“Elena, you take Jesse, Daddy ain’t learned how to hold her yet,” T.R. said. “Dew and Sue Lin will be off in a minute—I’ll go tell Maria and Josefina that they’re the new crew at the Mr. Burger. What I’d like to do is mobilize before that cocksucking Earl Dee wiggles out of the woodwork.”
“I like your command of the vernacular,” I said—and I did. The way T.R. put things had charmed me from the first.
But T.R. was mobilizing; she scarcely gave me a glance.
“Where’s your car?” she said.
8
An hour later we were all mobilized. Dew and Sue Lin had taken off their aprons and cheerfully hitched their fates to T.R.’s star. The Dismuke Street Mr. Burger proved to be a spongelike entity; it absorbed the two Mexican teen-agers and remained a fully functioning cheeseburger outlet. Everyone waved as we drove away.
T.R. had been right to describe her possessions as minimal. She, Sue Lin, Dew, Granny Lin, and the kids had been living in two rooms over a pet store on Telephone Road. Their possessions consisted of a few secondhand toys, an army cot, two mattresses, a few skirts and blouses, and a wok. Granny Lin, a very tiny and very ancient Vietnamese woman, sat on one of the mattresses, squinting at an old issue of the National Enquirer when we trooped in.
“Granny never gives up, she’s tryin’ to learn English,” Sue Lin explained.
“From that?” I said, horrified at the thought of the conclusions the old woman must be drawing about our culture if she was really managing to read the Enquirer.
“Now don’t you be runnin’ down our reading matter,” T.R. said. “I found it in the trash, and it’s better than nothing.”
Packing consisted of T.R. and Dew staring at the closet for a few minutes as they tried to decide if any of their clothes were worth taking.
“I say we junk this shit,” T.R. said. “Daddy can buy us all a lot better clothes than these. Let’s just go.”
“And leave my sequins?” Dew said, grabbing a pair of profusely sequined pants. “If we was to go dancing I’d feel naked without my sequins. Reckon they dance out in the Wild West?” she asked, looking at me.
“Oh, sure,” I assured her. “People up my way dance constantly.”
T.R. was for abandoning the toys, too, but the children screamed and turned red at the mere suggestion that we leave them behind. The wok, the clothes, and a collection of dingy toys took up most of the Cadillac’s trunk space. Jesse retained a stained Cabbage Patch Doll, and Bo kept a small green truck, which he raced up and down the back of my neck as we drove through town.
“Vroom, vroom, vroom!” he yelled—at least it seemed to me he was yelling. No one else seemed to notice.
Granny Lin had been assigned the seat next to me. She still clutched her copy of the Enquirer—the fateful issue whose cover carried a famous picture of Nema Remington and her then beau, Pinky Collins, a diminutive Irish terrorist, embracing in the surf at Malibu. The embrace itself was an echo of the famous Burt Lancaster-Deborah Kerr surf-fuck in From Here to Eternity, except that Pinky Collins was only about one-third the size of Burt Lancaster.
At that, he was probably larger than Granny Lin, who was humming a haunting if almost inaudible tune. The sound she made when she hummed was as faint as memory, in this case Asian memory. It caused me to imagine a misty village in the delta in a peaceful era, with rice paddies and dutiful water buffalo—but while we were stopped at a light Sue Lin informed me that her granny had grown up in Paris and had only returned to Vietnam in the fifties, to run a travel service.
“My goodness,” I said—one more bucolic fantasy shattered.
I parked about a block from the downtown jail. T.R. spit on her finger and created a couple of curls out of Jesse’s wispy hair.
“Muddy likes to think he’s got a little curlyheaded angel,” T.R. said. “That Muddy’s a dreamer.
“You coming?” she asked, looking at me across the humming head of Granny Lin.
“Sure, if you want me to,” I said gamely, though I hated going into jails. I had been in a number of them in the last few years, always to get Godwin released after some embarrassing and marginally criminal escapade.
“I thought we was in this together,” T.R. said, a little belligerently. “I don’t call it together if you’re just gonna sit in the car. Them cops are horrible to me—they think I oughta be sleeping with one of them instead of a little crook like Muddy.”
“I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to come,” I said, popping free of my seat belt.
From the backseat, Dew laughed.
“If you wasn’t supposed to come, you wouldn’t be here,” she said. “From now on, you always supposed to come.”
“That’s right,” T.R. said.
9
I got a little nervous going into the jail. My imagination, not active enough to get my new novel written, was active enough to imagine the life in jails. It was a ridiculously fastidious imagination, with a snobbish selectivity. Where jails were concerned, it skipped over the things you usually read about—gang rapes, knifings, suicide, beatings—and focused on the seemingly trivial matter of dirty hair.
I hate dirty hair. I wash mine constantly, sometimes twice a day. The state most likely to propel me into immediate insanity is a state of tonsorial filth. Clean hair is a bedrock condition for civilization, in my view—a view shared, of course, by shampoo manufacturers and many members of the classes among which I traveled in my years of celebrity.
It is not a view shared by the people who work in jails, much less by the incarcerees, if that’s the word for the people whose fate it is to be locked up. Hair care is not a priority for most of them; obviously it’s absurd of me to wish it were, but I wished it nonetheless. I no sooner enter a jail than I begin to imagine how horrible I would feel if my hair were as dirty as the hair of the people in the waiting room, not to mention the people in the cells.
This happened almost as soon as we entered the Houston jail. The waiting room smelled of mildew and ammonia. The air conditioner was off and the outer doors open, so the mildew may have been Houston’s contribution. Most of the women in the waiting room were black, but there were five or six Hispanics and one or two poor whites. Several children were waiting, most of them clutching toys at least as dingy as those my grandchildren owned. A lot of lank, discouraged, none too clean hair could be seen in the waiting room—the tonsorial equivalent of those pictures of ravaged gums particularly insensitive dentists sometimes put in their waiting rooms.
T.R. charged into the waiting room, Jesse in her arms, but by the time she actually reached the grille where visitors had to make obeisance to the law, her charge had lost a lot of its force.
“I need to see Muddy Box,” she said to an officer who was reading an old issue of Teen World with a semiotician’s concentration.
The officer glanced up resentfully.
“Muddy’s mopping,” he said. “He’s cleaning up the drunk tanks—they’re mostly knee-deep in puke. Muddy’s our best mopper. If he’d quit stealing he could get on as a janitor any time.”
“Hoorah for Muddy. Can I see him?” T.R. asked.
She sat Jesse on the little ledge in front of the grille, hoping that the sight of an angelic curlyheaded child would soften the officer’s heart, but it didn’t. He was more interested in Teen World.
“Fill this out and take a seat,” he said, pushing a form toward her. “Muddy won’t be available for a while.”
“You ask,” T.R. said, turning to me. “Otherwise we’ll have to sit around here for three hours and we’ll all get depressed.”
Her look said okay, we’re in this together, start being a daddy right now.
I’m as timid as most people when confronted with even the most low-level representative of the powers that be, but it was clear that I had better, for once, make an effort to be a little more bold.
“Officer, I’m sorry to trouble you, but we’re in an unseemly hurry today,” I said.
Fortunately, I had my pas
sport with me: I always do. Better yet, I also had a ticket, an open first-class ticket, Dallas-Paris, for those times when Godwin, Gladys, Texas, and America simply became too much. I extracted my passport and my ticket from an inside coat pocket and thrust them through the grille. I also had a meaningless little honorific visa the French government had given me as a return for my once having chaired a jury at the Cannes Film Festival. It had no real diplomatic validity, but it looked impressive, particularly for a jail clerk whose reading skills barely sufficed for Teen World. I gave him the visa while trying to imagine that I was Charles de Gaulle.
“You see, we have an international flight to catch,” I said. “We have to be in France tomorrow. My daughter’s film starts production next week. I assure you we won’t take Mr. Box away from his mopping for more than a few minutes, and we’d be immensely grateful if you could possibly facilitate this visit.”
Not merely the officer but the whole room was stunned. Several other jail clerks, including two matrons who had been picking their noses and killing time behind the grille, came over to take a look. The sound of my voice seemed to send them all into mild shock. From the look on their faces as they examined my passport, it was clear that a passport from a Martian couldn’t have surprised them much more.
The officer who had been so engrossed in Teen World seemed to have been struck dumb by my feeble Gaullism. He fingered my little French honor as gingerly as if it were a letter bomb.
“Uh, what relation are you to Mr. Box, sir?” he asked, after exchanging several glances with his colleagues.
“I’m his putative father-in-law,” I said, gaining confidence. I was beginning to sense that I could win this one-sided contest on vocabulary alone.
“We want to arrange for him to come to France when he’s released,” I went on. “There are some technicalities to discuss—you know the French.
“We’ll be staying in Cap d’Antibes,” I added as a flourish.
I doubt that any of the people inspecting my meaningless documents really did know the French—it was not evident that they even knew one another—but the mere fact that I had offered the documents caused them to abandon all efforts to push T.R. around.
“Go get Muddy,” the skinny officer said to one of the matrons. “He’s got all day to mop them drunk tanks.”
Then, as the matron shuffled off, he put his thumbs in his ears, wiggled his fingers, stuck out his tongue, and made a silly face at Jesse, who was not charmed. She responded by instantly emitting a squeal far more serious than any of her previous efforts in the squealing line. Everyone in the waiting room, visitors and jailers alike, clapped their hands over their ears in shock. Jesse held the squeal for perhaps ten seconds, by which time the unfortunate jail clerk had become the most hated man in the room. If there had suddenly been an uprising in the jail, his own colleagues would probably have strangled him.
“I was just trying to make a funny face,” he said lamely, when Jesse stopped squealing.
“She hates people who stick out their tongues at her,” T.R. said. “Looks like you’d learn—she does that every time we come in here.”
“She looks so cute,” the jail clerk said. “Look at them little spit curls. I was just trying to make friends.”
“I told her it was your fault her daddy ain’t livin’ with us now,” T.R. said. “She’s gettin’ revenge on you for breakin’ up our family. I’ll be glad when we get to France so I won’t never have to come in this crummy jail again.”
“Well, you wouldn’t have to anyway if Muddy would just earn an honest trade, like being a janitor,” the clerk said defensively. “Here he comes now.”
At first glance the young man who came into the room looked like what Gladys and I called Godwin-bait. He was short, slight, and blond. He was pushing one of those mop buckets on wheels that janitors used, and he was no taller than the mop. He sported a wisp of blond mustache—the fact that his jail pajamas were several sizes too large only made him look smaller.
At the sight of him Jesse began to coo. She almost wiggled off the ledge she was seated on in her excitement. Her immediate happiness was infectious; the dulled faces of the people in the waiting room brightened for a moment at the sight of Jesse’s pleasure.
“I thought I heard my little squealer and I did hear my little squealer,” Muddy said, scooping Jesse off the ledge.
She immediately became shy, holding her face in her hands.
Muddy stood on tiptoe and tried to give T.R. a big kiss, but she looked aloof and only offered him a cheek.
“I need to talk to you,” she said, “and I don’t like having to do it in front of a million people.”
After a glance at the clerk, who had lost interest, and at the matrons, who had never had any, she linked her arm in Muddy’s and started for the open door.
“We’re just gonna sit on the steps a minute so we can have a little privacy,” T.R. told the clerk, who was once again absorbed in Teen World.
“Okay, but leave the mop,” he said, without looking up. “There’s people in this town who’d steal a mop, and he’s one of them.”
“This is Daddy,” T.R. said, brusquely, dragging Muddy past us. “If it hadn’t been for him they’d have made us wait all day.”
Muddy offered a small, limp hand. He had the kind of dreamy face that betrayed no energy of any kind.
It was hard to believe that such a slight man had had the strength to burgle a TV set, much less the energy to father a child on my large energetic daughter—but apparently he had. A squib from a famous poem came to mind, the one about fine women eating a crazy salad with their meat. Muddy Box was a human version of one of those limp little salads you get served in country cafés throughout the West and South—a few leaves of tired lettuce, a shred or two of radish, an exhausted tomato.
But then I knew well enough that it was impossible to account for the confusing chemistries that sometimes combine in this life. Boys who looked as harmless as Muddy had more than once beaten Godwin to within an inch of his life and left him penniless in airport parking lots or beside remote roads.
When we stepped out of the jail the warm Gulf sun was beaming down on an empty street. Bo had escaped from the Cadillac and was sitting on its roof. Elena stood by the car, trying to coax him down. Dew, Sue Lin, and Granny Lin were just waiting. Muddy sat on a step with Jesse in his lap and began to try to charm her out of her shyness—her hands still covered her eyes. He would carefully pry loose a finger or two and she would immediately put them back. He and Jesse seemed totally absorbed by this game, but T.R. wasn’t. She was looking up and down the street, practically crackling with tension.
“This street’s totally empty,” she said. “There’s not a soul in sight except us.”
“Well, it’s a jail,” Muddy pointed out. “We don’t get too many tourists passin’ through.”
T.R. snorted at him—sometimes she exhaled disgust and frustration in a kind of violent snort.
“He don’t have no ambition,” she said, looking at me but referring to Muddy.
Muddy looked helpless in the face of what seemed to be her rising fury. He gave a tired little shrug. “I only finished sixth grade,” he said.
“Oh, bull, you went to vocational school after that!” T.R. said. “You told me you did, or was that just another of your lies?”
“Well, I went a few days,” Muddy said. “I was gonna learn diesel mechanics and try to get on at the truck stop, but shoot, that stuff’s hard. I can usually fix a regular engine but I ain’t worth a shit with a diesel.”
He had abandoned his efforts to pry Jesse’s fingers off her eyes, whereupon she dropped her hands and flashed him a brilliant smile.
“Aw,” Muddy said, overcome.
“If you had any ambition you’d escape right now,” T.R. said. “Nobody would care. I doubt you’d even be missed for a week or two.”
“That ain’t so,” Muddy said. “I’d be missed tomorrow when they need somebody to mop the drunk tanks.”
/>
“So is that all you want to do with your life, live in jail and mop drunk tanks?” T.R. asked.
“No, but it’s better than a lot of things,” Muddy replied, trying to be reasonable.
“Oh, come on,” T.R. said, grabbing his arm. “Come on, let’s just go. We could be halfway to France while we’re standing here arguing.”
Muddy looked horrified. “But I’m in jail, you swore out the complaint yourself,” he said. “You had me arrested.”
“I was pissed off,” T.R. said. “You oughtn’t to have sold the TV. At least the kids could watch cartoons on Saturday morning, it’s the one time I get to sleep late. Okay, that’s water under the bridge, let’s go. I’ll just have Daddy’s lawyer write them a letter and say I dropped the charges.”
“Yeah, but that ain’t the whole problem,” Muddy said. “They pulled up that time when I walked off the dope farm. I got six months to do on that one before they even get to this one.”
“Come on, I wanta go while there’s nobody in sight,” she said, half-dragging him down the steps of the jailhouse. “Daddy’s lawyer can get it all fixed once we’re in France.”
It was clear that Muddy’s heart was not in escaping, but his resistance was halfhearted and it took more than half a heart to apply an effective brake to T.R.
I was as appalled at T.R. as he was, probably because in the short time that we’d been together T.R. had developed the habit of taking everything I said at face value. She had not grasped the fact that I was a novelist, at least to the degree that I constantly improved on reality by inventing little scenarios that, if enacted, would make life better. The unfortunate truth, though, was that few of them were enacted. It seemed to me that our sudden trip to France might fall into that capacious category.
Muddy still held Jesse, who was now flirting madly with her father, all shyness gone. T.R. soon had us on the sidewalk by the Cadillac.
“Get off that roof and into that car, we’re leaving!” she said, snapping her fingers at Bo. Her finger snap was so emphatic that, after a quick glance to determine that she meant it, he obeyed, leaping off the car into Elena’s arms.