Leaving Cheyenne

by Larry McMurtry

  “No, I just like to know the feller I’m working for. If I’m working for a sex maniac, I want to know about it.”

  “That ain’t it,” he said. “You just got the damn nostalgia. You wish you was young enough to have a shot at Annie agin yourself.”

  “You damn right I am,” I said. “And kiss my butt. I was better off then than I am now, it don’t take no college degree to know that.”

  “Maybe you were and maybe you weren’t,” he said. “I know one thing, them times were hard. You couldn’t drag me back.”

  I just snorted. “Okay,” I said. “How about if I could show you Molly, looking like she looked in 1924. I don’t guess that would tempt you none.”

  That hit him right on the sore spot; I knew it would. I stood up and brushed the dirt off my pants.

  “Well, that might change my mind all right,” he said.

  I was sorry I said it. I could remember how she looked in 1924 myself.

  “You want me to bring the water can?” I said.

  “Naw, we ain’t gonna work very long. Take a big drink.”

  We started back down the fence row, with him a little in the lead. I stumbled and like to fell; memories had kept me from seeing the ground.

  “She could make my mouth water,” I said.

  “I’d just as soon not think about it,” he said. “I’ll be glad when I get that operation. My kidneys shore do ache.”

  “You don’t reckon Molly will really get upset about the way we run this fence, do you?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “But then I never could predict Molly very well. Anything that’s connected with her dad she’s touchy about.”

  When we got to the working place, Gid began to tamp the posts and I began to dig. The damn ground was so hard it took me half a dozen licks to get through the top crust, and then the sandrock started. I don’t know how long we worked, but after a while I looked up and seen the old red sun sitting right on top of Squaw Mountain, ten miles away. That brought her back too. When we were young it was an awful good picnicking place—there was supposed to be an Indian woman buried there, and me and Molly spent many an afternoon looking for her grave. Squaw Mountain was where the rattlesnake bit her. It wasn’t even coiled but it got her right in the fat part of her calf. She shut her eyes when I got ready to cut around the bite; I barely had the nerve to do it. “If you don’t I won’t be your girl,” she said, and I went ahead. While I was working the tourniquet she kissed me. “I’m still your girl,” she said. I had the devil of a time getting her home.

  “She’s going down, Gid,” I said. “Let’s quit.”

  He leaned on his tamping bar a minute, looking at the sun. He was so hot he was sweating on the ears. “One more hole,” he said. I dug it and he dropped the post in and tamped it while I took my sweaty shirttail out so the evening cool would get to my belly.

  “That’s a day,” he said. He dropped the tamping bar and stood there leaning on the post, panting a little and glaring at me.

  “What’s the matter?” I said. “Wasn’t that hole deep enough?”

  He snorted through his nose. “You never have believed how bad that hailstorm was,” he said. “Out in New Mexico, living with an Indian woman. Your old man never made a bushel of wheat that year.”

  “So what,” I said. “He knew about hail when he decided to plant the stuff in the first place.” But I guess I should have been sorry where it concerned Dad. The hailstorm turned Dad back into a poor man, and that turned him into a drunkard. But I guess if the hail hadn’t, something else would have.

  Gid picked up the crowbar and I shouldered my diggers, and we started back up the fence row.

  “Nearly seven o’clock,” I said. “Too many hours for an old-timer like you to work. You ain’t no wild coyote any more.”

  “You’re no young stud yourself,” he said.

  We made it to the lots and pitched our fencing stuff in the back of the pickup. Gid flipped a coin to see which one of us would drive, and he won. He was an expert coin flipper, or else the luckiest man alive. He never had to drive over once a month.

  “Don’t run over that rock,” he said, after we started off.

  “You just settle down,” I said. “I’m driving this vehicle, now. Tomorrow, is it, you’re taking your granddaughter to the picture show?”

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “Snow White. Get you in a good game of dominos.”

  I drove out of the pastures and onto the highway. “Pretty sundown,” Gid said. “Looky how the sky’s lit up. Looks like somebody set the world on fire.”

  “It wasn’t neither one of us that done it,” I said. But the sky was awful bright, over west of Thalia. The whole west side of the sky was orange and red.

  “I wish we had time to go by and see Molly,” he said. “Maybe we can day after tomorrow.”

  two

  Three days later, I met Gid on the road. He never showed up in the morning, so after I ate my dinner I decided I’d go in to the domino hall and play a little. I didn’t figure he was coming; but I just shouldn’t have figured. Before I got halfway to town I seen his car, about two hills up the road, coming like sixty: I knew right then I’d made the trip for nothing.

  Usually, when I met him on the road, he’d come flying over some hill and get nearly by me before he even seen the pickup, much less recognized it. I’d get to watch him go skidding by, cussing and talking to himself. I always just stopped my vehicle and waited: there wasn’t no sense in both of us trying to back up in a narrow road, no better than either one of us could drive. Gid would grind into reverse and back he’d come, leaning out the window and spitting cigar and backing as fast as a six-cylinder Chewy would back. Usually he would swerve off in the bar ditch a time or two, and run over a beer bottle or an old railroad tie somebody had thrown out to get rid of. Most of the time the damage wasn’t serious. Some times were worse than others.

  It had rained that morning, and I met him right at the top of the hill by Jamison Williams’ goat pasture. The old claytop hill was a little slippery. Gid went somewhere down the south side of the hill getting stopped. I kept one foot on the clutch and the other on brake and sat there on my side of the hill, waiting. In a minute I heard the gears grind, and then I seen the back end of the Chewy come over the hill. I saw right off it was coming in sight too fast and too far to the west, so I pushed in on my clutch and rolled on down out of the way. It looked like what happened was Gid’s hands were sweaty and slipped off the wheel. Anyhow, the Chewy went into a slide and came sideslipping down the hill and kinda bounced the bar ditch and went through Jamison’s fence and made a little dido and came back through another part of the fence and headed for the road agin. Only by then it was slowed too much to bounce the ditch, and it hit the soft dirt and turned over.

  Well, when I seen that I jumped out of the pickup and ran over and yanked open the first door I came to and helped Gid out. The glove compartment had come open and he was practically buried in maps and beer openers and pliers and old envelopes; he kept that glove compartment about as full as Fibber McGee kept his hall closet.

  “Are you hurt, Gid?” I said. The only thing I could see was a big skinned place on his nose. It didn’t look deep, but the blood was dripping on his new gray shirt. “Is your nose broke?” I said.

  “No, goddamnit!” he said. “Get to hell away if you can’t do nothing but stand there asking questions.”

  “You must have bumped the windshield,” I said.

  “Hell, I bumped the whole damn roof,” he said.

  “Don’t talk,” I said. “Sit down here a minute. You was just in a wreck, don’t you realize that?”

  But he went walking up the hill, bending over so his nose wouldn’t drip on his shirt. He acted like he was going on to the ranch, afoot. “Hey,” I said. “Don’t go walking off that way. Your insides may be hurt.”

  “I lost my cigar coming down here somewheres,” he said. “I just got it lit and I don’t intend to let it go to waste.” N
ow if that wasn’t consistent. I sat down on the Chewy and he went on and found his cigar and came back.

  “Get up from there,” he said. “Get the pickup and chain and we’ll drag this sonofabitch out.”

  I got up and looked around, and if it wasn’t just my luck. When I jumped out of my pickup I plumb forgot about it and the bastard had rolled off in the east bar ditch and stuck itself tight as a wedge. Gid was moderately mad when he seen he had two vehicles not fifty feet apart that wouldn’t neither one budge.

  “Shit,” he said. “Looks like you could have taken time to stop that pickup, Johnny. I guess if I was chasing a herd of cattle and my horse fell, you’d just bail off and let the horses and cattle go.”

  “I might,” I admitted. “There ain’t much telling what I’ll do.” A kid would have known better than to leave that pickup out of gear.

  “I thought I heard you yell at me when you went through the fence,” I said. “That’s what made me in such a big hurry.”

  “Aw, you got to do something when you’re running over a fence,” he said. “I just yelled to be yelling. What do you think I’m paying you for?”

  “Damned if I know,” I said. “I haven’t worked for you but thirty-eight years, you ain’t had time yet to tell me what you wanted me to do.”

  “Well, it’s not for driving into the domino parlor every day, that’s for sure,” he said.

  “I thought I better come in and get the news,” I said. “The country could have gone to war, for all I knowed.”

  “You got a radio,” he said.

  “Yes, but when I turn it on I don’t get nothing but music or static. And most of the time I’d rather listen to the static.”

  “Okay,” he said, “Don’t stand out there in the road arguing with me all day. Let’s dig her out.”

  “Which one?” I said.

  “Yours. It wouldn’t do no good to dig mine, it would still be wrong side up when we got it dug.”

  “Dig her out yourself, by god,” I said. I thought the car wreck must have driven him out of his mind. “Why, there’s a tractor at the Henrys’, not two mile away. I can go get it and be back before we could get the shovel sharp.”

  “Dig her out, by god,” he said. “I don’t intend to borrow from the Henrys.”

  But just then a hundred or so of Jamison Williams’ goats came out of a post-oak thicket and made for the hole in the fence. When Gid seen them coming it sobered him in a minute.

  “Run,” he said. “Let’s stop up them holes or them bastards will be all over the country and we’ll have to round them up.”

  And by god they would. Goats could hide in weeds and badger holes where it would take you a week to find one, much less a hundred.

  “Get your rope,” he said. “Maybe we can string it between the posts.”

  “I’ve seen eight wire fences that couldn’t stop a goat,” I said. “What good do you think a lariat rope would do?”

  “Okay,” he said. “You take the north hole and I’ll take the south.”

  “Take it and do what with it?” I said. “You don’t mean patch it, do you?”

  “Goddamn, Johnny,” he said. “Ain’t you got any initiation at all! Have I got to tell you ever move to make?”

  “If you mean go-ahead, I don’t guess I got any,” I said. “You whipped that out of me long ago.”

  He went trotting over to the south hole, no faster than I could walk. I guess he thought he was running. I walked on to my hole and stood there.

  “Wave your hands and yell,” he said.

  “Gid,” I said. “Why don’t you try out for the Olympics? You were really picking them up and laying them down. I’d hate to think what would happen if something got after you someplace where there wasn’t nothing to climb.”

  But he was mad enough to bite somebody, and I was the only one handy, so I shut up. We made what noise we could, and it kept the most of them from just walking right on through. But the old Chewy had cut a pretty wide dido, and there was about thirty yards of fence between me and him. It wasn’t exactly hole, but it wasn’t no goat fence, either. Gid was yelling like the Choctaw nation, but one old billy went right on through. I thought Gid might call up an ambulance or the volunteer firemen, though. The old billy stood in the road blatting and trying to get the rest to follow him.

  “Chunk that sonofabitch,” Gid yelled. I couldn’t find nothing to throw but a clod, and I missed with it. Gid was farther up the hill, where there was more sandrock, and he begin giving the old goat hell. Only about the fourth throw he led him too much and the sandrock went sailing right on through the rear window of the pickup and rattled around in the cab.

  “Goddamn,” he said. “Of all the places you could have stopped that pickup.”

  “Of all the places you could have thrown that rock,” I said. “If it broke that bottle of screwworm dope I had sitting in the seat, I’m quitting you for good. I don’t intend to ride along smelling that stuff for the rest of my life.”

  About then the rest of the goats decided to move. They spread out and come for the fence like a covey of quail. We did our best to turn them, but there wasn’t no way, short of actually grabbing hold. I wasn’t in the mood to wrestle no Jamison Williams goat, so I stood there and tried to get a count on the ones that went through.

  Gid gave up the hardest of any man I ever saw. He grabbed a nannie and fought her around and got her turned and then let her go and grabbed an old billy. The minute he did the nannie whipped around like a bobcat and jumped the bar ditch and run down the road a ways and jumped the off bar ditch and went on through the barbed-wire fence into the brush and was gone. Gid and the old billy went to the ground. It looked like Gid was getting the worst of it, only sometimes Gid had more stubbornness to him than a billy goat. A lot more, actually. It ain’t no exaggeration to say he was the stubbornest man I ever knew, except his dad. It ain’t no miscompliment, either. He was determined that at least one goat was going to stay in Jamison’s pasture, and by god one did. We tied him with our belts, and Gid sat on him.

  Gid sure did look worn out. He looked so old all of a sudden it worried me. His hat had got mashed in the struggle and was laying off to one side; he leaned over to reach for it and the old goat hunched and over Gid went, on his face. It wasn’t particularly funny, and I reached down to help him up, but he wouldn’t move.

  “I’ll just stay down awhile,” he said. “I ain’t no good when I’m up noways. I can’t even stay on a tied-down goat.”

  I remembered the time, up on the plains, when Gid had ridden eighteen wild horses in one day. Falling off the goat was a real comedown. He sat there on the ground, wiping his skint nose on his shirt sleeve. I handed him his hat.

  “And take this handkerchief, too,” I said. “You’ll get infected wiping that nose on your shirt.”

  “Don’t give a damn if I do,” he said.

  “Maybe it won’t be so bad,” I said. “Maybe Jamison’s got those goats trained to come to a horn.”

  “Aw, you couldn’t call them up with an elephant horn,” he said.

  I never knew there was such a thing as an elephant horn, but I didn’t say so. I squatted down on my hunkers. The old billy thought he was plumb to the high and lonesome, since he’d got rid of Gid, and he went hunching along the ground on one side.

  “If I had the money, I’d just buy them goats,” Gid said. “Then we could let them go, and anybody found one would be welcome to it.”

  “We’ll get ’em a few at a time,” I said. “Jamison oughtn’t to be in no hurry.”

  Jamison was the slowest white man either of us had ever seen, and pretty near the most worthless. He kept him a little herd of sorry Mississippi cows, that he let run loose on the road in the summertime. Ever evening his old lady and his boys would have to get out and gather them up. I’ve seen them many a time, moving the herd, Jamison poking along behind in his old blue Dodge, and Judith and the boys driving the cattle down the road afoot.

  “Oh hell,” G
id said. “He’s slow, but he ain’t dumb. He’ll figure out how much to charge us for this fence. If you had just have stayed home a few more minutes, all this never would have happened.”

  “No, nor if you had started a few minutes sooner. Same difference. If you could drive worth a shit it wouldn’t have happened anyway. Whoever heard of a grown man letting his car get out of control that way?”

  “I have,” he said. “It happens all the time.”

  I noticed he kept rubbing his elbow, like something was wrong with it. Finally I asked him about it.

  “Why nothing’s wrong with it,” he said, and then he looked at it and winced. He rolled up his sleeve and it looked like a rattlesnake had struck him; his elbow was the size of a grapefruit. I guess the blood vessels in it had burst; it was about the color of an old inner tube.

  “That beats all,” I said. “Wrestling with a damn goat and your arm nearly knocked off. Look how black it’s getting.”

  “It’s that damn steering wheel knob,” he said. “It’s as dangerous as a snake. I seen it whipping around at me when I first lost holt of the wheel, but I thought I got out of its way. Reckon my arm’s broke.”

  I figured so. He had done broke that arm three times. One time a whirlwind blew him off the barn roof, and one time a little mean Hereford bull knocked him down. Once I think he even broke it slamming a pickup door on himself.

  “I hear a car,” I said. “I’ll flag them down and they can run you into a hospital. You better get it X-rayed. I’ll stay here and dig that pickup out.” Actually I meant to go on up to the Henrys’ and get that tractor.

  But Gid wouldn’t even get up and walk out to the road. I never seen a man turn down as much good advice as he done.

  “Let them go,” he said. “I’ll rest a minute, and help you dig.”

  “No sir,” I said. “That arm needs tending to.”

  I went out to the road. And of all the people to be coming along just then, it had to be Molly. I knowed it was her before I even seen the car; she always went in to sell her eggs on Friday. And sure enough, it was her old Ford, the only car she’d ever had. We were humiliated for sure, one wrecked and one stuck, and I just turned my back to the road. As proud and contrary as Gid was, he wouldn’t ride in with her if his jugular vein was cut.