Moving On

by Larry McMurtry

  “Let’s go on to the airport,” Joe said. “We can walk around until the plane leaves.”

  Melissa decided to stay with them until the end, and Patsy was just as glad. They called a taxi and just as it arrived Barry arrived too, carrying a sackful of vegetables and a paperback copy of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He decided to come along and folded himself into the front seat of the cab while the four of them squeezed in the back. Miri was silent. She looked strained again, and a little wild. As the taxi curved onto the Bayshore freeway Patsy glanced back at the hills and white houses and wished for a moment that all was different, that she could walk around with Joe and Barry and Melissa and see the city. As it was, she could scarcely be conscious of anything but the troubled face of her sister. She could hardly believe that Miri seemed to know her so little, so intermittently.

  At the airport they thought to pass the time by watching the planes come in, but Miri’s face was tightening. She looked wild and tense and scared of the crowds, and they were all worried. “Maybe we ought to feed her,” Joe suggested. Patsy was dubious, but it proved a good suggestion. The airport restaurant was not too crowded. Melissa ordered Miri some chicken noodle soup, while the rest of them had coffee. The waitress brought a little plate of crackers and Miri ate them all before the soup came. Then she ate all the soup and did not protest when Patsy asked if she would like a grilled cheese sandwich. Patsy ordered it and Miri ate it all.

  It dawned on the four of them simultaneously that Miri was starving. They ordered her a salad and some milk and a hot roast beef sandwich. Miri ate the sandwich and asked for another. While it was coming, she asked Patsy what color Davey’s eyes were. “I couldn’t tell from the pictures you sent,” she said, wiping her mouth. Barry regarded her with wonder and a certain amount of envy. He was hungry but Melissa wouldn’t let him spend their money in an airport restaurant. “Could I have some ice cream?” Miri asked. She felt her hair to see if it was dry. She had ice cream and pie and coffee and leaned back in the booth, looking like a sane, clean, and somewhat somnolent girl who would like to take a nap. The rest of them, excepting Barry, felt almost slack with relief. Barry had not been tense. Patsy took advantage of the lull to call Jeanette. She told her to have Davey and Juanita ready. They were all going to Houston that night. Miri was okay but might react badly to Dallas. Jeanette was numb with gratitude and agreed to everything.

  On the way to the loading gate Miri walked ahead with Barry, talking rapidly. Joe and Patsy and Melissa all felt bushed, although Melissa made a pretense of it being all in the day’s routine. Patsy felt so grateful to all of them that she feared she would start crying if she tried to express it. At the gate she thanked Melissa rather awkwardly and Melissa smilingly passed it over by giving her messages to Lee, messages which it would not matter if she forgot. Barry put his arm around Melissa as they were waiting. They made a great tall couple, Patsy thought. She resolved to sing their praises to Lee and Bill. Patsy had brought nothing to read and Barry pulled the Kesey book out of his jacket and pressed it on her, assuring her he could get another the next day at the bookstore. As Miri was quiet, and waiting awkward, they waved and wandered off to window-shop in the airport stores.

  Miri was sitting comfortably in one of the seats in the waiting room yawning and looking out the window, and Patsy and Joe stood by the railing that separated passengers from guests, talking awkwardly about things that didn’t interest them. Joe looked a little ragged, and Patsy remembered that he had his love problem. She had wanted to talk to him about it, but she felt too odd and choked to want to do it there in the airport; she felt she had only a few threads of control left. Joe apparently felt somewhat the same way and they chatted without hearing each other and looked out at the blue sky over the brown hills of the peninsula. Tiny cars sped by at the foot of the hills. When the flight was called they were both glad, and they looked at each other finally. Tears started in Patsy’s eyes.

  “Okay, thanks, buddy,” she said. “Please don’t get your dumb heart broken.”

  Joe shrugged and grinned, as if to say such things were not in his power to prevent, and then he reached across the rail and hugged and kissed her. Patsy picked up her purse and got her ticket ready; Miri got in line with her, still yawning. Joe stood at the rail watching. “I’d know you for sisters anywhere,” he said. “What a pair of broads.” They both looked pleased.

  “Hollywood to the end,” Patsy said, turning to wave goodbye.

  “I accompany you,” he said. “Call me if I can help.”

  “Oh, Joe,” she said, and the line pressed her into the plane.

  “Want to read?” Patsy asked when they were both settled, but Miri merely nodded. They were both silent as they waited for the plane to fill, and silent as it taxied out the runway. But their silence was pensive, not awkward or hostile. Both looked out the window at the hills with the cars speeding at their feet, or at the planes coming in one after another over the water. It was a pleasant silence, as if both were glad that for a few hours nothing would be expected of either of them except that they sit. They were flying first class and it was very comfortable. As they went up, the white bank of evening fog was just pushing at the line of hills; the sun shone on the fog and made it brilliantly white, white as a cloud. In a few minutes they were over the Sierras, very beautiful and rough and capped with snow. Patsy had never seen mountains so clearly from the air. They shone beneath the plane, and all California stretched beside them, brown and white and blue at the horizons. Joe and Melissa and Barry would scarcely be back in the city. And then Joe would be driving intensely down the freeways, most of the night probably, unless he chose to stay in San Francisco and drink. She hoped Melissa and Barry would ask him to dinner; she didn’t like to think of him drinking alone. It had been a hard day. She was tempted to have a gin and tonic but remembered that she had to drive to Houston. She could not afford to get too relaxed.

  She was not allowed to relax, anyway, for as they were passing over Nevada, Miri, who had been sitting quietly, leafing through the Kesey book, opened her little purse and before Patsy noticed what she was doing took out a marijuana cigarette and lit it. Patsy caught the faint odor and looked around to discover to her horror that Miri was offering marijuana to the well-dressed middle-aged couple who sat across the aisle. The man looked startled for a second but immediately recovered his aplomb and he and his wife declined and spoke kindly to Miri, who offered the cigarette to Patsy. The stewardess came just at that time to take dinner orders; though she must have observed what Miri was smoking she treated it with the utmost cool and merely let down their trays. “Look, please put it out,” Patsy said. “Please. Wait until we get home. I don’t want you having your baby in jail.”

  After one more draw Miri complied. “I guess I better save it,” she said, looking into her purse. “I don’t know anyone to buy it from in Texas.”

  She ate her food when it came, but Patsy hardly touched hers. She was tight with apprehension. It occurred to her that the cool stewardess had probably told the pilot, who would probably radio the Dallas police. Narcotics agents would be waiting for them when they got off the plane. She thought of making a personal appeal to the stewardess, or of having Miri flush it, but she knew Miri wouldn’t want to and in any case her paranoia was accompanied by a kind of fatalistic lethargy. All she did was sit and worry. The land darkened; lights winked far below. Miri read in the Kesey book. “I met him,” she said, and talked in her light voice about a party, but Patsy was too glazed with worry to hear.

  As they left the plane in Dallas Patsy tried to think of what to say to the agents, but no agents appeared. They left the airport unmolested, and the relief carried her through an awkward half-hour at her parents’. Miri was extremely uncomfortable there. She moved restlessly from one room to another; Patsy tried to pack the Ford and yet stay in the same room with her, because it was obvious she would leave if a chance arose. Garland and Jeanette had no idea what to do or say, and Miri shut within
herself and would not say a word to them. Patsy made all the conversaton, to Garland, to Jeanette, to Miri, to Juanita. Davey had been asleep but woke as they were transferring him to the Ford. Patsy put Miri in the back seat with him, Juanita in the front with her, and they drove off, leaving Garland and Jeanette standing in their driveway, puzzled, awkward, and helpless. The best she had been able to do for them was to promise they could come and visit when things quieted down.

  Davey had come wide awake and wanted in his car seat, and once he was put in it wanted to twist around and look at Miri. She seemed pleased with him and offered him a finger to hold. He held it solemnly. “Can I smoke pot now?” Miri asked.

  Patsy was past caring. “I guess,” she said, glancing at Juanita to see how she would take it. Juanita was worried about car wrecks, not marijuana. “What if I get stopped for speeding?”

  “I could swallow it.”

  “Okay.” Soon Davey got in the back seat and lay on his back; Miri smoked pot and tickled his stomach and played with his feet and he gurgled and babbled and sang.

  It made Patsy miss him; she glanced back at him much oftener than Juanita would have liked. “Maybe your sister would like to drive,” she said. “You can play with Davey.” She was not above needling Patsy.

  “Listen,” Patsy said. “My sister is flying, can’t you tell? She’s high above us, in a marijuana airplane. You might as well get used to seeing her up there. She’s one of those people who get high.”

  “I weel be high if I get to heaven,” Juanita said, yawning.

  “Only my sister Patsy is going to heaven,” Miri said with a little giggle. “She’s the only one in the world who only does right things.”

  “Give me peace,” Patsy said. “It used to be only Davey and Juanita against me. Now I’ll have to buck all three of you.”

  “That’s right,” Juanita said, looking shyly at Miri. “We make you toe the line from now on. We run the house an’ you pay the bills.”

  They bantered for a while and Davey babbled, and then they all went to sleep and gave her peace. It was almost too much peace, for she was tired too, and three long hours from Houston. The smell of marijuana lingered in the car. To keep awake Patsy turned on the radio and, as she could get nothing else very clearly, listened to a hillbilly station in Shreveport. It reminded her of Hank. She had not called him since they had seen each other. In only a few rapid days it had become strange again, and unreal. She had no sense, as she drove, that they would ever get together again. Her immediate future was in the back seat. She could not see a future through the windshield. Ahead was the back of a truck with many license plates on it. She could not give her attention to the dark country stretching west. What she wanted was to get home, and once she got back on the long wide stretch of Interstate she pushed the Ford to its top speed, which was seventy-five. There was a mushy fog when she arrived in Houston. The downtown lights were pink and green. Davey didn’t wake up as he was transferred into the house, and Juanita scarcely did. Miri woke up and was downstairs playing a record when Patsy had changed into her nightgown. She went down for a minute.

  “I’m half dead,” she said. “I’m going to sleep. Please don’t run off.”

  “I’m just playing your records,” Miri said. “We had to sell my phonograph.”

  Patsy left it at that. The next morning Juanita found Miri asleep on the couch and covered her. Davey came and stared at her and babbled mightily, but Miri slept until noon.

  18

  WITH MIRI’S RETURN, a different sort of time began, different from any Patsy had known. It could not be called a bad time, and yet it was not good either, not for Patsy. March passed, and half of April, and Houston was hot again. Davey had learned to walk and toddled all over the house and the yard and the park and wherever else he was let to be. Patsy mothered him, and sistered Miri, and bossed Juanita. She ruled efficiently, often irritably, always reluctantly, over her small domain. She brooded, but could not decide whether it was a life she had made because it was the life she secretly wanted, or merely a life circumstance had thrust upon her despite herself.

  Miri changed, Davey changed, but she herself did not change, and in her worst moments she felt it to be unlikely that she would ever change again. She could not foresee anything happening that would make her much different than she was.

  Where Miri was concerned, only the first week was scary. All that week there was a strangeness in her, an intermittent restlessness. She constantly rearranged her room, she wandered restlessly about the house, and she took baths at the rate of four or five a day. Patsy could not be sure at night that she would awake and find her still there. But Miri didn’t leave. Toward the end of the week she had an eighteen-hour spell of franticness. She wanted Stone and looked at Patsy hostilely for having taken her away from him. She began to try and call him. She called everyone she knew in San Francisco, trying to find him, leaving word for him to call; but she didn’t find him and he didn’t call. For two days she was almost catatonic with despair; she sat by the phonograph for hours playing rock songs until Patsy thought the whole household would go crazy.

  Then, gradually, Miri began to feel better. She did not become the old Miri—Patsy knew she never would—but she became happier. She became friendly again in a quiet way, and soon she began to get her looks back. For a while she was always hungry and ate enormously. Patsy was afraid she would gain too much weight and made sure she saw her doctor regularly. Her cheeks filled out, she lost her pallor, and in a month her complexion was good again. At times she was quite rosy, and once in a while would burst into a peal of laughter at something Davey did. Her periods of restlessness became less intense, and her periods of withdrawal less impenetrable. With everyone except her parents she became talkative and sociable.

  Garland and Jeanette came down twice; their visits were horrors of awkwardness. They all skated constantly on the thinnest ice of convention. The visits left Patsy with terrific headaches, left Miri hostile, left Garland and Jeanette hurt and confused. Parents and children could find no safe ground to stand on. They couldn’t talk with pleasure. Jeanette so overflowed with gratitude to Patsy that Patsy felt she would drown in it. By the end of the second visit Garland and Jeanette realized they were at an impasse, and after that they called. It was easier on everyone. Over the phone everyone could believe that everyone else was fine. Garland and Jeanette could hope for a miraculous eleventh-hour proper marriage of some kind, with someone, and Patsy did not get headaches.

  Soon Miri was making friends. Emma and Flap liked her but she was a tiny bit suspicious of them, regarding them as Patsy’s allies. Her first friend was Juanita, who soon loved Miri and could not do enough for her. Juanita became the only person who really looked forward to Miri’s baby. If it was Miri’s, it could not but be a precious child, whoever its father was. Juanita talked about babies constantly and could hardly wait.

  Miri’s second friend was Kenny Cambridge. He stopped one night to chat and he and Miri sat up all night talking and listening to records. He quickly became a suitor, taking her out to movies and on long walks around Rice. He also became her source of pot. Patsy decided she would have to allow it, but she told them both her largesse extended only to pot. “No acid,” she said. But Kenny introduced Miri to a good many students and one night in April acid turned up at a party and Miri dropped it. It gave Patsy a serious scare. For two days Miri was again in her most downcast state—remote, sometimes crying, sometimes goofy, silent for long stretches, and defensive about her own exaltation. Patsy was very out of patience with her but she was too worried to explode and it passed off. Miri brightened again and seemed to have lost no ground.

  It was after that, during the course of laying down the law, that the question of Stone came up for the first and only time. It was late; she and Miri were in the living room. The TV had been moved back down, so that she and Miri could watch it while she played records. Patsy was giving an anti-LSD lecture and Miri was arguing, but rhetorically, with
little spirit. She had been cheerful all day but seemed low and lonely. It occurred to Patsy that perhaps she loved the boy. There might well have been a lovable side to him, one that had had no chance to show itself. She had to admit that she had seen him under the worst of circumstances.

  “Do you miss Stone?” she asked.

  Miri was surprised. Hearing his name caused her face to change. “Why would you care?” she asked, looking hostile.

  “Don’t be hostile,” Patsy said. “I care about you and what affects you.”

  Miri looked down at the chair, a deep chair done in brown. Her hair was very long and when she bent forward it lay on the arms of the chair. “How can you not miss someone?” she asked.

  “I took you away from there because you looked sick,” Patsy said. “You were sick, and you know it. I didn’t say you never could see him again, if you love him. I know I didn’t see him under good circumstances.”

  “I don’t think you saw him at all,” Miri said. Talking about him seemed to weigh on her. She sounded very discouraged.

  “I saw a very hostile person,” Patsy said. “But I don’t claim to have seen the whole of him. Please don’t look so blue. Talk to me about him.”