“I can’t speak for everybody but I don’t need no comparisons,” she said. “You ain’t never met Morris.”
Shanks looked at her coolly. “The thing about me, I’m willing to learn from anybody,” he said. “How does ol’ Morris go about producing all them wonders?”
“You’ll have to ask him about that,” the woman said, not a bit flustered. “I sure ain’t fixin’ to tell you.”
“You do look like you’ve got some mileage on you,” Sonny said, winking at Jim. The women all looked astonished, as if some agreed-upon bound had just been overstepped. They moved away together, each secretly vowing to make the others promise never to mention the conversation to anyone, though each of them reported it in detail to her husband that very night.
“Take a ride with me,” Sonny said. “I got to collect a wager.”
Jim went, fascinated. He decided at once that if he knew anyone with charisma, it was Sonny. It was no wonder the women had all seemed bewitched. He had a way of making whatever he was doing seem interesting, and even his most casual gestures had a kind of authority. They went to a large motel nearby, but the cowboy Shanks was looking for wasn’t in. His room was unlocked and his television set was on but the room was empty—just a saddle propped against the wall and a few clothes strewn about.
“He’s probably two doors down the way,” Sonny said, “puttin’ it to somebody’s old lady. Let’s give him ten minutes.”
He took a rope off the saddle, propped the saddle on a chair, and sat on the bed cross-legged roping the saddle horn. He demonstrated a number of throws for Jim’s benefit. He never missed, and he never had to get off the bed to take the rope off. He flipped it off every time just before the loop closed.
“I thought you were just a rider,” Jim said.
“Oh, I am,” Sonny said. “Any nut can rope a saddle. I guess I could have learned to rope if I’d wanted to. Trouble with roping, it takes a horse, and then you’ve got to haul the goddamn horse everywhere in the world. I’d as soon have an anchor tied to me as a goddamn horse.”
He stood up and quickly tied one end of the rope to the leg of the dresser and the other end to the bed and pulled the shades so the room was nearly dark.
“Let’s go,” he said. “If he’s screwin’ somebody, he’s takin’ too goddamn long. You can’t tell, the bastard might be in Canada, he ain’t got no sense. If he comes dragging in here drunk, maybe he’ll trip over this and break his neck.”
They sped back to the rodeo grounds, Sonny silent and angry. He ignored traffic lights when it suited him to, but by the time they pulled back into the grounds he had recovered his good humor and was whistling. “Well, that’s rodeo life,” he said. “I don’t know what kind of woman would let that low-life son of a bitch screw her anyway.”
He reminded Jim again of the party, and let him out with a nod. Pete Tatum was leading his donkey past the gate and Jim hailed him.
“Have you seen a guy named Peewee Raskin?” he asked. “I don’t know if you know him.”
“Hard to miss Peewee—but I ain’t seen him this morning. You hungry by any chance?”
It turned out that Boots was off with a girl friend eating Mexican food, and Pete was afoot and hungry. Jim was enthusiastic about taking him to eat. He felt he was learning the rodeo world fast. Without his makeup Pete’s face was rough, as if from many bumps and bruises, but confident and friendly. They went to a huge drive-in on the outskirts of Phoenix and ordered cheeseburgers and beer and ate rapidly. There was a south wind off the desert and paper napkins from the food trays kept blowing across the concrete of the drive-in. As soon as they blew off the concrete they stuck to one or another of the many small cacti and flapped in the wind. For fifty or sixty yards to the north of the drive-in almost every cactus had a few ragged napkins stuck to it. The sight annoyed Jim. A desert of napkins and hamburger wrappers was very unpleasant to look at.
“How’s picture takin’?” Pete asked in order to say something. Jim made him feel a little uncomfortable. Usually Pete made conversation easily with anyone, and yet he didn’t know what to say to Jim. He was clearly a likable, pleasant young man—Pete liked him even without knowing him—but it was so obvious that Jim didn’t know what he was doing that it made things a little awkward. He didn’t even know how to pretend he knew what he was doing. He was young, so it was no crime. Pete had seen many young men who were more adrift than Jim. Normally he gave them a wide berth, even if he liked them—or especially if he liked them. Otherwise he made disciples and dependents that he didn’t want.
“I’m none too expert yet,” Jim said. “I get some good pictures but I sure haven’t learned to be unobtrusive.”
“Yeah, I remember you obtruded a little too far, back there in Merkel.”
“I still can’t figure out why they hit me. I would have stopped if they had asked me to.”
“I wouldn’t lose no sleep tryin’ to figure it out,” Pete said. “These boys ain’t the gentlest folk in the world. I wish I had a dollar for every fight I’ve seen that there wasn’t no reason for.”
On their way back they stopped at the motel for Jim to get a lens he had forgotten. Patsy was still by the pool, still in her bikini. She had taken off the robe and had a blue towel draped over her shoulders.
“Want to come?” Jim asked, not really supposing she would. But he caught her at a gregarious moment.
“I guess so,” she said. “I was having a try at tanning, but it won’t work. Are you just going to take Pete back?”
“Yeah,” Jim said, though he had really meant to take pictures.
Patsy felt shy at the sight of Pete and went in and put on a beach robe over her suit. Pete got out so she could slide in next to Jim and she found that she was glad to see him. He seemed relaxed and approachable.
“Hi,” she said. “How many cowboys have you saved from horns and hoofs since I saw you?”
Pete smiled and said he hadn’t kept count. Patsy discovered that she was sitting on a beer-can opener, part of which was wedged between the seats, part of which poked into her behind. She twisted around and fished it out and leaned forward to put it in the glove compartment. She was warm from the sun and smelled of suntan oil and the arm she stretched out was freckled a little above the wrist. Pete looked away from her, at the sun-whitened streets of Phoenix. Patsy’s arm, or her odor, or her black hair, or her smile, something about her reminded him too vividly of his first wife, whose name was Marie. He had loved her very much, and lost her very painfully. She too had freckled in the sun.
When they pulled up at the trailer, Boots was sitting on the steps, barefooted and wearing Levi’s and an old gray shirt of his. She had just washed her hair and was letting the hot sun dry it.
“Get out and have a beer with us,” Pete said.
“I’m too nearly naked,” Patsy said. “I’d like to meet your wife, though—I mean your wife-to-be. Maybe we could have the beer in the car.” At first glance the trailer house seemed less roomy than the Ford, and she could not imagine the contortions that would be necessary for the four of them to crowd into it.
Boots came over and got introduced and Pete went in and got the beer. When he came back Boots was in the car chattering rapidly.
“You’re our first guests,” she said. “I don’t count rodeo people. They’re around so much it’s like brothers and sisters.”
Patsy felt drawn to her at once, partly because she was so completely unpretentious and partly because she and Pete were just getting married. She was more comfortable with people who had not been married very long. She didn’t really want the beer but sipped it politely, and some foam stuck to her upper lip. Being in company, even the company of two people, suddenly made her feel that she had been a recluse of late. She began to feel very sociable.
“Look,” she said, acting on impulse, “why must we sit in this car to drink. It’s obvious that trailer house is too small for all of us. Why don’t we go back to our motel? Nobody but us ever uses the pool.
We can sit around the pool and you men can get potted if you want to.”
“Great,” Boots said. “I love swimming pools.”
Pete looked slightly uncomfortable about the invitation, but Boots didn’t notice. “I can’t do much boozin’ in the afternoon,” he said. “We might come over and take a dip with you afterwhile.”
Patsy felt a little cast down, for she felt sociable at that instant and hated for the company to dissolve, but Pete was too firm a man to argue with. He added that he needed to work with his donkey awhile. Patsy would have liked to watch and regretted she hadn’t changed clothes. Sitting around a rodeo grounds in a bikini and a beach robe was out of the question.
“Well, we’ll be there,” Jim said. “Come on when you feel like it.”
Boots waved her beer can at the Carpenters as they departed, and Pete pitched his under the trailer before following her inside. Once they were inside Boots turned to give him a light kiss and to her surprise found that he wanted her and wanted her at once. “My hair’s wet, honey,” she said, startled.
“Well, you have to take the good with the bad on a honeymoon,” he said with a wry grin.
Her Levi’s were old, and so tight that he simply turned them wrong side out as he peeled them off. Boots had never known him to be so sudden about it, or so resolute. Throughout their courtship she had made most of the first moves, feeling that he would be ashamed to make them because she was so much younger. But for once he made the moves, and without hesitation. All she had to do was answer, never a difficult task for her. It seemed, when she looked up, that the trailer was shaking—someone might notice. Maybe that was why they had never done it in the daytime before. But the fact that Pete suddenly wanted her so much excited her past the point of caring about the trailer, or anything except what they were doing. “Oh, Pete,” she said, quickly caught. The hot afternoon sun came through the little window and made the sweat shine on their shoulders. She kept an arm crooked around Pete’s neck and went to sleep, the sheet beneath them cool with sweat.
When he knew she was asleep, Pete moved and lay beside her and wiped his sweaty face on the end of the sheet. He felt swollen and moody. Instead of being rested, he felt restless, neither empty nor at peace. He loved Boots—he had only to glance at her sleeping face to know that—but he had come to her wanting someone else. Not Patsy—Marie, still Marie, whom Patsy had reminded him of. He had never had enough of Marie, never had his fill of her at all. In that regard, his only accomplishment in ten years was the acquired ability not to think about her often. He wanted to want Boots and Boots only. He was old enough to know that he was lucky in her, lucky to have a girl so easy, so open and so honest—lucky to have anyone who cared about him as unselfishly as she did. She wanted nothing better than to be in his keeping. And yet even Patsy had distracted him from her. Her chatter, her smell, the beer foam on her upper lip, her slim torso: no more than that and he had become, for a time, drawn away from Boots and had ruthlessly forced himself back.
He looked down at his bride-to-be sleeping contentedly despite the heat, the sun on her shoulders and her small relaxed breasts. It made him sad, he felt confused—but at least she didn’t. She had been purely pleased. For a few minutes he grew more and more depressed, wishing almost that the whole business had never been invented; and then Boots woke up, her eyes shining when she looked at him, so cheerful and tender herself that he could not help but be glad after all that the whole business had been invented.
She sat up and rubbed his belly fondly then flushed a little and shyly got up and squeezed into the tiny bathroom. In a minute she came back and sat on the bed to brush her hair, her face quiet and relaxed.
“I guess we better start staying in motels,” she said. “The trailer was shaking.”
“I never thought,” he said. “You really want to go swimming?”
“Sure. I like them.” But she put down her brush and stretched out beside him. “You don’t have a suit, do you?”
“I’ll just cut the legs out of some old Levi’s.”
“I’ll do it for you,” she said, bouncing up again. “That’s what a wife’s for.”
She couldn’t find any scissors, and to Pete’s amusement cut the Levi’s with the shears he used to trim Hercules’ mane and tail. She kept cutting, trying to get the legs even, and soon little snips of denim covered the bed. Pete grew easy and drowsy and watched her with his eyes half shut. She was right. It was time to sell the trailer.
10
THE CARPENTERS WENT BACK to the motel to await Boots and Pete, and as the afternoon lengthened and they didn’t come Patsy grew terribly annoyed. She had wanted them to come right away, and when they didn’t her sociable mood soured, her spirits dropped, and she soon reached a point where she didn’t want them to come at all.
“He’s no better than any other cowboy,” she said, moping. “I hate cowboys, clowns, rodeo, and the whole business of cowboyism.”
“What’s cowboyism?” Jim asked lightly. He was sitting on the floor putting his pictures back in the file cases.
“I beg your pardon?”
“For shit’s sake,” he said, though still lightly. “You hardly know them. They may not be great minds but they’re perfectly likable. Just because they didn’t show up the minute you wanted them to, you make up some vague bitchy label that doesn’t really mean anything, even to you. Maybe they wanted to make love or something. Maybe he really did have to train his donkey. You told them to come any time, so what difference does it make?”
He was sitting with his back to her as he spoke, and Patsy considered his back gravely, wondering how it would really be to plunge a knife into someone’s back. But she knew that Jim was right: she was merely bored and being bitchy, and she didn’t want a quarrel, at least not wholeheartedly.
“So I’m bitchy and smarty,” she said. “You have no right to complain now. Besides, what I said about them was true—it was just fallibly put. I do like them. I’m no snob. You’re the essence of vagueness yourself and you have no right to criticize my terminology.”
“Boodly-boodly,” Jim said. “I’ll criticize all I want to.”
Patsy felt it was surely not possible for life to be any vaguer and duller than it was at moment. She lay on the bed with her chin on her wrists staring at the little brown dressing table. Through the open door of the bathroom she could see the white end of a motel towel that had been dropped in the shower. Jim had the annoying habit of drying himself while still in the bath or the shower, and he invariably got at least the ends of the towel wet, if not the whole towel. If he was going to go through life getting all their towels wet what was there to hope for?
“Feel like doing perversities?” she asked with no change of tone.
“What?” Jim asked, not looking around. “Want to do what?”
“Perversities,” Patsy said. “Per as in persimmon, versities as in universities. You know, unconventional activities, like people do in pornography.”
“Oh,” Jim said, sliding pictures into envelopes. “I don’t think you’re serious.”
Patsy didn’t answer. How could she blame him for dismissing the invitation? They had only made love the night before and she had seldom been inclined again so soon. It embarrassed her a good deal even to have said what she said, because she had been more or less serious. While Jim was at the rodeo pens she had peeked into Sexus and it had affected her. If life was just going to be a matter of dullness and wet towels and waiting and reading, such things might be worth trying. She was in a mood to accept almost any diversion, and besides she was curious. For him to dismiss her so cursorily, without even glancing around, annoyed her. It was certainly not an invitation she intended to issue twice.
“Why are you so completely vanilla?” she asked.
“Because that’s the way you want me,” he said, not turning around.
“I did to begin with, but maybe I’m changing,” she said. It was true that she had repulsed some experimental attempts on his part ear
ly on in their marriage, when she had been easily embarrassed, but it annoyed her that he thought her so static.
“I’m going to be new, dynamic, debased,” she said gloomily.
“You might get a chance tonight. Shanks is giving a party.”
“Oh, god.” She reversed herself instantly. “We’re not going, surely. At least I’m not.”
“Be a great opportunity for the new you,” Jim said.
“Oh, quit baiting me,” she said with a little heat. “I know I’m duller even than you. I give up. I don’t want to go. He’s awful. He’s cowboyism personified. I want to stay home and read.”
“Suit yourself. I’m going. Maybe some cowgirl will seduce me. Then we’ll have some guilt to work with. What our marriage needs is a little guilt.”
“I said hush,” she said. “Don’t talk to me in that vein.”
But they continued to talk in exactly that vein throughout the afternoon. They kept up a running low-grade argument of a sort they were expert at. They couldn’t seem to drop it, but neither did it flare high. When Boots and Pete finally came, Patsy was relieved and quickly forgave them for their tardiness. Pete looked sort of comical in his snipped-off jeans. The late afternoon heat was terrific and the water felt good. Boots dove a lot, not gracefully, but with great energy. She wore a two-piece green suit, not quite so skimpy as Patsy’s bikini.
After a while they all got out and sat on the cement letting themselves drip. It was obvious that Boots at least was very, very happy to be getting married. She sat by Pete and hung on to his arm or his shoulder constantly. Once she kissed him shyly behind the ear. Patsy was amused and a little envious—she would never have kissed Jim behind the ear in public. Pete was relaxed and quiet. He scarcely looked at Patsy and took Boots’s affection gracefully, now and then circling her waist with his arm. It turned out that both of them were from Fort Worth.