The Last Picture Show

by Larry McMurtry

  “I’ll help you carry that out to the trash barrel,” he said.

  Then it was Ruth’s turn to be mute—mute with relief. They went out the back door together and walked to the group of barrels at the edge of the alley. When they had dumped the cups into one of barrels, Ruth hesitantly came close to Sonny and then came very close. Her cheek was warm against his throat, and he smelled the thin, clean smell of her perfume. For a minute they were too silent—Sonny looked over her head, beyond the town. Far across the pastures he saw the lights of an oil derrick, brighter than the cold winter stars. Suddenly Mrs. Popper lifted her head and they kissed. Their mouths didn’t hit just right at first and she put her fingers gently on each side of his face and guided his mouth to hers. The touch of her cool fingers startled and excited him and he pulled her to him more tightly. Her breath was warm across his cheek. Near the end of the kiss she parted her lips and teeth for a moment and touched him once with her tongue. Then she took her mouth away and for several minutes pressed her lips lightly against his throat.

  “You’re not as scared as you were the first time I wanted to do this,” she said.

  It was true: Sonny didn’t feel at all scared, though his legs were trembling just a little from excitement. He liked to feel Mrs. Popper’s lips moving against his throat. This had been the first time in his life when kissing someone had been as pleasant as he imagined kissing should be. It was never that pleasant with Charlene.

  “Maybe we’re going to have something, after all,” Ruth said. “Will you drive me to the hospital again next week, if I arrange for Herman to ask you?”

  “You bet,” Sonny said. “The sooner the better, as far as I’m concerned.” He bent down to find her mouth and Ruth put her hands on his cheeks again. They kissed slowly and luxuriously. At first the kiss was as soft as the first one had been, but then Ruth discovered that Sonny had awakened and was thrusting at her, not so much with his mouth as with himself, wanting more of her. He kissed so hard her head was pushed back and when she opened her eyes for a moment she was looking straight up, toward the stars. Sonny tried to get even closer to her, pulling her against him with his arm. In years nothing had thrilled her so much or touched her so much as he did, simply by wanting her—the rush of her blood made her almost dizzy. She took his tongue into her mouth and touched it lightly for a second with her tongue and the edges of her teeth. Then she took her face away quickly, pressing it against his neck again.

  “I’m going home now,” she said. “This is no place to dawdle. Tuesday we’ll do this more. I really want to do it more, don’t you?”

  “You bet,” Sonny said, bending to kiss her neck. He didn’t want to talk—what he wanted was more of the delicate, delicious sensations her mouth had given him. It seemed to him it might just be best if he said so.

  “I want to kiss you one more time before you go home,” he said.

  “Goodness,” Ruth said. “Okay.” She lifted her hand and traced the edges of his lips with one finger before she kissed him. Again, when they kissed, he pressed against her with an insistence that thrilled Ruth: it was if he were trying to find her very center, her deepest place. While they were kissing, a car turned into the other end of the parking lot and the lights arced in their direction. It was simply some teenagers turning around, but it scared them and they broke apart immediately.

  “In three days I’ll see you,” Ruth said, picking up the wastebasket.

  Sonny felt it wouldn’t do for him to follow her in, so he walked around the building and entered at the front door. When he came in Duane was standing by the coatroom, obviously furious. Leroy Malone and two or three other boys were standing there too.

  “I guess you heard the news,” Duane said. “My girl’s gone swimming naked with Lester Marlow. That’s about the damnedest thing I ever heard. It’s enough to make a man go get drunk.”

  “I guess Mrs. Farrow forced her into it,” Sonny said.

  “Let’s go get drunk,” Leroy suggested. “I know where we can steal a couple of bottles of vodka—I saw a man put two in his car just a minute ago.”

  The suggestion had much appeal, and Sonny immediately seconded it. Getting drunk would be the only way to save Duane from a gloomy night, and besides he felt a good bit like getting drunk himself. Kissing Mrs. Popper had left him excited and confused.

  Leroy swiped the vodka and the three of them drove to the poolhall, which generally stayed open until one or two o’clock on Saturday nights. A good many of the younger kids trailed up also, hoping to get a swallow or two of vodka.

  They all bought Cokes and took them back to the john one at a time and spiked them. None of them were used to vodka and it was not long before it began to have an effect on their behavior, not to mention their pool shooting. They shot so badly that it took them thirty minutes to finish an eight-ball game.

  “Boys, from the way you all are shootin’ a feller would think you were drunk,” Sam the Lion said innocently, breaking them all up.

  Leroy Malone was very inventive when it came to pestering Billy, and when eight-ball began to get tiresome it occurred to him that it might be fun to get Billy drunk. He drew Sonny and Duane aside.

  “Let’s take Billy somewhere and get him drunk,” he said. “Think how funny he’d be drunk.”

  The boys were not against it. Anything for mischief and adventure. They grabbed Billy and waltzed him outside. Several of the younger boys got wind of the plot and tagged along.

  “We could go on down to the stockpens,” Leroy suggested. “There’s a blind heifer down there we could fuck. She belongs to my uncle. There’s enough of us we could hold her down. It’d be as good a place as any to get Billy drunk.”

  The prospect of copulation with a blind heifer excited the younger boys almost to frenzy, but Duane and Sonny, being seniors, gave only tacit approval. They regarded such goings on without distaste, but were no longer as rabid about animals as they had been. Sensible youths, growing up in Thalia, soon learned to make do with what there was, and in the course of their adolescence both boys had frequently had recourse to bovine outlets. At that they were considered overfastidious by the farm youth of the area, who thought only dandies restricted themselves to cows and heifers. The farm kids did it with cows, mares, sheep, dogs, and whatever else they could catch. There were reports that a boy from Scotland did it with domesticated geese, but no one had ever actually witnessed it. It was common knowledge that the reason boys from the dairy farming communities were so reluctant to come out for football was because it put them home too late for the milking and caused them to miss regular connection with the milk cows.

  Many of the town kids were also versatile and resourceful—the only difficulty was that they had access to a smaller and less varied animal population. Even so, one spindly sophomore whose father sold insurance had once been surprised in ecstatic union with a roan cocker spaniel, and a degraded youth from the north side of town got so desperate one day that he crawled into a neighbor’s pig pen in broad daylight and did it with a sow.

  “I say a blind heifer beats nothing,” Leroy said, and no one actively disagreed with the sentiment. They all got in the pickup and headed for the stockpens, eight or nine of the younger boys shivering in the back.

  The stockpens were a mile or two north of town, surrounded by mesquite. When they got there all the boys in the back piled out and went to locate the heifer, but Sonny and Duane stayed in the cab a minute and took a final drink of vodka to warm them up. They gave Billy a Coke that was about a third full of vodka and he drank it happily.

  “We better slow him down,” Duane said. “If he gets too drunk he may want a turn at the heifer. I doubt old Hank Malone would want an idiot screwin’ his livestock.”

  Sonny got out, not saying anything. It bothered him when people called Billy an idiot. Billy didn’t seem that much dumber than other people, and he was a lot friendlier than most.

  When they got to the lots Leroy was sitting on the fence watching the younger
kids chasing the scared, sightless heifer around the dark pen.

  “They’re after her,” he said. “They’ll get her in a minute.”

  The little heifer didn’t weigh over three hundred pounds and in a few minutes the boys cornered her by the loading chute and wrestled her to the ground. She struggled for a while but finally gave it up and lay still. A freshman was sitting on her head and her frightened breath raised little puffs of dust from the sandy lot. Sonny, Duane, and Leroy got off the fence and went over to watch. Billy had climbed up on the fence, but he didn’t know what was going on and just sat there sucking the empty Coke bottle.

  “You boys are holding her wrong,” Leroy said in a superior tone. “Ain’t you ever fucked a heifer before? You little piss-ants must be virgins. Let her up on her knees.”

  The younger boys thought that was bitter news: the heifer had been trouble enough to get down. Leroy was a senior, however, and they respected his authority. When they let her up she almost got away, but there were nine of them and they managed to hang on and stop her.

  It had come time to decide who went first, and the younger boys, nearing exhaustion just from holding the heifer, pressed for a decision. It would be one of the three seniors, of course.

  “You all decide,” one of them pleaded. “We can’t hold her all night.”

  At that point Sonny surprised everyone, even himself, by suddenly withdrawing from the competition.

  “You all help yourselves,” he said hastily. “I drunk too much, I think I’m gonna have to puke.”

  It was the best excuse he could think of. When he agreed to come to the stockpens he supposed he would naturally be a participant, but the moment he saw the little blind heifer he knew he didn’t want to. It had something to do with Mrs. Popper, though he was not certain just what. It didn’t seem right to kiss Mrs. Popper and still fiddle around with heifers, blind or not blind. Not only did it not seem right: it no longer seemed like fun. Kissing Mrs. Popper even once was bound to be more fun than anything he could possibly do with the skinny, quivering little heifer. He suddenly felt like he had graduated, and it was an uneasy feeling. He knew Duane and the other boys would think it awfully strange of him not to take a turn, so to fool them he went off in the mesquites and pretended to be sick.

  When he came back to the fence the orgy in the lot was in full progress. Duane was attacking the heifer, and Leroy, who had already finished, was helping hold. Two or three of the younger boys had their pants down and were parading lustfully around the lot. One sophomore was in something of a predicament because, by an unexpected stroke of luck, he had actually made out with a girl that night, a pig from Holliday who had come to the dance. As a consequence of that success the boy was feeling somewhat enervated and was attempting to restore himself by beating his member against a cold aluminum gate. When the freshmen started in on the heifer it was even more hilarious: many of them were too short to reach the target comfortably and had to struggle on tiptoe.

  Then in the midst of it all the heifer finally broke loose and went dashing across the lot with one of the freshmen hanging furiously to her tail. Sonny was just as glad. Somehow it wasn’t as exciting as it had been when he was a freshman.

  “Look at ol’ Billy takin’ that in,” Leroy said. “What we ought to do is buy him a piece. We could get the carhop for a dollar, if it was just Billy.”

  “Hell, if she’s that cheap we ought to gone to her ourselves,” Duane said. “I heard she was a five-dollar whore.”

  “Naw,” Leroy said. “Anybody with five dollars can do better than Jimmie Sue. That heifer’s got prettier legs than she has. She’d be okay for Billy, though. I’ve heard that idiots die when they’re fifteen or sixteen—we oughtn’t to sit around and let Billy die a virgin.”

  “I don’t know if we ought to try anything like that,” Sonny said. “What if it upset Billy and Sam the Lion found out about it? I’d just as soon not get crosswise with Sam.”

  “Aw don’t be a chickenshit, Crawford,” Leroy said. “It might do Billy good to get a little.”

  “Not if he gets it from Jimmie Sue it wouldn’t,” Sonny said, very ill at ease.

  “You don’t have to chip in if you’re so stingy,” Duane said. “Let’s go on and get her.”

  Sonny quit arguing—he really didn’t know how to argue against a whole crowd. He never had even wanted to before. They piled back in the pickup and he drove to the back entrance of the town’s one little hotel. Leroy and Duane went up to make arrangements with Jimmie Sue Jones, the available girl, and Sonny sat in the cab with Billy, who was still sucking on the empty Coke bottle. It was almost the first time in Sonny’s life that he had not been willing to go on and do whatever the crowd was doing. Before, it had always seemed like fun, whether it was getting drunk or screwing heifers, but he didn’t think it would be any fun at all to make Billy do it with Jimmie Sue. Billy was in a perfectly peaceful mood, sucking on the bottle and glad to be along with all the boys, and it seemed a pity to disturb him.

  In a minute the boys came out with Jimmie Sue, who was a sort of drive-in version of Penny, only dirtier. She had been car-hopping in Thalia for nine years and everyone in town was tired of her. She had been married once, to a mechanic with rat-tail sideburns, but he soon left her and went back to Bossier City, Louisiana, where he came from. The drive-in paid Jimmie Sue next to nothing and she seldom got tips, so she had to peddle herself when she could to make ends meet. She dyed her hair red and had no eyebrows except those she painted on in the morning, and she was so absentminded that sometimes she only painted on one eyebrow and went around like that all day. For Billy she didn’t bother to paint on even one. When she got in the cab it immediately began to smell so oniony that Sonny had to roll his windows down. Jimmie Sue looked at Billy disgustedly.

  “Why that thing’s just a kid,” she said. “You all oughtn’t to woke me up for a thing like that. I ought to get at least two dollars.”

  “Hell no, you said a dollar and a half,” Duane reminded her.

  “Well, I’d just as soon it was an idiot as not,” Jimmie Sue said, unpeeling a stick of chewing gum. “The only thing I draw the line at is Mixicans and niggers. I guess I told you about the time that nigger man in high heels stole my suitcase right out of the bus station, that time I went to Los Angeles.…”

  It had been Jimmie Sue’s one adventure. She saved her money and went to Los Angeles to work, but the very hour she arrived in the Los Angeles bus station a black man wearing high heels stole her suitcase and all her possessions. Jimmie Sue had never been so disappointed in all her life as she was with Los Angeles. She couldn’t get a job and had to turn around and hitchhike back to Thalia, to keep from starving. Hitchhiking across the desert without any eyebrows proved a slow business, too. If it hadn’t been for a carful of horny Mexicans she never would have got out of Needles, California, and bad as that was, Lordsburg, New Mexico was worse. Tired of eating dust, she let a Negro pick her up. By the time she got back to Thalia she had nothing good to say about minority groups.

  Billy looked at her with mild curiosity, but was obviously neither disturbed nor excited by her presence in the cab. Sonny drove back over the narrow, one-vehicle road that cut through the mesquite to the stockpens.

  “You all just get that thing out while I get ready,” Jimmie Sue said. “This ain’t the ideal dressin’ room.”

  Billy was happy to get out: he wondered if they were going to sit on the fence and watch the boys chase the cow again. To his surprise, no sooner was he out than six or seven of the boys grabbed him and unceremoniously threw him down on the cold hard ground. They took off his shoes, pants, and underwear. Groups of boys were always taking his pants off, and that alone wouldn’t have bothered him. It was having them off so late at night and at the stockpens that puzzled him. Also his legs were cold.

  “All right,” Jimmie Sue said. “Let the stupid little thing in.”

  “Wait a minute,” Duane said. “There’s a flashlight there in the
glove compartment. We want to show him where to go.”

  He got the flashlight and flashed it over Jimmie Sue, who was laying back in the pickup seat, as spraddle-legged as the narrow pickup would permit her to be. All the boys looked, and for a moment, paused in amazement. None of them had realized quite how fat Jimmy Sue was until the flashlight played over her huge hams and flabby stomach; nor had they considered how unappetizing the female anatomy could be when presented in its most unappealing light. They were all quiet for a moment, staring. It was only after they had looked for a while that they began to feel a little stirred up. Jimmie Sue was so ugly it was almost exciting—it was as if they were finally being shown the nasty things parents and preachers had always whispered about. It wasn’t exactly what they had expected, because they persisted in thinking about it in terms of pretty girls, movie stars like Elizabeth Taylor, but it was precisely what they had been taught to expect, and after the shock wore off it was exciting.

  “Shove that thing in here with me,” Jimmie Sue said. “I never hired out for no peep show.”

  The boys shoved Billy in, more or less between Jimmie Sue’s legs, and tried to shut the door. They couldn’t get it completely shut but there were so many of them there was not much chance it would come open.