Thalia

by Larry McMurtry

  “But aren’t you going to have a baby?” he asked, not sure that the question was proper.

  Maria nodded. “Two already,” she said, meaning to reassure him. Her heavy breasts and large grape-colored nipples were not at all congruous with her thin calves and girlish shoulders.

  Sonny lay down with her on the cot, but he knew even before he began that somehow twenty-five dollars had been lost. He didn’t want to stay in the room all night, or even very much of it.

  Two minutes later it came home to him why Ruth had insisted they make love on the floor: the cot springs wailed and screamed, and the sound made him feel as though every move he made was sinful. He had driven five hundred miles to get away from Thalia, and the springs took him right back, made him feel exposed. Everyone in town would know that he had done it with a pregnant whore. Suddenly he ceased to care about the twenty-five dollars, or about anything; the fatigues of the long trip, down from the plains, through the hill country and the brush country, through Austin and San Antone, five hundred miles of it all pressed against the backs of his legs and up his body, too heavy to support. To Maria’s amazement he simply stopped and went to sleep.

  WHEN HE awoke, he was very hot. The green counterpane was soaked with his sweat. It was not until he had been awake a minute or two that he realized the sun was shining in his face. He was still in the room where Maria had brought him, but the room had no roof—the night before he had not even noticed. It was just an open crib.

  He hurriedly got up and put on his clothes, his head aching. While he was tying his shoes he suddenly had to vomit, and barely made it past the blue curtain into the street. When he had finished vomiting and was kneeling in the white dust waiting for his strength to come back he heard a slow clop-clop and looked up to see a strange wagon rounding the corner into his part of the street. It was a water wagon, drawn by a decrepit brown mule and driven by an old man. The wagon was entirely filled by a large rubber water tank wrapped in ragged canvas; as the wagon moved the water sloshed out of the open tank and dripped down the sides of the wagon into the white dust. The old man wore a straw hat so old that it had turned brown. His grizzled whiskers were as white as Sam the Lion’s hair. As he stopped the mule, three or four whores stepped out of their cribs with water pitchers in their hands. One passed right by Sonny, a heavy woman with a relaxed face and large white breasts that almost spilled out of her green robe. The whores were barefooted and seemed much happier than they had seemed the night before. They chattered like high-school girls and came lightly to the wagon to get their water. The old man spoke to them cheerfully, and when the first group had filled their pitchers he popped the mule lightly with the rein and proceeded up the street, the slow clop-clop of the mule’s feet very loud in the still morning. When he passed where Sonny was kneeling the old man nodded to him kindly and gestured with a tin dipper he had in his hand. Sonny gratefully took a dipper of water from him, using it to wash the sour taste out of his mouth. The old man smiled at him sympathetically and said something in a philosophic tone, something which Sonny took to mean that life was a matter of ups and downs He stayed where he was and watched the wagon until it rounded the next corner. As it moved slowly up the street the whores of Matamoros came out of their cribs, some of them combing their black hair, some with white bosoms uncovered, all with brown pitchers in their hands and coins for the old waterman.

  Sonny found Duane asleep in the front seat of the pickup, his legs sticking out the window. Three little boys were playing in the road, trying to lead a dusty white goat across into a pasture of scraggly mesquite. The goat apparently wanted to go into the Cabaret ZeeZee. A depressed looking spotted dog followed behind the boys and occasionally yapped discouragedly at the goat.

  Duane was too bleary and sick to do more than grunt. His hair was plastered to his temples with sweat. “You drive,” he said.

  By some miracle Sonny managed to wind his way through Matamoros to the Rio Grande—in daylight the water in the river was green. The boys stood groggily under the customs shed for a few minutes, wondering why in the world they had been so foolish as to come all the way to Mexico. Thalia seemed an impossible distance away.

  “I don’t know if I can make it,” Sonny said. “How much money we got?”

  They found, to their dismay, that their money had somehow evaporated. They had four dollars between them. There was the money that Sam and Genevieve had given them, hidden in the seat springs, but they had not planned to use that.

  “I guess we can pay them back in a week or two,” Sonny said. “We’ll have to use it.”

  When the customs men were through the boys got back in the pickup and drove slowly out of Brownsville, along the Valley highway. Heat waves shimmered above the green cabbage fields. Despite the sun and heat Duane soon went to sleep again and slept heavily, wallowing in his own sweat. Sonny drove automatically; he was depressed, but not exactly sleepy, and he paced himself from town to town, not daring to think any farther ahead than the next city limits sign.

  Soon the thought of Ruth began to bother him. In retrospect it seemed incredibly foolish that he should drive a thousand miles to go to sleep on a pregnant girl’s stomach, when any afternoon he could have a much better time with Ruth. The thought of her slim, familiar body and cool hands suddenly made him very horny and even more depressed with himself. It occurred to him that he might even be diseased, and he stopped in a filling station in Alice to inspect himself. Duane woke up and exhibited similar anxieties. For the rest of the day they stopped and peed every fifty miles, just to be sure they could.

  There was money enough for gas, but not much for food, so they managed on Cokes, peanuts, and a couple of candy bars. Evening finally came, coolness with it, and the boys got a second wind. The trip ceased to seem like such a fiasco: after all, they had been to Mexico, visited whorehouses, seen dirty movies. In Thalia it would be regarded as a great adventure, and they could hardly wait to tell about it. The country around Thalia had never looked so good to them as it did when they came back into it, at four in the morning. The dark pastures, the farmhouses, the oil derricks and even the jackrabbits that went dashing across the road in front of them, all seemed comfortable, familiar, private even, part of what was theirs and no one else’s. After the strangeness of Matamoros the lights of Thalia were especially reassuring.

  Duane was driving when they pulled in. He whipped through the red light and turned toward the café. Genevieve would be glad to see they were safely back.

  To their astonishment, the café was dark. No one at all was there. The café had never been closed, not even on Christmas, and the boys were stunned. Inside, one little light behind the counter shone on the aspirin, the cough-drops, the chewing gum, and cheap cigars.

  “It ain’t a holiday, is it?” Sonny said.

  There was nothing to do but go over to the courthouse and wake up Andy Fanner—he would know what had happened.

  Andy woke up hard, but they kept at him and he finally got out of the car and rubbed his stubbly jaw, trying to figure out what the boys wanted.

  “Oh yeah, you all been gone, ain’t you,” he said. “Gone to Mexico. You don’t know about it. Sam the Lion died yesterday mornin’.”

  “Died?” Sonny said. After a moment he walked over to the curb in front of the courthouse and sat down. The traffic light blinked red and green over the empty street. Andy came over to the curb too, yawning and rubbing the back of his neck.

  “Yep,” he said. “Quite a blow. Keeled over on one of the snooker tables. Had a stroke.”

  Soon it was dawn, a cool, dewy spring dawn that wet the courthouse grass and left a low white mist on the pastures for the sun to burn away. Andy sat on the fender of his Nash and told all about the death and how everybody had taken it, who had cried and who hadn’t. “Good thing you all got back today, you’d ’a missed the funeral,” he said. “How’d you find Mexico?” Sonny could not have told him; he had lost track of things and just wanted to sit on the curb and watc
h the traffic light change.

  Seventeen

  SONNY WAS EMBARRASSED THAT HE DIDN’T HAVE A SUIT TO wear to the funeral—all he had was a pair of slacks and a blue sports coat that was too short at the wrists. No one seemed to notice, though. The graveyard was on a rough, gravelly hill, where the wind was always blowing. Sonny was able to quit being embarrassed because of Mrs. Farrow, who cried all through the graveyard ceremonies. She stood at the edge of the crowd, the wind blowing her long hair, and her cheeks wet; when she walked back to her Cadillac to drive away she was still crying and wiping her eyes with her gloves.

  It was because of her crying so much that Sonny learned she had been the woman who watched Sam the Lion piss off the tank dam. That night at the café Sonny asked Genevieve about it and she didn’t hold back.

  “Sam’s gone and Lois never cared who knew,” she said. “Everybody knew but Gene. She and Sam carried on for quite a while. Lois was just crazy about him. She would have married him, old as he was, but he wouldn’t let her leave Gene.”

  A few weeks before Sonny would not have believed it, but the world had become so strange that he could believe anything. Genevieve was wiping the counter with a gray washrag.

  “Sam was quite a man, you know,” she said. “And Lois was just beautiful when she was young—I always envied her her looks. She was prettier than her daughter ever will be, and nine times as wild. She had more life than just about anybody in this town.”

  Sonny didn’t tell her about the bet at the tank dam, but he thought about it a lot, just as he thought about many of the things Sam the Lion had done. Some of them were very strange things—the will he left, for instance. He left the poolhall to Sonny and Billy; he left the picture show to Old Lady Mosey and her nephew Junior Mosey, who was the projectionist; he left the café to Genevieve, five thousand dollars to the county swimming-pool fund, and strangest of all, a thousand dollars to Joe Bob Blanton. No one knew what to make of it, not even Joe Bob. People thought it was a damned outrage, but that was what the will said.

  Two weeks after the funeral the seniors left for San Francisco, on their senior trip. Sonny was glad to go. It seemed to him he had jumped up and gone to Mexico on the spur of the moment and had never quite managed to get back to Thalia, really. The town had become strange to him, and he thought it might be easier to return to it from San Francisco.

  The bus left Thalia at midnight and when dawn came was crossing the Pecos River, a dry winding rut cutting through the naked flats of West Texas. Most of the seniors had cut up all night and worn themselves out, but Sonny was awake, and just tired enough that his memory could do what it pleased. The sky was completely cloudless, a round white moon hanging in it. He had not thought of Sam the Lion much since the funeral—in Thalia it was no good thinking about him—but for some reason the bitter flats of the Pecos brought him to mind and Sonny remembered the way he used to slop around the poolhall in his house shoes, complaining about the ingrown toenail that had pained him for years. A bronc had stomped on his foot once, and the toenail had never recovered. Sam the Lion, the horsebreaker, pissing off the tank dam while Lois Farrow watched—it was too much to be thinking about on the way to San Francisco, and his eyes kept leaking tears all the way to Van Horn.

  They got to San Francisco in the middle of the night and checked into an expensive cheap motel on Van Ness Avenue, not far from the bay. Duane and Jacy were full of secret plans about the Thing they were going to do, and all the boys were itching to go bowling or find whores. The first day there the room mothers kept them all herded together and saw to it that they rode a cable car, visited the Top of the Mark, and went across the Golden Gate bridge. All the Californians looked at them as if they were freaks, whereas it seemed to the kids it was the other way around. The room mothers were scandalized by the number of bars in the city and kept everyone in a tight group to protect them against lurking perverts.

  The second day was unscheduled and most of the boys spent it on Market Street, looking at dirty magazines and talking to girls and sailors in the cheap sidewalk lunch counters. Sonny and three other boys wandered into a bar between Market and Mission and were met by a tall black-headed girl named Gloria who offered to let them take pictures of her naked. The bar itself was plastered with pictures of Gloria naked, a great inducement to photography. Unfortunately her fee for the privilege was twenty dollars and none of the boys could afford it.

  The major event of the trip occurred on the afternoon of the second day in San Francisco when Jacy finally allowed Duane to seduce her. The girls were all supposed to accompany the room mothers to the De Young Museum that afternoon, but Jacy cleverly got out of it. She was rooming with an obliging little girl named Winnie Snips, and she got Winnie to tell the room mothers that she had taken to her bed with menstrual cramps. No one ever doubted the word of Winnie Snips. She was valedictorian, and just unpopular enough that she was glad to do anything anyone wanted of her.

  After the girls and the room mothers left, Sonny stationed himself in the lobby of the motel so he could give the alarm if the party got back early. It was an ugly lobby full of postcard racks and it depressed him a little to sit in it. The only senior who bothered with postcards was Charlene Duggs who sent about a dozen a day to an airman boy friend of hers in Wichita Falls. She wanted everyone to know how much in love she was, but she didn’t have much to say and just wrote “Gee, I miss you, Love and kisses, Charlene” on every card. When Sonny thought about Jacy he got even more depressed, but Duane was his friend and a scheme of such daring had to be supported.

  As it turned out, Sonny’s depression was nothing at all compared to the one Duane had to cope with in the seduction chamber upstairs. The glorious moment had arrived, and was going to be just perfect: they could even see the bay and a part of Alcatraz through the window. “I love you,” Duane said, as soon as they had kissed a few times. “I love you too,” Jacy said, breathing heavily. It was the way things were done. Then she let Duane take absolutely all her clothes off, something she had never done before. For some reason, being naked with him was different than being naked around a bunch of Wichita kids. She caught him looking right at the place between her legs, and that seemed rather discourteous. Still, there was no backing out, so she stretched out on the bed while Duane undressed. He had been in a state of anticipatory erection for at least half of the 1,800-mile drive, and could hardly wait to get his socks off. They kissed again for a moment, but both supposed speed to be of the essence and Duane soon rolled on top. Jacy sucked in her breath, preparing to be painfully devirginized. For a moment or two she did feel something that was hard and slightly painful, but it wasn’t nearly as painful as she had expected it to be and in a moment it ceased to be hard at all and became flexible and rather wiggly. It certainly wasn’t hurting her, but it wasn’t going in, either. It sort of tickled, and kept sliding off into her pubic hair. Curiosity got the better of her and she opened her eyes. Duane had a very strange look on his face. He was horrified at himself, unable to believe his member should betray him—not then, of all times.

  “What’s wrong, honey?” Jacy asked, wiggling slightly. She couldn’t stand to be tickled.

  “Um,” Duane said, a little choked. “I don’t know.”

  He held himself above her, embarrassed to death but hoping beyond hope that his body would come to its senses and enable him to go on. He hoped for two or three long minutes, while Jacy offered her intimate of intimates, but his body continued to register complete indifference. Duane didn’t have the faintest idea what to do: no emergency had ever been more unlooked for.

  After a time Jacy felt a rising sense of exasperation.

  “Well get off a minute,” she said. “You might get tired and fall on me.”

  Duane complied, too disgraced to venture speech. He sat hopelessly on the edge of the bed, looking out at the bay. Jacy sat up and shrugged her hair back across her shoulders. Obviously they were faced with a crisis. The situation had to be salvaged or they would be t
he laughing stock of the class. Suddenly she felt furious with Duane. She looked with vexation at the offending organ.

  “It was Mexico,” she said. “I hate you. No tellin’ what you got down there. I don’t know why I ever went with you.”

  “I don’t know what happened,” Duane said glumly. He got up and crept reluctantly back into his clothes, but Jacy stalked about the room, indignantly naked and not giving a damn.

  “What’ll we say,” she said. “The whole class knows what we were going to do. I just want to cry. I think you’re the meanest boy I ever saw and my mother was so right about you.”

  “I don’t know what happened,” Duane said again. He really didn’t. He started for the door but Jacy stopped him.

  “Don’t go out there yet,” she said. “We haven’t had time to do it—Sonny would know. I don’t want one soul to know.”

  Duane sat back down on the bed and Jacy went into the bathroom and cried a few real tears of anger. It seemed to her Duane had been a monster of thoughtlessness to put her in such a position. She didn’t want to touch him again, ever, and it angered her to think she would have to go on pretending to be his sweetheart for the rest of the trip. It would never do to let the class think they had broken up over sex. In fact, she would have to be even more loving with him in public, so everyone would think they were having a warm, meaningful affair.

  When she thought they had been in the room long enough she went out and told Duane to leave.