Author: Larry McMurtry
Category: Literature
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They ate in the coffee shop of a large new motel, with red leatherette booths and fancy trays of syrups and jellies on each table. The place had a large plate-glass window; as they ate they watched the sun go down. Peewee had two cheeseburgers and Jim had a steak that was mostly gristle and Patsy had soup and a not-very-fresh salad and some rolls and butter; her legs were chilled from the air conditioning. When they left, the gray horizon had turned purple. As they drove away from Las Cruces, darkness came across the desert to meet them. The afterglow faded, there were taillights ahead and headlights coming and a swish from cars they met and a solid shock of air when they met one of the huge trucks. Before they reached Deming both Patsy and Peewee had fallen asleep again, Patsy on her pillow, Peewee under his hat.
Jim felt fresh and drove easily. After a bad stretch of dippy road they entered Arizona and he could drive faster. He could not see the scattered mountains, but he knew they were there. Patsy shivered. He rolled his window up and lost himself in fantasies of himself as a photographer. For a time the road went through a valley, through little towns that were asleep and scarcely lit, and when he rolled his window down to freshen the air he smelled alfalfa fields. Once, just outside a little town, he saw some people walking on the shoulder, and he slowed and saw that they were Indian teenagers walking home from somewhere. The boys were fat and wore cowboy hats, and the girls wore sweaters and clumped together. Off the roads he saw lights, but very low to the ground, as if they came from tepees or little huts. The lights were scattered along a gentle slope. Except for the teenagers, it was a little like being in the Old West for a moment, the scout slipping past the Indian encampment. The strange low lights were eerily beautiful, in contrast to the teenagers, who were eating Popsicles and throwing the wrappers on the ground.
He had driven over six hundred miles and, except for an interval or two, had not felt tired, but not long after he passed the teenagers an unshakable fatigue hit him, and hit him very quickly. It tugged at his eyelids, slowed his feet on the pedals, made the roadway seem very familiar and his own speed quite natural and safe. He knew how such tiredness worked, and the second time he nodded and jerked awake he slowed and eased down a steep shoulder to park on a level place by a barbed-wire fence. He pulled a jacket and a cotton blanket out of the heap of clothes in the back seat, spread the blanket over Patsy, covered himself with the jacket, and went to sleep at once.
In a little more than an hour he awoke and got out of the car to piss. He was stiff and cold and felt like driving on. The moon had risen over the valley and the clear desert sky was pale. In the moonlight he could see the dark bulks of mountains across the valley to the north.
When he started the Ford and drove up the slope of shoulder Patsy almost slid onto the floor, and the blanket slipped off her. She woke up and looked about in bewilderment. “Dumb fool,” she said vaguely and then scooted over by him and cuddled against his shoulder. It was quite cold. She turned around and fished in the clothes until she found a red cashmere sweater of his that she liked to wear. She tugged it on and snuggled against him again, nuzzling her face beneath his arm, almost into his armpit.
“What’s the appeal of my armpit?”
“Warmth,” Patsy said. “My nose is cold.” She covered her legs with the blanket and leaned her head against his shoulder, silent but friendly. When they curved up into the Superstition Mountains Jim slowed down and drove carefully, not fully trusting his reflexes. Patsy was still awake when they dropped into the flat desert east of Phoenix and saw the lights of the city brightening the sky.
“Please get a place with a swimming pool,” she said meekly. “If I’m going to have to sit around all day by myself I want something to dip my toes into. It won’t cost much.”
“You deserve that much,” he said. There were times when it was necessary for him to pretend he didn’t have almost a million dollars of his own, and it was one such time.
He pulled into a station to gas up and get a city map. Patsy got out and stretched and took a quick walk around the block, although it was almost two A.M. The air was cold and the dark sky very liquid. The sweater felt good; her legs were cold. When she was coming back to the station he saw Peewee standing at the curb looking down the wide empty street. He had his rigging and his canvas traveling bag and had tucked his shirttail in neatly. When he saw her coming he began to kick his bootheel against the curb.
“Where in the world are you going?” she asked.
“Might as well hitchhike on out to the grounds,” he said. “Ain’t no use in you-all going out of your way. I sure am much obliged for the ride. Hope I get to see you agin while we’re here.”
“Of course you will,” she said. “Don’t be so humble. Will anyone give you a ride this time of night?”
“Somebody’ll come along,” he said. “Always have.”
“He insisted,” Jim said when she was back in the car. “You scared him back there in El Paso.”
“How could I have scared him?” she said. “I didn’t do anything unusual.”
They drove down Broadway, the wide main street, rejecting block after block of palatial motels and settling finally on a modest stucco court with a small swimming pool. The manager had gone to bed, but cheerfully got up to register Jim. Patsy got out and walked across the gravel drive to stand by the water, which was bluish and lit by only two small lights. There was an old pool umbrella with five or six iron chairs grouped around it.
The room was modest and also poorly lit. The green bedspread depressed her and the green tile in the bathroom depressed her more. But whenever he was starting a new enterprise, Jim would have them poor for a time, and there was nothing to do but make the best of it. It was his one inflexible policy. Just as her spirits were sinking she caught an abrupt glimpse of herself in the bathroom mirror and pulled them up again. For a girl who had just traveled seven hundred and some miles, she looked okay, and she marched back out to the car to get her purse and her suitcase, determined that no cheap motel was going to control her spirits.
“Whee, we’re starting a new life,” she said cheerfully when she came back in. Jim was yawning, more tired than he would admit. He had brought only his cameras in. Without answering, he went back out to lock the car, and Patsy went in the bathroom to test the hot water. All the same, the life didn’t feel so new. She made the shower drip and held her hand under the drip until the water got hot, wishing there was a bathtub. Behind her she heard the springs of the bed give as her tired husband sank upon it, and when she went in to get her gown he was asleep, the bed light right in his eyes. Some new life, she thought, but then he had driven all that way without any help and with her bitching at him, and she went over and took off his loafers and turned the bed light out before she went in to take her shower.
7
PATSY SAT at the narrow little dressing table in the motel room, unhurriedly arranging her hair. The table had been designed to be a desk and a dresser both, and was not adequate to either purpose. It had a sheet of glass on top, under which was a map of a sort, showing all the spots of historical interest around Phoenix. The mirror was old and oval. Patsy lifted her hair, trying to imagine how she would look if it were long enough to be arranged in coils. Often she sat in front of mirrors for some time contemplating herself as she might be if she looked otherwise. She was far from indifferent to her looks, but on the whole she was content with them and felt no urgent need to make radical changes. She lingered at the dressing table because she found dressing tables nice places to meditate. When it came time to go someplace she could always be ready in six minutes. In the end she seldom did more than comb her hair and give a bit of attention to her eyes.
Jim was sitting impatiently on the bed watching her. He had his cameras and equipment bag ready and was merely waiting for it to be time to leave. Patsy had decided to skip the rodeo and go to a movie, and he was rather glad—if she had gone to the rodeo he would have felt responsible for her boredom. She had on her gray sleeveless dress and when s
he raised her arms to rearrange her hair the lift of her bosom made him feel sexy. He had slept most of the day while she had idled by the swimming pool reading and writing lengthy letters to her sister Miri and her friend Emma Horton. She was a happy idler—she loved to write long letters and sit by swimming pools, occasionally in the sun but more often in the shade. She never had been able to tan successfully—her shoulders and legs merely reddened.
As Jim watched her contentedly turning her head one way and another he became more and more horny, and with horniness came moodiness. He contemplated going over, kissing her, taking her to bed. She could usually be taken to bed, even if she had been planning on a movie; she cared more about impulse than she cared about plans. He cared about plans, though, and he had been planning to get some pictures taken. If they made love he probably wouldn’t even get to the rodeo that night. Given any sort of chance, Patsy would loll in bed for hours and would want him to talk to her, and he would get lazy and not go. He knew his laziness problem and was determined to get on top of it.
The thing that complicated such decisions the most was his knowledge that if he did go sweeping over and make love to her it probably wouldn’t be all too satisfying, anyway. Patsy liked for him to make love to her—at least she liked it okay, but she didn’t like it as much as he would have liked her to. It just didn’t seem to hit her terribly hard, or not very often, and though she was not critical of him particularly, he frequently felt that it was his fault that their transports were not more intense. If he made love to her and it worked out badly he would feel all the more that he ought to have gone to the rodeo and done his work. So, instead of going over and grabbing her he played out his desire in fantasy as he sat on the bed, and in fantasy it turned out a lot more gracefully and powerfully than it usually turned out in fact.
“I guess I’m ready,” Patsy said, standing up and putting her comb in her purse. “I’ve got about thirty minutes to make the feature.” Jim stood up too and managed to focus on the cool ready-to-go-out Patsy standing before him instead of the naked responsive Patsy in his mind.
She got a sweater, in case the theater should be too air-conditioned, and found her car keys. She was going to drop him at the rodeo and take the Ford. Jim kept a city map in his hand and gave her directions politely, but he was still horny and irritated with himself.
“I love these wide streets,” she said. “The nice thing about the West is all the space.”
“It wouldn’t be so nice if you had to live in the middle of it.”
Soon they saw the arena lights, with the sky behind them black and starless. There was a solid line of traffic. Patsy inched along irritably, tapping her fingernails on the wheel and compressing her lips with annoyance when a woman in a white station wagon stopped just in front of her and let two little boys out. Jim got out at the contestants’ gate, got his cameras from the back seat, and leaned across the seat to kiss her. She was in the process of taking off her sunglasses, and the kiss got tangled in fingers and frames.
“Don’t get yourself trampled,” she said.
He hung the cameras around his neck and walked into the mob that filled the space behind the arena. A riding club was lined up. Women in tight pants that made their abdomens bulge grotesquely clutched their saddle horns nervously. They obviously never rode except on the first nights of rodeos and strove desperately to keep their spotless hats on and their horses in place. Some of them looked so incongruous that Jim wanted pictures of them, but he had not yet learned to take pictures unobtrusively and was nervous about taking any. Despite his Levi’s and boots he himself felt incongruous—he no more belonged to the scene than the ladies on the horses. He felt almost as hopeless at photography as they were at horsemanship and wished for a moment that he had simply gone to the movie with Patsy.
He went up into the grandstand, but he stayed only a few minutes and took no pictures. The stands were a confusion of children, pillows, people in satin shirts, dropped programs, and Sno-cone vendors, and the aisles were already littered with popcorn sacks and paper cups. He went from the stands to the bucking chutes. The bareback riders paid him no mind at all. One tall man had his shirt off and was getting his shoulder bandaged. There was a smell of dust and horseshit, and the man who was being bandaged grunted almost as loudly as the broncs that were being cinched. He heard Sonny Shanks’s name called and looked up to see Sonny sitting above chute three, bareheaded and in a bright yellow shirt. A heavy-set cowboy reached up and handed him some money without a word and Sonny grinned and folded it carefully before stuffing it in his pants pocket. He wore black chaps and seemed without a care. When he saw Jim shooting pictures he nodded and gave a friendly wave.
Peewee appeared and was as glad to see Jim as Jim was to see him. “I would take you round but I got to help hustle the ridin’ stock,” he said. He wore the same clothes he had worn yesterday, but they were considerably dustier.
Jim found a place on the fence and watched the bareback riding. Shanks seemed to ride very well—at least two young cowboys standing nearby thought so. “I guess he’s living proof that no amount of pussy can hurt a man,” one said.
Instead of thinking of pictures, Jim found himself thinking of Patsy. He seldom photographed her—somehow it made them both self-conscious. He pictured her in his mind, sitting in the movie with a sweater over her shoulders. Her shoulders were lovely. Once before they were married they had gone in the evening to Fair Park, in Dallas, and sat on the grass by a little lake, eating fried chicken from a box. Patsy had worn a white dress with narrow straps, so that her arms and shoulders and neck were almost bare. She ate the hot chicken and wiped her fingers on the grass and talked about an Ingmar Bergman movie they had seen the night before, her voice soft and quick.
Jim sank easily and sometimes quite deliberately into reverie. As he was thinking of Patsy he was almost knocked off the fence by the two cowboys, who were scrambling up. He heard hoofs and snorting breath and looked down to see a yellow bronc charging straight up the fence line. The cowboys along the fence scattered upward before the bronc like grasshoppers before a mowing machine.
Jim got down and wandered to the stockpens to stare at the big lazy-looking bulls for a while. Three young would-be bull riders were looking at them too, one of them talking of how much he missed Idaho. When Jim got back to the arena the barrel racing had just begun. The first girl out was fat and a little scared. She let her horse go so wide on the second barrel that he almost touched the fence where Jim was standing. The second contestant was a woman in her thirties. She came out very fast on a well-trained gray horse, cut the barrels coolly and professionally, no more than a foot of space between the barrel and the horse’s body, and quirted the gray out of the arena in a time of twenty-one seconds. The crowd seemed to think that very good. The third rider entered the arena at a dead run. She was bareheaded, her hair bleached white. She charged down on the first barrel so recklessly fast that the crowd shushed completely and then roared when her Appaloosa came out of the turn safely, almost on his knees. The second barrel was harder. The girl rode almost straight at it, keeping the horse at full speed until she was only a few yards away. Then she swung right to clear the barrel and sharply left to round it; but the horse had too much speed. The girl was up and forward in her stirrups, and when the horse tried to whip out of the turn his forefeet slipped and he went down, still straining forward. The girl was thrown clear and hit the ground several feet from the horse, right in front of Jim. He and three cowboys immediately jumped the fence, thinking she was hurt, but the girl got up and shook her head rapidly, flinging tears out of her eyes.
“My stupid fault,” she said and began to cry bitterly. The clown came up and tried to put his arm around her, but she hit her fist against her thigh and stepped away. Still sobbing, she got her horse and began to lead him out of the arena.
“Well, bad luck,” the clown said, shaking his head in discouragement. Then he looked at Jim and seemed to recognize him.
“O
h, hi,” he said. “We met in Merkel, only you was knocked out at the time. I’m Pete Tatum.”
“Sure,” Jim said, shaking hands. “You saved my cameras.”
They followed Boots and her horse down the fence line, and a girl in a pink suit dashed into the arena, overshot a barrel, and lost her hat. By the time they were out of the arena Boots’s disappointment had subsided enough that she let Pete put his arm around her and soothe her and hug her a bit. Jim stood back awkwardly, not sure whether to leave or stay.
“I wish I would learn,” she said.
“Aw, you will. Let’s all go to the trailer and have a quick beer. I ain’t busy till calf-scramble time.”
On their way to the trailer they passed Shanks’s hearse and saw him sitting on the back end of it, one leg out of his Levi’s, trying to wrap an elastic bandage around his knee. He had a bandage on his hand too, and it gave him trouble wrapping the knee. He had one end of the elastic in his teeth. He glanced up and saw them passing and immediately let that end go.
“Hey, Boots,” he said. “Come wrap this thing for me. I ain’t got enough hands.”
Pete went over to the hearse, took the wrap off, and expertly rewound it on Sonny’s knee. “Tighter,” Sonny said.
“Not tighter unless you want gangrene. That ain’t the first knee I’ve ever wrapped.”
Sonny nodded at Jim. “Your wife ever get in a better mood?” he asked.
“She’s fine.”
Boots ignored Sonny entirely and walked on off, leading her Appaloosa. When Pete was finished with the support, Shanks slipped his leg back in his pants and began to tuck in his shirttail.