McMurtry, Larry - Novel 05 (9 page)

 
          
 
The reason Moorcock Malone knew about my
violence toward the pugs was because Cindy had spread the word while I was out
buying her the Sunday papers.

 
          
 
She had forced me out of bed about
noon
, at which time it became imperative that
she have the papers. For an A-list person like herself, the Post and the Times
were moral imperatives. By the time I staggered back with my load of morally
imperative newsprint she had finished her telephoning and was ready to get to
work.

 
          
 
Some people approach Sunday papers in the
spirit of an orgy—Cindy approached hers in the spirit of a seminar. Her
discipline was little short of daunting. She didn't go for the comics, or the
gossip columnists, as most people would have, but simply read the papers
straight through, from the front page of the Times to the last page of the
Post. She even read the Times Magazine. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't
been lying on her fine sheets, watching her.

 
          
 
Out of shame, rather than interest, I made her
let me have the want ads, so I could at least make a pretense of
professionalism myself.

 
          
 
Actually I do read want ads professionally,
most of the time. One develops an instinct for them—a sense of which garage
sales might be worth hunting up, or which auctions might yield a few sleepers.

 
          
 
While Cindy read she brushed her hair, which
was as filled with nice lights as good maple syrup. Once in a while she would
glance up long enough to pick a few hairs out of the brush, and once or twice
she glanced at me thoughtfully, as if considering whether on the whole I had
been a good idea.

 
          
 
I kept quiet, halfheartedly drawing circles
around a few garage sales, though I knew perfectly well that if there were any
scouts at all in the D.C. area the sales would long since have been picked
clean of everything but Reader's Digest books and cheap glassware, the two
great staples of garage sales everywhere.

 
          
 
"What does your father do?" I asked
Cindy.

 
          
 
"He owns two thousand apartment
buildings," she said, turning a page.

 
          
 
Then she gave me a look.

 
          
 
"You know what I think?" I said.

 
          
 
Cindy looked up, with a touch of impatience.

 
          
 
"I think you ought to get rid of that
bread sculpture," I said.

 
          
 
Actually I was nursing a modest inspiration. I
already had a clear sense that I ought to try to get Cindy away from
Washington
for a few days, onto something resembhng my
own turf. If I were going to cement our promising relationship I would have to
do it somewhere far from butlers, where she wouldn't be distracted by the
touching sight of Harris Fullinwider Harisse, stuck in a doorway.

 
          
 
"I think you ought to do a boot
show," I said. "At least consider it."

 
          
 
She gave me a big grin. "Giving you the
boot is what I'm considering," she said. "If I'm not careful you
could fuck up my life."

 
          
 
For a moment my heart leaped up, thinking she
must be afraid of falling in love with me, but that giddy sensation didn't last
more than a few seconds.

 
          
 
What she meant, of course, was that I was not
the most likely partner with which to ascend the social mountain.

 
          
 
"I thought you were always careful,"
I said.

 
          
 
"Naw," she said. "Sometimes I'm
reckless. I've made mistakes before."

 
          
 
"What did the last one do?" I asked,
out of morbid curiosity.

 
          
 
"He was an NBA guard," she said.
"The point is
,
it wasn't enough. If he'd been an
NFL quarterback it might have been enough, but an NBA guard just doesn't really
count."

 
          
 
I kept quiet, trying to figure out where that
left me.

 
          
 
A moment later Cindy told
me, with a candor that hardly anyone except Tanya Todd and my two wives could
have surpassed.

 
          
 
"You see my predicament," she said,
pulling a few hairs out of the brush. "Here I am fucking down again. At
least Maurice was a sports hero, but you're a complete nobody."

 
          
 
"Oh well," I said—stung
slightly—"I was NRA bulldog-ging champion two years running."

 
          
 
Cindy laughed. "Tell that to
Oblivia," she said. "Oblivia thinks a bulldog is something that sits
on its ass and wheezes."

 
          
 
"Who is Oblivia Brown?" I asked.

 
          
 
"The hostess with the mostest,"
Cindy said. "We're going to her house Wednesday night, if you last that
long."

 
          
 
It obviously didn't matter to her that my name
struck terror into the hearts of auctioneers and antique dealers from
Maine
to
Tacoma
. She didn't understand that I was the
superstar of the flea-market world, the man who found a hundred-thousand-dollar
vase in De Queen,
Arkansas
. And if she had understood it might not have made any difference.

 
          
 
"Hey," I said. "Let's assume I
survive a week or two."

 
          
 
Cindy looked up. "Okay," she said.
"Let's assume you do."

 
          
 
"I think you should do an exhibition of
boots," I said. "It's the perfect time. Cowboy fashions are sweeping
the land. Cowboy art sells at ridiculous prices. Get rid of those Latvian
breadcrumbs and fill the gallery with spectacular boots.
Emerald-encrusted
boots.
Historic boots.
Call your show The
Cowboy Boot Its History and Aesthetics.' Do a major opening—massive media
coverage. Who knows? The right people might come."

 
          
 
"Where would I get emerald-encrusted
boots?" she asked.

 
          
 
"Be serious," I said. "
Texas
is full of emerald-encrusted boots.
Also diamond-, ruby-, and sapphire-encrusted.
I know an
Amarillo
millionaire with fifty pair. Every major
hillbilly singer has them, not to mention Bum Phillips."

 
          
 
I was making an impression. Cindy looked
almost curious.

 
          
 
"Historic boots might be harder, but
they're there," I said.
"The boots of Wild Bill
Hickock, for example.
Maybe Pancho Villa's
boots."

 
          
 
"Who else?" she
said.

 
          
 
"Oh well," I said. "I can't
promise, but there's a chance I could get you the boots of Billy the Kid."

 
          
 
"The boots of Billy the Kid?" she
said, looking at me with real interest for the first time in a couple of hours.

 
          
 
"Yep," I said.
"His
last pair.
The boots he died in."

 
          
 
No question of it: the Kid's name was magic
still.

 
          
 
Cindy's bright eyes, which had yet to cloud
even momentarily with love of me, almost clouded at the thought of the media coverage
she could get if she exhibited the boots of Billy the Kid at her gallery in
Georgetown.

 
          
 
"Yeah," she said, approvingly. Apart
from "naw," it was her sexiest word. There was something kind of
All-American about the way she said those words. I couldn't begin to resist
it—not that I'm known for my powers of resistance.

 
          
 
Then she looked at me closely.

 
          
 
"Are you kidding me?" she asked.

 
          
 
"Not at all," I said. "I know
the precise location of the boots of Billy the Kid."

 
          
 
Of course I neglected to mention that every
other boot-and-spur scout in the West also knew their precise location: a bank
vault in
Clovis
,
New Mexico
.

 
          
 
"Finding the boots is no problem," I
said.

 
          
 
"Then what's the problem?" she said.
"Let's go get 'em."

 
          
 
I was so delighted I practically jumped out of
bed. It was just what I had hoped she would say. In my eagerness to get started
I was ready to overlook the actual problem, which was that the boots were the
property of Uncle Ike Spettle, possibly the oldest and certainly one of the orneriest
men in
America
.

 
          
 
By his own admission Uncle Ike was one of
those lucky people who just happened to be in the right place at the right
time, which in this case meant being in the backyard of Pete Maxwell's ranch
house in eastern
New Mexico
on a July evening in 1881. He was nine years old at the time.

 
          
 
It was in that backyard that Pat Garrett shot
Billy the Kid.

 
          
 
Fortunately for Uncle Ike, it was dark, and
Pat Garrett was not immediately sure he had killed the right man. Not wanting
to expose himself rashly, he retreated and waited awhile before going back to
count coup.

 
          
 
During that interval, Uncle Ike saw his chance
and grabbed the boots. As outlaw buffs all know, Billy the Kid was found
barefooted, a circumstance usually explained by the fact that he had been
lolling around in bed with his sweetheart and had just gone out to the
waterbucket to refresh
himself
when Garrett happened
on him.

 
          
 
However, it only takes a nodding acquaintance
with the backyards of eastern New Mexico—the haunt of sandburs and scorpions,
rattlesnakes and black widows—to convince one that a cagey man like Bill Bonney
would have known better than to step into one of them barefooted.

 
          
 
Uncle Ike, meanwhile, had devoted almost a
century to hanging onto those boots—in themselves just a scruffy pair of black
boots, somewhat run down at the heels.

 
          
 
Long since superannuated as a cowboy, he had
been for almost forty years a professional Old-Timer, driving buck-boards in
rodeo parades and cheerfully telling lies on smalltown talk shows all over the
West.

 
          
 
I had visited him several times, plied him
with steak dinners, and left a standing offer of $20,000 on the boots— modest
when one considers that Bat Masterson's Colt recently brought $52,000 at
auction—and he hadn't even really been an outlaw.

 
          
 
In Uncle Ike's case, more than money was
needed. After all, he had hung onto the boots for 99 years. What was needed was
a grasp of the subtleties of possession, and that I had. The fact that Uncle
Ike had kept the boots for 99 years didn't mean he would want to keep them for
103, assuming he lived.

 
          
 
Love affairs with objects sometimes end as
abruptly as love affairs with people. Beulah Mahony had the Valentino hubcaps
for 40 years, but she sold them to me without the slightest flicker of regret.
One day they simply lost their magic, after which it was just a matter of
seeing that they were passed on to a worthy successor.

 
          
 
In any case, a dash to
Fort Sumner
,
New Mexico
, to see Uncle Ike would accomplish my main purpose, which was to get
Cindy out of town for a while. Once there, if the old bastard balked I could
still run over to
Amarillo
and fill the car with emerald-encrusted substitutes.

 
          
 
"I gotta get going," Cindy said,
stretching. "It's Sunday afternoon. On Sunday afternoon I have tea with
Harris and his mother."

 
          
 
"Tea?"
I
said.

 
          
 
Cindy looked defiant.

 
          
 
"Ordinary tea?"
I asked.

 
          
 
"Of course," she said. "High
tea would be a little ostentatious."

 
          
 
"Why do you have to do it?" I asked,
too surprised to dissemble.

 
          
 
"Mrs. Harisse is testing me," Cindy
said. "After all, I am Harris' fiancee. She wants to see if my manners are
adequate."

 
          
 
"Why should you have to be tested?"

 
          
 
"Because I come from southern
California
and have a father who owns two thousand
apartment buildings," she said, reaching out to get her watch off the
breakfast table. Within two minutes she had arranged her shining hair into a
surprisingly demure bun.

 
          
 
Then she went to her closet and emerged with
an equally demure tea dress, complete with a prim white collar.

 
          
 
Before my very eyes the unconstrained woman of
the
California
beaches transformed herself into Emily
Dickinson. She even put on hose and sensible black shoes. The disciplines of
social climbing were apparently unrelenting.

 
          
 
"Hey," I said. "How long do you
have to be tested?"

 
          
 
"Probably about another year," she
said.

 
          
 
"Haven't you fucked up yet at all?"
I asked.

 
          
 
"Nope," she said with a grin.
"So far I’ve been impeccably well mannered. I’ve never helped myself to
the sugar cubes and I never eat more than two cucumber sandwiches. That's the
hard part. I love cucumber sandwiches. I could eat about fifty, if I turned
myself loose."

 
          
 
"What if you lose control and snarf up
eight or ten?" I said. "Is the engagement off?"

 
          
 
"Sure," she said. "Mrs. Harisse
would be horrified if I did that. But I won't."

 
          
 
She scratched her armpit thoughtfully for a
moment, before slipping on the tea dress. Then she came over and bit my
earlobe. We nuzzled around a bit. Maybe Cindy was just making up for the
restraint she would have to practice when the cucumber sandwiches were trucked
in.