Some Can Whistle (35 page)

“My dear, you look ravishing,” he said to T.R., as we bumped on toward the highway. “You’re as beautiful as Helen.”

“Helen who?” T.R. asked. “Is she one of Daddy’s so-called girlfriends?”

“Oh, no, Helen of Troy,” Godwin said, and proceeded to try to explain the Trojan War. T.R., who couldn’t have cared less, turned the stereo up as far as it would go and put in a heavy metal tape.

“Hers was the face that launched a thousand ships,” Godwin screeched into the music.

“I don’t want to hear about it, I get sick in boats,” T.R. said.

It didn’t take us long to reach Aunt Jimmie’s Lounge, a weather-beaten county-line roadhouse with a large jukebox, a small dance floor, and a few tables where one could eat if one chose, or simply sit and drink beer and brood silently if that was one’s mood—and it often
was
the mood of the roughnecks, cowboys, truckers, hay haulers, tool pushers and coyote trappers who frequented that lonely corner of the county. The roadhouse sat on the bleak gray prairies, and things were just as bleak inside as out. One felt that not a dime’s worth of paint had been expended on the building since it was built, and it had been built in the thirties.

Not a dime’s worth had been expended on Aunt Jimmie either; she sat by the cash register all day, smoking, reading the newspaper, and watching soap operas or whatever else offered on a blurry little black-and-white TV. People who had known Aunt Jimmie all their lives could not remember hearing her say anything. Service at the lounge was minimal. Her cooks—generally fortyish country women who were between marriages—never lasted long, but there was an endless supply of fortyish country women between marriages in that part of the country; Aunt Jimmie was rarely without a cook. Generally she also had a shaky, busted-up cowboy or retired roughneck as dishwasher, general factotum, and consort. Everyone had just called them boyfriends until Godwin came along, but he insisted that they were actually consorts. Efforts to make him explain the difference between a boyfriend and a consort proved fruitless. He may have known something none of the rest of us knew, though, for Aunt Jimmie seemed to like him and occasionally even let him clean up in her bathroom when he stumbled in from some particularly fetid roll in the drains.

T.R. marched right in, talked Aunt Jimmie out of a roll of quarters, and fed the roll hastily into the jukebox, punching in her selections as rapidly as if she were programming a computer.

I thought I might sit at a table, have a few cups of coffee, and contemplate dancing for a while, but T.R. would have none of that. She grabbed my hand and pulled me onto the dance floor immediately. Aunt Jimmie’s jukebox was liberally sprinkled with golden oldies, but it was still a bit of a surprise to find myself, at that hour of the day, dancing to “The Tennessee Waltz,” as sung by Tennessee Ernie Ford. I was a stumbling waltzer at best, but T.R. was a strong one and carried me with her. She put her head on my chest as we danced. I thought nothing of that until I felt a wetness seep through my shirt and realized she was crying.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, alarmed. I tried to lift her chin but she dug her face tighter into my chest and kept on dancing.

We were, of course, the only couple on the dance floor. Godwin
had gone into Aunt Jimmie’s bathroom to clean up a bit. Aunt Jimmie was watching the morning news. There were three oil-field workers at one table, two dairy farmers at another table, and an old cowboy sitting in the corner, smoking and looking out at the gray land. No one seemed to think it odd that I was dancing with my glorious young daughter at six-thirty in the morning, or that she was hugging me and crying. There was something Balkan in the indifference of everyone in the bar to the fate of everyone else. The roughnecks looked bent, the dairy farmers defeated, the cowboy old and grizzled and sad. My troubles and T.R.’s didn’t touch them; they were hard people in a hard place, so unconcerned about us that I didn’t even feel embarrassed about my bad dancing. Aunt Jimmie’s lounge might have been in Albania or some impoverished, rocky part of Greece for all the sympathy the customers showed for us or for one another.

“I wish I knew why you were crying,” I whispered to T.R. She just hugged me and sniffed.

“It’s okay, though,” I assured her. “Cry if you want to.”

The next song was by George Strait and was called “All My Exes Live in Texas.”

“I’m glad that sad old waltz is over,” T.R. said, flinging the last tear out of her eye as she picked up the beat. The beats got faster and faster as the songs she had chosen spun through the jukebox. I danced through six songs, by which time Godwin appeared, in his colonialist mode again, and danced several more with her, after which we all sat down and ate a huge breakfast. Then T.R. insisted on dancing again with me. The café was empty by then, all the customers having gone to work. Godwin sat at the counter and read Aunt Jimmie’s paper while we danced.

“It’s funny when you get your dream, ain’t it?” T.R. said. “All through high school I’d watch other girls dancing with their daddies and I’d dream I’d dance with my own daddy some day.”

“And now you have,” I said.

T.R. looked me in the eye for a long time. Though she was dancing easily, her eyes seemed sad.

“Yep, now I have,” she said.

“Don’t you say nothin’, Daddy,” she added. “Please don’t you say nothin’.”

She didn’t really have to warn me. One of the few things my strange life has taught me is not to try to talk away every sadness that a loved one shows you. I’ve tried that many times and only succeeded in driving the sadness deep as a nail into the loved one’s heart.

With some effort I obeyed my daughter’s injunction and kept silent. Song followed song, and we danced. T.R. soon put her face against my chest again—she danced and cried, cried and danced, through another whole roll of quarters, in Aunt Jimmie’s empty café. Godwin finished his paper, got up, started to come out and cut in, took another look, thought better of it, and went to the car to take a nap. Aunt Jimmie sat at the counter, smoking and filing her nails. Old Walter Wafer, her current dishwasher and consort, took advantage of the morning lull to mop the floor. He tactfully mopped around us, and we danced. Wafer had scarcely finished when the early-lunch crowd began to file in, soon to be supplied with cheeseburgers, chicken-fried steaks, and beer. A little roughneck, tousle-headed and not yet resigned to Balkan disciplines, cast a glad eye at T.R. She caught the glance and marched right over to his table. Her spirits were definitely on the rise.

“Hey, how tall are you?” she asked.

The young roughneck was caught off guard by the question; he looked shy and mumbled a measurement.

“That’s tall enough, get up from there and dance with me,” T.R. said. “I’ve just danced my poor old daddy to a frazzle.”

I went to the bathroom. When I came out I saw that things were fine. The music was faster. T.R.’s skirt was whirling, her long legs were flashing, and even the stolidest dairy farmers were having trouble keeping their eyes on their steaks.

T.R. danced happily with the young roughneck until his deckmates finally dragged him out of the café to go back to work—he had to eat his cold cheeseburger on the fly. T.R. followed them out, flirting with the young man, whose name was Dexter, until the pickup drove away.

“What do you think, Daddy, is he cuter than Muddy or not?” T.R. asked.

“Now really,” I said, “I hate to sound like a stern father but I hope you aren’t seriously thinking of abandoning Muddy.”

“You ain’t a stern father and I think of abandoning Muddy every time I see something cuter,” T.R. said. “Wake up, L.J., you’re sleeping your life away.”

“Who’s speaking?” Godwin said groggily. He was often confused for a bit when he woke up from his naps.

T.R. just laughed and drove us home. Muddy was pacing up and down in front of the house, bristling with military equipment. Several trips to the Army-Navy store in Wichita Falls had allowed him to augment his arsenal; he now had binoculars, grenades, and a sniper’s rifle with a starlight scope.

“Earl Dee’s out,” he informed us, as we stepped out of the car.

“Uh-oh,” T.R. said. “We better be leaving then. How far away is he?”

“What I meant is, he’s out of Huntsville,” Muddy explained. “Right now they got him in jail in some place down the road. He shot up a laundrymat.”

“A laundrymat?” T.R. said. “Why would he shoot up a laundrymat?”

“I don’t know,” Muddy said. “I guess one of the washing machines didn’t behave.”

“Maybe it’s all a mistake,” I said. T.R. had turned pale. She was looking at the car as if she wanted to get back in it and go.

“I was just told yesterday that he was still in Huntsville,” I reminded them.

“Oh, them prisons make mistakes like that all the time,” T.R.
said. “Half the time they can’t keep track of who they’ve got and who they haven’t. I’m for getting out of here right now.”

“You got a bunch of messages,” Muddy informed me. “The sheriff of the place that’s got him has been calling.”

The house was in something of an uproar. Bo was sitting on Jesse and beating her; Jesse was screaming and bleeding from the lip. T.R. immediately spanked Bo, who began to scream too. Neither Gladys nor Buddy was in evidence. While I was on the phone to the prison in Huntsville they emerged, sheepishly, from one of the bedrooms. Godwin, T.R., and Muddy began to smoke marijuana. Godwin had armed himself with a pistol of mine and kept cocking it and pointing it at the refrigerator while I talked on the phone.

“Godwin, don’t shoot the icebox,” I said.

It didn’t take long to determine that the prison had indeed made a mistake; it was an Earl Dean who had mashed someone’s head in with a cell door, not Earl Dee. I then called the sheriff of Palo Pinto county, who talked for ten minutes about how very much he and his family had loved “Al and Sal.”

“We miss that show, Mr. Deck, I just can’t tell you how much we miss that show,” he said, several times. When it finally dawned on him that I was worried about Earl Dee, he seemed surprised.

“Why, you don’t need to worry, Mr. Deck,” the sheriff said. “You can just ease your mind off, right now. He’s only been out three days and he’s done violated his parole, plus he assaulted a washing machine with a deadly weapon. I’d say that’ll get him at least another year. He ain’t even supposed to have a deadly weapon, and the old lady whose washing machine he shot up is going to press charges. I’d say you and your family should just relax, because this Mr. Dee is looking at quite a bit of additional time.”

“But are you sure there’s no chance of his escaping?” I asked. “He’s threatened my daughter several times and she’s pretty worried.”

The suggestion that a prisoner might escape from his jail took the sheriff by surprise.

“Oh, golly,” he said. “He ain’t gonna escape, we got this man under heavy guard. I been sheriff here sixteen years, nearly seventeen, and we ain’t had no escapes. The only thing of an escape-type situation we had was one little thief who was stealing tools off oil rigs—we caught him and while we was bringing him back he rolled out of the dern patrol car, which was a bad technique, it turned out, because he busted his head on the pavement and we had to pay hospital bills on him for six weeks because the dern deputy hadn’t made sure the car door was locked. With these courts like they are I’ve come to the conclusion it’s best just to shoot people if they try to escape ’cause if they’re dead there won’t be that matter of the county getting stuck with no hospital bills.”

The sheriff went on to assure me that Alcatraz itself was only slightly more secure than the Palo Pinto county jail. He then launched into a discussion of the episodes of “Al and Sal” that he and his family had admired the most. I listened politely; I definitely wanted the sheriff to stay on our side and do his best by us. Meanwhile, panic swirled around me. Jesse continued to scream intermittently, and Bo had a fit and banged his head on the floor. T.R., Muddy, Godwin, Gladys, and Buddy were all drinking margaritas. All except T.R. and Gladys were armed. T.R. sat with one foot in my lap, chewing lime pulps and listening to me talk to the garrulous sheriff. I rubbed her foot, which seemed to relax her. When the first foot was rubbed sufficiently she exchanged it for the other one, which I also rubbed.

“Well, he’s in jail under heavy guard,” I said, when I finally got off the phone. “I don’t suppose we need to be too worried. They’re planning to transport him right back to Huntsville as soon as the paperwork’s done.”

T.R. had calmed down a bit; she seemed thoughtful.

“How far away is this jail they have him in?” she asked.

“About sixty miles,” I said, trying to remember exactly where Palo Pinto county was.

“Too close,” T.R. concluded. “I ain’t gonna get much sleep with Earl Dee less than a hundred miles away, I don’t care what
no sheriff says. You’re always saying we can go anywhere we want to, any time we want to leave.”

“We can, only excluding countries that require passports,” I assured her.

“Fuck countries that require passports,” T.R. said. “Let’s go someplace that don’t require nothing but money, and let’s leave now.”

“I can depart immediately,” Godwin assured us.

“We’re too many for one car,” I pointed out. “Maybe we should go to Wichita and buy a van.”

“Good idea,” T.R. said. “We can fill it up with guns and take off. Call up the van store right now, Daddy.”

I promptly called the biggest van dealership in the area and let the magic of my name and well-publicized fortune do the rest. I was promised the most expensive van in the place, fully serviced and ready to go in thirty minutes. Godwin and I left the rest of them to study a road atlas and went to get the van.

“I can depart immediately,” Godwin repeated several times. I believe he was worried we might leave him behind to lead his own life, something he had given no thought to in several years.

“Godwin, we’re all departing immediately,” I said. “Shut up, you’re making me nervous.”

“I wonder how T.R. met this fellow Dee,” Godwin said. “He must be rather a magnetic personality. It’s been my experience that criminals often are.”