The Last Picture Show

by Larry McMurtry

  “I could have,” Duane said smugly. “I could have screwed her in five minutes.”

  Sonny knew that was true, but because it was true it seemed even more unfair of Duane to bring it up. Suddenly, for the first time in his life, he felt like hitting Duane.

  “You know why you could,” he said, almost choking. “The only reason you could have was because you was in the backfield. I was in the fuckin’ line. That’s the only reason Jacy went with you as long as she did, because you was in the backfield.”

  “That’s a lie, you chickenshit,” Duane said. “What are you talkin’ about? Me an’ her was in love.”

  “You was, she wasn’t,” Sonny said confidently. “Just because you was in the backfield. She likes me as good as she ever liked you. I’ll stay all night with her one of these nights, too—she’s done promised.”

  “You won’t either,” Duane said, furious.

  “Why shouldn’t I? She’s done told me you couldn’t even do it that time in San Francisco. What about that?”

  Duane couldn’t take that. He came out of his chair and slammed Sonny in the face with the beer bottle he had in his hand. It knocked Sonny backward, but he was soon up and at Duane. It was too much to take, saying he couldn’t have screwed Charlene, just because he was in the line. Sonny couldn’t see too well, but it didn’t matter because in a minute they were both rolling on the floor anyway, punching and kicking at one another. The barmaids and the airmen calmly got out of the way and the boys rolled over against the bar, whacking at one another and bonking their beads on the brass footrail. They got up and slugged a minute on their knees but before they could get to their feet the cops were there. The next thing they knew they were out on the curb, each handcuffed to a cop. One of Sonny’s eyes was hurting and he had to hold his hand over it, but otherwise he didn’t feel too bad. He and Duane stood beside one another at the police desk, and to their surprise were no longer particularly mad.

  “Don’t know what happened,” Duane said. “Never meant to hit you with that bottle. Reckon we got enough money to pay our fines?”

  They did have, barely, and in a few more minutes, without knowing exactly what had taken place, they were on the sidewalk again, walking back up Ohio Street. They walked past the bar where they had had the fight and one of the barmaids waved at them, tolerant, jolly, and apparently amused. It deflated the boys a little bit. Theirs must not have been much of a fight, as fights went on Ohio Street.

  “My damn eye sure hurts,” Sonny said. “Run me up by the General Hospital—maybe they can give me a shot or something. It’s a wonder we didn’t tear up that bar.”

  “I guess they get worse fights than us in there ever night,” Duane said unhappily. “When it comes to Jacy I guess I’m just crazy.”

  By the time they got to the hospital Sonny’s eye had swollen shut and was paining him terribly. The momentary good feeling that he had had at the police station was entirely gone, and he was a little scared. It was nice that he and Duane were not going to be enemies for life, but he was still scared. When a doctor finally took a look at his eye he immediately ordered Sonny a hospital room.

  “You’re not leavin’ here tonight,” he said.

  “You could lose the sight in that eye if we aren’t careful, and you might lose it even if we are. In the morning we’ll have to have a good look at it.”

  “Damn,” Duane said nervously. “Why’d I have to have that bottle in my hand?”

  “Aw, they’re always tryin’ to scare you,” Sonny said. “It feels like it’s just swole up.”

  Duane was really worried, and it made him so nervous and stiff that Sonny was almost glad when he left. He had a shot that made him sleep, and the next day the eye was hurting so badly that he had several more shots and was just in a sort of daze all day. He knew his father was there some of the time. The day after that he had some kind of operation, and when he woke up his father was there, shaking a little but not too badly. It was the first time they had seen one another since graduation night, when Sonny had reluctantly accepted fifty dollars as a graduation present.

  “Son, must have been some fight,” Frank said.

  “Oh, just me and Duane. He gone back to Odessa?”

  “Yeah, he had to. Tried to see you yesterday, but they wouldn’t let him. He said to tell you he was awful sorry.”

  “Well, it’s over now,” Sonny said. “I might have done it to him if I’d been holding a bottle. What’d they say about my eye?”

  “They don’t know yet,” Frank said. “You didn’t lose all your sight in it, but I guess you might lose some.”

  Sonny found it was not so bad having his father around. Frank didn’t say much, just sat in the room. He seemed comfortable and Sonny was too. There was only one awkward moment in the three days Frank stayed. It came one night when Sonny was eating supper.

  “Son,” Frank said, “reckon it would work out if we put the poolhall and the domino hall together? The building’s big enough, ain’t it?”

  It was, but the whole idea made Sonny nervous. “I don’t think it would do too well,” he said. “The men who play dominos wouldn’t want a lot of kids in there shooting pool and making racket.”

  Frank said that might be so, and didn’t mention it again.

  Sonny was in the hospital eight days. He got lonesome, but it was just about as bad when visitors came. Genevieve came one afternoon and brought Billy, who was scared of the hospital and didn’t know whether to sit down or stand up. Sonny was so used to seeing Genevieve in her waitress uniform that she looked strange to him in her regular clothes. She came right out and asked about his eye.

  “How is it, really?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” Sonny said honestly. “It wouldn’t surprise me if I was one-eyed when they take the bandages off. Duane caught me a good hard lick.”

  “Well, it was awful of you two to fight. You knew he joined the army, didn’t you? His mother told me two or three days ago.”

  Sonny hadn’t known it, and was very surprised. For the first time he really wondered about his eye. He had always planned to go to the army too, and it occurred to him that if he was one-eyed the army wouldn’t take him. He had never supposed he would be unable to make the army.

  The next afternoon the nurse brought in a note.

  “A lady’s down in the waiting room,” she said.

  The note just said: “May I come in and see you a little while? Ruth.”

  Sonny looked at the nurse, who was young and friendly.

  “Could you tell her I’m asleep?” he asked.

  “Sure I could. But you’re not asleep.”

  “If I go to sleep right now will you tell her I’m asleep?”

  The nurse did as he asked, but Sonny was blue anyway. He would not have minded seeing Ruth, but he felt bad whenever he thought about her and he was afraid that if she came up something bad might happen. In a way he wanted to see her—indeed, the more he thought about her the more lonesome he became for her—but it seemed like seeing her would only make everything worse.

  The next to last day he was there, Jacy came to see him. She wore a sleeveless green dress and looked a little sad. As soon as the nurse left the room she came to the bed and kissed Sonny for a long time. It surprised him and he embarrassed himself a little by getting a hard-on.

  “Oh, I was so worried,” Jacy said. “I just had to see you. When do you get out?”

  “Tomorrow,” Sonny said. “Why?”

  “I want us to get married,” Jacy said, her dewy mouth close to his. “I really do. Whenever you get out, just as soon as you want to.”

  Sonny was stunned. “Get married?” he said. He thought he must be having a dream.

  “Do you want to?” she asked.

  “Oh yeah, yeah,” he said. “But ain’t you goin’ to college?”

  “No. I don’t care about that. I love you and that’s more important. My folks won’t like it, but we can run off.”

  It was an inspiration
she had had as soon as she heard about the fight. Sonny was so dear, to fight for her. Running off with him would make her whole summer, and the fact that she did it even though he only had one eye would knock everyone in Thalia for a loop. It would be a lot wilder than Bobby Sheen and Annie-Annie—they were both rich and healthy. She would be running off with someone poor and sort of mutilated. Of course her folks would catch them and have it annulled, but at least she could show Sonny how much she was willing to sacrifice for him.

  Jacy sat on the hospital bed and they kissed some more and talked about how wild it would be being married. Life seemed almost too crazy to be true.

  The next day they unbandaged Sonny’s eye. It wasn’t that he couldn’t see anything out of it, it was just that all he could see was fog. It was like being inside a cloud. He could tell when people moved around, but he couldn’t tell who they were until they spoke.

  “Could be a lot worse,” the doctor said. “We’ll see how it responds before we do anything else.”

  They gave him a black patch to wear over his eye and told him to come back weekly for checkups, but Sonny hardly listened. Marrying Jacy was all he could think of, and he thought about it on the ride back to Thalia, while his father drove.

  As soon as they got home Sonny took the extra eye patch the doctor had given him and showed Billy how to wear it. Billy was tickled to death. Because Sonny did it, he thought seeing out of only one eye was a great way to see, and from then on he wore the spare eye patch whenever he went out to sweep the town.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  JACY WAS DEAD serious about getting married: the day after Sonny left the hospital they drove to Wichita and got the license. They had to wait three days, so to be doing something Sonny quit his roughnecking job and arranged for a new job pumping leases, something he could do with one eye. The rest of the time he just stayed around the poolhall thinking about sleeping with Jacy. The prospect helped take his mind off his eye.

  Jacy spent the three days imagining the effect her marriage would have on her parents and on the town. Everybody was curious about Sonny’s eye, which made it absolutely the ideal time to run off with him. Her folks would simply have a fit. Probably they would call the police and have them arrested and torn out of one another’s arms, but at least they would have been married and everyone would know it.

  Friday afternoon, when it actually became time for them to run away, she wrote her parents a quick note:

  Dear Mama and Daddy—

  I know this is going to be a shock to you but I guess it can’t be helped. Sonny and I have gone to Oklahoma to get married—I guess it will be in Altus. Even if he is poor we are in love. I don’t know what to say about college, I guess we’ll just have to talk about that when we get back. We are going to Lake Texoma on our honeymoon and will be home Monday. I guess I will live at the poolhall until we find someplace else to live. Even if you don’t like Sonny now I know you will love him someday.

  Jacy

  She left the note on the cabinet, propped up against a box of crackers. Gene found it when he came in from work three hours later. Lois was in Wichita that day and returned late. When she came in, Gene was pacing the kitchen floor, obviously distressed. He handed her the note.

  “Oh, goddamn her,” Lois said. “I can’t believe it.”

  “Well, we got to get going,” Gene said. “I want to catch ’em. Even if we can’t get ’em before they marry we can sure as hell get ’em before they go to bed. That way we can get it annulled with no trouble.”

  “Why bother?” Lois said. “I suppose we could get it annulled anytime—that’s what money’s for. Why don’t we just let her do the getting out—you know she won’t stay with Sonny ten days. I just hate to think of what she’ll do to him in that length of time. If we don’t get that little bitch off to college she’s going to ruin the whole town.”

  Gene was so upset he couldn’t take what Lois said. He turned and slapped her, but it was a light, indecisive slap.

  “You just change your clothes,” he said, shoving her in the direction of the bedroom. “I said we’re going to get ’em and by God that’s all there is to it. What do you mean calling my daughter a bitch? You’re her mother, ain’t you?”

  “I don’t see what that has to do with it,” Lois said, but she didn’t feel like arguing. She felt sorry for Gene, and pity always made her feel wretched. She already had visions of a horrible scene somewhere in Oklahoma. She stood in the doorway and heard Gene call the highway patrol and ask them to stop Jacy’s car. When he hung up he seemed to feel better. A man should react to such an event in a certain way, and he was doing what he should.

  “I won’t have her living over no poolhall, not even for ten days,” he said. “Hurry up and get changed, and don’t call my daughter a bitch again.”

  “No promises,” Lois said. “You know what she’s doing as well as I do, Gene. She doesn’t give a damn about Sonny, she just wants to hurt us and get a little attention while she’s doing it. What is that but bitchery?”

  “Well, she comes by it honest,” he said, looking his wife in the eye. “I know right where she gets it.”

  Lois merely nodded. “I’m sure you do,” she said. She obediently went into the bedroom and put on more somber clothes.

  Sonny and Jacy, meanwhile, were off on the realest of adventures: running away to get married. Jacy had an expensive suitcase and enough clothes to last her a week, while Sonny, who owned no suitcase, had a canvas overnight bag and an extra pair of slacks hung on a hanger in the back seat. They were in the convertible, and Jacy drove. Sonny didn’t yet trust himself to drive on the highway with one eye.

  Jacy was wearing a lovely white dress she had bought at Neiman’s the week before, to wear to fraternity parties. She had some new sunglasses, and drove barefoot. It was great fun to be running away to get married—both of them were delighted with themselves. All Sonny had to do was lean back and watch Jacy and imagine the bliss that was going to be his in only a few hours. It was a bright, hot day and there were drops of sweat on Jacy’s upper lip. Neither of them minded the heat, though. They stopped in Lawton and had milk shakes, probably the last milk shakes they would ever have as single people. Both of them were hungry and they sucked up every milky drop.

  Then they went on to Altus, a popular place for getting married. It was late afternoon when they arrived—Sonny stopped at a filling station and asked where they might find a justice of the peace. “Why there’s one right up the road,” the attendant said. “What part of Texas you all from?”

  They told him and drove on. It turned out to be absurdly simple to get married. The justice of the peace lived in an old unpainted frame house and came to the door in his khakis and undershirt.

  “Been having myself a little snooze,” he said. “What part of Texas y’all from?”

  He surveyed their license casually, got a pencil, licked the point, and filled in what he was supposed to fill in. Sonny would have preferred him to use a fountain pen, since pencil erased so easily, but he didn’t say anything.

  “I better go get Ma to witness,” he said, belching. “I guess I could put a shirt on too, if I can find one.”

  “Get many marriages up here?” Sonny asked, to be polite.

  “Not as many as I’d like,” the J.P. said. “Not like I used to when we was a Christian country. Used to be people feared God, but not no more. I don’t marry half as many kids as I used to—fornication don’t mean nothing anymore. Kids nowadays fornicate like frogs, they don’t never think of marryin’. What decent ones is left is mostly hifalutin’ kids, church weddin’s and recepshuns and such as that. Ma! Got some customers.”

  An old woman wearing a sunbonnet and gray work gloves came in from the backyard. She was a thin little woman and looked tired, but she nodded politely. “Pardon this getup,” she said. “I was out gettin’ the last of my black-eyes. Garden’s just about gone for this year. What part of Texas you all from?”

  The old man had wandered out,
but he came back into the living room buttoning a khaki shirt over his belly. He stuffed the shirttail unevenly into his pants and shuffled over to an old pigeonhole desk to find his service.

  “Y’all don’t mind if I read this, do you?” he asked. “I ain’t got a memory worth a damn.”

  They didn’t mind him reading, but Jacy did mind him standing so close to them. He had a body odor that almost made her gag, but he winked at her with mild lechery and seemed to think she found him attractive.

  “Wouldn’t mind marrying you myself, honey,” he said. “You got more meat on you than Ma has.”

  “Don’t be sassing, now,” his wife said. “You can wait till I get this sunbonnet off before you start.”

  He read the service heavily, sometimes stopping to trace his place with a forefinger. When he asked about rings Sonny shook his head. “She’s marryin’ a cheap skate, Ma,” the J.P. said.

  When it was over Sonny gave Jacy a quick kiss, but she wanted a long romantic one so they kissed for almost a minute while the old lady wandered off to start shelling her black-eyed peas. As soon as they quit kissing the J.P. came over and placed a wet kiss of his own on Jacy’s cheek—it made her furious. Sonny gave him a ten dollar bill and he stuffed it in his pocket contemptuously.

  “Yeah, a cheap skate,” he said. As they left he followed them out on the porch. “Hell, you’ve got a collaspable,” he hollered, when they were getting in the car. “Used to be collaspables were twenty dollar weddin’s ever time. Y’all got any fornicatin’ friends down in Texas tell ’em to cut it out and come up here to see me. I’ll set ’em right with the Lord as cheap as the next man.”

  “Why he’s just awful,” Jacy said. “I never dreamed they let people like him do marryin’.”

  “Anyway, we’re man and wife,” Sonny said, barely able to believe it. At the first stop sign they kissed again and wiggled their tongues enthusiastically. Jacy was for going to Lake Texoma to spend their wedding night, and Sonny was agreeable to anything.