Moving On

by Larry McMurtry

  “What did Roger tell you?” she asked.

  “Just that he wants us to have his ranch,” he said. “How could you forget to tell me? Think of that. A ranch.”

  “I take it that means you want it,” she said, bringing the chops and peas to the table. She had put a loaf of French bread in the oven and went back to see about it.

  “Of course I want it,” Jim said. “Don’t you? He doesn’t have anyone else to leave it to. Do you know what land is worth these days. It must be a couple of hundred dollars an acre, even out there.”

  “That much?” she said, sniffing at some cottage cheese.

  “Besides, Davey and I could ride,” he said.

  “He ought to have had a son of his own,” she said. “I think it’s sad. He would have made a fine father.”

  As soon as the bread was hot they sat down to eat. Davey was given a spoon and banged it against his tray. His hair was longer and getting darker. They were having a mild debate about whether to get his hair cut when the phone rang again.

  “I’ll get it,” Patsy said. “I forgot to bring the butter.”

  She had a bite of bread in her mouth when she picked up the hall receiver, and her hello was a little muffled.

  “Pat,” Emma said. Her tone was very strange.

  “Yah?” Patsy said. “How you?”

  “He’s done it,” Emma said. “He . . . shot himself.” She said no more and Patsy heard her breath catch as she struggled with tears. The sound of Emma’s voice, as much as her words, made her feel weak and shaky.

  “Okay, I’m coming,” she said. “I’m coming right now.”

  “Please hurry,” Emma said in a heavy voice. “I don’t want to leave the boys with the neighbors.”

  “I’m coming right now,” Patsy said, but Emma had hung up.

  “Oh, oh,” she said, going to the kitchen. She leaned against the cabinet, feeling very faint.

  “What is it?” Jim asked.

  “Flap shot himself,” she said, rocking against the sink. It was not believable.

  Jim jumped up and started for the phone and then stopped. “Is he dead?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t ask.”

  For a moment the only sound was the sound of Davey banging his spoon on the white plastic tray. Then Patsy remembered what she had promised. She shook her head and untied her apron.

  “I’ve got to go,” she said. Jim had come near, but he was a blur.

  “I ought to come,” he said. “I’ll have to.”

  “Not now, she needs me quick,” she said. “You’ll have to wait until Juanita can get here. I have to go right now. Put him to bed and try to get Juanita.”

  She grabbed a purse and a coat. “Look, call me,” he said as she was leaving.

  “Okay,” she said, but she could not think of anyone but Emma, and the fright in her voice. And when she got to the Hortons’, Emma was the only person she could see, really see. An ambulance with a whirling red light was pulling away as she drove up; neighbors were on the sidewalk talking quietly. Patsy ran through them, up the steps, and found more neighbors inside, and Emma sitting on the couch, her best coat on, hugging the two boys, who were not crying. Emma was not crying either, but her face was worse than tears could have made it, as if the effort she was making to hold in her fright had pulled her features out of alignment. She plainly did not really see the neighbors who filled the room. Her face changed a little when she saw Patsy.

  “Do you need to go on?” Patsy asked. As if released, Emma stood up. A boy had each hand. Teddy seemed merely amazed that so many people were there, but Tommy was scared and seriously inquisitive.

  “Mommy, are you going in an ambulance too?” he asked.

  “No, I’ll go in the car,” she said. “You and Ted stay with Patsy. She’ll put you to bed and stay till I come back.”

  “Me choo-choo story,” Teddy said. He released his mother’s hand and went to find his favorite book, The Little Engine That Could. Tommy held on for a moment.

  “Did he hurt himself badly or is it just a little hurt?” he asked, trying to get Emma’s eyes.

  “I don’t know, honey,” she said. “Not too bad, maybe. I’ll call Patsy when the doctor tells me.”

  Teddy came back with his book and thrust it into Patsy’s hand. The neighbors had begun to leave. Patsy knelt and tried to get Tommy to look at her. “What’s your favorite book?” she asked. “I’ll read it too.”

  “I don’t want any story.” He wouldn’t look at her.

  “Well, you be nice,” Emma said and disengaged her hand. “Momma’s got to go.”

  She looked at Patsy and left quickly. Some of the neighbors stayed, asking how they could help. Patsy only wanted them to go. She wanted to keep Tommy talking. She was dreadfully worried; he looked as if he might close up in his fear at any moment. She began to want very much to ask one of the women about Flap, but there was no way she could. Finally the last of the women left and she took Teddy in her lap and sat on the couch. “Goodness, when there’s an accident everybody comes,” she said.

  “Me choo-choo story,” Teddy said, and she read it. Tommy sat with his chin down and his heels pressed together.

  “He’s not in his pajamas,” he said. “He’ll make you read it again.”

  “That’s not so bad. We’ll get your pajamas on and have another story then.”

  “I would rather my daddy came back,” Tommy said quietly. “He reads stories very well.”

  “Me story agin, me p.j.s,” Teddy said, trying to get her attention. He wiggled out of her lap and went to find his pajamas. While they were in the bathtub she called Jim and told him what little she knew. He had not been able to get Juanita or a baby-sitter and was very distracted. Davey was crying in the background. “I’ll call again when I find out something,” she said.

  She read Teddy his choo-choo story again and was in the middle of a Babar book when the phone rang. It was Emma, sounding not so terrible.

  “I’m at Ben Taub,” she said. “God. It isn’t very bad, really. It just looked bad because it was in the neck and there was so much blood. He says it was really an accident but I don’t know. I called Mother, she’ll be over to spend the night with the boys. How are they?”

  “Okay. One of them is a little uptight. We’re reading stories. Don’t worry.”

  “I think he heard the shot,” Emma said. She sighed, and Patsy heard the sound of someone shouting, through the phone.

  “Terrible here,” Emma said. “Butchered-up people all around.”

  “Want me to come when your mother gets here?”

  “Would you? I really don’t quite know what to say to Flap.”

  “I won’t either, but I’ll come. Did he really fail his exams, or what?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t even think he knows. He didn’t come home until late. He’s been sulking around the library lately. I didn’t even know he was in the garage. Apparently he sat down there fiddling with his dad’s old pistol and feeling sorry for himself until he got it to go off and shoot him. He probably hasn’t failed. I don’t know what to think about him. I’m glad it was just a .22.”

  “Don’t think for a while. I’ll come as soon as I can.”

  “Tell Tommy Flap’s okay. Flap can explain it all to him sometime. He can explain it to me too.”

  Both boys were asleep before Emma’s mother arrived. She was a fat woman, as fat, Patsy supposed, as Emma would be someday if she wasn’t careful. And she was as complacent as she was fat. It had always irked Patsy a little that she cheerfully let her daughter live in squalor when she herself still kept a beautiful house in River Oaks, though it had occurred to her, watching them together, that it had simply not occurred to Mrs. Greenway that her daughter might lack for anything. The fact of the Hortons’ poverty seemed not quite to have penetrated her consciousness, something hard for Patsy to understand. Her own mother would not have drawn a happy breath if she and Jim were in similarly straitened circumstances.
But Mrs. Greenway seemed to assume that both the world and her own were as they should be and it would have taken a very dramatic occurrence to convince her otherwise. Even Flap shooting himself was not dramatic enough. She came in as unhurriedly as if she were merely dropping by to say hello to her grandchildren. Her face wore no expression of alarm, and in chatting with her it seemed clear that Emma had protected her mother from the ambiguities of the facts. She supposed that Flap had had a simple accident with a gun.

  It irked Patsy a little, with Emma. Why must she be so overprotective of a woman fifty-five years old? But then she remembered that she had done something of the same in regard to Miri and her own mother.

  “I suppose he thought it was unloaded,” Mrs. Greenway said, setting her purse on a table. “It’s always the unloaded gun that shoots people, isn’t it? How have you been, dear? I haven’t seen David in months. He must be walking by now.”

  “Not quite, but he’s thinking about it,” Patsy said. “I think the boys are okay. Tommy was sort of worried. I told Emma I’d go by the hospital and see how things were.”

  Mrs. Greenway looked around the Hortons’ living room as if surprised to find herself there. It seemed to horrify her slightly to realize that she was expected to spend the night. “That’s kind of you, dear,” she said. “She said they took him to Ben Taub. I believe that’s the one where they take all the Negroes after they cut themselves up. Why do you suppose she picked that one?”

  “The emergency treatment there is supposed to be very good,” Patsy said. “Really, it was very frightening. I think Flap lost a lot of blood.”

  “My husband died in Methodist,” Mrs. Greenway said vaguely. “Goodness, you know I’ve never spent the night at Emma’s. I wonder if she had time to change the sheets?”

  “No, I’m sure she didn’t but I’ll be glad to if you like,” Patsy said, white with anger.

  “Oh, no, dear, I can manage,” she said, bending over slowly to switch on the TV. “A little housework will be good for me.”

  When Patsy got outside she discovered that Mrs. Greenway had left her Cadillac parked a good yard and a half from the curb. It was ancient, as Cadillacs go; she had nosed it toward the curb and left the tail fins pointing out into West Main. Patsy stood on the sidewalk indecisively, trying to decide whether to go back in and get the keys and park the car properly, but she was too irritated to trust herself with Mrs. Greenway and went on to the hospital.

  Finding Emma and Flap was no simple matter. The registration room was crowded with indigent sufferers and their relatives. Though it was nine at night the line to the information desk was twenty people long and seemed not to move; most of the people sitting on benches were asleep, their heads in their arms. Most were Negro, but there were whites and Mexicans waiting as well. Many of the women held children in their arms, children whose faces, asleep or awake, already held something of the hopelessness of the women who held them. The sight of the children, pigtailed in some cases, chubby-fisted like her own child, all their faces a stupor of weariness, made Patsy wince inside. She wanted to leave the room, so she wouldn’t have to see the children. The longer she stood the more depressed she became. She knew that even if there was something that could be done about such things, she would never do it, but would go on day by day for years, leading a clean, extravagant, comfortable liberal life. After a time a feeling of dullness came over her and she stepped out of line and called Jim.

  “I haven’t found them yet,” she said. “You may as well go to bed. He’s not badly hurt. Maybe I’ll get home in time for breakfast.”

  They talked for a while about why Flap had done it, but without coming to any conclusions. Patsy went back to the line and by the time she reached the head of it had come to feel more vegetable than animal. For a time she listened to conversations around her, or to the arguments the sufferers were having with the nurse at the registration desk, but that grew old and painful. There were quibbles and belligerence from all parties and it was evident from the tone of the talk that nobody was going to be satisfied with the outcome. After a while Patsy tuned out; her ears ceased to pick up the conversation. She became a person waiting in a hospital. She didn’t move, except to shift her purse from one hand to another, shift her weight from one hip to another. The light in the room was as flat as she felt, and the gritty floors unpleasant to stand on, like the floors in a traffic court. After thirty or forty minutes something happened to her time axis: the waiting room seemed like a continuum, something eternal, to which the vegetable approach was the only approach possible. She could not remember a time when she had not been there waiting, and could not envision a time when she might be somewhere else. It was a shock to find herself suddenly at the desk, confronted by the nurse. She had been dreading the nurse. She had a twangy East Texas voice and had been cutting people down with it ever since Patsy had been in earshot. But to Patsy she was politeness itself; she was not tempted to cut down anyone white and middle-class.

  “They’re on four,” she said. “No room, honey, we’re full. Just look in the halls.”

  And it was in a corner of one of the fourth-floor corridors that she found the Hortons finally. Flap was by no means the only patient without a room; the halls were full of wheezing bulks and silent bulks. Emma sat in a straight chair at the head of the bed. Patsy tiptoed up, supposing Flap to be asleep or unconscious, but then she saw his eyes move. The corridor was shadowed, but there was a light coming in the window behind Emma, enough that Patsy could see that she had been crying.

  Patsy didn’t know which of them to speak to. She couldn’t see them well enough to judge what the emotional terrain was like. Flap was looking at her.

  “Hi, Pat,” he said.

  “How are you?” she asked, bending over him. She felt relieved. She had expected him to look crazed or doped, and he didn’t. His face was hollow, but the look he gave her was sheepish, not crazed.

  Flap sighed, as if he too were relieved. “I’m feeling much better,” he said. “Very good of you to come. Will you help me with Emma? I’m having trouble with her.”

  She looked at her friend, but Emma wouldn’t look at her. Emma looked lonely.

  “What’s the matter?” Patsy asked, not sure who she was addressing the question to.

  “See if you can persuade her not to treat me like a leper,” Flap said.

  “I’m not going to do any such thing. You shouldn’t have shot yourself. My god. What did you think you were doing?”

  “He doesn’t know what he was doing,” Emma said in a flat tone.

  “Emma, I do too,” Flap said. He tried to turn so he could see her but moving hurt his neck and he couldn’t make it. He sighed and was silent.

  “What did Momma say?” Emma asked.

  “Very little,” Patsy said, trying to suppress her irritation with Mrs. Greenway.

  “What did she do to tick you off?” Emma asked, looking up for the first time.

  Patsy sighed. “She wondered if you had time to change the sheets.”

  Emma smiled and after a moment bent over and began to cry, hiding her face in her arms, almost as Teddy had. Patsy looked at Flap and tried to be angry with him but couldn’t. He didn’t seem very upset by the crying. For a man who had just done the unpredictable, he looked very dependable. After Emma had cried awhile he reached awkwardly back with one arm, trying to get Emma to take his hand, but she wouldn’t and he gave up and raised his eyebrows at Patsy.

  “I hope you’re not crying because your mother wondered if you’d changed the sheets,” he said. “That’s just the way she thinks. There’s nothing so bad about it.”

  “I wish I had a chair,” Patsy said, and she went and found one several beds away. When she brought it back Emma was drying her tears and Flap was reaching for her hand again and still getting nowhere. For Emma’s sake Patsy decided to help him. It was incumbent that the two of them get cheered up.

  “I’m afraid I may have spoiled Teddy,” she said. “I ended up reading him t
he same story three times.”

  “God,” Flap said. “He’ll be trying to get me to shoot myself every day.”

  “Oh, hush!” Emma said, so loudly Patsy was afraid it would wake the hall. “He doesn’t really know what you did. Tommy doesn’t really know either.”

  Flap sighed and looked at Patsy to be sure she was on his side. He looked very tired, as if he wanted to go to sleep, but he made an effort for Emma’s sake. “I’ll tell them,” he said.

  “I don’t want you to tell them. I don’t want them to know.”

  “I’ll tell them, anyway,” Flap insisted. “I didn’t commit any crime against God. I was very depressed and I was sitting there thinking about suicide, I admit, but I didn’t intend to kill myself.”

  “Bullshit!” Emma said. “Patsy knows it’s bullshit too. Who do you think you’re fooling?”

  “I don’t know anything,” Patsy said. “I wasn’t a spectator.”

  “Well, I know. I don’t care what you two decide about it. It’s just an accident I’m not a widow right now. You don’t sit around thinking about killing yourself and then shoot yourself in the neck without there being some connection.”

  “I never said there was no connection. I was examining how it felt to face a loaded gun. I knew it was loaded. I thought I was pointing it past my head.”