Rhino Ranch

by Larry McMurtry

  “Why not? If I can do it so can you,” Duane said.

  “Dern, that’s nice of you, buddy,” Bobby said, once he thought it over. He then blew his nose and seemed close to tears.

  “We’ll have to pick out our courses pretty soon,” Duane said.

  “Courses? Why can’t we start with just one?” Bobby Lee wondered.

  “Well, now that you mention it, just one might be a good idea.”

  “My brain feels tired already,” Bobby said, at which point Duane thought he had better let the matter rest.

  3

  “I WENT TO THE Colorado School of Mines,” Dal said. “I wanted to know what was in the earth, and now I do know. How was the curry?”

  She was giving dinner to Duane and Bobby Lee at the tiny table in her room.

  “It was the second hottest meal I ever ate,” Bobby said. “And I lapped up every bite of it, ma’am.”

  “You don’t have to call me ma’am,” she said, with a mischievous look at Duane. He had never seen her look mischievous before.

  “I am not Scarlett O’Hara,” she added.

  Neither Duane nor Bobby could immediately place Scarlett O’Hara.

  “Gone With the Wind,” Dal said. “Very popular in Asia. What have you eaten that is hotter than my curry?”

  “There’s a little Indian tribe in El Paso,” Bobby explained. “They are the Tigua. They have a cafeteria that serves chili that’s hotter than this curry. They say no whites can tolerate it. I didn’t know that when I ordered the chili but I found it out pretty quick.”

  “The same would happen if you came to my village in Thailand,” Dal said. “There they make a curry that it would not be wise for you to eat.”

  They had come to dinner at Dal’s with the understanding that she would help them choose courses for the run they intended to make on college.

  When news of their intention leaked out they were soon the laughingstock of Thalia.

  “Them two don’t want an education,” one wag said. “They just want a chance at young pussy.”

  Duane had secured a copy of the continuing education curriculum for the fall term and gave it to Dal, who glanced at it and handed it back.

  “Do either of you like math?” she asked.

  Both shook their heads decisively.

  “There is a philosophy class that sounds just right for you,” Dal said. “Pre-Socratics to Wittgenstein,” she said. “If you took it you could talk more intelligently with your grandson.”

  “Who would be a philosopher I might have heard of, other than Willy Moore?” Bobby asked.

  “Of course there’s Plato and Aristotle,” Dal said. “Everybody knows about them.”

  “Well, nearly everybody,” Duane qualified.

  “I’m an oilman who barely finished high school,” Duane said. “How would I know about old-timey folks?”

  Dal had quit smiling. She was looking at them soberly—a look that carried some weight.

  “I realize something that I didn’t realize before,” Dal said. “It is something sad, I’m afraid.”

  “You don’t think we’re smart enough to go to college?” Bobby Lee asked.

  “Oh, you’re smart enough—plenty smart enough,” she said. “But you are not curious enough. That is the problem. If you are not curious enough and do not really want to learn then there is no reason for you to learn. You would just be a burden on the teacher.”

  Duane felt distressed. Now he had disappointed Dal.

  “Maybe you’re being too hasty,” Duane said. “We’ve only had a day or two to get used to the notion that we could be students. Maybe we’ll discover that we are curious about some of the things they teach in college.”

  Dal brightened at once.

  “That is a possibility—thank you,” she said. “I was too ready to accept defeat. I have had a hard life, with much defeat in it and I have come to expect it, I guess.

  “I probably have some survivor’s guilt,” she added.

  “What’s that?” Bobby asked. “It sounds like the very thing I’ve suffered from all my life.”

  Dal looked at them both, thoughtfully.

  “You should think about it a little,” she said. “Maybe they do teach something you are curious about.”

  “I sure hope so,” Duane said.

  “I hope so too, boss,” Dal said, wrinkling her nose in amusement.

  4

  DUANE GOT THROUGH to Willy on the third try. He sounded sleepy, but he listened as his grandfather mentioned that he might be enrolling in college, along with Bobby Lee.

  “I have a hard time seeing either one of you in a classroom,” Willy admitted. “But I think Dal may have had a good idea.”

  “So what about Plato and Aristotle?” Duane asked. “Do you think either of us could get interested in them?”

  “Not a chance,” Willy said. “I don’t mean to be harsh but I don’t think two old Greeks would really grab either one of you.”

  “Maybe we should give it up and just go on being rednecks,” Duane said.

  “I don’t know—I’d like to meet Dal, but I’m going to Mount Athos during my break,” Willy said. “One of the dons is taking three of us.”

  “What’s Mount Athos?”

  “It’s the Holy Mountain in Greece—getting on it is hard. No hippies are welcome, so I’ll have to cut my hair. But it might be worth it. Chances to visit the Holy Mountain are rare—I don’t want to miss it. Some of the monasteries there have been there since the sixth century—imagine that.”

  “That doesn’t mean I’ll forget about you and Bobby,” Willy said. “There must be something teachable you and Bobby could get interested in.”

  “I hope so,” Duane said. “Dal will be disappointed if we don’t.”

  5

  LATER IN THE DAY Duane and Bobby Lee decided to ponder the matter of their lack of curiosity from the restful security of a boat. They chose Lake Arrowhead for their pondering place. They put lines in the water but had little hope of catching much—it was not the croppie season.

  “I wonder if they have a course in fishing, there at Midwestern,” Bobby mentioned. “I bet I’d get an A if I took a course in fishing.”

  “Oh, there’s lots of bass schools if that’s all you want to try,” Duane said. “Of course the slobs who teach bass fishing are even more ignorant than us. You’re a record holder after all. You’d end up teaching them all your fine techniques.

  “Willy left me a message saying we should think about literature,” Duane went on.

  “You mean like study Louis L’Amour?” Bobby asked.

  “I looked through the curriculum and I didn’t see his name,” Duane said.

  “Of course there’s mysteries—I like Mike Hammer well enough.”

  “His name wasn’t on the list, either.”

  “What kind of silly damn university, that they don’t teach Mike Hammer or Louis L’Amour?”

  “The kind that’s the only one in driving distance,” Duane reminded him. “I talked to Willy today and he said I should try to read a book called Don Quixote. He said Dal would probably agree.”

  “What’s that one about?” Bobby Lee asked.

  “Windmills, I think,” Duane said.

  6

  DUANE AND BOBBY both felt a little uncomfortable going in the bookstore at the mall in Wichita Falls. Mainly their reading consisted of fishing and hunting magazines, and these were available at the Kwik-Sack in Thalia.

  When they walked up to a counter and asked for a book called Don Quixote, the pert little salesgirl laughed at them.

  “That’s not how you say it—don’t you guys know any Spanish?”

  “Why would we, is this Mexico?” Bobby Lee said, though he knew it was a dumb answer—the Great Plains were filling up with Hispanics right before their eyes, and had been for some time.

  “He didn’t mean it—he knows there’s lots of Hispanics here,” Duane said.

  “Don Quixote is not Mexican, it’s Spani
sh and it’s about an old crazy man and his friend, and was published in the early seventeenth century,” the girl went on. She was quite pretty—Bobby Lee was happy to play ignorant to keep her interest though in fact he was ignorant.

  “There are several translations—which do you prefer?”

  “Just any one that’s in English,” Duane said.

  “I wasn’t going to give you one in Croatian,” she said, and went and got the book, which was very thick, though, Duane thought, not as thick as Proust.

  “You wouldn’t think there could be this much to write about windmills,” Bobby Lee said. “In my experience windmills are either working or they’re broke.”

  “I hope we’re not getting in over our heads,” Duane said.

  “I liked that girl at the counter,” Bobby Lee said. “I wonder what her situation is?”

  “Let’s worry about our situation first,” Duane said.

  7

  “MAYBE WE ARE just a little too old to be educated,” Duane suggested, after he and Bobby Lee had been more or less stymied by Don Quixote. The prefatory matter quickly brought them to a halt. Neither had ever seen a book of chivalry and were none too clear about what chivalry was.

  “Opening doors for ladies, I thought,” Bobby Lee said.

  “Maybe we can skip ahead and find the part about windmills,” Duane said. “Windmills were in common use when we were younger, remember?”

  “I know and they’re trying to bring back wind chargers, but it don’t help me read this boring book.

  “I’m beginning to think I might just not be college material,” he said. “Which was why I never went to college in the first place.”

  Duane was feeling much the same about himself. Try as he might, he could not get interested in Don Quixote, which was set so far back in time that he could find no way to connect with it. The famous incident of the windmills, when they finally found it, left them puzzled.

  “Where’s the mystery?—that old man is just crazy,” Bobby said. “If he can’t tell a giant from a windmill why should we read all this guck about him?”

  “Nobody likes a person who gives up easy,” Duane reminded him.

  “I did notice that the peon had more sense than the old man,” Bobby said. “Just like I got more sense than you.”

  “Maybe we could scan that list of college courses again—there might be something easier than literature,” Duane suggested.

  “It’s just because you’ve got the hots for Dal—that’s why we’re doing this, ain’t it?”

  “I’ve got a poor record with women,” Duane replied.

  “You’ve got a poor record? What about me?” Bobby asked.

  “What about evolution?” Duane asked. Scanning the curriculum he came to in the biology section and noticed evolution stuck in with the rest of the biology.

  “Good lord, Duane,” Bobby Lee said. “Most of the locals hate us anyway—how bad do you think they’d hate us if it got out that we think the Bible is lies and we all came from monkeys?”

  “If evolution is that simple why would there need to be courses in it at a college?”

  At that point the conversation lapsed, and so did their effort to read Don Quixote.

  They were nervous about what Dal might think, but Dal, tactfully, held her peace, and, from time to time, continued to invite them over to eat her excellent food.

  8

  DESPITE THEIR DEFEAT by Don Quixote, Bobby Lee wasted no time in asking the perky salesgirl for a date.

  “You have to remember I’m three years younger than you, Duane,” Bobby Lee said. “It’s why my sex drive is stronger than yours.”

  “That and the penile implant,” Duane said.

  “Best investment I ever made, by far,” Bobby said.

  “Sure. What better to invest in than your own dick?”

  They were on their way to Possum Kingdom Lake, where Bobby Lee was hoping to break his own record with an even bigger bass.

  “That girl at the bookshop’s first name is Landry,” Bobby Lee said. “She won’t tell me her last name yet.”

  “I know Dal’s last name but I can’t pronounce it,” Duane said. “I’m happy enough just to call her Dal.”

  He thought of Dal a lot and wanted to ask her out, but somehow she didn’t seem like the dating type, and, anyway, as she herself had observed, there was no nice place to take her and certainly no place where the food would pass muster with someone who cooked as well as Dal.

  Besides, Dal had a family in Asia. She had not mentioned a husband, but she was naturally reticent. There could be a husband, though somehow Duane doubted it.

  In such a mood Possum Kingdom was perhaps the best place for both of them to be. He asked Bobby Lee to stop by his cabin so he could get his lure box, which took only a minute to snatch, but then, as they were leaving, the road leading back to the highway suddenly turned into a cloud of white dust.

  “Who could that be?” Bobby asked.

  “It could be Boyd Cotton, driving that herd of nilgai K.K. left behind when she got out of the rhino business,” Duane said, and he was right. A piece of pasturage to the north had been purchased for the nilgai, which K.K. thought could be made commercially popular.

  Boyd was not so much driving as he was leading the nilgai. Behind, in the dust, were the Hartman brothers, bringing up what strays attempted to oppose their removal.

  “Hi, Boyd,” Duane said. “How’s the nilgai business?”

  “Better than the rhino business,” Boyd said. “We’re thinking of expanding.”

  “We?”

  “Me and K.K.,” Boyd said. “I guess you heard that she’s moving back to town. She’s bought that old hotel and aims to fix it up and run things from it.”

  “Well, good,” Duane said. “Things in these parts are just livelier when K.K.’s around.

  “Any other news?” Duane asked.

  “Nope—but I like working nilgai,” Boyd said. “They’re not as lively as cattle but at my age I probably couldn’t handle too much lively,” Boyd said.

  “Are we going fishing or not?” Bobby Lee asked.

  9

  THE NEXT DAY Duane spotted K.K. on the roof of the old hotel. A horde of workmen were there and a big cement mixing truck was just backing up to the rear of the building.

  “Hi, Duane,” K.K. said. “I’m going to have a lap pool put on the roof of my hotel, which is going to look a lot different when I’m done with it.”

  “A which, you’re going to have built?” Duane asked.

  “A lap pool—it’s just a narrow pool—you swim to one end and then swim back.”

  “Exercise, in other words,” Duane said.

  “That’s right. Are you still walking?”

  “I walk some,” he said. “Why?”

  “You look a little paunchy, that’s why,” K.K. said. “You should consider upping the walks. You’re at the wrong age to let yourself go.”

  She looked at him in a friendly, if a sort of intense way. She asked about Willy and smiled when he told her Willy was in Oxford.

  “I studied in Paris for two years,” she said. “I studied some of that intense stuff Willy’s studying.”

  Then she looked at him again.

  “I think I know what’s wrong with you,” she said. “You’ve lost your sense of purpose. That happens to most of us at some point or another.”

  Duane was startled, mainly because he knew immediately that what K.K. said was true. A sense of purpose is exactly what he had lost.

  “You’re right,” he said. “I don’t feel necessary anymore.

  “I guess the truth is I’m not necessary.”

  “You would be if I hired you to run the Rhino Ranch.”

  “I thought you was out of that.”

  “I gave the South Africans their chance but there’s too much I don’t like about their program,” she said. “I think I’m going local again. What are you and Bobby Lee doing at the moment?”

  “We kinda want to stay
in college but it wouldn’t be hard to talk us out of it,” he said.

  “Waste of time, maybe I can interest you in the Rhino Ranch again,” she said.

  A swarm of workmen were at work on what had been the old Mitchell Hotel and one of them caught her attention.

  As he started to walk off K.K. grabbed his arm.

  “I’m throwing a big feed tonight to announce my return,” she said. “You and Bobby come. We’ve got a steer’s head buried and we’re cooking it in the old vaquero way, along with a couple of goats.”

  “What’s the vaquero way?”

  “We open the skull and eat the brains with some tortillas,” she said. “Some sissies won’t eat brains because of mad cow but I figure something else will get me first and brains, cooked right, are delicious—ask the French.”

  Far down the road from the south they spotted a car.

  “Here comes my sweetie,” K.K. said. “We got married, you know—don’t you read the papers?”

  “Not recently,” he admitted. “You married Hondo?”

  “Sure did—the billionairess and the Texas Ranger. Don’t you even watch TV?”

  “I thought he had a wife, Hondo,” he said.

  “Divorced,” she said. She lives in Bullhead City now, in an elegant condo,” K.K. said. “And I’m married to the man I’ve had a crush on since I was eight or nine.”

  She turned to address another workman and Duane hurried over to Bobby’s pickup.

  “Just drive, Bobby, and don’t look to the right or left,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause you might see something you won’t believe, and then you’ll think the world’s crazy,” Duane said.

  But his injunction came too late.

  The Lincoln Town Car with Hondo Honda in it passed them. To their shock Hondo was sitting in the back seat, looking regal if still gaunt, and in front, driving, was a chauffeur in a suit and tie.

  “You’re right, I just seen something I don’t believe,” Bobby Lee said.

  “I told you not to look,” Duane said.