Texasville

TEXASVILLE

A NOVEL BY

Larry McMurtry

Praise for Larry McMurtry’s
Texasville

“As
Texasville
unfolds, sentences practically tumble over one another in a race for laughs. … McMurtry is hot after a seriocomic study of a man trying to find mental balance in a Texas of which he observes, ‘Seems to me it’s so glorious it’s just about driven us all crazy.’ … There are plenty of eye-catching roadside sights to enjoy along the route.”

—New York Post

“Mr. McMurtry’s town, Thalia, is glutted with bed hoppers, maniacs, juvenile delinquents, stupid pets, suicidal bankers, and war mongering OPEC bashers—all brought to peaks of comic energy. … Madness reigns and it is quite amusing.”

—The Wall Street Journal

“Texasville
is just as funny as can be. … Such a kick to read that I predict its popularity may well outstrip Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winner,
Lonesome Dove.”

—Liz Smith, New York
Daily News

“Texasville
is simply great.”

—The Philadelphia Inquirer

“With
Texasville,
McMurtry has written an ideal sequel. The characters from
The Last Picture Show
have grown deeper, wiser, and more interesting, just as McMurtry’s writing has done.”

—United Press International

“Texasville
is a big ol’ mess of a book: long, haphazardly plotted, exuberant, populous, good-spirited … the sexual activity is vigorous and varied and described with considerable relish … the novels intelligence and its compassion are what really matter, and in this,
Texasville
is of a piece with all of McMurtry’s best work.”

—The Washington Post

“Unrestrained humor … McMurtry doesn’t ask us to feel sorry for his characters, but to laugh at their crude one-liners and to be appalled
at, and yet admiring of, their raw, material decadence. … The individual scenes are sharp, spare, full of longhorn humor and color. …
Texasville
is filled with local idioms, tall stories, and unabashed one-liners.”

—Louise Erdrich,
The New York Times Book Review

“Texasville
is just slightly off center and loony … but look beyond the gags and you’ll find a penetrating work. …McMurtry is the rare male writer who knows his women. With
Texasville,
he shows he knows his men, too.”

—Houston Post

“He is precise and lyrical, ironic and sad. … There aren’t many writers around who are as much fun to read as Larry McMurtry.”

—The Boston Globe

“Uproarious goings-on … when sliding from humor into pathos, McMurtry lets us down easy, with our laughter making bubbles as we sink. …Though Thalia is a small north Texas town,
Texasville
is really about contemporary America. …
Texasville
is funny and sad, ludicrous and penetrating, farcical and poignant. But it is above all entertaining.”

—The Denver Post

“Dark but hilarious humor … McMurtry’s agile literary hand is evident in every quick-moving chapter.”

—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“McMurtry’s … wonderfully loose-jointed narrative style slips in and out of comic exaggeration with practiced ease. There are no seams beneath the ambling yarn spinner (his literary heritage) and the slick ambiguities of the twentieth-century novelist.”

—Time

“McMurtry is such an engaging writer, you really don’t mind being kept up way past your bedtime finding out everything about his characters. … By the time you finish
Texasville,
you’ll feel as though you’ve spent a pleasant few weeks in Texas and that you’d like to go back pretty soon.”

—Cosmopolitan

BY LARRY MCMURTRY

Duane’s Depressed

Comanche Moon

Dead Man’s Walk

The Late Child

Streets of Laredo

The Evening Star

Buffalo Girls

Some Can Whistle

Anything for Billy

Film Flam: Essays on Hollywood

Texasville

Lonesome Dove

The Desert Rose

Cadillac Jack

Somebody’s Darling

Terms of Endearment

All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers

Moving On

The Last Picture Show

In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas

Leaving Cheyenne

Horseman, Pass By

BY LARRY MCMURTRY AND DIANA OSSANA

Pretty Boy Floyd

Zeke and Ned

SIMON & SCHUSTER
Rockefeller Center
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1987 by Larry McMurtry All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

S
IMON
& S
CHUSTER
and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc. For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales: 1-800-456-6798 or [email protected]

Manufactured in the United States of America

3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McMurtry, Larry.
Texasville.
I. Title.
PS3563.A319T48 1987
813’ .54 86-31520

ISBN 0-684-85750-2

ISBN-13: 978-0-6848-5750-3
eISBN-13: 978-1-4516-0768-0

Texas Ville

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98

For Cybill Shepherd

CHAPTER 1

D
UANE WAS IN THE HOT TUB, SHOOTING AT HIS NEW
doghouse with a .44 Magnum. The two-story log doghouse was supposedly a replica of a frontier fort. He and Karla had bought it at a home show in Fort Worth on a day when they were bored. It would have housed several Great Danes comfortably, but so far had housed nothing. Shorty, the only dog Duane could put up with, never went near it.

Every time a slug hit the doghouse, slivers of white wood flew. The yard of the Moores’ new mansion had just been seeded, at enormous expense, but the grass had a tentative look. The house stood on a long, narrow, rocky bluff, overlooking a valley pockmarked with well sites, saltwater pits and oily little roads leading from one oil pump to the next. The bluff was not a very likely place to grow Bermuda grass, but six acres of it had been planted anyway. Karla took the view that you could make anything happen if you spent enough money.

Duane had even less confidence in the Bermuda grass than the grass had in itself, but he signed the check, just as he had signed the check for the doghouse he was slowly reducing to
kindling. For a time, buying things he had no earthly use for had almost convinced him he was still rich, but that trick had finally stopped working.

Shorty, a Queensland blue heeler, blinked every time the gun roared. Unlike Duane, he was not wearing shooter’s ear-muffs. Shorty loved Duane so much that he stuck by his side throughout the day, even at the risk of becoming hearing impaired.

Shorty had the eyes of a drunkard—red-streaked and vacant. Julie and Jack, the eleven-year-old twins, threw rocks at him when their father wasn’t around. They were both good athletes and hit Shorty frequently with the rocks, but Shorty didn’t mind. He thought it meant they loved him.

Karla, Duane’s beautiful, long-legged wife, came out of the house, a mug of coffee in her hand, and started walking across the long yard to the deck. It was a clear spring morning; she had already put in an hour in the garden. Her tomatoes were under threat from the blister bugs.

When he saw Karla coming, Duane took off the earmuffs. It annoyed her severely if he kept them on while she was complaining.

“Now you’re ruining that brand-new doghouse, Duane,” she said, sitting down on the deck. “I guess I’m trapped out here in the country with a man that’s going crazy. I’m glad we sent the twins off to camp.”

“They’ll probably get kicked out in a day or two,” Duane said. “They’ll commit incest or something.”

“No, it’s a church camp,” Karla said. “They’ll just pray for their horrible little souls.”

They were quiet for a minute. Though it was only seven in the morning, the temperature was close to ninety.

“You can die if you stay in a hot tub too long,” Karla remarked. “I read it in
USA Today.”

They heard screams from the distant house. They came from Little Mike, Nellie’s terrible two. In a moment the baby joined in.

“Nellie may not even hear them,” Karla said. “She’s probably got her Walkman on.”

Nellie, nineteen, had just moved out on her third husband.
She liked getting married, but regarded the arrangement as little more binding than a handshake.

Karla wore a T-shirt with a motto stenciled on the front. The motto said,
YOU’RE THE REASON OUR CHILDREN ARE UGLY
, which was the title of a song sung by Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty. Karla laughed every time she heard the song.

She had thirty or forty T-shirts with lines from hillbilly songs printed on them. Every time she heard a lyric which seemed to her to express an important truth, she had a T-shirt printed. Occasionally she took the liberty of altering a line in some clever way, though no one around Thalia seemed to notice.