The Late Child (40 page)

Laurie flushed with embarrassment, she didn't know how to react but Harmony reacted: she stood up and punched Sonny in the mouth as hard as she could, which was hard enough to split his lower lip open—it might have split his upper lip too if there had been any upper lip to split. It was a solid enough punch that it knocked him across the aisle into the seats on the other side of the bus.

“You ditsy cunt, you busted my lip!” Sonny said. He put his hand to his mouth and looked at the blood on his fingers.

“Watch your language, buddy, there's a child on this bus!” Laurie said. Sonny tried to slap her, but he was off balance and Laurie was on guard—the slap didn't come anywhere close. Then Sheba came dashing up the aisle; evidently Sheba
really
disliked Sonny: she waded right in and punched him in the eye.

“You black whore!” he said, but before he could say more Omar and Salah pounced on him, and Otis rushed up to help Sheba; it was such a melee that all Harmony could see of Sonny was the blood on his shirt, from the lip she had split with her first punch.

The bus was kind of rocking from the struggle; Harmony could tell G. was not pleased, but he kept his eye on the road and slowly eased the bus off on the right shoulder and brought it to a stop. Harmony was grateful to him; it was reassuring to have a driver who kept his presence of mind even when a fight was going on in his school bus. Harmony glanced around to see what her sisters were making of it—after all, they were the ones who had invited Sonny to come along on the trip. Both of them were watching with surprised looks on their faces; probably they had been dozing or something and had no idea why Harmony had suddenly punched him. She was grateful to G. for stopping the bus, and to Sheba and Omar and Salah for coming to her
defense; but, still, it was her fight. He was
her
old boyfriend; she was the one who should have to reap the consequences of having made such a dreadful mistake as to sleep with him in the first place.

“Let him go, Salah,” she said, stepping into the aisle. Salah was the one who was mostly holding Sonny; Salah was bigger and had an arm across Sonny's throat—unfortunately blood from the split lip was getting on Salah's nice clean white smock, probably it wasn't a smock but Harmony didn't know what else to call it.

“But he is a crazed man,” Omar protested.

“No, he's not crazy, he's just selfish,” Harmony said.

With some reluctance, Salah released Sonny. Sheba and Sonny were glaring at one another; Sheba had a look in her eye that was a little scary. Obviously, given the chance, she was going to go for Sonny again.

“I want you all to go to the back of the bus, please,” Harmony said. “Sonny's getting off. I just want to say a few words to him.”

“Why's he getting off, what's happened?” Pat asked.

“Pat, he's getting off, mind your own business,” Harmony said; she was not in the mood to have to explain things to her sisters.

“I just asked,” Pat said. “I nap for five seconds and the next thing I know, you're throwing the man off the bus. Can't I even be curious?”

Neddie took her arm.

“Let's go back where we can smoke in peace, Pat,” she said. “If Harmony's got something to settle with the man, let her settle it.”

There was some huffing and puffing on Salah's part, and on Sheba's, but finally everybody moved away. Sonny stood there feeling his lip, which had nearly stopped bleeding. Pat handed him a Kleenex, before she moved back up the aisle.

“Why were you waiting around my daughter's rehearsals?” Harmony asked—she was feeling some very ugly feelings toward Sonny Le Song right at that moment. The fact that he knew
exactly where her daughter had lived was a disturbing fact, in her book.

For a moment Sonny looked as if he might spit it out, he still had a belligerent look in his eye, but then he lost it, he shifted, he let the macho go. Probably he picked up something in Harmony's attitude, the something being that she was going to kill him if he made a wrong move, or said a wrong word. He shrugged, stopped huffing, made himself look smaller.

“I seen her picture in the paper, that's all,” he said. “I thought, What's Harmony's little girl doing up here all by herself? I thought maybe I could be helpful, that's all. I only seen her like a maximum three times.”

Harmony was having the impulse to grab Sonny by the throat and squeeze until his guts popped out; never in her life had she had such a terrible impulse to rip into a man's body with her bare hands. For all she knew, she was looking at the man who had given her daughter the disease that killed her—among Sonny's many bad habits was a tendency to use the needle when he could afford it. Obviously there were only two reasons why Sonny would go to the trouble to find Pepper at a rehearsal. One was to mooch, to see if she could help find him a booking agent, or introduce him to a producer, or help him get gigs. The other reason was to fuck her: that was the one that was making Harmony want to rip a hole in his throat and pull his entrails out through the hole.

Harmony had a notion from the scared look in Sonny's eyes that she knew which one it had been—not that it couldn't have been both.

“Hey, forget it, I don't want to interfere with your trip, I'll just get out and hitch,” Sonny said; he even forgot his new T-shirts in his hurry to get off the school bus. G. opened the door and Sonny popped out so quickly that some of the oncoming traffic on the expressway honked at him—maybe they thought they had a suicide on their hands, though Sonny's main thought was probably just to get out of the bus before Harmony strangled him. He was right about that one, too—if he hadn't fled and she had actually
got her hands on Sonny Le Song he might have been dead before anyone could have pried her loose.

“G., could we just go?” Harmony asked.

G. immediately shut the door and eased the bus back into the traffic; the problem of where to drop Sheba and Otis was a problem they would have to cope with later. Harmony sat back down—for a while, no one came to sit with her or speak to her. Probably she had scared them all, she didn't know. The thought that Sonny Le Song might have seduced her daughter was so disturbing that if she let the thought settle in her mind, even for a second, it made her want to take the wheel of the bus herself and go back and run over Sonny—not just once but over and over again, until she had ground him into the asphalt; until there was nothing left, not even a stain. All he was was a stain anyway: a stain on her memory, a stain on her motherhood, a stain on her conscience, a stain on her life.

After the bus was moving along smoothly, Eddie came down the aisle and crawled up in Harmony's lap. He peered out the window, to see if he could see Sonny Le Song, but Sonny was somewhere back down the road, around a curve. All Eddie could see was traffic, and a last outline of the buildings of Manhattan.

“I like it that there's towers,” Eddie said, as the towers became shadows against the gray sky. “Demons and monsters and warlocks could live in the towers. And men with trunks like elephants.”

Harmony was still feeling like doing terrible bodily injury to Sonny Le Song—she couldn't concentrate on her son's vision of men with trunks like elephants, in the towers of Manhattan.

“You pummeled him, Mom, didn't you?” Eddie said.

“No, but I socked him,” Harmony said.

“Salah pummeled him, though,” Eddie said. “I think Omar pummeled him, too, and Sheba poked him in the eye.”

“Eddie, he said a very rude thing to Laurie,” Harmony said. “I didn't want him to go with us to Oklahoma.”

“I didn't either,” Eddie said. “I think he was fart, and fart makes bad smells in the bus.”

Neddie and Pat came up and sat down across the aisle. They looked puzzled and depressed.

“We're trying again,” Neddie said. “Why'd Sonny jump off the bus so quick? Now we've lost the one person in this whole gang who was like a normal American.”

“Neddie, he left because I was about to kill him,” Harmony said.

“You were about to what?” Pat asked. She had Sonny's little sack of T-shirts in her hand.

“Kill him,” Harmony repeated. “He got out just in time.”

“He said a rude thing to Laurie and he was fart,” Eddie informed them.

“You mean you had a fight, or what?” Neddie asked. “I don't understand. He seemed like a decent little fellow to me.”

“Yeah, we were getting along with him fine,” Pat said. “Now we got a bunch of ugly T-shirts that nobody at home is gonna want to wear.”

“Pat, are you saying it's my fault?” Harmony asked; it was very annoying to her that her sisters were sitting there with long faces, defending Sonny Le Song just because he was male and looked like he might live in their part of the country. It was so annoying to her that she wondered why she was even going home. Obviously she and her sisters had different values: what was the point?

“If it was just a spat he could have sat in the back with us, for a while,” Pat said.

“What if I threw him off because he was a child molester, would it still be my fault?” Harmony asked. Some of the anger that had made her want to pull Sonny's guts out of his body spilled into her tone when she looked at her sister Pat.

“Uh-oh, I think we better let this one lie,” Neddie said. “Harmony might know something about him that we don't know.”

“Neddie, I know a million things about him that you don't
know!” Harmony pointed out. “Why would you think it was my fault because I threw a little jerk off the bus? Haven't you ever met a jerk you wanted to throw off a bus?”

“There's a limited number of jerks in Tarwater, that's how bleak the scene is,” Pat said.

“You're my sisters, you shouldn't always think it's my fault,” Harmony said—she was still upset. “Why can't I even get support from my sisters?”

Both sisters were a little taken aback by the anger in her voice.

“Wow,” Pat said, a little defensively.

“Shut up these loud words!” Eddie commanded. “I want to talk to my mom about men with elephant trunks, but I
can't
talk to my mom when there's loud words all the time.”

“So do you two think it's always the woman's fault no matter how much of a scumbag the man is?” Harmony asked.

“Pat always gives them the benefit of the doubt,” Neddie said.

Harmony gave up and hugged Eddie, who was in a smiley mood and was so sweet to hold and look at that a little of her bad mood began to drain away. There was not much she could do about her sisters; mostly, they meant well. The sun came out and the white school bus went sailing along the freeway at top speed. But just as her spirits began to come back to normal another sorrow arrived; this time it was Sheba and Otis getting off the bus. Harmony looked out and saw the oil refineries she had seen from the window of the No-Tel Motel. They were back in Jersey City, not far from the Dumpster where Sheba and Otis lived.

“I'm going quick, otherwise I be crying so hard I fall right on my ugly face,” Sheba said; she bent and gave Eddie a quick kiss. At first Eddie tried to keep his hands over his eyes; he refused to let his eyes see that Sheba was leaving. But then he gave up and gave her a big hug and a kiss. In only seconds Sheba and Otis were off the bus. At this departure everybody cried except G. He was impassive and kept his eyes on the road. Soon the bus was moving, sailing down the freeway again as if the two young people
had not just severed themselves from the group, probably forever. Abdul cried and Salah and Laurie; Neddie and Pat looked bleak, and Harmony couldn't look out the window at all; she didn't want to see those two nice black kids standing by a freeway in New Jersey.

Eddie buried his face in Harmony's lap; he had always been supersensitive to departures and this one was particularly hard, the reason being that Eddie loved Sheba so much.

“This is the Jersey Turnpike,” Laurie said, after a while. Once again she took her seat beside Harmony. She reached over and smoothed Eddie's curls, but he kept his face in his mother's lap.

“I don't blame him for being upset,” Laurie said. “This is all so odd. You can't blame two black kids from New Jersey for freaking out and wanting to go home.”

“Laurie, I'm sorry Sonny called you a dyke,” Harmony said. “It's just too bad we met him on the street.”

“Forget it,” Laurie said. “What I was really worried about was that you might be going to get involved with him again.”

Harmony didn't answer. Probably the truth was that if Sonny had taken the trouble to be even halfway nice it could have happened, not right away, not on the bus trip, but someday. He would just have had to be patient and wait for the soft spot to grow. But it was hard to know: maybe the soft spot she had had when Sonny was singing at the Chevron station was gone anyway; maybe all she had left was the memory of a soft spot.

“I know I'm not strong, Laurie,” Harmony said. “I never have been strong, where guys are concerned. I just don't know how to be. But I can be pretty strong where Eddie is concerned.”

The question of Pepper and Sonny was hanging in the air. Harmony wanted to ask if Laurie had an opinion, but the question never came out; she let it be a question there would never be an answer to.

While she was letting the question die away, Eddie sat up.

“We'll see Sheba and Otis again someday,” he said. “We can go to the Shop and Sack and find them when we come back to Jersey City, or we can ask Beth at the No-Tel Motel and we can find them and have doughnuts
and
bagels.”

Neither Harmony nor Laurie could bring themselves to answer—it was a bit of self-reassurance on Eddie's part. He didn't like it that his friends Sheba and Otis were gone forever.
After all, only the day before, they had been shepherding him around New York, seeing that he got good treatment on the TV shows. Now he was just a little boy on the bus with his family again, traveling along toward Oklahoma.