Thalia

by Larry McMurtry

  From then on, Sam the Lion took care of him. Billy learned to sweep, and he kept all three of Sam’s places swept out; in return he got his keep and also, every single night, he got to watch the picture show. He always sat in the balcony, his broom at his side; for years he saw every show that came to Thalia, and so far as anyone knew, he liked them all. He was never known to leave while the screen was lit.

  “You workin’ today?” Sam asked, noticing that Sonny was taking his time brushing the eight-ball table.

  “The truck’s being greased,” Sonny said. On weekends, and sometimes week-nights too, he drove a butane truck for Frank Fartley of Fartley Butane and Propane. He didn’t make as much money as his friend Duane made roughnecking, but the work was easier.

  Just as Sam the Lion was about to get back to the subject of the football game they all heard a familiar sound and paused to listen. Abilene was coming into town in his Mercury. Abilene was the driller Duane worked for. He had spent a lot of money souping up the Mercury, and in Thalia the sound of his exhausts was as unmistakable as the sound of the wind.

  “Well, we barely got ’em clean in time,” Sam said. Abilene not only had the best car in the country, he also shot the best stick of pool. Drilling and pool shooting were things he did so well that no one could decide which was his true vocation and which his avocation. Some mornings he went home and cleaned up before he came to the poolhall—he liked to be clean and well dressed when he gambled—but if it was too early for any of the nine-ball players to be up he would often stop and practice in his drilling clothes.

  The Mercury stopped in front of the poolhall and Sam went over and got Abilene’s ivory-banded cue out of the padlocked rack and laid it on the counter for him. When the door opened the wind sliced inside ahead of the man. Abilene had on sunglasses and the heavy green coveralls he wore to protect his clothes from the oil-field grease; as soon as he was in he unzipped the coveralls and hung them on a nail Sam had fixed for him. His blue wool shirt and gabardine pants were creased and trim.

  “Mornin’,” Sam said.

  “Mornin’,” Abilene replied, handing Sam his expensive-looking sunglasses. He once had a pair fall out of his pocket and break when he was bending over to pick up a piece of pool chalk; after that he always had Sam put the sunglasses in a drawer for him. Though he was the poolhall’s best customer, he and Sam the Lion had almost nothing to say to one another. Abilene paid Sam two hundred and fifty dollars a year for a private key to the poolhall, so he could come in and practice any time he wanted to. Often Sonny would come in from some long butane run at two or three o’clock in the morning and see that Abilene was in the poolhall, practicing. The garage where the butane truck was kept was right across the street from the poolhall and sometimes Sonny would walk across and stand by one of the windows watching Abilene shoot. No one ever tried to go in when Abilene was in the poolhall alone.

  “Let’s shoot one, Sonny,” Abilene said. “I feel like a little snooker before breakfast.”

  Sonny was taken by surprise. He knew he would not even be good competition for Abilene, but he went and got a cue anyway. It did not occur to him to turn down the invitation. Abilene shot first and ran thirty points off the break.

  “Duane didn’t go to sleep on you last night, did he?” Sonny asked, feeling that he ought at least to make conversation.

  “No, the breeze kept us awake,” Abilene replied. That was their conversation. Sonny only got to shoot four times; for the most part he just stood back and watched Abilene move gracefully around the green table, easing in his shots with the ivory-banded cue. He won the game by 175 points.

  “You shoot pool about like you play football,” he said, when the game was over.

  Sonny ignored the insult and pitched a quarter on the felt to pay for the game. Abilene insulted everybody, young and old alike, and Sonny was not obliged to take it personally. Sam the Lion came over to rack the balls.

  “I hope they hurry and get that truck greased,” he said. “The way your fortune’s sinking you’ll be bankrupt before you get out of here.”

  “What’d our bet come to, Sam,” Abilene asked casually. He busted the fresh rack and started shooting red balls. Sam grinned at Sonny and went over to the cash register and got five ten-dollar bills. He laid them on the side of the snooker table and when Abilene noticed them he took a money clip out of his pocket and put the fifty dollars in it.

  “It’s what I get for bettin’ on my hometown ball club,” Sam said. “I ought to have better sense.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt if you had a better home town,” Abilene said.

  Sam always bet on the boys, thinking it would make them feel good, but the strategy seldom worked because they almost always lost. Most of them only trained when they felt like it, and that was not very often. The few who did train were handicapped by their intense dislike of Coach Popper. Sonny was not alone in considering the coach a horse’s ass, but the school board liked the coach and never considered firing him: he was a man’s man, and he worked cheap. They saw no reason to hire a better coach until a better bunch of boys came along, and there was no telling when that would be. Sam the Lion went loyally on losing money, while Abilene, who invariably bet against Thalia, cleared about a thousand dollars a season from Sam and others like him.

  While Sam and Sonny were idly watching Abilene practice, Billy swept quietly down the other side of the poolhall and on out the door. The cold wind that came through the door when Billy went out woke them up. “Go get him, Sonny,” Sam said. “Make him put his broom up for a while.”

  Billy hadn’t had time to get far; he was just three doors away, in front of what once had been the Thalia Pontiac Agency. He was calmly sweeping north, into the cold wind. All his floor-sweep had already blown away, but he was quite content to sweep at the curling ribbons of sand that the wind blew past him. A time or two in his life he had swept all the way to the Thalia city limits sign before anyone had noticed him.

  When Sonny stepped out of the poolhall the black pickup that the roughnecks used was stopped at the red light. The light changed and the pickup passed the courthouse and slowed a moment at the corner by the poolhall, so Duane could jump out. He was a tall boy with curly black hair. Because he was a fullback and a roughneck he held himself a little stiffly. He had on Levi’s and a Levi’s jacket with the collar turned up. Sonny pointed at Billy and he and Duane each grabbed one of Billy’s arms and hustled him back down the sidewalk into the warming poolhall. Sam took the broom and put it up on a shelf where Billy couldn’t reach it.

  “Let’s go eat, buddy,” Duane said, knowing that Sonny had put off having breakfast until he came.

  Sam the Lion looked Duane over carefully to see if he could detect any symptoms of overwork, but Duane was in his usual Saturday morning good humor, and if there were such symptoms they didn’t show.

  “If you boys are going to the café, take this change for me,” Sam said, pitching Sonny the dark green coin sack that he used to tote change from one of his establishments to the other. Sonny caught it and the boys hurried out and jogged down the street two blocks to the café, tucking their heads down so the wind wouldn’t take their breath. “Boy, I froze my ass last night,” Duane grunted, as they ran.

  The café was a little one-story red building, so deliciously warm inside that all the windows were steamed over. Penny, the daytime waitress, was in the kitchen frying eggs for a couple of truck drivers, so Sonny set the change sack on the cash register. There was no sign of old Marston, the cook. The boys counted their money and found they had only eighty cents between them.

  “I had to shoot Abilene a game of snooker,” Sonny explained. “If it hadn’t been for that I’d have a quarter more.”

  “We got enough,” Duane said. They were always short of money on Saturday morning, but they were paid Saturday afternoon, so it was no calamity. They ordered eggs and sausage and flipped to see who got what—by the end of the week they often ended up splitting meals. Sonny got the
sausage and Duane the eggs.

  While Penny was counting the new change into the cash register old Marston came dragging in. He looked as though he had just frozen out of a bar ditch somewhere, and Penny was on him instantly.

  “Where you been, you old fart?” she yelled. “I done had to cook ten orders and you know I ain’t no cook.”

  “I swear, Penny,” Marston said. “I just forgot to set my alarm clock last night.”

  “You’re a lying old sot if I ever saw one,” Penny said. “I ought to douse you under the hydrant a time or two, maybe you wouldn’t stink of whiskey so much.”

  Marston slipped by her and had his apron on in a minute. Penny was a 185-pound redhead, not given to idle threats. She was Church of Christ and didn’t mind calling a sinner a sinner. Five years before she had accidentally gotten pregnant before she was engaged; the whole town knew about it and Penny got a lot of backhanded sympathy. The ladies of the community thought it was just awful for a girl that fat to get pregnant. Once married, she discovered she didn’t much like her husband, and that made her harder to get along with in general. On Wednesday nights, when the Church of Christ held its prayer meetings and shouting contests anybody who happened to be within half a mile of the church could hear what Penny thought about wickedness; it was old Marston’s misfortune to hear it every morning, and at considerably closer range. He only worked to drink, and the thought of being doused under a hydrant made him so shaky he could barely turn the eggs.

  Sonny and Duane winked at him to cheer him up, and gave Penny the finger when she wasn’t looking. They also managed to indicate that they were broke, so Marston would put a couple of extra slices of toast on the order. The boys gave him a ride to the county-line liquor store once a week, and in return he helped out with extra food when their money was low.

  “How we gonna work it tonight?” Duane asked. He and Sonny owned the Chevrolet pickup jointly, and because there were two of them and only one pickup their Saturday night dating was a little complicated.

  “We might as well wait and see,” Sonny replied, looking disgustedly at the grape jelly Marston had put on the plate. He hated grape jelly, and the café never seemed to have any other kind.

  “If I have to make a delivery to Ranger this afternoon there won’t be no problem,” he added. “You just take the pickup. If I get back in time I can meet Charlene at the picture show.”

  “Okay,” Duane said, glad to get that off his mind. Sonny never got the pickup first on Saturday night and Duane always felt slightly guilty about it but not quite guilty enough to change anything.

  The problem was that he was going with Jacy Farrow whose folks were rich enough to make them unenthusiastic about her going with a poor boy like Duane. He and Jacy couldn’t use her car because her father, Gene Farrow, made a point of driving by the picture show every Saturday night to see that Jacy’s car was parked out front. They were able to get around that easily enough by sneaking out the back of the show and going somewhere in the pickup, but that arrangement created something of a courting problem for Sonny, who went with a girl named Charlene Duggs. Charlene had to be home by eleven thirty, and if Duane and Jacy kept the pickup tied up until almost eleven, it didn’t allow Sonny much time in which to make out.

  Sonny had assured Duane time and time again that he didn’t particularly care, but Duane remained secretly uneasy. His uneasiness really stemmed from the fact that he was going with Jacy, the prettiest, most desirable girl in town, while Sonny was only going with Charlene Duggs, a mediocre date by any standard. Occasionally the two couples double-dated, but that was really harder on Sonny than no date at all. With all four of them squeezed up in the cab of the pickup it was impossible for him to ignore the fact that Jacy was several times as desirable as Charlene. Even if it was totally dark, her perfume smelled better. For days after such a date Sonny had very disloyal fantasies involving himself and Jacy, and after an hour’s sloppy necking with Charlene even the fantasy that he was kissing Jacy had a dangerous power. Charlene kissed convulsively, as if she had just swallowed a golf ball and was trying to force it back up.

  Of course Sonny had often considered breaking up with Charlene, but there weren’t many girls in the town and the only unattached girl who was any prettier than Charlene was an unusually prudish sophomore. Charlene would let Sonny do anything he wanted to above the waist; it was only as time wore on that he had begun to realize that there really wasn’t much of permanent interest to do in that zone. As the weeks went by, Sonny observed that Jacy seemed to become more and more delightful, passionate, inventive, while by contrast Charlene just seemed more of a slug.

  When the boys finished eating and paid their check they had a nickel left. Duane was going home to bed, so Sonny kept the nickel; he could buy himself a Butterfinger for lunch. Outside the air was still cold and dusty and gray clouds were blowing south off the High Plains.

  Duane took the pickup and went to the rooming house where the two of them had roomed since their sophomore year. People thought it a little strange, because each had a parent alive, but the boys liked it. Sonny’s father ran the local domino parlor and lived in a room at the little hotel, and Duane’s mother didn’t really have much more room. His grandmother was still alive and living with his mother in their two-room house; his mother took in laundry, so the house was pretty full. The boys were actually rather proud that they lived in a rooming house and paid their own rent; most of the boys with real homes envied the two their freedom. Nobody envied them Old Lady Malone, of course, but she owned the rooming house and couldn’t be helped. She was nosy, dipped snuff, had a compulsion about turning off fires, and was afflicted with one of the most persistent cases of diarrhea on record. The one bathroom was so badly aired that the boys frequently performed their morning toilet in the rest room of the Texaco filling station.

  After Sonny got his delivery orders he jogged up the street to the filling station to get the truck, an old green International. The seat springs had about worn through the padding, and most of the rubber was gone from the footpedals. Still, it ran, and Sonny gunned it a few times and struck out for Megargel, a town even smaller than Thalia. Out in the open country the norther gusted strongly across the highway, making the truck hard to hold. Once in a while a big ragweed would shake loose from the barbed-wire fences and skitter across the road, only to catch again in the barbed-wire fence on the other side. The dry grass in the pastures was gray-brown, and the leafless winter mesquite gray-black. A few Hereford yearlings wandered dispiritedly into the wind, the only signs of life; there was really nothing between Thalia and Megargel but thirty miles of lonesome country. Except for a few sandscraped ranch houses there was nothing to see but a long succession of low brown ridges, with the wind singing over them. It occurred to Sonny that perhaps people called them “blue northers” because it was so hard not to get blue when one was blowing. He regretted that he had not asked Billy to ride along with him on the morning deliveries. Billy was no talker, but he was company, and with nobody at all on the road or in the cab Sonny sometimes got the funny feeling that he was driving the old truck around and around in a completely empty place.

  Two

  SONNY’S NEXT DELIVERY AFTER MEGARGEL WAS IN SCOTLAND, a farming community fifty miles in the opposite direction. As luck would have it he arrived at the farm where the butane was needed while the farmer and his family were in town doing their weekly shopping. The butane tank was in their backyard, and so were nine dogs, six of them chows.

  Besides the chows, which were all brown and ill-tempered, there was a German shepherd, a rat terrier, and a subdued black cocker that the farmer had given his kids for a Christmas present. When Sonny approached the yard gate the chows leapt and snarled and tried to bite through the wire. It seemed very unlikely that he could bluff them, but he stood outside the gate for several minutes getting up his nerve to try. While he was standing there five little teal flew off a stock tank north of the house and angled south over the yard. The sight
of them made Sonny long for a shotgun of his own, and some ammunition money; all his life he had hunted with borrowed guns. The longer he stood at the gate the more certain he became that the dogs could not be bluffed, and he finally turned and walked back to the truck, a little depressed. He had never owned a shotgun, and he had never found a yardful of dogs that he could intimidate, at least not around Scotland. He sat in the truck for almost an hour, enjoying fantasies of himself carrying Jacy Farrow past dozens of sullen but respectful chows.

  Just before noon the farmer came driving up, his red GMC pickup loaded with groceries, kids, and a fat-ankled wife. Some of the kids looked meaner than the dogs.

  “Hell, you should just ’a gone on in,” the farmer said cheerfully. “Them dogs don’t bite many people.”

  Like so many Saturdays, it was a long work day; when Sonny rattled back into Thalia after his last delivery it was almost 10 P.M. He found his boss, Frank Fartley, in the poolhall shooting his usual comical Saturday night eight-ball game. The reason it was comical was because Mr. Fartley’s cigar was cocked at such an angle that there was always a small dense cloud of white smoke between his eye and the cue ball. He tried to compensate for not being able to see the cue ball by lunging madly with his cue at a spot where he thought it was, a style of play that made Sam the Lion terribly nervous because it was not only hard on the felt but also extremely dangerous to unwatchful kibitzers, one or two of whom had been rather seriously speared. When Sonny came in Frank stopped lunging long enough to give him his check, and Sonny immediately got Sam the Lion to cash it. Abilene was there, dressed in a dark brown pearl-buttoned shirt and gray slacks; he was shooting nine-ball at five dollars a game with Lester Marlow, his usual Saturday night opponent.