Then, to my amazement, almost to my dismay, Muddy began to recover. He edged out of his grief, leaving me more alone in mine than ever. Even on his worst days he was always infinitely good, infinitely patient with Bo and Jesse. He spent hours playing games with them; he took them camping, took them to Six Flags. When he began to recover he also began to read. The ten thousand books in my library, only so much furniture to him until then, began to interest him. I would wander out late at night to find him reading Engels, Karen Blixen, some nineteenth-century travel writer.
One day I asked Muddy if he would like to go to college and he said yes. That fall he started classes in Wichita Falls, finishing just as Jesse was ready for first grade. Cameras and mikes and all sorts of communications technology fascinated him. He decided he might like to go to graduate school in communications. We had just moved back to L.A. Muddy was dubious about the move at first, but he came with us and entered UCLA in the fall. He proved a superior student, popular with everyone. At the end of his second year, a Houston television station offered him a job as a weatherman. He did well as a weatherman, but greater things awaited him. One day the regular traffic reporter called in sick; traffic reporting is a vital position in Houston, where freeway gridlock is a constant threat. Muddy climbed into a helicopter and rose almost immediately into legend. Morning and afternoon he soared high over the teeming Houston freeways, looking for pockets of trouble. It soon became clear that Muddy Box had a genius for anticipating traffic problems and analyzing possible solutions. In the two years that he did traffic he saved millions of Texans many more millions of man-hours by redirecting them around problems that had only barely begun to develop. His morning and evening traffic reports drew 80 percent of the listening audience, an unheard-of rating, and one that quickly brought him offers from around the country. He could have gone anywhere—Manhattan, Chicago, L.A.—but Muddy remained loyal to Houston.
Perhaps it was not just Houston he was loyal to—perhaps it was also T.R. Though he became a successful man and appeared to have recovered, in his heart perhaps he hadn’t. He took an apartment in the Lawndale area, not far from where he and T.R. had lived. When Jesse went there to visit—and Jesse went often—he took her to the same dance halls where he had once danced with her mother. If there were women in his life, they must have been minor—neither Jesse nor I were ever informed about any of them.
About midnight one November night, Muddy Box told a friend he was going to Lake Charles, for a few hours. Lake Charles was in Louisiana. On the way he had a flat on the bridge over the Old and Lost River. As he was changing it a passing horse trailer swayed a few inches into the emergency lane, and the bumper clipped him, killing him instantly. At the memorial service in Houston, three thousand people, remembering the hours his brilliant unsnarlings had saved them, gathered in the rain to show their respect. We buried him on the hill near Los Dolores, beside T.R. and Godwin. The next few months were the only time I feared for Jesse, for there was no measuring how deeply Jesse loved her dad.
2
As soon as she heard of the deaths, Jeanie came to Texas. The sight of me must have shocked her profoundly, though she never mentioned it. Almost at once my hair had turned white, and the weight that had led me to prefer caftans vanished; a human melt-down occurred so rapidly that soon I was even smaller than the small man I had once been. For a time I became hesitant and frail.
Jeanie immediately recognized that she could do little for the three adults, at that time mere stumbling globs of pain. For three weeks she devoted herself almost exclusively to the confused, frightened children. She took them on outings, picnics, shopping trips; sometimes she merely drove them around in the car, listening to music with them, getting them out of sight when our sorrow became too much. She colored and cut out collages with Jesse, bought mountains of play dough for Bo, and helped him sculpt an army of grotesque monsters. For three weeks she was able to focus all the love in her frustrated spirit on those two children; she sang to them and read them stories and taught them games she herself had never played. She employed all her energy, all her invention, all her brilliance to keep them in the light, not let them be engulfed by the darkness that shadowed the rest of the household.
At the time I hardly noticed this; I paid little attention to what Jeanie was doing with the children. I was glad she was there, but too broken to really attend. Later, though, when it became clear that the children were healthy, even though saddled with three crushed adults, I came to feel that Jeanie had saved them. Even given that I’m partial to her, I think it’s not an unfair opinion, though Jeanie herself won’t allow it to be mentioned. For all her smarts, even Jeanie has her blind spots; she doesn’t realize how easy it is to destroy a child.
After three weeks, though, I began to sense an uneasiness in her—a kind of traffic problem in her emotions. One morning I found her crying on the patio.
“What is it?” I asked.
“If I’m going, I’m going to have to go,” she said.
“It’s obvious that you have to go,” I said, after a moment.
“Oh, Danny, don’t say it’s obvious,” she said, wiping her eyes. “It isn’t so obvious.”
“It’s obvious to me,” I said. “We can’t use no martyrs down here.”
Jeanie sat and cried. My confidence was a straw at best, just then. I felt I had hurt the feelings of my one true friend. The others—Nema, Viveca, Marella, horrified that I had let myself become involved in a tragedy—began to float away. Grief was not their métier; movietown gossip and the colorful misdemeanors of their boyfriends could make no mark on it, and they were none of them women who could afford to make no mark.
“I was sort of trying to think of you,” I said to Jeanie, who shrugged and went on crying.
At the end of the week, at my insistence, she made an escape, though a narrow one. Jesse clung to her and squealed more loudly than anyone had ever squealed throughout human history. Jeanie wept, I wept, Gladys wept, Muddy shut himself in his room, Bo banged his head on the floor. The world seemed to be ending for all of us. At the airport, during the interminable wait for her plane, our distress was writ so large that people shunned us as if we were lepers; the whole nonsmoking section emptied; Jeanie and I sat in it alone, silent.
Yet, despite the agony of that parting—a necessary agony, I felt; I really didn’t want her martyred, even for my grandchildren—the world didn’t end for any of us. While I wandered around Los Dolores, deep in grief, Jeanie made three flops, an almost unredeemable situation for an aging actress. It seemed likely that she would soon be lucky to land a detergent commercial. In despair, she took the only role she could get, in an offbeat English film. She played a spinster who spends her days in the London Zoo, trying to cheer up the animals; by chance she meets the Prince of Wales at a ribbon-cutting and a tender passion develops, swelling until it almost shakes the throne. It all seemed wildly improbable; no one thought the picture had a chance; and yet the playground of art is littered with improbable successes. The little picture—Love in the Monkey House—caught the heart of the world. It won best picture of the year in several countries, including the United States, and Jeanie won another Oscar. She took Jesse to the ceremony. That triumph bought her ten very active years, several more good roles, and another nomination.
The pain of those three weeks in Los Dolores altered our friendship a bit. Perhaps it was just that there was no longer enough left of me to keep the spark in it—I’m not sure. If so, my loss was Jesse’s gain. Jeanie called Los Dolores often. We talked a bit, but it was not long before I realized she was really calling to talk to Jesse. When Jesse was three, Jeanie gave her a private line, making her one of the youngest regular long-distance customers in history. As soon as she was old enough to be entrusted to stewardesses, I began to send her to New York or L.A.—to wherever Jeanie was at the time—for week-long binges of shopping, theater, zoos, city life. Jeanie and Jesse’s bond was deep, and never broken. It was Jeanie who hounded me into
moving back to L.A. so the children could have good schools. “Danny, you have to wake up now,” she said. “You can’t just imprison those children there. You have to give them a chance.”
When engaged, Jeanie could be a relentless, merciless nag, and in this case she was fully engaged. In some sense I was like an animal living at the bottom of the sea, an immense weight of water above me. To rise out of it to the top, through layers upon layers of inertia, was not easy, but Jeanie nagged, and I struggled upward, to somewhere near the surface. We moved to L.A. It made little difference to me or Bo, but an immense difference to Jesse and Jeanie, who became, in effect, big sister and little sister. Jeanie dressed Jesse, Jeanie formed her taste, Jeanie began to travel with her. Together they did the world: Paris, Egypt, China. Bo and I stayed home, mistrusting one another.
3
But four years passed before we left Los Dolores for Los Angeles, and in those dark years it was mainly Gladys who carried the daily load. She was right in the judgment she had made the moment she heard of Buddy’s death: he had been her last chance. By accident, in her sadness she confessed to Chuck that she had slept with Buddy, whereupon Chuck beat her up, divorced her, and married the waitress in Amarillo.
Three of Gladys’s five daughters got divorced in the same year. At various times all of them moved into Los Dolores to help Gladys with the housework, a succession of pale, distraught girls who lay around smoking and watching videos, leaving Gladys to care for their pale, watery babies, who seemed to be composed entirely of piss and tears.
Still, it meant there was life in the house; Bo had children other than Jesse to beat up on and Jesse had several worshipful toddlers to command.
Poor Gladys, too, had her remorse; her mind, too, struggled with the need to rewrite the last day. Her references to what had gone on between her and Buddy that afternoon were cryptic to begin with, and always soon punctuated with crying jags, so that I was a long time understanding or locating the reason for her profound guilt.
“All the rest of my life I’ll wish I’d let him,” she said, one day, drying her eyes after a crying jag.
“But, Gladys, I thought you did let him,” I said. “I thought that was why you were in the bedroom.”
“Yeah, but he wanted to try for two,” Gladys said sadly. “He wanted to try for two, and I wouldn’t let him—I thought that would be rushing things a little.”
“Oh, dear,” I said.
“Yep,” Gladys said, and began to cry again.
A few days later she confessed that she could barely remember Buddy—they had only known one another about two weeks. But the fact that she couldn’t remember him did nothing to free her from the burden of remorse—she lived out her life believing that her silly reluctance to rush things had cost Buddy his life. Unfortunately she was right; if she’d kept him in the bedroom ten more minutes no one would have thought to take him on that fatal ride.
One day old Pedro came walking to the house alone to get his beer. Gladys asked him why Granny Lin hadn’t come with him—she had come to rely on Granny Lin.
“She forgot to wake up this morning,” old Pedro said, opening a Coors.
A few months later he, too, forgot to wake up.
4
Then Gladys got sick. A cancer in her female organs began to consume her. I took her to Houston, to the great cancer hospital there, but Gladys hated the hospital, and in any case the cancer’s appetite was not to be slowed.
Desperate, I managed to locate Elena and got her whole family—three sisters and a mother, six children in all—to move to Los Dolores to help us.
Gladys sat on the sunny patio, playing cards with Jesse, for the last month of her life.
“You ought to take these precious children and move,” she said, one day—the very words I had been hearing from Jeanie.
“Well,” I said noncommittally.
“This whole hill’s becoming a graveyard,” she said.
“That’s one reason I stay,” I admitted. “I like to be close to them.”
“If you’re that selfish, I’m sorry I wasted my life working for you,” Gladys said. “Little children don’t need to be playing on graves. Little children need some life around them.”
“You’re right, I give up, I’ll move,” I said.
“It’s awful to be dying,” Gladys said. “I’d rather be washing clothes, and I hate to wash clothes.”
I was trying vaguely to keep my promise to Godwin vis-à-vis his book. I had several folders of his notes on the table before us.
“I never thought I’d be put in the same graveyard with L.J.,” she said. “That comes as kind of a surprise.”
“Gladys, you don’t have to be,” I said gently. “Other arrangements can be made.”
“Naw, put me by him,” Gladys said. “I was in love with him anyway, he just never took no notice. I guess I was too weird for him.”
A few days later Jesse—used to death by this time—came stumbling into the kitchen one morning dragging a large stuffed turtle. She looked at me solemnly for a moment.
“I think Gladys kinda died,” she said.
5
My one accomplishment the first year back in L.A. was to find a skinny graduate student of classics to help me locate the Greek references in Godwin’s book notes. Her name was Clarissa, and besides locating Greek quotations she also taught Jesse French. Jeanie was already contemplating lots of European travel for Jesse and herself and thought Jesse ought to acquire a language or two.
“Then I won’t have to do all the talking,” she allowed.
Fortunately Elena and her family moved to L.A. with us. Small Latin boyfriends eventually married all three sisters and took them away, but Elena, already equipped with two bouncing boys, rejected many suitors and seemed happy to stay with us.
Godwin’s book, Notes on Euripidean Elements in the Music of the Rolling Stones, was published at my expense by a distinguished small press in Los Angeles. The Times Literary Supplement gave it a three-paragraph review.
That same year I gave two million dollars to establish a center and a hot line, in T.R.’s name, to inform women when men who had threatened them were being released from prison. In the first year the hot line received twenty-three thousand queries. Despite our efforts, four women lost their lives anyway, but I feel sure that some were saved, at least temporarily.
6
Once the modest duty of putting together Godwin’s book was discharged, I had almost nothing to do. Day after day I sat on the top floor of our house in Santa Monica and looked out at the sea. I would really have preferred to be looking out at the plains, but the sea itself was a kind of plain. The sea would do.
I had no thought of writing again, but after four or five years I began to be visited by sentences. They collected and collided in my head. They were all sentences describing a girl much like T.R. The girl was growing up in a middle-sized town in East Texas, with criminal grandparents and even some criminal boyfriends. In my head, though not yet on paper, the sentences seemed like sentences that should be in a novel.
Fumblingly, after a year of thinking about it, I began to write the novel, which I called Let the Stranger Consider, borrowing the title from the haunting portfolio bequeathed me by Jill Peel. I thought that since Jill had given me the portfolio, perhaps her shade would not be offended if I stole the title.
I had been gone a long time from the country of prose, and had difficulty getting back across the border. My passport—the sentence—was never quite in order. The sentences I offered all lacked a certain stamp, or else they were dated or otherwise unusable. Several times I gave up and attempted to resign myself to a life spent in exile from prose, but resignation wouldn’t come. I wanted to write a book, but I didn’t know where to begin, and I had become an unwitting refugee from the English sentence.
For a time my nascent book had only one character, the girl who was much like T.R. But then the shadowy figure of an old man, a pious, Bible-thumping old criminal, began to eme
rge from the shadows. He was grandfather to the girl—the man T.R. had called Big Pa.
A month or so after she was killed I had had a letter from Big Pa. I had received a lot of mail from a lot of people then, and been touched by none of it; I could not remember that I had even read most of those letters, but I did remember getting one from Big Pa, though finding it again required a trip back to Los Dolores. There was an old trunk there, a Wells Fargo trunk, bought in Tucson, into which I had thrown thousands of letters, mostly fan mail, through the years. It seemed to me that, indifferent in my grief, I had thrown Big Pa’s letter into the trunk. Five years had passed when I suddenly had a strong desire to read that letter.
And the letter was indeed there, written on tablet paper and mailed from an address in Lufkin, Texas. It was short:
Dear Mr. Deck—
It was on TV today that that evil monster has killed our Tyler Rose, she was a precious thing to me and to my late wife as well—I should have picked up a good cedar post and clubbed that black dog to death the day I met him, he was just a damn killer anyway. It’s the Lord’s kindness that my wife passed on last year as this heartbreak and tragedy would have been more than she could have stood. I am losing my eyesight and can barely see the TV now anyway but my hearing’s fair, I never thought to hear such terrible news coming from the TV set—anyway we can be sure he will sizzle in the burning lake of sulphur throughout eternity and then some! But it won’t bring back our Tyler Rose.
Lloyd Bynum
Lloyd Bynum was the man who had beaten me up and chased me away the night T.R. was born—helped by his wife, Big Ma. He had deflected me from my child, and I had hated him for years, though of course it was my fault, not his, that I had accepted the deflection.
Lufkin was not that far. On the spur of the moment I decided to go see if the old man was still alive.