Leaving Cheyenne

by Larry McMurtry

  “Just an inch, Molly said,” he said. “That’s already burned up.”

  “Now just back up,” I said. “You’ve been lying here half-unconscious in an air-conditioned room for ten days, and you’re trying to tell me how hot and dry it is?”

  “I got eyes,” he said. “I can see that lawn out there. They water it ever day and it’s still dry.

  “How’s the cattle?” he said.

  “They all died of blackleg and a whirlwind blew the windmill over,” I said. “How’s that for calamity? When you coming home?”

  “Be out in two days,” he said. “Don’t tell nobody though. They think they’re gonna keep me two more weeks.” Gid was a great one for walking out of hospitals; he’d done it four or five times in his life.

  “Glad to hear it,” I said.

  “Willy’s been driving me crazy,” he said. “Been bothering you?”

  “Not much. I chased him off with some #62 screwworm dope. That the right tactic?”

  “It’ll do till I get out,” he said.

  “Molly said they want you to ease up,” I said.

  “Hell, don’t they always?” he said. “If doctors had their way, the whole world would be sitting on its butt. But I’ll tell you a secret. This is the last hospital I ever intend to go in. If I get to hurting too bad to live, by god I’ll shoot myself, like Dad done. He had the right slant on this business, that’s for sure.”

  “I better give you my present,” I said. I had picked him up a good smooth cedar whittling stick, and I handed it to him. I didn’t figure he’d hurt nobody with it. Once I give him a stockwhip, and the doctors and nurses like to ate me up. They figured he had weapons enough as it was.

  But the stick tickled him to death. “Many thanks,” he said. “Looks like a dandy.”

  About that time the door opened and a little red-headed doctor popped in.

  “Well, how’s the patient?” he said. We didn’t say anything, and he went over and checked the charts. I knew he had come to run me out.

  “Now you’re coming along fine,” he said. “How would it be if this gentleman left, so you could take a little nap?” He said it just a little timidly; I guess he had already had a run-in with Gid.

  “It wouldn’t be worth a damn,” Gid said, popping the stick on the sheet.

  “Well, you know a sick man needs lots of rest,” the doctor said. He wasn’t Gid’s regular man. “I’m sure this gentleman wouldn’t mind leaving.”

  “What do you know about me?” I said. “I might not leave for love nor money.”

  “Get out of here,” Gid said. “I’ve got some business to talk with this man. I’ll sleep when I get sleepy, like I’ve done all my life.”

  “Hospital rules,” the doctor said. “If he won’t leave, we’ll have to show him out.”

  “That’ll be fine,” I said. “Just bring a few pretty nurses to help you.”

  “You old cowboys seem to think the world revolves around you,” he said. “We’ll see about this.” And he left; he was plenty mad.

  Gid was popping his stick against the sheet.

  “That makes me just mad enough to leave,” he said. “Two days or no two days.”

  I didn’t say a word. He looked out the window for a while.

  “Bring the pickup around the side,” he said. “I’ve had my craw full.”

  And twenty minutes later me and him was on the road to Thalia, and everbody but the FBI was after us. The doctors and nurses acted like it was Judgment Day. But Gid didn’t pay them any mind. That Wichita hospital was nothing to the one he walked out of in Galveston one time. That time he chartered a private airplane and had himself flown home. I guess having money is right convenient sometimes.

  “Now I guess you’ll die,” I said. “Only I’ll get the blame for killing you, instead of the doctors.”

  “Oh, I’m all right,” he said. “I’ll have to be careful of my side for a while.”

  “Take you home?”

  “Yeah, I reckon.”

  We drove about fifteen miles and he was feeling a little sore.

  “No, by god, take me to Molly’s,” he said. “If I go home, they’ll just knock me out and haul me back to the hospital. Take me out there. The doctor can come and see me, and you and her can help me fight off the ambulance drivers.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Once you get strong enough to take care of yourself, I can cart you in to town.”

  “You know, I may never get that strong,” he said. “Won’t this surprise Molly?”

  Myself, I figured that question was settled, if he didn’t die before I got him out there. I figured he’d stay right there the rest of his life. Where that left me, I couldn’t tell.

  six

  Getting Gid out tickled us all. I came up the hill to Molly’s honking, so I guess she thought the war was on agin. Coming over those country roads had bounced Gid up enough that I think for a while he was kinda wishing he had stayed where he was; but Molly ran out and we helped him in the house and got him installed in the big south bedroom, where he caught every breeze there was, and he picked up pretty quick. Molly asked him what she could get him, and he said fresh tomatoes, so she sliced him up a bunch fresh from the garden and brought them in to him. He ate tomatoes and drank coffee till he got his spirits back. Late that afternoon his regular doctor showed up and tried to get him to go back, but Gid wouldn’t do it. The doctor had to come out and see about him every day for a while.

  Just getting away from the hospital done Gid a world of good. There was a day or two when he didn’t feel too spry, but in the long run he got better a lot quicker. Molly fed him good and watched after him and made him sleep a lot, and he didn’t have Mabel or Willy always worrying him.

  Of course I had a big run-in with Willy. I had been at the filling station, drinking a Delaware Punch. All the boys got a big laugh out of hearing about Gid. Then I ran into Willy on the sidewalk, and he motioned with his hand for me to stop.

  “Willy, don’t be waving me down,” I said. “I ain’t no motorcar.”

  “I guess you realize what a serious thing you done,” he said. “Taking Gid out of everybody’s reach.”

  “Whose reach?” I said. “The doctor was just out this morning and said he was improving fast.”

  “Well, out of the reach of the people who love him,” he said. “Anyhow, when’s he coming back?”

  “When he gets ready, I guess,” I said. “He told me yesterday he was going to start fencing agin next week. Does that ease your mind?”

  “Not a bit,” he said. “You know he ain’t to work.”

  “Oh sure,” I said. “I know it. But I ain’t agile enough to stop him, are you?”

  “Well, I just wanted to warn you,” he said. “Just don’t you get crosswise with the law. I got some friends who are judges.”

  “You’ll probably need them,” I said, and he left.

  Molly and Gid enjoyed hearing about it. Gid was propped up in bed eating ice cream.

  “I wish there was some way to run him out of the country,” I said. “That’s the damn trouble with democracy. You got to wait around and vote, and then the people are so stupid they put the scroungy sonsofbitches back in office.”

  “I don’t like to hear that kind of talk,” Molly said. She was democracy-crazy.

  Gid handed Molly his ice-cream dish. “Uum,” he said. “This is mighty nice. Only I got to get up from here and start getting a few things accomplished.”

  Molly frowned, but he never noticed; he was already planning. I knew right then he wouldn’t be in bed much longer.

  Molly done wonders, though. She fought him and argued with him and dominoed him and ice-creamed him and kept him down another week. She was working so hard keeping Gid down she was about to get down herself.

  I didn’t know what they had decided about him staying and living there. Molly wanted him to, that was plain as day, and I guess they must have talked about it. But never while I was there, which wasn’t too often. Run
ning the ranch kept me busy all day, and usually I got over about suppertime to see how the invalid was doing. The nights weren’t too hot, and we all sat around on the porch and talked.

  Then one morning it come to a head. I was over helping Molly set up an owl trap in her chickenyard. We worked on it about an hour and looked up and seen Gid coming out the back door, all dressed and carrying his suitcase. Molly was just crushed; I guess she thought he was going to stay for good.

  “Now where’s he fixing to go?” she said. “He don’t have to go nowhere.”

  I was kinda wishing I wasn’t nowhere around.

  But she grabbed my wrist before he got to us. “Listen,” she said. “Now if I can’t talk him out of going, you be sure and see he takes it easy on his work. Will you do that for me?”

  “Of course I will,” I said.

  Gid had put his gear in the pickup, and he came over, looking proud of himself.

  “Owl trouble,” he said. “Can I help?”

  Molly was all over him. “You sure can,” she said, “you can go in out of this hot sun and get back in bed and stay there. That would help me a whole lot.”

  But Gid put up his bluff.

  “Can’t,” he said. “I’ve got to get to working.”

  And we stood there. I kept on working on the trap. Molly was trembling and about to cry, I could tell. But Gid was determined.

  “Don’t think I ain’t much obliged to you,” he said. “But I’ve got to go to work, Molly.”

  She looked at me kinda funny. It was really tearing her. I was surprised to see she still had those terrible strong feelings, at her age. I never had felt things that hard, at any age.

  “All right, go to work,” she said. “But, honey, you don’t have to leave, you can go to work and come back.”

  She had never called him honey in public, in all the years I’d known her, either. I was trembling a little too, from just watching, and I don’t know what held Gid up.

  “Yes I have, Molly,” he said. “For right now, anyway. Just running off from a hospital like that ain’t the right way to settle anything.”

  She was crying then, but neither one of us quite dared touch her.

  “There never will be a way right enough for you,” she said.

  He said maybe there would. “And much obliged agin, for taking care of me.”

  I guess she thought Gid was sort of leaving her for the last time. “You’re mighty welcome, Gid,” she said. “God bless you.” And she turned and went to the house, crying and snuffling.

  “We better go if we’re going,” I said.

  It upset Gid a good-bit too. We were pretty quiet, driving to town.

  “I wish I could have thought of a nicer way to leave,” he said.

  “I hate to upset Molly.”

  “Well, Gid,” I said. “My god, you ought to stay out there with her, if you want to. It’s about time you pleased yourself a little, if you’re ever going to. Or it looks that way to me.”

  “Well, I want to,” he said. “And I may do it. In fact, I guess I intend to do it. But you can’t just go off and do something like that on the spur of the moment, without making no arrangements. There’s a right way and a wrong.”

  “And you’re the only man alive that can tell them apart,” I said. “Or maybe just the only one that bothers to try.”

  When I let him out at his house he told me to buy a keg of steeples. He said he’d be out Monday and we’d start steepling the fence. I never stopped by Molly’s, going home. I couldn’t think what I would say to her.

  seven

  It was a good thing I got the steeples, because Monday morning he was there before I got the milk strained. I stayed about that far behind the rest of the day.

  “Are you ready?” he said.

  “I’m bound to be readier than you are,” I said. “I’m well, anyway.”

  “Shut up and let’s go,” he said. I sat the milk in the icebox and got my steepling hatchet. I had soaked it in water all night so the head wouldn’t fly off and kill Gid.

  The wires were done stretched; I had done that; so all we had to do was steeple. We didn’t waste no time. I got off from him a hundred yards or so, and we started in. I guess I steepled forty or fifty posts before I thought to look around, and Gid wasn’t nowhere in sight. It scared the sense out of me: I thought he’d passed out. I started running back up the fence row, but I wasn’t used to running and I thought I was gonna collapse. If he hadn’t of hollered, I’d have passed him right by. He wasn’t over fifty yards from where he started steepling. There was a little shady shrub oak tree there and he was sitting under it fanning himself with his hat. I never saw a man so wet with sweat in my whole life.

  “I didn’t know you could run so fast,” he said. “Where’s the fire?”

  “By god,” I said, trying to get my breath. “It looks like it’s underneath you.” I had to sit down and get my breath.

  “I just came out here to rest,” he said. “I was getting too hot.”

  “My god, Gid,” I said. “If you’re sweating like that already, what you better do is sickle in to town and rest on some nice cool bed. It ain’t good for a man in your shape to get that hot.”

  “Oh, I’m all right,” he said. “You’re more give out than me, just from that run.”

  “I may be out of breath,” I said. “But I ain’t sweated down from steepling no ten or fifteen posts.”

  “It was more like a hundred and fifty, the way my arm feels,” he said. “But it’s just sweat. Must have been them drugs they gave me. I never sweated this much before.”

  “Hell of a note,” I said. “Why don’t you let me hire a Mexican or two, to finish this fence? They work a lot cheaper than doctors.”

  “I never asked for no advice,” he said. “I guess I know when I’m able to work and when I’m not.”

  “I doubt very seriously that you do,” I said. “But I can’t do much about it.”

  “You can get to steepling,” he said.

  And that was the way it went, the rest of the week. Gid couldn’t work but thirty minutes at a time without having to rest, but he wouldn’t quit. The whole week he was just up and down. I finally just let him alone about it. I guess he just had so much sweat to get out of his system. After we finished the fencing we spent a week spraying the cattle and getting them shaped up. He finally got where he could work an hour or two at a stretch, but he wasn’t the hand he used to be.

  I asked him once if he’d been by to see Molly, and he said he had. Mabel was off on a vacation in Colorado and had Sarah and Susie with her, so Gid was batching. I imagine he seen Molly a lot. I never asked him what they decided about living together, and he never said. I knew he wouldn’t do nothing till Mabel got back; that would make him feel too sneaky. He didn’t much want to talk about it, and I couldn’t blame him particularly, so very little was ever said.

  One morning he came out looking kinda blue—he had got it into his head to fix the windmill that day. It was the mill on the old Fry place, where I was living. I had used it for years and years, without no particular trouble except a worn-out sucker rod now and then. But he had done ordered a new set of pipes and a new running barrel, and everything: a man was going to bring them out from town that morning. It looked like a hell of a hard day’s work, and I tried to head him off.

  “Just think a minute, Gid,” I said. “It’s the first of September. In another month it’ll be cool, and that mill won’t be half as hard to fix.”

  “I know it’ll be a little hot,” he said. “But we’ll just fix it anyway, while we got the time. We might be doing something else in another month. Let’s go get the sucker rod out.”

  The sucker rod in itself wasn’t much of a job, and we had it out in no time. The job was going to be lifting that old pipe out and lowering the new pipe in. I never had been much of a pipe hand, and the old stuff was corroded at the joints. It had been in long enough to be petrified.

  While we were waiting for the man with
the pipe to come, we sat in the shade of the waterhouse and told some old windmilling stories we saved up for days like that. I had had an uncle get killed on a windmill, and I was scared of them as I was of a rattlesnake. I told Gid about it.

  “It was a steel mill,” I said. “Lightning struck it while he was up working on it. Electrocuted him.”

  “They’re dangerous,” he said. “If it’s a wooden mill, the dam frames are apt to break and let you fall. Remember Clarence Fierson? He got his neck broke falling off one.”

  “Yeah, I remember,” I said. “Went around with his neck in a brace for years. Lucky at that.”

  Pretty soon the pipe man came and the hard work began. It was all we could do to carry the new pipe over to the windmill where we needed it. Gid got as hot as a pistol, and I wasn’t cool, myself.

  “I don’t believe we better fool with this stuff,” I said. “You’ll strain your operation, lifting this shit. I can barely hold out myself.”

  “You want to work on the mill or on the ground?” he said.

  “I’m trying to think what will be the best for you. If you get up there you’ll get dizzy and fall, and if you stay down here you’ll get all the heavy lifting.”

  “Shut up about me,” he said. “I ain’t collapsed yet, and I been windmilling all my life. You stay down here.”

  He began to unscrew this and unscrew that, and in a little while it was too late to back out, we done had the thing torn into. We spent the rest of the morning unscrewing the old rotten pipe and lifting it out.

  When dinner time came we were both give out. I went in the house and fried us a little steak and made some tea, and for dinner we had steak and bread and about a gallon of iced tea apiece. We were too tired to tell any windmill stories, too. Gid flopped down on the living room couch, and I got me a pillow and stretched out on the floor. We couldn’t get ourselves moving agin till two o’clock.

  “Godamighty,” I said, when I finally sat up. “I sure hate to go back out there.”

  “Yeah, them pipes will be hot,” he said. “Hot and heavy.”