The Last Picture Show (24 page)

"Peanut butter?" he asked absently, when he noticed Jacy. She didn't want to eat, she wanted to sit in his lap, but she saw he was really watching the news and made herself refrain. They had come home in his car, she had no way to leave. During the commercial Bobby got up to fix himself another sandwich. "Oh, you're afoot, aren't you," he said. "As. soon as the news is over I'll run you back to the club."

He was quite cheerful and relaxed, but Jacy was a little surprised that he didn't take on over her more than he did. For the next four or five days she hung around the club pool almost constantly, expecting to hear that Bobbie and Annie-Annie had broken up; she was sure that as soon as that happened Bobby would call her for another date.

The next Sunday morning Jacy was in the kitchen peeling an orange when her mother came in from the bedroom to get more coffee. On Sunday mornings Lois always lay in bed and drank coffee until the coffee pot was empty. Gene was gone-he always spent Sunday morning inspecting his leases.

"Honey," Lois asked, "don't you know that Sheen boy in Wichita? Bobby Sheen?"

"I sure do," Jacy said. "Why?"

"He got married yesterday to some girl named Annie Martin," Lois said. "It's in the paper this morning. I knew I'd seen them around the club. They got married in Oklahoma a couple of days ago and it just now made the paper. You know her?"

Jacy walked into the bedroom and found the article. It was just a tiny article with no picture, the kind the paper always ran when kids of prominent families ran off and got married without their parent's consent.

When Lois came into the bedroom with her coffee, Jacy was sitting on the bed crying bitterly.

"He's the luh-ast one," she said. "I'll just be an ol' maid." Lois set her coffee down and got her daughter a box of Kleenex. She had seldom seen Jacy so upset, and least of all over a boy. Her tears were ruining the newspaper, and since she hadn't finished reading it Lois gently pulled it away.

"Oh, honey," she said. "Don't cry like that. That's the way it is, you know. Win a few, lose a few. That's really the way it goes, all through life."

About a week after Bobby Sheen got married, something totally unexpected happened to Jacy, and it was led up to by an event so startling that everyone in Thalia almost went mad with surprise. Joe Bob Blanton was arrested for rape! It was one of those days when it seemed to Christian people that the Lord must have lost all patience with the town. It was a wonder he hadn't simply destroyed it by fire, like he had Sodom, and since the heat at mid-afternoon that day was 109 degrees He could easily have done so simply by making the sun a little hotter. A few degrees more and the grass would have flamed, the buildings begun to smoke, and the asphalt streets to melt and bubble.

Joe Bob didn't rape Jacy, of course, but the general confusion that followed his arrest made possible what did happen to her. Joe Bob didn't actually rape anybody, but very few would have believed that at the time.

"That poor kid's downfall started the day old man Blanton got the call to preach," Lois Farrow said, but she was the only one who took that view. No one else thought of blaming Brother Blanton for his son's disgrace, and still less did they think of blaming Coach Popper or the school board president or San Francisco or Esther Williams, the movie star. They were all quite willing to put the blame squarely on Joe Bob himself.

Joe Bob was a seventeen year old virgin. For years he had been tormented by lustful thoughts. When he was only fourteen Brother Blanton slipped into his room one night and caught him masturbating by flashlight over a picture of Esther Williams. Joe Bob had torn the picture out of a movie magazine one of their neighbors had thrown away. Of course Brother Blanton whipped him severely and disposed of the picture; he also told Joe Bob in no uncertain terms what the sequel of such actions would be.

"Joe Bob," he said, "have you ever been through the State Hospital in Wichita? The insane asylum?"

"No sir," doe Bob said.

"Well, sometime I'll take you," Brother Blanton promised. "There are three or four hundred men over there, pitiful creatures, rotting away, no good to their families or to the Lord or anybody. I don't know about all of them, some of them may have come from broken homes or been alcoholics, but I'm sure most of those men are there because they did just what you were doing today. They abused themselves until their minds were destroyed. I don't want to scare you now. You're young, you haven't hurt yourself much, and the Lord will forgive you. I just want you to know what will happen if you keep on with this kind of filthiness. You understand, don't you?"

"Yes sir," Joe Bob said.

He understood, but he soon discovered he was just too weak to stop. He kept right on playing with himself, all through high school, in the face of certain insanity. His father hadn't told him how long it took for a mind to be destroyed, but he never doubted that his would be, sooner or later.

In the summer of his junior year, when he got the call to preach, he thought there still might be hope. If he preached, girls might like him, and if they did he might be able to overcome his vices and lead a normal life. The hope was very short-lived. The very night he preached his first sermon he succumbed to the vice again. Besides that, he found he did not really like to preach. He didn't have anything to say, and he soon decided he must have heard a false call: he could always get the Lord off his mind, but the only way he could get girls off his mind was by jacking off. In San Francisco he had been with the boys who wandered into the bar where Gloria was, and the thought of Gloria haunted him for weeks. By the time he got back home he had decided to resign himself to eventual insanity, and he ceased to make any effort to curb his self-abuse. If the Lord spared him until he got through college that would be enough to ask.

Joe Bob might have got through the summer all right if it had not been for the scandal caused by Mr. Cecil's dismissal. That set the town on its ear so that it made things hard for all sinners. The church ladies decided the time had come for some widespread soul-saving. If a homosexual was teaching English in high school, there was no telling what state of degeneracy the ordinary populace had fallen into. Ruth Popper herself was known to be sleeping with a high school boy. They decided to have an All City Revival, and they didn't waste any money bringing in a slick traveling evangelist who would have charged them three hundred dollars. There were six active preachers in the town, plus Joe Bob and a few old ones that were retired, so the ladies decided to put aside denominational differences and make do with the native preaching stock.

Everybody but Joe Bob thought it was a fine idea. He didn't because it meant he would have to preach two sermons.

"Yes, sir," Brother Blanton told him. "We've all got to get out there and preach our hearts out if we're going to get this town back on the right track."

Joe Bob agreed, but he was afraid he could preach his own heart completely out in just a minute or two. During the winter his ministerial flame had burned very low—he was not even confident that he himself was saved. He knew that he harbored hatred in his heart for about three-quarters of the boys of the town, and that was surely not a Christian attitude. He had no idea what he could say that might prompt anyone in the congregation to rededicate their life to Christ, and so far as he knew, getting people to rededicate their lives was the only point of a revival.

He worried about it for two weeks, and it turned out his worries were fully justified. Joe Bob had to preach the last sermon in the first go-round of preachers, which meant that he had to preach on a Thursday night, the worst possible night to preach. The first wave of revival spirit had had time to ebb, and the second wave had not yet begun to gather. The revival was held in the local baseball park under the lights, and when Joe Bob got up to preach there was just a sprinkle of a crowd, old faithfuls from all the churches in town, people so habituated to church going that they never missed a sermon, no matter how dull. Joe Bob was dressed in his black wool suit, the only suit his father would let him preach in. The night was sweltering. For days Joe Bob had racked his brain, trying to come up with a sermon, but the only moral advice he could think of was that people ought to read the Bible more. That was his theme, and he sweated and stammered away at it for twenty minutes.

"When I say back to the Bible I don't mean just a chapter here and there," he tried. "I mean the
full
Gospel, the
whole
Bible,
all
of it! Ever bit!"

He kept working that point over desperately, hoping somebody, at least one person, would come down and rededicate his life. Finally, to his great relief, the Pender family got down out of the stands and came. It was not much of a triumph, because the Pender family rededicated their lives regularly, several times a year, but it was better than nothing. The Penders lived in a cabin down on Onion Creek where they shot squirrels and farmed sweet potatoes. Every two or three months, when things got boring, they came to church and rededicated their lives, hoping thereby to move the community to charity. They were a generally scruffy lot -in fact old man Elmer Pender spat tobacco juice right on home plate as Joe Bob was calling for the closing hymn.

Because of the Penders, the first sermon was not a total disgrace, but Joe Bob still had the second one to preach. That one was scheduled for a Saturday night, only one night before the revival was due to end. Hysteria would be at its height, and Joe Bob knew he would need something more potent than the Full Gospel to exhort on that night. On the next-to-last night of a revival it would be a black disgrace not to get twenty or thirty rededications.

All week he brooded about the final sermon. He knew good and well there was no way he could get out of it, and as the week wore on the only way he could get it off his mind was by abusing himself. By Saturday morning he was in a serious state. He stayed in his room until noon and abused himself twice. Then he talked his father into letting him use the family Plymouth, on the grounds that he needed to go off and commune with nature in order to get inspiration for his sermon. Nature that day was about as hot as the place Joe Bob was supposed to be saving people from. He drove out to the lake and sat staring at the water for a couple of hours, thinking how much he didn't want to preach that night. Finally he tired of staring at the bright sun-whitened water and drove into town to get a coke. That move turned out to be his downfall.

The facts of it almost passed belief. Nobody in Thalia would have supposed that Joe Bob could get in so much trouble in Thalia, Texas, right in the middle of a hot Saturday afternoon. Sonny heard about it almost as soon as the news got out. The sheriff happened to be in the poolhall shooting a quiet game of snooker when Monroe, his skinny deputy, came bursting in, white as a sheet.

"Sheriff, Johnny Clarg's little girl has kinda been kidnapped," he said. "They seen the preacher's boy putting her in his car about an hour and a half ago, in front of the drugstore."

"What the hell?" the sheriff said, taking aim at a red ball.

"Maybe Joe Bob gave her a ride home—be doing her a favor, hot as it is. Why would Joe Bob want to kidnap Molly Clarg?"

"Don't ask me," Monroe said. "She ain't at home, though. Miz Clarg's all upset-she's done looked everywhere for 'em. They was seen drivin' out of town toward Olney. Miz Clarg's afraid Joe Bob might be goin' to mo-lest her or something."

At that the sheriff quickly slapped his cue into a rack. He was getting beat anyway, and a sex crime called for immediate action.

"Some of you boys might come with us," he said. "If that's the way it is, no tellin' what we'll find."

In all, three cars set out on the search. Brother Blanton was in one, with his wife and some good church deacons. Mrs. Clarg was in another, with a deputy and some of her friends, and the sheriff and several men were in the lead car. Sonny was with the sheriff.

Fortunately, no particular searching was required. It was clear to. everybody that Joe Bob had taken Molly out to an old lover's lane, three or four miles south of town.

"Boys, I don't know what to think, but I fear the worst," the sheriff said, wiping his sweaty face on his shirt sleeve. He drove like sixty, roaring over the rattly cattle guards as if they weren't there. If they hadn't been lucky and encountered Joe Bob on an open stretch of dirt road the sheriff might well have plowed right into him and killed Molly and several other people. When they spotted him Joe Bob was on his way back to town, but he was coming reluctantly, at a speed of five miles an hour. He stopped instantly when he saw the three cars coming toward him.

The sheriff quickly got out of his car and rolled down the cuffs of his shirt sleeves, while Joe Bob sat in the Plymouth, looking miserable. Everyone but Brother Blanton and his wife got out of the cars and stood looking indecisively at the Plymouth. After a moment Mrs. Clarg became hysterical and ran over to the Plymouth and yanked Molly out. Molly was five, and had been sitting quietly in the front seat eating a lemon all-day sucker Joe Bob had given her. When her mother yanked her out everybody noticed that she didn't have her panties on.

"Get him, ain't you goin' to?" Mrs. Clarg cried. "He's the one done it, here's my little girl, why don't you get him. If my husband was here he'd kill him dead."

At that the sheriff and Monroe leaped in and pulled Joe Bob out of the car.

"What'd you do to that child?" the sheriff said. "We all know you done somethin'."

Joe Bob started to say something but he was too scared and nervous to get it out. Instead he collapsed, and they carried him to the sheriff's car and rushed him back to Thalia.

Sonny volunteered to drive the Blanton's Plymouth into town. Seeing Joe Bob so scared depressed him and he drove slowly. Molly Clarg's panties were laying in the car seat no one had noticed them, but Sonny supposed they were evidence so he left them there. By the time he got back to town the poolhall was full of men, all of them talking about the crime. It was generally agreed that Johnny Clarg would go to the jailhouse and kill Joe Bob as soon as he came in off his rig.