Thalia

by Larry McMurtry

  “But you didn’t mess it up,” Ruth said. “My husband messed it up. I’ll never forgive him for it. If anybody needed to be fired for . . . what they fired you for, it was him.”

  John Cecil looked at her with astonishment. “Oh, you don’t mean that, Ruth,” he said, after a moment. “Why Herman’s the football coach.”

  She saw that he didn’t believe her, and knew that Herman had been right. Nobody, not even John Cecil, would believe her, and in truth she didn’t even know for sure herself what Herman was. She just felt sad and uncertain and wanted to cry.

  “But you’ve even got two kids,” she said. “We don’t have any kids, and we never will.”

  John chuckled. “It’s kind of amazing to me that me and Irene had the girls,” he said. “I guess it just don’t take much enthusiasm for people to have two kids.”

  Suddenly Ruth wanted to be home, away from John Cecil. His sadness was so heavy that just being with him made her feel the weight, made her own limbs seem heavier. She made an excuse and left quickly, glad to be outside.

  The next day John Cecil left Thalia for good, to go back to Plainview to his brother’s grocery store. The job on the Indian reservation hadn’t worked out.

  When Sonny returned from the senior trip, Ruth and he discovered that they were famished for one another. The first afternoon he stayed so long that, while they were dressing, the coach’s pickup drove into the driveway. It was something they had dreaded and been frightened of for months, but just then they felt so calm and comfortable with one another that they were not even scared. Besides, the coach customarily spent ten or fifteen minutes carefully putting away his fishing equipment. Sonny quietly finished dressing and went in the living room, so he could go out the front door as the coach came in the back. Ruth, wearing only her panties, folded the quilt and took it to the cedar chest in the hall closet, where it was kept. She was still a little excited, still a little warm. She picked up her dress and went into the living room—the late sun was filtering through the Venetian blinds and Sonny was peeping out of one window, watching the garage. Ruth came up behind him, slipped her arm around his waist and rubbed his stomach. When he realized she was still almost naked he turned with a smile and lifted her breasts. She put the dress on and Sonny buttoned it in back.

  “I love you,” she said. “You must treat me right from now on.”

  He didn’t reply, but when they heard the back door open he kissed her lightly and walked blithely away, down the front sidewalk.

  Herman was in the kitchen, poking around in the cabinet trying to find some Mercurochrome to put on a skinned hand. He could never find things like that when he needed them. Ruth stood in the door a moment, watching him fumble in the cabinet, and her mood was so good that she felt a moment of fondness for him. All he really needed of her was an occasional small kindness.

  “I’ll find that,” she said. “How was fishing?”

  For three weeks she continued to make his bed on the couch, and he accepted it, bewildered. Every night he thought he would think up a way to get his supremacy back, but every night the task proved too much for him and he decided it wouldn’t hurt Ruth to have one more night to cool off.

  In fact, he needed only to wait. Ruth found that she didn’t like to sleep alone. She slept better with a body next to hers, even if it was Herman’s. For a night or two she fought with herself, determined to keep the advantage she had gained, but she just felt more and more restless and decided finally that it was a silly way to keep an advantage. The next evening, when she was changing the pillowcases, she put Herman’s pillow back on the bed. Without a word being said, he came too.

  Nineteen

  SUMMER SHAPED UP VERY WELL FOR SONNY, BUT VERY BADLY for Duane. The first thing Sonny did was quit his job with Frank Fartley. He then hired on as a roughneck with Gene Farrow. He liked driving the butane truck better, but doing it full time gave him no chance to be with Ruth, whereas if he roughnecked at night he could count on spending the whole afternoon with her. Coach Popper was away fishing almost every day. Ruth was becoming happier every day, and was a lot more fun to visit than she had been. She and Sonny both lived for the afternoons.

  Duane, unfortunately, had no one to make his days worthwhile. True to her word, Jacy had cut him off cold. Once in a while he saw her driving through town, her sunglasses on, the top of her convertible down, her bare arms tanned from all the hours she spent lying around the country club pool in Wichita. Such glimpses made him ache with desire, but ache was about all he could do. He spent most of June futilely trying to get her to talk to him on the phone—usually she just hung up, but the few times she didn’t hang up were even worse.

  “Why don’t you go back to Mexico,” she said once. “I guess girls are just easier to please down there.”

  “Just go with me once more,” he kept saying. “Just one more time. You can at least see me.”

  He was convinced that if he were actually in her presence for a few minutes all her craziness would go away and they could be in love again.

  Jacy knew how he felt, and repeatedly refused to see him. The whole town knew he was desperate to get her back, which suited her fine. After a month had gone by she put a stop to the calls.

  “You find somebody else to pester,” she said. “I’ve got a new boy friend now and I can’t be talking to you.”

  “Who?” Duane asked, confused. The blow was unexpected.

  “Lester Marlow,” Jacy said. “I guess I’ve just been wanting to go with Lester all along and didn’t realize it.”

  Duane hung up, went downstairs, and threw three pool balls against the back wall of the building as hard as he could, knocking out three big hunks of plaster and scaring Old Man Parsons almost to death. Old Man Parsons was a retired hardware salesman who looked after the poolhall during the day.

  That night Duane told Sonny that he was leaving town—he had already packed his suitcase.

  “There’s not a goddamn thing to stay for,” he said. “I’m goin’ to Midland. All the roughnecks say you can get a job out there anytime. Jacy’s goin’ with Lester, why not leave?”

  Sonny had no answer. Late that night he and Duane and Genevieve had coffee and pie together and Duane caught the three o’clock bus out. The prospect of setting out into the world had already taken Duane’s mind off his problem. He was speculating about what sort of wages he could draw in Midland. Sonny felt okay about it, figuring to see Duane back in Thalia as soon as Jacy got off to college. When they walked Duane to the bus in the warm summer night they all felt good. Sonny and Genevieve stood on the curb in front of the café and watched the bus pull out. Soon all they could see of it were the red taillights, far out beyond the city limits sign.

  “Wouldn’t mind goin’ someplace myself,” Sonny said.

  “Well, Uncle Sam will see you get your chance,” Genevieve said, stretching her arms.

  Abilene’s Mercury was parked in front of the poolhall. Sonny was ready to go home, but he hated to go through the poolhall while Abilene was practicing. Finally he went in and had another cup of coffee with Genevieve, waiting to hear the Mercury roar away.

  When Jacy heard about Duane leaving town she was a little bit upset. His calls had not been all that annoying—sometimes when she was bored the calls picked her up a little. It was true that she had started going with Lester more or less officially, but it was certainly no deep love affair. She was getting ready to be deeply in love with Bobby Sheen, and she regarded Lester as a necessary stepping-stone. Only by going with someone in Bobby’s circle could she keep herself constantly before his eyes, and she knew that if she kept herself constantly before his eyes he would soon realize that she was more beautiful than Annie-Annie. Jacy knew quite well that she was prettier than Annie-Annie, but at the same time it worried her a little that Annie-Annie always managed to look extremely sexy. The only thing Jacy could figure was that the sexy look was something Annie-Annie had acquired with experience, and there was certainly no reason wh
y she couldn’t get just as much experience as Annie-Annie had. Lester Marlow was exactly suitable for such a purpose: he adored Jacy and was completely manageable. She still thought red pubic hair was a little ridiculous, but some things had to be accepted if one was to become a woman of the world.

  The Wichita kids called sexual intercourse “screwing,” so Jacy took to calling it that too. Lester’s parents were in Colorado for the summer, so she and Lester could screw whenever they wanted to—Lester was always willing and usually more or less able. In a week or so Jacy managed to become completely unshy about the whole business, and even worked out a sort of routine. She slept until noon, got up, ate some peanut butter, called Lester to see if he was home, put on shorts, sandals, a blouse, and her new sunglasses and drove to Wichita. The drive always made her sweat a little and it was pleasant to walk into Lester’s big cool house. Lester would always be there looking slightly nervous.

  “Hi,” Jacy would say. “Want to screw?” That was the favored approach among the Bobby Sheen set. Lester wouldn’t have dared not to want to, so Jacy would go up to his parents’ bedroom, the room with the biggest, most comfortable bed. There she would peel off her clothes and wait for Lester to peel off his. The screwing itself was pretty athletic—Jacy had never been very big on athletics, but she knew good and well she could learn to screw if she put her mind to it. Fortunately, Lester had a good attitude: he would do exactly as directed. When they were finished they usually drove over to the country club and lay around the pool with Bobby Sheen and Annie-Annie and all the other kids, most of whom had been screwing too. One day Bobby Sheen offered to rub suntan oil on Jacy’s back and legs and she knew she was making progress. He rubbed the oil on in a very sexy way, she thought.

  From time to time it occurred to her that she had really run Duane off too soon. He wasn’t quite as manageable as Lester, but he was really a good bit sexier, and she discovered that some of the girls thought there was something pretty romantic about sleeping with roughnecks. She could probably have got another month or so of good out of Duane, but that she hadn’t didn’t really worry her: Bobby Sheen was the main objective, and if for prestige reasons it became necessary to have a roughneck in love with her there was always Sonny. He was very available, and just as nice as Duane.

  Once, just to show that she wasn’t snobbish, she called Sonny up and invited him to have a hamburger with her. It was a pleasant summer evening in early July and they decided to drive to Wichita and eat. Jacy drove, her hair blowing across her face. She had on a white silk blouse with the ends tied together in a knot across her stomach—an inch or two of her midriff showed between blouse and shorts.

  “Do you ever hear from Duane?” she asked, sighing. “I really feel bad about that.”

  “I had a postcard,” Sonny said. “He’s makin’ three-twenty a month. Said he bought a car.”

  “Well, I guess I’ll always be a little bit in love with Duane,” Jacy said. “We just had too much against us. It wasn’t easy having to be the one to break up.”

  Talking about it made Sonny uneasy. In fact, just riding with Jacy made him feel a little disloyal. He still thought of her as Duane’s girl.

  They ate hamburgers, drank milk shakes, and rode slowly back to Thalia, looking at the millions of summer stars. Jacy let Sonny out at the poolhall and went on home, realizing only after she got there that she had enjoyed the evening. Dating no one but Lester Marlow was really tiresome. Except for not being rich, Sonny was more her type of boy. The thought of screwing Lester one more time was utterly boring, but she didn’t really feel like she could push things with Bobby Sheen. She decided that in a day or two she would call Sonny again and perhaps go to the lake with him to find out if she liked to kiss him. It would be nice once more to go with somebody she liked to kiss.

  The very next day, Bobby Sheen seduced her. Annie-Annie had gone to Dallas to buy her college wardrobe, and Jacy had skipped Lester and gone straight to the club to swim. Bobby asked her if she wanted to go to his house to play some records and that was it. They spread towels over the seats of his MG and wore their wet bathing suits to the house. As soon as they were inside Bobby slipped her straps down so he could play with her breasts. Jacy tried to concentrate and do everything right but it was actually pretty arousing, screwing Bobby Sheen, and she couldn’t keep her head clear. He was about five times as athletic as Lester and when she thought it over later she was pretty sure she came, which was what one was supposed to do. At any rate, she went to sleep and didn’t wake up until six o’clock. She found Bobby downstairs. He had on Bermuda shorts and was eating a peanut butter sandwich while he watched the news on TV.

  “Peanut butter?” he asked absently, when he noticed Jacy. She didn’t want to eat, she wanted to sit in his lap, but she saw he was really watching the news and made herself refrain. They had come home in his car, she had no way to leave. During the commercial Bobby got up to fix himself another sandwich. “Oh, you’re afoot, aren’t you,” he said. “As soon as the news is over I’ll run you back to the club.”

  He was quite cheerful and relaxed, but Jacy was a little surprised that he didn’t take on over her more than he did. For the next four or five days she hung around the club pool almost constantly, expecting to hear that Bobby and Annie-Annie had broken up; she was sure that as soon as that happened Bobby would call her for another date.

  The next Sunday morning Jacy was in the kitchen peeling an orange when her mother came in from the bedroom to get more coffee. On Sunday mornings Lois always lay in bed and drank coffee until the coffee pot was empty. Gene was gone—he always spent Sunday morning inspecting his leases.

  “Honey,” Lois asked, “don’t you know that Sheen boy in Wichita? Bobby Sheen?”

  “I sure do,” Jacy said. “Why?”

  “He got married yesterday to some girl named Annie Martin,” Lois said. “It’s in the paper this morning. I knew I’d seen them around the club. They got married in Oklahoma a couple of days ago and it just now made the paper. You know her?”

  Jacy walked into the bedroom and found the article. It was just a tiny article with no picture, the kind the paper always ran when kids of prominent families ran off and got married without their parents’ consent.

  When Lois came into the bedroom with her coffee, Jacy was sitting on the bed crying bitterly.

  “He’s the luh-ast one,” she said. “I’ll just be an ol’ maid.”

  Lois set her coffee down and got her daughter a box of Kleenex. She had seldom seen Jacy so upset, and least of all over a boy. Her tears were ruining the newspaper, and since she hadn’t finished reading it Lois gently pulled it away.

  “Oh, honey,” she said. “Don’t cry like that. That’s the way it is you know. Win a few, lose a few. That’s really the way it goes, all through life.”

  Twenty

  ABOUT A WEEK AFTER BOBBY SHEEN GOT MARRIED, SOMETHING totally unexpected happened to Jacy, and it was led up to by an event so startling that everyone in Thalia almost went mad with surprise. Joe Bob Blanton was arrested for rape!

  It was one of those days when it seemed to Christian people that the Lord must have lost all patience with the town. It was a wonder he hadn’t simply destroyed it by fire, like he had Sodom, and since the heat at midafternoon that day was 109 degrees He could easily have done so simply by making the sun a little hotter. A few degrees more and the grass would have flamed, the buildings begun to smoke, and the asphalt streets to melt and bubble.

  Joe Bob didn’t rape Jacy, of course, but the general confusion that followed his arrest made possible what did happen to her. Joe Bob didn’t actually rape anybody, but very few would have believed that at the time.

  “That poor kid’s downfall started the day old man Blanton got the call to preach,” Lois Farrow said, but she was the only one who took that view. No one else thought of blaming Brother Blanton for his son’s disgrace, and still less did they think of blaming Coach Popper or the school board president or San Francisco or E
sther Williams, the movie star. They were all quite willing to put the blame squarely on Joe Bob himself.

  Joe Bob was a seventeen-year-old virgin. For years he had been tormented by lustful thoughts. When he was only fourteen Brother Blanton slipped into his room one night and caught him masturbating by flashlight over a picture of Esther Williams. Joe Bob had torn the picture out of a movie magazine one of their neighbors had thrown away. Of course Brother Blanton whipped him severely and disposed of the picture; he also told Joe Bob in no uncertain terms what the sequel of such actions would be.

  “Joe Bob,” he said, “have you ever been through the State Hospital in Wichita? The insane asylum?”

  “No sir,” Joe Bob said.

  “Well, sometime I’ll take you,” Brother Blanton promised. “There are three or four hundred men over there, pitiful creatures, rotting away, no good to their families or to the Lord or anybody. I don’t know about all of them, some of them may have come from broken homes or been alcoholics, but I’m sure most of those men are there because they did just what you were doing today. They abused themselves until their minds were destroyed. I don’t want to scare you now. You’re young, you haven’t hurt yourself much, and the Lord will forgive you. I just want you to know what will happen if you keep on with this kind of filthiness. You understand, don’t you?”

  “Yes sir,” Joe Bob said.

  He understood, but he soon discovered he was just too weak to stop. He kept right on playing with himself, all through high school, in the face of certain insanity. His father hadn’t told him how long it took for a mind to be destroyed, but he never doubted that his would be, sooner or later.

  In the summer of his junior year, when he got the call to preach, he thought there still might be hope. If he preached, girls might like him, and if they did he might be able to overcome his vices and lead a normal life. The hope was very short-lived. The very night he preached his first sermon he succumbed to the vice again. Besides that, he found he did not really like to preach. He didn’t have anything to say, and he soon decided he must have heard a false call: he could always get the Lord off his mind, but the only way he could get girls off his mind was by jacking off. In San Francisco he had been with the boys who wandered into the bar where Gloria was, and the thought of Gloria haunted him for weeks. By the time he got back home he had decided to resign himself to eventual insanity, and he ceased to make any effort to curb his self-abuse. If the Lord spared him until he got through college that would be enough to ask.