Terms of Endearment

by Larry McMurtry

  The big man evidently didn’t think her comment deserved an answer, because he grabbed her arm and stuffed her into a blue Pontiac without further ado. The two of them sat in the Pontiac for a while watching the little man writhe; then, somewhat to Royce’s surprise, the big man started the car and drove away, without bothering to run over the little man. The little man finally managed to get one foot under himself. The other foot evidently wouldn’t go under him, because he hopped on one leg right past Royce’s potato chip truck and on into the darkness of the parking lot.

  Royce scarcely gave him a glance. He had just had an inspiration. When the little man struck the building, it seemed to Royce that the building had crunched. He had distinctly heard a crunching sound. Obviously the building was flimsy; it was probably only made of plywood and tarpaper. There was no reason for him to wait half the night so as to run over Rosie and F.V. in the parking lot. A building that would crunch under the impact of a small dirty-mouthed man wouldn’t stand a chance against a six-year-old potato chip truck in excellent condition. He could drive right through the wall and run over Rosie and F.V. while they were actually dancing together.

  Without further contemplation, Royce acted. He drove his truck up parallel to the rear wall and leaned out and punched the wall a time or two with his fist. It felt like plywood and tarpaper to him, and that was all he needed. He chose as his point of entry a spot right in the center of the rear wall, backed up so as to give himself about a twenty-yard run at it, revved his engine for all it was worth, and, with blood in his eye, drove straight into the wall.

  The J-Bar Korral was a big place, and at first only those customers who happened to be drinking or dancing at the south end of the building noticed that a potato chip truck was in the process of forcing its way into the dance. The first impact splintered the wall and made a hole big enough for the nose of the truck, but it was not big enough for all the truck and Royce was forced to back up and take another run at it. A couple from Conroe were celebrating their first wedding anniversary at a table only a few yards from where the nose of the truck broke through, and the young couple and their friends, while mildly surprised to see the wall cave in and the nose of a truck appear, took a very mature attitude toward the whole thing.

  “Look at that,” the husband said. “Some sorry son of a bitch missed his turn an’ hit the wall.”

  Everybody turned and watched, curious to see whether the truck was going to break on through. “I hope it ain’t a nigger,” the young wife said. “I’d hate to see a nigger while we’re celebrating wouldn’t you, Goose?” Goose was her pet name for her husband. He didn’t like for her to use it in company, but the sight of the truck caused her to forget that temporarily. Her first name was Beth-Morris and that’s what everybody called her, including her husband’s best friend, Big Tony, who happened to be sitting right next to her at the table, helping her celebrate her first anniversary. No sooner had she uttered the forbidden nickname than Big Tony gave her a best-friendly hug and began to make goose talk right in her little white ear. “Shit, your husband’s already too drunk to cut the mustard. Let’s you an’ me sneak out to the car and play a little goosey-gander,” Big Tony said.

  Before Beth-Morris could take a firm stance Royce and his truck burst right into the J-Bar Korral. Annoyed at being stopped the first time, Royce had backed halfway across the parking lot for his second run. Beth-Morris looked up just in time to see a potato chip truck bearing right down on their table. She screamed like a banshee, spoiling everyone’s anniversary mood. Big Tony instantly had all thoughts of goosey-gander driven from his mind. He had just time to fling his beer at Royce’s windshield before the edge of the front bumper hit his chair and knocked him under the table.

  For a brief moment there was a lull. The people in the south end of the dance hall stared at Royce and his truck, unwilling to believe what they were seeing. Royce turned on his windshield wipers, to get Big Tony’s beer off his windshield, at which point people began to scream and push back their chairs. Royce knew he had no time to lose. Rosie and F.V. might escape him in the confusion. He let out his clutch and roared right out on the dance floor, scattering tables like matchsticks.

  Of the people Royce sought, F.V. was the first to see him. He and Rosie were dancing near the bandstand. They had both heard the first screams, but screams were not uncommon at a big dance, and they didn’t immediately stop dancing. At the sound of gunfire they would have stopped dancing, but screams ordinarily just meant a fist fight, and fist fights were not worth stopping for.

  Thus it was a severe shock to F.V. to complete what he thought was a nicely executed step and look up to see Royce Dunlup’s potato chip truck driving straight toward the bandstand. If shocks really froze blood, his circulatory system would have achieved a state of immediate deep freeze. As it was, except for a couple of involuntary jerks, he managed to control himself rather well.

  “Don’t look now,” he said to Rosie. “Royce is here. Don’t look now.”

  Rosie felt instantly weak. It was not a surprise, though; the only thing surprising was that she seemed to hear the sound of a truck. It was bound to be her imagination, however, and F.V.’s tone had more or less convinced her that her life depended on keeping her head down, so she did. She assumed Royce was stalking through the dancers, probably with a gun in his hand; since she had nowhere else to put it, she reposed her trust in F.V. Perhaps he could steer them out the door so they could make a run for it.

  But F.V. had stopped dancing and stood stock still, and the sound of a truck got louder; then the sound of screams got far too loud to be the result of a fist fight, and the musicians suddenly lost the beat. “My gawd,” the vocalist said, and Rosie looked up just in time to see her husband driving past in his familiar baby blue delivery truck.

  For a moment Rosie suddenly felt deeply happy. There was Royce in his delivery truck, driving with both hands on the wheel, just like he always did. Probably all that had happened had been a dream. Probably she was not at a dance but home in bed; the dream would be over any minute and she would be back in the life she had always lived.

  A happy relief swelled in her as she stood there expecting to wake up. Then, instead of her waking up, Royce’s truck hit the bandstand, flinging musicians left and right. The drummer’s drums all fell on top of him, and the vocalist was knocked completely off the platform into the crowd. To make matters worse, Royce backed the truck up and went at the bandstand again. The drummer, who had just managed to get to his feet, was once again knocked sprawling into his drums. The second crash did something bad to the electrical system. It spluttered and flashed a very white light, and the electric guitar, which was lying off by itself in a corner, suddenly emitted a horrible scream, frightening everyone in the place so badly that all the women screamed too. All the musicians picked themselves up and fled except one, the bull fiddle player, a tall gangly fellow from Port Arthur who preferred death to cowardice. He leapt over the fallen drummer and smashed at the potato chip truck with his bull fiddle. “Son of a bitch bastard!” the bull fiddle player yelled, raising the fiddle on high.

  Royce was mildly surprised at the stance the bull fiddle player took, but he was far from daunted. He backed up a few feet and went at the bandstand a third time. The gallant from Port Arthur got in one tremendous swing before being flung backward into the drums and the drummer. The fight was not gone from him, though; he rose to his knees and flung a cymbal at the truck, cracking Royce’s windshield.

  “Security, security, where’s the goddamn security?” the vocalist yelled from the midst of the crowd.

  As to that, no one knew, least of all the two owners of the J-Bar, Bobby and John Dave, who had run out of their office to watch the destruction of their place of business. They were both middle-aged businessmen, long accustomed to dealing with rowdiness, but the spectacle that confronted them was more than they had bargained for.

  “How’d that get in here, John Dave?” Bobby asked, astonished. “We nev
er ordered no potato chips.”

  Before John Dave could answer, Royce was off again. He was largely satisfied with the destruction of the bandstand, and whirled the truck around to face the crowd. He began a fast trip around the perimeter of the dance hall, honking as loud as he could in order to scatter the many bunches of people. It worked too; the people scattered, hopping around like grasshoppers over the many fallen chairs. In order to block the exit Royce then began to use his truck like a bulldozer, pushing chairs and tables into the one door and then smashing them into a kind of mountain of nails and splinters.

  Vernon, ever a cool head in an emergency, had rushed to Rosie’s side as soon as he figured out what was happening, and the two of them were concentrating on trying to “keep F.V. from panicking, which might give their position away. The fact that they were all short gave them some advantage, though it didn’t seem so to F.V. “Good as dead, good as dead,” he kept saying.

  “Damn the luck,” he added mournfully.

  “It ain’t luck, it’s justice,” Rosie said grimly. She was not especially calm, but she was a long way from panic. She had not lived with Royce twenty-seven years without learning how to take care of herself when he was mad.

  Vernon watched the little blue truck chug around the room smashing what few tables it hadn’t already smashed. The three of them had taken refuge behind the huge man who had danced with Rosie; fortunately he was with his equally huge wife. The two of them seemed to be enjoying the spectacle enormously.

  “That’s a pretty little blue truck,” the huge lady said. “Whyn’t we get one of them to haul the kids in?”

  At that very moment the pretty little blue truck veered their way. “Here’s what you do. You two run for the ladies’ room,” Vernon said. “Run, run!”

  Rosie and F.V. broke for it and the moment they did Royce spotted them. He braked in order to get an angle on where they were going, and while he was slowed down six drunks rushed out of the crowd and grabbed his rear bumper. The huge man decided to get in on the sport and ran right over Vernon, who had just moved in front of him to try and get in the truck. Royce jerked the truck into reverse and flung off all but two of the drunks; then he shot forward again and the last two let go. As the truck went by, the huge man threw a table at it, but the table only hit one of the drunks.

  F.V. outran Rosie to the ladies’ room, only to remember at the last second that he wasn’t a lady. He stopped and Rosie ran into him.

  “Ooops, where’s the men’s room?” F.V. asked.

  Rosie looked around and saw that the crowd had parted and that Royce was bearing down on them. There was no time for commentary. She shoved F.V. through the swinging door and squeezed in behind him about two seconds before the truck hit the wall.

  The part of the J-Bar where the rest rooms were had once been the projection area when the J-Bar had been a drive-in theater rather than a dance hall. It had cinderblock walls. Royce had expected to plow right through into the ladies’ John, but instead he was stopped cold. He even bumped his head on his own windshield.

  His confusion at finding a wall he couldn’t drive through was nothing, however, to the confusion inside the rest room. Most of the women who had been using it were blissfully ignorant of what was going on out on the dance floor. They had heard some screaming, but they had just assumed it was a bigger than usual fight and more or less resolved to stay where they were until it was over. Several were in the process of combing their hair upwards, one or two were regluing false eyelashes, and one, a large redhead named Gretchen who had just finished getting laid out in the parking lot, had one leg propped up over a lavatory and was douching.

  “Lord knows the trouble it saves,” she remarked, to general agreement, and the conversation, such as it was, was largely concerned with the question of unwanted pregnancies. A woman who was sitting in one of the toilets was regaling everyone with a story about unwanted triplets when with no warning at all a small male Cajun popped through the door and right into their midst. The appearance of F.V. was so startling that no one noticed the small frightened-looking redhead who was right on his heels; but the shock that followed when the truck hit the wall was nothing anyone could miss. Gretchen fell right off the lavatory, and a blonde named Darlene opened her mouth to scream and dropped a false eyelash in it. F.V., off balance to begin with, had the bad fortune to fall right on top of Gretchen.

  “It’s a monster, get him away,” Gretchen screamed. She assumed she was about to be raped and rolled on her belly and kept screaming. A couple of women rolled out from under the doors of the toilet stalls. They assumed a tornado had struck, but when they saw F.V. they began to scream for the police. Rosie had her ear to the door, and could hear the wheels of the truck spinning on the slick dance floor. When she looked around she saw that F.V. was in real trouble. Five or six women had leaped on him to keep him from raping Gretchen, and a particularly tough-looking young brunette was trying to strangle him with a tubular syringe.

  “Naw, naw,” Rosie said. “He ain’t out to hurt nobody. He just run in here to hide. My husband tried to run over him in a truck.”

  “He dove at me,” Gretchen said.

  “You mean there’s a truck loose in this dance?” the young brunette said. “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard of.”

  She hurried over and peeked out the door. “Aw,” she said, “it’s just a little truck. I thought you meant a cattle truck, or something like that. Anyway, it’s driving off.”

  Gretchen was still looking at F.V. with burning eyes. The news that a truck was loose in the dance hall seemed to mean nothing to her at all. “I still think he’s an ol’ sex fiend,” she said, looking at F.V. “A man that waits till he’s right between my legs to fall down may fool you, honey, but he ain’t fooling me.”

  F.V. decided Royce was the lesser of two evils. He ran out the door, with Rosie close behind him. On the dance floor a scene of pandemonium reigned. Royce had a headache from bumping his windshield, and had decided to go back to his original plan, which had been to run over the two sinners in the parking lot. To make that work he had to get back to the parking lot, and it wasn’t proving easy. The patrons of the J-Bar had had time to size up the situation, and a number of the drunkest and most belligerent began to throw things at the truck—beer bottles particularly. The outraged vocalist had managed to locate the two security policemen, both of whom had been taking lengthy craps when the trouble started. The two policemen rushed onto the dance floor with guns drawn, only to discover that the criminal was in retreat.

  Royce ignored the rain of beer bottles and plowed on across the dance floor, honking from time to time. The two policemen, plus Bobby and John Dave and the vocalist, began to chase the truck. Neither of the policemen was the sort to enjoy having a crap interrupted, though, and they weren’t running their best. When a small man jumped out at them and yelled “Stop!” they stopped.

  “Don’t stop,” the vocalist yelled, very annoyed.

  Rosie joined Vernon. “It’s all right, it’s all right,” she assured the policemen. “It’s my husband. He’s crazed with jealousy, that’s all.”

  “I knowed it, Billy,” one of the policemen said. “Just another goddamn family fight. We could have stayed where we was.”

  “Family fight, my Lord in heaven,” John Dave said. “Lookit this dance hall! Hurricane Carla never done us this much damage.”

  “No problem, no problem,” Vernon said quickly, pulling out his money clip. He peeled off several hundred dollars. “The man’s my employee and I’ll make good your damages,” he assured them.

  At that moment there was the sound of a car wreck. Despite the bottles and an occasional chair, Royce had managed to drive more or less calmly down the length of the dance floor and out the hole he had made coming in. It was just after he got out that the wreck occurred. The large man in the blue Pontiac had thought it all over and decided to come back and throw the little man against the wall again, and he was driving along slowly, looking fo
r him, when Royce drove through his hole. Darrell, the large man, was not expecting anyone to drive out of the wall of the dance hall and was caught cold. The impact threw Royce out the door of his truck and onto the asphalt of the parking lot.

  The next thing Royce knew he was looking up at a lot of people he didn’t know, all of whom were looking down at him. The surprising thing was that there was one person in the crowd he did know, namely his wife Rosie. The events of the evening, particularly the unexpected car wreck, had confused Royce a good deal, and he had for the moment completely forgotten why it was he had come to the J-Bar Korral in the first place.

  “Royce, just keep still now,” Rosie said. “Your ankle’s broken.”

  “Aw,” Royce said, looking at it curiously. It was the ankle belonging to the foot on which he had no shoe, and the sight of his sock, which wasn’t even particularly clean, made him feel deeply embarrassed.

  “I never meant to come with just one shoe on, Rosie,” he said, doing his best to meet his wife’s eye. “The reason is Shirley’s damn old dog carried the other one off.”

  “That’s all right, Royce,” Rosie said. She saw that Royce had forgotten her little indiscretion for the moment; he just looked tired, drunk, and befuddled, as he often did on Friday night, and squatting down beside him in the parking lot, with hundreds of excited people around, was indeed a little bit like waking up from a bad dream, since the man before her was so much like the same old Royce instead of the strange new hostile Royce she had been imagining for several weeks.

  Royce, however, felt a little desperate. It seemed very important to him that Rosie understand he had not deliberately set out to embarrass her. Long ago his own mother, a stickler for cleanliness, had assured him that if he didn’t change his underwear at least twice a week he was sure to be killed in a car wreck someday wearing dirty underwear, a fact that would lead inevitably to the disgrace of his whole family. A dirty sock and one shoe was maybe not so bad as dirty underwear, but Royce still felt that his mother’s prophecy had finally been fulfilled, and he needed to do what he could to assure Rosie it hadn’t really been his fault.