“Swim, swim,” Jesse said.
“What a magnificent girl,” Godwin said. “My Aphrodite. I intend to propose soon.”
“Propose what?” I inquired. “You better be careful what you propose to my daughter.”
“Marriage, of course,” Godwin said. “Sometimes sudden proposals work. In any case, I have nothing to lose.”
I had bought Jesse a rubber duck. While I was trying to figure out if Godwin was serious, a little boy came over and tried to take Jesse’s duck away from her. Jesse started to run away but instead went plop in the water. Before I could intervene, the little boy jumped on top of her and grabbed the duck. Jesse squealed her terrible squeal; the little boy’s mother took the duck away from him and gave it back to Jesse, but the damage was done: Jesse’s bandage was very wet.
“Now we’re in for it,” Godwin said. “I may have to delay my proposal for a month or two because of your incompetence as a grandparent.”
I was unnerved myself at the thought of what T.R. was going to say, but she was neither surprised nor critical.
“You can’t really expect a little girl to go swimming and not get her bandage wet,” she said. “Hand over some of those hundred-dollar bills you’re so handy with and we’ll just overlook this. Muddy and I want to go buy everything in sight.”
Everything in sight turned out to be a car trunkful of heterogenous rubber pool animals for our own pool. The pièce de résistance was a hippo, but there were also several fish, a sea snake, and a large, inflatable floating mattress.
“What do you think we’re gonna do on that inflatable mattress as soon as we get home, Muddy?” T.R. asked, as we were bearing down on Jacksboro at around ninety-five miles per hour. She was at the wheel, wearing one of the several new pairs of sunglasses she had bought. None of us had bothered to dress; the combination of packed bodies and wet bathing suits made the car smell like the inside of a washing machine.
“I couldn’t guess in ten thousand years,” Muddy said.
“Well, we are, anyway, even if you can’t guess,” T.R. said. “I can barely wait to try out that mattress.”
“Don’t the rest of you dare look, though,” she said, sweeping the car with a sunglassed gaze.
“Aw, T.R.,” Muddy said, abashed.
“We should have bought us a couple of them big inner tubes, Gladys,” Buddy said. “It’s good relaxation, floating around in inner tubes.” He gave her a coltish look.
“They’d be too big for the pool,” Gladys said. “We’d have to both get in one. One might fit in that pool.”
Then, at the thought of what she’d just implied—the two of them sharing an inner tube—Gladys looked twice as embarrassed as Muddy and began to talk insane baby talk to Jesse, who wasn’t impressed.
Neither was Godwin impressed. “I wish we’d brought more drugs,” he said.
12
That night Muddy tried to watch the rest of Berlin Alexander platz. T.R. and I were watching it with him. But the two of them had spent much of the late afternoon in strictly enforced privacy on the new pool mattress, and whatever they did had left Muddy so exhausted that even his new idol, Fassbinder, couldn’t keep him awake. As soon as it became clear that he was very soundly asleep T.R. turned off the TV.
“I guess I tuckered him out,” T.R. said, stroking his hair. “Muddy’s a pretty sweet little guy when all is said and done, ’specially done.”
“I’m still worried about that trouble you were in,” I said. She seemed contented, and I had been waiting for just such a moment of content to press my question. Even so, I pressed it casually, and as gently as possible.
“What trouble?” she asked.
“The trouble you said you got in once or twice.”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “I got caught with one hundred and ten pounds of marijuana in the trunk of my car. I was hauling it for Big Pa.”
“Your grandfather was a dope dealer?” I said, incredulous. “I thought he was some kind of minister before he became a car dealer.”
“He’d stop and preach at the drop of a hat, all right,” T.R. said. “It just got harder and harder to find churches that would let him preach. The minute they let him in the door he’d start gettin’ people pregnant.”
“I still never dreamed he was a dope dealer, though,” I said.
T.R. gave me a light dig with her elbow, a gentle comment on my credulity.
“You shouldn’t believe everything Mexican detectives tell you,” she said. “Big Pa wasn’t always a dope dealer, though. He only started selling dope after he got too old to make a good living stealing cars. Big Pa had just about a genius for stealing cars—least he did at one time. I bet half the cars that ever got stolen in Dallas he resold. That’s how I met Earl Dee, or did I tell you that?”
“You haven’t talked that much about Mr. Dee,” I said.
“That’s because of Muddy,” T.R. whispered. “Muddy’s about as jealous as you can get and he don’t welcome no mention of E.D. Sound asleep as Muddy is, I still feel like I better whisper when I say that name.”
“Did E.D. steal cars too?” I asked.
“Nope, E.D. wouldn’t have been caught dead actually stealing a car,” T.R. said. “Too tame for him. Earl Dee’s happiest when he’s pointin’ guns at people. But he did drive for Big Pa for a while. If Big Pa had stolen a Cadillac he needed driven to Houston or San Antonio, sometimes Earl Dee could be bribed to do the job.”
“Bribed with money?”
“Mostly Big Pa bribed him with dope,” she said, watching Muddy closely to see if he showed any signs of waking. “But I was getting grown up by that time, and pretty soon Big Pa started bribing him with me.”
Though I tried to keep my reactions neutral I’m sure I looked a little startled at this revelation.
“Shoot, I was happy to be the bribe,” T.R. said, her eyes alight. Then Muddy twitched a few times and rolled on his side; T.R. watched him nervously. She leaned over and put her mouth close to my ear—her breath smelled like chewing gum.
“Let’s go outside,” she said. “I get nervous as a cat talking about this around Muddy.”
We stopped in the kitchen and mixed a pitcher of margaritas. Gladys and Buddy were watching TV and chatting. They stopped chatting as T.R. and I came through with our pitchers, but I heard them resume as we went out the door.
There was a full, white moon. I sipped a margarita, but T.R. drank most of the pitcher. She drank margaritas as if she were drinking Dr. Pepper, and then chewed the pulp of the limes we had squeezed into the tequila.
“How old were you when you got caught?” I asked.
“Oh, sixteen, the first time,” T.R. said casually. “I wasn’t hauling marijuana that time—that time it was just pills.”
“Illegal pills?”
“Methamphetamines, ’bout four thousand of them,” she said, cleaning out a lime. “All them truck drivers and roughnecks in East Texas got to have their pills or they’d fall asleep on the job and have wrecks and stuff. Big Ma worked in a pharmacy then. Big Pa just started dealing pills as a little sideline. Big Ma stole ’em by the thousands and Big Pa bribed his drivers with them. Earl Dee was a big pillhead or we might never have met.”
She paused and looked at me thoughtfully.
“You sure you really wanta know all this stuff?” she asked. “Maybe you oughtn’t even to bother about knowing it. It’s over now. If it’s gonna upset you to know your little girl was a criminal, I just won’t tell you.”
“No, please tell me,” I said. “Too much of your life’s a blank to me. I think you’re wonderful, no matter what you did. Please go on and fill in the blank.”
T.R. laughed. “It wasn’t no blank from my end,” she said. “They let me off for the pills, I was just a juvenile and didn’t have no record. I got a year suspended. It was really Earl Dee who was selling them pills, but I was so in love with him then I’d have gone to jail for life if he’d asked me to.”
“Understandable,” I said, b
ut the word was just a form of punctuation. I couldn’t remember having been in love so much that I would contemplate going to jail for life.
“Oh, yeah, we was hot as little pistols, me and Earl Dee back then,” T.R. said. “Every single minute I wasn’t with him I was thinking about him. To me it was ten times more exciting to run around being a criminal with Earl Dee than to date one of them rich boys that was always sniffing around me. Shoot, I’d get bored looking at a rich boy. But I sure didn’t get bored with Earl Dee. All I could think about was helping him live his life of crime any way I could. He was supposed to haul that hundred and ten pounds of marijuana, but we’d been in our little trailer house screwing for three or four days, and he decided he’d rather stay home and watch TV. I barely got to the city limits before about fifty cops stopped me. Earl Dee found out it was happening and caught a ride to El Paso with a trucker. That was the last I seen of him till I got out of jail.”
“He doesn’t sound too gallant,” I said.
T.R. shrugged. “Earl Dee wouldn’t know what the word meant,” she said. “I got caught and he didn’t—that’s the way criminals are.”
“What happened with the law that time?” I asked.
“It wasn’t no fun, that time,” T.R. admitted. “I was looking at five to ten, because I wouldn’t cooperate. All I could think about was how horny I’d get in five years if I didn’t get no sack time with Earl Dee. But Big Pa bribed the assistant D.A. and I only got three years. I just served eight months, but it was still a good long time to do without.”
T.R. paused, evidently a little depressed by her memories. “By the time I got out, Earl Dee had done so much cocaine he couldn’t get it up anyway,” she said. “Talk about disappointment. It was round about then that I met Muddy—we had the same probation officer.”
“That sounds like a lucky encounter,” I said. “I like Muddy.”
T.R. didn’t seem too impressed with her luck just at that moment.
“God, it’s boring out here in the country,” she said. “I’d go commit a crime right now if it wasn’t so far to any place where you could commit crimes. Looks like you’d go crazy sitting around out here with L.J. and Gladys. There’s nothing to do out here but fuck, and you don’t even have a girlfriend.
“At least you don’t have one very handy that I can see,” she said, suddenly diffident. She was fearful, I think, that she might have hurt my feelings.
“Nope, I don’t have one handy,” I said.
I felt she was watching me closely, and the thought made me a little nervous. She was my daughter—I wanted to be open with her, but at the same time I was frightened that she might ask me about my love life, or lack of it.
“Speak up, Daddy,” T.R. said. “I told you about my criminal activities. It wouldn’t hurt you to tell me about your girlfriends. I see their pictures on the wall, and I hear you talking to them on the phone, but they sure don’t seem to hang around much.”
“They’re like you,” I said. “City girls. They’d be bored to death around here.”
“Well,” T.R. said, a little restlessly, “you ain’t nailed down, you know. If they won’t come to you, you might just have to go to them once in a while.”
“I do go see them,” I said.
“I thought you said you hadn’t even started your car for six months before you came to get me,” she reminded me. “If you haven’t started your car in six months, you must not be seeing your girlfriends too often.”
“No, I haven’t,” I admitted cautiously.
T.R. scooted over beside me and put her arms around me. “I’m getting blue just from thinking what I’m thinking,” she said.
“What are you thinking?”
“That you don’t really have a girlfriend,” she said.
“You’re a smart girl,” I said.
“How come you don’t?”
“Beats me,” I said.
“It’s because you ain’t tryin’,” she said. “Of course it wouldn’t hurt if you lost a little weight, but you’re rich and famous—you could get a girlfriend.
“Besides, you’re nice,” she said, hugging me. Then she quietly started crying.
“Don’t cry, sweetie,” I said. “My lack of a girlfriend is not exactly a global tragedy.”
“What ain’t?” she gulped.
“That I don’t have a girlfriend,” I said. “Sometimes men my age just don’t quite get around to having girlfriends.”
“Bull!” T.R. said, jumping up. Her tears quickly turned to rage. “You just sit around on this stupid fuckin’ hill, talkin’ on the phone all day. No wonder nothing ever happens to you. Shoot, taking kids to the dentist beats living like you live. At least you get to hear somebody scream. I feel like I wanta scream right now.”
“Well, you can,” I said, horrified that I’d angered her.
“No, I can’t scream, Jesse gets nightmares when I scream, I have to learn to hold it down,” she said.
“I’ve had quite a few girlfriends in my life,” I assured her. “It’s not that serious that I don’t happen to have one right now.”
“Let’s go to France tomorrow,” she said. “The only hope I see is if I get you moving right now.”
“Honey, I haven’t even sent in the passport applications yet,” I said.
“I went to Mexico twice without no passport,” T.R. said. “I bet France would let us in if we all just showed up in Paris, or wherever their airport is. Jesse and I can charm our way in just about anywhere.”
She sat down beside me again and hugged me even tighter. I could feel her quivering. I held her as tightly as I could; she began to sob again, loud, gulping sobs.
“I knew I should have called you up sooner,” she said. “I knew I ought never to have waited. I should have called you up last year. I let that fuckin’ Muddy Box talk me out of it.”
“Why would Muddy talk you out of it?” I asked, curious.
“Because he’s a dickhead,” T.R. said. “He was so in love he didn’t want to share me with my own daddy. Now I waited too long, and you’re all sad. I don’t know what to do.”
She was clinging to me, trembling, a look of tight pain on her young face. I held her and whispered “It’s okay, it’s okay,” but suddenly I felt like crying myself, from confusion, from T.R.’s half-formed accusation. I started to say, Don’t be sad, I’m not doing anything—but even in my confusion I realized that the fact that I wasn’t doing anything was why she was sad.
“I hate it, hate it, I hate it!” T.R. said. “I finally get my daddy, and now, look. It’s all too late, everything’s always been too late my whole life.”
“No, it’s not too late,” I said. “Why would it be too late? We’ll get the passports in a few days and head for France. I promise you I’ll get a girlfriend right away. Maybe I’ll get five or six.”
T.R. just shook her head and shrugged hopelessly.
“That ain’t gonna happen,” she said. “I’m on probation and Muddy’s a jailbreaker. They’ll look on their fuckin’ computers and come and get us both. They’ll catch us and handcuff us right there in the airport. They catch a lot of people in airports, that’s why I’d rather go someplace we could just drive to.”
The possibility of going someplace we could drive to had occurred to me also. I hadn’t mentioned it because I didn’t want to make T.R. any more discouraged than she already was.
“It doesn’t really have to be France,” I said. “It could be Mexico or Canada. We could all just pile in the car and drive. It could be Colorado. It could be Minnesota. It could be New York or New Orleans.”
“Okay,” she said in the subdued, lifeless tone that a child uses when it gives up.
“Okay, Daddy,” she said in the same tone.
“T.R., don’t sound like that,” I pleaded. I felt horrible—felt I had taken away her guts, or something.
“Don’t sound like that,” I repeated.
“Why can’t I?” she asked. “It’s how you sound. If you’re gon
na sound that way, so am I. Maybe it’s the only way I can stay with you.”
I was beginning to have a sense of déjà vu. Somewhere back along the road of my life I had had a similar, indeed an identical, conversation. Some other disappointed woman had vowed to stay with me by lowering her flame to my level, in effect. It might have been Jeanie—I couldn’t be sure. But the sense of déjà vu was not pleasant; it was a pain in the breast, as if a lump of long-undigested love had risen to lodge once more in my throat. It was all I could do to breathe, and I knew that anything I said would be wrong, yet I also felt that I had to say something. Indeed, I knew even from my half-obscured memory of the analogous conversation from the past that whatever I found to say would be precisely wrong, would turn the woman’s dull sadness into bitter anger or blistering contempt—and maybe that was the point.
“I don’t know why you would even want to stay with me,” I said.
T.R. looked stunned for a second and then whipped her elbow into my side as hard as she could—months later it was determined that the jab cracked a rib.
“Oh, get fucked!” she said, jumping up. “No wonder you don’t have no girlfriend if you don’t have no more feelings than to say a horrible thing like that. All I want to do is love you. Ain’t you even gonna let me?”
“Of course, of course, I didn’t mean to make you feel that way,” I said. Even as I said it, I felt those same words echoing endlessly off the walls of the long tunnel of my past: I didn’t mean to make you feel that way, Jill, I didn’t mean to make you feel that way, Jeanie. I had never meant to make a single woman feel that way; and yet that way was exactly how I had made every one of them feel.
“You better just be careful!” T.R. said, her eyes blazing. “I ain’t got impeccable taste, remember? I won’t stand for just anything. You better start acting more like a daddy real quick or I’ll take my babies and I’ll be outa here—I won’t be waitin’ around for no passport, neither!”
Then, without giving me time to say anything else—if I had, it would have been even more precisely wrong, I have no doubt—she picked up the empty margarita pitcher and went into the house.