Texasville by Larry McMurtry Read Free Book Online

said.
    “I didn’t say need it, exactly,” Junior said, blushing into his sunburn.
    “Don’t look at me, I’m a bachelor,” Sonny said.
    “We need the bachelor perspective,” Duane said. “Mitch is a bachelor too. What do you think about it, Mitch?”
    “Duane, I wouldn’t know,” Mitch said. “I’ve mostly done without, except during rodeos.”
    Duane glanced over at the ladies from the courthouse, avoiding Janine’s steely blue eyes. He had an urge to invite them to join in the conversation, if it ever became a conversation.
    He wondered what had prompted Junior to ask such a question.His wife, Suzie Nolan, was a lovely woman, quiet and seemingly demure. She had lived in Thalia all her life, graduating in the same class as Duane and Sonny.
    In those years she had been overshadowed by Jacy Farrow, only child of Lois and Gene, and Duane’s own first love. Jacy had overshadowed every female in town except her own mother, and had been Sonny’s first love too. Their graduating class was planning its thirtieth reunion that summer, and everyone wondered if Jacy would attend.
    Through the years she had only returned to Thalia for a weekend or a holiday now and then. She lived in Italy, where she had been a minor movie star. In March she had returned to Thalia, driven home, some said, by the death of her youngest child, a six-year-old named Benny, who had been electrocuted in a freak accident on a movie set.
    So far Jacy had rarely been seen in town. She lived in the house of a friend, twenty miles in the country. The friend, a screenwriter named Danny Deck, lived in Europe and kept an eye on Jacy’s two daughters, who were both almost grown. Danny Deck had grown up near Thalia but had not gone to high school there.
    No one understood why Jacy was a movie star in Italy and not in America, or why she had had all her children by Frenchmen, if she lived in Italy, or why she had chosen to stay in the house of a man who lived in Europe with her daughters, while her own parents’ large house stood empty. Besides inheriting the house, she had also inherited Farrow Oil, a solid little company Duane would have liked to buy. It consisted of the many leases Gene Farrow had managed to acquire during his lifetime—leases which still produced a few hundred barrels of oil a day.
    In the flush years he had often thought of flying over to Europe and making Jacy an offer for the oil company. It was a plan Karla adamantly opposed—not the part about him buying the oil company, but the part about him going to Europe to see Jacy Farrow. Karla and Jacy had never met, Karla having moved to Thalia just after Jacy left.
    Duane was careful to point out, as unemotionally as possible, that what he had in mind was strictly a business deal. He hada chance to get Gene Farrow’s production, and if he didn’t, somebody else would.
    “No, they won’t, she’ll keep it herself and spend it in Paris buying clothes,” Karla said. At that time her favorite T-shirt read, LEAD ME NOT INTO TEMPTATION, I’LL FIND IT FOR MYSELF.
    “You don’t need to go all that way to look for temptation, in case you’ve missed the point of my T-shirt,” she said.
    Duane was becoming a little irked at having to read a message every time he looked at his wife.
    “There’s not enough temptation in Thalia,” he said.
    “There’s me,” Karla said. “That’s all the temptation you get, Duane.”
    Only Sonny Crawford had really seen Jacy since her return. Once in a while she would show up at his little convenience store in the middle of the night and look through the few magazines that Sonny stocked.
    “Is she as beautiful as ever?” Duane asked.
    “She never takes off her dark glasses,” Sonny said. “She’s beautiful, but she’s older.”
    Just after they graduated from high school Duane and Sonny had had a terrible fight over Jacy, a fight that cost Sonny an eye. Since then they had tried to tread lightly where she was concerned—it wasn’t hard,