Leaving Cheyenne

by Larry McMurtry

  Johnny, though, he wasn’t worrying; they wasn’t his cattle.

  “Me for some shut-eye,” he said. “I wonder if that roughneck ever woke up.”

  It was an awful small, bare room we got, without no bathroom and with one of the littlest beds you ever saw.

  “You mean we paid fifty cents apiece just to get a little old bed like that?” I said. “Hell, I slept in a bigger bed than that when I was a baby.”

  Johnny could sleep anywhere; he pulled off his boots and lay down. “Which you want,” he said, “top or bottom? There ain’t room enough for sideways.”

  But I thought I’d look at the street a minute, and when I let the windowshade up I seen it was daylight.

  “Why, it’s morning,” I said. “Get up and let’s go look for those cattle.”

  But he was done asleep and I went on without him. I figured I could do as well by myself anyway.

  When I got back to the yards things looked a lot more cheerful; the sun was up and the cattle were bawling and people were charging around everywhere. They had big wide planks nailed on top of the fences, so you could just walk around above the pens and see the cattle without having to get down in the cowshit. I found my cattle in about ten minutes, and was I relieved. There was even a feller with them filling up the hayrack with hay. Them yards was really run right. The hay feller turned out to be a sourpuss.

  “Howdy,” I said. “I sure am glad to see those cattle.”

  “You’re the Fry boy, ain’t you?” he said.

  “Gideon Fry. I’m glad to meet you.”

  “Why’d the hell you sleep so late?” he said. “You done missed two good chances to sell these cattle already. Your dad, now, he was always out at the yards by daybreak.”

  I never cared much to take a chewing out from an old fat hay hauler in a corduroy cap, so I asked him which way the buyers went. He got up on the fence and pointed one out to me, way across the yards. He bought for Swift & Armour, it turned out. I went over and introduced myself, and I’ll be damned if he didn’t buy the cattle right there, for a dime a pound. He took me right on in the Exchange building after the cattle were weighed and gave me a check. So that was that. I was so surprised I felt lightheaded; I had expected a hell of a day’s work selling them cattle. It was just an hour after sunup and they were already sold.

  There was a little lunch counter over in one corner of the big rotunda of the Exchange building, and I went over and bought myself a cup of coffee and set down with it. I just set there, feeling good, drinking the hot coffee; I felt like I could handle anything.

  By then it was seven o’clock on a Monday morning, and the floor of the Exchange building was swirling with people. There was a big blackboard over on one wall and two men were at it all the time with chalk and erasers, marking up reports of prices and the number of cattle and whatnot at all the other big markets, Chicago and Kansas City and Omaha and I don’t remember where else. The big cattlemen were stomping around the lobby, making deals and ordering people around. You could tell them right off from the just plain cowboys, even if they dressed alike. The cattlemen were the ones giving orders and acting like Dad acts, and the cowboys were taking orders and going off every which way to carry them out. I heard one feller, he was standing about ten feet from me, make a deal for over a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of cattle, and he was just standing there drinking coffee, like me. Watching them big operators made an impression on me. They acted like what they were doing was important, and they did things like they meant them. Nobody was ordering them around, like Dad done me and Johnny. They was their own bosses—they weren’t nasty about it, you could just tell. I guess it was independence. Anyhow, I went and got another cup of good strong hot coffee and set down to think about it. Dad had probably been right about me. Johnny, he could go off and cowboy if he wanted to; I might enjoy going along for a while, but it just wouldn’t suit me for long. I wanted to amount to what all them big boys amounted to.

  In a little while I went down the street a few doors and had breakfast at a little café. I started to go get Johnny, but I decided I might as well let him sleep. I felt like I’d wasted too much time in my life, and that cattle money was burning my pocket. There was all them cattle out in the yards, just waiting for somebody to buy them and make money on them. I intended to go make a little.

  So I went back and spent the day on the yards. I kept expecting Johnny, but he never come, and I didn’t have time to go get him. I had over eight thousand dollars of Dad’s money when I started buying and trading and fooling around. Right off I bought a little bunch of steers and sold them not an hour later for a dollar a hundred profit. Boy, I felt like I was on the way. Only then a damn scoundrel from South Texas sold me another bunch too high. I guess I was tired or something and didn’t look at them good. It was the ruination of me. I had made six hundred dollars on my first little deal and I figured I’d make that much more on the steers. Then I could buy some real good steers to take home to Dad, and I would still have made money. But, by god, if the last bunch wasn’t the worst bunch of cattle I ever bought in my life. When I finally took time to really look them over, I seen how sorry they was, full of pinkeyes and foul foots and crips of one kind and another; looking at them from up above had fooled me. I spent all afternoon trying to sell them: I didn’t dare go home with them. Finally I sold them back to the bastard I bought them from, at a four dollar a hundred loss. I lost twelve hundred dollars right there. During the afternoon I did buy some good steers and arranged to ship them to Henrietta, but that didn’t make up for the twelve hundred dollars. It was just gone. I seen right then I was going to have to pay better attention if I was ever going to make a cattleman. Only I just gave up for that day. Losing that money kinda made me sick. I wanted to whip that South Texas bastard, but I didn’t have a legitimate reason to. He had skinned me fair and square. It just left a bad taste in my mouth.

  About an hour before dark I went through the Exchange building and walked on back to the Longhorn Hotel. It was getting cold agin, and I felt sleepy and lonesome and plumb depressed with the world. Who I really wanted to see right then was Molly, in the worst way. Fort Worth didn’t look like a very cheerful place any more. In fact, when I looked at it close, it looked like the dustiest, ugliest place I’d ever seen, except that town in Kansas where the hospital was. I would have given another twelve hundred dollars to have been back home, eating supper with Molly and listening to her talk.

  But I wasn’t there, and I had lost the money, and that was all there was to it. I sure did feel blue. I went up the stairs to our room, intending to get Johnny up so I could lay down and sleep, but when I opened the door I seen he wasn’t there. And it was such a cold lonesome ugly little old bare room that I didn’t feel like going to sleep in it, even if I was about to drop. The bed never had nothing on it but a little thin green counterpane anyway, and that wouldn’t have kept a midget warm.

  So I went back down stairs and out on the street. The street lights were done on, and they made the town look yellow and full of shadows. I figured Johnny was at the nearest honkytonk, but he wasn’t; I had to go in eight or ten before I found him. Finally I seen him, way back in a bar, sitting at a table with some old feller I didn’t know. They couldn’t hardly see one another for the beer bottles stacked in front of them. Then I recognized the feller he was with: I had heard Dad tell about him. His name was Sam, and he was kind of a stockyards beggar, I guess; he had one real leg and one pegleg, and he wore a boot on the peg just like he did on the real foot. In his younger days he had been a cowboy on some big ranch and had got his leg pinched off between two boxcars, loading cattle one day. Johnny looked in high spirits.

  “Hello, partner,” he said. “Where you been all day? I had me a good nap.”

  “I stayed out on the yards and traded a little,” I said. “Wish I hadn’t. A sonofabitch got the best of me and I lost a lot of Dad’s money. I don’t know what I’m going to do now.”

  “Drink a beer and do
n’t brood,” he said. “Hell, don’t never brood. Sam can show us where and we’ll go lose our virginity; then we can go home plumb busted.”

  “I can show you, sonny,” Sam said. “Call that waitress over here. I’m strangling of thirst.”

  The waitress was a big fat woman in a red skirt; she was too ugly to look at if you could help it. I drank a couple of bottles right quick, but they didn’t improve my spirits none.

  “I wished you’d have come out there,” I said to Johnny. “I needed you. What kind of a hand are you, anyway?”

  “One with sense,” he said. “And I ain’t drunk, either, so quit frowning at me. I wouldn’t get drunk before you did; it wouldn’t be polite. Hell, if I had come out the way I was feeling today, we might have lost everything and really been up shit creek.”

  “I lost enough for both of us,” I said. “Goddamn the luck.”

  “That’s what I say, sonny,” Sam said. “Goddamn the luck. I been saying that for years. Call that waitress over here, I could stand a little more beer, couldn’t you’all?”

  We stood a hell of a lot more of it. I don’t guess we left the place till ten or eleven o’clock, and by that time the table top was full of beer bottles and we had set so many on the floor we were practically surrounded. We left a little alley for the waitress to come through, between me and where Sam was laying. He had slid off on the floor and went to sleep earlier in the evening and was stretched out nice and comfortable with his pegleg boot propped up on one rung of the chair. They had tried to drag him out, but me and Johnny made them let him alone. He had so much of our beer in him, me and Johnny felt like we ought to protect him. We would have fought like hell if anybody had grabbed him.

  About that time, it was funny as hell: we both drank so much beer we got so we couldn’t taste it. I don’t know whether it was being tired or what, but it got so it didn’t taste like beer, it tasted like real good water. And we were both awful thirsty, so we just kept pouring it down and ever now and then peeing some of it out.

  “This is the best damn beerwater I ever drank,” Johnny said. “How’s yours taste?”

  “Fine,” I said. “Just fine. It goes down like twelve hundred dollars.”

  “Quit that damn brooding,” he said, standing up all of a sudden. “Let’s go to the whorehouse so you won’t brood. Let old Sam sleep, we can find it. He don’t need no pussy anyhow.”

  “Let him sleep,” I said. “He don’t need none.”

  I got up too, but then I fell down. I guess I stepped on a damn beer bottle; anyway, down I went. I fell right in about a hundred bottles, and Johnny he reached down meaning to help me and he fell too and there we were, rolling around in the bottles. At first I wanted to cuss, but then we both got tickled; it was kind of fun to lay there knocking empty bottles over, and we just sort of rolled and laughed and knocked the bottles every which way till I happened to notice we wasn’t inside no more. It was colder and there wasn’t any bottles and we were laying behind somebody’s damn automobile.

  “Hell, they threw us out,” I said. “Did they throw you out too?”

  He was up on his hands and knees laughing like mad. “Hell yes, can’t you see me? They threw us both out.”

  “Want to go attack them?” I said. “Get back in the bottles?”

  “Naw. Let’s find the whorehouse.”

  I had forgot about that. Then the next thing this fat streetcar man was shaking me. “You boys need to sleep, go to a damn hotel,” he said. “I’ve carried you far enough.”

  We were standing on a brick street, not very far from the courthouse, and the norther was blowing right down the street at us. Brother, it was cold.

  “There’s the courthouse,” Johnny said. “Want to go there?”

  “No,” I said. “There ain’t no whores in the courthouse, you damn fool.”

  “Might be some in jail,” he said.

  “I guess so,” I said.

  Then we ran into a damn drunk and he took us right to the whorehouse. He was so drunk he couldn’t walk straight; he walked all over the street.

  In the house there was a nice-looking redhead and I was going to be friendliest with her, only when we come in she said, “Here come two cowshits,” and that made us so mad we didn’t go near her. The carpet was so deep it confused me; my boots didn’t make no noise; I thought I was barefoot.

  Johnny just about fell over the banister going up stairs.

  The girl in my room was blond-headed, and I seen her turning back the counterpane on a big white bed. I watched her do that awhile and then I noticed we were laying on the bed and I didn’t have my pants with me, just my socks and shirt. But she didn’t have nothing on at all and she was getting out of the bed instead of in it; I seen her big floppy fanny going across the room and then she hiked up one leg and washed herself at a little dishpan of a thing.

  “That was real nice, sweetheart,” she said. “Now be a darling and help me make up this bed.”

  “We ain’t through already, are we?” I said.

  “Why sure, sugar,” she said. “Can’t you tell by your equipment?”

  I wished then I hadn’t drunk all that beer. Johnny was done downstairs when I got there and we went out.

  “How do you feel?” I said.

  “Horny,” he said.

  “Let’s catch that streetcar, I’m about to freeze.”

  Of course we missed the train we was supposed to catch, so the new cattle got to Henrietta about twelve hours earlier than we did. That shrunk them a little. It was dark when we got there; we spent all night and till nine-thirty the next morning driving them home. We kept getting in thickets all night and like to froze to death, too; both of us looked like Ned when we finally got the cattle home and penned. Dad was in the barn loft when we penned them, and he come down and looked them over.

  “Well, they ain’t the worst cattle I ever seen,” he said. “How’d the other cattle sell?”

  “Good,” I said. “Only I never got home with all the money. I got to cattle-trading and made a little money and let a damn feller skin me and lost all that and twelve hundred dollars besides. Maybe I can work it out in a few years.”

  I expected him to blow up, but he just kept walking around, inspecting the cattle.

  “Got you in a little trading practice, did you?” he said. “Good. You may learn yet.”

  And he put us right to work, branding the new stock. I was so surprised at Dad that I never even minded the work. Dad was one man I never learned to predict.

  eight

  It took us till past the middle of November to recuperate from the trip to Fort Worth. Johnny, he swore off beer drinking forever, but his forevers usually just lasted about a week, and this one wasn’t no exception. I couldn’t enjoy myself much for worrying about when Dad was going to come down on me about the twelve hundred dollars. He just seemed to forget it, and Dad wasn’t the kind to forget that much money.

  One pretty warm fall day we worked like hell dipping cattle and hadn’t much more than got to bed when somebody come riding up to the back gate just a-screaming. I jumped up and grabbed my pants and run out; Dad was done there. It was one of Mabel Peters’ little brothers.

  “Daddy says come tell you our house is on fire,” he said. “Grandma burned it up.”

  We took his word for it. Dad yanked the kid off the horse and told me to take it and get on over there, he would follow and bring the kid in the wagon. So I grabbed a Levi jacket off the back porch and went.

  When I got there it was just a nice campfire left; an old chickenhouse don’t take long to burn. The Peterses were all out in the yard, squatting around patting the dogs and crying: it was the only time in my life I ever saw that family all in one place, and I was surprised at how many of them there was. Six kids younger than Mabel, her momma and dad, and her grandma.

  “Well, she’s gone, Momma,” the old man said. “Now we’ll just have to trust in the Lord.”

  The grandma was taking on the worst; she had started
the fire. She was about ninety-five. One of the boys said she had sloshed some kerosene out of a lamp onto the tablecloth. Mabel’s mother was hysterical because she missed the boy they had sent to our place and thought he was burned up in the fire. There wasn’t any fire fighting to do at all, and it was pretty miserable standing there watching the Peterses try to figure out what they had to go on living with. The old man had run out on the back porch and took out the milk strainer; it probably wouldn’t have burned anyway. One of the boys had grabbed a Montgomery Ward catalogue and let the Bible burn, and Mabel had brought out a dish of pecans that was sitting on the new chair. The chair was the only new thing in the house, but nobody ever thought of grabbing it, and the two littlest boys had already eaten about half the pecans.

  “Well, son,” the old man said, coming over to me, “we’re burned out.”

  “Dad’s coming,” I said. Then I went over and got Mabel and made her squat down close enough to the fire that she could at least keep warm. She was barefoot and never had on very warm clothes.

  Pretty soon people that had seen the fire began to come. Dad was the last one there, but he had filled the wagon up with quilts, coffeepots and stuff to eat, so he done the most good once he come. We raked off a little of the fire and made some coffee, and gave each of the Peterses a quilt.

  “Ain’t it a mess, Gid?” Mabel said. Her teeth were chattering. “Now’s when I wish I was married,” she said, looking at me; the fire lit up her thin little face. She was pretty as could be in the face.

  “If I was married,” she said, “it wouldn’t be so bad. We could all go over to my husband’s house and live.”

  That about made my teeth chatter. I felt sorry for the Peterses, but nobody would have wanted all them kids and old folks swarming into their house.

  “I wisht I’d got the chair,” she said, starting to cry agin. “Why didn’t I get the chair? Instead of the pecans.”