Some Can Whistle by Larry McMurtry

forgive all and draw me back to her bosom? Or forgive nothing and suck me off the freeway into a bad neighborhood, where I would be shot down by a young crack dealer with an Uzi before I even got my bearings.
    Twenty-two years is a long time; more than a generation, as generations are now reckoned. Even though I averted my eyes at newsstands and flipped past articles in
The Times
, I had not missed the fact that Houston had grown; huge when I left, it was now much more huge. I was scarcely past the town of Conroe when plinthlike glass buildings began to appear, at first singly, then in clusters. To the east, near the airport, a kind of minicity seemed to have risen.
    I had gotten a late start; the day was ebbing and the pastels of a summer evening colored the sky above and behind the downtown skyline when I came in sight of it. A stately white battleship of a cloud was crossing the ship channel toward Galveston.
    I began to relax a little; though most of the downtown hadnot been there when I left, the clouds, the pastel sunset, and the sky itself had a familiar and reassuring beauty.
    Just as the freeway passed over Buffalo Bayou a pickup passed me on the right—a little surprising, since I was still slicing along at a comfortable eighty-five. I glanced over in time to catch a glimpse of the driver, a big, raunchy-looking girl with long hair flying. She was putting on her eye makeup while rocketing over downtown Houston at roughly ninety-five miles an hour. The hand that had been assigned to the steering wheel was also finger-tapping in rhythm with a song I couldn’t hear.
    The girl must have sensed my glance; she looked over and gave me a big toothy grin, eyebrow brush still poised; she honked loudly, as if to say, Let’s go, then she was past. On the curve ahead I was still close enough to see her open a lipstick.
    I slowed down and drifted off the freeway at the next exit, relaxed and feeling fine. I
was
fine; moreover, I was home. The spirit of Houston might have assigned that girl to pass me just when she did; where else do girls drive pickups at ninety-five while doing their eye makeup? Besides that, driving so well that you don’t even have the sense that anything reckless is happening? The main thing, obviously, is getting to the party while the party’s fresh.
    I touched a button and my window went down, letting in the old fishy smell of Houston, moist and warm, a smell composed of many textures. I stopped at a 7-Eleven on West Dallas Street, already back in love with the place. Now all I had to do was consult a phone book, make a list of Mr. Burgers, and go meet my daughter.

19
    Mr. Burger was not yet a threat to McDonald’s—not in Houston at least. There were only three locations listed in the phone book: Airline Road, Telephone Road, and Dismuke Street. Airline lay to the north—I had missed it coming in. The address on Telephone Road had such a high street number it could almost have been in the Gulf of Mexico.
    “I bet she works in the one on Dismuke Street,” I said out loud.
    “They don’t call it Dismuke Street no more,” a man said.
    I looked around but didn’t immediately spot the source of the voice.
    “Now they call it Pit Bull Avenue,” the voice said.
    The voice seemed to come from above me, and in fact did come from above me. An old man wearing tennis shoes and cutoffs sat on the rim of a giant blue dumpster.
    “I think my daughter works on Dismuke Street,” I said by way of explanation.
    “She’s lucky she ain’t had a leg chewed off, if that’s the case,” the man said. “I’d call this a friendly town but I wouldn’t call Dismuke Street a friendly street. I’m from the Panhandle myself, but the fact is I hate the goddamn Panhandle. Got any change?”
    In fact, I didn’t. I had only hundred-dollar bills. For the last few months Gladys had taken care of all my petty expenses. Change wouldn’t have worked in a caftan, anyway.
    “I’m sorry, I only have large bills,” I