Moving On

by Larry McMurtry

  “Why did it shoot, then? You don’t usually shoot guns past your head.”

  “I squeezed too hard,” he said. “Quite accidentally. Even if it wasn’t accidental, so what? Maybe I wanted to scare myself. It was in the nature of a warning shot. It worked too. I feel a lot more sensible now. I certainly found out I don’t like to shoot myself.”

  “Well, I’m glad you did,” Emma said, her voice still breaking.

  Flap tried again to get her hand and finally did, and she scooted her chair a little closer to the bed so his arm would not be twisted so awkwardly. He seemed relieved and subdued. They were all silent for several minutes. Patsy could think of absolutely nothing to say.

  “It’s eerie taking prelims,” Flap said. “I had to do something to get it off my mind.”

  “That’s a weak excuse,” Emma said instantly.

  “I know, but it’s the only one I’ve got.”

  “How inconsiderate can you be?”

  “Pretty inconsiderate,” Flap said quietly.

  Patsy felt lighter all of a sudden. The Hortons would go on arguing forever. She looked behind Emma, out the window, and could see, beyond the trees, the wall of another, larger hospital, with only a few of its many rooms lit. It had begun to mist; the streets would be wet. When she looked back Flap was asleep and Emma more composed. “Can you stay while I find a john?” she asked.

  “Want me to stay all night?” Patsy asked when Emma returned. “We could take shifts.”

  “Doing what? There’s no place to lie down. You might as well go.”

  Patsy looked doubtful. “No, I’m okay,” Emma added. “I just get mad at him every time I think of him doing that. It’s so unfair to the boys.”

  “I think it’s probably like he said. He needed some kind of a jar.”

  “Not that bad, he didn’t. If he’d waited a week he might have found out he passed with flying colors. He can’t expect me to forgive him for doing that. It’s too unfair.”

  It was true; Patsy looked down. For a moment she felt more kinship with Flap than with Emma. Emma didn’t know what it was to do something that was completely unfair. Emma had never done anything that threatened everything. Patsy didn’t know what to say, but nothing was necessary. Emma sighed and rubbed her eyes.

  “Well, there’s no use brooding over it,” she said. “I didn’t think he would die, you know, even when I was so scared. I just couldn’t believe it. I knew the minute I started going with him years ago that I’d never get rid of him and I just couldn’t believe he would die.”

  They were silent. Emma rested her cheek on Flap’s arm.

  “I wish you had at least a cot,” Patsy said.

  “Damn it. Now we have to stay in this cruddy hospital for days. It’s going to seem like years.”

  Patsy saw there was no use in staying longer and got up to go. “Let me know what you want done,” she said. “We can keep the boys. One of us could stay with Flap while you go home and rest, maybe tomorrow.”

  “He’s not that sick,” Emma said. “If we ever get in a ward he can stay by himself. There is one big favor I need you to do. I hate to ask it.”

  “Well ask it.”

  “Go over early in the morning and clean up the blood,” Emma said, looking up at her. “I don’t want the boys discovering it.”

  “Sure. What time do they get up?”

  “I guess you ought to go by seven.”

  Flap had begun to snore softly, his mouth open. As she had been coming to the hospital it had begun to rain; the wind had died. She took a silk scarf out of her purse and bent over to look at Flap as she was tying it around her head. “So that’s what you have to sleep with every night of your life,” she said, joshing a bit. “I always wondered how he looked asleep.”

  Emma looked at him and smiled. “That’s it,” she said. “Fool that I am. Thanks for coming.”

  The smell of the soft rain on the sidewalks and the grass, and the patter of it on the tops of cars in the parking lot was so nice, after the hospital, that Patsy almost wished she could go in and get Emma and bring her out in it. It made a mist in the high branches of the trees in Hermann Park, and the street lights were misty golden circles. She drove slowly, her window down, enjoying the swish of her tires on the wet street and the shine of neon through the rain. Though it was November, the night had turned warm. The wind was gone and the rain held nothing of winter. She yawned and pulled the scarf off her head as she drove.

  It was a relief knowing that Flap Horton was not going to die. Having to mop his blood off the garage floor at seven in the morning was not going to be convenient, but convenience was nothing compared to what might have happened. As she turned off Sunset she thought of Hank and slowed down. Albans Road was only a block away. She had never been there at night. Jim was doubtless already asleep and anyhow she had a perfect excuse. Good excuses were rare—there might never be another. Lately she had been able to see him only twice a week, at best. She drove around the block, debating as she drove. She wanted to tell him about Flap, but she wanted even more just to go up and see what he was doing. She parked near his house, but slightly past it, so that someone coming out wouldn’t notice the Ford. She sat under the wheel for several minutes, tapping it with her fingernails, trying to decide. What if Kenny were there? What if she met him at the door? What could she invent? It wouldn’t do to spread the story of Flap’s near suicide.

  As she was sitting pondering it all, the light in Hank’s front room went off. No one was there. She got out and hurried across the squishy grass and up the stairs. When she tapped on his door he asked who was there.

  “Let me in,” she said.

  He was very surprised, and Patsy, once in, found that she was trembling. It was always an adventure—always scary. He had been taking off his shirt and it was unbuttoned. “Your hair’s misty,” he said.

  “I’ve been at the hospital.” She told him, swearing him to secrecy. Once she calmed down she found that she was hungry and got herself a glass of milk and a peanut butter sandwich.

  “I was just going to bed,” Hank said.

  Patsy took her milk and sandwich to the bedroom and snooped through his bedside books while she ate. There was a fat red anthology of the Romantics open on the bed. There was also a book on Defoe.

  “Aren’t you reading any books? These all seem to be studies. I could never live with you. Who wants someone who’s always reading studies?”

  He bent to kiss her but she fended him off with her milk glass.

  “Quit,” she said.

  “Jim reads studies,” he pointed out.

  “No he doesn’t. He just carries them home and carries them back. That’s better than someone who reads them. Flap reads them and look how he turned out.”

  He had gone to turn off the light in the kitchen.

  “Why are you turning off the lights?” she asked. She put her plate on the floor. Hank sat on the bed and began to untie his shoes. She put her hand under his shirttail and rubbed the smooth curve of his back. “A nice back,” she said. “Guess I’ll be going, since you’re sleepy. If you had a book I’d stay and read awhile, but I don’t like to read studies.”

  “Keep doing that,” he said, and she did. He scooted back in the bed more comfortably, so that he sat in the curve of her body. It was very relaxing. Patsy’s mind had gone back to the hospital, to Flap’s hollow face and Emma sitting in the straight chair, and the children in the waiting room, their faces either too thin or bloated-looking. Hank noticed that she was a little depressed and began to rub her neck. The bed light was in his eyes and he turned it off. “Come on,” he said, meaning undress. He took off his shirt, but Patsy sat as she was, her lips thoughtfully against the skin of his shoulders.

  “I ought to go home,” she said, but she didn’t feel like moving. The prospect of a night there, enclosed by darkness and the arms that were already around her, was too delicious to allow, even as a thought. Hank pulled her blouse out of her skirt and put his hand un
der it, low on her back, touching her where she had been touching him. She put her face against his shoulder while he stroked her back, and as he touched her lightly the faces in the hospital faded, the need for thought slipped from her attention, and the time axis swung again, but in a better way. They undressed sitting on the bed, in a timeless darkness. For months time had controlled them; the need for haste had been with them at every meeting; heat could be worked off but often the working off was rushed and not very subtle. It was fighting or sex, sex or fighting. Unknowingly, Flap had given them a fine gift, a time to be together unhastily. Patsy had never been so awake to the light touch, the cool or gentle touch, to breath and skin and the feel of arm against arm and leg against leg. It was so long after they had made love.

  Once she felt a flutter of fear, a tug of home, but it was not strong enough to make her get up. She raised up on her elbows, for a time, and saw her driveway, the dark room where Jim and Davey were sleeping, saw Emma in the chair at the hospital, and then she lay back down and put her fingers on Hank’s lips. The darkness seemed to add a different quality to it all; it made the nearness of each other’s bodies seem so natural that it seemed something that would go on forever, or until it got light. They slept and awoke together, as if by plan, and made love again, almost too greedily, reducing the small subtle tastes to a single taste. Then, a little numb, they recovered and talked companionably, their voices as soft as the gray rainy dawn that eventually lighted the room. Patsy sat up to watch it, idly straightening her hair, and Hank sat behind her, both arms around her shoulders.

  “I didn’t mean to do this,” she said. “Suppose Jim found out somehow. I’d be hung.”

  “It was worth it,” Hank said, yawning.

  Patsy closed her eyes for a minute. “Right now it is,” she said. “How do I know how I’d feel about it if it really happened?”

  The clock said six-thirty. She got up and showered, came back, combed her hair, put her panties on, collected her clothes and brought them to the bed. Hank was dozing. She sat down on the bed to sort out her garments. Hank woke and looked at her strangely, as if he were surprised to see her on his bed at that hour of the morning, untwisting her bra straps. She fastened the bra, making a small grimace at the effort it took, and went to the window. Her hair was loose about her shoulders and her face still softened by the night. “I love this kind of rain,” she said. “You can go back to sleep.” He held out a hand to her and she sat back down for a minute, tapping her fingers on his chest. “I hope you enjoyed all this,” she said.

  “Why?”

  Patsy looked at him thoughtfully. “Because enjoying it’s the only security we’ll ever have,” she said. “I have to go attend to some gore.”

  The morning rain was colder than it had looked through the window. For a time Patsy was in two places at once. She was driving to the Hortons’, but at the same time she hadn’t quite left the bedroom. It made mopping up the dried blood no task at all—it didn’t affect her. She mopped carefully but automatically, her mind carrying her backward and forward. Then she took the bucket of water and emptied it behind the garage, wrung out the old mop, and hung it on Emma’s clothesline. The back yard was soppy. When she had gone in to get the mop there had been sounds in the boys’ room, so she decided to go up and fix them breakfast. She came upon both boys in the kitchen, and both were looking forlorn. Tommy had climbed up on the cabinet and was eating Quisp straight from the box, by the handful. Teddy had been unable to negotiate the cabinet and sat on the floor looking up at Tommy. Occasionally Tommy let two or three pieces of cereal fall to the floor and Teddy picked them up and ate them, looking very small and woebegone. When Patsy turned on the kitchen light they blinked.

  “No one was around to feed us,” Tommy said.

  “So I see.”

  “We were very hungry.”

  “Well, don’t make a big thing of it. It’s only seven and I’m here to feed you. How you, Teddy?”

  “Me no have bery much Quisp,” Teddy said, sighing. He got up and went like a streak to his highchair, convinced that now that an adult female had appeared breakfast must inevitably follow. Sure enough it did. She managed to get a respectable amount of juice, toast, cereal and egg down them. Both clamored for bacon but she couldn’t locate any. “Bacon,” Teddy kept saying brightly, as if by tossing the word at her he would eventually force her to produce some.

  “Hush,” she said. “There’s no bacon today. Nibble on your toes, or something.”

  Both boys regarded the remark as immensely amusing and risqué. Tommy repeated it and Teddy broke into hysterical laughter. Then he peered at his toes to see if the suggestion seemed practical. Patsy obliged Teddy by reading descriptions of what could be had from various cereal companies. The chatter was lively, but in her mind she kept going back to the place where she had been all night. Teddy, the bon vivant, blew her kisses from his sticky palm. While they were chattering, Mrs. Greenway arose and swept in like a Spanish galleon, her enormous purple housecoat billowing about her. Her hair also billowed. “I might have known you boys would be up before me,” she said.

  “We’re always up before everybody,” Tommy assured her.

  Just as Patsy was about to leave, Emma called. Her voice sounded cracked.

  “You okay?” Patsy asked.

  Emma said she was and that she would be home in an hour, and Patsy left. Driving home, she began to feel tired. The night had become last night, not something she was still in, though her body still held the memory of it. She parked the Ford and yawned and stretched and got out. Perhaps Davey would let her sleep. She found them in the kitchen—Davey was getting his breakfast. After the din at the Hortons’ it was almost abnormally quiet for a scene in a kitchen. Davey grinned when he saw her, but not Jim. She was pulling her wet scarf off her head when she looked at Jim, and saw at once, with a shock like a fist hitting her chest, that everything was changed. Something had happened. His face was terrible. Even before they spoke she knew what had happened, knew that, after all, she was hung.

  2

  “WHAT’S WRONG? What happened?” she said, her wet scarf in her hand. She knew, but thought for a second that it might be something else, some catastrophe in his family or hers. It needn’t be her that had changed his face so.

  “You know what’s wrong,” Jim said, giving Davey another bite of baby food.

  Patsy walked past them to the cabinet, to the place where she had stood when the news of Flap came. She was numbed and frightened past speech. She didn’t want to turn around and look at Jim.

  “No, I don’t,” she said with her back to them.

  “Emma called just after you left the hospital last night. She forgot to tell you to ask me to bring Flap some books.”

  Patsy was silent. A lie occurred to her. She could say she fell asleep in the car in the hospital parking lot. Or that she went to the Hortons’ to clean up the garage and fell asleep there. But the lie never got to her throat. She didn’t have the energy to lie, or the pride. She felt too numb, and anyway, she could not lie to Jim with him looking so hurt. Lying was easy when he was complacent, when he was happily taking her for granted, but it was not possible when he was sitting feeding Davey and looking crushed.

  She turned and went over to the table. Davey smiled at her. The smile didn’t reach her, but she bent and kissed him on the forehead from habit.

  “Want to fix his bottle?” Jim asked. “He won’t eat much more of this.”

  Patsy looked vaguely at Davey and got up to fix the bottle. She forgot for a moment where the bottles were, so numb was her mind. She began to wish Jim would talk. It was a time when speech would have helped, even the bitterest, angriest speech. But he seemed as voiceless as she was.

  When she had fixed the bottle she got a rag and wiped Davey’s face and hands and took him out of the highchair. He leaned back in her lap and guzzled his milk, but his presence didn’t matter, for once. It didn’t lighten anything.

  “Please go on and accus
e me,” she said, facing Jim finally. “I’m not worth your getting that hurt about. Did you think I was off getting murdered or something?”

  “Oh, for a few minutes I did. Then it occurred to me where you were.”

  “How?”

  “I’m not so dumb,” Jim said. “Hank doesn’t have a girl this year and you get strange every time I mention him. I was thinking about spying on you but this saved me the trouble.”

  “You could have asked,” she said. “I might have told you the truth.”

  “Would you have?”

  “I don’t know,” she said tiredly. “Maybe if you’d asked at the right time. Maybe not. I really don’t know.”

  He stood up and got himself another cup of coffee. “Want some?” he asked politely, but she shook her head. “Why him?” he asked when he sat back down. “That’s what I’ve been wondering most of the night.”

  Patsy shrugged, flat and discouraged and ashamed. “I don’t know,” she said honestly. The sick feeling that filled her made the question unanswerable. Why Hank? The night that only an hour before had seemed worth much turned its other side to her memory. With Jim’s new, older face looking at her from across the table the hours that had seemed beautiful while they were happening seemed in memory only common and sordid. She could not remember them as being worth very much, certainly not what they had cost her.

  “I don’t guess I understand you very well,” Jim said. “I thought you were the most virtuous woman alive.”

  Patsy winced; feeling tightened her throat, but she didn’t cry. “Don’t say that,” she said. “Don’t say things like that.”

  “Okay,” Jim said mildly. “I guess I idealize you too much. I guess in a way it’s mostly my fault.”

  But Patsy liked that even less. She shook her head, bent over and knocked Davey’s baby bottle out of his hand accidentally. He was indignant and she picked it up.

  “You needn’t go assuming the fault,” she said. “I was the one who was out all night.”