Moving On

by Larry McMurtry

  “Quit,” she said. “Go rope a cow or something. Why bother with me? Thirty minutes you’ve been here and you’ve already got seduction out of the way and can get on with your work, whatever it is. Quit tugging.”

  He tugged and she clung to the bedpost, gritting her teeth. She felt very determined.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Aren’t you happy?”

  “No,” she said. “I have a very bad character, or I wouldn’t let myself be seduced so quickly.”

  He decided her mood was best ignored, and got up and went to the kitchen. When he came back he had a plate of cold chicken, a large hunk of cake, and some milk. Patsy was feeling somewhat better. He sat on the bed eating chicken, cake, and milk while Patsy lazed and threw out small criticisms from the depths of the quilts.

  “What an eye,” she said. “You spotted that chicken in two seconds, while you were chasing me through the kitchen. I have a feeling I’m little better than a chicken to you.”

  “You’re warmer than this one,” he said, folding the end of the quilt over his bare feet.

  He put the cake plate on the floor and Patsy leaned out of the covers and broke herself off a piece. She had some milk from his glass.

  “Don’t get crumbs in the bed,” he said.

  “Why not? There’s everything else in here.” She reached down and after some searching came out with the Reader’s Digest condensed book that she had read the night before. It had been kicked aside during the lovemaking.

  They spent the morning in bed making up for months of separateness. She got seduced again, more satisfyingly, and when she finally got up insisted that he help her wrestle the old phonograph downstairs. Then they went out. The day had warmed up and was very sunny. They fiddled awhile with a tractor that was behind the barn and finally decided it was inoperative. Then they climbed up into the loft and sat in the open loft door looking across the land. Patsy became pensive and worried. Everything was so uncertain.

  “What if Jim wants all this?” she asked. “He might come back and decide to be married to me now that we own a ranch.”

  Hank had no views on what Jim might do. As they were about to go down she saw him eying a pile of hay. “Uh-oh,” she said. “I have a feeling I’m about to hear a hackneyed metaphor.” But for whimsey’s sake they inspected the hay together. It was the leavings of several barnloads of alfalfa and baled oats and was stubbly and scratchy and quite uninviting, even as a place to sit. “It would be like doing it on a bed of nails,” she said.

  In the afternoon she decided it would be pleasant to retrace in the Ford the tour she had taken with Melvin, so they set out. They couldn’t find any real cowfeed, but she insisted that Hank put a few pounds of oats in a sack, in case cows came up and acted ravenous. “It’s my obligation to feed them if they approach, I believe,” she said, somewhat worried about it. She did not want to disappoint her own cows.

  “Who would have thought I’d end up responsible for a bunch of cows?” she said, concentrating intently on her driving. The road was narrow, very bumpy, and full of roots, ruts, and what seemed to be small stumps. In the first two pastures they didn’t see a single cow, much to Patsy’s chagrin. Worried though she was about what to do if a lot came, she still wanted to show Hank that she had them. He was irreverent and skeptical and it was a relief, in the third pasture, to see twenty or more grazing with their calves among the mesquite, not far from the road. One or two cows raised their heads when they passed, but most paid the car no attention at all.

  “We have no rapport yet,” she said. “They’re going to be sold, so I guess we never will.”

  They came to the place where Melvin had done the feeding the day before. It was ringed with piles of dung. Patsy drove on adventurously; since the road was getting no worse it would be fun to see where it went. It ended a mile farther on, at a long shallow-looking pool of water with an earthen dam at one end. As they pulled up and stopped a large gray crane rose from the shallows and flew away. His take-off was so heavy and awkward it seemed he might not clear the mesquite, but as he rose higher he flew more swiftly and more gracefully and soon disappeared to the north.

  They got out and sat on the dam of the tank for a while, plinking little stones into the water. “I wish Davey were here,” Patsy said. “He’d love all this.” She wished also that a few cows would come by. It seemed to her that she remembered that cows came to water in the afternoons, and it would be a nice way to meet some. It had grown quite warm.

  “Too bad it isn’t summer,” he said. “We could go swimming.”

  “You could. For all you know these tanks have alligators. I’m not swimming in unauthorized waters, even if I own them.”

  When they got tired of sitting on the dam they went back to the Ford. In the course of some light necking Hank developed an urgent desire for her. She fanned it a bit, for amusement, only to discover that he was serious.

  “Come on,” she said. “What can you be thinking of? This is a family car.”

  “It’s my life’s ambition,” he said.

  “I can believe that—it’s your only ambition.” She surveyed the Ford hastily, not really opposed, only a little skeptical. But he laid her in the front seat, and they managed, almost comfortably. The front seat was warm from the sun shining through the glass, a little too warm, and the outside air felt cool on her bare legs. She held to the steering wheel with one hand and Hank with the other. Afterward, standing barefoot on the short prickly grass, nude from the waist down and trying to untangle her rolled-together jeans and panties she felt it was all very silly, the whole business—what ridiculous moments it involved.

  “I’m glad no cows came by,” she said.

  It seemed to be a day for doing it. That night they ate the rest of the chicken, all the coleslaw, and most of the angel food cake, then built a fire and lay in front of it on the couch, watching very blurred television. They brought down some quilts and eventually ended up wearing quilts rather than clothes. Television was dull as well as blurry and sex easily drove it out. Aunt Rosemary’s couch, though not ideal, was more comfortable than the Ford. Afterward Patsy sat on the hearth, feeding the fire, her front warm and her back cool, basking, feeling wonderfully dreamy and lazy. They went to sleep scrunched on the couch and only hours later, when the fire was out and both were uncomfortable, did they manage to drag themselves and the quilts up to the bedroom. The sheets were icy.

  When they awoke the next morning the floors were icy and the sheets warm, and their clothes were downstairs. It was bright and sunshiny outside but very cold in the bedroom, which made conditions ideal for dawdling. They dawdled and argued about the future, all pleasantly. Patsy got up, tiptoed to the john, and came back a mass of goose bumps, to snuggle gratefully back into the warm bed. Hank was for staying a day or two, but she was firm against it. “I have to get back to Dallas,” she said. “Anyway, I’d just sap your manhood if we stayed any longer.”

  Hunger eventually drove them up, but the only thing left to eat was oatmeal. She made some brittle toast from bread that was a week old, and then firmly sent him off. “Maybe I’ll meet you every full moon, or something,” she said. She felt very good, glad that he had gone without a scene, and went into the house to get a washrag and the broom. The Ford needed cleaning out. She scrubbed the front seat and fished from between the seats a quarter Juanita was always complaining about having lost. She loosened the back seat a little and found another quarter, a nickel, two dusty pennies, a map of Salt Lake City, a blue comb, a ball-point pen, a tie clasp of Jim’s that she had not seen in years, toothpicks and chewing gum wrappers in quantity, and a dusty crumpled letter from Emma, written only three months after she and Jim married, when Emma was pregnant with Teddy. She reread the letter, which was full of the miseries of pregnancy, and of Flap’s neglect and general intransigence, all cheerfully related in the very literary epistolary style they had used in their letters in those days.

  For a minute she was sad. She put the letter and J
im’s tie clasp in the glove compartment. He had liked it, she remembered; she could mail it to him. Working for IBM must require one to wear ties. It was sad, but the little gold tie clasp made the Jim she had once known and once married more vivid than anything the present Jim had done in many months. She sniffed at the car seat, to reassure herself, and then got out. It was still early and cold. The sun was turning the frost to water and it shone on the grass of the slope. The white moon was just fading in the sunlight, but it could still be seen, a faint half-moon hanging in the blue west over the road where Hank was driving. Once again, with Hank gone, the land and the buildings looked too empty; they registered the absence of all that Roger had brought to them. Patsy got the broom and washrag and hurried in to wash the pan of oatmeal before the oatmeal stiffened and became hard to remove.

  Later, her bag packed and the dishes washed, she tidied up the house. Best to leave it, for a time, as it had been. She shoved the couch back into its usual place; it was easy to position because of the dust that had been beneath it on the bare floor. In tidying, Mrs. Daniels had not thought to sweep under the couch, little supposing it would be moved. What that lady or the lady whose couch it had been would have thought of the goings on of the night before did not disturb her; she had come, by the act of inheritance, to think of it as her house. She folded the quilts and put them back in the closet, thinking that if there was a ghost in the house it was the ghost of a man who had never spent much time in the living room. She returned the Reader’s Digest book to the glass-fronted case. Next trip she would bring some books and some food and some reading lamps and probably Davey, if all went well.

  She washed the three cake plates, the chicken plate, and the bowl the coleslaw had been in and, on the way through town, dropped them at the minister’s house, near the church where the funeral had been held. He was still shaky, but kindly and inquisitive, and promised to get the plates to their respective owners. He said he hoped to see her in church when she was up. “We got a fine little nursery school,” he said. Patsy thanked him for everything and left for Dallas, her conscience clear.

  16

  IT WAS A PLEASANT DRIVE to Dallas, the pleasanter because there was no Davey squalling and no Juanita fidgeting and sucking in her breath every time they passed a car. In almost every little town along the way there was a roadside antique shop, and Patsy stopped to poke in almost every one of them. All she bought was a few funny turn-of-the-century postcards, but it was fun to stop and poke. She stopped in a town called Decatur and walked around a huge grotesquely ugly old courthouse. She pretended she was in France looking at cathedrals, and the old men spitting and whittling on a bench on the courthouse lawn looked at her as if she were an invader from a century they did not want to live in. Mostly she stopped in order to walk. She felt extraordinarily good, light and loose and fresh, and she kept smiling as she walked. It had been so long since she had had sex that she had forgotten what it could do for her, and she felt several twinges of regret that she had not stayed at the ranch another day. The minute Hank had driven away she had begun to miss him. But as she got closer to Dallas she began to develop a strong desire to be in her own house, and she determined to bundle up Davey and Juanita and drive straight on.

  She discovered, however, that in her absence another mission had been prepared for her.

  The first person she saw when she walked in was her mother, and the look on Jeanette’s face was so awful that it sent a current of shock and weakness through Patsy. Jeanette looked past tears, as if something had happened from which there could be no possible recovery. Patsy immediately assumed it had happened to Davey.

  “Where is he?” she said. “What’s happened?” Then she heard his voice babbling from another room, and she stepped past her mother and there he was, in blue overalls, as merry and healthy as ever. She grabbed him up and kissed his neck and, holding him, went back to her mother.

  “Thank god you’ve come,” Jeanette said. “I wanted to call but Garland didn’t want me to. He said you’d be back today.”

  “What is it, mother? What is it? Is somebody dead?”

  Jeanette sat down on a sofa shaking her head. “It’s Miri.”

  Patsy was impatient. “Well, what? Is she dead or sick or in jail or pregnant or what?” When she said pregnant her mother’s blank pained face twisted and she began to cry.

  “She’s pregnant,” she sobbed. Davey was twisting, trying to get to the floor, and Patsy squatted down and watched his blue bottom as he rapidly crawled into the other room.

  Jeanette was sobbing so wrenchingly that Patsy could do nothing until she quieted. She sat by her on the couch and put her arms around her. Finally Jeanette grew calmer.

  “Come on, dear. It’s not the end of the world,” Patsy said. “Where’s Daddy?”

  “Oh, it is, it is,” Jeanette insisted.

  “No. We’ll just have to get her back here where we can take care of her. Who’s the boy?”

  It turned out they didn’t know. Indeed, they knew next to nothing. A daughter of an old family friend had seen Miri and reported that she was pregnant—that was all. They could not get her on the phone. Garland had started to go out and find her but had decided to wait for Patsy’s return. He came in an hour later, red-faced and not very coherent. He too regarded it as the end of the world and had been drinking heavily. It made Patsy angry. He had a reservation on a six o’clock flight to San Francisco. Once the facts were known to all and they had speculated fruitlessly about the possible father and what ought to be done, a silence fell over the room. Patsy was very angry at her sister for not having called, but then she had not been calling Miri and couldn’t really complain. But she was even angrier at her parents, an anger she tried hard to curb, because she felt sorry for them at the same time. It was plain that they were beaten. Their only plan was to find Miri and the boy and force them to marry. It was the only approach to such a problem that they knew. Even in her irritation with them Patsy kept away from stating some of the more awkward possibilities, such as that Miri might not know who the father was, or that he might be Negro, Arab, Chinese—there was really no telling. She decided that the first order of business was to block any confrontation between her parents and Miri. She had better go herself and find Miri and get the facts.

  Once she made up her mind to go, she wasted no time. Garland surrendered his reservation with clear relief. “I guess it would be better if I stayed here to look after Mother,” he said, sighing.

  “I think you two can use some mutual looking after,” Patsy said and left them and went to see Juanita. She got a report on Davey and took him out in her parents’ large sunny back yard and played with him for an hour and a half before she had to bathe and leave. While she was bathing she began to have apprehensions. Perhaps she was not up to the job she was taking on. She didn’t know California, and what she had read of the hippie scene made it seem rather different from the one camping weekend she had spent in Yosemite years before. But it was not really the thought of a strange city that scared her; it was the thought of a strange sister. They had never been the sort to exchange every confidence, but neither of them had supposed when Miri left for Stanford that such a time would elapse before they saw each other again. Miri had simply not come back, and Patsy couldn’t help wondering what sort of girl she would find when she found her.

  In any case, as she packed, the desirability of some masculine help began to seem more and more clear. It occurred to her that while she was out there she might as well see Jim. It was absurd to go on allowing him to be a sort of floating man in her life. “You know,” she said, “maybe I ought to go see Jim first. If we can work something out he might come help me with Miri. If we can’t then I have an old friend in Los Angeles who might help. Let’s see if I can switch my flight.”

  Her parents were cheered. They welcomed any effort toward reconciliation, on any front. The switching was no problem; the two flights left within minutes of each other, and in a very short time Patsy wa
s flying west. It was a beautiful flight, with the sun setting just ahead of them for two and a half hours. Almost at once, it seemed, they were over the desert. Patsy had a seat by a window and looked down at the brown land and brown lakes and tiny towns whose names she didn’t know. She had a vague idea they must be flying over Lubbock and thought how strange it would be if Hank were still driving on one of the highways she was flying over. The only town the pilot mentioned by name was Las Vegas, and she was on the wrong side of the plane to see it. She had a gin and tonic for the sake of her nerves. The fields of clouds were made beautiful by the setting sun. She dozed for a little and awoke with a sense of pressure and a sense of disorientation. She felt very unprepared. Only a few hours before she had been in her bathrobe, being hugged, Hank’s arms around her and her back against his car, with the silent house and the clear morning and the still pastures around them. The sun that had risen while the two of them lay snugly in the bed had beaten her to the coast and dropped into the Pacific clouds. The land below was no longer bright with evening but was gray, sprinkled with faint lights, and soon, before she could clear her head, the plane had banked and was descending into the white smog of Los Angeles. Just before they landed she glimpsed a freeway below and rows of cars with their lights on.

  As the plane taxied in among the strange smog-hidden terminals of the L.A. International and her fellow passengers gathered up purses and briefcases, Patsy became very oppressed by the hastiness of what she had done. The desire to keep her father in Dallas had wiped out her judgment, she felt. She had not called Jim, she had no hotel reservations, she didn’t know where Altadena was, or even where to find her luggage.