Thalia

by Larry McMurtry

  To James and Curtis, Texas troubadours

  Contents

  Introduction

  HORSEMAN, PASS BY

  LEAVING CHEYENNE

  THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

  Introduction

  Life and art alike are filled with accidents. The big one in my career was the discovery, by chance, of William Butler Yeats, the great Irish poet, and his famous epigraph:

  Cast a cold eye

  On life, on death.

  Horseman, pass by!

  Had I not stumbled upon those words, I have often wondered whether I would have written Horseman, Pass By. It was, for me, the key that turned the starter to my journey as a writer. I went home to Archer City in 1958, the summer after I graduated from North Texas State University in Denton, Texas, to cowboy on my father’s ranch while I wrote the book.

  I had little previous experience in writing fiction, but I jumped right into Horseman. The novel grew out of a short story I had written in the only creative writing class I attended while at North Texas State, which was about the decline and death of a famous Panhandle cattleman. It was probably my first intimation of Charles Goodnight, the great Panhandle cattleman himself. My father’s own family produced nine cattlemen, who were sprinkled all over the Texas Panhandle. In all, I did five drafts, written at a five-pages-a-day pace. Once my fluency was established, I occasionally doubled that pace, but the five-pages-a-day is the one that has served me throughout most of my writing life. I finished Horseman about a week before I left Archer City for Houston, Texas, where I was about to enroll at Rice University as a graduate student in English.

  Looking back, I realize that completing Horseman, Pass By marked the end of my direct contact with the myth of the cowboy—or at least, the myth carried throughout their lives by the cowboys I knew. My father was one of those cowboys. I myself have carried that myth through more than forty books. I didn’t know where the completion of that first novel might lead, but I did know, once I finished it, that my life was to be spent with words.

  Leaving Cheyenne, written a few years after my first novel, is, in my estimation, a vast improvement over the occasionally pleasing lyricism of Horseman, Pass By. At the very least, I like to feel that in Leaving Cheyenne, I had matured as a writer. It tells the bittersweet story of a longtime love triangle among a rancher, his cowboy, and an appealing countrywoman who loves them both. It might be generous to call it my American version of Jules et Jim, Francois Truffaut’s lively masterpiece that tells the same story in French.

  The Last Picture Show, the third book contained in this Thalia trilogy and originally published in 1966, was written while I was teaching freshman English at Rice University in Houston. It was written in order to teach myself how to write fiction in the third person. I wrote it in the first person and then painstakingly translated it into third person. The Last Picture Show is mostly known by the brilliant movie (written mostly by me and Polly Platt) directed by Peter Bogdanovich. Polly, Peter’s wife at the time, had read the novel, loved it, and then pestered her husband to read it and consider adapting it into a film. She had multiple roles on the movie, including production design, makeup, and helping Peter find its brilliant cast. Polly and I remained close long after the film ended and up to her death in 2011.

  The novel takes place in a small town in 1950s Texas I called Thalia, much like the small town where I grew up, but that small town might live anywhere within the vastness of this great United States. The movie house in Archer City burned down in the 1950s, when the population was less than two thousand people—the same census number today. The closing of the picture show in a place already isolated from the outside world would undoubtedly intensify, both intellectually and emotionally, that sense of isolation.

  After World War II, much of America began an exodus from the small towns to the cities. And so the myth of the cowboy grew purer, because there were so few actual cowboys to dispel it. While writing these three novels, it was clear to me that I was witnessing the dying of a way of life, too—the rural, pastoral way of life. And in many of the books that I’ve produced, it has taken thousands of words to attend, as best I could, to the passing of the cowboy as well: the myth of my country, and of my people, too.

  —Larry McMurtry

  HORSEMAN, PASS BY

  HORSEMAN, PASS BY

  is dedicated to my parents,

  W. J. and Hazel Ruth McMurtry,

  with gratitude and love.

  Prologue

  LONNIE:

  I remember how green the early oat fields were, that year, and how the plains looked in April, after the mesquite leafed out. Spring had come dry for seven straight years, and Granddad and the other cattlemen in Dry Bean County had had to watch the bare spots widening in their pastures. But that year the month of March was a long slow drizzle, and when it ended, the bare spots shrunk again and new grass carpeted the flats. When I rode out with him on Saturdays, Granddad would sometimes get down from his horse, to show me how the grass was shooting its runners over the droughty ground; and he told me that nature would always work her own cures, if people would be patient enough, and give her time. After school on the weekdays, riding the long road home through the ranches in the old yellow school bus, I watched the range change. I watched the whole ranch country shake off its dust and come alive.

  At night, when the milking was done and the supper eaten, we sat on the east porch, in the late spring dusk, resting and talking about the day. On the warmest nights Grandma came out too, and rocked for a while in the cord-bottomed porch rocker, sometimes crocheting doilies to spread on the living room chairs. Even Hud might sit on the steps a few minutes, brushing his red suède boots before he left for town. But soon he would leave in his rag-topped Ford, and Grandma would get too cool and go back to her radio. Granddad and I sat on the porch alone, through the best hour—that last little while when he and I watched another day turning into night.

  Just before full dark, the bull bats came out from somewhere and swooped around the lilac bushes; and the horses clopped past the yard on their way to the dark grazing flats below the hill. A highway ran alongside the horse pasture, a mile to the east of our house, and from the porch we could watch the cars zoom across the plains—north to Amarillo or Raton, south to Dallas or Houston or Fort Worth. The big Diesel trucks growled through the thick prairie dusk. The railroad was just the other side of the highway, and about sundown the Katy freight chugged by, pulling its string of oil and cattle cars. During the shipping season the cars were full of calves, their bawling a lonesome sound at twilight. Sometimes the bawling stirred Granddad: reminded him of other times he had heard it, and of men he had heard it with. Then he might tell me stories of his days on the big ranches, or of cowboys like his dead foreman Jericho Green. I sat below him, flipping my pocketknife into the soft dirt of Grandma’s lilac beds, taking in every word he said.

  Granddad was an old man then, and he worked hard days. By eight or eight-fifteen he was tired of sitting up. Around that time the nightly Zephyr flew by, blowing its loud whistle to warn the station men in Thalia. The noise cut across the dark prairie like the whistling train itself. I could see the hundred lighted windows of the passenger cars, and I wondered where in the world the people behind them were going night after night. To me it was exciting to think about a train. But the Zephyr blowing by seemed to make Granddad tireder; it seemed to make him sad. He told me one time that it reminded him of nights on roundup, long years ago. On quiet nights he and the other cowboys would sit around the fires, telling stories or drawing brands in the dirt. Some nights they would camp close to a railroad track, and a train would go by and blow its whistle at the fires. Sometimes it scared the cattle, and sometimes it didn’t, but it always took the spirit out of the cowboys’ talk; made
them lonesomer than they could say. It made them think about womenfolk and fun and city lights till they could barely stand it. And long years after, when the last train would go by, Granddad got restless. He would stretch, and push his old rope-bottomed chair up against the house. “Train’s gone, son,” he said to me. “It’s bedtime.” Then he took his coffee-can spittoon over to the yard fence, stood there long enough to piss, and went into the house.

  With that Granddad’s day ended, and my night really began. I went to the windmill and let the faucet run till the coldest deep well water came gurgling up through the pipes. After I drank I sometimes went over and sat in the rope swing that hung from the biggest sycamore limb, to drag my feet in the sandy dirt and watch Granddad through his window as he got ready for bed. When he had his nightshirt on he usually came to stand awhile by the window screen, looking into the dark and scratching the scarred old leg that he had almost torn off in a roping accident. Then he would turn his back on the night, and go to bed.

  When I knew Granddad was in bed I went back to the windmill and stopped the blades, so I could climb up and sit on the platform beneath the big fin. Around me, across the dark prairie, the lights were clear. The oil derricks were lit with strings of yellow bulbs, like Christmas trees. The lights were still on in the kitchens of the pumpers’ cabins, the little green-topped shacks scattered across the plain, each one propped on a few stacks of bricks. Twelve miles away, to the north, the red and green and yellow lights of Thalia shimmered against the dark. I sat above it all, in the cool breezy air that swept under the windmill blades, hearing the rig motors purr and the heavy trucks growl up the hill. Above the chattering of the ignorant Rhode Island Reds I heard two whippoorwills, the ghostly birds I never saw, calling across the flats below the ridge.

  Sitting there with only the wind and the darkness around me, I thought of all the important things I had to think about: my honors, my worries, my ambitions. I thought of the wild nights ahead, when I would have my own car, and could tear across the country to dances and rodeos. I picked the boys I would run with, the girls we would romp; I kept happy thinking of all the reckless things that could happen in the next few years. Some nights it stormed out on the range, and I watched the little snake-tongues of lightning flicker against the clouds. When it was clear enough, I could see the airplane beacons flashing from the airport in Wichita Falls.

  Later, I climbed down and drank from the faucet before I went to bed. I tiptoed through the kitchen, across the patches of moonlight that sometimes lay on the cool linoleum, and climbed the stairs to my room under the roof. On nights when I was wide awake I lay on top of the covers and read a paperback until I got drowsy, or until I heard Hud coming back from town. I was always ready to sleep by the time he came in. In the summers I slept with my head toward the foot of the bed, so I could see the moon and the yard trees out the window. That way I got what breeze there was; and that way, too, I only had to raise up on one elbow in the mornings to watch the lots, and see Granddad and the cowboys catching their horses for the new day. I didn’t always sleep the hours a growing boy was supposed to, but the nights that spring were a field that I left well sown.

  One

  FOR DESSERT THAT NIGHT HALMEA MADE A BIG FREEZERFUL of peach ice cream, rich as Jersey milk and thick with hunks of sweet, locker-plant Albertas. It had for me the good, special flavor of something seasonal, something you have waited all winter to taste, like early roasting ears or garden tomatoes. I ate three big helpings and still couldn’t get enough. When the freezer was almost empty I went in to get the dasher, but Hud shoved me out of the way and took it himself. We dished the last peachy drops of cream and took our bowls out on the porch to scrape them dry.

  Granddad had taken his last helping of cream and gone out before us, and his empty blue saucer was sitting by his elbow when we came out. He sat on the bottom step of the porch, whittling on a cedar stick he had picked up that day. He whittled it down patiently, setting his knife in the reddish wood just so; and while I scraped my saucer I watched the thin slivers curl off the stick and drop between his legs. Eighty years old and more, Granddad was then, but the sandy hair on his head was still thick as ever, and his gray eyes were still steady and clear. He pulled the thin blade of the case knife in toward him, his mouth loosening as he worked. For a few minutes he went on smoothing the stick, and nothing was said. We all sat enjoying the quiet evening. Then Granddad looked up from his whittling and nodded toward the three empty bowls.

  “Why don’t you take them bowls in to Halmea?” he said to me. “She might want to get her dishes done.”

  “Then let the nigger bitch gather ’em up herself,” Hud said. He sat on the edge of the porch, picking his teeth with a sharpened matchstick. He had on his suède boots and a new pearl-buttoned shirt, but he didn’t seem to be in any hurry to leave for wherever he was going.

  “Let her work a little,” he said. “She sits on her butt all day.”

  “She ain’t the only one,” Granddad said, rubbing his fingers over the smooth length of stick. “It won’t hurt Lonnie to move once in a while. He’s young and supple.”

  “Young and simple,” Hud said, spitting. He smirked at me when he said it, a lock of his dark crow hair falling over his forehead.

  I got up and grabbed the three empty bowls and took them in with no argument. Hud was thirty-five to my seventeen, and my best bet was to pay him as little mind as possible. Everybody in the county, even Granddad, took a little of Hud’s sourness, and nobody felt quite big enough to do anything about it. Granddad kept him on partly because he was a stepson, I guess, and partly because, when Hud was interested and cared to be, he was as good as the best and more reckless than the wildest of the thousand wild-ass cowboys in the Texas cattle country.

  When I went in with the bowls, Halmea was sitting by the kitchen table reading True Romances. The supper dishes were piled on the washboard, and the ice-cream freezer still stood in the sink. Hud was right about Halmea sitting on her butt nine tenths of the time, but she could afford to. She was the only one of us who could keep Grandma in a halfway good humor.

  “You better get those dishes washed,” I said. “Granny’ll have kittens.”

  She looked up from the magazine, grinning her lazy, big-mouthed grin. “Few kittens jus’ what she need,” she said. “She worried so ’bout goin’ to de hos-pital, she ain’t gonna mind no dishes tonight. Get on an’ let me read.”

  I sat the saucers in the sink and went down the darkened hall to the bathroom. When I came out, Grandma was standing by her bedroom door, looking for someone to pester.

  “Lordy ain’t it hot tonight,” she said. “Help me out on the porch and I’ll sit awhile. My kidneys don’t give me a minute’s peace.”

  I took her arm and led her out to the rocking chair, but then I went back to the kitchen to keep from having to listen to her gripe. Halmea had laid her magazine down and was giving her toenails their daily coat from a bottle of nail polish she kept in the cabinet. Her big tansoled feet were bare, one of them propped on the churn stool so she could reach her toes. She looked up suddenly and caught me glancing at her where her floppy blue dress was lifted off one leg; she just gave me that slow grin of hers and went back to dipping the toenail brush. “Tend you own rat-killin’,” she said. I fiddled with the water pitcher a minute and decided I’d be just as well off listening to Grandma after all. Sometimes Halmea was too unconscious even to pester. I set the pitcher down and went back to the porch.

  Grandma was wadding her calico apron between her hands and rocking like sixty, talking a blue streak to keep time with her rocking. “I never had no kidney operation,” she said. “I hate to just lay there knocked out an’ not keep up with what they’re adoin’ to me. I ought to be the one to say.”

  Over to the east, I saw a pickup pull off the highway and start across the dirt road toward us. “Here comes Jesse,” I said. “I guess he got ’em unloaded.”

  He was a new hand, Jesse. Just a week before
he had stepped off a cattle truck and come walking up to the ranch house with nothing but a saddle and a paper sack full of clothes, looking for a job. Hud was against him from the minute he came through the gate, but Hud was against hiring anybody, and Granddad took Jesse on anyway. He was coming back from hauling a few dry cows to a new pasture; coming home to cold supper and no peach ice cream.

  “I swan,” Grandma said. “It’s a pity an old woman like me has got to be cut into afore she dies. But it ain’t aworryin’ you-all one bit. They could cut off my nose an’ nobody but me ’ud miss it. It’s awful when an old woman can’t get no sympathy from her own kinfolks.”

  “You’re gonna get your bills paid, though,” Hud said. “If I could accomplish that, they could have my nose.” He laughed lazily, without looking at Grandma, and she began to daub at her eyes with the apron. I walked over to the north edge of the porch and looked off toward Thalia. Around us, under the last daylight, the plains lay clear. To the east purple was spreading into the sky, but west of me the trail to the lots was a lane of dusty gold light. I saw three crows pass over the willow thicket behind the barn and go cawing off into the blaze of western sky.

  “Looks like the Lord would think it was trial enough, keeping me sixty-five years in this hell on earth,” Grandma went on. “But I ain’t the one to say.”

  “More than likely you ain’t,” Granddad said, looking up from his stick. “Scott, was you figurin’ on getting into town tonight?”

  “Thought I would,” Hud said. “I didn’t dress up to sit out here an’ listen to Ma bitch.”

  “Now, Huddie,” Granny said, changing her tune. “You just stay here tonight. There’s a storm warning out from ten o’clock on.”

  “Fine,” Hud said. “Maybe it’ll rain an’ green up this desert a little. If I sat around an’ waited for ever little piss cloud to turn into a tornado, I never would go nowhere.”