Author: Larry McMurtry
Category: Literature
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The young man was having trouble getting his lugs unscrewed. He had three off and in the hubcap, which was rapidly filling with water, but the last two lugs weren’t budging.
“Hi, boys and girls,” Sonny said, sloshing up to them. He was barefooted. “Let’s take shelter under here,” he said, opening the umbrella.
“Thanks, but there’s not much need now,” Patsy said. Water dripped off her hair, her green dress was soaked, her bra sodden, and her bra straps clearly visible through the thin wet dress. She was annoyed and, since Sonny had appeared, embarrassed as well. Jim slipped in his effort to wrench loose a lug, and went down on one knee in the mud.
“Shit,” he said. “You wouldn’t have a good lug wrench, would you, mister? I can’t get enough leverage with this miserable thing.” It was a short lug wrench, of the sort that doubled as a jack handle. The footing was getting worse and worse and he could not keep the wrench on the lugs.
“It’d take a week to find mine,” Sonny said. “Let me have a try. I’m fresh and you’re done exasperated.”
He grinned and handed the umbrella to Patsy. Jim gladly yielded the wrench. It had only been raining a few minutes and yet his pants and shirt were already smeared with mud. Shanks squatted by the tire bracing his elbow on his knees. He jammed the wrench onto the top lug, held it there with the heel of one hand, and put his arm and shoulder into the push. The lug gave, and the other one did likewise. He took them both off and dropped them with a splash into the brimming hubcap. “That’ll get ’em,” he said. The back of his red silk shirt was already as wet as Patsy’s dress.
“Thanks,” Jim said. “This isn’t my day. I guess it’s time I bought some new tires.”
“Might buy a car to go with ’em,” Sonny suggested. “This one looks like it’s seen too many road signs.”
He grinned at Patsy, but she didn’t grin back. She was of precisely the same opinion where the Ford was concerned but managed to refrain from saying so. She sluiced the water off her hair with one hand and gave Sonny back his umbrella.
“You’re Sonny Shanks,” she said.
He nodded, looking at her more closely. He had a feeling he should know her, but he couldn’t come up with a name. The two of them were not rodeo, obviously. The green dress was stylish, even if wet, and her husband’s tone was a city tone.
“I’m Patsy Carpenter and this is my husband Jim,” she said. “I recognized the hearse of course, but actually we met a few times years ago. I guess I was about twelve then. You used to know my Aunt Dixie.”
“Dixie McCormack?” he asked, but it was a superfluous question. There was only one Dixie—or only one that counted.
“She’s my aunt,” Patsy said.
“My god,” Sonny said. “I know her okay. The only thing that keeps us apart is that I ain’t got the energy I once had. She cost me a world championship and I never went with her but three weeks. That woman’s crazy. She could foul up a two-car funeral.”
“She takes some keeping up with, okay,” Patsy said. Jim let the tire slip as he was lifting it off the spokes and it splashed muddy water on their ankles and calves.
“I think a coincidence like this here calls for a drink,” Sonny said. “I got a little bar in the hearse. Let’s have a drink to Dixie while your husband finishes changing his tire. I been out of touch and ain’t heard her recent exploits, anyhow.”
He took Patsy by the arm, held the umbrella over her as jauntily as if they weren’t both soaked, and led her along the edge of the wet pavement to the hearse.
“You look awfully smart to be a niece of Dixie’s,” he said. “Not that she’s what you’d call dumb.”
Patsy was annoyed with him for leading her away, and annoyed with herself for allowing him to, but he had done it so smoothly that she had not thought to stop him until it was too late.
“Nobody thinks of Aunt Dixie in terms of smart or dumb,” she said. “Fast or slow, maybe.”
“I’d like to see her sometime when she’s slow,” he said. “I’ve seen her other speed. Hop in.”
He helped her in the back of the hearse and switched on a small light. A narrow mattress and box spring took up one side of the rear, and the other side was filled with an incredible litter: clothes, ropes, boxes of tapes and gauze, a case of whiskey, bridles, and chaps. A large saddle with what seemed to be a golden saddle horn was propped against the front seat. At the rear, near the door, was the tiny bar.
“It’s kind of a mess,” Sonny said ruefully. “My maid quit last week. What’ll you drink?”
“A Coke if you’ve got one and if not, a little bourbon. About an inch.”
Sonny stood at the rear, still in the rain, and reached inside to fix the drinks. He even had ice. “Make it bourbon,” he said. “Soda water ain’t good for a pretty girl’s complexion.”
There was a green high-heel shoe laying on the bed, and without thinking, Patsy picked it up and looked at it. It was cheaply made—the strip of inner sole was about to curl. Sonny handed her a glass. She put it to her lips politely and the odor of whiskey prickled her nose. She took a small sip and, when she put the glass down, became aware of another smell, which the smells of rain and mud and liquor had covered until then. It was faint but unmistakable and it came from the sheet on which she was sitting. When she realized what it was, anger and shock hit her almost at the same time. She pushed herself indignantly off the bed and one of her knees hit Sonny’s hand. He had just finished fixing his own drink and the glass slipped out of his hand and fell into the mud. Patsy scrambled awkwardly out of the hearse, almost falling. She was embarrassed and very angry.
“Damn you,” she said. “What do you mean, forcing me into your hearse when you’ve just . . . done something in it. You didn’t even give her back her shoe.”
She sloshed halfway to the Ford, crying, then remembered that she still had the green shoe and sloshed back and threw it angrily into the hearse. Sonny watched her. He was mildly disgruntled, but more at himself than at her. He had completely forgotten May.
“Well, kick me,” he said. “I’m awful. I should have tidied things up. It ain’t no reason for you to run off, though. It’s messy everywhere tonight.”
“Not like that it isn’t,” Patsy said. “This was a nice rain until you came along.”
She turned and walked away, furious with her aunt for having had anything to do with such a person.
“Have a good swim,” Sonny said, mostly to himself. He crawled into the hearse out of the rain, opened himself a beer, sniffed at the offensive sheets, and sat on the bed sipping his beer and watching Jim Carpenter wrestle the muddy tire into the back end of the Ford.
In a minute Jim came to the hearse.
“Thanks for the help,” he said. “I guess we’ll have to skip the drink. The rodeo and the flat seem to have tired my wife a little.”
“Don’t matter. Where you headed?”
“A stepuncle of mine has a ranch not far from here. I imagine we’ll see you again. I’m a photographer and I’m going to be traveling the rodeo circuit for a while.”
“Oh, yeah,” Sonny said. “You’re the guy who got clobbered in Merkel.”
“Right,” Jim said. “However, I got through Santa Rosa without being beat up.” He was a little awed to be talking to Sonny and would have liked to prolong the conversation, but, though Patsy hadn’t said a word to him, he knew she was furious about something, and the longer he lingered the more difficult she was apt to become.
“Going to be in Phoenix?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” Sonny said. “If your car makes it, look me up. Your wife’s a little peeved at me but she’ll get over it by then. We’ll have a party or something.”
“Fine,” Jim said, flattered. “I certainly will.”
When he left, Sonny rolled one of the big windows down and sat with his back propped against the front seat, drinking beer. The rain was slowing down. The clouds had already broken to the north, and stars were visible. He bent ov
er and got himself a handful of ice and sat crunching it. Now and then a car or a diesel swished by, but there was not much traffic. Noticing May’s one green shoe, he picked it up and looked at it a minute before tossing it out the window. Then he took off his shirt and stretched out to sleep for a while. He had decided to go visit the love of his life, and she wouldn’t be awake for several hours.
4
PATSY COULDN’T QUITE STOP crying, and the reason she couldn’t was because Jim refused to understand why she had started crying in the first place. He was annoyed with her and told her she was old enough to be able to control herself better. She was almost twenty-five, and it was quite true, but it didn’t help. She was not crying freshets, but her eyes kept dripping and she felt wronged and her breastbone hurt from it. They had turned off the highway and were on a little dirt road that led to the ranch house of Jim’s stepuncle, Roger Wagonner. As they drove west, the rain had slackened, but the shower had been heavy enough to make the dirt road a little slick.
“I didn’t smell anything,” Jim said for the second time.
“You weren’t sitting on the mattress.”
“All right!” he said. “I still don’t see that it was so terrible. What different did it make, you’re not a prude. You could have sat somewhere else. I wanted to talk to him.”
“You’re offending me,” Patsy said grimly. “So I’m too delicate. I’m still not going to spend the evening in a puddle of sperm just so you can talk to some stupid bull rider about a lot of stupid bulls.
“It was very unsanitary,” she added. “Much as I’d like to get pregnant, I don’t want to do it by a mattress. Especially not his mattress.”
Jim was silent. He was pretending to be very careful with his driving. Her abruptness annoyed him as much as her crying, and she knew it. His annoyance annoyed her. She would have liked him to be light and joshing—if he had been she might have become convinced that the whole thing was funny. But she had deprived him of a pleasure, and he wasn’t immediately ready to let her forget it. They had been married over a year and a half and she had still not learned to control either her abruptness or her tears. He had just better get used to them—and the sooner the better, she felt.
“I am too a prude,” she said in a small tone, wiping her cheeks with her hands. “It’s my only distinction. I may be the last prude. You’re a cruel beast to want to deprive me of my prudery.”
“Oh, shut up,” he said loudly, making her jump.
“I’m going to see him in Phoenix,” he added, more quietly. “You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.”
“I certainly don’t,” she said, perking up a little. She saw that he was ashamed of having yelled at her.
“If he was good enough for your aunt I don’t see why you need be so snooty. After all, he’s been World’s Champion Cowboy three times. That saddle in the hearse was a championship saddle.”
“That wasn’t a saddle,” she said. “It was an altar. I bet he deflowers a virgin on it every week.”
They crossed a cattle guard and circled the dark ranch house. Jim parked by the back-yard gate and began to collect his cameras from the back seat. His annoyance would not subside. Patsy had a genius for fouling up evenings, but she did it in such a way that it was never clearly her fault, and he could never feel really justified in his annoyance.
“If he liked your aunt he couldn’t have much taste for virgins,” he said.
Patsy drew herself up. “Such remarks are not apropos,” she said. “I love my Aunt Dixie and don’t you be snippy about her. She just happens to have a weakness for organs, that’s all.”
It had rained more at the ranch house than it had on the road leading to it. They squished across the wet back yard, Patsy gradually getting her mood in hand. There was a towsack on the back porch for them to wipe their feet on. Jim wiped his, but Patsy merely slipped off her shoes.
The house was completely dark, and though it was the third night of their stay they were still unfamiliar with its layout. They bumped things and stepped on a great many squeaky boards. Patsy felt very tired. Jim offered her the bathroom first but she declined it and merely dried her wet hair on a towel from her suitcase. It was one of those times when she didn’t feel like taking care of herself, and she undressed and got into her nightgown hastily and was in bed when Jim returned from the bathroom.
He came in shortly and turned on the overhead light—there was no other. The room was still a little dusty from long disuse, and there was nothing in it but a straight chair, a bed, and an old brown bureau. The wallpaper had once been green but was faded almost gray and was blotchy on the ceiling. The light shone right in Patsy’s eyes and she hid under the sheet until Jim noticed and switched it off again.
“I guess people never read in this country,” she said. “They haven’t heard about bed lights.”
Jim was standing by the open window. A light drizzle had started up again and he stood listening to it. “I ought to get those films ready to mail,” he said. “I want to get them off first thing in the morning.”
“Please do it in the morning. It’s nice in here dark, and awful when you turn the light on.”
Without answering, he came and stretched out on the bed, close against her, his body cool for a second. “Anyway, I bet you surprised him,” he said. “He’s probably not used to girls jumping out of his hearse.”
“I’m not used to sitting in sluck, either,” she said. “At least not in other people’s.”
Jim kissed her lightly on the shoulder. “Saint Patsy,” he said. “Prude and martyr.” He yawned and rubbed his forehead against her shoulder. “Maybe you aren’t going to like being a photographer’s wife.”
She lay facing away from him, on her side, and he reached one hand across her as if to touch her loins but then rested the hand on her hip instead. In two or three minutes he was sleeping, and the drizzle and the sounds of Jim’s breathing were the only sounds she heard. She fitted her back and legs against his body and soon felt warm and relaxed. She loved to listen to the rain. She drew Jim’s arm across her and held it beneath her breasts. Often she felt closest to him just after he had gone to sleep, especially if he went to sleep at a time when she wanted quiet rather than talk. The rain made a lovely sound and a lovely smell, and as she became more content she became more wakeful. She would have liked to read, but there was no bed light.
After a time she slept, but not very long. When she woke it was still dark outside. She could never sleep long or deeply in strange beds. Jim had turned over, so that only the curves of their backs were touching. Patsy felt sure morning couldn’t be far away, and she got up and put on her robe and tiptoed down the cool bare-floored hall to the bathroom. Her hair felt gritty from two nights of rodeo, and it seemed a good enough time to wash it.
The bathtub was old, narrow, and deep, with some of the enamel chipped off around the edges. The water pressure was very low, only a strong dribble, and she knew from the previous day’s experience that it would take a good thirty minutes for the tub to fill to the level she liked. She left the water running and slipped back through the dust-scented hall to the bedroom and got herself a book and tiptoed down the cool stairs to the kitchen. In the darkness the kitchen smelled of oilcloth and linoleum and the strong gray soap that Uncle Roger used at the sink. She turned on the light, got a glass of water, and made herself a peanut butter sandwich. There had been no peanut butter on hand when they arrived, so she had bought some in Vernon for just such an emergency. The kitchen window was open; through it she could hear the squabblings of chickens. She was reading Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, a good book to read but annoying because the pages wouldn’t stay open. She had been reading it at intervals for a month and was sixty pages into Volume II. She tried setting the peanut butter jar on the top margins, but that didn’t work very well, so she gobbled her sandwich and then read, picking up crumbs with her fingertips and eating them. When she went back upstairs the bath was still not ready and she sat on the
toilet and read until it was. She stuck the book in a closet on top of some towels, assembled her shampoo and several bath brushes, got in and soaked, scrubbed her knees and toes and back, soaked some more, washed her hair, and soaked still more, the wet ends of her hair dripping streams of water onto her chest and shoulders. Given half a chance she could bathe for an hour.
While she was drying herself she heard Roger Wagonner pass the door and go downstairs. The mirror over the lavatory was small and not very helpful, and she went back to the bedroom to attend to her hair.
Jim was sleeping soundly, his body curled toward the part of the bed where she had been. His shoulders were goose-pimpled by the morning coolness. Patsy pulled the sheet up over him and sat on the bed for a minute rubbing his shoulders until the goose bumps went away. He had not shaved the day before and in the gray early light she could see, when she bent over him, the line of light blond whiskers on his jaw, the same color as the light hairs on his chest. For some reason Jim took on authority when he slept; it was then that he seemed most like the man that she wanted him to be, and she felt respectful of him and pulled the sheet a little higher before she got up.
She went and sat by the window in the straight spindly brown chair, rubbing her hair with a towel. Outside, a cow was bawling at intervals, and in a few minutes Patsy saw her trailing slowly toward the barn. She was a small Jersey, and the calf that trotted after her was incongruously large and red. Uncle Roger had explained to her that the calf was adopted, and not the result of any irregular behavior on the cow’s part. The country smelled cool and wet. The sky was quite clear, and a white moon, already fading slightly, hung high in the southwest.
Patsy concluded that they were right, those people who said dawn was as lovely as evening. She had never been awake so early, and the few times she had been up early at all she had been going someplace and had had to dash or drag around, hunting clothes and stockings and cosmetics, and it had not been pleasant. But she was there, and settled, and clean and wide awake, and had a book to read and a husband sleeping nearby and her hair to dry in its own time, and the morning seemed beautiful. The sun was up, she could tell, but the window where she sat was on the west side of the house and the sun was still low in the east. After a while its rays began to touch the green mesquite trees on the slope south of the house and to touch the wet grass. The damp ground had begun to give up a little mist. She used a dryer when at home, but since she wasn’t at home she rubbed her hair vigorously with the towel from time to time, examining the ends closely to see if they were splitting.