“Well, I swear,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say.
But she grinned, and squeezed my hand. “That’s the first time I’ve ever seen you embarrassed,” she said. “I’ve had to wait sixty-two years.”
“Well, it ain’t because of that.” I said. You’ve caused that many a time. You’ve stayed too pretty. It’s because of Gid I’m embarrassed.”
“I don’t want you to be,” she said. “That’s nature, she ain’t no respecter. I don’t want you to be embarrassed even if we’re a hundred years old.” Then she grinned a sad grin; for a minute she reminded me of herself when she was twenty years old. “And you better not waste it, either,” she said.
“You’re an unusual woman,” I said, rubbing her side. “Only it ain’t much to waste. If old Gid can’t, then by god I won’t neither, how’s that?”
“About as foolish as something he’d say,” she said. “Only thank god you won’t stick to it like he did.” And she rolled over and hugged me and cried for an hour, at least. I had to get up and hunt a box of Kleenex.
Nine
A WEEK AFTER THE FUNERAL I STOPPED BY MOLLY’S house; she never heard the car come up. She was out in the garden, and I walked around the house and stood by the gate a minute, watching her. The garden was just about gone. When I walked out she was down on her knees, pulling onions and putting them in her apron.
“You’re getting a little deaf,” I said. “A person could sneak up on you.”
She grinned, happy and jolly as could be. “Hold these onions for me,” she said.
“Let’s go sit in the kitchen, where it’s cool and there’s something to eat,” I said.
But she took me to the porch, instead. “You can eat here, what there is,” she said. “Cold potato pie is all there is, and you don’t like it. I didn’t figure you’d come tonight.”
“I just like two kinds of pie,” I said. “Hot and cold. Go get me some.”
We ate a little pie and rocked awhile and she brought out some coffee.
“Well, I’m all packed,” I said. “I guess I’ll move tomorrow.” They had fired me, of course—I was going back to the old McCloud place, three mile off. It wasn’t a very long move.
“They didn’t allow you much time,” she said.
“Aw yeah,” I said. “They said no hurry. But it don’t take much time to move what little I got.”
We talked a little while, about Gid and the will and one thing and another. Gid had left me the old pickup and a thousand acres of land—he couldn’t stand for me not to increase my holdings by at least that much. So I was set pretty for my old age—I done had two sections I inherited from Dad. That thousand acres sure burned Mabel and Willy; they thought the pickup would have been enough. He just left Molly his dad’s old pocket watch. I guess he knew Mabel would have gone to court if he had left her anything more. Molly was plenty satisfied.
After a while the new moon came up, about the size of a basketball, and the conversation petered out. I could see Molly’s face, and she looked tired. I was too. I gave her my pieplate to take in the house, and when she came back we walked around to the pickup together. The moon was so bright we could see the chickens roosting on the chickenhouse.
I had something big on my mind and I didn’t know how to get it up. It just seemed like I better ask Molly to marry me, for the sake of all our old times, but I didn’t know whether she’d much want to, and I didn’t even know if I much wanted to, we got along so well like we were. Finally I came out with it; I was standing with my arm around her.
“Well, Molly, what would you think about us marrying?” I said.
“I’d think we ain’t the kind, honey,” she said, “but thank you a whole lot for asking.”
It was kind of a sad relief. “It’s a damn strange time for me to do it,” I said. “I could have asked you forty years ago.”
“We lived them pretty good,” she said. “It ain’t as important a question as a lot of people think.”
“Don’t you miss Gid?” I said. “I never thought I’d miss such a contrary so-and-so so much.”
“Oh yes,” she said.
“Molly, just for curiosity,” I said. “Do you think you and him would have taken up together for good, if he had lived?”
She put one of her hands in my hip pocket and pulled out my handkerchief to see if it was clean. She had to smell it. This one wasn’t, and she kept it so she could wash it.
“We’d decided to,” she said. “I guess we decided about thirty times. And I think in about another year I would have got his conscience quiet enough and his nerve worked up so he could have come out and stayed.”
We thought about it a minute.
“You know I think he worried about you as much as he did Mabel,” she said. “He kept saying it wouldn’t be fair to you if he moved out here.” She gave me a long look. “I got sick of him wanting to be so fair to you,” she said, “and I even got sick of you being around for him to worry about. You may have noticed.”
“No,” I said. “But I imagine it’s true.”
“Johnny, when it came to him, I just never cared to be fair, “she said.
“I don’t blame you none.”
When I got in the pickup she leaned in and kissed me on the cheek. “I’ll take you in to a ballgame one of these cool nights,” I said.
“I wish you would,” she said. “I ain’t been to a half a dozen games since Joe quit playing.”
I started to drive off, but she had ahold of my arm. “I’ll have a better supper tomorrow night,” she said. “Just because we ain’t marrying don’t mean you’re free to miss a night. You’re welcome here every night, all night, when you feel like putting up with me.”
“I’ll be here in time to carve the beef,” I said, and drove off. I felt pretty blue driving down the hill, and kinda wished I had stayed that night. But sometimes you can’t get around being lonesome for a while.
I TOOK my time driving home on those old bumpy roads. When I got back to the house I put the pickup in the garage and shut the doors. I had me some Delaware Punches in the icebox and I got one and went out on the screened-in porch. Over at Molly’s I had been a little sleepy, but the drive had woke me up.
The porch was cool, and the night was real quiet. I set my Punch bottle down and stepped out in the yard to take a leak. I could hear an oil rig working way over in the Dale, but except for that and a few crickets the night was perfectly still. When I got through I didn’t much want to go in, so I walked around the old Fry place for a while, watching that white moon circling out over Gid’s pastures. It was strange how I never knowed till Gid died just how used to him I was.
“You old so-and-so,” I said. “You wouldn’t listen. I offered to go up and fix that thing, but no sir, you had to do it yourself.”
“Aw, you couldn’t have fixed it if you’d a gone,” he said. “You never was no hand with pipe.”
“Hell no, a cowboy ain’t supposed to be,” I said.
“That’s all right. Who made the fortune, and who worked for wages all his life?”
“You might have made the fortune,” I said. “But I’d just like to know what good it did you. Working like a Turk. Which one of us was satisfied?”
“Hell, that’s easy,” he said. “Neither one. We neither one married her, did we?”
Talking to myself. Gid was off in the Great Perhaps. I looked around at the house and down toward the barn. One man’s whoop is another man’s holler, anyhow. At least Gid was stubborn about it. I remembered one election day, when I gave him hell. Me and Molly had the first shift. The bloom was really on the peach, as far as she was concerned. She wore a blue dress with white dots on it and never wore nothing on her hair. About two weeks before that I had got to spend my first whole night with her. We was there an hour by ourselves, and kissed and walked around and had the best time: I pumped my hat full of water so she could get a drink. Then Gid come and talked her into staying with him after I was supposed to leave. Only he had
old Ikey for a partner and had to scheme around someway to get rid of him, I don’t remember how he finally done it. It tickled me. He thought he’d have Molly to himself for two hours or so. I left about the time Ikey did and circled around and intercepted him; he was riding that old crippled mule. “Ikey, you ought to be ashamed of yourself,” I said. “Living in a free country where they let you vote. And the first time the government gives you a little job you let somebody send you off on some damn errand. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll turn that mule around and get back up there where you belong.” I broke me off a good-sized mesquite limb and handed it to him. “See if you can get that mule in locomotion,” I said. I guess he thought I intended to use it on him. “Yes suh, Mistuh Johnny,” he said. “I sure get back. I didn’t inten’ to leave in de fust place.” So poor Gid got about twenty minutes. I guess it was kinda mean, really—nobody gets enough chances at the wild and sweet. But he would have done the same thing. There’s just two things about it that I really regret. One was not being there to see the look on Gid’s face when he heard that crippled mule clomping up, and the other is forgetting to bring a Kodak that morning, so I could have got a picture of Molly while she was sitting in her blue and white dress on the schoolhouse steps.
THREE GRAVESTONES
GIDEON FRY
1896–1962
MOLLY TAYLOR WHITE
1900–1976
JOHNNY MC CLOUD
1898–1985
THE LAST PICTURE SHOW
THE LAST PICTURE SHOW is lovingly
dedicated to my home town.
One
SOMETIMES SONNY FELT LIKE HE WAS THE ONLY HUMAN creature in the town. It was a bad feeling, and it usually came on him in the mornings early, when the streets were completely empty, the way they were one Saturday morning in late November. The night before Sonny had played his last game of football for Thalia High School, but it wasn’t that that made him feel so strange and alone. It was just the look of the town.
There was only one car parked on the courthouse square—the night watchman’s old white Nash. A cold norther was singing in off the plains, swirling long ribbons of dust down Main street, the only street in Thalia with businesses on it. Sonny’s pickup was a ’41 Chevrolet, not at its best on cold mornings. In front of the picture show it coughed out and had to be choked for a while, but then it started again and jerked its way to the red light, blowing out spumes of white exhaust that the wind whipped away.
At the red light he started to turn south toward the all-night café, but when he looked north to see if anyone was coming he turned that way instead. No one at all was coming but he saw his young friend Billy, headed out. He had his broom and was sweeping right down the middle of the highway into the gusting wind. Billy lived at the poolhall with Sam the Lion, and sweeping was all he really knew how to do. The only trouble was that he overdid it. He swept out the poolhall in the mornings, the café in the afternoons, and the picture show at night, and always, unless someone specifically told him to stop, he just kept sweeping, down the sidewalk, on through the town, sometimes one way and sometimes another, sweeping happily on until someone noticed him and brought him back to the poolhall.
Sonny drove up beside him and honked. Billy quit sweeping at once and got in the pickup. He was a stocky boy, not very smart, but perfectly friendly; picking him up made Sonny feel less lonesome. If Billy was out the poolhall must be open, and when the poolhall was open he was never lonesome. One of the nice things about living in Thalia was that the poolhall often opened by 6:30 or 7 A.M., the reason being that Sam the Lion, who owned it, was a very bad sleeper.
Sonny drove to the hall and parked and took Billy’s broom so he wouldn’t go sweeping off again. The air was so dry and dusty it made the nostrils sting and the two boys hustled inside. Sam the Lion was up, all right, brushing one of the snooker tables. He was an old man, but big and heavy, with a mane of white hair; cold weather made his feet swell and he wore his old sheepskin house shoes to work in in the wintertime. He was expecting the boys and barely gave them a glance.
Once they were inside, Sonny let Billy have the broom again and Billy immediately went over to the gas stove to warm himself. While he warmed he leaned on the broom and licked a piece of green pool chalk. Sam the Lion didn’t particularly care that Billy licked chalk all the time; it was cheap enough nourishment, he said. Sonny got himself a package of Cheese Crisps and made room for himself at the stove, turning Billy’s cap around backward for friendship’s sake. It was an old green baseball cap some lady had given Billy three or four summers before.
“Cold in here, Sam,” Sonny said. “It’s nearly as cold in here as it is outside.”
“Not as windy, though,” Sam replied. “I’m surprised you had the nerve to come in this mornin’, after the beatin’ you all took. Anybody ever tell you boys about blockin’? Or tacklin’?”
Sonny ate his Cheese Crisps, unabashed. Crowell, the visiting team, had tromped Thalia 28 to 6. it had been a little embarrassing for Coach Popper, but that was because the local Quarterback Club had been so sure Thalia was finally going to win a District Crown that they had literally jumped the gun and presented the coach with a new .12 gauge Marlin under-over at the homecoming game two weeks before. The coach was quite a hunter. Two of Crowell’s four touchdowns had been run over Sonny’s guard position, but he felt quite calm about it all. Four years of playing for Thalia had inured him to defeat, and so far as he was concerned the Quarterback Club had been foolishly optimistic.
Besides, he could not see that he had much to gain by helping the coach get new shotguns, the coach being a man of most uncertain temper. He had already shot at Sonny once in his life, and with a new under-over he might not miss.
“Where’s your buddy?” Sam asked.
“Not in yet,” Sonny said. That was Duane, Sonny’s best friend, who besides being an All-Conference fullback, roughnecked the midnight tower with a local drilling crew.
“Duane’s gonna work himself into an early grave,” Sam the Lion said. “He oughtn’t to play a football game and then go out and work all night on top of it. He made half the yardage we made.”
“Well, that never tired him out,” Sonny said, going to get another package of Cheese Crisps.
Sam the Lion started to cough, and the coughing got away from him, as it often did. His whole body shook; he couldn’t stop. Finally he had to stagger back to the washroom and take a drink of water and a swig of cough medicine to get it under control.
“Suckin’ in too much chalk dust,” he said when he came back. Billy hardly noticed, but Sonny felt a little uneasy. He didn’t like to be reminded that Sam the Lion was not as young or as healthy as he once had been. Sam the Lion was the man who took care of things, particularly of boys, and Sonny did not like to think that he might die. The reason Sam was so especially good to boys was that he himself had had three sons, none of whom lived to be eighteen. The first was killed when Sam was still a rancher: he and his son were trying to drive a herd of yearlings across the Little Wichita River one day when it was up, and the boy had been knocked loose from his horse, pawed under, and drowned. A few years later, after Sam had gone into the oil business, a gas explosion knocked his second son off a derrick. He fell over fifty feet and was dead before they got him to town. Sam sold his oil holdings and put in the first Ford agency in Thalia, and his youngest son was run over by a deputy sheriff. His wife lost her mind and spent her last ten years rocking in a rocking chair. Sam drank a lot, quit going to church, and was said to be loose with women, even married women.
He began to come out of it when he bought the picture show, or so people said. He got lots of comedies and serials and Westerns and the kids came as often as they could talk their parents into letting them. Then Sam bought the poolhall and the all-night café and he perked up more and more.
No one really knew why he was called Sam the Lion. Some thought it was because he hated barbers and always went around with a shaggy head of h
air. Others thought it was because he had been such a hell-raising cowboy when he was young, but Sonny found that a little hard to believe. He had seen Sam mad only once, and that was one Fourth of July when Duane stuck a Roman candle in the pocket of one of the snooker tables and set it off. When it finally quit shooting, Sam grabbed the pisspot and chased Duane out, meaning to sling it at him. He slung it, but Duane was too quick. Joe Bob Blanton, the Methodist preacher’s son, happened to be standing on the sidewalk wishing he was allowed to go in and shoot pool, and he was the one that got drenched. The boys all got a big laugh but Sam the Lion was embarrassed about it and cleaned Joe Bob off as best he could.
When he was thoroughly warm Sonny got one of the brushes and began to brush the eight-ball tables. Sam went over and looked disgustedly at the two nickels Sonny had left for the Cheese Crisps.
“You’ll never get nowhere, Sonny,” he said. “You’ve already spent a dime today and you ain’t even had a decent breakfast. Billy, you might get the other side of the hall swept out, son.”
While the boys worked Sam stood by the stove and warmed his aching feet. He wished Sonny weren’t so reckless economically, but there was nothing he could do about it. Billy was less of a problem, partly because he was so dumb. Billy’s real father was an old railroad man who had worked in Thalia for a short time just before the war; his mother was a deaf and dumb girl who had no people except an aunt. The old man cornered the girl in the balcony of the picture show one night and begat Billy. The sheriff saw to it that the old man married the girl, but she died when Billy was born and he was raised by the family of Mexicans who helped the old man keep the railroad track repaired. After the war the hauling petered out and the track was taken up. The old man left and got a job bumping cars on a stockyards track in Oklahoma, leaving Billy with the Mexicans. They hung around for several more years, piling prickly pear and grubbing mesquite, but then a man from Plainview talked them into moving out there to pick cotton. They snuck off one morning and left Billy sitting on the curb in front of the picture show.
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