Moving On (11 page)

She grabbed her purse and went running into the drugstore crying, and Jim sat nervously at the wheel and tried to explain to Peewee that it was probably nothing serious, just one of Patsy’s little fits of depression. Peewee was terribly worried and nervous and had already decided never to accept another blind ride involving a wife. He racked his brain for some excuse that would allow him to get out and hitchhike to Phoenix. Patsy was beautiful but altogether too scary.

“Don’t look so worried,” Jim said. “She does this sort of thing all the time. She’ll calm down.”

“What’s gonna happen to us before she calms down?” Peewee said. “That’s what’s got me worried.”

Patsy came striding back out of the drugstore carrying a number of boxes of Kleenex in her arms. She dumped them on top of the paperbacks, glowered briefly at Peewee, and sat down.

“Drive on, you wretch,” she said. “I’ve decided to accompany you, even though I’m not wanted. Wither thou goest I might as well go. At least I’ve got some Kleenex now. I intend to cry a lot.”

“You’ll go, but you’ll bitch about it,” Jim said, driving on.

“I’ll bitch if I feel like it, of course,” she said. “Have you ever been married, Peewee?”

“Me?” Peewee asked. “Who would marry me?”

He said it so simply, with no trace of self-pity or melancholy, that it made Patsy stop feeling tense. There was always someone with a problem worse than hers. She wiped her eyes with a Kleenex and smiled back at him, and he looked at her with bewilderment and relief. They were curving west out of El Paso, with the thin winding Rio Grande visible in the valley to the south.

“Why, you look very eligible,” she said. “You could use a shirt that fits but other than that there’s no reason why you shouldn’t get married and be as miserable as everyone else.”

“All I can do to get a date oncet an’ a while,” he said, sure that he was being flattered.

“What do you do when you aren’t riding professional broncs?”

“This an’ that. Work in fillin’ stations.”

The sun was lowering, dropping more rapidly toward a horizon far into New Mexico. The face of the great bare mountain to their right, El Capitan, was shining from the late sun, and the desert around them was cooler and more fragrant as the evening came.

“I never had a job,” Patsy said. “I wonder what one would be like.”

“You never?” he said. “You don’t look like you have, now you mention it. They ain’t so bad, most of ’em. The best one I ever had was in Houston.”

“Goodness. That’s where we live when we’re home. What did you do there?”

“Drove a little train. It’s over by the zoo, in Hermann Park. We lived in Houston a year. None of us ever liked the town much but I liked drivin’ that train. It just goes around the park, you know.”

“I know. How strange. I ride it all the time, or every time I go to the zoo. Maybe I rode it while you were driving it. Wouldn’t that be odd?”

“Shore would,” Peewee said, grinning at the thought. “We couldn’t take that humid weather so we all moved back to the plains.”

“Let’s eat in Las Cruces,” Jim said. Peewee’s talk of jobs made him strangely envious. All his jobs had been arranged by his father and had been with oil companies owned by his father’s friends. He had never felt that he could have gotten any of them if he had been applying strictly on his own merits.

They ate in the coffee shop of a large new motel, with red leatherette booths and fancy trays of syrups and jellies on each table. The place had a large plate-glass window; as they ate they watched the sun go down. Peewee had two cheeseburgers and Jim had a steak that was mostly gristle and Patsy had soup and a not-very-fresh salad and some rolls and butter; her legs were chilled from the air conditioning. When they left, the gray horizon had turned purple. As they drove away from Las Cruces, darkness came across the desert to meet them. The afterglow faded, there were taillights ahead and headlights coming and a swish from cars they met and a solid shock of air when they met one of the huge trucks. Before they reached Deming both Patsy and Peewee had fallen asleep again, Patsy on her pillow, Peewee under his hat.

Jim felt fresh and drove easily. After a bad stretch of dippy road they entered Arizona and he could drive faster. He could not see the scattered mountains, but he knew they were there. Patsy shivered. He rolled his window up and lost himself in fantasies of himself as a photographer. For a time the road went through a valley, through little towns that were asleep and scarcely lit, and when he rolled his window down to freshen the air he smelled alfalfa fields. Once, just outside a little town, he saw some people walking on the shoulder, and he slowed and saw that they were Indian teenagers walking home from somewhere. The boys were fat and wore cowboy hats, and the girls wore sweaters and clumped together. Off the roads he saw lights, but very low to the ground, as if they came from tepees or little huts. The lights were scattered along a gentle slope. Except for the teenagers, it was a little like being in the Old West for a moment, the scout slipping past the Indian encampment. The strange low lights were eerily beautiful, in contrast to the teenagers, who were eating Popsicles and throwing the wrappers on the ground.

He had driven over six hundred miles and, except for an interval or two, had not felt tired, but not long after he passed the teenagers an unshakable fatigue hit him, and hit him very quickly. It tugged at his eyelids, slowed his feet on the pedals, made the roadway seem very familiar and his own speed quite natural and safe. He knew how such tiredness worked, and the second time he nodded and jerked awake he slowed and eased down a steep shoulder to park on a level place by a barbed-wire fence. He pulled a jacket and a cotton blanket out of the heap of clothes in the back seat, spread the blanket over Patsy, covered himself with the jacket, and went to sleep at once.

In a little more than an hour he awoke and got out of the car to piss. He was stiff and cold and felt like driving on. The moon had risen over the valley and the clear desert sky was pale. In the moonlight he could see the dark bulks of mountains across the valley to the north.

When he started the Ford and drove up the slope of shoulder Patsy almost slid onto the floor, and the blanket slipped off her. She woke up and looked about in bewilderment. “Dumb fool,” she said vaguely and then scooted over by him and cuddled against his shoulder. It was quite cold. She turned around and fished in the clothes until she found a red cashmere sweater of his that she liked to wear. She tugged it on and snuggled against him again, nuzzling her face beneath his arm, almost into his armpit.

“What’s the appeal of my armpit?”

“Warmth,” Patsy said. “My nose is cold.” She covered her legs with the blanket and leaned her head against his shoulder, silent but friendly. When they curved up into the Superstition Mountains Jim slowed down and drove carefully, not fully trusting his reflexes. Patsy was still awake when they dropped into the flat desert east of Phoenix and saw the lights of the city brightening the sky.

“Please get a place with a swimming pool,” she said meekly. “If I’m going to have to sit around all day by myself I want something to dip my toes into. It won’t cost much.”

“You deserve that much,” he said. There were times when it was necessary for him to pretend he didn’t have almost a million dollars of his own, and it was one such time.

He pulled into a station to gas up and get a city map. Patsy got out and stretched and took a quick walk around the block, although it was almost two
A
.
M
. The air was cold and the dark sky very liquid. The sweater felt good; her legs were cold. When she was coming back to the station he saw Peewee standing at the curb looking down the wide empty street. He had his rigging and his canvas traveling bag and had tucked his shirttail in neatly. When he saw her coming he began to kick his bootheel against the curb.

“Where in the world are you going?” she asked.

“Might as well hitchhike on out to the grounds,” he said. “Ain’t no use in you-all going out of your way. I sure am much obliged for the ride. Hope I get to see you agin while we’re here.”

“Of course you will,” she said. “Don’t be so humble. Will anyone give you a ride this time of night?”

“Somebody’ll come along,” he said. “Always have.”

“He insisted,” Jim said when she was back in the car. “You scared him back there in El Paso.”

“How could I have scared him?” she said. “I didn’t do anything unusual.”

They drove down Broadway, the wide main street, rejecting block after block of palatial motels and settling finally on a modest stucco court with a small swimming pool. The manager had gone to bed, but cheerfully got up to register Jim. Patsy got out and walked across the gravel drive to stand by the water, which was bluish and lit by only two small lights. There was an old pool umbrella with five or six iron chairs grouped around it.

The room was modest and also poorly lit. The green bedspread depressed her and the green tile in the bathroom depressed her more. But whenever he was starting a new enterprise, Jim would have them poor for a time, and there was nothing to do but make the best of it. It was his one inflexible policy. Just as her spirits were sinking she caught an abrupt glimpse of herself in the bathroom mirror and pulled them up again. For a girl who had just traveled seven hundred and some miles, she looked okay, and she marched back out to the car to get her purse and her suitcase, determined that no cheap motel was going to control her spirits.

“Whee, we’re starting a new life,” she said cheerfully when she came back in. Jim was yawning, more tired than he would admit. He had brought only his cameras in. Without answering, he went back out to lock the car, and Patsy went in the bathroom to test the hot water. All the same, the life didn’t feel so new. She made the shower drip and held her hand under the drip until the water got hot, wishing there was a bathtub. Behind her she heard the springs of the bed give as her tired husband sank upon it, and when she went in to get her gown he was asleep, the bed light right in his eyes. Some new life, she thought, but then he had driven all that way without any help and with her bitching at him, and she went over and took off his loafers and turned the bed light out before she went in to take her shower.

7

P
ATSY SAT
at the narrow little dressing table in the motel room, unhurriedly arranging her hair. The table had been designed to be a desk and a dresser both, and was not adequate to either purpose. It had a sheet of glass on top, under which was a map of a sort, showing all the spots of historical interest around Phoenix. The mirror was old and oval. Patsy lifted her hair, trying to imagine how she would look if it were long enough to be arranged in coils. Often she sat in front of mirrors for some time contemplating herself as she might be if she looked otherwise. She was far from indifferent to her looks, but on the whole she was content with them and felt no urgent need to make radical changes. She lingered at the dressing table because she found dressing tables nice places to meditate. When it came time to go someplace she could always be ready in six minutes. In the end she seldom did more than comb her hair and give a bit of attention to her eyes.

Jim was sitting impatiently on the bed watching her. He had his cameras and equipment bag ready and was merely waiting for it to be time to leave. Patsy had decided to skip the rodeo and go to a movie, and he was rather glad—if she had gone to the rodeo he would have felt responsible for her boredom. She had on her gray sleeveless dress and when she raised her arms to rearrange her hair the lift of her bosom made him feel sexy. He had slept most of the day while she had idled by the swimming pool reading and writing lengthy letters to her sister Miri and her friend Emma Horton. She was a happy idler—she loved to write long letters and sit by swimming pools, occasionally in the sun but more often in the shade. She never had been able to tan successfully—her shoulders and legs merely reddened.

As Jim watched her contentedly turning her head one way and another he became more and more horny, and with horniness came moodiness. He contemplated going over, kissing her, taking her to bed. She could usually be taken to bed, even if she had been planning on a movie; she cared more about impulse than she cared about plans. He cared about plans, though, and he had been planning to get some pictures taken. If they made love he probably wouldn’t even get to the rodeo that night. Given any sort of chance, Patsy would loll in bed for hours and would want him to talk to her, and he would get lazy and not go. He knew his laziness problem and was determined to get on top of it.

The thing that complicated such decisions the most was his knowledge that if he did go sweeping over and make love to her it probably wouldn’t be all too satisfying, anyway. Patsy liked for him to make love to her—at least she liked it okay, but she didn’t like it as much as he would have liked her to. It just didn’t seem to hit her terribly hard, or not very often, and though she was not critical of him particularly, he frequently felt that it was his fault that their transports were not more intense. If he made love to her and it worked out badly he would feel all the more that he ought to have gone to the rodeo and done his work. So, instead of going over and grabbing her he played out his desire in fantasy as he sat on the bed, and in fantasy it turned out a lot more gracefully and powerfully than it usually turned out in fact.

“I guess I’m ready,” Patsy said, standing up and putting her comb in her purse. “I’ve got about thirty minutes to make the feature.” Jim stood up too and managed to focus on the cool ready-to-go-out Patsy standing before him instead of the naked responsive Patsy in his mind.

She got a sweater, in case the theater should be too air-conditioned, and found her car keys. She was going to drop him at the rodeo and take the Ford. Jim kept a city map in his hand and gave her directions politely, but he was still horny and irritated with himself.

“I love these wide streets,” she said. “The nice thing about the West is all the space.”