Moving On (12 page)

“It wouldn’t be so nice if you had to live in the middle of it.”

Soon they saw the arena lights, with the sky behind them black and starless. There was a solid line of traffic. Patsy inched along irritably, tapping her fingernails on the wheel and compressing her lips with annoyance when a woman in a white station wagon stopped just in front of her and let two little boys out. Jim got out at the contestants’ gate, got his cameras from the back seat, and leaned across the seat to kiss her. She was in the process of taking off her sunglasses, and the kiss got tangled in fingers and frames.

“Don’t get yourself trampled,” she said.

He hung the cameras around his neck and walked into the mob that filled the space behind the arena. A riding club was lined up. Women in tight pants that made their abdomens bulge grotesquely clutched their saddle horns nervously. They obviously never rode except on the first nights of rodeos and strove desperately to keep their spotless hats on and their horses in place. Some of them looked so incongruous that Jim wanted pictures of them, but he had not yet learned to take pictures unobtrusively and was nervous about taking any. Despite his Levi’s and boots he himself felt incongruous—he no more belonged to the scene than the ladies on the horses. He felt almost as hopeless at photography as they were at horsemanship and wished for a moment that he had simply gone to the movie with Patsy.

He went up into the grandstand, but he stayed only a few minutes and took no pictures. The stands were a confusion of children, pillows, people in satin shirts, dropped programs, and Sno-cone vendors, and the aisles were already littered with popcorn sacks and paper cups. He went from the stands to the bucking chutes. The bareback riders paid him no mind at all. One tall man had his shirt off and was getting his shoulder bandaged. There was a smell of dust and horseshit, and the man who was being bandaged grunted almost as loudly as the broncs that were being cinched. He heard Sonny Shanks’s name called and looked up to see Sonny sitting above chute three, bareheaded and in a bright yellow shirt. A heavy-set cowboy reached up and handed him some money without a word and Sonny grinned and folded it carefully before stuffing it in his pants pocket. He wore black chaps and seemed without a care. When he saw Jim shooting pictures he nodded and gave a friendly wave.

Peewee appeared and was as glad to see Jim as Jim was to see him. “I would take you round but I got to help hustle the ridin’ stock,” he said. He wore the same clothes he had worn yesterday, but they were considerably dustier.

Jim found a place on the fence and watched the bareback riding. Shanks seemed to ride very well—at least two young cowboys standing nearby thought so. “I guess he’s living proof that no amount of pussy can hurt a man,” one said.

Instead of thinking of pictures, Jim found himself thinking of Patsy. He seldom photographed her—somehow it made them both self-conscious. He pictured her in his mind, sitting in the movie with a sweater over her shoulders. Her shoulders were lovely. Once before they were married they had gone in the evening to Fair Park, in Dallas, and sat on the grass by a little lake, eating fried chicken from a box. Patsy had worn a white dress with narrow straps, so that her arms and shoulders and neck were almost bare. She ate the hot chicken and wiped her fingers on the grass and talked about an Ingmar Bergman movie they had seen the night before, her voice soft and quick.

Jim sank easily and sometimes quite deliberately into reverie. As he was thinking of Patsy he was almost knocked off the fence by the two cowboys, who were scrambling up. He heard hoofs and snorting breath and looked down to see a yellow bronc charging straight up the fence line. The cowboys along the fence scattered upward before the bronc like grasshoppers before a mowing machine.

Jim got down and wandered to the stockpens to stare at the big lazy-looking bulls for a while. Three young would-be bull riders were looking at them too, one of them talking of how much he missed Idaho. When Jim got back to the arena the barrel racing had just begun. The first girl out was fat and a little scared. She let her horse go so wide on the second barrel that he almost touched the fence where Jim was standing. The second contestant was a woman in her thirties. She came out very fast on a well-trained gray horse, cut the barrels coolly and professionally, no more than a foot of space between the barrel and the horse’s body, and quirted the gray out of the arena in a time of twenty-one seconds. The crowd seemed to think that very good. The third rider entered the arena at a dead run. She was bareheaded, her hair bleached white. She charged down on the first barrel so recklessly fast that the crowd shushed completely and then roared when her Appaloosa came out of the turn safely, almost on his knees. The second barrel was harder. The girl rode almost straight at it, keeping the horse at full speed until she was only a few yards away. Then she swung right to clear the barrel and sharply left to round it; but the horse had too much speed. The girl was up and forward in her stirrups, and when the horse tried to whip out of the turn his forefeet slipped and he went down, still straining forward. The girl was thrown clear and hit the ground several feet from the horse, right in front of Jim. He and three cowboys immediately jumped the fence, thinking she was hurt, but the girl got up and shook her head rapidly, flinging tears out of her eyes.

“My stupid fault,” she said and began to cry bitterly. The clown came up and tried to put his arm around her, but she hit her fist against her thigh and stepped away. Still sobbing, she got her horse and began to lead him out of the arena.

“Well, bad luck,” the clown said, shaking his head in discouragement. Then he looked at Jim and seemed to recognize him.

“Oh, hi,” he said. “We met in Merkel, only you was knocked out at the time. I’m Pete Tatum.”

“Sure,” Jim said, shaking hands. “You saved my cameras.”

They followed Boots and her horse down the fence line, and a girl in a pink suit dashed into the arena, overshot a barrel, and lost her hat. By the time they were out of the arena Boots’s disappointment had subsided enough that she let Pete put his arm around her and soothe her and hug her a bit. Jim stood back awkwardly, not sure whether to leave or stay.

“I wish I would learn,” she said.

“Aw, you will. Let’s all go to the trailer and have a quick beer. I ain’t busy till calf-scramble time.”

On their way to the trailer they passed Shanks’s hearse and saw him sitting on the back end of it, one leg out of his Levi’s, trying to wrap an elastic bandage around his knee. He had a bandage on his hand too, and it gave him trouble wrapping the knee. He had one end of the elastic in his teeth. He glanced up and saw them passing and immediately let that end go.

“Hey, Boots,” he said. “Come wrap this thing for me. I ain’t got enough hands.”

Pete went over to the hearse, took the wrap off, and expertly rewound it on Sonny’s knee. “Tighter,” Sonny said.

“Not tighter unless you want gangrene. That ain’t the first knee I’ve ever wrapped.”

Sonny nodded at Jim. “Your wife ever get in a better mood?” he asked.

“She’s fine.”

Boots ignored Sonny entirely and walked on off, leading her Appaloosa. When Pete was finished with the support, Shanks slipped his leg back in his pants and began to tuck in his shirttail.

“You-all come to the party tomorrow night,” he said to Jim. “My place, at the Ramada. You can come too, Peter, if you bring your girl friend. You ain’t much fun stag.”

“I got to train my mule tomorrow night,” Pete said, walking off.

“See if you can train him to fuck,” Sonny said, grinning at Jim. “A fucking mule is what the circuit needs.”

Jim promised to be at the party and followed Pete to the trailer house. Boots was sitting on the steps and had a can of beer for each of them between her legs. She sipped at hers, and Pete stood with one hand on his hip, draining his. When it was empty he threw the can under the trailer and reached down to hold Boots’s head against his leg for a minute.

“I got to be goin’,” he said. “Come on, shake off that fall. Everybody in rodeo falls sooner or later. See you, Jim.”

He left. His attempt to cheer Boots up had not worked. She still looked very disconsolate.

“We’re going to get married next week,” she said. “That’s why Pete acted embarrassed. He thinks he’s too old for me.”

Jim squatted down so he could see her better. Her nose was a little too blunt but otherwise she was pretty, in an open, energetic, unself-conscious way. Her straight white hair framed her face nicely. He found her immediately likable and was glad to be relieved of the necessity to be a photographer every minute.

“How long have you been married?” she asked.

“A year and a half.”

“I wish we had,” Boots said wistfully. “I’ll be glad when Pete and I have been married ten years. Then we won’t have any problems like this.”

Jim was a little surprised. He thought she was sad about her fall, not about her marriage. He looked around for a place to put his empty beer can. Throwing things on the ground seemed sloppy to him, and he was always trying to break Patsy of the habit.

“Oh, just pitch it under the trailer,” Boots said. “It gets messy around a rodeo whatever you do. That’s one thing I like about it. I’ve always been messy.”

It was really a one-man trailer, and so small that Jim could scarcely imagine how two people could even
get
in it, much less live in it; but its smallness and simplicity appealed to him. He loved the thought of being able to live on next to nothing—on the bare essentials. In his imagination he often stripped his life of all extras, all luxuries, everything wasteful. The difficulty was Patsy. He could not have persuaded her to live in the largest trailer ever made. In Houston they had the whole top floor of a large three-car garage, and she was not content even with that. She wanted a house and had threatened to buy one with her own money—she had just about enough. It was insane; she didn’t particularly want to live in Houston, but she continually complained about not having a house, and he could never be quite sure she wouldn’t just go out some morning and buy one. The value of keeping stripped down to essentials was lost on her, and his attempts to explain it did not impress her. When he quoted Thoreau she yawned. Boots was clearly more amenable to the simple life than Patsy would ever be.

“It’s tiny, all right,” she said, noticing that he was looking at the trailer. She giggled a little and looked happier. “Pete keeps talking about trading it in on a Volkswagen, so we’ll have more room to screw. I guess we’ll end up getting a station wagon.”

“You ought to get a hearse, like Sonny has.”

“He’d kill us. Us or anybody else who gets one. He’s as proud of that hearse as he is of his dong. Want the rest of my beer? I feel like I may throw up. I get so excited running the barrels that I’m always throwing up.”

Jim would have liked to talk longer, but she did look a little drawn. He stood up and said he had to go. Except for Peewee she was the only rodeo person he had met that he really liked to talk to. He was a little intrigued by girls who came right out with words like screw and dong. Patsy was more inhibited than he felt she ought to be where talk of sex was concerned.

“Bring your wife by tomorrow,” Boots said. “I’d love to meet her.” Jim said he would.

When he left, Boots went in and set her half-can of beer in the icebox and then went out and began to unsaddle the Appaloosa, whose name was Sprinkles. The dachshund had been run over the week before. She missed him, and now she laid her cheek against the horse’s neck.

“It wasn’t your fault, sweet thing,” she said. “It was all my fault.”

8

P
ATSY HAD GONE
to see
Lolita
and was delighted with it. For some reason she had missed the film when it first came out, though she had read the book three times and thought it beautiful. James Mason had been a perfect Humbert Humbert too. Still, the movie left her annoyed—vaguely annoyed.

The Ford was in a parking lot only a block from the theater, and as she walked down the wide sidewalk by the even wider street she tried to put her finger on what had bothered her. She passed a shop that seemed to sell nothing but sunglasses; there were hundreds in the window, with all sorts of strange frames, and as she loved sunglasses and liked to have numerous pairs in reserve, she stopped and peered in the window. A carload of boys passed in the street and let out a chorus of whistles. Alarmed for a second, she turned and looked. There were five of them in a new convertible, soldiers probably, all of them wearing the gaudy short-sleeved sports shirts that soldiers seemed to adopt for their nights on the town. When she looked at them they cheered and whistled and made it obvious they thought she was luscious, but they also seemed inoffensive and even a little shy, and they moved rapidly on down the street.

Normally, being whistled at embarrassed her, but this time it perked her a bit instead. As she walked on to the parking lot she reflected on the movie and decided that one reason she was annoyed by it was because she had been no nymphet herself, no Lolita, when she was that age. She had been thin and inhibited and had had no bosom at all and, as well as she could remember, no flair at all. She had had no trouble getting a respectable number of dates, but that was because she had always been pretty in the face, as the saying was in Texas. She would certainly not have attracted a Humbert Humbert, and except for one occasion when a boy had bumped his penis against her hand nothing memorably lascivious had happened on any of the dates. The movie left her all the more convinced that as a teenager she had been a complete stick-in-the-mud.

The question was, had she really changed? She had grown prettier, and had more bosom, and thought of herself as knowing the facts of life, but she was still not convinced that she was all a woman ought to be. She had always wanted to be beautiful and had always been slightly contemptuous of girls who just wanted to be sexy, but being sexy had begun to seem more important to her or, at least, important in a different way. Jim was not much help. It was a vague problem and he was vague himself half the time. He was often eager to make love to her, but that fact alone never seemed too convincing. His life, so far as she could tell, was one great interlocking structure of fantasies involving himself, and it was probably just necessary to the overall fantasy for him to think of her as sexy. In a way, being whistled at by a earful of boys was more convincing than Jim’s attentions. At least the soldiers were something objective.