McMurtry, Larry - Novel 05 (4 page)

 
          
 
But a lot of hard-drinking, fast-fucking
grandmothers had lost their hero.

 
          
 
I sold Dandy, my wonderful dogging horse, that
night. The next day I accompanied Goat home to Guthrie and paid for his
funeral. The minute it ended I left for Houston, with a station wagon half full
of what Boog Miller called Indian doodads, sure of nothing except that I had
gained an exit, and lost a friend.

 
          
 
The peculiar thing about my first date with
Cindy Sanders was that the whole thing was arranged more or less directly under
the anguished gaze of her fiance, Harris Fullinwider Harisse.

 
          
 
I say more or less directly because the first
thing I noticed about Harris was that it was hard for him to fix his gaze
directly on anything—up to and including a woman as easy to look at as Cindy.
His gaze wandered nervously from place to place, object to object, and person
to person, darting away like a hummingbird if it seemed likely that other eyes
were about to make direct contact with his own.

 
          
 
When I mentioned this to Cindy, in bed the
next morning, she sighed, up to then the first evidence I had that she was
capable of even momentary discouragement.

 
          
 
"He looks that way because he can't decide
whether to come in or go out," she said.

 
          
 
It was early morning—my brain hadn't started
its day.

 
          
 
"Come in or go out what?" I asked.

 
          
 
"The door, of course," Cindy said.
"Doors confuse him. He gets one leg through and then he can't decide
whether to put the other leg through. So he stands there looking that
way."

 
          
 
It was true that Harris had neither come in
nor gone out during the hour I was in Cindy's shop. But, apart from noting his
anguished gaze, I had been so entranced with Cindy that I hadn't paid him much
attention.

 
          
 
"That's a strange problem to have,"
I said, for so it struck me. I had known confused people in my day, but none so
confused they stopped in doorways.

 
          
 
"Not at all," Cindy said. "It's
a perfectly well-bred indecision. Choice for Harris is like poetry for poets.
It's so filled with nuance that he usually just stops. You have to respect
it."

 
          
 
Maybe you did, but it was hard for me to
imagine Cindy Sanders waiting sweetly while Harris worked out the nuances of
every doorway they came to, as if it were a sonnet.

 
          
 
Cindy got up and tromped off to her kitchen.
She returned in a minute, clutching a knife,
an expensive
Italian salami, a big slab of Brie, and a half-gallon of apple juice. Then she
sat cross-legged on the bed and ate heartily, occasionally whacking me off a
hunk of salami or swiping up a glob of Brie and offering it to me on her
finger.

 
          
 
I was at a loss to understand how a man so
indecisive had managed to become engaged to Cindy, a girl who expected
immediate contact, eye, mouth, and genital. She liked direct looks and direct
kissing.

 
          
 
"Tell the truth," I said.
"You're not really engaged to Harris."

 
          
 
Cindy had her mouth full of salami and
couldn't talk, but she shook her head vigorously and looked slightly outraged.

 
          
 
"I certainly am engaged to him," she
said indignantly, as soon as the salami was on its downward path, somewhere
between her breasts.

 
          
 
"Who are you to question it?" she
asked, with the open defiance I seem to inspire in emphatic women.

 
          
 
What was I supposed to say to that? I was
nobody to question it. I wasn't particularly ill-disposed toward Harris, just
curious as to how such an arrangement had come about.

 
          
 
After all, Cindy had made the moves, where I
was concerned. When I drove up and parked In front of her shops—she had three,
all in one elegant nineteenth-century building on O Street—all I had meant to
do was sell a earful of cowboyana. The only reason I was in
Washington
was because Boog insisted that the East had
gone cowboy crazy.

 
          
 
"The twain's done met," he said.
"Cowboy boots is sellin' quicker than two-dollar pussy, even up in
New York
, where two-dollar
pussy
don't
have to stand on the street comer very long."

 
          
 
"Not if you're in town, you
pot-gut," Boss said. She was making biscuits in her big airy kitchen and
Boog just happened to wander past, drinking what he called his breakfast toddy,
a mixture of vodka, gin, tequila, and orange juice. Boss turned around and
plastered him right in the face with a big wad of biscuit dough, laughed heartily,
and immediately set about mixing some more dough.

 
          
 
Boog's uncontrollable lust for cheap women,
unabated through three decades of marriage, had inadvertently contributed to
Boss's own fame, since she had long since chosen to fight fire with fire.

 
          
 
"What I told the old fatty," she
confided one day, '*was that rd fuck six famous Yankees for every little pot he
stuck his dipstick in."

 
          
 
Boss had implemented her threat with vigor, if
legend was to be believed. She was a tall woman, with raven hair and looks that
still stopped people in their tracks, though she was fifty-two and had been
married to Boog over thirty years, an experience that would have marked most
women deeply.

 
          
 
Since most of those years had been spent in
Washington
, Boss had not lacked opportunity. Writers
were her over-all favorites, though she excluded most journalists and all
sportswriters from contention.

 
          
 
"Why would I want a sportswriter when
I've already got six kids to
raise
?" she asked,
when the subject came up.

 
          
 
Scarcely a poet or novelist of consequence had
escaped her, in her time. It was not uncommon to find her latest, a tiny Jewish
poet named Micah Leviticus, sobbing quietly in her motherly lap, or else
perched on the cabinet watching television, depending on his mood. Micah lived
upstairs, sharing a room with Tommy, the Millers' youngest child.

 
          
 
About politicians Boss was more discreet.
There were gossips who felt they knew which of the major figures she had
accepted, but Boss herself was inscrutable when the great names were reeled
off. She spoke of Jack or Adlai or. Lyndon as of any other friend, though once
in a while a special light would come into her restless gray eyes at the
mention of Estes Kefauver.

 
          
 
The light was not lost on Boog, who sometimes
dropped Kefauver's name just to see it come on.

 
          
 
"Ain't women sumpin'?" he would say.
"Remember Estes Kefauver? Why that big gawky son of a bitch could get
pussy Jack Kennedy wouldn't have got the merest whiff of."

 
          
 
When Boss mentioned her threat about the famous
Yankees she was sitting at her kitchen table, drinking coffee.

 
          
 
"I learned a harsh truth as a result of
that remark," she said.

 
          
 
"Which is?"

 
          
 
"Which is that
there's
more cheap women than famous Yankees," she said, opening The Wall Street
Journal to the real estate ads. Boss had a pilot's license and would fly off in
her Cessna to any part of
America
where there was a good property to buy. Her
local operations she ran mostly by phone from her spacious bedroom, leaving the
legwork to competent young women such as Kate, Coffee, or Tanya Todd—another
old girl friend of mine, who ran her
Dallas
office. I sometimes called Tanya Roger the
Dodger, since over the years she had proved about as hard to sack as Roger
Staubach. Once in a while she could be blindsided, if one felt up to a sexual
blitz, but that was the only method likely to prove effective.

 
          
 
Though neither famous nor a Yankee, I was
crazy about Boss and was always shooting her looks of love. I shot her a few
while she read the Journal, but she looked up and disposed of my candidacy with
a vivid smile.

 
          
 
"Get up and go buy some doodads,"
she said. "I class you with the sportswriters."

 
          
 
"In my view that's very unfair," I
said.

 
          
 
Boss ran her fingers through her long black
hair, idly testing its texture as she smiled at me.

 
          
 
"Yeah, but your view don't count,"
she said, and turned the page.

 
          
 
Before I could get her to look at me again,
Micah Leviticus came dragging into the kitchen, wearing gym trunks and an old
C.C.N.Y. T-shirt. He was carrying a tiny TV, which he plugged into an outlet
near the sink before climbing up in Boss's lap. A Roadrunner and the Coyote
cartoon happened to be playing. Micah watched it raptly, as Boss read the
Journal
The
minute a commercial came on he looked up
into her beautiful face.

 
          
 
"I dreamed about Rilke again last night.
Boss," he said. "Why is it always Rilke? I don't even like Rilke.”

 
          
 
"You sweet thing," Boss said, and
gave him a couple of not-so-motherly kisses. Then she favored me with another
of her cheerful and vivid smiles.

 
          
 
I wondered sometimes if her cells weren't just
better than other people's—
more ripe
with the
lifestuff, or something.

 
          
 
It was one way to account for the fact that
she seemed twice as alive as the rest of us.

 
          
 
Micah Leviticus was exactly five feet one
inch—sixteen inches shorter than
myself
. That fact
alone blew the one solid theory I had about women, which is that even the best
of them are suckers for tall men.

 
          
 
Meanwhile—back in bed—the defiance had not entirely
faded from Cindy Sanders' face. She swallowed a big glob of Brie and washed it
down with three big gulps of apple juice, watching me closely to see if I was
going to mount a serious campaign against her engagement.

 
          
 
I kept quiet. Every single time I've gone
one-on-one with female defiance, I've ended up face down on the floor,
twitching weakly. One thing I've learned to do without is the myth of male
dominance. Possibly there had actually been male dominance in other eras, but
constant exposure to women on the order of Boss Miller and Tanya Todd convinced
me it had gone the way of the dodo and the great auk.

 
          
 
"I want to get something straight,"
Cindy said. "Did you really know Big John Connolly, or were you just
conning me?"

 
          
 
"Sure I know him," I said. "Why
would you doubt it?"

 
          
 
"Let's put it this way," she said.
"Why would you doubt that I'm engaged to Harris? Do you have some notion
that you're better than he is?"

 
          
 
"Not better," I said.
"Maybe just a little more practical.
What if you start the
wedding and Harris can only decide to put one leg through the door of the
church?

 
          
 
"Of course you could marry him in the
park," I added. "No doors."

 
          
 
For some reason her mood lightened.

 
          
 
"In
L.A.
, maybe," she said.
"If
I wanted some freako LA.
wedding
, I'd marry the
head of Fox and get the Dalai Lama to preside. Members of Harris' family do not
get married in parks."

 
          
 
"I guess he did look pretty proper,"
I said, trying to remember Harris. All I could remember was that he was tall,
aristocratically thin, wore a suit, and had an anguished gaze.

 
          
 
"Changes clothes three times a day,"
Cindy said, tapping me gently on the chest with the handle of the knife.
"I didn't have to make him buy a dinner jacket the first time I took him
out."

 
          
 
"
My gosh
,"
I said. "I'm just a scout. It's not every day I meet a girl like
you."

 
          
 
"I'd like to hear more about your
wives," she said. "They don't seem to have taught you much."

 
          
 
"They weren't teachers, just wives,"
I said. "They both work for Boss."

 
          
 
Frankly I was beginning to be sorry I had
popped off about her engagement, since the remark had set in motion an
interrogation whose purpose was more or less a mystery to me. Cindy was now
gathering historical data of a sort all women feel they have an automatic right
to. Even Coffee had suspended her antihistorical bias long enough to secure a
thorough account of my prior relationships, when we first met.

 
          
 
"I know a flea-marketer's daughter who
doesn't work for Boss," I said, to change the subject.

 
          
 
"Where does she live?"

 
          
 
"
Zanesville
,
Ohio
," I
said,
a direct lie. For some reason I
wasn't ready to come clean about the flea-marketer's daughter, who actually
lives near
Augusta
,
West Virginia
, not much more than a two-hour drive from
Washington
.

 
          
 
"Yeah," Cindy said, looking at me
closely. She had probably activated her truth radar, an instinctive
lie-detecting mechanism I'm convinced all women have. It is an enormously
sophisticated mechanism which frequently enables women to skip quickly over the
fact of the lie and zero in on the motive behind it.

 
          
 
I've often been stunned to discover that women
can discern with great precision the true motive behind lies I had thought I
had merely wandered into casually, as I might wander into a junk shop.

 
          
 
There's really no winning against equipment so
finely calibrated, but there are certain evasionary tactics that will sometimes
delay the inevitable reckoning. I decided to try and camouflage the lie with a
sprig of truth.

 
          
 
"I have a confession to make," I
said. "I wasn't conning you yesterday. I do know Big John Connolly. But
the Big John I was actually referring to was Big John Flint."

 
          
 
Big John Flint is a phenomenal trader whose
antique bam just outside
Zanesville
,
Ohio
—where I had just fallaciously located Beth
Gibbon, the flea-marketer's daughter—was a mecca for scouts of all
descriptions. Since the business that had brought me to Cindy was antiques, I
assumed she would assume I meant Big John Flint when I uttered the phrase
"Big John."

 
          
 
The fact that she thought I meant Big John
Connolly was probably what prompted her to ask me to the dinner party.

 
          
 
Cindy owned three trend-setting businesses,
two downstairs and one upstairs in the large building on
O Street
.

 
          
 
One of them was an antique shop called
Schlock, my reason for being in D.C. in the first place. Next door was her
dress shop, Fancy Folk, and upstairs, over both shops, was her very avant-garde
gallery, which was called Sensibility.

 
          
 
At the time of my arrival Sensibility was
filled with the bread sculpture of an emigre Latvian peasant woman. Many of the
sculptures evidently represented the eternal feminine, being a mixture of lumps
and indentations. "Women are the bread of life, in Latvian folklore,"
Cindy explained.

 
          
 
Before I went to see Cindy for the first time,
Boog advised me to dress as vulgarly as possible, reasoning that what had
worked for him might work for me.

 
          
 
"A tasteful Texan ain't gonna play,"
he said. "It'll just confuse the natives, what few they
is
."

 
          
 
I decided to ignore this advice. I put on a
beautiful white doeskin jacket I had bought from a Blood Indian in
Montana
, and got my Stetson out of its hatbox in
the rear of the Cadillac. The Stetson was a brown 100-X beaver, with a hatband
made from the skin of an albino diamondback. It had been the Sunday hat of a
famous Texas Ranger captain and had probably not been out of its box six times
when I bought it from a spur-scout in the
Rio Grande
valley.

 
          
 
I put on my yellow armadillo boots and a thin
silver concho belt that had belonged to a Zicarilla medicine man.

 
          
 
After some thought, I decided to put my
Valentino hubcaps on the Cadillac.

 
          
 
Valentino hubcaps were in the form of silver
cobras, very graceful. Anyone who flea-markets much will have seen one or two
such hubcaps, all of them purporting to be off Valentino's own cars.

 
          
 
In fact, almost all the hubcaps now being
traded are the work of a well-known hubcap forger from
Torrance
,
California
. He was finally exposed in the sixties, but not before he had salted
the market with several hundred cobra hubcaps. The one detail he neglected, or
was too cheap, to duplicate, was the eyes. Valentino's cobras had real rubies
for eyes. And of the many cars he owned, only four—all Hispano-Suizas—were
equipped with the silver-plated, ruby-eyed cobra hubcaps.

 
          
 
I had one of the four true sets, bought from
Valentino's secretary, an aged, contentious, dipsomaniacal woman named Beulah
Mahony, who ended her days in a dingy apartment on
De Longpre Street
, in
West Hollywood
.

 
          
 
I almost didn't buy the hubcaps from her, not
because I doubted their authenticity but because I hated to think of Beaulah
without them, knowing, as I did, that they were her last link with youth and
glory.

 
          
 
Also, the hubcaps were her last means of
securing herself a little company.

 
          
 
Many aged, lonely people own a treasure or two
and quickly learn to use them as a tease. By letting it be known that they
might—just might—sell the treasure, they can entice collectors and scouts to
visit them again and again, if only for long enough to share a cup of coffee or
watch a soap opera with them. If the object in question is desirable enough,
the old person can sometimes scratch out a marginal social life on the strength
of it.

 
          
 
The true test of the honor and discipline of a
scout lies in his treatment of the old man or old woman with only one treasure
left. When they finally give in and sell it, it means they're done: tired of
the small indignities of the tease.

 
          
 
When they sell it, people stop coming to see
them and they die.

 
          
 
My claims to virtue are modest, but at least I
never went to
L.A.
without checking on Beulah Mahony—not that she was invariably grateful
for my loyalty.

 
          
 
Beulah was a querulous old orange-haired
woman, frenzied one day and apathetic the next. She was so incurably addicted
to holding garage sales that the last time I saw her she had even sold her
cheap
formica
table and had made a crude replacement
out of forty or fifty phone books she had managed to gather up around her
apartment building. She just piled them up in a block and ate off them. For
drinks she mixed gin and Kool-Aid, probably because Kool-Aid was the only mixer
she could afford.

 
          
 
Beulah's attitude was not unlike Momma Cullen's.
Any form of charity, even a buddy check, was an insult, but somehow she had
figured out that I really liked her,
an affection
she
rightly judged to be a weakness on my part. Consequently—in common with all the
other women in my life—she saw no reason to refrain from harsh judgment.

 
          
 
We sat at the phone book table, drinking the
revolting drink from two pink glasses Beulah had managed to withhold from her
last garage sale. Outside the window, a ditch-digging machine was eating its
way down
De Longpre Street
, belching and roaring as it crunched
through the asphalt.

 
          
 
"Jack, I don't know what to do about
you," Beulah said, occasionally pulling out a sprig of her orange hair and
tossing it on the phone books.

 
          
 
"It's a selfish life, driving around
buying things," she added. Being Valentino's secretary had not blurred her
sense of values, those having been inculcated long ago in her hometown,
Topeka
,
Kansas
.