Cadillac Jack

by Larry McMurtry

  "I’m worried about you, Jack," he said, out of a clear blue eastern Oregon sky.

  "Me?" I asked. "Why worry about me? Don't I look healthy?"

  "Yeah, you do. You shore do, Jack," Goat said, pulling at a tuft of hair that curled out of one side of his nose, as white as the covering of Momma Cullen's worn-out chair.

  He was silent for a few minutes, obviously a little embarrassed by the conversation he seemed to want to initiate.

  "Jack, all you thank about is bulldoggin'," he blurted out, awkwardly picking up a pair of wire-pinchers and looking at them as if they might contain the secret of existence.

  "I guess you're right. Goat," I said. "I guess it is about all I think about."

  "I tolt you," he said. "It's all you thank about."

  "But what am I supposed to think about?"

  My question stumped Goat completely. He lapsed into an aggrieved silence, staring out the window at the gray sage. I could tell he thought it unsporting of me to turn the question around and point it in his direction.

  "Why hell. Jack, I don't even thank you like rodeoin'!" he exclaimed, some thirty miles later.

  It was true. I didn't, particularly, although I had not got around to admitting this to myself. I was honestly fascinated by bulldogging, but apart from that what I really liked about the life was the opportunity it gave me to drive across vast, lonely American spaces.

  Still, there was no way I could dispute Goat's main point. The world of the arenas was a tawdry one—pridefully crude, complacently violent. I had already started to escape it by spending what spare time I had in junk shops and low-grade antique stores.

  The day before, at a little store outside Pendleton called Babe's Antiques and Plaster, filled mostly with hideous plaster lawn ornaments, I had bought what I later discovered was a Tlingit copper-and-bone dagger. I gave Babe $30 for it, just because it was pretty.

  But my passion for objects was still latent, and I had not consciously considered Goat's point.

  "Well, what do you like about it, Goat?" I asked.

  Goat could hardly believe I would be gauche enough to ask him two questions in the same day. On the whole he was not a talkative companion, though once in a while he could be induced to talk about some of his more impressive accidents, which he called storms.

  "Got in a storm down in Laramie," he would say. "Hung myself to a dem bull and that sucker jerked my arm too far out of the socket, they had to fly me to Dallas, to a socket doctor. Missed two rodeos because of that storm."

  My question put him into a sulk, but it*s a long way from Pendleton to Sedalia, Missouri, where we were going. By the time we were fifty or sixty miles into Idaho, Goat had looked into his soul and found the truth.

  "Why hell, what I like about it is all that over-age pussy," he said. "All them drunk grandmothers. I’d be lucky to get any other kind, bunged up as I am."

  It was true that an awful lot of middling to old ladies used rodeos as an excuse to get lit, not to mention laid.

  "Some of them was my fans," Goat added, respectfully, meaning that they had been hopeful young women when, as a young cowhand fresh out of Guthrie, Oklahoma, he had made rodeo history at the Fort Worth Fat Stock Show by riding a bull called Sudden Death—a monster black Brahma, sort of the Moby Dick of bulls, killer of two, crippler of several, and never ridden for a full regulation 8 seconds until Goat came along.

  Goat was not particularly moved by his observation, but I was. Rodeo people of a certain age, staring out into the arenas around which they have spent painful and mostly disappointing lives, still talk reverently about the night Goat Goslin rode Sudden Death. It was a bittersweet thought that all over the west there were old ladies eager or at least willing to grapple with Goat, in a pickup seat or miserable motel room, because of a brief, dust-cloaked ride thirty-five years back down the highway, that most of them had not even been there to see.

  But whether they had seen it or not it was the diamond in the popcorn of their lives—an event that only lasted 8 second.

  A month later, at the National Finals Rodeo, I nearly hit perfection, throwing a steer in 4.1 seconds. It won me a championship saddle and a belt buckle that would have stopped a bazooka bullet. When I let the steer up I felt sad—the same sadness I felt driving out of De Queen with the Sung vase. I was looking downward from a peak, and my descent was swift. A month later I was taking 10 and 12 seconds to throw steers I should have thrown in 5 or 6. But I lacked even a vague notion of what I might want to do next, and kept on desultorily dogging steers.

  In early February the Fort Worth Fat Stock Show rolled around. On the first night. Goat was sitting on the fence by the bucking chutes, smoking and watching, as he had done for thousands of nights.

  Tex Ritter—Goat's favorite singer—was there that night. During one of the breaks in the action he sang "Hillbilly Heaven"—it was not long before he departed for it himself. The crowd burst into tears, overcome by the memory of immortals like Patsy Cline and Cowboy Copas. Tex didn't sing his well-known rodeo classic, "Bad Brahma Bull," fearing, perhaps, that it would be an augury.

  Twenty minutes after he sang, a very bad and very black Brahma bull smashed through the chute gate, threw his rider, narrowly missed killing a clown, then whirled and leaped the arena fence right where Goat was sitting. The fence, like the gate, smashed as if it were plywood. The bull came down with Goat right underneath him, the bull's front feet hitting Goat in the chest—his cigarette was still in his mouth and still lit when he died, by which time the bull had trotted back to the bullpen, as placid as a milk-pen calf.

  So died Goat Goslin, a small legend in his own time. Everyone agreed that the spirit of Sudden Death had finally come back to claim him. Some went so far as to allow that it was fitting.

  But a lot of hard-drinking, fast-fucking grandmothers had lost their hero.

  I sold Dandy, my wonderful dogging horse, that night. The next day I accompanied Goat home to Guthrie and paid for his funeral. The minute it ended I left for Houston, with a station wagon half full of what Boog Miller called Indian doodads, sure of nothing except that I had gained an exit, and lost a friend.

  Chapter V

  The peculiar thing about my first date with Cindy Sanders was that the whole thing was arranged more or less directly under the anguished gaze of her fiance, Harris Fullinwider Harisse.

  I say more or less directly because the first thing I noticed about Harris was that it was hard for him to fix his gaze directly on anything—up to and including a woman as easy to look at as Cindy. His gaze wandered nervously from place to place, object to object, and person to person, darting away like a hummingbird if it seemed likely that other eyes were about to make direct contact with his own.

  When I mentioned this to Cindy, in bed the next morning, she sighed, up to then the first evidence I had that she was capable of even momentary discouragement.

  "He looks that way because he can't decide whether to come in or go out," she said.

  It was early morning—my brain hadn't started its day.

  "Come in or go out what?" I asked.

  "The door, of course," Cindy said. "Doors confuse him. He gets one leg through and then he can't decide whether to put the other leg through. So he stands there looking that way."

  It was true that Harris had neither come in nor gone out during the hour I was in Cindy's shop. But, apart from noting his anguished gaze, I had been so entranced with Cindy that I hadn't paid him much attention.

  "That's a strange problem to have," I said, for so it struck me. I had known confused people in my day, but none so confused they stopped in doorways.

  "Not at all," Cindy said. "It's a perfectly well-bred indecision. Choice for Harris is like poetry for poets. It's so filled with nuance that he usually just stops. You have to respect it."

  Maybe you did, but it was hard for me to imagine Cindy Sanders waiting sweetly while Harris worked out the nuances of every doorway they came to, as if it were a sonnet.

 
Cindy got up and tromped off to her kitchen. She returned in a minute, clutching a knife, an expensive Italian salami, a big slab of Brie, and a half-gallon of apple juice. Then she sat cross-legged on the bed and ate heartily, occasionally whacking me off a hunk of salami or swiping up a glob of Brie and offering it to me on her finger.

  I was at a loss to understand how a man so indecisive had managed to become engaged to Cindy, a girl who expected immediate contact, eye, mouth, and genital. She liked direct looks and direct kissing.

  "Tell the truth," I said. "You're not really engaged to Harris."

  Cindy had her mouth full of salami and couldn't talk, but she shook her head vigorously and looked slightly outraged.

  "I certainly am engaged to him," she said indignantly, as soon as the salami was on its downward path, somewhere between her breasts.

  "Who are you to question it?" she asked, with the open defiance I seem to inspire in emphatic women.

  What was I supposed to say to that? I was nobody to question it. I wasn't particularly ill-disposed toward Harris, just curious as to how such an arrangement had come about.

  After all, Cindy had made the moves, where I was concerned. When I drove up and parked In front of her shops—she had three, all in one elegant nineteenth-century building on O Street—all I had meant to do was sell a earful of cowboyana. The only reason I was in Washington was because Boog insisted that the East had gone cowboy crazy.

  "The twain's done met," he said. "Cowboy boots is sellin' quicker than two-dollar pussy, even up in New York, where two-dollar pussy don't have to stand on the street comer very long."

  "Not if you're in town, you pot-gut," Boss said. She was making biscuits in her big airy kitchen and Boog just happened to wander past, drinking what he called his breakfast toddy, a mixture of vodka, gin, tequila, and orange juice. Boss turned around and plastered him right in the face with a big wad of biscuit dough, laughed heartily, and immediately set about mixing some more dough.

  Boog's uncontrollable lust for cheap women, unabated through three decades of marriage, had inadvertently contributed to Boss's own fame, since she had long since chosen to fight fire with fire.

  "What I told the old fatty," she confided one day, '*was that rd fuck six famous Yankees for every little pot he stuck his dipstick in."

  Boss had implemented her threat with vigor, if legend was to be believed. She was a tall woman, with raven hair and looks that still stopped people in their tracks, though she was fifty-two and had been married to Boog over thirty years, an experience that would have marked most women deeply.

  Since most of those years had been spent in Washington, Boss had not lacked opportunity. Writers were her over-all favorites, though she excluded most journalists and all sportswriters from contention.

  "Why would I want a sportswriter when I've already got six kids to raise?" she asked, when the subject came up.

  Scarcely a poet or novelist of consequence had escaped her, in her time. It was not uncommon to find her latest, a tiny Jewish poet named Micah Leviticus, sobbing quietly in her motherly lap, or else perched on the cabinet watching television, depending on his mood. Micah lived upstairs, sharing a room with Tommy, the Millers' youngest child.

  About politicians Boss was more discreet. There were gossips who felt they knew which of the major figures she had accepted, but Boss herself was inscrutable when the great names were reeled off. She spoke of Jack or Adlai or. Lyndon as of any other friend, though once in a while a special light would come into her restless gray eyes at the mention of Estes Kefauver.

  The light was not lost on Boog, who sometimes dropped Kefauver's name just to see it come on.

  "Ain't women sumpin'?" he would say. "Remember Estes Kefauver? Why that big gawky son of a bitch could get pussy Jack Kennedy wouldn't have got the merest whiff of."

  When Boss mentioned her threat about the famous Yankees she was sitting at her kitchen table, drinking coffee.

  "I learned a harsh truth as a result of that remark," she said.

  "Which is?"

  "Which is that there's more cheap women than famous Yankees," she said, opening The Wall Street Journal to the real estate ads. Boss had a pilot's license and would fly off in her Cessna to any part of America where there was a good property to buy. Her local operations she ran mostly by phone from her spacious bedroom, leaving the legwork to competent young women such as Kate, Coffee, or Tanya Todd—another old girl friend of mine, who ran her Dallas office. I sometimes called Tanya Roger the Dodger, since over the years she had proved about as hard to sack as Roger Staubach. Once in a while she could be blindsided, if one felt up to a sexual blitz, but that was the only method likely to prove effective.

  Though neither famous nor a Yankee, I was crazy about Boss and was always shooting her looks of love. I shot her a few while she read the Journal, but she looked up and disposed of my candidacy with a vivid smile.

  "Get up and go buy some doodads," she said. "I class you with the sportswriters."

  "In my view that's very unfair," I said.

  Boss ran her fingers through her long black hair, idly testing its texture as she smiled at me.

  "Yeah, but your view don't count," she said, and turned the page.

  Before I could get her to look at me again, Micah Leviticus came dragging into the kitchen, wearing gym trunks and an old C.C.N.Y. T-shirt. He was carrying a tiny TV, which he plugged into an outlet near the sink before climbing up in Boss's lap. A Roadrunner and the Coyote cartoon happened to be playing. Micah watched it raptly, as Boss read the Journal The minute a commercial came on he looked up into her beautiful face.

  "I dreamed about Rilke again last night. Boss," he said. "Why is it always Rilke? I don't even like Rilke.”

  "You sweet thing," Boss said, and gave him a couple of not-so-motherly kisses. Then she favored me with another of her cheerful and vivid smiles.

  I wondered sometimes if her cells weren't just better than other people's—more ripe with the lifestuff, or something.

  It was one way to account for the fact that she seemed twice as alive as the rest of us.

  Micah Leviticus was exactly five feet one inch—sixteen inches shorter than myself. That fact alone blew the one solid theory I had about women, which is that even the best of them are suckers for tall men.

  Chapter VI

  Meanwhile—back in bed—the defiance had not entirely faded from Cindy Sanders' face. She swallowed a big glob of Brie and washed it down with three big gulps of apple juice, watching me closely to see if I was going to mount a serious campaign against her engagement.

  I kept quiet. Every single time I've gone one-on-one with female defiance, I've ended up face down on the floor, twitching weakly. One thing I've learned to do without is the myth of male dominance. Possibly there had actually been male dominance in other eras, but constant exposure to women on the order of Boss Miller and Tanya Todd convinced me it had gone the way of the dodo and the great auk.

  "I want to get something straight," Cindy said. "Did you really know Big John Connolly, or were you just conning me?"

  "Sure I know him," I said. "Why would you doubt it?"

  "Let's put it this way," she said. "Why would you doubt that I'm engaged to Harris? Do you have some notion that you're better than he is?"

  "Not better," I said. "Maybe just a little more practical. What if you start the wedding and Harris can only decide to put one leg through the door of the church?

  "Of course you could marry him in the park," I added. "No doors."

  For some reason her mood lightened.

  "In L.A., maybe," she said. "If I wanted some freako LA. wedding, I'd marry the head of Fox and get the Dalai Lama to preside. Members of Harris' family do not get married in parks."

  "I guess he did look pretty proper," I said, trying to remember Harris. All I could remember was that he was tall, aristocratically thin, wore a suit, and had an anguished gaze.

  "Changes clothes three times a day," Cindy said, tapping me ge
ntly on the chest with the handle of the knife. "I didn't have to make him buy a dinner jacket the first time I took him out."

  "My gosh," I said. "I'm just a scout. It's not every day I meet a girl like you."

  "I'd like to hear more about your wives," she said. "They don't seem to have taught you much."

  "They weren't teachers, just wives," I said. "They both work for Boss."

  Frankly I was beginning to be sorry I had popped off about her engagement, since the remark had set in motion an interrogation whose purpose was more or less a mystery to me. Cindy was now gathering historical data of a sort all women feel they have an automatic right to. Even Coffee had suspended her antihistorical bias long enough to secure a thorough account of my prior relationships, when we first met.

  "I know a flea-marketer's daughter who doesn't work for Boss," I said, to change the subject.

  "Where does she live?"

  "Zanesville, Ohio," I said, a direct lie. For some reason I wasn't ready to come clean about the flea-marketer's daughter, who actually lives near Augusta, West Virginia, not much more than a two-hour drive from Washington.

  "Yeah," Cindy said, looking at me closely. She had probably activated her truth radar, an instinctive lie-detecting mechanism I'm convinced all women have. It is an enormously sophisticated mechanism which frequently enables women to skip quickly over the fact of the lie and zero in on the motive behind it.

  I've often been stunned to discover that women can discern with great precision the true motive behind lies I had thought I had merely wandered into casually, as I might wander into a junk shop.

  There's really no winning against equipment so finely calibrated, but there are certain evasionary tactics that will sometimes delay the inevitable reckoning. I decided to try and camouflage the lie with a sprig of truth.

  "I have a confession to make," I said. "I wasn't conning you yesterday. I do know Big John Connolly. But the Big John I was actually referring to was Big John Flint."