The Late Child

  Praise for The Late Child

  “Raucous, unexpected, and downright quirky, this is McMurtry at his powerful best.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “McMurtry’s genius for seductive, wholly American speech is in full flower here, and it’s always a pleasure to hear his characters talk. … Harmony is one of McMurtry’s best characters, eternally hopeful even when crushed with sadness.”

  —Adam Woog, Seattle Times

  “A favorite old character and an endearing new one fill McMurtry’s latest with heartbreak, hope, happiness. … The Late Child is the most optimistic, hopeful novel McMurtry has written in a long time. Eddie, one of the most memorable characters ever to walk out of the pages of a novel, has enough love, enough determination, and enough good ideas to keep not only his grieving mother but also all of us going.”

  —Linda Brinson, Winston-Salem Journal

  “McMurtry has always written exceptionally well about women: they represent many of his most memorable characters, such as Patsy and Emma, or Jacy from The Last Picture Show. And in The Late Child, Harmony emerges as every bit their equal.”

  —David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times

  “The Late Child possesses a distinctive charm and, ultimately, a high position in McMurtry’s body of work. … Eddie [is] one of the most appealing little boys in all of literature. … McMurtry’s prose is sharp nearly all the way through; funny, sad, full of insight and human surprise.”

  —David Hendricks, San Antonio Express-News

  “By the close of the novel, I found myself captivated by this bittersweet picture of life, eager to follow Harmony’s story a step or two farther to see how things worked out.”

  —Clay Reynolds, Houston Chronicle

  “Entertaining … The Late Child is both funny and forlorn. McMurtry has a good eye for eccentricity and the assorted misfits add a measure of peculiarity, kindness, and humor. … Harmony is a wonderful companion.”

  —Susan Kelly, USA Today

  “McMurtry writes as insightfully about bright, passionate, confused, frustrated women as anybody has. … Maybe if we let go the reins of our life, as Harmony has to do when crippled by grief, our lives could take us places we never expected to go in our wildest dreams.”

  —Joyce R. Slater, Chicago Tribune

  “This is a car trip … with episodes as hilarious as almost anything from Trip to Bountiful to Breathing Lessons to National Lampoon’s Family Vacation … [by] an author whose character studies have the depth of real people.”

  —Michael Lollar, The Commercial Appeal (Memphis)

  “McMurtry … invests Harmony’s plight with genuine poignancy.”

  —Michael Berry, San Francisco Chronicle

  “The Late Child offers a darker look at the American heartland than the bicoastal culture is accustomed to. … McMurtry clearly dotes on Harmony … she’s finely drawn and believable.”

  —Angie Jabine, Oregonian

  “[A] trademark Larry McMurtry production, a hilarious and poignant cross-country odyssey that’s rich in characters, laughs, and truths about life.”

  —Jean Westmoore, Buffalo News

  “The Late Child has some sweet fablelike moments. … The story is never less than engaging, and sometimes dates to be more ambitious than that.”

  —Amanda Heller, The Boston Globe

  “Distinctly readable … McMurtry’s accomplishment is the way in which, by virtue of Harmony’s sorrowful cruise through the complacency of their worlds, everyone around her starts to make noise, like dominoes falling. Choices are made, many of them agonizing, some liberating, most pointing this or that person toward home.”

  —Beaufort Cranford, The Detroit News

  “It’s always fun to listen to McMurtry’s characters talk.”

  —Verlyn Klinkenborg, The New York Times Book Review

  “Traditional and modern American landscapes come to life, personalities flawed by limited intelligence and unlimited heart flash between poignancy and slapstick, and the story takes on a momentum in the early pages that does not flag until the very last.”

  —Judi Goldenberg, Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “The author gives us another tender and comic odyssey that sends his characters on an unforgettable journey across America.”

  —Mary Jane Ulmer, Beaver County Times (Pennsylvania)

  “Engaging and charming … uniquely shaped by [McMurtry’s] witty vivacity and humorous cynicism … The author pulls off this picaresque comedy better than anybody else writing today.”

  —John G. Cawelti, Lexington Herald-Leader

  “Under McMurtry’s fine hand, [the] denouement is as perfect as the rest of this wonderful book. … The Late Child is actually a joyous celebration of life and our instincts to survive. … It is a great piece of work and another winner from one of America’s finest writers.”

  —Curt Schleier, The Grand Rapids Press

  BY LARRY MCMURTRY

  Paradise

  Boone’s Lick

  Roads: Driving America’s Greatest Highways

  Still Wild: Short Fiction of the American West 1950 to the Present

  Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen

  Duane’s Depressed

  Crazy Horse

  Comanche Moon

  Dead Man’s Walk

  The Late Child

  Streets of Laredo

  The Evening Star

  Buffalo Girls

  Some Can Whistle

  Anything for Billy

  Film Flam: Essays on Hollywood

  Texasville

  Lonesome Dove

  The Desert Rose

  Cadillac Jack

  Somebody’s Darling

  Terms of Endearment

  All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers

  Moving On

  The Last Picture Show

  In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas

  Leaving Cheyenne

  Horseman, Pass By

  BY LARRY MCMURTRY AND DIANA OSSANA

  Pretty Boy Floyd

  Zeke and Ned

  THE LATE CHILD

  Larry McMurtry

  SCRIBNER PAPERBACK FICTION

  Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Rockefeller Center

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1995 by Larry McMurtry

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  First Scribner Paperback Fiction edition 2002

  SCRIBNER PAPERBACK FICTION and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

  For information regarding special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-800-456-6798 or [email protected]

  Designed by Colin Joh

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 0-7432-2254-7 (Pbk)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-2254-9

  eISBN: 978-1-4391-2978-4

  For Curtis

  Take me back to Tulsa,

  I’m too young to marry.…

  BOB WILLS

  THE LATE CHILD

  BOOK ONE

  1.

  When Harmony got to the line in the letter that told her Pepper was dead, she stopped reading the letter and stuffe
d it in a glass. She had been home from her job at the recycling plant in north Las Vegas maybe five minutes, just long enough to drink a glass of iced tea. The sides of the glass were still wet—moisture soon began to soak through the yellow paper the letter was written on. Harmony watched this process with a little bit of hope: maybe this terrible information would just soak away and not be true.

  Harmony felt like pouring more iced tea into the glass to make the soaking happen more quickly. Just yesterday she had complained to the kids at the recycling plant that she never got any interesting mail. Day after day her mailbox would be stuffed with flyers from supermarkets or department stores, informing her of big savings she could realize if she acted quickly. If something else happened to show up in her mailbox it was usually just a bill she couldn’t afford to pay, or an ugly letter from a collection agency, telling her she better pay the bill anyway, even if she was down to around eight dollars in her checking account, the amount that always seemed to be there when she got worried enough to check her balance.

  Now, though—if the words in the letter were true—a bill had come that she could never pay. The only feeling she had immediately was that she didn’t want the letter so close to her, so she opened the screen and pitched the glass out in the yard. Her apartment was first-floor; the glass didn’t break when she threw it out. It rolled up against a little green cactus and stopped. The letter was still in it, yellow as ever.

  Jimmy Bangor, Harmony’s boyfriend, happened to be coming into the little patio of the apartment building just when Harmony pitched the glass with the letter in it out the window. Jimmy Bangor was a man not much troubled by curiosity—he took life as it came, as he was fond of saying—but the fact that Harmony, the most stable girlfriend he had ever had, had just thrown a perfectly good glass out the window of their apartment did catch his big brown eyes. Jimmy was a parking lot attendant at Caesars; he spent many long days squeezing himself into tiny cars that were definitely not the kind of cars high rollers drove when they showed up in Las Vegas.

  Harmony and Jimmy had been a couple for nearly six months—Jimmy had never seen her throw a glass out the window before. It occurred to him that he might have witnessed a freak accident of some kind: the glass might have just popped out of Harmony’s hand somehow, and come to rest against the little green cactus in their tiny yard. Why there was a piece of yellow paper stuffed in the glass was beyond Jimmy’s ken, but he picked up the glass anyway. It didn’t appear to have suffered from dropping out the window; there were no chips in the rim that he could see.

  Jimmy could just make out Harmony, through the window, waving at him—he had no idea what the waving meant. He smiled at her anyway, which was easy to do: Harmony was by far the sweetest woman Jimmy Bangor had ever had to come home to.

  “I don’t want that glass in here, Jimmy, please put it back in the yard,” Harmony said, before Jimmy even got both feet inside the apartment. Harmony’s voice shook, and she wasn’t smiling, which made Jimmy feel a little hurt. One thing he and Harmony had agreed on from the first was that the least a woman owed her man was a welcoming smile when he got home from work in the evening—although, since they lived in Las Vegas, men such as Jimmy Bangor didn’t necessarily get home from work in the evening; they were apt to get home from work at any hour of the day or night.

  So far, though, Harmony had always produced a welcoming smile, and it wasn’t just a “Hi, honey, how was your day?” smile, either. Harmony really was welcoming. She loved to see her Jimmy come through the door; only, at the moment, just as Jimmy was expecting to have his spirits lifted by the welcoming smile, Harmony didn’t have the welcoming smile.

  “What’s wrong, honey?” Jimmy asked. The look on Harmony’s face was so different from any look he had ever seen on her face before that he felt, for a moment, that he might have stepped into the wrong apartment.

  It wasn’t the wrong apartment, though: the seventeen-pound bass that Jimmy had caught up near Green River, Wyoming, was still there, stuffed, over the television set, claiming pride of place over several framed pictures of Harmony: one with Elvis, one with Liberace, one with Wayne Newton, even one with Mr. Sinatra. All of the pictures were taken back in the days—long-ago days, now—when Harmony had been the most beautiful showgirl in Las Vegas. To some women it might have seemed in bad taste, putting a stuffed fish right in the middle of a lot of pictures of a beautiful showgirl hobnobbing with celebrities, but Harmony had not only been nice about it, she had insisted on putting the big bass right there: after all, Jimmy was her man, he had caught the big fish; it belonged where visitors could see it and appreciate it, right away. Anyone seeing that fish would know what a fine fisherman Jimmy Bangor was.

  Actually, Harmony and Jimmy didn’t have that many visitors, though both of them considered themselves to be friendly people. Most of Harmony’s friends in Las Vegas had either died or drifted away—quite a few went east, to try their luck, when the big new casinos began to open in Atlantic City. Some of Jimmy’s old buddies had left town, too, but the reason Jimmy Bangor developed the habit of hanging out mainly with Harmony was that he had fallen in life. Once Jimmy had been head of security at the Tropicana, but he had got caught sleeping with a girl who was a little underage—five years underage, to be exact—so he had lost that job and slipped all the way down to his present level, just a parking lot attendant at Caesars. Jimmy didn’t care to socialize with too many of the people he worked with, who tended to be either kids or dopeheads. Every time one of the security men at Caesars stepped outside to get five minutes of sun, Jimmy—if he happened to notice the security man—became a little depressed. He didn’t like to be reminded of the days when he had been head of security at the Trop, and had a name that was respected all over town.

  “Jimmy, I don’t want that glass in the house, would you throw it back in the yard?” Harmony said, again. Keeping the glass with the yellow paper in it as far away as possible felt like her only chance.

  “Why, hon? It ain’t broke,” Jimmy said, before he noticed that Harmony had tears in her eyes. She was not the same cheerful woman he had left only eight hours before. It occurred to Jimmy that the freak accident he had been speculating about might have occurred in Harmony’s head, but before he could do more than formulate the thought, Harmony snatched the glass out of his hand. This time she didn’t simply roll it out the window, either. She threw the glass as hard as she could, not into the street—that might have endangered someone—but at the sidewalk, only a step or two behind Jimmy.

  The glass shattered, but the paper that was in it just lay there. There was no breeze; the paper didn’t even flutter, much less blow away. The tiny fragments of glass that lay on it and around it sparkled in the sunlight like diamonds.

  Jimmy Bangor was dumbfounded.

  “Well, it’s broke now,” he said, noticing that two or three tiny pieces of glass were lodged in the cuffs of his trousers. He knelt in the doorway and picked them out, as carefully as if they had been grass burrs.

  Before Jimmy could even get all the glass out of his cuffs, Harmony shoved past him and began to kick at the paper. There were three sheets of yellow paper in all, and Harmony soon kicked them apart. She seemed to be trying to kick them into the air, or into the street, or into the corners of the yard.

  “Don’t, my God, don’t, you’ll cut yourself—there’s glass everywhere,” Jimmy said. Harmony was barefoot, of course; she always kicked off her shoes the minute she was inside the door. Now she was kicking about wildly, on a sidewalk strewn with sharp fragments of glass—kicking at the three sheets of yellow paper.

  “Hon, what is it?” Jimmy asked, trying to grab Harmony and pull her away from the glass. Already he could see blood on her feet. Jimmy was respectful of property, and the apartment had wall-to-wall carpet; he had an impulse to go spread some paper towels before he steered Harmony inside, but her feet were cut already, she might cut an artery or something if he didn’t get her off the sidewalk quick.

  “
Is it PMS or what?” he asked—surely some freak accident had occurred in Harmony’s head; Jimmy had no idea what the accident might involve.

  “PMS—my daughter’s dead!” Harmony said, stopping suddenly: out of the corner of her eye she saw the school bus round the corner; in only a second or two it would be stopping in front of the apartment, to let Eddie out. Eddie was five—he was a preschooler—and it would be a big embarrassment to him if his little friends saw his mother kicking pieces of paper around the yard and cutting her feet to pieces in the process. She couldn’t be a crazed mother, even if the terrible words in the letter were true. She had to think of Eddie—if the words were true, if Pepper was dead, then Eddie was the one person left that she absolutely had to think about.

  “Jimmy, would you just get me the broom and the dustpan, real quick?” Harmony said. “I need to sweep this glass up before Eddie gets off the bus.”

  Jimmy was only too glad to grab the broom and the dustpan; he immediately started sweeping up the broken glass himself. In his haste he forgot what Harmony had just said, until he looked up and saw that her cheeks were now wet with tears. Jimmy had never met Harmony’s daughter, he had no idea what she was like and now he never would, because she was dead.

  Just then Harmony saw the red lights flashing, as the school bus pulled up to the little gate in front of their apartment building. She dried her cheeks as best she could. She caught a brief glimpse of Eddie as he came down the steps of the school bus, but then, for a moment, all she could see of him were the golden curls on the top of his head. Eddie was just the height of the little gate that led into the yard; then, there he was, a big smile on his face as he burst through the gate and came racing toward his mother, just as he did on every normal day.

  “Eddie, don’t run please, there’s glass on the sidewalk—somebody broke a glass,” Harmony said; but Eddie didn’t heed her, he loved to run into his mother’s arms at the end of a day of preschool.

  “Mom, I drew a lion,” Eddie said, and then he gave an almost perfect grrrrr sound, just the sound a little lion might make, as he flung himself into his mother’s arms.