Author: Larry McMurtry
Category: Literature
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Shanks let them out with a grin and a wave. “Sorry we never scared up no action,” he said.
Patsy crawled out and went quickly into the motel, but Jim stood by the hearse a few minutes chatting with Sonny. Patsy was sure they were talking about the movie job and it angered her that they had not done their talking in front of her. She had an impulse to go back and tell them both off, but her desire to have Sonny gone was even stronger, and she didn’t.
As soon as she heard the hearse pulling away she began to strip, wrenching her blouse off angrily. She threw it into a corner near the suitcases. Two drinks had left her just high enough that she felt careless about herself. She intended to shower. As she was unhooking her bra Jim came in the door looking sheepish. She let the bra fall where it fell. When Jim saw that she was undressing he quickly shut the door. Patsy flung her skirt in the corner where she had flung the blouse. She shoved her panties down and kicked them high in the air with one foot. They floated down near the bra.
“Nice kick,” Jim said. He sat down in the one chair and idly picked up a copy of Esquire. Patsy strode in front of him, took off her watch and wedding band, and put them on the bedside table. She stood there a moment fidgeting and then sat down nude on the bed and stared at the wall, clasping her knees and pouting. Jim looked up curiously. “You look a little high,” he said. “He sure drives fast, doesn’t he?” Patsy lay back on the bed, her arms wide. She brought her legs up, one at a time, and held them as straight up as possible. She felt very odd. Jim glanced at her again and went back to his reading. It made her angry, and she chewed her lip in a way that she only chewed it when very unsettled. She felt sexy, and it seemed to her that it must be obvious, and that Jim had deliberately and callously rejected her just at the one time in their married life when she plainly wanted sexual attention. It seemed beyond belief that he could sit four feet away and not observe that she was in the mood to make love. But Jim was reading a piece about hallucinogenic mushrooms and noticed nothing of the sort. Patsy sometimes cavorted briefly and athletically in the nude, experimenting with exercises she soon grew tired of, and it failed to stir him. It was an interesting article on mushrooms and it simply never occurred to him that his wife was feeling sexy.
Patsy had never imagined that she would be, but she was, and being nude, eager, and ignored was very awkward. She had always responded or not responded to Jim’s wanting her, never otherwise. She got up and stood in front of him scratching her hip, but he didn’t look up. She went behind the chair and peered as if to see what he was reading, putting her hands on his shoulders.
“Your shower’s running,” he said, and it was. She had turned it on just before she began to undress so it would warm up.
“Oh, golly,” she said and hurried off to the bathroom, which was full of steam. The water was scalding and she turned it off and went back to the bedroom uncertainly. She felt quite disoriented and got her gown and a hairbrush and began to brush her hair with quick furious strokes. Her mood made itself felt. Jim looked up and saw that she was agitated, but he was at a loss as to why and looked down again at his magazine.
“Oh, hell,” Patsy said, sniffing and beginning to cry. She dropped gown and brush and went over and sat in her husband’s lap, on top of the slick magazine. “Please quit reading,” she said.
“Why?” he asked, surprised.
“Because I don’t know how to seduce you,” she said.
He was even more surprised but quickly kissed her, and Patsy was wet-cheeked and grateful. She was so eager that Jim was startled and a little discomfited, though for months he had hoped for precisely such eagerness. The passionate Patsy he had fantasied so long had miraculously materialized right on his lap, and had only to be taken.
Yet, when he did take her, nothing was so dramatically different. He was deceived by her eagerness into thinking she was nearer the moment than she was, and yet when his was past she seemed, if anything, to be quieter and further away than she usually was. But he was not angry, not even later when she was ready and her movements became more dictatorial and he had to strain to stay with it. He was calm enough but puzzled and a little sad. If anything new had happened it had belonged to Patsy and not to the two of them, but better one of them than neither of them, he decided, and he was prepared to kiss her or make conversation or do anything she wanted in order to keep things pleasant. He lay quietly, a little bemused, until her heart stilled and her body ceased nipping at him. After a while she put her hand on his shoulder so that he would move off, and when she returned from the bathroom she put her hand on his hip and let one of her legs lie against his. She wanted that much touching but no more and moved her breast away when he reached out to hold it. It was quite hot, it seemed to her. “Well?” Jim said, as if there might be something to be discussed.
Patsy’s stomach gurgled. She felt quiet and didn’t want to discuss anything. “I’m glad we can sleep late in the morning,” she said.
Later, when he was asleep, she felt gentle toward him and stroked his hip, regretting that she was not kinder or more congratulatory or something. Often since marrying him she had had the feeling that something very important was being ignored or misunderstood, but always before it had caused her to worry about herself, or to be scared for herself. The feeling came again, but it made her worried about Jim and a little scared for him. It occurred to her for the first time that of the two of them he might be the more insecure and the more exposed. When the wind cooled the cabin and her body dried she pulled the bedclothes out from under Jim and covered them and moved closer to him, as if her being close might remove the vague threat and make things right for him.
17
THE NEXT MORNING began as many did, with Patsy kneeling on the bed reading Gibbon while Jim slept. He slept on his back and she occasionally gave him a fond glance. One of the nice things about him, she decided, was the little line of blond hair that ran down the middle of his stomach toward his groin.
There was a knock on the door and she jumped up, frightened. She had a feeling it was Sonny Shanks returning to the attack. But it was Boots—and Boots looking uncharacteristically wifely, with a scarf around her head and the Thunderbird stuffed full of dirty Levi’s and shirts. “Let’s go wash,” she said. Patsy was in the mood. She put on an orange shift and quickly gathered up their dirty clothes. Jim awoke and peered sleepily at Boots over the covers and she laughed. “He’s cute when he’s sleepy,” she said.
They drove to a laundrymat with egg-yellow washing machines and chattered while the clothes whirled. The laundrymat was crowded. Patsy sipped a Fresca and peered through her sunglasses at the flabby wives in pedal pushers that seemed to predominate. Children were continually dropping gum from the penny gum machine and squalling when it rolled unretrievably beneath the washers. There was a pile of coverless magazines, Redbook, The Saturday Evening Post, U.S. News and World Report, but she was not in a reading mood. A cowboy with his shirttail out sat across from them and sharpened his pocketknife on the heel of his boot. He had a sad, lonely-looking face.
“You look so pretty in whatever you wear,” Boots said. “I just look like me in whatever I wear.”
Patsy was flattered. She felt happy and bright, but Boots seemed slightly sunken and kept twirling her Coke in her hand.
“Won’t you and Pete have to settle down sometime?” she asked. “You can’t just go on rodeoing forever, can you?”
“I don’t know,” Boots said. “Sometimes I don’t think we lead a very normal life. Do you and Jim go to bed together very often?”
“Sure, every night,” Patsy said, but when Boots’s face fell she realized something else had been implied.
“Oh, no,” she said. “Not that often. It varies. Sometimes two or three weeks get by us.”
Boots looked a little less downcast. “I’ll be glad when I’m in my twenties,” she said. “Being so young makes me blue.”
“No shirts?” she asked, incredulous, when she saw that Patsy’s laundry was all und
erwear and towels. She was holding a sodden gray work shirt in her hand.
“We launder them. Where would I iron. I couldn’t iron even if I had a place. What do you do?”
“Iron on the drain-board. Pete would never let me get his laundered. It would be a waste of money and we never waste money except on beer.”
When the laundry was done they had a quiet cup of coffee in a noisy cafe and parted at the motel feeling that they were almost friends.
When Patsy left, Jim got up, shaved hurriedly, and went over to Sonny Shanks’s motel. Boots’s visit was a godsend. Sonny had asked him to come over and he had been wondering if he would lie to Patsy when she asked him where he was going. She almost never asked him where he had been, so he wouldn’t need to lie. Sonny was lounging on the bed in his undershorts drinking a beer. He had asked Jim over because he liked an audience and Jim was an excellent audience. Before the morning was over he had regaled Jim with a great many of his exploits, some involving bulls and horses, some involving women, but all starring himself.
Jim, in return, showed Sonny his rodeo pictures. There were pictures of bulls, horses, cowboys, cowgirls, riders getting dumped, Pete training Hercules, ropers with pigging strings in their mouths, bulging matrons in riding pants, Sno-cone vendors, piles of rigging, one picture of a mound of bullshit, one of some dogging steers trying to screw each other, several of bleachers strewn with trash, one of a drunken Indian passed out under a pickup—pictures of everything that could be photographed around a rodeo. The one Shanks liked best was a picture of himself. Jim had caught him sitting on the rear end of the hearse, one leg cocked up, one leg stretched out, his shirt unbuttoned and a can of beer in one hand. He was talking to a cowgirl who had happened by.
“They oughta put that one on a billboard,” Sonny said cheerfully. “Sell a lot of beer.”
Jim left feeling good about himself and friendly toward Sonny, but he was slightly annoyed with Patsy. She never liked anyone he found really interesting.
That evening, tired of the motel and indifferent to such movies as could be seen in Laramie, Patsy went to the rodeo. Peewee ate supper with them and offered to sit with her while Jim attended to his picture taking. They sat high up in the grandstand, where she could enjoy the Wyoming sky and look down at the horses milling in the arena. Peewee had a hopeless crush on her but handled it very well, restricting himself to an occasional worshipful glance. She was wearing her favorite gray dress and had a green sweater to put on when the evening grew too chill.
“Okay,” she said. “You have to explain it all to me. This going on right now is the Grand Entry, right? Why do they have it?”
Peewee was nonplused. It had never occurred to him to question the importance of the Grand Entry.
“Well, you wouldn’t want to just start off without it,” he said.
He explained gallantly through three events and then had to leave to go ride his saddle bronc. It was a big gray horse and to Patsy’s dismay dumped him flat on his back ten steps in front of the chutes.
“What went wrong?” she asked when he had made his way back to her.
“Everything. All I did right was land to the side. Half the time I land underneath ’em.”
Patsy eventually grew bored and they left the stands and wandered along the arena fence. The barrel racing was about to begin, and to Patsy’s delight Boots was announced as the first rider. She had Peewee help her up on the fence so she could see better. Boots came out very fast. The first barrel was close to where Patsy sat and she saw that the look on Boots’s face was very like the look she had when driving the T-bird, only more intense. The horse whipped around the barrel and headed directly across the arena toward the second barrel. There, while running almost at top speed, it seemed to Patsy, he fell suddenly and rolled completely over. “She overrun it,” Peewee said. “That’s twice I seen her do it.” Boots and the horse were both hidden by a swirl of dust, but when the dust thinned it looked as if she had come through unhurt. She clung to the side of the saddle as the horse got to its feet, and several of the cowboys who had begun to run toward her stopped, supposing that she meant to finish the ride. The horse, confused, looked around at her, and when he did Boots let go her hold and dropped to the ground.
“What happened?” Patsy said.
“No telling. He rolled over with her, though.”
Patsy jumped down into the arena. By the time she got to Boots more than a dozen cowboys had gathered around her, and Pete had arrived. A doctor had been summoned, and while he was bending over Boots, Jim joined Patsy on the edge of the crowd. An ambulance, its red light swirling, entered the arena slowly and came toward the crowd. Pete glanced up from talking to the doctor, saw Jim and Patsy, and motioned for them to come. He looked very discouraged.
“Is it bad?” Patsy asked.
“Busted hip, at least,” Pete said. “The doc says we oughta take her to Cheyenne. I was wondering if you-all could go and stay with her till I get there. I can’t come until the bull ridin’s over.”
They quickly agreed. Boots was unconscious. As they were closing the ambulance doors Patsy caught a glimpse of Pete, looking very dejected, taking the reins of Boots’s horse from some cowboy. Then they were speeding out of Laramie on the dark road to Cheyenne. The trip was as fast as the one they had made the night before with Sonny, and they were just as silent. Boots moaned from time to time but did not really regain consciousness until they were wheeling her into a bright hospital corridor in Cheyenne. Her face was tear-streaked and her mouth quivering with pain. Patsy stayed with her in the emergency room, holding her hand until the interns came and wheeled her away.
Then there was nothing she and Jim could do but sit in the waiting room and wait. They held hands and sat almost in silence for more than an hour, now and then shifting their dry fingers in each other’s hands. Then Pete came in. His face was streaked with greasepaint, though he had made a hasty attempt to wipe it off. He had already seen Boots’s doctor.
“Smashed up her hip and leg, and she’s got a little concussion,” he said. “Didn’t break no ribs, by a miracle.”
He seemed tired and white, and they scooted over to make room for him on the bench where they sat. He handed Jim the keys to the Thunderbird. “You two just as well go on back,” he said. “I’ll stay around tonight and tomorrow. Maybe one of you could come back and stay tomorrow night while I’m working. Hate to ask. Course she may not need nobody by then.”
“Why should you hate to ask?” Patsy said. “Of course she’ll need somebody. We should just get a motel room here. I’d as soon be in Cheyenne as in Laramie.”
They stood up but didn’t leave immediately. Patsy hated to go away and leave Pete looking so forlorn. “Look, we can stay with you tonight, if you want us to,” she said, trying to get him to look up at her. He did, but his gaze scarcely registered.
“No, no use everybody being miserable,” he said. “Just come late tomorrow afternoon.”
When they left he walked with them down the corridor to a pay phone, to put in a call to Boots’s parents, in Fort Worth.
“Aren’t you tired of all this?” Patsy said, as they were driving back. Jim was quiet. He looked almost cheerful, and it disturbed her. She carried other people’s pain with her for hours, and it always disconcerted her to see that Jim didn’t. Once out of sight of suffering, his mind simply negated it and he could act as if it didn’t exist.
“I’m not tired of anything,” he said. “The only thing I’m really tired of is you waiting for me to get tired of something. I do get a little tired of you not believing in me.”
“Oh, for god’s sake,” she said. “I wasn’t not believing in you. I meant rodeo. Haven’t we followed cowboys around long enough watching them get hurt. I want to go back to Texas and have a baby.”
“I was thinking I might go to graduate school this fall,” he said.
“Were you?” She was quite surprised.
“I haven’t decided anything. I knew if I brought i
t up you’d accuse me of giving up on photography too soon.”
“I wasn’t meaning to accuse you of anything,” Patsy said. “Please don’t be so defensive.” They fell silent again, and she felt very depressed.
The next morning she awoke before Jim and went down the street to a drab linoleum-floored cafe for breakfast. There was an item on the front page of the morning paper that chilled her so much that she couldn’t eat. Two rodeo cowboys had beaten an elderly man almost to death, and all by mistake. One of them fancied his girl friend was sleeping around and he and a friend had gotten drunk and gone to the girl’s house. Her father, whom they had never seen, answered the door, and the cowboys concluded he was the lover and hit him with their fists and a beer bottle and left him on his own living-room floor with a fractured skull. The cowboys’ pictures were in the paper—she had the immediate irrational conviction that they were the same two men who had beaten Jim. She had ordered toast and coffee and a glass of milk, but except for a sip of milk she left the breakfast untouched and hurried back to the motel, very upset. She woke Jim and insisted that he look at the paper.
“Are those the men who beat you?” she asked.
At first Jim could make no sense of what she was saying, but when he did he shook his head. “Those aren’t the guys,” he said. “The ones that hit me were down in Texas.”
“I know, I know,” she said. “So were we then. That makes it even worse. It’s not just two especially dangerous cowboys, it’s some sort of insane violence this life seems to breed. I hate it. I won’t stay around it any longer. We’re going back to Houston.”
She was sitting by him on the bed, looking so serious that he wanted to smile, though he knew there would be hell to pay if he did. Stories of violence seldom really touched him, and being awakened and given an ultimatum made him feel stubborn.
“We’ll go in good time,” he said.