Moving On

by Larry McMurtry

  “I knew you’d say that. I say we go now. It’s insane to run the risk of some nut cracking our skulls with a beer bottle just because he feels like it. Shanks could do that sort of thing and you know it.”

  “You’re paranoid about Sonny,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “Just because he scared you once doesn’t mean he’s insane.”

  “Oh, Jim, why do you want to argue about something obvious?” she said.

  “I don’t. I was enjoying being asleep. I just don’t like you waking me up and giving me blanket orders.”

  “I don’t like being scared all the time for no good reason.”

  “You’re not scared all the time. Besides, there are risks everywhere.”

  “Please don’t generalize like that,” she said, very annoyed. “I’m not general. I’m your own particular individual wife and I want to go home. That’s not unreasonable.”

  “No, except we can’t just go this instant, today.”

  “I could,” Patsy said. She got off the bed and went to the dresser. “I could be ready in thirty minutes.”

  “You’re always hasty.” He peered at their traveling clock and lay back down.

  “You’re always inconsiderate,” she replied. She was nervously twisting the ends of her hair. “I think I’ll leave you. Then you can say the whole thing’s been hasty. I seduced you hastily, I married you hastily, I was a very hasty wife generally and it would be perfectly in character if I left you hastily.”

  “I seduced you,” Jim said with a yawn. “Don’t try to make out that you were a bohemian. You were a prude.”

  “I wasn’t all the time,” she said. “I think I will leave you. I don’t care which of us seduced the other, it hasn’t worked out very well. We have nothing mutual any more except our ability to argue.”

  Jim decided to go back to sleep and ignore her until her mood changed, but he was a little too wide awake and he noticed after a while that she had changed into a dress and was combing her hair and actually making as if she might leave.

  “Patsy,” he said worriedly, sitting up.

  She was tugging a comb through her hair, her teeth set. She didn’t reply.

  “Now calm down,” he said. “I’m sorry. You can’t leave.” His tone was not entirely steady.

  “Oh, go back to sleep,” she said. “I know it. I’m too weak. I’m just going over to Cheyenne to see if there’s anything I can do for Boots and Pete. I meant all that other, though. I really want to go back to Texas soon.”

  “We will,” Jim said, relieved.

  “You can have the Ford,” she said, digging in the pocket of his pants for the keys to the Thunderbird. Jim held out his hand, hoping she would sit on the bed and be friendly a minute and kiss him, but she ignored it and went out the door holding a purse and her green sweater. She looked as if she would not be in a kissing mood for quite some time.

  Patsy enjoyed driving the Thunderbird. When she was in high school she had begged her parents to let her get a Jag or a Porsche or even an MG for her first car, but they had refused, and while they were considering what sort of first car she should have, her Aunt Dixie had come to her rescue and given her a Corvette with white leather seats. The Thunderbird reminded her of the Corvette, and she sped across the brown sparsely grassed plains, remembering Dallas and high school and one or two of the boys who had been twice as eager to date her once she got the Corvette. One night while drunk her father borrowed the car and wrecked it completely while on his way to a U-Totem to buy some shaving cream. Neither he nor her mother had ever forgiven her Aunt Dixie for giving it to her in the first place.

  She found Pete Tatum asleep on a couch in the waiting room. He looked mussed, unshaven, and uncomfortable. She hated to wake him, but when she spoke he woke easily and seemed glad to see her.

  “Pleasant surprise,” he said. “Hope you brought a razor.”

  Patsy hadn’t and was chagrined at her own complete impracticality. She offered to run out and get one but Pete wanted her to go with him to the ward to see Boots.

  “Gosh, aren’t wards awful?” she said. “Couldn’t she have had a private room?”

  Pete looked puzzled. “Best we could afford,” he said. Patsy was embarrassed. She felt nervous and distressed, and in the light of morning the whole hospital seemed squalid. Boots had apparently had no nightgown and was dressed in a gray hospital gown. In the bed she looked smaller than she normally did, and younger. The contrast between her age and Pete’s showed more. With no makeup, her lips pale, her hair short, she could have been in her early teens. The old lady in the next bed had on a bright pink bathrobe and looked at them inquisitively, as if she was trying to decide who was married to whom. She was too timid to ask, but her glances made Patsy uneasy, anyway.

  “Pore darlin’,” the old woman said. “She looks feverish. They just give her a shot.” Pete felt Boots’s forehead and smoothed back her hair, but she rolled her head from side to side, as if his touch made her hot. Patsy had no idea what to do, and when Pete looked at her again she realized he felt as helpless as she did.

  “Let’s go buy you a razor,” she said. He asked the old woman to tell Boots they had gone to eat, if she awakened, and then quickly followed Patsy into the hall, as glad to get out of the ward as she was.

  It was a cloudy day, with now and then a clear patch of pale blue sky showing through the clouds. The wind was blowing—Patsy’s hair blew and blew and grew tangled. They drove to a drugstore and Pete bought a razor and some shaving cream. Patsy sat in the Thunderbird huddled over her knees while he went into the rest room of a Texaco filling station and shaved. When he came out his face looked clean and pleasant and healthy, in contrast to the dirty overalls and wrinkled shirt. He had nicked himself a little. They went to a restaurant on the highway and Pete ate what seemed to her an enormous unstomachable meal. Her own stomach had closed up nervously—she subsisted all day on Cokes.

  “How can you eat?” she asked, watching him eat a breakfast steak. He had even put ketchup on it, which repelled her a little.

  “One of the few things I can always do,” he said, smiling at her comfortably.

  A little later, back at the hospital, their hands brushed as they were going through a door and Patsy felt oddly embarrassed by the accidental touch. Boots was sleeping calmly, and as they had nothing to do but wait they decided to wait in the town rather than at the hospital. They drove to Frontier Park and sat at the curb in the car, talking and watching three mothers and their children. The park was brown and rather bare, and, as the day was so windy, Patsy didn’t feel like getting out. She had the green sweater over her shoulders. She told Pete about the cowboys beating up the old man and he asked what their names were. She couldn’t remember.

  “Rummel?” he said. “Ed Rummel?”

  “That’s it. He was one of them.”

  “He told me she was two-timin’ him,” Pete said, looking at the women in the park. “I know her. She’s a sorry little hussy.”

  Patsy was quite disturbed, first by the way in which he seemed to take the blame from the man and put it on the woman, but even more disturbed by his casualness in regard to the violence. It put a distance between them, gave her the feeling she had had about him before. They were not the same kind of people, and it was inappropriate, her being in the car with him.

  “Oh, Pete,” she said, “even so. You don’t go beating old men with beer bottles, however bad she was. Even if he had been her boy friend that wouldn’t be the thing to do. If his girl friend was so worthless he could have tried to get one who wasn’t.”

  Pete saw that she was annoyed, but his mind was not really on what had happened in Laramie. “Well, that’s true too,” he said. “Ed Rummel just ain’t that smart, or that nice, either. He’s a mean bastard when he’s drunk. I never meant to take up for him. So far as I’m concerned he deserves whatever he gets.”

  A trash truck was moving slowly through the park, with an Indian in a red baseball cap standing on the back end. From time
to time he hopped down and emptied one of the many trash barrels into the truck. Pete looked tired and solemn and Patsy ceased being annoyed with him. She could not stay annoyed with him for something that he had not done—it merely puzzled her that he would choose a life in which such things happened often. Probably they happened so often that he had become indifferent to them, and yet he didn’t seem like a man who would be indifferent to such things. He looked worried and melancholy, probably because Boots was hurt. Patsy was not worried, exactly, but she felt lonely and very out of place. A park in Wyoming had nothing to do with her. She grew suddenly wistful for familiar places and familiar people, and regretted being ugly to Jim. He was familiar, and he had not been ugly to her at all. He had merely been sleepy.

  She had her back against the car door and her arm across the top of her seat. Pete looked at her solemnly, and she expected him to say something else about the beating. Instead, he lifted one of his hands and put it on one of hers. The touch shocked her, and the shock did not stop with her hand but went through her. Her legs felt it, and her chest. “Oh, don’t,” she said. He smiled his quick wry smile but left his hand on hers. It was rough, much larger than Jim’s hand, and very much larger than hers. Her protest had sounded thin and strange and she didn’t repeat it. They looked at the windy playground and said nothing. For a minute the silence was very uncomfortable to Patsy, but then it ceased to be. The shock had diminished and it did not seem likely that the sky was going to fall. Because it was more comfortable she let her fingers entwine a little with his. He had not been offensive but had merely taken her hand, and it was restful enough to sit holding hands. The little ridge of sandy hair at the back of his neck was curly and led down into the rumpled collar of his blue denim work shirt. After the first agitation of the touch subsided a bit she saw that she had nothing to fear from Pete. He didn’t want to kiss her, he didn’t want to talk, he merely wanted to sit and hold her hand and watch the trash truck circle about the park. That was all right—it was even pleasant. Every time she had been with him she had tried talking and had ended up feeling shallow and frivolous. He had shocked her into silence, and once the shock diminished she felt more comfortable with him than she ever had when she had been trying to talk.

  “Sure would have been a miserable day if you hadn’t come over,” he said, smiling tiredly, and Patsy felt even more at ease. He was really more worried and more worn down than he would have admitted, and it was flattering that such a strong man needed her, even if a crisis had produced the need.

  She felt a sense of relief and with it a lightening of mood. The whole day had been strange, but she had suddenly begun once again to feel like her normal self. She felt quite friendly toward Pete, but at the same time she didn’t want to sit by the curb holding hands with him all morning. She straightened up and disengaged her fingers.

  “Let’s go to a store,” she said.

  “What kind of store?”

  “A ladies’ store. I want to buy Boots a nightgown. She shouldn’t have to wear those pajamas.”

  They went to one, and after some brooding Patsy bought a gown. She started to get a modest blue one, but decided Boots needed more cheer and finally bought a wilder yellow gown. Pete stood by uncomfortably, feeling badly dressed and awkward. They were in a large department store, and as they were passing the men’s shirts Patsy stopped and asked him his shirt size. She picked out a nice red shirt.

  “I’m buying you this,” she said a little imperiously. “You’d look so nice in red.”

  He started to protest but she walked off to the counter and paid for her purchases, amazed at her own daring. She seldom bought shirts for Jim. When the package was ready she gave it to Pete to carry.

  “Let’s drive a little,” he said when they were back in the car. He drove out the road toward Denver, and after eight or ten miles turned and drove back to Cheyenne. As they were coming into town he noticed a two-minute carwash and wheeled into it on impulse.

  “Roll up your window,” he said. “Boots ain’t had this car washed since we left Texas. We might as well freshen it up a little.”

  “I’ve never been in one of these,” Patsy said, delighted. She had often meant to take the Ford through a two-minute carwash, just to see what it was like. They drove the car onto a kind of track, Pete put fifty cents into a coin slot, and they rolled up their windows as tightly as possible. After the breezy morning the car immediately seemed a little hot and close. Patsy took out a comb and began to comb her hair. Soon the washing mechanism started and moved them under a rectangular system of pipes. The pipes spurted very suddenly and a cascade of water broke over the car. The world vanished as suddenly as if they had driven under a waterfall. Water roared against the roof and sheet after wavering sheet streamed down the windows and the windshield.

  “What a way to get a car washed,” Patsy said. She glanced at Pete and caught him looking at her and was very startled, for there was no mistaking what was in the look. Hunger was in it. Outside, she might not have noticed it, or might have ignored it, but they were not outside. The pouring water hid them from the world, and hid the world from them, and it was very different from sitting by the windy park, with mothers following their children around a few yards away. The constant pulse of the water over the car was the only sound, and it made a disturbing background to the silence between them. It was not a pleasant silence—it was too charged with what Pete wanted, which could not have been more obvious if he had leaned over and kissed her or put his hand on her body. It had been only a minute since the track had carried them under the water, and in less than another minute they would be out again, into the air and the wind, but for Patsy it was a long and dreadfully complicated two minutes. She clutched her comb and tried not to look flustered, but the water kept pouring steadily over the car, and Pete was there, a foot away, and she was flustered. She looked at her hands. The silence was so uncomfortable and the tension between them so unexpected and so intense that it held her suspended, mute and uncertain. She almost wished he would lean forward and kiss her if he wanted to so much. At least it would be a movement that might break the tension. But Pete looked away from her face and soon the Thunderbird rolled off the track, the sound of the water died, and the world came into view again through the streaming windshield. The stream thinned to rivulets. Patsy put her hands on her temples for a moment and then began to comb her hair back. She was flushed and very agitated.

  “Well, it’s cleaner than it was,” Pete said.

  The fact that he drawled irritated her suddenly, and she was barely able to keep herself from saying something biting. Soon they were driving back through Cheyenne, the windows open, the wind cool. But Patsy felt very far from cool. Her emotions swirled: she felt foolish, she felt offended and angry, she felt bitchy, and yet she also felt apologetic and almost contrite. She didn’t know what was wrong, but the more confused she felt the more determined she was to be casual. She chattered inconsequentially and even began to talk about Niagara Falls, where she had not been since she was eight years old. But her own talk rang thin in her ear and she was very glad when they got to the hospital.

  Boots was awake, or half awake, and was pathetically glad to see them. She cried over the yellow nightgown and Patsy found herself crying too. Boots’s gratitude made her feel guilty, and she avoided looking at Pete. The fact that they had held hands a few minutes seemed like a sordid secret, and she was glad when he left for Laramie. Boots drowsed and woke and drowsed and woke, and the afternoon passed as slowly as a season. When Boots talked it was generally of Pete, of how good he was to her and how much she wished her parents liked him better. Patsy scarcely listened. She felt a stranger to Boots, a stranger to Pete, and only wished she could leave the depressing hospital and the town and go back to her own motel and her own husband. She told herself again and again that practically nothing had passed between her and Pete, and that there was no reason for her to feel guilty and depressed about it. What little had happened had been the resul
t of some accident of mood and meant nothing. But she continued to feel guilty and restless and depressed. About dusk, Boots went soundly to sleep and Patsy walked into the hall to get a Coke. She was wondering if she could risk a walk outside the hospital when Jim came into the corridor. He was fresh and cheerful and looked very glad to see her.

  “Hi,” he said. “I thought I’d come sit with you. I’m sorry I was so grouchy this morning. I don’t think I was very wide awake.”

  He seemed all sane and familiar, and everything else seemed insane and unfamiliar, but nevertheless his sudden appearance only put her the more on edge. She felt taken by surprise. Jim was alert and saw at once that she was nervous about something, and he had the good sense not to push. “Would you like to go out and eat?” he asked.

  “That’s just what I’d like,” she said. “I’m sick of this hospital.”

  In the Ford he said, “Something’s settled.”

  “What?” She had not been paying him much attention, but when she looked she noticed that he seemed unusually cheerful.

  “We can start back to Texas tomorrow,” he said. “I’m really tired of all this too.”

  “Good,” she said, not very surprised. “Let’s go to a drive-in. I feel like a milkshake.”

  The clouds had finally cleared away and they watched the last of a long afterglow as they sat at the drive-in. “Should we stay a few more days to help Boots and Pete?” Jim asked.

  Patsy’s milkshake was so thick it clogged the straw. She ate it in globs, using the straw as a spoon. “Hum?” she asked. “Sorry. Hospitals make me so abstracted I can hardly listen. I’m really glad we’re going.” He repeated what he had said and she frowned. “I don’t think we’re needed,” she said. “Her folks are coming.”

  Boots said the same thing when they told her they were going. She was glad to see Jim. He knew how to joke with her and they joked and chatted and again Patsy felt out of place. She was not bothered, but neither was she happy—she felt tired and out of reach of everyone. Pete came in, straight from work, smelling of animals and sweat. He thanked them for staying and walked with them to the Ford, chatting with Jim about routes.