suggests the Flintstones, not a sex act.”

“Hi,” Jesse said, this time in a warning tone. Used thus, I
think “Hi” meant that it was time to stop worrying about the F word and start worrying about checkers.

I looked back at the board, but my mind was elsewhere—it had followed T.R. out of the room, but she had outdistanced it. My mind was standing distractedly in the hall, more or less wondering what next.

This was not good enough for Jesse—she promptly threw a checker into the sink, and then another, looking at me coolly all the while.

“If you’re going to play with Jesse, you have to play,” Gladys said. “She don’t care for opponents that just sit there looking dazed.”

I
was
dazed, though. Godwin had made a moving statement about T.R., moving but troubling—it seemed to suggest that I now had responsibilities that I wasn’t being sensitive to. Before I could organize my thoughts and ask him what he thought I ought to do about T.R., or her drinking, or my responsibilities, Jesse began to throw all the checkers on the floor. It was a deliberate, willful act: how should I, as a grandparent, respond? Should I just smile at her whimsy or deliver a fond but stern statement in which I’d point out that good little girls didn’t knock all their checkers onto the floor just because their grandpa was disheartened for a moment?

It seemed to me that suddenly all eyes were on me: Godwin’s, Gladys’s, Pedro’s, Granny Lin’s, and, of course, Jesse’s. Was this the point at which I was supposed to start Jesse’s moral education, or was flinging checkers around just a normal act for a little girl who wasn’t even two? Not since the days when I had been the emperor of “Al and Sal,” leading my reluctant army into battle every day, had I been the sinecure of so many watchful, not to say judgmental, eyes.

Unfortunately, a quick decision was called for. Jesse, after flinging half a dozen checkers, changed her tactic—now she began to sweep them off the checkerboard with her chubby little arm. In a very short order the checkerboard would be cleared, and I would have missed the great opportunity I felt I
was being offered to become a force for moral good in my granddaughter’s life.

The truth is, I missed my opportunity. I felt I should say something; I knew it was wrong, not to mention ridiculous, to let myself be dominated by an eighteen-month-old child, but that’s exactly what happened.

“I guess that’s the end of that checker game,” I said lamely. “I wonder who won.”

The adults in the room, myself included, knew perfectly well who had won, and so did Jesse. She smiled in triumph and held out her arms to Gladys.

“Hi,” she said, as Gladys came to pick her up.

That night, worn out by my own indecision, my lack of confidence, my conviction that in my whole life I had never at any critical moment really known what to do, or managed to do what was in retrospect the obvious right thing, I went to bed early; but no sooner had I slipped into a doze than I felt an uneasy pulse in my head. A migraine was sneaking up. Sometimes I thought of it as a Comanche—once lord of these very plains where I lived, or failed to live, the Comanche-migraine hid quietly in the cave of my indecision, my fear, my fragmented conviction, sneaking out to attack whenever it saw its chance. Its approach, in this case, was stealthy, silent, intermittent, and might have gone undetected by anyone less experienced with sneak headaches than me.

I could not be fooled, though. Even when the migraine, a smart Comanche, crouched behind a bush for half an hour and restrained its torturous pulses, hoping to lull me into a deeper sleep, I wasn’t fooled. I knew that if I allowed myself to be deceived, if I sank too deeply into sleep, the Comanche would pounce, his knife at my scalp.

Tired though I was, I didn’t feel like being knifed by a migraine just then. Two can play the sneaking game, after all. I
decided to get up and see if I could sneak past the headache, walk around it, as it were. Sometimes such a tactic worked, sometimes not. I had worn a caftan to bed, so I didn’t have to dress—I just got up and slipped down the hall.

I thought I heard Elvis Presley music coming from the video room, and I was right. Muddy, Buddy, and Gladys were watching
Fun in Acapulco
—Elvis had just finished a song and was cavorting rather innocently with Ursula Andress. I watched only a minute or two, but seeing the two of them looking so young and innocent made me feel old and sad. Eras end every few years in Hollywood;
Fun in Acapulco
definitely called back an era that had ended. I had been there and lived through that era; I had seen Elvis a few times and Ursula Andress many times. Ursula was still going strong; but Elvis had not only faded, Elvis had died, and the Hollywood where they made pictures like
Fun in Acapulco
seemed quainter and more remote now than Belle Époque Paris.

“We’re watching Elvis,” Gladys informed me. Several more Elvis cassettes were scattered around.

“Where’s T.R.?” I asked.

“She’s pissed off,” Muddy said, without explanation.

“Well, enjoy your film festival,” I said.

I found T.R. on the porch after failing to find her in the rest of the house. I had insisted on a little porch—who would want a house without a porch?—much to my architect’s disgust. I loved to sit on the porch on nice summer nights, especially if the moon was full; moonlight made the plains seem timeless, the pale grasslands beautiful. The stars, a show of their own on moonless nights, could not compete with the full lunar power on such nights; they shrank to faint specks.

The porch had immediately become popular with the kids. I had to pick my way through a minefield of toys to get to the couch where T.R. sat. She was still drinking.

From the road in front of the house I heard what sounded like the crackle of a police radio.

“Is that Buddy listening to the radio?” I asked.

“Nope, that’s Gene,” T.R. said. “Buddy’s the day pig, Gene’s
the night pig. That’s what Muddy calls them. Muddy hates cops.”

Despite my caution, I sat on a toy—a plastic monster of some kind. Somehow its head snapped off.

“I’m afraid I decapitated a toy,” I said.

T.R. just shrugged.

“Do you mind if I sit and talk?” I asked.

“You ain’t shown me that closet full of presents yet,” she said. “Was you lying about that?”

“No,” I said. “I can show them to you right now, if you’d like.”

She didn’t answer for a bit. Far across the valley we saw the yellow lights of an oil derrick.

“I wonder if there’s any nice roughnecks around here,” T.R. said. “I’ve danced with a few roughnecks, but I ain’t went out with one since high school, and then it was one of them offshore roughnecks. Johnny—I still remember him. Boy, was he sexy.”

“What happened to him?”

“Alaska happened to him,” T.R. said. “He wrote me two letters. We had a hot little time while it lasted. I was gonna go up and see him—he offered to pay my way—but it was just one of those things that never came about.”

“Did Godwin leave?” I asked, remembering that I had not seen him during my recent house tour.

“Yeah, I bit his head off and he left,” T.R. said. “I don’t know how far he’ll get without no head.

“Don’t call him Godwin, either,” she said. “It gives me the creeps to hear a name like that. Call him L.J., it’s shorter and it’s sort of his initials, anyway.”

“I’ll try to remember,” I promised.

“I’ve known people like him down in Houston,” T.R. said. Her mood seemed to be improving.

“They puzzle me,” she said. “Why would anyone want to fuck an asshole when they could be fucking a pussy? That just don’t make sense.”

I laughed, and T.R. chuckled too, as if it had just dawned on her that her own language might be considered a little inappropriate.
I loved her candor, of course, but in this case she seemed a little embarrassed by it.

“Well, it don’t make sense!” she said defiantly. “You think it’s bad to talk about it?”

“Of course it’s not bad to talk about it,” I said. “It’s not bad to talk about anything.”

“Maybe not with somebody, but what about if it’s with your daddy?” she said. “I never thought I’d be talking about pussies and stuff with my daddy. I don’t know if that’s too proper.”

“Do you want to be proper, T.R.?” I asked.

“I might if I knew what it was, for sure,” T.R. said. “Back when I was a teen-ager I wanted to be proper so much it hurt. I thought if I could just learn to be proper life would be perfect.”

“I used to think that too,” I said. “My metaphor for proper was a nice kitchen with a nice woman in it. I knew a very nice woman once, and she spent most of her life in her kitchen. I thought that if I could just marry someone like her and live in a kitchen something like hers, that would mean I was proper at last. And from then on, life would be perfect.”

“What was her name?”

“Her name was Emma,” I said.

T.R. looked at me a little sadly. I don’t think she approved of my caftan, but she refrained from comment.

“Maybe you can still try,” she said.

“I can’t try,” I said. “Emma’s dead.”

T.R. was silent for a bit, thinking over the tormenting issue of propriety, or its lack.

“For me, it was just getting asked to one of the dances over at the country club, in Tyler,” she said. “I wanted to dress up and go to one of them fancy dances so bad I could taste it.”

“Did you ever get to?”

“I finally got to,” she said. “A stupid little rich boy finally got up his nerve and asked me, even though his parents didn’t approve. He took me but then he got ashamed of me and never came near me the whole night. One or two old sots danced with me, and some of the college boys.