Thalia

by Larry McMurtry

  “We might as well,” Duane said. “Be better than loafin’ around here.”

  Sonny was agreeable. While Jerry went out in the country to pick up his load he and Duane walked over to the café to have supper. Sam the Lion was there, waiting for old Marston to bring out his nightly steak. Penny was still at work and Marston was hopping to get the orders out. Penny had taken to wearing orange lipstick.

  The boys sat down with Sam the Lion and ordered chickenfriend steaks. “Sam, how’s the best way to get rich?” Duane asked.

  “To be born rich,” Sam said. “That’s much the best way. Why?”

  “I want to get that way. I want to get at least as rich as Lester Marlow.”

  “Well, of course,” Sam said, buttering a cracker. “You’re really too young to know what’s good for you, though. Once you got rich you’d have to spend all your time staying rich, and that’s hard thankless work. I tried it a while and quit, myself. If I can keep ten dollars ahead of the bills I’ll be doin’ all right.”

  “How much do you think Gene Farrow’s worth?” Duane asked. “How rich would I have to get to be richer than him?”

  “How much cash you got?” Sam asked.

  “Fifty-two dollars right now. Fifty-one after we eat.”

  “Then cashwise I imagine you’re as rich as Gene,” Sam said, looking suspiciously at his salad. Marston was always sneaking cucumbers into his salads, against strict orders. Sam the Lion regarded cucumbers as a species of gourd and would not eat them.

  “I doubt if Gene could lay his hands on fifty dollars tonight,” he added.

  Both boys were stunned. Everyone thought Gene Farrow was the richest man in town.

  “Why Sam, he’s bound to have lots of money,” Duane said. “Mrs. Farrow’s fur coat is supposed to be worth five thousand dollars.”

  “Probably is,” Sam said. “That’s five thousand he don’t have in cash, though. He’s got lots of trucks and equipment and oil leases, too, but it ain’t cash and there’s no way of tellin’ how much of it’s his and how much is the bank’s.”

  He broke a biscuit in two and wiped his gravy bowl clean. “There ain’t no sure-nuff rich people in this town now,” he said. “I doubt there’ll ever be any more. The oil fields are about to dry up and the cattle business looks like it’s going to peter out. If I had to make a guess at who was the richest man in town I’d say Abilene. He may not own nothing but his car and his clothes, but I’ve never seen the day when he couldn’t pull a thousand dollars out of his billfold. A man with a thousand dollars in his pocket is rich, for Thalia.”

  Duane cheered up suddenly and began to go after his steak with good appetite. “Well that’s all good news,” he said. “Maybe if the Farrows go broke they won’t mind my marrying Jacy.”

  Sam grunted his disagreement. “Penny, bring me a dish of that cobbler,” he said. “Apricot. Nope, Duane, you’re wrong. I don’t know about Lois, but if Gene was to even think he was going broke he wouldn’t want you to get within a mile of that girl. There ain’t nobody snootier than an oilman who’s had to sell one of his Cadillacs.”

  “Aw, Sam it’s not him,” Duane argued. “I get along with him all right. It’s Mrs. Farrow who don’t like me. I bet it’s her fault Jacy’s off with Lester tonight.”

  “Well, Lois has got a lot of judgment, maybe she’s doin’ you a favor,” Sam said. “That little girl is goin’ to be a hard one to please.”

  Talk like that made Duane huffy. “I please her well enough,” he said. Sonny wished the meal were over. It was getting so Duane wanted to talk about Jacy half the time, and for some reason the conversations always left Sonny depressed.

  Outside, after they had all finished, Sam the Lion slapped them on the shoulder. “Well, have fun in Cowtown,” he said. “If I didn’t have all these businesses to run I’d ride along with you. Ain’t been to Fort Worth in fifteen years.” The night was cold and sleety and he hobbled on back to the poolhall on his sore feet.

  The boys walked over to the courthouse where they could wait out of the wind. While they were waiting they saw Lester and Jacy drive by in Lester’s Oldsmobile. Jacy wasn’t sitting very close to him but as they passed under the street light the boys could see that she was laughing at something. Her hair was rolled up on her head in a fancy way.

  “You don’t need to look so blue about it,” Sonny said. “This time next year you’ll probably be married to her. Look at me, I ain’t got no date either.”

  “Yeah, but you ain’t in love,” Duane said.

  Finally Jerry’s cattle truck screeched up to the stoplight, jam-packed with Hereford yearlings. When it stopped they all began to bawl and shove around and shit through the sideboards. The boys ran over and climbed up in the high cab—Jerry whanged the truck in gear and they were off.

  “Break out the beer,” Jerry said. “There’s two six-packs there on the floor somewhere.”

  Sonny found an opener in the glove compartment. When he popped into a can the cold beer spewed all over him, its smell filling the cab. “The coach would have a shit fit if he knew we were breakin’ trainin’,” he said happily. For a moment Mrs. Popper crossed his mind—what would she be doing on a Saturday night?—but it was so much fun to be going down the road in a high, bouncy cattle truck that he soon forget her. All he and Duane had to do was drink beer and watch the fence posts and the culverts whiz by; before the first six-pack was finished their troubles were forgotten and they were happily reminiscing about old times in Thalia High School, reliving all the ball games they had played and the fights and adventures they had had. Jerry Framingham enjoyed the conversation: most of the kids he had graduated with were in the army and he seldom had any company at all on his cattle hauls.

  Sonny and Duane found that they were a little out of shape for beer drinking. By the time they reached Fort Worth they were both fairly drunk, and the anecdotes they were telling seemed so funny to them that it would sometimes take them three or four miles to quit laughing. One classic story simply broke them up: it was about the time they had persuaded Billy to come out for football, although he wasn’t even enrolled in school. Billy knew nothing about football and hadn’t thought it at all strange when they put his shoulder pads on backward, daubed foot toughener in his ears, and made him wear a jockey strap for a noseguard. When he trotted out on the field with his jockey strap on his nose the whole team had hysterics and Coach Popper laughed so hard he almost ruptured himself.

  Jerry Framingham was not drunk and thus did not become uncontrollably amused when he heard such stories retold—in fact the boys’ laughter seemed to irritate him a little. “You drunk bastards can’t do anything but laugh,” he said.

  Jerry’s turn came later, after they had unloaded the cattle. They were having a beer or two in a honky-tonk on North Main and Jerry talked them into putting up five dollars apiece toward a fifteen-dollar whore he knew about. They could all three have easily found five-dollar whores, but Jerry insisted on flipping to see who got the more expensive one, and he won the flips. The whore was in a dinky little North Main hotel. Sonny and Duane walked around outside, freezing their tails, while Jerry went up to have fun. They stepped inside a cheap dance hall a few minutes to warm up and watched a lot of sideburned stockyard hands dance their skinny girl friends around the room.

  As soon as Jerry was done and they were back in the truck the boys went to sleep. Jerry was somewhat weakened himself and on the home side of Jacksboro he pulled the truck off the road and went to sleep himself. About four in the morning Sonny woke up, practically frozen to death. Jerry and Duane were both mashed on top of him, trying to keep warm, and the door handle was about to bore a hole in his back. The windshield was completely sleeted over. Sonny pushed around until he woke the others up and he and Jerry got out and scraped the sleet off the windshield with an old Levi’s jacket. While they were doing that Duane crawled over and vomited in the bar ditch. Coming back from Fort Worth was never as much fun as going.

  While they
had rolled around trying to sleep they had kicked the heater wires loose, so the rest of the trip home was miserably cold. The café looked like the most comfortable place in the world when they finally pulled in. Genevieve was sitting at the counter reading an old paperback of Forever Amber that everyone who worked at the café had read several times. When she saw what bad shape Sonny and Duane were in she put it away and fixed them some toast and coffee; as soon as they ate a little they dozed off and slept with their heads on the counter while she filled the coffee maker and got things ready for the morning business. Asleep they both had the tousled, helpless look of young children and she kept wanting to cover their shoulders with a tablecloth or something. When Marston came in she woke them up. She put on her heavy blue coat and the boys stumbled outside behind her, trying to keep their eyes open. The cold air snapped them out of it a little. Genevieve had an old gray Dodge that was hard to start and by the time she got it to kick off the boys were wide awake.

  “What do you think about a woman that would make her daughter go with Lester Marlow?” Duane asked, remembering that he had a grievance.

  “I don’t know much about Lester, but if I had a daughter I don’t know that I’d want her going with either one of you boys, the way you all cut up,” she said, treating the whole matter lightly. She pulled up in front of their rooming house and raced her motor, so the old car wouldn’t die.

  The boys got out, thanked her, waved as the car pulled away, its exhaust white in the cold air. “Well, at least we got to go somewhere,” Sonny said, picking up a beer can somebody had thrown out on the lawn. Fort Worth, after all, was a city, part of the big world, and he always came back from a trip there with the satisfying sense that he had traveled. They flipped to see who got the bathtub first and he won.

  Eight

  THE FIRST BASKETBALL GAME OF THE SEASON WAS WITH Paducah, a town well over a hundred miles from Thalia. It was the longest trip of the year and usually the wildest: in Paducah they played basketball as if it were indoor football, and they had everything in their favor, including a gym so small that the out-of-bounds lines were painted on the wall. The Paducah boys were used to the gym and could run up the walls like lizards, but visiting teams, accustomed to normal-sized courts, had a hard time. Every year two or three Thalia players smashed into the walls and knocked themselves out.

  This time it happened to Sonny, and in the very first minutes of play. Leroy Malone managed to trip the gangly Paducah center and while the center was sprawled on the floor Sonny ran right along his back, in pursuit of the ball. Just as he was about to grab it somebody tripped him and he hit the wall head first. The next thing he knew he was stretched out beside the bench and one of the freshmen players was squeezing a wet washrag on his forehead. Sonny tried to keep his eyes closed as long as he could—he knew Coach Popper would send him back into the game as soon as he regained consciousness. He feigned deep coma for about five minutes, but unfortunately the coach was experienced in such matters. He came over and lifted one of Sonny’s eyelids and saw that he was awake.

  “Possuming,” he said. “I thought so. Get up and get your butt back in there. We’re forty points behind and it ain’t but the second quarter.”

  “I think I got a concussion,” Sonny said, trying to look dangerously ill. “Maybe I ought to stay out a little while.”

  “Get up,” the coach insisted. “We just quit football practice ten days ago, you ain’t had time to get that out of shape. If you want to rest, by God go in there and foul out first. Knock the shit out of that forward two or three times—he’s the one doin’ all the scorin’. Hell, we come all this way, let’s make a showing.”

  Sonny reluctantly got up and went back in. He managed three fouls before the half, but he was too weak to hit anybody very hard and none of the fouls was really satisfactory. The half-time score was Paducah 62 and Thalia 9. During the half the coach called them over for one of his little pep talks, this one very brief.

  “You ten boys have got the shortest little peckers of any bunch of kids I’ve ever coached,” he said sincerely. “By God, if you don’t stomp some asses this next half I’ll stomp a few tomorrow afternoon when we start practicing.”

  He scowled fiercely and strolled off to the concession stand to have some coffee.

  In the second half things began to look really ominous. Sonny felt strangely lightheaded and went out on the floor not much caring what he did. Paducah defense had become virtually impenetrable: for one thing, they had started openly tackling whichever Thalia player had the ball. It seemed to Sonny that at last the time had come to shoot peg shots—there was not much chance of moving the ball down the court any other way. Whenever they tried, Paducah tackled them, tripped them, threw body blocks into them, or had the referee call fouls on them.

  Actually, the refereeing was another very bad aspect of basketball in Paducah. Unusual as it was, Paducah had a male home economics teacher, a frail little man named Mr. Wean. The school board felt that teaching home ec was really too light a job for a man so they made Mr. Wean basketball referee. He had never managed to learn much about the game, but he was quite docile and called whatever the Paducah team told him to call. Also, he was in bad shape and couldn’t possibly run up and down the court for forty-eight minutes. Instead of following the ball, he just stood on the center line and made all his calls from there.

  After considering the matter for half a quarter or so Sonny concluded that peg shots were the only feasible tactic. He was simply too weak to dodge the blocks the Paducah boys were throwing. From then on, every time he got the ball he threw it at the backboard he was attacking. At the very worst it slowed down Paducah’s scoring. The other Thalia players were quick to see the wisdom of such an offense and in five minutes they were all doing it. Whoever caught the throw-in after a Paducah score would immediately whirl and throw a full-court peg shot. The only one it didn’t work for was Leroy Malone: the big Paducah center anticipated him, caught the ball, and threw a ten-yard peg shot right at Leroy’s groin. It hurt so bad he later told Sonny he was unable to jack off for two weeks.

  The groin shot drew such sustained applause from the Paducah bleachers that Sonny was angered. Mr. Wean had failed to see that it was a deliberate foul: indeed, Mr. Wean was seeing less and less all the time. Thalia’s peg-shot offense confused him—he had to keep turning around and around to keep up with the ball. After a while this made him so dizzy that he simply stopped and stood facing the Thalia goal—most of the Paducah team was down there anyway, catching the peg shots and throwing them back. Mr. Wean felt that he had somehow got involved in a game of ante over, and he didn’t like it. He had a fat wife and all he really wanted to do was stay in the home ec classroom and teach young, small-breasted girls how to make pies. Instead he was standing on the center line, sweating and wishing the quarter would end. Suddenly, Sonny had an irresistible urge to chunk somebody. He unleashed a flat, low peg shot that caught Mr. Wean squarely in the back of the head and sent him sprawling.

  The Thalia bench, boys and girls alike, arose with shrieks and cheers, their jubilation all the more noticeable because of the moment of total silence in the Paducah bleachers. The shot instantly made Sonny a celebrity, but it also scared hell out of him and his teammates who were on the floor at the time. They rushed over and tried to help Mr. Wean up, but his legs were like rubber. He had to be dragged off the floor. Paducah’s assistant football coach was called in to referee the rest of the game—by the time he got his tennis shoes on, the hometown bleachers had recovered from their shock and were clamoring for Sonny’s blood. He knew his only hope was to foul out immediately and get to the bench. While he was trying to decide on the safest way to foul, Coach Popper came to his rescue and took him out.

  “Good lick,” the coach said. “Nobody but a queer would teach home ec anyway.”

  From there on things were dismal for the Thalia five. Duane fouled out before the quarter ended, leaving no one but Joe Bob and the freshmen to play the fourth
quarter. Paducah was ahead 88 to 14. Coach Popper got so mad at the freshmen that he couldn’t see; he almost strangled himself tugging at the towel around his neck. He sent Sonny in again but Sonny quickly threw a couple of light body blocks and fouled out. That left Joe Bob and the freshmen to do the best they could. For the remainder of the game they never once managed to get the ball into their end of the court. As soon as they threw it in, the Paducah players took it away from them and made another goal. In five minutes the score was 110 to 14 and Coach Popper called time out. A huddle was in order.

  “I tell you,” the coach said philosophically, “let’s just forget about winning and try to hold the score down. We’re gonna get beat over a hundred points if we ain’t careful. Oaks, you throw the ball into Joe Bob and Joe Bob, as soon as you get it lay down with it. That way they’ll have to tie it up and jump for it every time. That’ll slow ’em down a little.”

  The tactic worked fine the first time it was tried. Joe Bob swallowed the ball and Paducah had to tie it up to get possession. It took them about forty seconds to score. Thalia tried it again and three Paducah players gang-piled Joe Bob as he went down. He had to be carried off. The freshman who shot his free throw for him was so scared he barely got the ball halfway to the basket.

  Joe Bob’s injury left the four freshmen alone on the field for the last few minutes of the game. None of them wanted to swallow the ball and get gang-piled so they did what they could to cooperate with Paducah. The final score was 121 to 14.

  “Well, hell, at least my B team got some experience,” Coach Popper said. “Might as well look on the bright side. Let’s go to the bus.”

  Basketball defeats weighed very lightly on the coach: football was the only sport that really counted. Ten minutes later he was flopped down in his bus seat, sound asleep.

  The boys sat in a stupor for the first twenty miles or so, trying to get used to feeling safe again. Besides, Old Lady Fowler, the girls’ coach, was still awake and they could not start to work on the girls until she dropped off. She went to sleep as they were pulling out of Vernon, and from there on it was dog-eat-dog.