McMurtry, Larry - Novel 05 (3 page)

 
          
 
One of my recurrent dreams is of driving
backward down the highway of my life.

 
          
 
When the dream begins I will usually just be
drifting gently backward in the pearly Cadillac over some broad, beautiful
stretch of Interstate—perhaps the wonderful stretch of 1-90 between
Buffalo
and
Sheridan
,
Wyoming
, with the
Big
Horn
Mountains
off to the north.

 
          
 
But as the dream progresses the cuts get
faster and I regress through ten years of cars, back at least to the GMC pickup
I used during my first year on the rodeo circuit. The roads get worse,
too—often I find myself zooming backward over the gritty wastes near
Monahans
,
Texas
, before the little psychic balance bar that keeps me from becoming an
insane person tilts me back toward wakefulness.

 
          
 
Once in a while one of my wives is with me, in
the dream—always Coffee, my first wife, the more pliable of the two. Everyone
called her Coffee because she drank so much of it. From dawn to
midnight
, if Coffee was awake, she was never without
a cup with a swallow or two left in it. Her kisses tasted of mountain-grown
Folger, and I could never make love to her without the absurd conviction that
Mrs. Olson—the Swedish lady in the Folger commercial—was apt to pop in on us
while we were fucking, in order to compliment us on our choice of brands.

 
          
 
Coffee allowed me to drag her around
America
for nearly a year before she bailed out and
went back to
Austin
to work in one of Boss Miller's real estate offices.

 
          
 
Kate, my second wife, also worked for Boss,
but in the
Houston
office. Boss also had offices in
Dallas
,
Georgetown
, and Middleburg, and was waiting
impatiently for several young
Texas
cities to get rich enough to be worth her
time. Kate was hard at work when I walked in one day with a suit of samurai
armor I hoped to fob off on Boog. During the two years we were married most of
our sex took place on the vast couch in Boss's seldom-used office, in hectic
moments late in the day when Kate was giving a client time to get a little
snockered before showing him a three-million-dollar property.

 
          
 
Kate was a true saleswoman, in the way that I
am a true scout. The thought of all that money brought a flush to her face, and
if I happened to be around, the flush would often spread downward and engulf
us. There was never time to undress, or lay around enjoying the afterglow. Kate
would be off down
Memorial Drive
in her
Pontiac
convertible, a beer in the hand whose wrist
was crooked over the steering wheel. The other hand would be holding her long
dark blond hair on top of her head, in an effort to cool her neck and face so
she wouldn't look as if she had been doing what in fact she had just been
doing.

 
          
 
"I don't
care,
I
like to fuck on the fly.
It's
better," Kate said,
when I teased her about it. In that respect she was the opposite of Coffee, who
would drift around and drink a gallon of coffee, listen to several albums, and
watch five or six TV shows, ignoring or simply failing to notice gestures from
me that other women would have interpreted as passes—only to discover while she
was brushing her teeth that she felt a little passionate. Sex was not among the
things that Coffee was emphatic about.

 
          
 
There was never any question about my dragging
Kate around
America
. She might have been to
Dallas
once or twice, but that was it. For Kate,
Houston
was a sufficient universe, a fact even my
dream mechanism seemed to respect.

 
          
 
Boog would have given his eyeteeth to fuck
her, but his eyeteeth were in no danger.

 
          
 
About Coffee I'm not so sure. The mistake I
made with Coffee was to assume that because we both liked to spend all our time
buying things we would naturally have a happy marriage.

 
          
 
The element of miscalculation in that judgment
was small but crucial. I liked to buy old things, whereas Coffee liked to buy
new things. I bought Sung vases, but Coffee bought Halstons and Steuben glass.
She never went anyplace where she might wear a Halston, but that was not the
point. Buying the thing was the point.

 
          
 
The problem was never one of money: The
problem was that I had become an object-snob. Coffee had reasonably good taste,
but mine was better. She loved modern furniture and was constantly buying
chairs and lamps, but they were always a cut below the really classic modern
chairs and lamps. She bought strange angular chairs, and beanbags you were
supposed to sit on. She even bought a custom-made leather chair in the shape of
a hippo. It didn't look like a chair, but it could be sat in, if you were
willing.

 
          
 
The lamps were apt to be made from ostrich
eggs or kettledrums. She even bought one made from a small Chinese boat—not an
easy lamp to describe, much less to read by. Pretty soon our modest home in
Houston
contained more chairs than there would ever
be guests, and more lamps than there were sockets to plug them in.

 
          
 
When it came down to it, I loved Coffee but
couldn't tolerate her objects. She had been reluctant to leave
Austin
in the first place and of course went right
back. What she really liked to do was talk on the phone when nothing was happening
around the real estate office—when she discovered that she could do that
without having to put up with my antiques she was delighted. I had traded a
phone freak in
Milwaukee
out of some very sophisticated mobile equipment, and in time ate up
thousands of American miles while chatting with Coffee, who had not left
Austin
since her return.

 
          
 
One of the things she was most emphatic about
was that buying old things was an unhealthy habit. In her view the suggestion
that old things were often better than new things was an affront to life. She
had managed to get through the
University
of
Texas
while remaining totally unaware of the
existence of people on the order of Mao Tse-tung, and I even discovered one day
to my shock that she thought

 
          
 
World War II had occurred in the nineteenth
century, although her own father had fought in it.

 
          
 
"Oh well, Daddy was real young at the
time," she said, not really interested in the question.

 
          
 
Her determined rejection of history fascinated
Boog, who was better read historically than anyone I knew. On nights when he
wasn't too drunk to hold a book, he read himself to sleep with Thucydides,
Livy, Suetonius, Gibbon, and Napier. Every ugly suit he owned had a raggedy
Penguin paperback in the inside pocket, always history. Naturally he found
Coffee's attitude perverse and charming. Coffee couldn't be bought outright,
with money, but who was to say she couldn't be swept into romance by the right
kind of presents?

 
          
 
Boog would find the right kind, too: things so
new that ads for them hadn't even appeared in The New Yorker. He had contacts
with all manner of manufacturers, foreign and domestic, and probably swamped
Coffee with ponchos and belts—two of her particular loves—or chairs and lamps
so esoteric that they might not even be recognizable as chairs and lamps.

 
          
 
Before going further I might quote the
well-known Coke bottle scout Zack Jenks, who found a near-mint 1924 Coke bottle
beside 1-85 near
Gaffney
,
South Carolina
, in the summer of 1979.

 
          
 
"Anything can be anywhere," Zack
said, a statement that is to scouting what E = MC^ is to physics.

 
          
 
As we were breaking up.
Coffee and I had many long talks, in none of which did we quite locate the
nipple of the problem, to use one of her favorite phrases. Her view was simple:
All my character flaws resulted from the fact that I had grown up in a
trailer-house.

 
          
 
"You didn't have a lawn," she said,
as if that was all there was to it.

 
          
 
The trailer-house sat in
Solino
,
Texas
, and for most of my childhood it had two sad turd-hounds chained
underneath it. The dogs were named Lion and Tiger. When they were puppies they
liked to chew fiercely on my father's dirty socks, but once grown they lost
their warlike attributes. My father kept them chained under the trailer-house
anyway, in the hope that their ferocity would return if someone tried to rob
us. Nobody did, so all Lion and Tiger had to do was lie in the dirt and
scratch.

 
          
 
I grew up in the trailer-house. When I was
four my mother was killed in a car wreck, a few blocks away, a fact I don't
record in order to gain sympathy. In fact, I had an abnormally happy childhood,
running with a lively and sexually precocious gang of Mexican kids, in the warm
sun of the
Rio
Grande
valley.

 
          
 
My father.
Gene
McGriff,
took little part in my life, and not much of a part
in his own. His only affliction was a lifelong apathy, which he passed on to
the dogs but not to me. Clerking in the local hardware store was good enough
for him, and still is.

 
          
 
By the time I entered my teens I was already
twice as tall as my Mexican companions, and knew that basketball was going to
be my game, and it was a basketball scholarship that took me to college, though
I was tired of the sport even before I got there. My real passion was
gymnastics: I loved the clarity, the precision, and the utter loneliness of it.
But of course it was a hopeless passion, since I was six feet five inches. One
day I was watching an amateur rodeo when it occurred to me that bulldogging was
just a form of applied gymnastics. You jump, you grip, you swing, and you
twist, and if the timing of the four actions is precise the running animal will
throw himself with his own weight, rolling right across your body and whopping
himself
into the ground with a satisfying thump.

 
          
 
When I started dogging I was looking for a
passion. My world was the
Texas
valley, where there were no objects of the quality of a Sung vase, or
women as beautiful as Cindy Sanders. As yet unaware of the stimulus of beauty,
I made do with the stimulus of sport, and rapidly became a crackerjack
bulldogger. I qualified for the National finals my very first year on the
circuit, and soon fixed upon four seconds as a pure limit, a goal to aim for.
To chase and throw a steer within four seconds would equal perfection, the best
that concentration and technique could hope to achieve.

 
          
 
Fortunately I had an experienced hazer, an old
steer-roper named Goat Goslin. I also had a powerful little dogging horse named
Dandy, with a start like a cannon shot. For two years I burned up the circuit,
consistently turning in times around 5 seconds. I had a 4.8 in
Salinas
, a 4.6 in
Miles
City
, and a 4.3 at the Pendleton Roundup. For
two or three peak months I felt I was closing in on perfection.

 
          
 
At that point Goat Goslin began to worry about
me, though forty years of rodeo had not exactly taught him caution. He had only
one ear, the other having been butted off in Tucumcari in 1946, and his left
hand consisted of a thumb and first finger, the rest of it lost to a roping
accident in
Grand
Island
,
Nebraska
.

 
          
 
In his day Goat had tried his hand at every
event, an eclecticism that had left him with pins in
both
legs
, an artificial hip joint, and a little steel plate behind his left
temple that he would sometimes reach up and strike a match on. A person
unfamiliar with rodeo, looking him in the face for the first time, would have
had a hard time accounting for the sight. A cowboy from
Wolf
,
Wyoming
, probably put it best.

 
          
 
"That hairy old son of a bitch looks like
he dove off a three-story building into a waffle iron," he said.

 
          
 
And yet Goat was actually worried about me. We
were chugging along in the GMC pickup, down the east side of
Oregon
, the day after I posted my 4.3. It was a
cold morning and we could neither get the heater to work nor the right window
to roll up all the way. Goat was blowing on what was left of his crusty old
hands.

 
          
 
"I’m worried about you, Jack," he
said, out of a clear blue eastern
Oregon
sky.

 
          
 
"Me?" I asked. "Why worry about
me? Don't I look healthy?"

 
          
 
"Yeah, you do. You shore do, Jack,"
Goat said, pulling at a tuft of hair that curled out of one side of his nose,
as white as the covering of Momma Cullen's worn-out chair.

 
          
 
He was silent for a few minutes, obviously a
little embarrassed by the conversation he seemed to want to initiate.

 
          
 
"Jack, all you thank about is
bulldoggin'," he blurted out, awkwardly picking up a pair of wire-pinchers
and looking at them as if they might contain the secret of existence.

 
          
 
"I guess you're right. Goat," I
said. "I guess it is about all I think about."

 
          
 
"I tolt you," he said. "It's
all you thank about."

 
          
 
"But what am I supposed to think
about?"

 
          
 
My question stumped Goat completely. He lapsed
into an aggrieved silence, staring out the window at the gray sage. I could
tell he thought it unsporting of me to turn the question around and point it in
his direction.

 
          
 
"Why hell. Jack, I don't even thank you
like rodeoin'!" he exclaimed, some thirty miles later.

 
          
 
It was true. I didn't, particularly, although
I had not got around to admitting this to myself. I was honestly fascinated by
bulldogging, but apart from that what I really liked about the life was the
opportunity it gave me to drive across vast, lonely American spaces.

 
          
 
Still, there was no way I could dispute Goat's
main point. The world of the arenas was a tawdry one—pridefully crude,
complacently violent. I had already started to escape it by spending what spare
time I had in junk shops and low-grade antique stores.

 
          
 
The day before, at a little store outside
Pendleton called Babe's Antiques and Plaster, filled mostly with hideous
plaster lawn ornaments, I had bought what I later discovered was a Tlingit
copper-and-bone dagger. I gave Babe $30 for it, just because it was pretty.

 
          
 
But my passion for objects was still latent,
and I had not consciously considered Goat's point.

 
          
 
"Well, what do you like about it,
Goat?" I asked.

 
          
 
Goat could hardly believe I would be gauche
enough to ask him two questions in the same day. On the whole he was not a
talkative companion, though once in a while he could be induced to talk about
some of his more impressive accidents, which he called storms.

 
          
 
"Got in a storm down in
Laramie
," he would say. "Hung myself to a
dem bull and that sucker jerked my arm too far out of the socket, they had to
fly me to
Dallas
, to a socket doctor.
Missed
two rodeos because of that storm."

 
          
 
My question put him into a sulk, but it*s a
long way from Pendleton to
Sedalia
,
Missouri
, where we were going. By the time we were
fifty or sixty miles into
Idaho
, Goat had looked into his soul and found the truth.

 
          
 
"Why hell, what I like about it is all
that over-age pussy," he said. "All
them
drunk grandmothers. I’d be lucky to get any other kind, bunged up as I
am."

 
          
 
It was true that an awful lot of middling to
old ladies used rodeos as an excuse to get lit, not to mention
laid
.

 
          
 
"Some of them was my fans," Goat
added, respectfully, meaning that they had been hopeful young women when, as a
young cowhand fresh out of Guthrie, Oklahoma, he had made rodeo history at the
Fort Worth Fat Stock Show by riding a bull called Sudden Death—a monster black
Brahma, sort of the Moby Dick of bulls, killer of two, crippler of several, and
never ridden for a full regulation 8 seconds until Goat came along.

 
          
 
Goat was not particularly moved by his
observation, but I was. Rodeo people of a certain age, staring out into the
arenas around which they have spent painful and mostly disappointing lives,
still talk reverently about the night Goat Goslin rode Sudden Death. It was a
bittersweet thought that all over the west there were old ladies eager or at
least willing to grapple with Goat, in a pickup seat or miserable motel room, because
of a brief, dust-cloaked ride thirty-five years back down the
highway, that
most of them had not even been there to see.

 
          
 
But whether they had seen it or not it was the
diamond in the popcorn of their lives—an event that only lasted 8 second.

 
          
 
A month later, at the National Finals Rodeo, I
nearly hit perfection, throwing a steer in 4.1 seconds. It won me a
championship saddle and a belt buckle that would have stopped a bazooka bullet.
When I let the steer up I felt sad—the same sadness I felt driving out of De
Queen with the Sung vase. I was looking downward from a peak, and my descent
was swift. A month later I was taking 10 and 12 seconds to throw steers I
should have thrown in 5 or 6. But I lacked even a vague notion of what I might
want to do next, and kept on desultorily dogging steers.

 
          
 
In early February the Fort Worth Fat Stock
Show rolled around.
On the first night.
Goat was
sitting on the fence by the bucking chutes, smoking and watching, as he had
done for thousands of nights.

 
          
 
Tex Ritter—Goat's favorite singer—was there
that night. During one of the breaks in the action he sang "Hillbilly
Heaven"—it was not long before he departed for it himself. The crowd burst
into tears, overcome by the memory of immortals like Patsy Cline and Cowboy
Copas.
Tex
didn't sing his well-known rodeo classic,
"Bad Brahma Bull," fearing, perhaps, that it would be an augury.

 
          
 
Twenty minutes after he sang, a very bad and
very black Brahma bull smashed through the chute gate, threw his rider,
narrowly missed killing a clown, then whirled and leaped the arena fence right
where Goat was sitting. The fence, like the gate, smashed as if it were
plywood. The bull came down with Goat right underneath him, the bull's front
feet hitting Goat in the chest—his cigarette was still in his mouth and still
lit when he died, by which time the bull had trotted back to the bullpen, as
placid as a milk-pen calf.

 
          
 
So died Goat Goslin, a small
legend in his own time.
Everyone agreed that the spirit of Sudden Death
had finally come back to claim him. Some went so far as to allow that it was
fitting.