The Last Picture Show

by Larry McMurtry

  “What do you think about it all?” he asked Genevieve.

  “I don’t know about it all,” Genevieve said, “but the one thing that stands out nice and clear is that Lois’ little girl took you for a nice ride. Boys in this town don’t seem to have much sense when it comes to girls like her.”

  While they were talking all the football boys trooped into the café, laughing and cutting up. They were making a big thing of how sore and bruised they were—the first workout had been that afternoon. They played the jukebox and sat around talking about what a horse’s ass the coach was. Sonny felt left out and even more depressed. He had always been on the football team and had done the same things they were doing after workouts, but suddenly he wasn’t on the team and the boys didn’t even notice him, he might have been out of high school ten years.

  After a while he went over to the picture show and watched a funny movie with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. The movie took his mind off things, but afterward, when he was buying a bag of popcorn from Old Lady Mosey, he got another disappointment. She told him they were going to have to close the picture show sometime in October.

  “We just can’t make it, Sonny,” she said. “There wasn’t fifteen people here tonight, and a good picture like this, Jerry Lewis. It’s kid baseball in the summer and school in the winter. Television all the time. Nobody wants to come to shows no more.”

  Sonny said he would be sorry to see the place go, and it was true. He went outside and sat on the curb, waiting for Billy to get through sweeping out. Since Sam’s death Billy had grown nervous and restless, and was only really happy when he was with Sonny. If Sonny wasn’t there to meet him after the show, he would go sweeping off somewhere and be lost half the night, so Sonny had got in the habit of being there. He and Billy would go walking together, Billy carrying his broom and occasionally sweeping at a leaf or a paper cup someone had thrown out. Sometimes they walked as far as the lake. Sonny would sit and watch the water while Billy swept the dam.

  Once a week Sonny went to Wichita to have the doctor look at his eye, but the doctor seldom told him anything new. “Looks like sometime this fall I’ll have to send you to Dallas. Better be saving your money. If the doctor down there decides to operate it’ll cost you plenty.”

  So far as Sonny was concerned the Wichita doctor was costing plenty himself, but for once money was not too big a worry. His pumping job paid him enough to live on and he was able to put what the poolhall brought in in the bank. The pumping job was a lonely kind of job, but that was okay: he was not in the mood for people anyway. He spent his mornings bumping over the country roads in the pickup, going from one lease to the next, checking the rod lines, greasing the pumps and motors. Often he took Billy with him—Billy loved to go. When dove season came around Sonny bought a shotgun, an old L. C. Smith .12 gauge singleshot; occasionally, to Billy’s surprise, he would take a shot at a dove or a jackrabbit, but he seldom hit anything.

  He thought about Ruth a good deal, always painfully. After football season started he thought about her even more—Coach Popper’s name was on every tongue. It looked like Thalia was finally going to win the district, and opinion was divided as to whether the team owed its success to the coach’s coaching or to Bobby Logan’s quarterbacking. Sonny felt strangely reluctant to go to the games, and stayed home from the first three or four. He felt a little guilty about not going, but somehow he just didn’t want to.

  Finally, in early October, the game with Chillicothe came up and Sonny broke down and went. It was a game that seemed likely to decide the conference crown—custom demanded that every male in Thalia go. At first Sonny enjoyed himself, and regretted having missed so many games. The night was cool and clear and the grass on the football field looked greener and softer than it ever had when he played. The assistant coach asked him and Jerry Framingham to run the first-down chain, and they accepted. When the band played the Thalia school song it was a little thrilling: it touched something in Sonny and made him feel as though he was part of it again, the high school, football, the really important part of life in the town.

  It would have been better if he had never felt that way, because as soon as the game started he realized he was not part of it at all. Bobby Logan was part of it, and Coach Popper was very much part of it. He strode up and down the sidelines, scowling fiercely at the referees—everyone knew the coach was there. Even the linesmen were part of it, even the freshmen and sophomores on the bench—at least they were suited out. But Sonny wasn’t part of it, and neither was Jerry, who had been out of school so long that he was used to not being part of it. Sonny couldn’t get used to it. He kept wishing he was out on the field playing. Running the chain, measuring first downs, that was nothing: he might have been invisible to everyone but the referees. He was an ex-student—nothing. A feeling came over him sort of like the feelings he used to get in the mornings, only the new feeling was worse. Then he had felt like he was the only one in town, but standing on the sidelines, holding the chain, he felt like he wasn’t even in town—he felt like he wasn’t anywhere.

  As the game went on the feeling became worse, even though Thalia was winning. Bobby Logan was quarterbacking beautifully: he got Thalia a seven point lead and they still had it when the fourth quarter began to run out. The whole town began to believe that Thalia had won the conference, and Sonny began to believe that he was not there. The people in the stands were wild, their eyes glazed, they saw nothing but the boys on the field. When the game was over and Thalia had won, it was chaos. The cheerleaders, the band, and a mob of high-school girls rushed out of the end zone to greet the dirty, victorious heroes. The girls hugged the boys and clung to them as they walked off the field. The Quarterback Club, the local gamblers, farmers, lawyers, well-wishers of all sorts crowded around Coach Popper to congratulate him, strewing the green, cleat-torn grass with cigar butts and chewing-gum paper.

  Jerry Framingham was as excited as the rest of them: he was going off with some of his truck-driving buddies to get drunk, so Sonny was left to carry the chain back to the football bus. The boys were all crowded around the bus, hugging and kissing the girls who met them on the field. Sonny put the chain with the rest of the equipment and walked back through the crowd to his pickup, feeling like he had been completely erased. People he had known all his life were all around him, but they simply didn’t see him. He was out of school.

  Back at the poolhall, Billy was gone, sweeping somewhere, probably, and the poolhall was dark and empty. Sonny began to cry. Every minute or two he would think how silly it was and would stop for a little while, but he couldn’t stop completely. He was out and could never get back in. He would have got drunk but there was no liquor. The only person who could have made him feel real was Ruth, and he couldn’t go to her. Or Lois, but he couldn’t go to her either. Or Sam the Lion, but he was dead. Finally he went to hunt for Billy and found him down by the jail. Billy, it turned out, was able to bring Sonny back. They started walking together and Sonny felt okay again. He had started talking to Billy almost as he would have talked to Duane, sometimes even more freely than he would have talked to Duane, and though Billy never answered he was always friendly. Feeling like he wasn’t there had made Sonny think about Ruth, and when he really thought about her he felt ashamed of himself. He realized that for years she must have felt like she wasn’t there; he was probably the only person who had ever made her feel she was there, and he had quit her without a word and left her to feel the old way again. It would have been a bad way to behave even if it had got him Jacy, but it hadn’t, and it had probably left Ruth feeling hopeless. He had just begun to realize how hard it was to get from day to day if one felt hopeless.

  As they walked, Sonny took off his eye patch and let Billy wear it. They walked north from the jail, past the Masonic lodge and the Jehovah’s Witness church. To the south, back toward the drive-in, they could hear horns honking as people celebrated Thalia’s victory. Once in a while a dog barked at them as they walked by, but most of
the dogs in Thalia knew Sonny and Billy and didn’t give them any trouble. They circled past the cemetery and Sonny waited in the road while Billy swept the cattleguard. They didn’t often pass the cemetery, because Billy knew that Sam the Lion was there somewhere and he was always reluctant to leave. For once Sonny did not particularly mind. Billy swept the cattleguard and got it very clean—from the pastures to the north they heard the moan of a coyote and when Billy was satisfied they walked on, past the rodeo pens and back to the dark poolhall.

  CHAPTER XXV

  A WEEK BEFORE the picture show closed down Duane came home from boot camp. He drove in on Sunday morning and word soon got around that he was leaving for Korea in a week’s time. Sonny learned that he was home Sunday night, when he and Billy were having a cheeseburger in the café.

  “Wonder where he is?” he asked. “He hasn’t been to the poolhall.”

  “I kinda doubt he’ll come,” Genevieve said, frowning. “His conscience is hurting him too much about your eye. I think he’s gonna stay at the rooming house this week.”

  “Well, maybe he’ll come in,” Sonny said. “There ain’t much to do in this town. I couldn’t live in it a week without going to the poolhall, I know that.”

  “I think it’s all silly,” Genevieve said. “Why don’t you go see him? Be a shame if he goes to Korea without you all seein’ one another.”

  Sonny thought so too, but he was nervous about going to see Duane. He kept hoping Duane would show up at the poolhall and save him having to make a decision; but Duane didn’t. So far as anyone knew, he spent the whole week watching television at his mother’s house. A couple of boys saw him out washing his Mercury one afternoon, but he never came to town.

  As the week went by, Sonny got more and more nervous. Several times he was on the verge of picking up the phone and calling—once he did pick it up, but his nerve failed him and he put it back down. If Duane didn’t want to be bothered there was no point in bothering.

  Friday night there was a football game in Henrietta, but Sonny didn’t go. He heard the next morning that Duane had been there drunk. All day he considered the problem and finally decided that he would go see Duane at the rooming house and let the chips fall where they may—it couldn’t hurt much to try. If Duane didn’t want to see him all he had to do was say so.

  About five-thirty, as it was beginning to grow dark, Sonny got in the pickup and drove to the rooming house. Duane’s red Mercury was parked out front. A norther had struck that afternoon and sheets of cold air rushed through the town, shaking the leafless mesquite and rattling the dry stems of Old Lady Malone’s flowers. Sonny rang the doorbell and then stuffed his hands in his pockets to keep them warm.

  “H’lo, Mrs. Malone,” he said, when the old lady opened the inside door. The screen door was latched, as always. “Duane here?”

  “That’s his car, ain’t it?” she said, edging behind the door so the wind wouldn’t hit anything but her nose and her forehead. “He’s here if he ain’t walked off.”

  She shut the door and went to get Duane. Sonny shuffled nervously on the porch. In a minute, Duane opened the door and stepped outside.

  “Hi,” Sonny said, finding it hard to get his breath because of the wind. “Thought I’d better come by and see you before you got off.”

  “Glad you did,” Duane said. He was nervous, but he did look sort of glad. He was wearing Levi’s and a western shirt.

  “Want to go eat a bite?” Sonny suggested.

  “Yeah, let me get my jacket.”

  He got his football jacket, the one from the year when the two of them had been cocaptains, they got in the warm pickup, and drove to the café. Conversation was slow in coming until Sonny thought to ask about the army, but then Duane loosened up and told one army story after another while they ate their hamburger steaks. It was pretty much like old times. Penny waited on them—she had had twin girls during the winter, put on twenty-five pounds, and was experimenting that night with purple lipstick. Old Marston had died in February of pneumonia—he had gone to sleep in a bar ditch in the wrong season. Genevieve had hired a friendly young widow woman to do the cooking.

  “Guess we ought to take in the picture show,” Sonny said. “Tonight’s the last night.”

  “A good thing, too,” Penny said, overhearing him. “Picture shows been gettin’ more sinful all the time, if you ask me. Them movie stars lettin’ their titties hang out—I never seen the like. The last time I went I told my old man he could just take me home, I wasn’t sittin’ still for that kind of goings on.”

  “Yeah, we might as well go,” Duane said, ignoring her. “Hate to miss the last night.”

  They went to the poolhall and Sonny got his football jacket too. Then they angled across the square to the picture show and bought their tickets. A few grade-school kids were going in. The picture was an Audie Murphy movie called The Kid from Texas, with Gale Storm.

  “Why hello, Duane,” Miss Mosey said. “I thought you was done overseas. Hope you all like the show.”

  The boys planned to, but somehow the occasion just didn’t work out. Audie Murphy was a scrapper as usual, but it didn’t help. It would have taken Winchester ’73 or Red River or some big movie like that to have crowded out the memories the boys kept having. They had been at the picture show so often with Jacy that it was hard to keep from thinking of her, lithely stretching herself in the back row after an hour of kissing and cuddling. Such thoughts were dangerous to both of them.

  “Hell, this here’s a dog,” Duane said.

  Sonny agreed. “Why don’t we run down to Fort Worth, drink a little beer?” he asked.

  “My bus leaves at six-thirty in the mornin’,” Duane said. “Reckon we could make it to Forth Worth and back by six-thirty?”

  “Easy.”

  Miss Mosey was distressed to see them leaving so soon. She tried to give them their money back, but they wouldn’t take it. She was scraping out the popcorn machine, almost in tears. “If Sam had lived, I believe we could have kept it goin’,” she said, “but me and Jimmy just didn’t have the know-how. Duane, you watch out now, overseas.” Outside the wind was so cold it made their eyes water.

  Sonny insisted they go in the pickup. He knew Duane would go to sleep on the way back and he didn’t want the responsibility of driving the Mercury. The wind shoved the pickup all over the road, but the road was still a lot better for their spirits than the picture show had been. Rattling out of Thalia reminded them a little of the time—it seemed years before—when they had gone to Matamoros. As soon as they reached a wet county they stopped and bought two six-packs of beer. The cans spewed when they were opened and the smell of beer filled the cab.

  By the time they crossed the Lake Worth bridge they had gone through a six-pack and a half and were feeling okay. Soon they came to the Jacksboro highway bars and Sonny pulled off at a place called the Red Dot Tavern. Inside, a lot of tough-looking boys with ducktails were playing shuffleboard, and a couple of women with dyed hair were sitting at the bar with their middle-aged sweethearts. The ducktails looked at the boys belligerently, but no direct challenges were offered.

  “All we can do here is get drunk and get whipped,” Duane said. “Let’s see what the prospects are on South Main.”

  They drove slowly around the courthouse—the only courthouse they knew that had a neon American flag on top—and parked far down Main Street, where the bars were. The wind whipped around the big granite courthouse and cut right down the street, as cold as it had been in Thalia. The boys went in a hash house and had some chili and crackers to fortify themselves, then let the wind blow them down the street to a bar called the Cozy Inn, where a three-piece hillbilly band was whomping away. One middle-aged couple was dancing, and a few more were sitting in the booths or at the bar. The barmaid, a friendly old woman in her mid-fifties, wiped off their table with the end of her apron and then brought them some beer.

  “Where you boys from?” she asked. “Thalia? Ain’t it windy up there? I w
ouldn’t live that close to the plains for nothin’. My oldest sister lives out in Floydada.”

  In a few minutes the band ended its set and the three young musicians straggled off to the rest room to relieve themselves.

  “Maggie, you sing us a couple,” one of the older customers said.

  The barmaid didn’t much want to, but the other couples took up the cry and finally she went over and picked up a guitar, shaking her head and deprecating herself.

  “I ain’t much of a singer,” she said, but she strummed a minute or two and sang “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” Everyone thought she was real good, the boys included. Her voice was rough but strong—it filled the Cozy Inn better than the three sideburned young honky-tonkers had. She sang like she meant every word; it was not hard to believe that she had run afoul of a cheating heart or two somewhere in her life. After that she sang “Making Believe,” and would have put the guitar down and gone back to the bar if Duane hadn’t gone up and stopped her. He liked her singing.

  “I’m goin’ off to Korea tomorrow, ain’t no tellin’ when I’ll get to Fort Worth agin,” he said. “Sing one more.”

  “Why sure, if that’s the case,” the woman said. “Both my boys was in the service. I was right proud of ’em.”

  “These is for the soldier boys,” she announced, not wanting the rest of the crowd to think she was singing out of vanity. She sang “Filipino Baby” and everyone applauded loudly; encouraged, she finished with “Peace In The Valley” and went back to the bar to draw someone a Pearl. Sonny felt suddenly depressed. The old barmaid had reminded him that he wasn’t in the army. It seemed a fine thing to be going off to Korea and Sonny wished very badly that he could go. When the band came back the boys left and stood on the cold street a minute, both slightly wobbly from the beer.