McMurtry, Larry - Novel 05 (57 page)

 
          
 
Fortunately Boog's dirty black
Lincoln
was sitting there, in front of the Double
Bubble. He if anyone would know what Ponsonby's sharklike smile had meant. *

 
          
 
I found Boog in a hot tub with Lolly, Janie
Lee, and a skinny brunette I didn't know. Although Boog had probably contracted
for all the specials of the day, none of the girls were paying him the
slightest attention. Lolly was practicing her shorthand in a little shorthand
notebook, Janie Lee was watching a soap on the huge TV, and the brunette was
reading a book about running.

 
          
 
"Look, Janie Lee, Jack's back,"
Lolly said, looking up from her shorthand practice.

 
          
 
"This is B.J.," she added, nodding
toward the brunette.

 
          
 
"'lo," the brunette said.

 
          
 
Boog had been taking a nap, but he groaned and
opened his eyes.

 
          
 
"I thought somebody was gonna go get some
barbecue," he said.

 
          
 
"Not right now," Janie Lee said, her
eyes glued to the TV screen.

 
          
 
Boog looked at me unhappily. The moodiness
which had suddenly seized him still had him in its grip.

 
          
 
"Get in here and help me with this orgy
I'm havin'," he said. "We can split the cost of watching these girls
do their own thangs. Ain't
none
of them doing much for
my thangs."

 
          
 
"Oh, Boog, hush," Lolly said.
"We're all real busy."

 
          
 
Boog suddenly slid downward, immersing himself
in hot water. He stayed under for quite a while.

 
          
 
"I don't know what's happened to that
man," B.J. said. "He used to be real jolly."

 
          
 
"It's a midlife crisis," Janie Lee
said. "It's just like the one Richard's having."

 
          
 
"Who's Richard?" I asked.

 
          
 
"On
General
Hospital
," the girls said, in chorus.

 
          
 
Boog surfaced. "What'd you do all
morning, try to fuck my wife?" he asked.

 
          
 
"I had a little run-in with Mr.
Ponsonby," I said. "Is he dangerous or just obnoxious?" I told
him about the deal.

 
          
 
"Better men than you have runt from
him," Boog said. "Whoever heard of charging twenty thousand dollars
for a billy club? I imagine he would have just stopped payment on the check.
Wonder what he does with all
them
billy clubs?"

 
          
 
There was a green lawn chair nearby. I pulled
it up and sat in it.

 
          
 
"Lolly's gettin' real good at
shorthand," Boog said. "Teddy Kennedy's gonna hire her to run his
office any day now."

 
          
 
"Shoot, I may not even live here much
longer," Lolly said. "
Me
and Janie Lee may
move to
California
."

 
          
 
"Eviste moved in," Boog said.
"Boss is gonna train him to mow the lawn or something, so he can pay his
keep. He's gonna give the kids lessons in conversational Franch, so they can be
worse snobs than they are already."

 
          
 
"Boog, you oughta take up running,"
B.J. said. "It's real good for depression and thangs."

 
          
 
"Depression ain't my problem," Boog
said. "Thangs is my problem."

 
          
 
"Well, jogging's good for a wide range of
problems," B.J. assured him.

 
          
 
"I ain't about to run up and down the
sidewalk," Boog said. He climbed out of the hot tub and walked off to get
dressed.

 
          
 
"My dad was real grouchy which is why
Momma left him," Lolly said. "She took it for twenty years and then
she couldn't take it no more."

 
          
 
Boog reappeared, still moody, in a bright
green suit

 
          
 
"You girls
is
all wastin' your lives," he remarked as we left.

 
          
 
"Yeah, but so
what?"
B.J. said. She had an argumentative look about her.

 
          
 
"What's wrong with you?" I asked, as
we headed for the Cover-Up.

 
          
 
"Shut up and drive," he said.
"You ain't
no
psychoanalyst, why should I tell
you?"

 
          
 
He looked blankly out the window as
Arlington
merged imperceptibly into
Falls Church
.

 
          
 
"I been thanking about goin' back to
Winkler
County
," he said.

 
          
 
"What could you do there?"

 
          
 
"I could thank about my roots," Boog
said.

 
          
 
I snorted. The notion of Boog brooding about
his roots was ludicrous.

 
          
 
"Laugh all you want to," he said.
"Yore young.
You ain't ground to a halt in the pit of
pointlessness yet."

 
          
 
"The pit of what?"

 
          
 
"Pointlessness.
The point at which all that was at one time more has become less."

 
          
 
"The girls are right," I said.
"You're having a midlife crisis."

 
          
 
"It's a rest-of-my-life crisis,"
Boog said. "
Them
girls is sweet but they barely
got brains enough between them to focus a TV set.

 
          
 
"I just mostly wanta go home and sit on
the porch," he said, a moment later. "Watch the sun
come
up and the sun go down. Coexist in harmony with the
possums and the skunks. At night I could listen to the sound of the oil patch.
Motors chuggin'.
Might grow a tomato once
in a while, or raise ocelots or something."

 
          
 
"You?"
I
said. I could hardly believe I was hearing this fantasy of the rural life from
Boog Miller, one of the most compulsively urban people I had ever known.

 
          
 
Boog shrugged. "There is a great tendency
to return unto the first place," he said. "The home of one's youth.
The scene of the first humiliations.
Winkler
County
, in other words.*'

 
          
 
"You wouldn't last a week," I said.
"What would you do without massage parlors?
Flea
markets?
Auctions?
Politics?"

 
          
 
"I could read Spinoza," he said.
"Might write my memoirs."

 
          
 
"You'd miss Boss a lot," I said.
"Boss isn't going to
Winkler
County
."

 
          
 
"No, she's got to stay here and teach
that little Frenchman how to mow the grass," Boog said.
"Boss
and me been married thirty-two years.
We couldn't miss one another if we
tried."

 
          
 
It was strange to think that the Miller
marriage was only one year younger than I was. When they had gone to the altar
I had been tottling around the trailer house in Solino.

 
          
 
"She makes the best biscuits I ever
tasted," Boog said. "I thank that's what kept us together. I
appreciate good biscuits, a rare trait in modem man."

 
          
 
I parked at the Cover-Up, amid a few hundred
Datsuns and Toyotas. Boog, who had been starving, didn't seem in any hurry to
get out and go in.

 
          
 
"You want to go in the antique business
with me?" I asked, thinking he might really like a change of profession,
though at the moment the nature of his profession was rather vague. "We
could still probably get one or two of the Smithsonian warehouses."

 
          
 
"Nope," Boog said.
"Ain't interested.
I thank I'd rather just go back to
Winkler
County
and read Spinoza."

 
          
 
The Cover-Up, as usual, was full of people
with little plastic-sheathed security cards clipped to their lapels. Behind the
counter, Freddy Fu was taking money and dispensing Princetonian suavity. There
was no sign of Mrs. Lump. We had our usual order of goat and Tasmanian beer,
and when we finished I asked Boog if he would make a reservation for two at the
best restaurant in town.

 
          
 
"I'd like to meet this woman," he
said.

 
          
 
"You might, someday."

 
          
 
"I doubt it," he said. "You're
stingy with your women."

 
          
 
"I brought you Josie, didn't I?"

 
          
 
"Yeah, but she ain't yours," he
said. "She's married to some little third-generation fuckup down in
Henrietta. If it hadn't been for you,
me
an' Coffee
would have been true sweethearts long ago."

 
          
 
"Coffee's got enough problems as it
is," I said. "Do you know about the dope dealer?"

 
          
 
"Yeah, he's a midget Italian who wears
bracelets," Boog said. "That girl ain't leading a wholesome
life."

 
          
 
On the way out he stopped at a pay phone and
spoke in French to someone. I was surprised.

 
          
 
"I didn't know you spoke French," I
said.

 
          
 
"Some polish is gaint with one's mint,
said she," he said. "That was your maitre d'. You got your
reservation. Just try not to disgrace me by orderin' the wrong wine or
something."

 
          
 
In the afternoon I felt like an auction. I
needed something to get my adrenalin pumping, so I wouldn't get sleepy and take
a nap.

 
          
 
Unfortunately the only auction scheduled in
the D.C. area that day was a mixed auction of Oriental rugs and estate
glassware, at a gallery I was unfamiliar with. I seldom handle rugs, for the
simple reason that most of them won't fit in my car, and what's called
"estate" glassware by two-bit auctioneers is usually just ornate
junk.

 
          
 
But an auction is an auction. I got out my map
and managed to locate the gallery, which was one of a row of cinderblock
warehouses in a warehouse area not far from the Pentagon. To my surprise, the
place was packed, mostly with depressed-looking men in cheap suits. At any auction
where there is glassware there will usually be a lot of women, but in this case
there were only a handful, three or four hard-bitten ladies with silver hair
who were obviously dealers, and a couple of young mothers who had thought to
relieve the boredom of young motherhood by bringing their babies out to an
auction. The babies were strapped in strollers and had their own boredom to
contend with. They dealt with it mainly by trying to wriggle out of the
strollers.

 
          
 
The auctioneer, a thin, nervous little fellow,
was trying to teach a couple of surly Cubans how to hook the rugs to a pulley
arrangement so they could be hauled up briefly for display.

 
          
 
The men in the cheap suits all looked pallid,
as if, collectively, they had been raised under artificial light. The warehouse
was dusty and the free coffee which was being served tasted like it had been
brewed the week before. There was not one single piece of glassware that was
even decent. One Chinese lacquer-ware dish might have been described as
half-decent. The rugs were no better than the glass. The old ones were ragged
and much repaired, and there were only a few of them. Most of the rugs had been
manufactured since 1940.

 
          
 
Though there was no point at all in staying, I
stayed, sitting in a hard little bridge chair and watching the terrible
auctioneer auction the worthless rugs and terrible glass. The two Cubans were
totally without interest in the proceedings and half the rugs slipped loose
from the pulleys and flopped on the floor.
Once a large one
fell on the auctioneer, who was having a terrible day.
He tried to laugh
it off", but the rug that fell on him was big and dusty and from then on
he was prone to fits of coughing. Every wretched little
Canton
plate he held up he described as being a
"real early piece," his phrase for anything between the dawn of time
and 1975. One of the young mothers worked up her nerve and bought a set of
glasses which the auctioneer described as "real early crystal," when
in fact they had been made in
Minnesota
within the decade.

 
          
 
It was such a disgracefully amateurish auction
that I spent most of my time wondering why I wasn't leaving. I tried to tell
myself it was discipline: After all, the principle that anything can be
anywhere still held true.

 
          
 
Back there somewhere could be a rug that
Genghis Khan had sat on, as he trekked eastward in his years of conquest It
could happen. The odds were scarcely longer than the odds on a great Sung vase
turning up in De Queen,
Arkansas
.

 
          
 
At the same time, I knew it wasn't going to
happen. For one thing, apart from two silver-haired ladies who undoubtedly had
an antique store somewhere nearby, I was the only professional there. Blink
Schedel wasn't there, nor were any of Brisling Bowker's many runners. Of
course, none of them had been in De Queen, either, but De Queen was out of
their territory and south
Arlington
wasn't. If there had been something great in the auction one of them
would have sniffed it out and been there.

 
          
 
For the last forty lots of the sale I amused
myself by winding up a windup plastic duck for the fat little child of the
nearest mother. The duck was meant for a bathtub, and didn't perform well on
the concrete floor of the warehouse. Its little plastic propeller kept tipping
it over on its nose. This amused the child, a little girl with a few wisps of
orangish hair. When the duck tipped over I picked it up, let its propeller spin
down, and then wound it up again. In this harmless fashion the auction finally
passed.

 
          
 
I had bought nothing, and what was worse, no adrenalin
had pumped, as it would have at a good auction. I left feeling as flat as I had
felt when I entered, went to the nearest phone booth, and called my banker in
Houston
, to see if twenty thousand dollars had
materialized in my account.

 
          
 
It hadn’t John C. V. Ponsonby was losing his
chance at the Luddite truncheon. Or maybe he wasn't. Perhaps a well trained
agent had already been dispatched, to deal with me. He might follow me to a
swap-meet and steal the truncheon out of my car. He could slip a tranquilizing
drug into my hotdog or something. Most swap-meets have a hot-dog stand nearby,
a perfect cover for a well-trained agent.

 
          
 
I felt a little nervous, but since there was
no way to anticipate the agent's moves I drove to Wheaton, checked into a motel,
and lay in a bathtub until it was time to pick up Jean.

 
          
 
Soaking in water was more refreshing than
taking a useless nap.

 
          
 
While I soaked I thought of women. My moods
were flickering, like a radio with a loose wire. At moments it would occur to
me that if I just continued to be a scout I could lead a consistent and
interesting life. I didn’t really have to have women. They were not a necessity
of nature. In fact, they were a lot of trouble, disrupters of the peace, almost
all of them.

 
          
 
For moments, as I lay in the tub, I thought
how nice it would be just to drive around
America
buying things, not having one’s own peace
disrupted.
America
itself was very beautiful, very various. There was plenty to see. The
skies over the west were so lovely that they alone should have been enough to
sustain me.

 
          
 
When I looked at it that way I felt light for
a few seconds—I felt like an escapee—from tantrums, confusion, fucking, and a
million needs, stated and unstated.

 
          
 
Then, only a few seconds later, I would remember
that I liked fucking, and was interested in needs, stated and unstated. Even
America
could get boring. I wouldn't really escape
women. As soon as I got over one, another one would pop up. Things would repeat
themselves, some of them nice things, some of them not. After all I had a date
with a very appealing woman. We had even made love once, although so briefly
that I couldn't really remember it. When I tried to remember it I got an
erection, and soon after went to sleep in the bathtub.

 
          
 
At Jean's,
Beverly
let me in, edging out Belinda by a step.

 
          
 
"Mom's getting ready," she said.

 
          
 
"I was gonna get it," Belinda said,
annoyed to have been edged out. Her hair was impossibly curly. The girls were
both looking fresh and mischievous.

 
          
 
I sat on the couch and Belinda climbed into my
lap.

 
          
 
"I thought you said you were bringing
some presents," she said. She felt in my shirt pocket, to make sure no
small presents were hidden there.

 
          
 
Then Jean came downstairs, looking a little
discontent. She looked lovely, but she was not elaborately dressed. Often, in
dressing up, a woman will make herself into a person that doesn't look like the
self you know, but Jean hadn't succeeded in doing this at all.

 
          
 
"I failed," she said, anticipating
my comment. At that moment the doorbell rang, and both girls flew to get it.
Since Belinda was in my lap she was in a poor takeoff position. She tripped
over my boot and fell sprawling. Once again,
Beverly
got to get the door. Belinda burst into
tears at this double defeat. The babysitter was a thin teenage girl with lots
of braces.

 
          
 
"He tripped me," Belinda said,
sitting on the floor with a tear-streaked face.

 
          
 
"So?" Jean said. "Who told you
to run?" She introduced the babysitter, whose name was Debbie.

 
          
 
"Nobody cares," Belinda remarked,
still crying.

 
          
 
"That's right," Jean said.
"You've exhausted all sympathies. You're going to have to go the whole
rest of your life without any, because you're so greedy."

 
          
 
"What's sympathy?" Belinda asked.

 
          
 
Jean helped her up, wiped her face, kissed
them both, grabbed a coat, and went to the door.

 
          
 
"Let's go," she said. "All this
is Debbie's problem now."

 
          
 
"Have a good time, Mom,"
Beverly
said.

 
          
 
"Oh,
Beverly
, you're so generous," Jean said.

 
          
 
Belinda gave us both a cool look and marched
out of the room.