Moving On

by Larry McMurtry

  “Hello,” she said, turning around and smiling at Peewee. She saw immediately, once his hat was off, that he was too young to be shy about. He had short reddish brown hair and a slightly crooked nose. He looked about sixteen.

  Peewee smiled tentatively. He was blinking and trying to get the sleep out of his eyes, and it took him much aback to be spoken to at a critical juncture in his waking. And the girl who had spoken was so pretty that he just wanted to stare at her. Her eyes were merry and gray, and she had a straight nose that wrinkled a bit when she smiled, and her smile was merry too. She wore no makeup but she had a comb in her hand and now and then ran it through her black hair.

  “I’m Patsy,” she said. “Very pleased to meet you.”

  “Uh, yeah,” Peewee said, feeling very, very shy. He wished he was tidier and tried to tidy himself a bit, but his canvas bag was in the trunk and there was not much he could do except try to tuck his shirttail in better. Patsy kept looking at him, her chin resting on her arm, which was across the back seat.

  “Peewee Raskin,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”

  “What do you do, Peewee?”

  “Uh,” Peewee said. For a moment he was honestly unable to remember what he did.

  Patsy saw that he was struggling to collect his wits, and she politely looked at the road for a minute to give him a chance. Somehow he looked like a likable person, irresistibly hopeless. Jim was driving with iron concentration, determined to make up for the few minutes he had lost at the service station. He knew it was ridiculous, but despite himself he couldn’t help making schedules and straining horribly to keep them. Patsy couldn’t stand schedules and was glad Peewee had turned up in the back seat. They could make friends.

  Peewee soon recovered himself and was glad when Patsy looked back at him again. He took up the question of what he did.

  “Uh, I rodeo,” he said. “Much as I can afford to, anyway. This here’s actually my first year to be a pro. My folks thought I or-tent to a turned pro yet but I figure the younger the better, you know. So I done it.

  “I ain’t actually won no money yet,” he added apologetically.

  “Oh, well,” Patsy said, stretching. “I bet you will any time. What do you ride?”

  “Bareback horses,” he said. “Try to, that is. I ain’t actually stayed on one yet, either. These pro horses they’re a different pot of beans from them amateur horses I was used to.”

  “My goodness, how complicated. I didn’t know there were professional broncs.”

  “Aw, yeah,” Peewee said seriously, warming to his subject. “You got to learn ’em, you see. Study ’em, I mean, so you know what to expect. Like the other night I drew this old red horse and the boys told me I ort to take a short rein so I done it an’ the ol’ son of a bitch, uh, the ol’ so-an’-so stood on his head and yanked me off flat of my face.”

  Patsy giggled, delighted with him. He was not only hopelessly hopeless but hopelessly genuine too. “Those boys probably misled you on purpose,” she said. “You shouldn’t take advice from your competitors, should you?”

  Peewee looked at her blankly, as if the idea that he would have competitors had never occurred to him. In truth, it had never occurred to him that anyone would regard him as competition.

  “Aw, they wouldn’t have needed to do that,” he said. “I couldn’t have rode the old son of a bitch anyway.”

  Patsy noticed that he was fidgeting—he had a look of discomfort on his face. He kept shifting the position of his legs.

  “Are you too crowded back there?” she asked. “I’m sure we could cram some of that stuff into the luggage compartment.”

  “Uh, no, I’m just fine,” Peewee said, still squirming.

  He gazed out the window as if he had some inner pain, and Patsy felt perturbed. He was a very likable boy. One of his front teeth was chipped and his blue Levi shirt was at least a size too large. Watching him squirm, it occurred to her that in all likelihood his problem was the one she had had before they got to Big Spring: a full bladder, pure and simple. She was at once less perturbed, thinking he would mention it when they came to the next town; but in time they came to the next town, Midland, and passed through it, and Peewee didn’t mention stopping. Jim had begun to chat with him, quizzing him about rodeo and rodeo people, and Peewee answered lengthily and fidgeted and looked stoically out the window. Patsy grew worried, then annoyed. He was plainly not going to do anything to interrupt Jim’s ridiculous schedule, even if his bladder burst, and it probably would if something weren’t done, for there was no telling how far Jim would drive before he stopped again. If they got beyond Pecos without stopping, Peewee was doomed. The longer she thought about it the more annoyed she became. There she was again, involved in the workings of a cowboy’s bladder. It was ridiculous. But when she looked at Peewee she found she could not be angry at him. He was obviously a person who would never amount to anything, and who knew it, and who had only his friendliness with which to face the world. The way he tried not to look at her too much flattered her and made her feel nervous and strangely powerful. He was probably only keeping quiet about his bladder through fear of offending her. She began to feel responsible for him. He was a child in her keeping, virtually. Jim was the one who was infuriating, for he should have anticipated the problem, or asked Peewee, or simply stopped himself, through common consideration. He was very insensitive. He had no awareness whatever of other people’s bladders. It had been all she could do to get him to stop for her own.

  She grew more and more fretful and squirmed a bit herself. It had been a fine cool morning, and she had really been very happy to be going on an endless drive, and the cheese crisps and the Coke had been exactly what she wanted for breakfast, and Peewee had been a nice surprise—up until the time when he needed to pee. But it was all getting spoiled. She grew angry at Peewee too. If he didn’t have gumption enough to speak up, he deserved to suffer. Then they reached Odessa, passed the first stations, and he was still silent. Patsy abruptly decided to act. She was tired of suffering the thought of him suffering.

  “Pull into that station, please,” she said, pointing dictatorially.

  “Why?” Jim asked, surprised. “We just stopped in Big Spring.”

  Patsy had put on her shades, and she looked at him imperiously from behind them. “True,” she said. “We stopped in Big Spring. Would you mind stopping again please? I have to do something.”

  Her tone left him no choice, so he braked hastily and swerved into the station. Patsy got out at once and strode to the rest room. The service station men looked at her hostilely when they saw they did not intend to buy gas. She waited in the rest room a minute, her bosom heaving with annoyance. Peewee’s boots tapped by and in time there was the sound of a toilet flushing from the other rest room. Then the boots went back to the car. She waited another minute and went back too, her head down. Jim was drumming his fingers on the wheel. In the back seat Peewee looked content and comfortable and grateful, but she wanted none of his gratitude.

  “Thank you very much,” she said to Jim. “I hope this excessive stopping hasn’t destroyed your career.”

  “Used to like outside Odessa,” Peewee said. “Nice little town.”

  Patsy ignored his cheerfulness and Jim’s silent, somewhat quizzical annoyance and turned and bent over the back seat to fish in the box of paperbacks. She fished out A Charmed Life, which she had bought only a few days before. Peewee was looking at the books curiously.

  When she bent over to reach down into the box he had not been able to help looking down her blouse. All he had seen was the strap of her bra and the hollow of her shoulder, but it was the kind of glimpse that was infinitely tantalizing, and he quickly looked at the books in order to cover himself. There were a great many books, it seemed to him.

  He picked one off the top and stared at it with surprise. It was called The Decipherment of Linear-B. He had never seen a book with such a title, and he stared at it silently. Patsy looked back at him again, still ste
rn, but her sternness soon broke down. Peewee pushed his hat back on his head and stared at the book with innocent fascination, as if it were an unknown species of lizard. He looked so stunned and funny that she immediately remembered he was a child in her care and forgave him his modest reticence. She had also seen him glance down her blouse and felt slightly flushed.

  “Read that?” she asked, grinning merrily again.

  “Read it?” Peewee grinned too and grunted a little, pleased that she was friendly again. “No, ma’am,” he said.

  “Now look, call me Patsy. If you’ll call me Patsy we can be friends and talk about literature.”

  “You read many Westerns?” Peewee asked, determined to do his best.

  “Not many. I read Destry Rides Again when I was a little girl. Are there many good ones?”

  “Uum,” Peewee said. He was still looking askance at The Decipherment of Linear-B and glanced in the box of books as if he had suddenly discovered he was sitting next to an unknown mineral that might well give him radiation burns.

  “I don’t reckon there are many good ones,” he said humbly. “I mean, they’re mostly the kind of books I read. Westerns. If you read books like this here, whatever it is, then you probably wouldn’t never think a Western was no good.”

  “I don’t know. I like all kinds of books.”

  “Why would there need to be something like this here?” he asked, laying the book carefully back in the box. “It makes me glad I quit school when I did. I ain’t got the brain power for such as that.”

  Patsy started trying to tell him what it was about, but she hadn’t read it herself—it was a relic of Jim’s flirtation with linguistics—and Peewee looked at her so raptly that it annoyed her a little. She soon broke off her lecture. It had grown hot and they all three gave themselves up to the boredom of a long desert drive. They lunched on hamburgers and shakes under the worn green awning of a drive-in in Pecos, and edged on west through the afternoon. Patsy read idly in A Charmed Life, stopping from time to time to look out the window at the bright empty country. It brought back the vacations of childhood. Every other year her parents would decide to go west and would bundle her and her sister Miri into a Cadillac and spend two or three weeks hurrying between scenic spots while the girls read comic books or Nancy Drew mysteries and waited irritably for the Grand Canyon or some other redeeming wonder to appear.

  As the sun sank, it shone more hotly into the front seat, and Patsy slipped for a while into a sweaty doze. When she awoke she had a momentary sense of bewilderment and disorientation. It seemed strange that she should be in such barren gray country. If she had any sense, she reflected, she would be in a cool bed in Connecticut, having a tremendous love affair with someone sensitive—someone who would never be likely to have anything to do with Texas, New Mexico, or Arizona. But then Jim smiled at her fondly and she realized that such a fantasy was even more unreal than the locale—it was not her at all. She felt sweaty and tired and nothing seemed clearly the right thing to do.

  “Couldn’t we just stop in El Paso for the night?” she asked.

  Jim looked slightly weary but shook his head. “Peewee needs to be there in the morning to get entered,” he said.

  She glanced around at Peewee and found that he had been exploring in the paperbacks again and had come up with Sexus—a fat red paperback and one of Jim’s recent purchases. She hadn’t read it and wasn’t especially eager to, but it was obvious that Peewee had never read anything like it in his life. He was holding the book about four inches in front of his eyes and seemed to have stopped breathing.

  “You’re getting ahead of me,” she said. “I haven’t read that one. Is it pretty sexy?”

  Peewee was stunned. When he opened the book he had forgotten everything. He had a terrific erection and when he saw Patsy looking at him he became horribly embarrassed, for he was sure his condition must be obvious. He dropped the book at once and tried to look out the window as if nothing had been happening, but his throat was dry and he had a hard time breathing.

  “Uh, yes ma’am, it’s kinda racy,” he said.

  “Patsy. Not ma’am.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Patsy.”

  She felt cramped and sat with her back against her door, her legs on the seat, the soles of her feet pressed against Jim’s leg. There was nothing to do but watch the distances, gray and wavery with heat, and so endless.

  “God,” she said. “I had forgotten this desert. Couldn’t I just fly from El Paso and meet you gentlemen in Phoenix?”

  “Sure,” Jim said. “No problem about that. We can drop you at the airport as we go through. You’ll have to change clothes, though. We’ll find a station.”

  But when they arrived in El Paso three hours later and Jim asked her if she still wanted to fly, she shook her head. She did not like to do things alone, and it made her feel a little low to think that Jim was so obligingly going to let her fly. Another four hundred miles of desert with Jim and Peewee was a lot better than a pointless night alone in some motel in Phoenix.

  “You would just put me on a plane, wouldn’t you?” she said.

  “Why not? You’re grown. You have a right to fly to Phoenix if you’d rather. I know it’s boring poking along in this car.”

  “You’re just glad to get rid of me because my rest room habits aren’t to your liking,” she said sulkily, looking at the bare brown mountains behind the town. “Somehow I’ve been offended. Probably if I went on a plane you and Peewee would scoot right over to Juárez and carry on with women of the night. I know your types. Marriage vows mean nothing to you.”

  Peewee listened open-mouthed, amazed. She looked back at him sternly and he shut his mouth. He decided he had made some horrible mistake. He should not have let her see him reading that book. Clearly she had figured out that he had had a hard-on.

  Jim was in traffic, an annoyance after the open desert, and he was not at all impressed with Patsy’s shift of mood. “Oh, for shit’s sake,” he said. “You’re ridiculous. You brought up the airplane. I wouldn’t go to Juárez and you know it.” But it had crossed his mind that if Patsy flew, he and Peewee might make Juárez for an hour, to rest themselves from the road.

  Late afternoon depression fell on Patsy like a hot quilt and she felt ready to cry. “Don’t say things like that to me,” she said. “I’m sure they embarrass Peewee. You don’t love me. All you do is yell excretory words at me. I was pretty once, until you robbed me of my youth.” Tears ran out from under her sunglasses and she wiped them on her palms.

  “If you don’t go to Juárez it’s because you’re chicken,” she said. “Any man in his right mind would dash right to Juárez the minute he got rid of me. You’re both men of no spirit. Stop at that drugstore.”

  She grabbed her purse and went running into the drugstore crying, and Jim sat nervously at the wheel and tried to explain to Peewee that it was probably nothing serious, just one of Patsy’s little fits of depression. Peewee was terribly worried and nervous and had already decided never to accept another blind ride involving a wife. He racked his brain for some excuse that would allow him to get out and hitchhike to Phoenix. Patsy was beautiful but altogether too scary.

  “Don’t look so worried,” Jim said. “She does this sort of thing all the time. She’ll calm down.”

  “What’s gonna happen to us before she calms down?” Peewee said. “That’s what’s got me worried.”

  Patsy came striding back out of the drugstore carrying a number of boxes of Kleenex in her arms. She dumped them on top of the paperbacks, glowered briefly at Peewee, and sat down.

  “Drive on, you wretch,” she said. “I’ve decided to accompany you, even though I’m not wanted. Wither thou goest I might as well go. At least I’ve got some Kleenex now. I intend to cry a lot.”

  “You’ll go, but you’ll bitch about it,” Jim said, driving on.

  “I’ll bitch if I feel like it, of course,” she said. “Have you ever been married, Peewee?”

  “Me?�
� Peewee asked. “Who would marry me?”

  He said it so simply, with no trace of self-pity or melancholy, that it made Patsy stop feeling tense. There was always someone with a problem worse than hers. She wiped her eyes with a Kleenex and smiled back at him, and he looked at her with bewilderment and relief. They were curving west out of El Paso, with the thin winding Rio Grande visible in the valley to the south.

  “Why, you look very eligible,” she said. “You could use a shirt that fits but other than that there’s no reason why you shouldn’t get married and be as miserable as everyone else.”

  “All I can do to get a date oncet an’ a while,” he said, sure that he was being flattered.

  “What do you do when you aren’t riding professional broncs?”

  “This an’ that. Work in fillin’ stations.”

  The sun was lowering, dropping more rapidly toward a horizon far into New Mexico. The face of the great bare mountain to their right, El Capitan, was shining from the late sun, and the desert around them was cooler and more fragrant as the evening came.

  “I never had a job,” Patsy said. “I wonder what one would be like.”

  “You never?” he said. “You don’t look like you have, now you mention it. They ain’t so bad, most of ’em. The best one I ever had was in Houston.”

  “Goodness. That’s where we live when we’re home. What did you do there?”

  “Drove a little train. It’s over by the zoo, in Hermann Park. We lived in Houston a year. None of us ever liked the town much but I liked drivin’ that train. It just goes around the park, you know.”

  “I know. How strange. I ride it all the time, or every time I go to the zoo. Maybe I rode it while you were driving it. Wouldn’t that be odd?”

  “Shore would,” Peewee said, grinning at the thought. “We couldn’t take that humid weather so we all moved back to the plains.”

  “Let’s eat in Las Cruces,” Jim said. Peewee’s talk of jobs made him strangely envious. All his jobs had been arranged by his father and had been with oil companies owned by his father’s friends. He had never felt that he could have gotten any of them if he had been applying strictly on his own merits.