Thalia

by Larry McMurtry

  I could tell there wasn’t much show left, because the musicians were already over on the concrete slab, tuning their fiddles and guitars. The people who didn’t like rodeo and just came to dance were filing out of the grandstand and heading for the slab. I went on inside, anyway. The cutting horses were in the arena working, and our colt wasn’t with them. I stood by the fence and watched. While I was standing there a kid named Pin came up to me; he was wearing a big black Stetson, and he had a can of beer in one hand. He looked like the rodeo, about nine tenths done.

  “Hey, cowboy,” he said. “Did you see Hermy?”

  “Not tonight,” I said. “I just got here. I been helping Andrews fix his car.”

  “Oh, goddamn, you shoulda been here,” he said, belching. “A bull stepped on Hermy. God, he was hollerin’ and cussin’.”

  “No shit?” I said. “Did he get hurt bad?”

  Pin nodded and tried to look solemn, but he was enjoying having a story to tell. “The bull stepped right in his stomach,” he said. “He wasn’t out, though, he was yellin’ his fuckin’ head off. They say he was broke all to pieces inside. Shit, you ain’t gonna see me on one a them bastards.” He left, tossing his beer can on the ground with a thousand others. I noticed he had a canvas contestant’s sticker pinned to the back of his shirt.

  YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE, the announcer said. WILL JESSE LOGAN REPORT TO THE ARENA AT ONCE. LAST CALL FOR JESSE LOGAN. WILL YOU PLEASE BRING YOUR HORSE TO THE CUTTING ARENA AT ONCE. IF NOT, YOU WILL BE SCRATCHED. YOUR ENTRY WILL BE SCRATCHED. LAST CALL FOR MR. LOGAN.

  I ran around behind the chutes, wondering where in the world Jesse was. Surely he hadn’t gone off without making the final performance. Then I found the colt, saddled and ready, tied to the fence. But no Jesse anywhere. I was almost ready to ride the colt myself, when I heard the announcer scratch the horse. I left him tied and walked on around the arena, figuring Jesse might have got in a fight or got kicked or something. Somebody yelled at me and I saw Hud and his new woman coming out of the grandstand. He was leading her along by the arm.

  “Well, now where’s your fine feathered friend tonight?” he said.

  “I wish I knew,” I said. “Granddad fired him this morning, he may be gone. The colt’s back there tied.”

  “Homer fired him? The hell he did.” He pulled Lily to him and snickered something in her ear. She smiled at what he said. Hud was wild and messed-up-looking, like he hadn’t changed clothes since the card game, his shirttail out of his pants; but Lily was wearing a gold and white dress, and her long honey-and-butter hair curled like a colt’s tail down her back. She looked even prettier than she had in the Cadillac.

  “Well, the sonofabitch just wasted an entry fee,” Hud said. “Tell him he better not forget he’s fired. If I run into him I may take that entry money out in skin.”

  “Carry me back to the car, honey,” the woman said. “I can’t wade through this cowshit.” Hud picked her up like she was a doll, and she put her face against his neck.

  LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, the announcer said, THIS CONCLUDES OUR SHOW FOR TONIGHT. LET ME REMIND YOU ABOUT THE BIG DANCE OVER THERE ON THE SLAB, STARTING RIGHT NOW. FREDDY HILL AND HIS POST OAK VALLEY BOYS WILL BE THERE FURNISHING THE MUSIC, FROM NOW TILL ONE O’CLOCK. ADMISSION IS JUST FIFTY CENTS A HEAD, SO YOU FELLERS GRAB YOUR FILLIES AND GET ON OVER THERE. THANK YOU, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, AND WE HOPE TO SEE YOU ALL BACK WITH US NEXT YEAR. OH, EXCUSE ME, he said. WILL YOU KEEP YOUR SEATS JUST A MINUTE? I HAVE SOME NEWS THAT you-all WILL BE ANXIOUS TO HEAR, THE YOUNG MAN WHO WAS INJURED TONIGHT IN THE bull-riding CONTEST IS NOW BEING TAKEN BY AMBULANCE TO THE HOSPITAL IN WICHITA FALLS. THEY WERE UNABLE TO TREAT HIM SATISFACTORILY HERE. I KNOW YOU’RE ALL HOPING AND PRAYING THAT THE YOUNG MAN IS ALL RIGHT, AND WE SURE ARE TOO. IF ANY MORE NEWS REACHES US WE’LL GIVE IT TO YOU AT THE DANCE. THANK YOU, AND GOOD NIGHT.

  It made me feel weak in the stomach to know that Hermy was bad hurt. Right then, they were racing him across the dark highway in an ambulance. The next morning I would get loose and go visit him, but first I had to find Jesse.

  The dance slab was filling up fast. Over the voices and the shuffling, I could hear the band playing “Your Cheating Heart,” and the boot soles scraped the concrete in time to it. I passed by a fist fight and stopped a minute to watch. “You’re a hot-check-writing bastard,” one of the boys said, and they slugged away. I went on. Fist fights would be easy to find. I pushed my way onto the dance floor, and it felt like the whole ranch country was in on it with me. The old men bunched together near the corners, and the little kids, boys and girls both, were out on the dance floor whooping and running. I saw one little boy sound asleep on a bench, with a couple courting right beside him. The rodeo contestants and their girl friends made up a good part of the crowd. Now that the show was over the boys were drunk and excited, hoping the nooky was going to come after the dance, and they really lived it up. The grown-ups two-stepped and single-footed right along to the rock and roll numbers that the band had to play. Now and then there would be a polka or a square dance especially for the old folks. But it wouldn’t be long before the old ones would trickle out, and the musicians wouldn’t have anyone but the kids to please. Then the dance songs would last longer and go faster. “Hit it there, Leroy,” the bandleader said.

  I eased my way through the crowd, looking for Jesse among the sorrowful stag cowboys on the sides. I went around twice without finding him, but I knew he would have been easy enough to miss. Then I ran into a girl I knew, and we danced awhile. She was so looped she barely knew me, but it didn’t matter. The cowboy vocalist laid down his fiddle and came to the mike to sing. He sang a new song, one I had only heard a time or two before. It was called “Fräulein.”

  Far across the distant waters

  Lived an old German’s daughter,

  On the banks of the old River Rhine . . .

  I locked my hands and dropped them on the girl’s butt, and swayed along with the music and forgot Jesse for a minute. The people were quieting down a little, and the singer was crying into the mike about the girl him and all the other soldier boys had left alone across the waters. “That’s too slow,” Charlene said, looking up at me. “I want somethin’ fast, make a little whoopee, don’t you?” But she got quiet again. The mournfulness of the song was getting to me, but before I had really caught it bad they switched to a polka and I led Charlene to the side. While we were watching the old folks jig around, a tired-looking cowboy waltzed up to us with a blonde. “Here, you can have this one,” he said, holding out the girl’s arm. “I don’t want her no more; I’ll take yours.” I told him he was welcome to all I had, and walked away. They were all too drunk to know what became of me.

  Since I wasn’t finding anybody in the dance, I went outside and walked through the parking lot awhile. The pickup wasn’t very far from the dance floor, and I went to it. There was a wagon sheet in the back. I got in and unrolled part of it and stretched out on my back. I thought maybe Jesse might come by, and waiting would be the quickest way to find him. The band was playing one of those songs of Hank Williams’, the one about the wild side of life, and the music floated over the car tops and touched me. I felt lost from everybody, and from myself included, laying on a wagon sheet in a pastureland of cars. Only the tune of the song reached me, but the tune was enough. It fit the night and the country and the way I was feeling, and fit them better than anything I knew. What few stories the dancing people had to tell were already told in the worn-out words of songs like that one, and their kind of living, the few things they knew and lived to a fare-thee-well were in the sad high tune. City people probably wouldn’t believe there were folks simple enough to live their lives out on sentiments like those—but they didn’t know. Laying there, thinking of all the things the song brought up in me, I got more peaceful. The words I knew of it, about the wild side of life, reminded me of Hud and Lily, but more than that, the whole song reminded me of Hermy and Buddy and the other boys I knew. All of them wanted more and seemed t
o end up with less; they wanted excitement and ended up stomped by a bull or smashed against a highway; or they wanted a girl to court; and anyway, whatever it was they wanted, that was what they ended up doing without. That song ended, and another one began, and it ended, and then I got up and went back into the dark arena to untie the colt and take him to his pen. I thought maybe I would come back to the dance and honky-tonk a little myself.

  3.

  Before I got near the horse, I heard Jesse talking. He was sitting spraddle-legged against the fence, talking to the horse. There were three or four empty beer cans scattered around his feet.

  “Everbody’s gone home but me,” he said. “If anybody’s left it’s always me.”

  When I squatted down beside him he didn’t seem a bit surprised.

  “Hello,” he said. “I had her, but she got away.”

  “Who got away?” I said. I had a pretty good idea.

  “That pretty little woman,” he said. “We were in somebody’s car, just talking, and I took a little nap, dozed off a few minutes. I woke up an’ she wasn’t there.” He sighed, and started to get up. “But I been left many a time,” he said. “I didn’t wake up in time to ride the colt, either. I just fucked up.”

  “It don’t make too much difference,” I said.

  “Makes a little,” he said. I saw that he wasn’t really drunk, he was just trying to be, or wishing he was. “Oh, the colt wouldn’t a won,” he said. “But it woulda made a little difference to me. Reason I came up here in the first place, I got drunk an’ fell off a cuttin’ horse. In the San Antone show. Ladybug went one way and Jesse went the other.”

  “Hell, so what,” I said. He was feeling real sorry for himself about something. “Falling off a horse ain’t much of a crime,” I said.

  “No,” he said. He was fiddling with the colt’s reins. “Fallin’ off wasn’t no crime. It wasn’t even a disgrace. My boss didn’t think so either. He give me three hundred dollars and told me to haul Ladybug home. But you know,” he said. “I never done it. I got to thinking about it and got drunk agin, and went up the road about sixty miles an’ turned the trailer over an’ broke that little mare’s neck. That was the crime of it. Third best cuttin’ horse in the nation, an’ she was just a five-year-old. Let’s go to the dance,” he said. “I want to watch them pretty girls whirl.”

  I told him I’d meet him there. I got on the colt and took him to the pen and unsaddled him. The dance wasn’t but a half a mile away, and I walked back through the cool quiet streets. I could hear the music plain as a radio, and I wasn’t all hemmed-up in the crowd. When I got back, Jesse was leaning on the wire fence, looking in.

  “Let’s stay till the music stops,” he said. “This here fascinates me.”

  The music was slower by that time, with just a couple of dozen couples pushing themselves around the dance floor. It was after one o’clock, and the bandleader was ready to quit. Some of the cowboys weren’t tired, and they wouldn’t let the bandleader stop. Jesse stood there nearly thirty minutes, nodding his head to the slow music. I sat on the fender of somebody’s car. After they had played “Good Night, Ladies” three times the cowboys gave up and everybody straggled out.

  “We might go get a bite to eat,” Jesse said. “I ain’t goin’ back out to you-all’s place. Found a trucker, an old boy I used to rodeo with. He said he’d give me a ride to New Mexico early in the mornin’ if I’m here. Guess I better sleep in the truck, so I won’t miss it.”

  We went to the pickup, and I drove. Jesse leaned against the door with his head on his arm as we followed the slow line of cars back through town. He looked awful low and sad, and I couldn’t think of anything that would cheer him up. I hated to see him just go off down the road, with nothing to take with him and nowhere to go. In a minute I heard him singing the verse to the soldier song:

  Far across th’ dis-tant waters

  Lived an ol’ German’s daughter,

  On th’ banks of th’ ol’ Rivah Rhiiinnne . . .

  “Ain’t that tune pretty?” he said. He looked out of the pickup window at the dark houses. We were on the edge of town, then, and could see the yellow lights of a big oil derrick, standing on the prairie miles away.

  “Fräulein, fräulein, look down from your window an’ be mine,” he sang. “That the way it goes?” He sighed and slumped back in the seat. “I never will forget that tune,” he said.

  I pulled in at Bill’s, and we followed a group of cowboys inside. When the last performance of the rodeo was over, the people all left for another town, so the café was almost empty, just a few tired rodeo hands eating a late meal before starting their long drives home. We took our pick of the booths. I ordered coffee and cherry pie, and Jesse just ordered coffee. He went on talking.

  “I knew this mornin’ I was gonna do all this,” he said. He looked up and smiled when the ugly, waddle-assed waitress set the coffee in front of him. “I guess I done had it planned,” he went on. “Because I don’t intend to ride in another arena agin. Only reason I go to rodeos is to chase after the prettiest tail I can find, and I know beforehand I ain’t gonna catch that.” I ate my pie slowly, not looking at him very often. He looked terrible, sick and worn out, dark scraggly whiskers on his cheeks. He kept nibbling at the tag of his Bull Durham sack.

  “Ain’t no fräulein ever looked down on me,” he said. “Not unless it was to ask for money. Some fellers just belong in whorehouses, I don’t know why.”

  “I halfway wish I was going someplace,” I said. “I ain’t doin’ any good around here.”

  “You just think you ain’t,” he said. “You better stay till your Granddad gets back on his feet a little. That’s a lot a good you can do. After he kinda gets over this it might not hurt you to see the world some.”

  “I don’t know how long that will be,” I said. “May not ever be. Granddad sure looks worn out.” Somebody had put money in the jukebox. It was Ernest Tubb, singing “Rainbow at Midnight.” His deep voice carried over what little talk there was in the café. The waitress was going around mopping off the dirty yellow tabletop with a dripping rag.

  “You probably ain’t got any money to leave on, anyway,” Jess said.

  “Two hundred dollars calf money,” I said. “That’d last me awhile.”

  “Yeah,” he said, setting his coffee cup down. “About a week. But you’re the boss.” He rubbed his fingers into the corners of his eyes. “It don’t hurt to take a little look around,” he said. “Just don’t turn into an old loose horse like me. You’re better off to stop somewhere even if it ain’t no paradise. I could have myself, many a time. I had the chances any man has.” He wiped his lips with his napkin, and dropped the napkin in his coffee cup. “I guess I was too particular, for too long, what’s wrong with me. I went all over this cow country looking for the exact right place an’ the exact right people, so once. I got stopped I wouldn’t have to be movin’ agin, like my old man always done. But that’s going at it wrong. I shoulda just set down an’ made it right wherever the hell it was.

  “I ain’t agoin’ to now,” he said, and he blew smoke out of his mouth with a weary breath.

  “Granddad made something good,” I said. “Look at him. It didn’t stay made.”

  “Look at him,” Jesse said, his voice sharp. “He lost something all right, but by god he’s still got something too. I know a lot a people in worse situations than your granddad’s in.”

  “Well, I guess he did make something he could keep,” I said.

  “I’d say so,” Jesse said. “I’d say your granddad made it.” His hands were clasped together on the table, and he looked shivery and shaky, like he’d just fallen in a cold winter river and pulled out to a place with no fire.

  “Some folks do,” he said.

  Thirteen

  JESSE HAD QUIT TALKING, AND WE SAT LISTENING TO THE jukebox. It was Wayne Rainey, singing

  Why don’t you haul off

  And love me, like you

  Used to do . . .
<
br />   Why do you treat me like a worn-out shoe, and on like that. My pie was eaten, except for a few crumbs, and I pushed them around with the red prongs of my fork. Finally Jesse got up. “Let’s go,” he said. “If you can run me back to the pens I’ll find that truck and catch me a little nap.”

  He paid the ticket, and we went out. There were only five or six cars in the parking lot—one of them had its back doors open and a cowboy’s legs stuck out one side. There were two or three beer cans under his heels. I drove Jesse back to the pens. The lights were out and the whole area was dark, but there were still a few cowboys around, sleeping in cars, or on blankets and sleeping bags spread behind the chutes. We found the truck, and I helped Jesse girt his saddle to the sideboards. He stood on the high running board, looking down at me.

  “Well, I guess I better try an’ snooze awhile,” he said. “Much obliged for the ride an’ all.”

  “Oh, you bet,” I said. “You’re welcome.”

  “Tell your grandpa I enjoyed working for him what little I did,” he said. “I imagine I’ll be running into you somewhere, one a these days.”

  “I hope you get a good job,” I said.

  “Oh, I guess I’ll get by,” he said. “It’s hard times and dusty roads.”

  He said to be careful, and I said so long, Jesse. That’s the last I’ll ever see of him, I thought. I drove back through Thalia, under the fluttery rodeo flags that would have to come down for another year. The highway to the ranch was deserted, and all I could get on the radio was gospel singing and commercials from the station in Del Rio. I felt like I was losing people every day. If there had been anyplace open in Thalia besides Bill’s, I would have gone back. A coyote ran across the road in front of me, yellow in the headlights, his eyes shining like marbles. I slammed on my brakes and grabbed for the thirty-thirty, but he had already scooted under the fence and disappeared.