The Last Picture Show

by Larry McMurtry

  Sonny had no answer. Late that night he and Duane and Genevieve had coffee and pie together and Duane caught the three o’clock bus out. The prospect of setting out into the world had already taken Duane’s mind off his problem. He was speculating about what sort of wages he could draw in Midland. Sonny felt okay about it, figuring to see Duane back in Thalia as soon as Jacy got off to college. When they walked Duane to the bus in the warm summer night they all felt good. Sonny and Genevieve stood on the curb in front of the café and watched the bus pull out. Soon all they could see of it were the red taillights, far out beyond the city limits sign.

  “Wouldn’t mind goin’ someplace myself,” Sonny said.

  “Well, Uncle Sam will see you get your chance,” Genevieve said, stretching her arms.

  Abilene’s Mercury was parked in front of the poolhall. Sonny was ready to go home, but he hated to go through the poolhall while Abilene was practicing. Finally he went in and had another cup of coffee with Genevieve, waiting to hear the Mercury roar away.

  When Jacy heard about Duane leaving town she was a little bit upset. His calls had not been all that annoying—sometimes when she was bored the calls picked her up a little. It was true that she had started going with Lester more or less officially, but it was certainly no deep love affair. She was getting ready to be deeply in love with Bobby Sheen, and she regarded Lester as a necessary stepping-stone. Only by going with someone in Bobby’s circle could she keep herself constantly before his eyes, and she knew that if she kept herself constantly before his eyes he would soon realize that she was more beautiful than Annie-Annie. Jacy knew quite well that she was prettier than Annie-Annie, but at the same time it worried her a little than Annie-Annie always managed to look extremely sexy. The only thing Jacy could figure was that the sexy look was something Annie-Annie had acquired with experience, and there was certainly no reason why she couldn’t get just as much experience as Annie-Annie had. Lester Marlow was exactly suitable for such a purpose: he adored Jacy and was completely manageable. She still thought red pubic hair was a little ridiculous, but some things had to be accepted if one was to become a woman of the world.

  The Wichita kids called sexual intercourse “screwing,” so Jacy took to calling it that too. Lester’s parents were in Colorado for the summer, so she and Lester could screw whenever they wanted to—Lester was always willing and usually more or less able. In a week or so Jacy managed to become completely unshy about the whole business, and even worked out a sort of routine. She slept until noon, got up, ate some peanut butter, called Lester to see if he was home, put on shorts, sandals, a blouse, and her new sunglasses and drove to Wichita. The drive always made her sweat a little and it was pleasant to walk into Lester’s big cool house. Lester would always be there looking slightly nervous.

  “Hi,” Jacy would say. “Want to screw?” That was the favored approach among the Bobby Sheen set. Lester wouldn’t have dared not to want to, so Jacy would go up to his parents’ bedroom, the room with the biggest, most comfortable bed. There she would peel off her clothes and wait for Lester to peel off his. The screwing itself was pretty athletic—Jacy had never been very big on athletics, but she knew good and well she could learn to screw if she put her mind to it. Fortunately, Lester had a good attitude: he would do exactly as directed. When they were finished they usually drove over to the country club and lay around the pool with Bobby Sheen and Annie-Annie and all the other kids, most of whom had been screwing too. One day Bobby Sheen offered to rub suntan oil on Jacy’s back and legs and she knew she was making progress. He rubbed the oil on in a very sexy way, she thought.

  From time to time it occurred to her that she had really run Duane off too soon. He wasn’t quite as manageable as Lester, but he was really a good bit sexier, and she discovered that some of the girls thought there was something pretty romantic about sleeping with roughnecks. She could probably have got another month or so of good out of Duane, but that she hadn’t didn’t really worry her: Bobby Sheen was the main objective, and if for prestige reasons it became necessary to have a roughneck in love with her there was always Sonny. He was very available, and just as nice as Duane.

  Once, just to show that she wasn’t snobbish, she called Sonny up and invited him to have a hamburger with her. It was a pleasant summer evening in early July and they decided to drive to Wichita and eat. Jacy drove, her hair blowing across her face. She had on a white silk blouse with the ends tied together in a knot across her stomach—an inch or two of her midriff showed between blouse and shorts.

  “Do you ever hear from Duane?” she asked, sighing. “I really feel bad about that.”

  “I had a postcard,” Sonny said. “He’s makin’ three-twenty a month. Said he bought a car.”

  “Well, I guess I’ll always be a little bit in love with Duane,” Jacy said. “We just had too much against us. It wasn’t easy having to be the one to break up.”

  Talking about it made Sonny uneasy. In fact, just riding with Jacy made him feel a little disloyal. He still thought of her as Duane’s girl.

  They ate hamburgers, drank milk shakes, and rode slowly back to Thalia, looking at the millions of summer stars. Jacy let Sonny out at the poolhall and went on home, realizing only after she got there that she had enjoyed the evening. Dating no one but Lester Marlow was really tiresome. Except for not being rich, Sonny was more her type of boy. The thought of screwing Lester one more time was utterly boring, but she didn’t really feel like she could push things with Bobby Sheen. She decided that in a day or two she would call Sonny again and perhaps go to the lake with him to find out if she liked to kiss him. It would be nice once more to go with somebody she liked to kiss.

  The very next day, Bobby Sheen seduced her. Annie-Annie had gone to Dallas to buy her college wardrobe, and Jacy had skipped Lester and gone straight to the club to swim. Bobby asked her if she wanted to go to his house to play some records and that was it. They spread towels over the seats of his MG and wore their wet bathing suits to the house. As soon as they were inside Bobby slipped her straps down so he could play with her breasts. Jacy tried to concentrate and do everything right but it was actually pretty arousing, screwing Bobby Sheen, and she couldn’t keep her head clear. He was about five times as athletic as Lester and when she thought it over later she was pretty sure she came, which was what one was supposed to do. At any rate, she went to sleep and didn’t wake up until six o’clock. She found Bobby downstairs. He had on Bermuda shorts and was eating a peanut butter sandwich while he watched the news on TV.

  “Peanut butter?” he asked absently, when he noticed Jacy. She didn’t want to eat, she wanted to sit in his lap, but she saw he was really watching the news and made herself refrain. They had come home in his car, she had no way to leave. During the commercial Bobby got up to fix himself another sandwich. “Oh, you’re afoot, aren’t you,” he said. “As soon as the news is over I’ll run you back to the club.”

  He was quite cheerful and relaxed, but Jacy was a little surprised that he didn’t take on over her more than he did. For the next four or five days she hung around the club pool almost constantly, expecting to hear that Bobby and Annie-Annie had broken up; she was sure that as soon as that happened Bobby would call her for another date.

  The next Sunday morning Jacy was in the kitchen peeling an orange when her mother came in from the bedroom to get more coffee. On Sunday mornings Lois always lay in bed and drank coffee until the coffee pot was empty. Gene was gone—he always spent Sunday morning inspecting his leases.

  “Honey,” Lois asked, “don’t you know that Sheen boy in Wichita? Bobby Sheen?”

  “I sure do,” Jacy said. “Why?”

  “He got married yesterday to some girl named Annie Martin,” Lois said. “It’s in the paper this morning. I knew I’d seen them around the club. They got married in Oklahoma a couple of days ago and it just now made the paper. You know her?”

  Jacy walked into the bedroom and found the article. It was just a tiny article
with no picture, the kind the paper always ran when kids of prominent families ran off and got married without their parents’ consent.

  When Lois came into the bedroom with her coffee, Jacy was sitting on the bed crying bitterly.

  “He’s the luh-ast one,” she said. “I’ll just be an ol’ maid.”

  Lois set her coffee down and got her daughter a box of Kleenex. She had seldom seen Jacy so upset, and least of all over a boy. Her tears were ruining the newspaper, and since she hadn’t finished reading it Lois gently pulled it away.

  “Oh, honey,” she said. “Don’t cry like that. That’s the way it is, you know. Win a few, lose a few. That’s really the way it goes, all through life.”

  CHAPTER XX

  ABOUT A WEEK after Bobby Sheen got married, something totally unexpected happened to Jacy, and it was led up to by an event so startling that everyone in Thalia almost went mad with surprise. Joe Bob Blanton was arrested for rape!

  It was one of those days when it seemed to Christian people that the Lord must have lost all patience with the town. It was a wonder he hadn’t simply destroyed it by fire, like he had Sodom, and since the heat at midafternoon that day was 109 degrees He could easily have done so simply by making the sun a little hotter. A few degrees more and the grass would have flamed, the buildings begun to smoke, and the asphalt streets to melt and bubble.

  Joe Bob didn’t rape Jacy, of course, but the general confusion that followed his arrest made possible what did happen to her. Joe Bob didn’t actually rape anybody, but very few would have believed that at the time.

  “That poor kid’s downfall started the day old man Blanton got the call to preach,” Lois Farrow said, but she was the only one who took that view. No one else thought of blaming Brother Blanton for his son’s disgrace, and still less did they think of blaming Coach Popper or the school board president or San Francisco or Esther Williams, the movie star. They were all quite willing to put the blame squarely on Joe Bob himself.

  Joe Bob was a seventeen-year-old virgin. For years he had been tormented by lustful thoughts. When he was only fourteen Brother Blanton slipped into his room one night and caught him masturbating by flashlight over a picture of Esther Williams. Joe Bob had torn the picture out of a movie magazine one of their neighbors had thrown away. Of course Brother Blanton whipped him severely and disposed of the picture; he also told Joe Bob in no uncertain terms what the sequel of such actions would be.

  “Joe Bob,” he said, “have you ever been through the State Hospital in Wichita? The insane asylum?”

  “No sir,” Joe Bob said.

  “Well, sometime I’ll take you,” Brother Blanton promised. “There are three or four hundred men over there, pitiful creatures, rotting away, no good to their families or to the Lord or anybody. I don’t know about all of them, some of them may have come from broken homes or been alcoholics, but I’m sure most of those men are there because they did just what you were doing today. They abused themselves until their minds were destroyed. I don’t want to scare you now. You’re young, you haven’t hurt yourself much, and the Lord will forgive you. I just want you to know what will happen if you keep on with this kind of filthiness. You understand, don’t you?”

  “Yes sir,” Joe Bob said.

  He understood, but he soon discovered he was just too weak to stop. He kept right on playing with himself, all through high school, in the face of certain insanity. His father hadn’t told him how long it took for a mind to be destroyed, but he never doubted that his would be, sooner or later.

  In the summer of his junior year, when he got the call to preach, he thought there still might be hope. If he preached, girls might like him, and if they did he might be able to overcome his vices and lead a normal life. The hope was very short-lived. The very night he preached his first sermon he succumbed to the vice again. Besides that, he found he did not really like to preach. He didn’t have anything to say, and he soon decided he must have heard a false call: he could always get the Lord off his mind, but the only way he could get girls off his mind was by jacking off. In San Francisco he had been with the boys who wandered into the bar where Gloria was, and the thought of Gloria haunted him for weeks. By the time he got back home he had decided to resign himself to eventual insanity, and he ceased to make any effort to curb his self-abuse. If the Lord spared him until he got through college that would be enough to ask.

  Job Bob might have got through the summer all right if it had not been for the scandal caused by Mr. Cecil’s dismissal. That set the town on its ear so that it made things hard for all sinners. The church ladies decided the time had come for some widespread soul-saving. If a homosexual was teaching English in high school, there was no telling what state of degeneracy the ordinary populace had fallen into. Ruth Popper herself was known to be sleeping with a high-school boy. They decided to have an All City Revival, and they didn’t waste any money bringing in a slick traveling evangelist who would have charged them three hundred dollars. There were six active preachers in the town, plus Joe Bob and a few old ones that were retired, so the ladies decided to put aside denominational differences and make do with the native preaching stock.

  Everybody but Joe Bob thought it was a fine idea. He didn’t because it meant he would have to preach two sermons.

  “Yes sir,” Brother Blanton told him. “We’ve all got to get out there and preach our hearts out if we’re going to get this town back on the right track.”

  Joe Bob agreed, but he was afraid he could preach his own heart completely out in just a minute or two. During the winter his ministerial flame had burned very low—he was not even confident that he himself was saved. He knew that he harbored hatred in his heart for about three-quarters of the boys of the town, and that was surely not a Christian attitude. He had no idea what he could say that might prompt anyone in the congregation to rededicate their life to Christ, and so far as he knew, getting people to rededicate their lives was the only point of a revival.

  He worried about it for two weeks, and it turned out his worries were fully justified. Joe Bob had to preach the last sermon in the first go-round of preachers, which meant that he had to preach on a Thursday night, the worst possible night to preach. The first wave of revival spirit had had time to ebb, and the second wave had not yet begun to gather. The revival was held in the local baseball park under the lights, and when Joe Bob got up to preach there was just a sprinkle of a crowd, old faithfuls from all the churches in town, people so habituated to churchgoing that they never missed a sermon, no matter how dull. Joe Bob was dressed in his black wool suit, the only suit his father would let him preach in. The night was sweltering. For days Joe Bob had racked his brain, trying to come up with a sermon, but the only moral advice he could think of was that people ought to read the Bible more. That was his theme, and he sweated and stammered away at it for twenty minutes.

  “When I say back to the Bible I don’t mean just a chapter here and there,” he tried. “I mean the full Gospel, the whole Bible, all of it! Ever bit!”

  He kept working that point over desperately, hoping somebody, at least one person, would come down and rededicate his life. Finally, to his great relief, the Pender family got down out of the stands and came. It was not much of a triumph, because the Pender family rededicated their lives regularly, several times a year, but it was better than nothing. The Penders lived in a cabin down on Onion Creek where they shot squirrels and farmed sweet potatoes. Every two or three months, when things got boring, they came to church and rededicated their lives, hoping thereby to move the community to charity. They were a generally scruffy lot—in fact old man Elmer Pender spat tobacco juice right on home plate as Joe Bob was calling for the closing hymn.

  Because of the Penders, the first sermon was not a total disgrace, but Joe Bob still had the second one to preach. That one was scheduled for a Saturday night, only one night before the revival was due to end. Hysteria would be at its height, and Joe Bob knew he would need something more potent than t
he Full Gospel to exhort on that night. On the next-to-last night of a revival it would be a black disgrace not to get twenty or thirty rededications.

  All week he brooded about the final sermon. He knew good and well there was no way he could get out of it, and as the week wore on the only way he could get it off his mind was by abusing himself. By Saturday morning he was in a serious state. He stayed in his room until noon and abused himself twice. Then he talked his father into letting him use the family Plymouth, on the grounds that he needed to go off and commune with nature in order to get inspiration for his sermon. Nature that day was about as hot as the place Joe Bob was supposed to be saving people from. He drove out to the lake and sat staring at the water for a couple of hours, thinking how much he didn’t want to preach that night. Finally he tired of staring at the bright sun-whitened water and drove into town to get a Coke. That move turned out to be his downfall.

  The facts of it almost passed belief. Nobody in Thalia would have supposed that Joe Bob could get in so much trouble in Thalia, Texas, right in the middle of a hot Saturday afternoon. Sonny heard about it almost as soon as the news got out. The sheriff happened to be in the poolhall shooting a quiet game of snooker when Monroe, his skinny deputy, came bursting in, white as a sheet.

  “Sheriff, Johnny Clarg’s little girl has kinda been kidnapped,” he said. “They seen the preacher’s boy putting her in his car about an hour and a half ago, in front of the drugstore.”

  “What the hell?” the sheriff said, taking aim at a red ball. “Maybe Joe Bob gave her a ride home—be doing her a favor, hot as it is. Why should Joe Bob want to kidnap Molly Clarg?”

  “Don’t ask me,” Monroe said. “She ain’t at home, though. Miz Clarg’s all upset—she’s done looked everywhere for ’em. They was seen drivin’ out of town toward Olney. Miz Clarg’s afraid Joe Bob might be goin’ to mo-lest her or something.”

  At that the sheriff quickly slapped his cue into a rack. He was getting beat anyway, and a sex crime called for immediate action.