Terms of Endearment

by Larry McMurtry

  Mitch was a retired roustabout who had had a hand pinched off in an oil field accident years before. It had been him, in fact, who had introduced Royce to Shirley. She had been Mitch’s girl friend for years, but they had had a falling out that started (Shirley later told Royce) because Mitch’s old thing acquired the bad habit of falling out of Shirley just at the wrong time. Despite this, Mitch and Shirley had decided to stay friends, and in a moment of lethargy Mitch handed his friend Shirley over to his friend Royce. He himself regarded Royce as being far too crude for Shirley, and he was very upset when they happened to hit it off. It was his own doings, however, and he managed to keep quiet about how wrong it all was, except to Hubbard Junior, the nervous little manager of the Tired-Out Lounge. Mitch frequently pointed out to Hubbard Junior that Royce and Shirley couldn’t last, and Hubbard Junior, a very neat man who had the bad luck to own a bar that was only two blocks from a tire factory, always agreed, as he did with everybody, no matter what they said.

  Still, on the surface, Royce and Mitch were still buddies, and it was no great surprise to Royce that it was Mitch who rang him up on the phone.

  “What’s up, good buddy?” Mitch asked when Royce said hello.

  “Restin,” Royce said. “Havin’ a few beers.”

  “You’re gonna need something stronger than that when you hear what I got to say,” Mitch said. “I’m over here at the J-Bar Korral.”

  “Aw, yeah?” Royce said, not much interested.

  “It’s this here East-Tex Hoedown,” Mitch went on. “They have it ever’ Friday night, unescorted ladies free. The pussy that walks around loose over here ain’t to be believed.”

  “Aw, yeah?” Royce repeated.

  “Anyhow, guess who just come in,” Mitch said.

  “John F. Kennedy,” Royce guessed, feeling humorous. “Or is it old LBJ?”

  “Nope,” Mitch said. “Guess again.”

  Royce racked his brain. He could think of nobody they both knew who might be likely to turn up at the East-Tex Hoedown. In fact, in his relaxed state, he could not even think of anybody they both knew.

  “Too tired to guess,” Royce said.

  “All right, I’ll give you a hint,” Mitch said. “Her name starts with an R.”

  Mitch expected that crucial initial to burst like a bombshell in Royce’s consciousness, but once again he had miscalculated.

  “Don’t know nobody whose name starts with an R,” Royce said. “Nobody ‘cept me, an’ I ain’t hardly even got out of bed today.”

  “Rosie, you dumb shit,” Mitch said, exasperated by his friend’s obtuseness. “Rosie, Rosie, Rosie.”

  “Rosie who?” Royce said automatically, all thought of his wife still far from his mind.

  “Rosie Dunlup!” Mitch yelled. “Your wife Rosie, ever hear of her?”

  “Oh, Rosie,” Royce said. “Ask her how Little Buster’s doin’, will you?”

  Then the bombshell finally burst. Royce sat up abruptly, spilling the can of beer off his navel. He didn’t notice it until the cold liquid began to leak underneath him. Then, since when he sat up his stomach hid the can, he thought the sudden shock must have caused him to wet the bed.

  “Rosie?” he said. “You don’t mean Rosie?”

  “Rosie,” Mitch said quietly, savoring the moment.

  “Go tell her I said to go home,” Royce said. “What’s she think she’s doin’ over there at a dance with all them sluts?

  “She oughtn’t to be out by herself,” he added.

  “She ain’t out by herself,” Mitch said. It was another moment to savor.

  Royce stuck his finger in the puddle he was sitting in, and then smelled the finger. It smelled like beer rather than piss, so at least he was rid of one anxiety. Dim memories of his married life began to stir in him, but only vaguely, and when Mitch dropped his second bombshell the room of Royce’s memory went black.

  “Whut?” he asked.

  Mitch adopted a flat, informative tone and informed Royce that Rosie had arrived with two short men, one of whom wore a mustache. The other was a well-known oil man who drove a white Lincoln.

  There was silence on the line while Royce absorbed the information. “Fuck a turkey,” he said finally, running his fingers through his hair.

  “Yeah, don’t that beat all?” Mitch said. “I guess what they say is true: While the cat’s away, the mouse will play.”

  “Why, what does she mean, goin’ off an’ leavin’ the kids?” Royce said. A sense of indignation was rising in him.

  “She’s a married woman,” he added forcefully.

  “She sure ain’t actin’ like one tonight,” Mitch said. “Her an’ that Cajun’s dancin’ up a storm.”

  “Don’t tell me no more. You’re just makin’ it hard for me to think,” Royce said. He was trying to keep in mind a paramount fact: Rosie was his wife, and she was in the process of betraying him.

  “You comin’ over?” Mitch asked.

  In his agitation, Royce hung up the phone before he answered. “You goddamn right I’m coming over,” he said to no one. Problems lay in his way, however. One of his shoes was lost. Shirley had a scroungy little mongrel named Barstow, after her home town, and Barstow was always dragging Royce’s shoes off into corners so he could nibble at the shoestrings. Royce found one shoe in the kitchen, but the other one was completely lost. While he was looking for it, though, he found a bottle of Scotch he had forgot they had, a good deal of which he gulped down while he was looking for the shoe. The shoe refused to turn up, and Royce, tormented by the thought of what his wife was getting away with, grew more and more frantic. He turned the bed upside down, thinking it might be under there. Then he turned the couch upside down. Then he stepped outside to kick the shit out of Barstow, who had vanished as neatly as the shoe.

  As the minutes ticked by, Royce’s desperation increased, and his fury with it. Finally he decided the shoe was nonessential; he could do what he had to do with one shoe on. He rushed out into the street and jumped into his delivery truck, but unfortunately, thanks to a month of inactivity, the truck’s battery was dead. Royce felt like turning the truck over, as he had the bed and the couch, but sanity prevailed. After trying vainly to flag down a couple of passing cars he hobbled rapidly up to the Tired-Out Lounge. Everybody got a good laugh at the sight of him with one shoe on and one shoe off, but Royce scarcely heard the uproar.

  “Shirley’s damn turd hound stole it,” he said to silence speculation. “Got an emergency. I need somebody to come help me jump-start my truck.”

  Nothing wins friends in a bar like someone else’s emergency, and in no time Royce was getting a jump-start from a ’58 Mercury, his shoe problem forgotten. Five or six tire experts from the used-tire center stood around idly kicking at the tires of Royce’s truck while the jump-start took place. Several of them tried not too subtly to find out what the emergency was. After all, they had left their drinking to participate in it and had done so with the expectation—always a reasonable one on Harrisburg—of gunshots, screaming women, and flowing blood. A used potato chip truck with a rundown battery was a poor substitute, and they let Royce know it.

  “What the fuck, Dunlup,” one said. “Your old lady’s house ain’t even on fire.”

  Royce was not about to admit the humiliating truth, that his wife was out honky-tonking with other men. He silenced all queries by slamming his hood down and roaring away, although the hood popped up again before he had gone a block, mainly because in his haste he had neglected to remove the battery cables and had slammed it down on them.

  The men who had helped him watched him go with a certain rancor. “The son of a bitch is too ignorant even to put on both shoes,” one of them said. They were hoping maybe he’d have a car wreck before he got out of sight, but he didn’t and they were left to straggle back to the bar without even a story to tell. “Dumb bastard,” another tire whanger said. “I wouldn’t help him next time if a snappin’ turtle had a holt of his cock.”

  2.r />
  OVER AT the J-Bar Korral, meanwhile, a colorful evening was in progress. A group called the Tyler Troubadours was flailing away at a medley of Hank Snow favorites, and the customers had divided themselves roughly into three equivalent groups: those who came to drink, those who came to dance, and those who hoped to accomplish a little of both. Brylcream and Vitalis gleamed on the heads of those men who bothered to take their Stetsons off, and the women’s hair was mostly upward coiffed, as if God had dressed it himself by standing over them with a comb in one omnipotent hand and a powerful vacuum cleaner in the other.

  Everybody was happy and nearly everybody was drunk. One of the few exceptions to both categories was Vernon, who sat at a table smiling uncomfortably. He was not sober on purpose, but then neither was he unhappy on purpose. Both states appeared to belong to him, which was just as well, since as near as he could tell nobody else wanted them.

  Certainly Rosie didn’t. She had immediately flung herself into dancing, figuring that was the easiest way to keep her mind off the fact that she was out on a date with F.V. d’Arch. It was very clear to her that it was a date, since at the last minute she had let him pay for her ticket; beyond that, her imagination refused to take her. She had more or less forgotten why she had been so determined to drag poor Vernon along, but she was glad that she had, anyway, just in case problems arose with F.V.

  Fortunately, though, F.V. had shown himself to be a model of comportment. He flung himself into dancing just as eagerly as Rosie had, mostly to keep his mind off the fact that he couldn’t think of anything to say to Rosie. For years the two staples of their conversation had been Bossier City, Louisiana, and Packard engines, and neither seemed quite the right thing to talk about on their first date.

  Also, looming in both their minds was the specter of Royce Dunlup. Despite the fact that he had not been heard from in weeks, and might be in Canada, or even California, both Rosie and F.V. secretly assumed that somehow he would find them out and turn up at the dance. They also secretly assumed that by their being there together they were guilty—probably in the eyes of God and certainly in the eyes of Royce—of something close to adultery, although they had as yet to exchange even a handshake. Both were sweaty before they had danced a step, from guilt and nervousness, and the dancing proved to an enormous relief. At first F.V. danced with great Cajun suavity, from the hips down, never moving his upper body at all, which struck Rosie as slightly absurd. She was used to lots of rocking and dipping and hugging when she danced, and while she didn’t especially want F.V. to try any hugging she did expect him to at least turn his head once in a while. Right away she poked him in the ribs to make her point.

  “Loosen up there, F.V.,” she said. “We ain’t standin’ in no boat, you know. You’re gonna be a dead loss when they play one of them jitterbugs if you can’t twist no better’n that.”

  Fortunately a little practice and five or six beers and the fact that there was no sign of Royce did wonders for F.V.’s confidence, and Rosie had no more cause for complaint. F.V. had her on the floor for every dance and they were only cut in on twice, both times by the same massive drunk, who couldn’t seem to get over the fact that Rosie was as short as she was. “Ma’am, you’re plumb tiny” he said several times.

  “That’s right. Be careful you don’t fall on me. I’d just be a smear on the floor if you was to,” Rosie said, charitable in her happiness at finding out she could go about in the world and dance with various men without any lightning bolts striking her dead.

  In her happiness, and because the inside of the J-Bar Korral was roughly the temperature of a bread oven, she began to drink beer rapidly during the intermissions. F.V. drank beer rapidly too, and Vernon bought beer as rapidly as they drank it. The top of their table was a puddle from all the moisture that had dripped off the bottles, and Vernon amused himself while they danced by soaking up the puddle with napkins.

  “F.V., we ort to of been doing this years ago,” Rosie said during one intermission. She was feeling more and more generous toward F.V. The fact that he had gotten up the nerve to mumble, “Wanta go?” that morning was the beginning of her liberation.

  “We ort, we ort,” F.V. said. “Wanta come next week?”

  “Oh, well,” Rosie said, fanning herself with a napkin. The “oh, well” was a delaying tactic she had picked up from listening to Aurora.

  “They have these dances ever’ week,” F.V. said. He paused. “Ever’ week on the dot,” he added, in case Rosie doubted it.

  “That’s sweet,” Rosie said vaguely, looking around the room in such a way as to leave in question as much as possible. It was rather vulgar of F.V. to rush her so, she felt, and the thought of having to commit herself to something a whole week away was scary.

  “It’s the same band all the time,” F.V. persisted.

  “Vernon, you ought to try a dance or two,” Rosie said, hoping to slip quietly off the spot she was on.

  “I was raised Church of Christ,” Vernon explained. “They ain’t partial to dancing.”

  Vernon was not going to be any help, Rosie saw. He was merely waiting politely for the evening to be over. Meanwhile, F.V.’s dark Cajun eyes were shining and he was waiting to find out if he had a date for next week.

  “Well, if Little Buster ain’t been kidnapped, or the sky don’t fall …” Rosie said and let her sentence trail off.

  That was enough for F.V. Anything less crushing than blank refusal had always been enough for F.V. He leaned back and drank beer while Vernon ate pretzels.

  Vernon felt like he was still in a state of backward drift. Old Schweppes, the baseball fan, would have said that life had thrown him a curve, the curve being Aurora, but to Vernon it felt more like the road of his life had just suddenly forked, giving him no time to turn. He had left the old straight road of his life, probably forever, on the impulse of an instant, yet it did not surprise him very much that the fork had so quickly led him into the sand. He did not expect to get back on the old road, and to him the sweat and the roar of the J-Bar were just part of the sand. He watched and ate his pretzels rather disconnectedly, mild in his dullness, not thinking of much.

  None of them knew that outside in the far reaches of the J-Bar parking lot a baby blue delivery truck was revving up. Royce Dunlup had arrived and was preparing his vengeance.

  He had not, however, parked his truck. On the way over he had had the feeling that a few beers might clear his head, so he had stopped at an all-night grocery and bought two six-packs of Pearl. To his annoyance, everyone in the store had laughed at him because he had on only one shoe. It was beginning to seem to Royce that he must be the first person in the history of the world to have a shoe carried off by a girl friend’s dog.

  The cashier at the grocery store, no more than a pimply kid, had felt obliged to crack a joke about it. “What happened, hoss?” he asked. “Did you forget to put the other one on, or forget to take this one off?”

  Royce had taken his six-packs and limped to his truck, followed by the rude jeers of several onlookers. The incident set him to brooding. People seemed to assume that he was some kind of nut, a kind who only liked to wear one shoe. If he went limping into a big dance like the East-Tex Hoedown wearing only one shoe hundreds of people would probably laugh at him; his whole position would be automatically undermined. For all he knew, Rosie could have him committed to an insane asylum if he showed up at a dance with only one shoe on.

  It was a thorny problem, and Royce sat in his truck at the far end of the J-Bar parking lot and drank his way rapidly through a six-pack of beer. It occurred to him that if he waited patiently enough some drunk was sure to stagger out and collapse somewhere in the parking lot, in which case it would be no trouble to steal a shoe. The only risky part about such a plan was that Rosie and her escorts might leave before he could find a collapsed drunk. In light of the seriousness of it all, the matter of the missing shoe was a terrible irritation, and Royce made up his mind to strangle Barstow the next time he came home, Shirle
y or no Shirley. He drank the second six-pack even more rapidly than the first. Drinking helped keep him in a decisive mood. The J-Bar was only a cheap prefabricated dance hall, and Royce could hear the music plainly through the open doors. The thought that his own wife of twenty-seven years was in there dancing with a low-class Cajun put him in a stomping mood, but unfortunately he had nothing but a sock on his best stomping foot.

  Then, just as he was finishing his twelfth beer, a solution to the whole problem accidentally presented itself. Royce had about decided to wait in the truck and try to run over Rosie and F.V. when they came out to leave. He killed his motor and prepared to lie in wait, and just as he did the solution appeared in the form of two men and a woman, all of whom seemed to be very happy. When they stepped out of the door of the J-Bar they had their arms around one another and were singing about crawfish pie, but by the time they had managed to stagger the length of the building the party mood had soured. One of the men was large and the other small, and the first sign of animosity Royce noticed came when the big man picked up the little man by his belt and abruptly flung him at the rear wall of the J-Bar Korral.

  “Keep your fuckin’ slop bucket mouth shut around my fiancée, you little turd you,” the big man said, just about the time the little man’s head hit the wall of the J-Bar Korral. Royce couldn’t tell if the little man heard the command or not. Instead of answering he began to writhe around on the concrete, groaning out indistinct words.

  The woman paused briefly to look down at the small writhing man. “Darrell, you never need to done that,” she said calmly. “I’ve heard the word ‘titty’ before anyway. I got two of ’em, even if they ain’t the biggest ones in the world.”