Texasville by Larry McMurtry Read Free Book Online Page B

and ambled out, trying to walk bow-legged. He affected the walk of a lifelong cowboy, but for most of his life he had been a short-order cook who rodeoed a little on the side. Junior had gone up to the Panhandle to buy some calves, had met Mitch at a small rodeo, mistaken him for a cowboy and hired him on the spot.
    Since he had lived in Thalia for a mere ten years, Mitch was not deeply versed in its lore, which only a lifetime’s residence could make intelligible—and sometimes not then.
    Duane had spent a lifetime there and still found much of what went on to be incomprehensible, but he didn’t care. He was beginning to find the thought of Suzie Nolan interesting. After all, as he knew better than most, what looked demure from one angle might not look so demure from another. Janine Wells sat just behind him looking like the woman who invented Sunday school, while in fact possessing the heart of a slaver.
    “Maybe Junior should call up Dr. Ruth,” Sonny suggested.
    One reason Sonny’s little Kwik-Sack did such a booming business at night was because he took the night shift himself and kept the radio tuned to Dr. Ruth Westheimer’s popular call-in show, Sexually Speaking. He kept the radio turned up loud so that all the customers could hear it, even if they were back in the far corner by the detergents. Roughnecks and truck drivers, stepping in to buy cigarettes or beer, would fall under the spell of Dr. Ruth’s brisk Central European voice; often they lingered for fifteen or twenty minutes, piling up item after item they didn’t need, while Dr. Ruth discussed the pros and cons of anal intercourse or offered helpful tips on how not to drip too much spit into one’s partner’s mouth while tongue kissing.
    “Hell, let’s get the women in on this,” Duane said, suddenly feeling in an impish mood for the first time in months.
    “They’re the ones who know the answer,” he added.
    Sonny smiled when he said it. Sonny could smile without looking one bit less sad, a fact that had bothered Duane slightly during all the years of their friendship.
    Elsewhere around the table the suggestion met with something akin to panic. Bobby Lee nearly swallowed the toothpick he had been masticating for the last ten minutes.
    “I don’t think we ought to ask them,” he said. “They’re women.”
    “Well, wasn’t Junior asking about women?” Duane said.
    Eddie Belt, who rarely agreed with Bobby Lee about anything, agreed with him this time. “If Junior wants to know, letJunior ask them,” Eddie said. “I ain’t gonna ask one of them nothing.”
    He started to shut up, but then remembered the many injustices he had suffered at the hands of women.
    “I wouldn’t ask one of ’em for a Dr. Pepper if I was dying of thirst,” he said. “I wouldn’t ask them to connect the hose if my house was burning down. If both my legs was broke and one offered me a wheelchair I wouldn’t take it.”
    “What’s he raving about?” Janine said. She and her friends, Charlene Duggs and Lavelle Bates, were on their way out, but Eddie’s outburst had been delivered in such a loud voice that they all stopped. Janine had the bold urge to chat with Duane a minute and felt that Eddie Belt, whom she couldn’t stand, had provided her with a sufficient excuse.
    “I wasn’t raving about nothing, and if I was, it was none of your business,” Eddie said. His memories had raised him to such a pitch of outrage that he forgot for a moment that he was talking to his boss’s girlfriend.
    “That’s not very polite,” Janine said crisply. “I just asked.”
    “You girls sit down,” Duane said, jumping to his feet. He was not willing to be cheated of his first impish mood in months. Who knew when he would see another?
    He secured chairs so quickly that the women were nonplused.
    “Duane, we just got up,” Charlene said. “We got jobs to do. We ain’t allowed to sit back down.”
    “Yeah, you ought to been doing the jobs all this time