Moving On (26 page)

“What happened?” Patsy said.

“No telling. He rolled over with her, though.”

Patsy jumped down into the arena. By the time she got to Boots more than a dozen cowboys had gathered around her, and Pete had arrived. A doctor had been summoned, and while he was bending over Boots, Jim joined Patsy on the edge of the crowd. An ambulance, its red light swirling, entered the arena slowly and came toward the crowd. Pete glanced up from talking to the doctor, saw Jim and Patsy, and motioned for them to come. He looked very discouraged.

“Is it bad?” Patsy asked.

“Busted hip, at least,” Pete said. “The doc says we oughta take her to Cheyenne. I was wondering if you-all could go and stay with her till I get there. I can’t come until the bull ridin’s over.”

They quickly agreed. Boots was unconscious. As they were closing the ambulance doors Patsy caught a glimpse of Pete, looking very dejected, taking the reins of Boots’s horse from some cowboy. Then they were speeding out of Laramie on the dark road to Cheyenne. The trip was as fast as the one they had made the night before with Sonny, and they were just as silent. Boots moaned from time to time but did not really regain consciousness until they were wheeling her into a bright hospital corridor in Cheyenne. Her face was tear-streaked and her mouth quivering with pain. Patsy stayed with her in the emergency room, holding her hand until the interns came and wheeled her away.

Then there was nothing she and Jim could do but sit in the waiting room and wait. They held hands and sat almost in silence for more than an hour, now and then shifting their dry fingers in each other’s hands. Then Pete came in. His face was streaked with greasepaint, though he had made a hasty attempt to wipe it off. He had already seen Boots’s doctor.

“Smashed up her hip and leg, and she’s got a little concussion,” he said. “Didn’t break no ribs, by a miracle.”

He seemed tired and white, and they scooted over to make room for him on the bench where they sat. He handed Jim the keys to the Thunderbird. “You two just as well go on back,” he said. “I’ll stay around tonight and tomorrow. Maybe one of you could come back and stay tomorrow night while I’m working. Hate to ask. Course she may not need nobody by then.”

“Why should you hate to ask?” Patsy said. “Of course she’ll need somebody. We should just get a motel room here. I’d as soon be in Cheyenne as in Laramie.”

They stood up but didn’t leave immediately. Patsy hated to go away and leave Pete looking so forlorn. “Look, we can stay with you tonight, if you want us to,” she said, trying to get him to look up at her. He did, but his gaze scarcely registered.

“No, no use everybody being miserable,” he said. “Just come late tomorrow afternoon.”

When they left he walked with them down the corridor to a pay phone, to put in a call to Boots’s parents, in Fort Worth.

“Aren’t you tired of all this?” Patsy said, as they were driving back. Jim was quiet. He looked almost cheerful, and it disturbed her. She carried other people’s pain with her for hours, and it always disconcerted her to see that Jim didn’t. Once out of sight of suffering, his mind simply negated it and he could act as if it didn’t exist.

“I’m not tired of anything,” he said. “The only thing I’m really tired of is you waiting for me to get tired of something. I do get a little tired of you not believing in me.”

“Oh, for god’s sake,” she said. “I wasn’t not believing in you. I meant rodeo. Haven’t we followed cowboys around long enough watching them get hurt. I want to go back to Texas and have a baby.”

“I was thinking I might go to graduate school this fall,” he said.

“Were you?” She was quite surprised.

“I haven’t decided anything. I knew if I brought it up you’d accuse me of giving up on photography too soon.”

“I wasn’t meaning to accuse you of anything,” Patsy said. “Please don’t be so defensive.” They fell silent again, and she felt very depressed.

The next morning she awoke before Jim and went down the street to a drab linoleum-floored cafe for breakfast. There was an item on the front page of the morning paper that chilled her so much that she couldn’t eat. Two rodeo cowboys had beaten an elderly man almost to death, and all by mistake. One of them fancied his girl friend was sleeping around and he and a friend had gotten drunk and gone to the girl’s house. Her father, whom they had never seen, answered the door, and the cowboys concluded he was the lover and hit him with their fists and a beer bottle and left him on his own living-room floor with a fractured skull. The cowboys’ pictures were in the paper—she had the immediate irrational conviction that they were the same two men who had beaten Jim. She had ordered toast and coffee and a glass of milk, but except for a sip of milk she left the breakfast untouched and hurried back to the motel, very upset. She woke Jim and insisted that he look at the paper.

“Are those the men who beat you?” she asked.

At first Jim could make no sense of what she was saying, but when he did he shook his head. “Those aren’t the guys,” he said. “The ones that hit me were down in Texas.”

“I know, I know,” she said. “So were we then. That makes it even worse. It’s not just two especially dangerous cowboys, it’s some sort of insane violence this life seems to breed. I hate it. I won’t stay around it any longer. We’re going back to Houston.”

She was sitting by him on the bed, looking so serious that he wanted to smile, though he knew there would be hell to pay if he did. Stories of violence seldom really touched him, and being awakened and given an ultimatum made him feel stubborn.

“We’ll go in good time,” he said.

“I knew you’d say that. I say we go now. It’s insane to run the risk of some nut cracking our skulls with a beer bottle just because he feels like it. Shanks could do that sort of thing and you know it.”

“You’re paranoid about Sonny,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “Just because he scared you once doesn’t mean he’s insane.”

“Oh, Jim, why do you want to argue about something obvious?” she said.

“I don’t. I was enjoying being asleep. I just don’t like you waking me up and giving me blanket orders.”

“I don’t like being scared all the time for no good reason.”

“You’re not scared all the time. Besides, there are risks everywhere.”

“Please don’t generalize like that,” she said, very annoyed. “I’m not general. I’m your own particular individual wife and I want to go home. That’s not unreasonable.”

“No, except we can’t just go this instant, today.”

“I could,” Patsy said. She got off the bed and went to the dresser. “I could be ready in thirty minutes.”

“You’re always hasty.” He peered at their traveling clock and lay back down.

“You’re always inconsiderate,” she replied. She was nervously twisting the ends of her hair. “I think I’ll leave you. Then you can say the whole thing’s been hasty. I seduced you hastily, I married you hastily, I was a very hasty wife generally and it would be perfectly in character if I left you hastily.”

“
I
seduced
you
,” Jim said with a yawn. “Don’t try to make out that you were a bohemian. You were a prude.”

“I wasn’t all the time,” she said. “I think I will leave you. I don’t care which of us seduced the other, it hasn’t worked out very well. We have nothing mutual any more except our ability to argue.”

Jim decided to go back to sleep and ignore her until her mood changed, but he was a little too wide awake and he noticed after a while that she had changed into a dress and was combing her hair and actually making as if she might leave.

“Patsy,” he said worriedly, sitting up.

She was tugging a comb through her hair, her teeth set. She didn’t reply.

“Now calm down,” he said. “I’m sorry. You can’t leave.” His tone was not entirely steady.

“Oh, go back to sleep,” she said. “I know it. I’m too weak. I’m just going over to Cheyenne to see if there’s anything I can do for Boots and Pete. I meant all that other, though. I really want to go back to Texas soon.”

“We will,” Jim said, relieved.

“You can have the Ford,” she said, digging in the pocket of his pants for the keys to the Thunderbird. Jim held out his hand, hoping she would sit on the bed and be friendly a minute and kiss him, but she ignored it and went out the door holding a purse and her green sweater. She looked as if she would not be in a kissing mood for quite some time.

Patsy enjoyed driving the Thunderbird. When she was in high school she had begged her parents to let her get a Jag or a Porsche or even an MG for her first car, but they had refused, and while they were considering what sort of first car she should have, her Aunt Dixie had come to her rescue and given her a Corvette with white leather seats. The Thunderbird reminded her of the Corvette, and she sped across the brown sparsely grassed plains, remembering Dallas and high school and one or two of the boys who had been twice as eager to date her once she got the Corvette. One night while drunk her father borrowed the car and wrecked it completely while on his way to a U-Totem to buy some shaving cream. Neither he nor her mother had ever forgiven her Aunt Dixie for giving it to her in the first place.

She found Pete Tatum asleep on a couch in the waiting room. He looked mussed, unshaven, and uncomfortable. She hated to wake him, but when she spoke he woke easily and seemed glad to see her.

“Pleasant surprise,” he said. “Hope you brought a razor.”

Patsy hadn’t and was chagrined at her own complete impracticality. She offered to run out and get one but Pete wanted her to go with him to the ward to see Boots.

“Gosh, aren’t wards awful?” she said. “Couldn’t she have had a private room?”

Pete looked puzzled. “Best we could afford,” he said. Patsy was embarrassed. She felt nervous and distressed, and in the light of morning the whole hospital seemed squalid. Boots had apparently had no nightgown and was dressed in a gray hospital gown. In the bed she looked smaller than she normally did, and younger. The contrast between her age and Pete’s showed more. With no makeup, her lips pale, her hair short, she could have been in her early teens. The old lady in the next bed had on a bright pink bathrobe and looked at them inquisitively, as if she was trying to decide who was married to whom. She was too timid to ask, but her glances made Patsy uneasy, anyway.

“Pore darlin’,” the old woman said. “She looks feverish. They just give her a shot.” Pete felt Boots’s forehead and smoothed back her hair, but she rolled her head from side to side, as if his touch made her hot. Patsy had no idea what to do, and when Pete looked at her again she realized he felt as helpless as she did.

“Let’s go buy you a razor,” she said. He asked the old woman to tell Boots they had gone to eat, if she awakened, and then quickly followed Patsy into the hall, as glad to get out of the ward as she was.

It was a cloudy day, with now and then a clear patch of pale blue sky showing through the clouds. The wind was blowing—Patsy’s hair blew and blew and grew tangled. They drove to a drugstore and Pete bought a razor and some shaving cream. Patsy sat in the Thunderbird huddled over her knees while he went into the rest room of a Texaco filling station and shaved. When he came out his face looked clean and pleasant and healthy, in contrast to the dirty overalls and wrinkled shirt. He had nicked himself a little. They went to a restaurant on the highway and Pete ate what seemed to her an enormous unstomachable meal. Her own stomach had closed up nervously—she subsisted all day on Cokes.

“How can you eat?” she asked, watching him eat a breakfast steak. He had even put ketchup on it, which repelled her a little.

“One of the few things I can always do,” he said, smiling at her comfortably.

A little later, back at the hospital, their hands brushed as they were going through a door and Patsy felt oddly embarrassed by the accidental touch. Boots was sleeping calmly, and as they had nothing to do but wait they decided to wait in the town rather than at the hospital. They drove to Frontier Park and sat at the curb in the car, talking and watching three mothers and their children. The park was brown and rather bare, and, as the day was so windy, Patsy didn’t feel like getting out. She had the green sweater over her shoulders. She told Pete about the cowboys beating up the old man and he asked what their names were. She couldn’t remember.

“Rummel?” he said. “Ed Rummel?”

“That’s it. He was one of them.”

“He told me she was two-timin’ him,” Pete said, looking at the women in the park. “I know her. She’s a sorry little hussy.”

Patsy was quite disturbed, first by the way in which he seemed to take the blame from the man and put it on the woman, but even more disturbed by his casualness in regard to the violence. It put a distance between them, gave her the feeling she had had about him before. They were not the same kind of people, and it was inappropriate, her being in the car with him.

“Oh, Pete,” she said, “even so. You don’t go beating old men with beer bottles, however bad she was. Even if he had been her boy friend that wouldn’t be the thing to do. If his girl friend was so worthless he could have tried to get one who wasn’t.”

Pete saw that she was annoyed, but his mind was not really on what had happened in Laramie. “Well, that’s true too,” he said. “Ed Rummel just ain’t that smart, or that nice, either. He’s a mean bastard when he’s drunk. I never meant to take up for him. So far as I’m concerned he deserves whatever he gets.”

A trash truck was moving slowly through the park, with an Indian in a red baseball cap standing on the back end. From time to time he hopped down and emptied one of the many trash barrels into the truck. Pete looked tired and solemn and Patsy ceased being annoyed with him. She could not stay annoyed with him for something that he had not done—it merely puzzled her that he would choose a life in which such things happened often. Probably they happened so often that he had become indifferent to them, and yet he didn’t seem like a man who would be indifferent to such things. He looked worried and melancholy, probably because Boots was hurt. Patsy was not worried, exactly, but she felt lonely and very out of place. A park in Wyoming had nothing to do with her. She grew suddenly wistful for familiar places and familiar people, and regretted being ugly to Jim. He was familiar, and he had not been ugly to her at all. He had merely been sleepy.