Moving On (100 page)

But what was hard, what was annoying, what bugged him, was slowing down for L.A. He was primed for speed, for some straight drive, and the traffic and the lights really bugged him. He should have taken the saddle to Las Vegas, so he could have gone straight to the Guthrie ranch. Cops were out for Christmas. He saw many cars pulled over, but he had always been lucky; no cops threatened him and he swung at eighty-five through the interchanges and past downtown L.A., saw it glow in the midnight smog. Some people thought the hearse was an ambulance and gave way for it reflexively. But some didn’t. He was boxed in and couldn’t get out and in annoyance swung off the freeway onto Sunset Boulevard. It was a bad move. His apartment was a hundred blocks up the Boulevard, above the Strip. He shot up the dinky, dingy downtown end of the Sunset, but after the open desert and the fast freeway his timing was off. He kept hitting lights. There was no way to make the speed of the hearse match the speed inside him. He would gun it up to seventy-five in a few blocks and then hit another light. For once he couldn’t relax, make his own rhythm match the rhythm of the lights. He was too hyped, too impatient. He wanted his saddle and then to be gone to Texas.

Then he remembered the pills and made a screeching right-hand turn. The pills he could get at a place on Hollywood Boulevard. No problem there, it would only take a minute. He could even double-park. Then he could get his saddle and be gone. He cut the few blocks north at sixty, feeling better, hitting lights again. Half an hour and he would be on the desert again. He approached the Boulevard at the point where the Hollywood freeway passed underneath it. The light turned yellow when he was half a block away, but Sonny didn’t stop. He had had enough of stopping. Let the traffic wait. He was going fast enough that they could see he wasn’t stopping.

But a stoned young driver in an old Buick full of hippies didn’t see. They were all listening to a soul station and not thinking much, swaying and talking, and someone’s head and swinging hair was between the driver and the approaching hearse, and the driver himself was swinging with the radio. He hit the intersection early, just as Sonny hit it late. He saw the Buick’s movement too late, and the driver, listening to his sounds and blinded by lights and hair, never saw the hearse at all. He was accelerating fully when the two vehicles struck each other. Sonny, with a great reflex, sensed the collision a second before it happened and tried to swing out of his turn, to shoot straight across the Boulevard and onto the downgoing entrance ramp. But though he whipped his body right, as he would have whipped it riding a turning bull, he could not whip the heavy hearse that quickly. The Buick hit him, knocked the hearse across the Boulevard, where a Chrysler driven by a swinger from Van Nuys whirled into the entrance ramp from the other direction, also in full acceleration, and hit the hearse again. Sonny, knocked half loose by the Buick, had nonetheless hung on to the steering wheel and hit his own footfeed hard, hoping to outspeed the Chrysler. But he didn’t, and when the Chrysler hit him his own speed and the sharp downward drop of the ramp caused the hearse to lift as it rolled, to slide along the railing and drop twenty feet to the Hollywood freeway, the bottles, the clothes and bandages, the ropes and old boots and some woman’s forgotten scarf, the mattress, the bridles, and all the gear from the back end falling over Sonny as the white hearse fell.

It was not, as wrecks go on that freeway, a very disastrous wreck. The hearse hit a spot in the traffic and it was late enough that the pile-up was not bad. Only nine cars were involved. Three people were hurt seriously but not as seriously as they might have been, and of the fourteen people injured only one, Sonny Shanks, World’s Champion Cowboy, was killed.

11

P
ATSY WAS IN
H
OUSTON
when she heard of the death. She had flown back the morning after Christmas. Davey was in the process of having his first cold, and she wanted him home before he got any sicker. She did not want to be trapped for three or four days in her parents’ house, having to cope both with Davey and with her mother’s nursing. Davey was feverish and fretful and took coping enough, and she wanted him where his own doctor could see him in case his cold got worse.

Juanita had been given a key, and was there ahead of her, and the rooms were nice and clean and warm. In the afternoon Patsy walked to the drugstore to get some cough syrup for Davey and some shampoo for herself and saw Lee Duffin and two of her daughters sitting at the counter. The girls were both taller than Lee and had long dark hair, and both were wearing jeans and sweaters and chattering happily while Lee sipped her coffee and looked melancholy. When Patsy came over she brightened a little and introduced her girls.

“Ah, yes, I know your sister,” the older girl said. Her face was like her mother’s, good sharp features, but she was very merry and her mother was not.

“My goodness,” Patsy said. “Do you? I’m very angry with her right now. She seems to think of herself as in exile. We haven’t seen her in two years.”

“I know,” Melissa said. “She hates Dallas. I guess she hates all of Texas. I don’t see too much of her but we do live in the same house.”

Patsy picked Melissa’s brain for a while, but Melissa carefully avoided telling her any of the scary things she knew about Miri and boys and Miri and drugs. The other girl was looking through
Newsweek
. When Patsy ran out of questions they were all silent for a moment, each looking absently at their images in the mirror behind the counter.

“I was sorry to read about your friend Mr. Shanks,” Lee said, looking at her. “Of course I only met him that once but I liked him.”

“What about him?” Patsy asked.

“He was killed last night. It was in the morning paper, but there wasn’t much detail. He was killed in a car wreck in Hollywood.”

“Oh, no,” Patsy said. A flat feeling struck her. They were silent, except for the young girl, who made a sucking sound with her straw trying to get the last few drops of her Coke.

“He seemed like a charming man, in his way,” Lee said.

“In his way,” Patsy said. “I’m sorry he’s dead.”

Though she knew it was true, it was hard to believe. Sonny dead? They walked out of the drugstore together and Lee stopped with her a minute on the blowy corner while the girls walked on. “As soon as they leave I’m going to pack,” she said. “You can bring things over in stages, if you want. Bill’s at the MLA again. Are you expecting Jim back in time for the move?”

“No,” Patsy said. “I’m not really expecting anything.” What’s to expect? she thought.

“I think I know how you feel,” Lee said. “I’ve got to get on. Cheer up. I hope Davey’s better tomorrow.”

As she was walking up her steps Patsy saw the browned stems of Sonny’s roses sticking out of the garbage can. Juanita had just thrown them away. She went in, unrolled the morning paper, and found the story, one column on page three. The picture with it had been taken during the movie work—Sonny, no hat on, his black hair tousled as always. She felt no great pain about it but she did feel a strange clear sorrow that stayed with her until the evening. After Davey went down, with the thought that perhaps she hadn’t read the paper or hadn’t heard, she called Dixie. But Dixie had heard, and when Patsy said his name her aunt broke into tears.

“I know, I’m going to the funeral,” she said. “It’s in Borger, if you want to go. He always drove too fast. He was worse than me, even. If we’d got married I guess it would have happened long ago. Did I tell you he wanted to marry me once? Like a fool I turned him down. Can you imagine anyone turning Sonny down and then marrying Squatty? Well, that’s me—”

“Come on, dear,” Patsy said. “Don’t cry. Sonny wouldn’t have liked being married to anybody, I don’t think.”

“That’s true,” Dixie said. “That’s true. I guess I did him a favor without either of us knowing it.

“But he was gorgeous,” she added in a quieter voice.

Patsy cried a little after she hung up, no less for her aunt than for Sonny. She didn’t believe that Sonny had ever proposed to Dixie, but she knew Dixie would believe it and tell it to everyone as long as she lived, or could remember. Such would be Sonny’s few years of immortality, the stories the women he had briefly wanted would tell about him. How many women would beat their husbands with Sonny’s ghost in the next few years?

For weeks after that she wanted to call Dixie again and ask if Eleanor Guthrie had been at the funeral, but she never did. The next day in a moment of sentiment she sent flowers, and she walked out of the flower shop after ordering them feeling somehow lightened and cheerful. It occurred to her that as a tribute to Sonny she ought to have gone to the funeral wearing a sign that said, “I’m the one that got away,” and she imagined how all the fattening, fading Dixies that might be there would hate her, and how Sonny, could he know, would applaud the joke. Could he know, it would almost make up for her having got away.

But her light mood was deceptive. That afternoon, at the seedy laundrymat that she and Emma used, she broke into tears. An old woman caused it by giving her a laundry cart. The place was crowded, for once, and carts in short supply, and Patsy was carrying a load of sopping clothes to the dryer by hand when the old lady saw her problem and brought her a cart she was just emptying. “Here, honey,” she said. “You’re getting your skirt wet.” It seemed so kind a thing to do that Patsy was undone. Who else would do something kind for her? The Hortons, maybe, but they were her fast friends. Her eyes dripped as the clothes spun in the dryer.

That night Jim called, wanting to talk about Sonny, but she refused to talk about him. She was calm and wanted to stay calm, and besides it seemed fatuous to talk about him as if they had been close friends when they hadn’t. Jim surprised her a great deal by telling her he was thinking of taking a job with IBM.

“You?” she said. “At IBM? Why, for god’s sake?”

“Because Ed can get me one. If I’m going to stay out here I ought to get some kind of job. That’s the one place I’ve got a contact.”

“And you’ve decided to stay out there?” she asked calmly.

“I think I better, for a while. If I come back right now we’ll just start it all again. You know that.”

“Okay. I wasn’t arguing. I was just asking.”

“It’s tragic,” he said, “but we’re just at cross purposes when we’re together.”

“Oh, shit,” she said. “There’s nothing tragic about it. We’re both just spoiled. Do what you damn well please but don’t go tragicizing it, if that’s a word. Tell all that to her, if she’s still around.

“Is
she still around?” she asked.

“More or less,” Jim said.

“Oh, for god’s sake. Don’t be so wishy-washy. A person can’t be around more or less. She’s around and you might as well say so.”

“Okay,” he said angrily. “She’s around.”

He didn’t tell her that he and Clara had already taken an apartment in Altadena. They finished the conversation on a polite note.

She had scarcely hung up when Hank called. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“Thinking about the quick and the dead,” she said. “How are you? Why aren’t you at work, bringing art to the masses? I suppose you heard about Sonny Shanks.”

“Sure. There are big write-ups out here.”

“I’m tired of talking about it. Are you okay?”

“I’d like to come and see you.”

She thought about it. “No,” she said. “I have to move next week. I can’t tell what Jim might do and I don’t want any complications until the dust gets settled. You’re dusty enough yourself. In fact you’re mostly dust. You’re probably even worse now that you live in a desert again.”

“They have bumper stickers out here that say, ‘Lucky Me! I Live in Lubbock.’”

“Send me one. I’ll put it in my kitchen to remind me that you exist.”

In a week she moved. The Duffins had decided to take a fancy apartment for the spring, one with a heated swimming pool. Patsy hired two gigantic good-natured movers to move her. It only took half a morning. Her possessions—they had almost crowded her out of the apartment—seemed no more substantial than a couple of suitcases in the expanse of the new house. They did not even make a good litter; some rooms remained totally bare. Emma came over and wandered about for an hour marveling at how much room there was. Patsy had ordered a couch and two tables and some rugs and several chairs, but none of them were due to arrive for a few days. The Horton boys made dozens of trips up and down stairs. Patsy’s spirits were drooping very badly. The house was cold and too bare and full of half-unpacked boxes; a new lamp she had bought needed to be screwed into a wall and there was no one to do it. She didn’t know what to do first; she started on the kitchen and then decided it would be better to do Davey’s room first. His room was the whole narrow third floor. It had lots of windows and was a lovely bright room when the sun was shining, but it was a cloudy January day and the room seemed cheerless. Davey didn’t agree. He crawled about with great enthusiasm, mumbling to himself, and every three seconds managed to work his way to the head of the stairs. They fascinated him. Patsy had neglected to get stair gates and had horrible visions of him tumbling down.

“Why did we buy it?” she said to Emma. “I’m too helpless for a house.” She felt very much like crying. Three stories was too much to be alone in with a little boy. It had been lovely to plan on fixing up the house, but to be dumped on the floor of it on a cold day was depressing. It was awful of Jim. He had wanted the house too, and should not have gone off and left her to cope with anything so major. She felt bitter at the same time that she felt lonely. He had not done his part. In the end, despite her threat, she had moved the books for him. She felt like a sucker, and an abandoned sucker at that. She had forgotten to tell the movers that the TV had to go on the second floor. With it on downstairs she could not hear Davey crying from the third floor. The TV set was too heavy for her to move upstairs. Juanita had the flu and Davey had never quite got over his cold and was a drippy mess, although a cheerful one. The large empty house made her feel lonely and exposed. In the apartment she had at least felt safe and cozy.