Thalia

by Larry McMurtry

  The four little freshmen had no chance with the girls and had to get what amusement they could out of tormenting Joe Bob. They crowded him in a seat, took his underpants off, and threw them out the window. Joe Bob was too weak from the gang-piling to fight back, and he might not have bothered anyway. He lost so many pair of underwear that his mother bought them wholesale. He was the only boy on the team who wore his regulars, rather than a jockey strap: Brother Blanton wouldn’t hear of him wearing anything so immodest.

  “What if you got hurt and were taken to a hospital wearing a thing like that?” Brother Blanton said. “Our good name would be ruined.”

  Most of the kids had seen Joe Bob’s underwear often enough to be thoroughly bored with it. The freshmen attracted no notice at all, and soon went to sleep.

  Sonny started the return trip sitting by Leroy Malone, whose balls were so sore that the mere thought of girls made him writhe. After a little bargaining Sonny managed to switch with the kid in front of him, which put him next to the pretty but prudish sophomore he had had his eye on. Knocking Mr. Wean down gave him so much status that he was able to hold the girl’s hand almost immediately. Martha Lou was her name. By the time they reached Electra she was willing to let him kiss her, but the results were pretty discouraging. Her teeth were clenched as tightly as if she had lockjaw, and even Sonny’s status couldn’t unlock them. His only reward was a taste of lipstick, in a flavor he didn’t much care for.

  The only real excitement on the bus ride home involved Jacy and Duane, the star couple. That was usually the case. None of the other kids excited one another much. There was a fat blonde named Vida May who would feel penises, but the teachers knew about her and made her sit so close to the front that it was dangerous to fool with her even when the teachers were asleep.

  Jacy and Duane, as a matter of course, were sitting in the very back seat. Duane didn’t like the back seat much because there was a little overhead light above it that the bus driver refused to turn off. The bus driver’s name was Wilbur Tim and he wasn’t about to trust any kids in a totally dark bus. One time years earlier his wife Jessie had found two prophylactics when she was sweeping out the bus, and it just about sent her into hysterics. She was the apprehensive type and went around for months worried sick that some nice little girl had got pregnant on her husband’s bus. After that Wilbur installed the light.

  It was a small bulb that didn’t really give any light, just a nice orange glow. Jacy loved it and wouldn’t sit anywhere else, despite Duane’s protests. She thought the light was very romantic and suggestive: everyone in the bus could tell when the couple in the back seat were kissing or doing something sexy, but the light wasn’t strong enough for them to see too clearly. Courting with Duane when all the kids on the school bus could watch gave Jacy a real thrill, and made her feel a little like a movie star: she could bring beauty and passion into the poor kids’ lives.

  Because Jacy enjoyed them so much, the kissing sessions in the back seat had become a sort of regular feature on basketball road trips. All the kids watched, even though it made them itchy and envious. Jacy, after all, was the prettiest girl in school and watching her get kissed and played with was something to do on the long drives home. The element that made it really exciting to everyone was the question of how far Jacy would go. Once Duane got started kissing he was completely indifferent to whether he had an audience or not: all he wanted was more. The dim light made it impossible to tell precisely how much more Jacy allowed: everyone caught shadowy glimpses, and occasionally a gasp or a little moan from Jacy indicated that Duane was making some headway at least, but no one ever knew how much or what kind.

  Only Jacy and Duane knew that he was making a great deal of headway indeed. Jacy would kiss and play around any time, but she seldom got excited past the point of control unless she was on the school bus, where people were watching. Being in the public eye seemed to heighten the quality of every touch. On the bus seat she never had to feign passion—she was burning with it. It was easy for Duane to get his hands inside her loose uniform and touch her breasts, and she loved it. Also, since she was in shorts, it was easy for him to do even more abandoned things to her. She loved to have him slide his hands up the underside of her legs, and sometimes she would even get to the point where she wanted him to touch her crotch. It was a matter that took very delicate managing, but if Duane’s hand were cupped against her at the right time so she could squeeze it with her legs, something nice would happen. That was not for the audience, however: she didn’t want the kids to see that. When the moment came near she would try to get Duane to crowd her back in the corner, so they couldn’t be seen so well. Sometimes it worked beautifully. The younger and more naïve kids were sure Duane went all the way; the juniors and seniors knew better, but felt he must be going a pretty significant distance, anyhow. Every trip added to Jacy’s legend. The following day at school she would be on every tongue. Some of the girls said bitter things about her, but the boys took notice when she walked by. The only one seriously discommoded by bus-seat sessions was Duane, who frequently ached painfully by the time the bus reached home. He didn’t like it, but he supposed such frustration was something he would simply have to bear until they were married.

  Just before the bus got back to Thalia Coach Popper woke up and looked around. Most of the kids were asleep by that time, Jacy and Duane among them, but Jacy had gone to sleep with her legs across Duane’s and when the coach saw that he was infuriated. It would put him in an awful spot if Lois Farrow somehow found out he had let her daughter go to sleep with her legs across Duane’s. Gene Farrow was on the school board, and an incident like that could cost a coach his job. He stormed back and shook Jacy until she was awake enough to stumble down the aisle to the front seat, where she stayed the rest of the way home.

  When all the kids had been delivered to their houses the coach got to thinking about it and began to cuss. There was no end to the trouble a couple of silly-ass kids might cause, particularly if one of them was Lois Farrow’s daughter. Lois Farrow was the one person in Thalia who didn’t give a damn for the fact that he was football coach.

  Wilbur Tim dropped him off at his home, and he stomped inside, still angry. When he turned on the light in his bedroom closet it woke Ruth up. She had just had her breast operation a few days before and was still taking pain medicine. As he was taking off his shoes she sat up in bed.

  “Herman, could you bring me a pain pill?” she asked. “It’s hurting a little and I’m too groggy to get up.”

  “You sound goddamn wide awake to me,” the coach said, fed up with women. “I bet if I let you you could lay there and talk for two hours. Get up and get your own pills, I ain’t no pharmacist.”

  After a moment, Ruth did. She was dizzy and had to guide herself along the wall, holding her sore breast with one hand. She had washed that day and her white cotton nightgown smelled faintly of detergent. The coach ignored her and flopped on the bed. So far as he could tell, it had not been enough of an operation to make a fuss about. The scar on her breast was barely three inches long. He had cut himself worse than that many times, usually when he was hurrying through a barbed-wire fence to get to a covey of quail. The only thing that worried him about Ruth was the chance that they hadn’t removed all the tumor and might have to operate again, in which case there would be no end to the expense. The cheapest and most sensible thing would have been for them to take the whole breast off while they were at it. The breast wasn’t doing Ruth any good anyway, and if they had taken it all that would have been the end of the matter. He had told them so, too, but the doctor had ignored him and Ruth had gone off in another room and bawled. A woman like her would try the patience of a saint.

  The next day at basketball practice the coach gave Duane a dressing down in front of the whole squad. He told him if he ever again so much as sat with Jacy on a basketball trip he would give him fifteen licks with a basketball shoe. A basketball shoe was the only thing the coach ever whipped boys with
, but since he wore a size thirteen that was enough. He also told Duane to run fifty laps around the outside of the gym, and at that point Duane rebelled.

  “I ain’t runnin’ no fifty laps all at one time,” he said. “I’ll do ten a day.”

  “You’ll do fifty right now or check your suit in, by God,” the coach said. “If you check it in you don’t need to come out for track or baseball, neither. We can get along without you.”

  Duane went to the locker room, took his suit off, and left. It was just what the coach had hoped for. Any mess the boy got into with Jacy Farrow could no longer be laid at his door. It put him in such good spirits that he worked the boys until seven o’clock that night. The next day he commandeered a sophomore, and the team had ten players again.

  Nine

  IN THALIA, WINTER WAS ALWAYS DULLER THAN SUMMER, AT least for the boys. In the winter it was too cold to sit around on the square and think up meanness to do—if they wanted to sit around they had to do it in the café, and that cost money. When the square became empty because of the cold, the town seemed emptier than ever.

  A senior year was supposed to be exciting but with winter setting in Sonny’s suddenly began to look very dull. When Duane quit basketball, the game became a sort of tiring chore that Sonny went on with because he didn’t have a legitimate excuse to quit. Thalia lost every game by thirty points or more. Even teams that were as bad as they were beat them thirty points on sheer morale. No team had less in the way of morale than Thalia.

  Besides that there was his work. It was an unusually cold winter, and the demand for butane was high. Often, after practice or after a game, Frank Fartley would be waiting for Sonny at the gym and Sonny would have to spend half the night driving over the dark, ice-rutted roads looking for a farmhouse with an empty butane tank. Sometimes he could only find them by the mailboxes, usually old-fashioned Sears and Roebuck models stuck on posts beside the road.

  Sonny took to drinking coffee to stay awake, and Genevieve didn’t approve. “You’ve got to get you another job,” she told him one time. He had come stumbling into the café at two-thirty in the morning, half-frozen. The heater in the old International only worked about half the time.

  The trouble was, there weren’t any other jobs, and Genevieve was scarcely in a position to give that kind of advice. Her husband was not improving as rapidly as he had been—it looked like it would be summer before he got back to work. The strain had begun to tell on Genevieve: her uniform no longer fit so snugly at the shoulders, and often she was so tired she couldn’t sleep even when she had the time.

  Everybody seemed to have the winter doldrums, including Sam the Lion. He was taking daily naps for his heart condition and his cough was still just as bad. Duane’s grandmother took the flu and was in the hospital two weeks; everyone expected it to carry her off but all it did was destroy what was left of her mind. Since he didn’t have basketball to wear him out, Duane had taken to working a double shift. It was cold work, but it paid, and he could count on having Saturday nights off to spend with Jacy.

  The strange conversation Jacy had had with her mother threw Jacy temporarily into a state of uncertainty. For a time she had been convinced that she knew exactly what her mother wanted of her, and exactly how to get around it; but since the conversation she hadn’t been so sure. It seemed incredible that her mother would actually give her license to sleep with Duane. For a day or two she was rather tempted, just to see what sex felt like, but then she decided that would merely be walking into her mother’s trap. Advice like that was bound to be a trap.

  For a time the conversation had the effect of inhibiting Jacy drastically. After she and Duane had concluded they were in love she had taken to allowing him considerable freedom with her body. She had even let him feel inside her panties on a few occasions, but when her mother told her to go ahead and sleep with him she immediately put a stop to that. She felt she had to if she were going to protect their love from her mother’s subtle treacheries. Besides, the only times she really enjoyed letting him touch her there was on the school bus.

  She even tried to quit letting him take off her brassiere, but Duane complained so bitterly about the loss of that privilege that she finally let him start doing it again. There were a few awkward dates, but in time Jacy became rather proud of herself for the mature way she was handling the situation. She could let Duane kiss her and play with her breasts and yet remain quite cool about it all, protecting them from his passion and her own. Her mother was outwitted and Duane had as much fun as was good for him. Sometimes in church she felt a little like a martyr because of the effort it cost her to keep the two of them morally upright. Her grandmother would have approved if she had been alive and known about it—her grandmother had been had been a woman of virtue.

  Besides, sexual intercourse was supposed to be painful at first, and she knew Duane wouldn’t want to hurt her until it was absolutely necessary. There was a time and a place for everything, as her grandmother had always said.

  The week before Christmas there was a big county wide dance held at the American Legion Hall, an annual affair that everybody looked forward to. About the only people that stayed away were the hardshell Baptists and a few of the smaller, eccentric denominations who, like the Baptists, believed that dancing was sinful. In the old days, before the church women of the town had organized, eggnog had been served at the dance, and the men who couldn’t tolerate dilution brought their whiskey bottles inside and kept them in their coat pockets while they danced. But when the church women finally organized, they saw to it what drinking was done, was done outside.

  This year Lester Marlow was one of the first people to arrive at the dance. He stood around the almost empty hall for an hour, practicing looking rakish and devil-may-care. Lester was temporarily a celebrity in Thalia by virtue of the fact that, only the night before, he had lost a record amount of money to Abilene in an all-night nine-ball game. He had come out the loser by some $820, winning only 11 of 181 games, but that fact did not dismay him at all. Instead he felt almost legendary for having lost so much, and as he strolled around the silent dance floor he continually adjusted the hang of his cashmere sports coat. He wanted to look like the sort of fellow who was ready to accept all risks. He had not bothered to bring a date, but had a plan involving Jacy that he meant to put into effect at the proper time.

  Half an hour later, when Jacy drove up in her convertible, Lester was waiting at the curb, bourbon flask carelessly in hand.

  “Why hi, Lester,” Jacy said nervously. She knew Sonny and Duane would be coming along any minute.

  “I hear you lost some money last night,” she added. The sum had been impressive.

  “Duane coming?” Lester asked at once. Jacy nodded. Any other time Lester would have taken the nod as final, but he had had enough whiskey to be able to set aside his normal caution.

  “You know Bobby Sheen, in Wichita?” he asked. “He’s going to have a midnight swimming party tonight in his indoor pool. A lot of kids from the club are going to be there. I guess you heard about the last one: his folks were gone to Miami and everybody swam naked. I was there and it was really something. I don’t know what they’ll do tonight, but his folks are gone again and it’s probably going to be pretty wild. If you want to run over there with me after the dance, why don’t you? Bobby has great parties.”

  Lester was smart enough to leave it at that. He rakishly took another sip of bourbon and went back into the dance. Just as he was walking away Sonny and Duane rattled up. They parked the pickup and immediately got in Jacy’s car. Duane had noticed Lester talking to her and asked about it.

  “Oh, he just wanted to tell me about losing all that money,” Jacy said, a little on edge. She had been all primed to enjoy the dance, but Lester’s invitation upset her timing a little and Duane came along before she could think things out.

  In a few minutes Sonny got out of the car and went in the dance to see what Mr. and Mrs. Farrow were doing. They were on the sponsoring
committee and Jacy felt she and Duane probably ought to go in separately unless her father was already drunk enough not to notice them.

  While Sonny was reconnoitering Jacy made a quick decision: clearly she would have to go to the swimming party with Lester. It took a rich, fast crowd to go swimming naked, and Jacy always prided herself on belonging to the fastest crowd there was, moral or immoral. Indeed, for a rich, pretty girl like herself the most immoral thing imaginable would be to belong to a slow crowd. That would be wasting opportunities, and nothing was more immoral than waste.

  Then too, when word got around that she had gone swimming naked with a lot of rich kids from Wichita Falls her legend would be secure for all time. No girl from Thalia had ever done anything like that.

  It was clear that she had to go: the only problem was Duane. He had the night off and was expecting to devote it entirely to her—if she left him at eleven o’clock to go somewhere with Lester it would make him so mad he might even break up with her, and that was to be avoided. She quickly decided that her best bet would be to spend a couple of hours being extremely nice to him, so he would be too much in love with her to be mad when she left. If he was mad anyway she would have to blame it all on her mother—that always worked.

  She turned to Duane and started to kiss him, but then stopped and looked at him fondly a moment. “I love you so much tonight,” she said. “I wish we could stay together all night.”

  As soon as they settled into the kiss Jacy turned so that one of her breasts nudged Duane’s hand. He was astonished, but not too astonished to take advantage of what was offered him. He pulled her brown sweater out of her skirt and slipped his hand beneath it. Her belly was warm but the brassiere was a cold barrier. It was frustrating to come up against the stiff, cold material when Jacy’s warm breasts were just underneath. Duane had experienced that frustration many times before, but it was nothing Jacy usually cared to help him out with; anyway he could hardly expect her to undress right in front of the Legion Hall. Then Jacy broke the kiss with a soft sigh. “Wait a minute,” she said. “I don’t want to go in right now—let’s get in the back seat a few minutes.” As soon as they had she edged both her bra straps off her shoulders. Duane slipped the bra down a few inches and her breasts were free. She didn’t seem to mind that the tight straps more or less imprisoned her arms. She kissed Duane lingeringly while he touched her breasts and nipples.