“Nothing. He just meant we were good friends.”
Lucy shuffled over to the patio and looked out at the white sky. “This weather’s gonna melt me yet,” she said. “They ain’t got them cattle in. I thought they was gettin’ some cattle in today.”
“Maybe it melted the cattle,” Eleanor said.
Lucy was still troubled. “A friend ain’t no husband,” she said. “No husband of no kind. You ain’t gonna do nothing crazy, is you?” She had not forgotten the nightmare of Eleanor’s marriage.
“Honey, you know me better than to ask that,” Eleanor said. “Of course I’ll do something crazy. I’ve always done crazy things. You’re as much to blame as anyone. You raised me. But I’m not going to marry that particular man, if it will ease your mind.”
“It sure does,” Lucy said. “Eases my mind. He was jus’ barely respectful.”
“I think I’ll swim a little. One of the most unpleasant men in Texas is coming this afternoon.”
“Mr. Stob?”
“Mr. Stob.”
“He ain’t eatin’ here, I hope.”
“No. He’s just buying cattle. We hope.” She got up and dipped the lemon out of her iced-tea glass and sucked it. It was cold, and soft from the tea, but still tart.
“Symbolic husband,” Lucy said. “I hope that man don’t get in the habit of callin’. Me and him could have some fights, I see that.”
“You’d love him,” Eleanor said, slipping off her robe. “He thinks I’m beautiful and sweet and domestic. Men are easy to fool, aren’t they?”
“You never fooled one yet,” Lucy said, handing her the bathing suit. “Not while I was around, you ain’t.”
20
“ANYWAY, IT WILL BE NICE to see Emma and Aunt Dixie,” Patsy said. They had just passed through a town called Jacksboro, on the edge of which stood the abandoned drive-in movie theater where Jim had taken the picture of the marquee with HORS SHIT spelled on it. They had gotten a disgracefully late start, and it was close to noon. Jim was silent and irritated, and Patsy had abandoned Love among the Cannibals and had decided to devote some attention to cheering him up.
“It may be nice for you,” he said. “I think she’s silly.”
“I wonder who she’ll have now?” Patsy said, calm and polite.
“Someone dumb. She’s never had anybody who wasn’t dumb.”
“You don’t know who she’s had. Don’t be needlessly rude to my aunt just because you’re mad at me.”
“Your aunt is a brainless woman,” Jim said, feeling more annoyed the more he thought about Dixie.
“Oh, forget it,” Patsy said. “I was just trying to make cheerful conversation.”
They lapsed into a prickly silence for a few miles and then were startled out of it by the sight of a swarm of helicopters in the air. There seemed to be more than a hundred of them, buzzing over the fields, the pastures, and the low hills like swarms of giant dragonflies.
“What in god’s name?” Jim said.
The closer they got to the swarm the more amazing and phenomenal it seemed. Helicopters were alighting and taking off mysteriously from both sides of the road. None of them were flying very high—some crossed the road over the car barely higher than the telephone poles. They had soldiers in them, soldiers wearing green fatigues. Some of the soldiers looked down at them curiously, some with embarrassment. All around, to the east and west, the swarm circled. To the south a long string of helicopters was visible coming north from some fixed but hidden point, like bees coming from a bee tree. Jim slowed down so they could watch the helicopters, and the soldiers in the lower copters pointedly ignored them, as if irritated by their watching. A little farther on they saw a sign that said DA NANG TRAINING CENTER.
“Weird?” Patsy said. “Are we in Vietnam?”
They stopped in the town of Mineral Wells and asked a filling station attendant, and he beamed and spoke proudly of the helicopters. “Ain’t they something?” he said. “Biggest trainin’ center going. They practice settin’ ’em down out there in the brush. You want to see something spectacular you ought to watch ’em going to the base some evening, three or four hundred of ’em coming over those hills at one time. It’s awe-inspiring, what you might say. Somethin’ to see.”
The sight made them forget that they were on bad terms, and though the heat increased, their spirits picked up. “We could go to Austin,” Jim suggested.
“Why?”
“Oh, for the hell of it. We could see the Williamses. We could eat Mexican food. We could sit in the beer garden and drink beer. We could go to a party tonight—there’s always a party in Austin. We could smoke pot and argue about literature. I miss all that. I don’t know why I thought I wanted to be a photographer. I’m really more of a literary type.”
“I don’t want to do any of those things,” Patsy said. “I want to go to our apartment and not leave for years. I want to go home and make a cream cheese sandwich.” Elaborate sandwiches were her culinary forte. She had not yet mastered cooking, though once in a while she made an ambitious effort, but she loved to concoct exotic sandwiches, with cheese and vegetables and fish and meat.
“Just for one night?” Jim asked.
“No. I itch. I want to see my doctor tomorrow if possible. We can do all those things you mentioned in Houston, you know.”
“I know,” Jim said, “but Austin is so much more promiscuous. Now that you’ve become a flirt we have to consider that. In Austin we could get laid, mutually, independently, any old way. In Houston there’s nobody to lay us but ourselves.”
He said it jokingly, but Patsy was not amused. “That’s very crude talk,” she said. “I don’t want anybody laying us but ourselves. Stupid. We have enough trouble with sex as it is. And I don’t like the term ‘get laid.’ It has very repulsive overtones to me. Just because I was teasing you a little you needn’t get salacious.”
“Who’s salacious? I was teasing you too.”
And they continued to snipe quietly at each other as they rode. When they passed through College Station the gray buildings of Texas Agricultural and Mechanical University were blurred by the midafternoon heat.
“At least you’re not an Aggie,” Patsy said. “That would have been too much.”
It had become very hot indeed. The back of her blouse was all sweat and likewise the back of Jim’s shirt. She leaned forward and unstuck the wet blouse from her back, but it was almost as wet in front too. Even her chest and bosom were moist, as if water was oozing out of every pore.
In Navasota, a crumbling Southern hamlet, they stopped to get some ice. The sun was falling, but falling very slowly. Patsy sucked a cupful of ice, dipping her fingers in the cup and lifting the ice to her mouth. It was in chunks slightly too big to get in her mouth and she juggled them in her palms and sucked them. She slipped her cold wet fingers inside her blouse and let the cool water drip onto her chest, onto the tops of her breasts and inside her bra. They passed through Hempstead and turned east onto the coastal plain, only fifty miles from Houston. The highway cut straight through the flat pastures. The sun came into the car from behind and sweat shone on Jim’s neck. When Patsy had eaten the last of the ice she wiped her face with her wet hands. Along the road, under almost every tree, was a Negro boy or an old Negro woman, with a small pile of watermelons or a basket or two of tomatoes to sell.
As they came near to Houston white clouds filled the horizons, but they were clouds that seemed to belong as much to the earth as to the sky. They were smeared and befogged with heat waves, huge indistinct clouds that were not at all like the clear fleecy clouds of the West, of Montana and Colorado and the Texas Panhandle. The clouds that hung over Houston seemed to drip and melt in the moisture-filled air, as if seen through the steam from a shower. About five-thirty they hit the outskirts of Houston and bogged in the evening traffic.
“God,” Jim said. He was tired and soaked with sweat and itchy and irritated. “What an insane thing to be coming into Houston. We’ll be an
hour getting across town.”
But Patsy, though as hot as he was, felt generally quiescent and good. She had ceased resenting the heat and the sweat, and felt almost cooled by it. She felt loose and tired and passive and a little somnolent, and looked at the unweeded foliage-clogged fields at the edge of town. She watched the fields turn into houses, into lots, into shopping centers, watched the cars, the red lights, heard the honking of irritated commuters, and was indifferent to it all, even to Jim, whose blond hair was darkened with sweat. In Houston she felt more located than she had in weeks, and the heat didn’t matter. She was not even bothered when they got behind a wreck and had to edge along for ten minutes until they could brave their way into another lane and swing around it.
“Don’t fret,” she said to Jim. “We’ll make it. There’s nothing to hurry for, anyway.”
Finally they got on a freeway. It too was clogged, but at least it was a freeway. They swung around the western edge of Houston on a loop that showed the downtown skyline with the heavy Gulf clouds as a background. In ten minutes they were on South Boulevard, where they lived. Their apartment was over the garage of one of the huge solid tree-hidden houses at the base of the Boulevard. The people who owned the house lived in Guadelajara much of the year, so they might almost have had the mansion. The owners were friends of Jim’s father, and let them have the garage for eighty dollars a month. Their friends universally regarded it as a great apartment, though it wasn’t air-conditioned. They had the whole upper story of an old frame garage, with great trees hanging over it.
Patsy jumped out ahead of Jim and ran up the stairs dragging her purse. She loved coming home, even though she knew the inside of the house would be an oven. She had meant to write Emma, who had been taking care of the mail and had a key, to come over and open the windows, but she had forgotten to write. It was very hot inside and the air was a little mildewy, as it was apt to be in Houston, but she dashed through the three rooms flinging the windows up. There was a huge pile of papers and magazines piled on their red couch, and although she would have read them already it was still lovely to have a pile of magazines to go through. Jim staggered in with his cameras and set them down and stripped off his sweaty tee shirt and went straight to the shower.
“Oh, goody,” Patsy said, wandering into her kitchen to make sure all her plates were still in the cabinet. “Jim,” she said. He was in the bathroom stripped. “I’m going to run out. I’ll get some beer and stuff and some meat and cheese. We’ll have great sandwiches for supper. You can unload the car when I get back.”
“Okay,” he said, bushed.
She went out and got bread and lox and cheese and chopped chicken livers and romaine lettuce and rye bread and beer and tea and some flowers from her favorite flower stand.
While Jim tripped in and out, cool in Bermuda shorts, unloading the stained untidy Ford she showered and put on a shift and set her table and put the flowers in vases and made sandwiches and stopped to call Emma.
“Emma!”
“Great, you’re home!”
“Are you still my friend?”
“Uh, sure, I guess. What do you mean?” Emma was not easy to pin down, but her voice was the same.
“I was just checking. I’m making sandwiches. We’re beat. I’ll see you in the morning, okay?”
She finished setting the table and they ate and sat around after supper, Patsy unwrapping magazines and skimming through them, Jim gloomily watching television. Gloom had settled on him at the supper table. He had wasted two months and much money and had not done what he had meant to do and was nowhere again. Casablanca was on the late show and was one of his favorite movies, but before it was well begun, sleep crowded past depression and Patsy had to poke him to make him go to bed.
She sat up very late. It was hot even with the windows open and their one little fan on, but she wore only her gown and drank iced tea and read such New Yorkers as she had missed in the West and washed her plates and made a pile of laundry and wandered about the house straightening things. She got drawn into Casablanca about halfway through and cried helplessly at the end, remembering Joe Percy, who was a great deal like Claude Rains except fatter. When she went to bed she dispensed even with her gown and lay on her side of the bed naked, listening. It was as though the heavy moist heat had an audible quality, as though she could hear it, something low but there, beneath the sounds of cars on the freeway and the distant wheen of ambulances. After a time she lay back, the heat her only cover, her upper lip, her breasts and stomach and shoulders all slightly damp with moisture; and when she could not sleep she turned on her reading light and adjusted it very low, looking to see that it did not shine in Jim’s eyes. He was heavily, sweatily asleep. She sighed, for she knew there would be trouble with him in the next few weeks. He would be very dissatisfied with himself. But being home again was a pleasure no prospect could spoil. She got up and fixed herself another glass of tea with ice in it and lay naked, reading New Yorkers until three in the morning. Occasionally some warm gust of breath from the Gulf came in the window and made the moisture on her body feel cool. The breath stirred the edges of the curtains and the pages of her magazines, and even the mossdraped limbs on the great trees, so that they moved as she read and brushed against the shoulders of the house.
BOOK II
Houston,
Houston,
Houston
1
PATSY SAT PERCHED on the very top of a jungle gym in Fleming Park, in Houston, watching Tommy and Teddy Horton. Tommy and Teddy were Emma’s two sons. They were climbing a slide from the bottom up and clambering rapidly down the ladder on the other side. Both of them needed haircuts. Emma sat on a concrete bench by a concrete picnic table, below Patsy. She was trying vaguely to do something about her hair—keep it out of her eyes, at least—but she was not having much luck. Emma had wispy dull blond hair, neither long enough nor vivid enough to be spectacular and not short enough to be pert. Patsy could not look at it without wanting to beseech her to do something about it, but she could never quite decide what ought to be done. She had just broken some big news and felt happy but a little nervous. She held on to the top bar of the jungle gym with her hands and rocked back and forth on her behind.
“Well, it’s nice you’re so pleased about it,” Emma said. “You look very pleased when you look pleased.” She glanced at her sons and raised her voice. “Knock that off, boy! Ladders are to climb up, slides are to go down. Run it the other way around for a while.”
Emma didn’t really care. She had merely noticed that the boys made Patsy nervous, clambering so recklessly down the ladder. Patsy made her nervous, rocking so recklessly on the jungle gym; but she looked so happy that she couldn’t be made to be careful, and Emma had a superstition against mentioning miscarriages or their possibility, so she held her tongue.
The boys each gave their mother a glance, saw that she didn’t really care, and went right on with their game. “I think Patsy’s the one that’s going to fall,” Tommy said. He was four and a half and extremely articulate for his age. At the very moment he said it Teddy lost his footing on the ladder and hung precariously by his arms for a moment. He slyly found his footing and continued down somewhat more cautiously, pretending it hadn’t happened.
“I won’t fall,” Patsy said. “Maybe I won’t know what to do with a child. Maybe I’ll be scared to let him climb ladders.” Tommy’s remarks often put her off. She was aware that he was a child she didn’t quite know how to handle.
“What do you mean, him?” Emma said, winding her hair into a loose knot. She wore a much-washed blue cotton dress. Patsy wore shorts and one of the old blue denim shirts that Jim had bought to disguise himself among the cowboys.
“I just think in terms of a him,” Patsy said. “How long does it take to learn the essential things? I look to you for instruction, I guess.”
“It takes until about the time the second one comes along,” Emma said. Teddy had got sand in his eyes from climbing into the
sole of Tommy’s tennis shoe, and he came running to his mother weeping and rubbing his sandy eye with an even sandier fist. Emma cleaned his face with the hem of her skirt, and once the tears washed out the sand Teddy dashed away, back to the slide. Teddy was barely two. He tried to crowd in ahead of his brother and Tommy immediately kicked him off the slide.
Patsy watched from her perch and said nothing, but she was secretly appalled at the savagery of Tommy and Ted. They fought all the time and were as violent as cowboys, only fortunately much smaller. Teddy got gamely up and Tommy kicked him off the slide again. Emma raised an eyebrow but kept out of it. Patsy watched with anticipatory smugness. Hers wouldn’t be savage. Firm and resourceful, but not savage. Teddy seemed to accept the violence as his due. He was not offended by the kicks and merely waited until Tommy got well up the slide before climbing on again.
“So what’s with Jim?” Emma asked. “I’ve been waiting for you to tell me, but my patience is wearing thin. I cry on your shoulder often enough, why don’t you cry on mine? It makes me seem weaker than you. You’re being inhumanly stoical about something.”
“No I’m not,” Patsy said, a little defensive. In musing about her baby she had been feeling so lifted and so cheerful that she had forgotten she had ever been depressed. She had been depressed all too frequently since their return to Houston, but a good mood always banished the memory of all bad moods, and she was a little miffed with Emma for bringing it up.
“Jim’s just been withdrawn lately,” she said, sighing.
Teddy, for some reason, chose that moment to make a dash for the street on the other side of the park. Being two, he was whimsical. Emma had to leave the conversation abruptly and dash after him. She was hefty and ran awkwardly, yelling, “Teddy, stop, Teddy, stop!”—words which had no effect whatever on Teddy. For a moment Patsy felt silly and looked across at Tommy. He was sitting on top of the slide watching the race with a slightly malevolent look on his face.
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