McMurtry, Larry - Novel 05 (44 page)

 
          
 
Talking to Jean made me feel considerably
better. I felt I had contact with a live person. Of course, another live
person, Cindy, had left only a few hours before, but I was far from confident
that I still had contact with Cindy. I could easily imagine never hearing from
her again, if things went well between her and Spud.

 
          
 
Talking to Jean hadn't really answered any
major questions but it had at least restored my energies. I didn't want to
waste another night in
Lubbock
, listening to a second-rate sandstorm. In ten minutes I was up,
dressed, checked out, and on my way. I wasn't exactly sure where I was going
next, but I knew it had to be east, so I drove in that direction.

 
          
 
Often the strings of homey roadside
businesses—pizza parlors, muffler shops, hairdressers, cheap cafes, and
7-Elevens—appeal to me as I drive around. Their overall tackiness is part of
the charm of
America
. But seen through a screen of sand these same little businesses can
seem intolerably bleak.
Lubbock
seemed particularly rich in muffler shops. I passed about forty of them
as I was leaving town. Just passing them depressed me. They seemed to bespeak
the many disappointments of life. Then I became slightly less depressed. At
least I wasn't working in a muffler shop in
Lubbock
. My fate was more intricate, and less oily.

 
          
 
I soon dropped off the caprock and proceeded
through the night, slipping through a number of small silent towns. All of them
were one-street towns, and the buildings of their one street were pale under
the streetlights. The wind finally blew the clouds away and left a cold sky,
sprinkled with stars. My thoughts kept slipping back to Jean. I didn't really
think anything very specific about
her,
I just sort of
had her in mind.
Thinking about her blanked out two hundred
miles.
Before I really took note of myself I was buying gas in
Wichita Falls
, at one in the morning.

 
          
 
It occurred to me as I was paying for the gas
that I wasn't far from the home of Little Joe Twine. His home was just down the
road, near a town called Henrietta. In some parts of the world Little Joe would
be called Joseph Twine II, but in Henrietta he's called Little Joe, to
distinguish him from his father.
Big Joe.
The
situation is further confused by the fact that Little Joe is married to a small
blonde named Josie.

 
          
 
The Twines owned the largest ranch in that
part of the world, a lovely ranch whose thousands of acres are dotted here and
there with oil pumps. I had met Little Joe and Josie about a year earlier, at
the home of a gun dealer in
Amarillo
. They had driven up to sell the gun dealer all the Twine family
guns—and since the Twines had been a pioneer family that meant quite a few.

 
          
 
"These ain't the only guns in the world.
Little Joe," Josie said several times, as I sat drinking beer and watching
the transaction. The whole floor of the house was covered with rifles, pistols,
and shotguns.

 
          
 
"No, but they're the handiest,"
Little Joe muttered. He was fat, long-haired, and depressed.

 
          
 
"Listen," Josie said with authority,
"if I need to shoot you I'll shoot you. I can buy plenty of guns on a
credit card."

 
          
 
"
This don't
mean
I expect to live forever," Little Joe replied.

 
          
 
Then he snorted some cocaine.

 
          
 
Later I ran into Josie in the kitchen, where
she was pouring vodka into a large pitcher of tomato juice. She was good-looking,
but unhappy in the eyes, and had cut her blond hair too short.

 
          
 
"Let's go upstairs and fuck," she
said in a friendly tone. "Shoot, it'll take them all night to finish this
deal."

 
          
 
"That might be dangerous," I said.
"Little Joe might load one of the guns and come up and shoot us."

 
          
 
"He ain't about to," Josie said.
"The reason he's selling these guns is to stop me from shooting him."

 
          
 
"Why would he think you'd do that?"

 
          
 
"Because Momma Twine shot Big Joe two
weeks ago," she said. "Don't you read the papers?"

 
          
 
"I guess I missed it," I said.

 
          
 
"I don't see how, it was on the TV
too," Josie said. "Big Joe was down in the lots working some cattle
and she walked down with a 30-30 and shot him right off his horse. She took
good aim, too. Ten cowboys standing around and nobody even noticed her until
she pulled the trigger.”

 
          
 
"Was he hurt
bad
?”

 
          
 
"He was killed deader than a
sonofabitch," Josie said. "It worries Little Joe. He's afraid it'll
give me ideas. Shoot, I ain't even mad at him. Little Joe's real
paranoid."

 
          
 
Then she told me about her life, which
consisted of driving down to
Dallas
—as she put it—almost every day. It was only
85 miles to
Dallas
, a short toot in that country. In
Dallas
she bought things for a while and then went
to a city billy bar, had a few beers, and looked for boyfriends. Little Joe
spent his days playing cassettes of dirty movies on his wall-size TV. Sometimes
the cowboys came in and watched, and a lot of dope was enjoyed. Now that Big
Joe was dead nobody saw any reason to do much work, least of all Little Joe.

 
          
 
Instead of fucking we went out and sat in my
car awhile, drinking vodka and tomato juice and watching the wind blow. While
we were drinking Little Joe and the gun dealer came out, got in the gun
dealer's pickup, and drove off, destination unknown.

 
          
 
"I don't know why I come on this
trip," Josie said. "Shoot, I don't even know why I married Little
Joe, except he's rich. Wanta go to
Dallas
? We could stop off at the ranch and have
breakfast. I can cook."

 
          
 
The house was the Twine ranch headquarters,
about 300 miles away.

 
          
 
"Or we could have the pilot fly up and
get us," Josie said. "Little Joe probably went to
Lubbock
to buy some dope. No telling when he'll be
back. We keep this pilot to fly us around but we hardly ever call him. I think
he's about bored to death."

 
          
 
She was wearing a wonderful pair of red
ostrich-skin boots with elaborate flame stitching, and when I complimented her
on them she smiled. "I got about three hundred pair," she said.
"
Me
and Little Joe just buy boots all the
time."

 
          
 
Since Little Joe and the gun dealer had not
returned in an hour, I drove Josie home. The Twine ranch house was done in
typical degenerate third-generation style, with ugly shag rugs and dozens of
telephones and TV sets. Little Joe never wanted to be out of sight of a TV set
or out of reach of a phone, so he had put several phones and TVs in every room.
The phones were all different colors and sizes, from fake antiques to Mickey
Mouse phones. There was not one good thing in the house, except the boots.
Upstairs there was a walk-in closet the size of a presidential suite, all
filled with boots. The Twine family had evidently never thrown away a pair of
boots, or worn one out, either. There were boots in the closet going back to
Big Joe's father's early days, most of them in fairly decent condition.

 
          
 
It was the boots I remembered, as I was
getting gas in
Wichita Falls
. If Josie hadn't shot Little Joe yet maybe I could buy their boot
collection and fulfill my obligation to Cindy at one swoop.

 
          
 
I had the Twine number in my book, and I
called it, hoping for Josie. Instead, I got Little Joe.

 
          
 
"You got any hash?" he asked, once
he figured out who I was. Though clearly disappointed when I said no, he
invited me over anyway.

 
          
 
When I knocked at the door, twenty minutes
later, he met me. He was wearing cut-offs, a purple T-shirt, and a look not far
from idiocy. In the years since I had seen him he had gained another fifty
pounds, and managed to avoid barbers. His hair was really long.

 
          
 
"Got any dirty movies?" he asked.
"If you got any I'll buy 'em as long as there ain't queers or niggers in
them. I mainly like to watch heterosexual activity between members of the white
race."

 
          
 
When I stepped into the large, ugly living
room I saw that that was exactly what he had been watching. Several pale bodies
were bobbing and weaving on the wall-size TV screen, but Little Joe was so high
he had let the set get out of focus. The bodies were just a blur, though a pale
blur.

 
          
 
There was a huge blue suede couch along one
wall, beside which sat a large tube of gas of some kind. It looked like the
tubes that welders have on their trucks, but it was hard to know why Little Joe
would need acetylene in his living room.

 
          
 
"Aw, that's just laughing gas," he
said. "Want some?"

 
          
 
He offered me a little mask, such as dentists
use when they give gas, but I declined so he plopped down on the couch and put
the mask on his own face, opening the nozzle on the tube of gas so that he
would get a strong stream of nitrous oxide right up his nose.

 
          
 
"Where's Josie?" I asked.

 
          
 
"Upstairs watching the cable," he said.
"She
don’t
like dirty movies."

 
          
 
As I started to leave the room I almost
stepped on a cowboy, stretched out on the floor by one of the doors. He had on
boots, spurs, and chaps, but he lay so limply that for a moment I thought he
must be dead. His eyes were open, but they weren't fixed on anything.

 
          
 
"What's wrong with him?" I asked.

 
          
 
Little Joe had forgotten about the cowboy.

 
          
 
"Is he still there?" he said.
"I thought Josie called the ambulance to come and get him. He took some
horse medicine by accident.

 
          
 
"He'll be all right," he added.
"Only thing is we may have to cut his boots off. That horse medicine makes
your feet swell."

 
          
 
The vast hall upstairs was lined with
extremely bad oil paintings of
Texas
rural scenes. Far down the hall I could
hear the sound of a television set. It proved to come from the master bedroom,
which was about the size of a tennis court. Much of it was filled with one of
the largest beds I had ever seen. Josie sat in the middle of it, in a
nightgown, watching Benjy on another wall-size TV.