Some Can Whistle (36 page)

Several times I’d been on the point of asking T.R. what attracted her to a man who would threaten her life, but at the last second I had always pulled back and left the question unasked. Attraction didn’t have to mean, it only had to be. Why was I attracted to women so high-strung and brilliant that if you looked at them twice it would usually prompt a fit? Was it the brilliance that attracted me, or was it the fits, or was it the combination? Who knew? And if I could not answer such a question for myself, there was no point in asking T.R. to try to explain what she had seen in Earl Dee.

“De
gustibus,”
I said to Godwin as we raced toward Wichita Falls.

“I hate it when you resort to classical tags,” Godwin said.

The van was ready as promised; Godwin insisted on taking the wheel at once, so he drove it and I followed him home in the Cadillac.

We arrived back at Los Dolores to find that panic had somewhat abated, sluiced away by several pitchers of margaritas. The whole gang was sitting around the kitchen table, armed to the teeth, and arguing over the road atlas. T.R. and Muddy were locked into a quiet but deadly debate over our immediate destination. T.R. wanted to go to Disneyland but Muddy had his heart set on Lake Louise.

“I seen it in a travelogue they showed us in jail,” he said. “It’s supposed to be the prettiest spot in the entire world. Buddy and Bo could sure get lots of fishing done.”

“Baloney, let ’em fish in a ditch,” T.R. said. “I want to go to Disneyland and then Hollywood. Maybe I’ll be a movie star. Earl Dee wouldn’t dare kill me if I was a movie star.”

“But Lake Louise is a better hideout, just till they get him back in Huntsville,” Muddy argued. “It wouldn’t never dawn on him that we went to Lake Louise.”

“Bull,” T.R. said. “Nobody but Earl Dee knows what might dawn on Earl Dee. A man that would empty his gun into a washing machine don’t think like other people.”

“I’ve heard Colorado’s nice,” Gladys offered.

“We could easily lose ourselves in the Yucatan,” Godwin said.

“I’ve got an aunt in Saint Louis,” Buddy said. “She might not mind puttin’ us up for a while.”

“Please, I can’t stomach the Midwest,” Godwin said. “So few nice asses there.”

T.R. had been painting her fingernails while the debate raged. At some point she stopped in order to concentrate on her argument with Muddy, leaving the bottle of fingernail polish on the edge of the table. Jesse quietly appropriated the bottle and sat on the floor by the refrigerator, trying with poor
success to paint her own fingernails. Finding the process tedious she had quietly dumped the remainder of the bottle on the floor and was spreading it around with her hands. T.R. and I noticed this at the same moment, and T.R. shrieked.

“Oh, my God, Jesse, what have you done now?” T.R. said.

Startled, Jesse held up her red hands. Realizing she had been caught in what might be considered a misdemeanor, she decided to try to charm her way out of trouble with her new word and a brilliant smile.

“Swim?” she said, hopefully.

“Oh, well, this means a trip to the store,” T.R. said, not really angry with Jesse. “I sure ain’t gonna show up in Hollywood with half my nails done and the other half not. Let’s write up a list of things we need on the trip, and me and Muddy will go buy them.”

“Go buy them yourself, I never agreed to go to Hollywood,” Muddy said. “You’re just a bully, T.R.”

“In every little family somebody’s got to be the boss, and in this little family it’s me,” T.R. informed him. She hugged his neck to show there were no hard feelings, but Muddy
had
hard feelings and went into one of his famous sulks. The rest of us quickly composed a list of dozens of items we might find useful on a trip to California.

“I bet we throw half of this stuff out, but that’s okay, we’ll buy it anyway,” T.R. said. She had acquired a cowboy hat at some point and set it jauntily on her head as she got ready for the shopping trip. Then she grabbed me and insisted that we dance a few steps to her own rendition of “The Tennessee Waltz.”

“When we get out there to L.A., we’re gonna work on your dancing, Daddy,” she said, giving me a little punch in the stomach. “You need to dance off some of that fat.”

“Why don’t you go shopping in the Cadillac while we load the van?” I suggested. “That way we’ll get off quicker.”

“These feet were made for dancin’, Muddy,” T.R. said, doing a suggestive dance around the kitchen in an effort to tempt him out of his sulk. “If you’re not careful they’re gonna dance right over you.”

“Couldn’t we just stop by Lake Louise on the way to California?” Muddy said—he was holding firm in his sulk.

“Forget it,” T.R. said, but she came closer—close enough to give him a juicy kiss.

“You don’t never let nobody win,” Muddy said, letting her pull him briefly into the dance.

“I got something else that’s made for something else,” T.R. said. “You don’t wanta see Lake Louise bad enough to risk losing my something else, would you?”

“You wouldn’t let me even if I wanted to,” Muddy said, disengaging himself. “I’m gonna take a nap before we start on this stupid trip if we’re really gonna go to L.A.”

“Come on, L.J., you gotta help me buy things, this list has got a million things on it,” T.R. said, snapping her fingers at me. The finger snap meant hand over the money, which I did, several hundred. At the last minute Buddy and Bo decided to go along to check out new fishing gear. As they left, Godwin was peering at the list, trying to determine if any essential delicacies had been left out.

I had every intention of getting on with the packing, but the excitements of the day had tired me a little, and before I could start I let myself be drawn into a checker game with Jesse, while Gladys busied herself getting fingernail polish off the floor. Jesse was in high spirits; she had invented a new checker strategy that pleased her even more than throwing my checkers on the floor. Every time I threatened to jump one of her men she simply put her finger on my checker and held it pinned to the board. I pretended that her finger was the finger of Superwoman; no effort of mine, strain though I might, could possibly move a checker once her finger was on it.

This tactic amused Jesse so that she soon became hysterical with laughter. Every time I started to jump her she popped a small finger on my checker and dissolved into helpless paroxysms of laughter.

“That little girl, I love to hear her laugh,” Gladys said. She herself was exhibiting excellent spirits—post-coital euphoria, or so I assumed.

While Jesse and I were playing, Jesse subject to ever more prolonged fits of helpless giggling, the phone on the kitchen table rang and I picked it up.

“Mr. Deck, come quick, come quick,” an unfamiliar young voice said. Jesse had just put her finger on a checker; impatient with the interruption of the game, she tried to pull my free hand toward the checker-board.

“Come where, who are you?” I asked. Fear jammed into me like an arrow, almost closing my throat.

“I’m Jim at the filling station—come quick, Mr. Deck, he’s killed them all!” the boy said. “He just drove up to the unleaded and pulled that gun and killed them all.”

Still obeying Jesse, I concentrated enough to try and lift my checker, provoking another helpless gush of childish laughter. But Gladys, by the sink, looked at my face and paled. She had to grab the sink for support.

“Mr. Deck, come quick,” the boy said again.

“Yes, I will,” I said, hanging up.

“What?” Gladys said. “What?”

“The kid at the filling station in Thalia says he’s killed them all,” I said. My thin voice seemed to come from another person.

“Oh, no, Buddy was with them!” Gladys said, her face a knot of agony. “Buddy was with ’em! Here we just got in love and he was my last chance. Now I won’t never have no other chance again as long as I live. Oh, no!”

Jesse, shocked and puzzled by the sudden change-ability of adults, stopped giggling and put her small fist in her mouth.

It was only about seven minutes into Thalia. Muddy and I could see the crowd gathered at the filling station long before we got there. Hay trucks and cattle trucks and trucks with oil rigs on them were parked along the road almost to the city limits sign. With the exception of the local deputy, who looked pale and horrified at the responsibility that had been suddenly thrust upon him, the crowd around the bodies consisted mostly of
truckers, cowboys, roughnecks, a few storekeepers, a stunned housewife or two.

The only person in the crowd who seemed to be acting with any presence of mind was Duane Moore, a local oilman I knew only slightly. Apart from Jim, the terrified gas station attendant, Duane had apparently been first on the scene, and what little he could do—call ambulances, for example—he had done.

As soon as we stepped out of the van Duane came over and tried to prepare us for what we would have to see. He told us that T.R. and Godwin were still alive, but his look was not reassuring.

“I’m not a doctor, but it looks pretty bad, Mr. Deck,” he said. “Your English friend’s shot to pieces and your daughter’s been shot in the head.”

“I should have come, I should have come,” Muddy said; he could scarcely speak and was already descending into the deep pit of self-accusing remorse where he would dwell for years.

T.R. lay in the front seat of the Cadillac; she had been behind the wheel—Earl Dee had shot her in the head at point-blank range. Her eyes were closed and to me she looked much smaller and younger than she had looked only twenty minutes earlier. I couldn’t see her wound, though there was blood on her forehead and blood on the seat. I wanted to sob but the arrow held my throat closed. Despite her shallow breathing, T.R. seemed gone: a dead bird, its flight over, small and limp on the ground.

Buddy lay between the gas pumps, quite dead; Godwin was stretched on the oily cement behind the car—though shot three times, he had managed to get Buddy’s pistol and had fired several shots at Earl Dee before collapsing. He was fully conscious.

“I wish I’d killed that piece of pigshit,” he said weakly, when I knelt beside him. “I did fire rather rapidly, perhaps I wounded him at least.”

“Godwin, don’t talk,” I said. “The ambulance is coming.”

“But I’m dying,” Godwin said, recovering a bit of his strength. “I want to talk. Why should the dying be denied their last chance to speak? It’s just a fucking literary convention. You
find a dying man in a novel and the first thing the bloody author does is have someone tell him not to talk. What kind of behavior is that?

“I guess I shan’t be buried beside the weedy Cam,” he added wearily, as an afterthought.

“Godwin, talk, I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize what I was saying. It’s just that if you shut up and save your strength you might not die.”

“Where’s Bo?” Muddy asked, remembering the child. “Bo was with them. Where’s Bo?”

No one in the crowd had any idea, but he was not in the car and he was not in the crowd. The only logical inference was that Earl Dee had taken Bo with him, though no one could recall seeing this happen.

I left Godwin and went to kneel by the open car door, as close as I could get to T.R. She was no different. I watched her face, hoping, hoping, hoping that she would open her eyes and look at me. Muddy crawled into the back seat, reached over, and took her limp hand. I’m sure he was hoping the same thing.

“She might come to,” he said. “She might come to.”

Then we heard the distant whirr of a helicopter.

“I called for the ambulance chopper,” Duane said. “I figured, since it’s this serious, you’d want to take them to Dallas.”

“Thank you,” I said.

Someone covered Buddy up. I thought of poor Gladys, terrified and desperate, at home with Jesse. The body of her last chance was lying dead between the leaded and the unleaded.

The helicopter eased down in the street, blowing dust over us all. Muddy and I tried to shield T.R. Then we had to stand aside while the young men of the ambulance crew expertly eased her out of the car and strapped her onto a stretcher. It took some time. The crowd around us had grown, but it was a silent crowd. The only ones who spoke were the ambulance men and Godwin, who did what he could to make theater out of this blood-soaked occasion. He chatted urbanely with the ambulance man, with me, with Duane Moore, in the best Gunga Din/Four Feathers tradition, as they got him onto a
stretcher and lifted him into the helicopter. I resisted several impulses to tell him to shut up, though indeed I had never admired him more.

When the two were in the ambulance helicopter Muddy and I prepared to climb in with them but one of the young men stopped us.

“I’m sorry, we just have room for one,” he informed us politely.

Muddy and I were startled. I didn’t know what to say, but Muddy did.

“You go, you’re her daddy,” he said, with a look of desperate sadness on his thin face. “I got Jesse to take care of, anyway.”

I got in, but I was not really convinced I was the one who should go. T.R. and Muddy were close; he was good to her. Perhaps he would be better than me at helping her rally, persuading her to live. I felt it was mostly a matter of persuasion, too. Once she opened her eyes, one of us would have to start persuading her. Better me, or better Muddy? I didn’t know, and the sight of Muddy, standing in the dusty street, looking hopelessly at the helicopter that was about to carry his true love away, was almost too much to bear. I felt I should jump out and let him go, but I delayed my decision too long, and the young man shut the door and the helicopter rose. I sat numbly, looking at the upturned faces below us. Soon they blurred like images in a dream; then I couldn’t see them at all.

Both of the young attendants were busy doing things to Godwin and T.R. They were giving them transfusions, attaching monitors—I don’t know. I felt sick, partly from shock and partly from the conviction that I had erred in getting into the helicopter. Muddy was almost her husband; Muddy would probably have been more help; Muddy had a better right.

I sat blank for a moment or two, blank and sick; it was with difficulty that I could get Muddy’s face out of my mind and bring my attention back to T.R.