Some Can Whistle (18 page)

“Just ignore him, all he wants is attention anyway,” T.R. said.

The other residents of the car seemed to be practiced at ignoring him, but I wasn’t. I began to get a sort of low, migrainous feeling—I felt as if a headache were waiting somewhere up the road. There wasn’t much airspace in the car, and Bo’s screaming made me realize what a crowded situation I had got myself into. There were eight humans in the car with me, all of them going about being human in their own separate ways. Not since the day I finally left the set of “Al and Sal” had I actually been in close proximity to eight other humans at one time. Mostly I had been in close proximity to no one—I breakfasted with Godwin and Gladys, it was true, but that usually took place outdoors, with the great space of the plains around us.

Not in a long time had I been so uninsulated from human contact as I was at that moment. Soon the human emanations all around me, of which the most extreme manifestation was Bo’s screaming, began to make my temples throb alarmingly. A headache was coming. I metaphorized it as a great black eighteen-wheeler. The ominous black truck was just now leaving Dallas; it was racing south, we were racing north; unless I was very lucky the migraine collision would occur somewhere near Corsicana. It felt as if it would be a terrible collision, too: the bodies of my recently acquired family might be scattered like matchsticks beside the road.

I hated to admit it, but I was about to get sick. Solitude had given way to crowdedness too suddenly: my synapses weren’t adjusting rapidly enough. I began to feel shaky, and my temples throbbed more violently as the great black headache shifted into high gear.

“I don’t feel so hot,” I said, with what I hoped was admirable control. “I wonder if any of you would like to drive?”

“You bet, me!” T.R. said. “Stop, I need to change Jesse anyway, she always loses it when she gets around her daddy.”

She changed Jesse and took the wheel. Elena moved back and sat on Muddy’s lap, more or less, and I took her place on the other side of Granny Lin. I gulped a few pills, hoping to
deflect the headache; instead of being a head-on collision, maybe it would just be a fender bender.

I shut my eyes for a few minutes, hoping to fool the migraine into thinking I was asleep. It was not a tactic likely to work, and it didn’t; with my eyes shut I was even more conscious of the angry pulse in my temples. When I opened my eyes again, the thinning forests beside the road were being left behind very fast.

T.R. was not driving slow. Her eyes were alight and she looked happy, though. While I watched with fascination and horror, we sped up almost onto the bumper of a pickup that was idling along in the fast lane.

T.R. honked and flashed her lights at the pickup repeatedly, but the pickup didn’t move over. I recalled that the same thing had happened to me several times on the drive to Houston; people in Texas hadn’t acquired the good lane-switching manners one can usually count on in California. Many Texans seemed to feel they had a perfect right to drive in the fast lane even if they were only going a sedate seventy-five.

Like T.R., I was irritated when I had to check my speed because of a slow driver in the fast lane, but I suppressed my irritation and she didn’t.

Seeing that the pickup wasn’t going to budge, she whipped around it on the right. As we shot past it she stuck her head out the window and yelled at two startled cowboys.

“Get out of the way, you stupid fuckheads!” she yelled. She cut back sharply in front of the pickup and then gunned the Cadillac down the road at top speed, as if to illustrate how fast they ought to be moving if they insisted on using that lane.

The way she yelled at the cowboys amused me. “For a disciple of Jesus, you certainly do use strong language,” I said.

T.R. just grinned. “Jesus don’t care if I call a stupid fuckhead a stupid fuckhead,” she said confidently.

“How do you know, have you talked to him lately?” Muddy inquired, passing T.R. the joint they were smoking.

“I doubt he’d have no sympathy for people too dumb to know which lane to drive in,” T.R. said.

“Oops, Jesse just got a little carsick,” Elena said.

“She always does, just point her toward the floor,” T.R. said.

Bo began to scream at his little sister. “Yuk!” he screamed. “Yuk, yuk!”

“Hand him up to Daddy,” T.R. said. “It’s time he got to know his grandpa better.”

“I’m not sure that’s a great idea,” I said. “I’m not feeling too hot myself.”

Nevertheless several eager hands immediately grabbed Bo and thrust him over the seat headfirst—his popularity with the backseaters was understandably slight. I took him and sat him on my lap. I tried smiling at him and got a sullen look in return.

“You’re a writer,” T.R. said. “Tell him a story. Stories are about the only thing that’ll keep Bo quiet for long.”

I was remembering my solitude so carefully cultivated over the years. Once I’d probably felt that I was developing my solitude for the sake of my novel, or for some kind of art work, but in recent years I had come to realize that that wasn’t really true. I had become solitary because I liked it and needed it. Aloneness, I had come to believe, did not need an art work to justify it; aloneness was self-justifying, valuable for its own sake.

But the fact was, my solitude was now gone. I was in a car with eight other human beings. I had traded solitude for a daughter who clearly had no wish to be alone. Perhaps she had never really been alone; with two children it was unlikely she would be for a while. I wasn’t sad about my choice—T.R. was there, there at last, and it would have taken a colder man than myself not to yield up solitude in response to her energy, her aliveness, her guts. I was ready to yield everything instantly, only something deep within me did preserve a warm nostalgia for my old, deep, civilized solitude.

At the mention of a story, Bo became a little less sullen. He was looking at me neutrally, and he wasn’t screaming. For an instant, he seemed almost likable.

“You better start a story,” Elena warned. “He don’t like it if there’s no story.”

At that point Jesse, smelling slightly of her car sickness,
arrived in the front seat with the help of the same willing hands. She smiled lopsidedly and arranged herself on my other knee.

“All right, Grandpa,” T.R. said. “The pressure’s on. I sure hope you know a story.”

What I knew, first and foremost, was that the black truck of the headache was somewhere ahead, speeding toward me. It wasn’t there yet, but the collision was coming—if I was going to win my waiting grandchildren with a story I would have to be quick.

Once, many years ago in Paris, I had made up a story for Romy Schneider’s little girl, whose baby-sitter had had a car wreck. The child had been dropped with me at the Plaza Athénée for thirty minutes while Romy did an interview. When I asked the child what sort of stories she liked best she said that she particularly enjoyed stories about vegetables that talked. I was in an inventive mood that afternoon and immediately reeled off a story about a carrot and a radish. It was a great success.

Romy’s little girl had been about four at the time; neither Bo nor Jesse was yet four. Would either of them know what a radish was, or even a carrot?

“Have either of you ever met a radish?” I asked tentatively. Four unswerving eyes looked at me critically—if either child had ever made the acquaintance of a radish, they weren’t saying.

In fact, the whole crowd in the car, so raucous only a moment ago, had fallen silent. Everyone, it seemed, was waiting for my story.

“This story takes place in the land of peas,” I began, trying to remember how I’d gotten the story off the ground the first time I told it.

“Once in the corner of a big pea patch there lived a carrot named Jimmy. Jimmy’s best friend was a radish named François”—that part, as I remembered, had caused Romy’s little girl to crack up. It made no visible impression on Bo and Jesse. Of course, they weren’t French.

“One day Jimmy and François went for a walk, and François,
who was rather fat, stumbled over a pea vine and went tumbling down a hill into the road, just as a big truck from the vegetable market came rushing along.”

Without warning Bo suddenly shifted his attention from my story and punched his little sister in the mouth, knocking her into the floorboards at Granny Lin’s feet. Jesse, who had seemed to like my story, or at least the sound of my voice, began to wail. Granny Lin picked her up and shielded her from her brother, who seemed fully prepared to punch her again.

“Hulk!” Bo yelled, directing the yell at me.

“Bo just likes stories about monsters, only he calls them hulks,” T.R. said. “He ain’t too interested in carrots and peas that roll downhill. Know any stories about monsters?”

“No, but I will once I get to know Bo better,” I said. “He has many of the attributes of a monster himself.”

T.R.’s face fell. I knew immediately that I had said something very wrong—but then Bo had punched Jesse when she had merely been sitting there quietly, listening to my story. I felt she would have enjoyed the story even if she wasn’t fully aware of what a radish was.

“I know, nobody likes Bo,” T.R. said, sniffing back tears. “Everybody thinks he’s horrible. I was hoping at least his grandpa would like him, but I guess that’s too much to ask.”

“I’m sure I will like him in time,” I said, but without conviction.

“No, nobody really likes Bo ’cept me and Elena,” T.R. said. “Muddy hates him and now you hate him too.”

“I don’t
hate
him,” I protested. “I just don’t enjoy his behavior.”

T.R. gave me her flat look. “He’s sitting right in your fuckin’ lap,” she said. “You’re his grandpa. Spank the shit out of him—he deserves it. Why should I have to do all the dirty work?”

To the surprise of everyone in the car, I
did
spank him. It was not what T.R. said that enabled me to do it—it was the fact that the child was looking at me with such cold insolence. Before he could move, I turned him on his stomach and gave him three
quick splats with my open hand. They weren’t hard but in the silent car they seemed louder than I expected.

Bo began to scream and wiggle. He managed to get loose and flung himself over the seat into Elena’s arms, where he sobbed as if he had been tortured for hours.

T.R. looked surprised. The flat look left her face.

“I’m glad you done that,” she said. “I didn’t really think you had it in you. Maybe I finally found somebody who’ll help me try and turn Bo into a nice person.

“I want him to be a nice person someday,” she said in an uncertain voice. “I don’t want him to just be a criminal like his daddy.”

“He won’t be,” I said, exhilarated by my own performance. “We’ll soon shape him up.”

“You ain’t gonna change that kid,” Muddy said bluntly. “If you ask me, our best bet would just be to leave him beside the road.”

“Yeah, but nobody did ask you, dickhead!” T.R. said hotly. “You’re the one who’ll be left beside the road if you don’t shut up. Better yet, I might turn this sucker around and take you back to jail.”

Muddy shut up, I shut up, Bo sobbed. Jesse regained her good spirits and crawled back into my lap. T.R.’s mood was hard to judge—dangerous might have been the right word for it.

“I hate the way people talk about Bo,” she said. “He’s just a little boy. He ain’t even three, and I been doing the best I could with him. But every single person except Elena talks hateful about him.”

Nobody denied it. T.R. sighed heavily; she had not slowed down. We were passing trucks and cars as if they weren’t moving.

“Don’t worry about it, sweetie,” I said. “Things are going to get better now.”

But before they were better, they were going to be worse, I knew. We were almost to Corsicana, and, right on schedule, the great black truck of the migraine came roaring out of the north.

This migraine might have been Peterbilt, such was its power. My vision began to waver; the road ahead seemed a jerky mirage. Needlelike pains shot up my neck into the back of my skull, while every few seconds there would be an intense throb just above my eyes, as if someone were striking me there with a small cobbler’s hammer.

I swallowed three more pills, seeking any magic that might deflect the headache before it attained its full force.

T.R. saw me swallow the pills. Even driving ninety, she didn’t miss much. She favored me with two or three searching glances as she blazed up the road.

Jesse, not realizing the pain I was in, decided it was a good time to flirt. She settled herself carefully astride one of my legs and smiled at me even more lopsidedly than before—one result of Bo’s punch was a puffy lower lip.

Even with the black truck grinding its gears in my head I couldn’t entirely resist Jesse. She hid her eyes behind my hands, inviting me to play the game she had played with her father. Carefully I pried a couple of her fingers loose—I had to be especially careful because my hands were trembling, and I certainly didn’t want to mar the promising relationship that was developing with my granddaughter by poking her in the eye.

“What’s wrong with you?” T.R. asked. “You’re white as a sheet and you look real shaky. I hope you haven’t got some old disease you could give my babies.”

“No, I just have a headache,” I said. “I have migraines—fairly intense ones. If it gets much worse we may have to stop for a while until I get over it. We’ve still got a way to go before we get home and I’m not sure I can make it.”

T.R. looked fretful.

“It must be like PMS,” she said. “Dew gets real bad PMS. Sometimes when she’s trying to work with PMS she can’t tell a hot dog from a cheeseburger, she’s that out of it.”

“I can’t tell nothin’ from nothin’,” Dew agreed. “I feel like a stupid old tick, so full of blood I just need to be squashed.”

“We’ll all need to be squashed if we have to sit around in a car with these kids, waiting for Daddy to get over a headache,” T.R. said.

I was wiggling a finger at Jesse—it was the most flirtatious behavior I was capable of in my throbbing state. To my surprise she studied my finger for a moment, then grabbed it and yanked it up and down, smiling.