“I don’t see why you wanted to run off,” he said. “Wouldn’t catch me running off from a woman that good-looking.”
“What good-looking?” Sonny said absently. He had completely forgotten Wanda Lou.
“You know,” Soon said irritably. “Wanda.” It seemed to him a token of intimacy that she had allowed him to use her first name.
Sonny was a little amused. “You liked her, huh?” he said.
“Well, who wouldn’t. You could have screwed her if you’d halfway tried.”
“Tried?” Sonny said. “I was afraid to get on an elevator with her unless somebody else was in it.”
“Yeah, that’s what I mean,” Coon said. “And you pass it up.”
“I got city ways now,” Sonny said. “A girl from Waxahachie is just as apt to have ticks as not. You ever had a tick on your balls?”
Coon was sullenly silent. The glamour of being Sonny’s driver was wearing off and he was oppressed by the unfairness of life. Not only was he not getting girls, he was not improving as a bronc rider either, and the only reason he had stopped being a bronc rider was to get what girls Sonny didn’t want. He was convinced that in another day in Las Vegas Wanda Lou might have come to him for consolation. It seldom happened, but he brooded about it and decided it would have, in her case.
“Fucking desert,” he said. “What a big fucking desert. Fucking Sahara desert.”
Sonny was mildly amused and mildly irritated. He was in the mood for a quiet drive.
“You should have told me you was in love with her,” he said. “I might could have fixed you up. You might as well quit cussing the desert. It ain’t the desert’s fault you’re dumb and ugly.”
He meant it jokingly, but Coon’s bad mood was getting out of hand. He felt very aggrieved. “Merry Christmas, motherfuckers,” he said to two shivering hitchhikers they zoomed past. Both had beards.
“Goddamn hippies,” he said. “I guess their last ride got tired of smelling them. I hate those fucking hippies. That’s what I liked about Las Vegas. No goddamn hippies around.”
“You’re just full of peace on earth, ain’t you?” Sonny said. “All because you got no pussy for Christmas. You could have bought you some for a Christmas present if you weren’t so tight. Half the women in Las Vegas are for sale.”
“I don’t buy it,” Coon said righteously, though he bought it on occasion.
Sonny suddenly lifted his foot and let the hearse coast. When it was down to fifty he braked and pulled to the side of the road. He turned and reached into the back, got Coon’s dufflebag, and politely handed it to him.
“And a Merry Christmas to you,” he said.
Coon was stunned. He was well aware that Sonny was given to arbitrary decisions, but he had not been expecting an arbitrary decision of such a nature just then.
“What’d I do?” he asked.
But Sonny had torn a check off his checkbook and was scribbling a note on the back of it. He turned on the cab light. “Here,” he said, handing the note to Coon, who looked at it blankly.
Dear Wanda Lou:
Coon can’t wait to have a date with you. Be nice to him, honey, he’s a real good old boy.
Sonny
“She won’t gimme no date,” Coon said. “You crazy?”
“I may be and I may not be. The one thing I’m sure of is that I’m tired of listening to you talk. If you get out here and start back you might get to meet them hippies.”
“I don’t wanta meet ’em. Can’t I ride with you? I’ll be quiet.”
“No, you need a little desert air and I need a little solitude. Better put that Levi jacket on. It’s cold out there.”
“Just to Barstow?” Coon said. “Be a lot easier hitching out of there.”
“I’m not going to slow down in Barstow. I guess if you want to take a chance on jumping out, you can.”
Coon knew there was no point in arguing. Sonny was drumming his fingers impatiently on the wheel.
“Reckon she’d give me a date if I give her the note?” Coon asked.
“Ain’t but one way to find out. See you by and by.”
Coon got out without another word and Sonny spun the hearse back on the highway and was off. There would be no more interruptions, but the exchange with Coon had broken his mood, the mood he had been in since talking with Eleanor. He had been feeling mellow. The thought of the big ranch and the good food and the fireplace and Eleanor had seemed very desirable, very resting. But his mood had switched. He wanted speed instead of rest.
The hearse sliced through the desert at close to a hundred and ten, and the farther he drove the faster he wanted to drive. Barstow was passed, a few lights in the night, and then Victorville, and he bore down on San Bernardino, made it and swung west into the traffic of the San Bernardino freeway. The traffic annoyed him. He got into boxes of traffic and honked until one or another of the cars gave way for him; then he swept on. He wanted more driving. It seemed like no time since he had left Las Vegas and already L.A. was only fifty miles away. He wanted more driving than that, but for once he had no clear notion of where he wanted to go. He felt too pilled up to stop. There were too many places to go, and anyway he wanted to go faster than he could drive on the San Bernardino freeway.
He thought of turning south and shooting down to Tijuana. It would serve Eleanor right if he made her come to Tijuana for New Year’s. Instead of getting married they could watch the donkey show. But he didn’t turn toward Tijuana; the urge wasn’t strong enough. He could go to Palm Springs, make her come there. They could fuck for a while in Palm Springs and if they wanted to get married they could easily do it there. The traffic swept him on, but he tried to outrun it; he kept the hearse close to a hundred on the open stretches. Or he could go to Texas after all. That feeling felt best. Back to Texas, with Coon got rid of and the whole clear dark desert to drive through. The lights of the cars ahead annoyed him. He didn’t feel like seeing taillights. He passed strings of cars, schools of cars, scores of them. He wanted the clear desert, with the headlights whitening the straight road. Then he could open the hearse up and really drive.
But he kept on toward L.A., and there kept on being lights in front of him. His saddle was in L.A. For some reason he had forgotten to put it in the hearse and had not taken it to Las Vegas. He decided then what to do—he would run on to L.A., get his saddle and some pills, and split down Highway Ten for Texas. He could make Arizona by breakfast, and Arizona was fine to drive through. Hitchhikers could drive when he came down. Or he could drive all the way. It would be a great drive, Las Vegas to L.A. and then back to Texas. No taillights ahead that he couldn’t pass. No more California, no more movies. There was a rodeo in Denver just after New Year’s. They could spend New Year’s in Colorado, in the Broadmoor, or in Denver or in Aspen. Once with another driver he had driven all the way from Calgary to Baton Rouge in three days to make a rodeo. That had done in his first hearse; that had been fifteen years ago. Vegas to L.A. and back to Texas, with no other drivers—it appealed to him. All he needed was his saddle and some pills.
But what was hard, what was annoying, what bugged him, was slowing down for L.A. He was primed for speed, for some straight drive, and the traffic and the lights really bugged him. He should have taken the saddle to Las Vegas, so he could have gone straight to the Guthrie ranch. Cops were out for Christmas. He saw many cars pulled over, but he had always been lucky; no cops threatened him and he swung at eighty-five through the interchanges and past downtown L.A., saw it glow in the midnight smog. Some people thought the hearse was an ambulance and gave way for it reflexively. But some didn’t. He was boxed in and couldn’t get out and in annoyance swung off the freeway onto Sunset Boulevard. It was a bad move. His apartment was a hundred blocks up the Boulevard, above the Strip. He shot up the dinky, dingy downtown end of the Sunset, but after the open desert and the fast freeway his timing was off. He kept hitting lights. There was no way to make the speed of the hearse match the speed inside him. He would gu
n it up to seventy-five in a few blocks and then hit another light. For once he couldn’t relax, make his own rhythm match the rhythm of the lights. He was too hyped, too impatient. He wanted his saddle and then to be gone to Texas.
Then he remembered the pills and made a screeching right-hand turn. The pills he could get at a place on Hollywood Boulevard. No problem there, it would only take a minute. He could even double-park. Then he could get his saddle and be gone. He cut the few blocks north at sixty, feeling better, hitting lights again. Half an hour and he would be on the desert again. He approached the Boulevard at the point where the Hollywood freeway passed underneath it. The light turned yellow when he was half a block away, but Sonny didn’t stop. He had had enough of stopping. Let the traffic wait. He was going fast enough that they could see he wasn’t stopping.
But a stoned young driver in an old Buick full of hippies didn’t see. They were all listening to a soul station and not thinking much, swaying and talking, and someone’s head and swinging hair was between the driver and the approaching hearse, and the driver himself was swinging with the radio. He hit the intersection early, just as Sonny hit it late. He saw the Buick’s movement too late, and the driver, listening to his sounds and blinded by lights and hair, never saw the hearse at all. He was accelerating fully when the two vehicles struck each other. Sonny, with a great reflex, sensed the collision a second before it happened and tried to swing out of his turn, to shoot straight across the Boulevard and onto the downgoing entrance ramp. But though he whipped his body right, as he would have whipped it riding a turning bull, he could not whip the heavy hearse that quickly. The Buick hit him, knocked the hearse across the Boulevard, where a Chrysler driven by a swinger from Van Nuys whirled into the entrance ramp from the other direction, also in full acceleration, and hit the hearse again. Sonny, knocked half loose by the Buick, had nonetheless hung on to the steering wheel and hit his own footfeed hard, hoping to outspeed the Chrysler. But he didn’t, and when the Chrysler hit him his own speed and the sharp downward drop of the ramp caused the hearse to lift as it rolled, to slide along the railing and drop twenty feet to the Hollywood freeway, the bottles, the clothes and bandages, the ropes and old boots and some woman’s forgotten scarf, the mattress, the bridles, and all the gear from the back end falling over Sonny as the white hearse fell.
It was not, as wrecks go on that freeway, a very disastrous wreck. The hearse hit a spot in the traffic and it was late enough that the pile-up was not bad. Only nine cars were involved. Three people were hurt seriously but not as seriously as they might have been, and of the fourteen people injured only one, Sonny Shanks, World’s Champion Cowboy, was killed.
11
PATSY WAS IN HOUSTON when she heard of the death. She had flown back the morning after Christmas. Davey was in the process of having his first cold, and she wanted him home before he got any sicker. She did not want to be trapped for three or four days in her parents’ house, having to cope both with Davey and with her mother’s nursing. Davey was feverish and fretful and took coping enough, and she wanted him where his own doctor could see him in case his cold got worse.
Juanita had been given a key, and was there ahead of her, and the rooms were nice and clean and warm. In the afternoon Patsy walked to the drugstore to get some cough syrup for Davey and some shampoo for herself and saw Lee Duffin and two of her daughters sitting at the counter. The girls were both taller than Lee and had long dark hair, and both were wearing jeans and sweaters and chattering happily while Lee sipped her coffee and looked melancholy. When Patsy came over she brightened a little and introduced her girls.
“Ah, yes, I know your sister,” the older girl said. Her face was like her mother’s, good sharp features, but she was very merry and her mother was not.
“My goodness,” Patsy said. “Do you? I’m very angry with her right now. She seems to think of herself as in exile. We haven’t seen her in two years.”
“I know,” Melissa said. “She hates Dallas. I guess she hates all of Texas. I don’t see too much of her but we do live in the same house.”
Patsy picked Melissa’s brain for a while, but Melissa carefully avoided telling her any of the scary things she knew about Miri and boys and Miri and drugs. The other girl was looking through Newsweek. When Patsy ran out of questions they were all silent for a moment, each looking absently at their images in the mirror behind the counter.
“I was sorry to read about your friend Mr. Shanks,” Lee said, looking at her. “Of course I only met him that once but I liked him.”
“What about him?” Patsy asked.
“He was killed last night. It was in the morning paper, but there wasn’t much detail. He was killed in a car wreck in Hollywood.”
“Oh, no,” Patsy said. A flat feeling struck her. They were silent, except for the young girl, who made a sucking sound with her straw trying to get the last few drops of her Coke.
“He seemed like a charming man, in his way,” Lee said.
“In his way,” Patsy said. “I’m sorry he’s dead.”
Though she knew it was true, it was hard to believe. Sonny dead? They walked out of the drugstore together and Lee stopped with her a minute on the blowy corner while the girls walked on. “As soon as they leave I’m going to pack,” she said. “You can bring things over in stages, if you want. Bill’s at the MLA again. Are you expecting Jim back in time for the move?”
“No,” Patsy said. “I’m not really expecting anything.” What’s to expect? she thought.
“I think I know how you feel,” Lee said. “I’ve got to get on. Cheer up. I hope Davey’s better tomorrow.”
As she was walking up her steps Patsy saw the browned stems of Sonny’s roses sticking out of the garbage can. Juanita had just thrown them away. She went in, unrolled the morning paper, and found the story, one column on page three. The picture with it had been taken during the movie work—Sonny, no hat on, his black hair tousled as always. She felt no great pain about it but she did feel a strange clear sorrow that stayed with her until the evening. After Davey went down, with the thought that perhaps she hadn’t read the paper or hadn’t heard, she called Dixie. But Dixie had heard, and when Patsy said his name her aunt broke into tears.
“I know, I’m going to the funeral,” she said. “It’s in Borger, if you want to go. He always drove too fast. He was worse than me, even. If we’d got married I guess it would have happened long ago. Did I tell you he wanted to marry me once? Like a fool I turned him down. Can you imagine anyone turning Sonny down and then marrying Squatty? Well, that’s me—”
“Come on, dear,” Patsy said. “Don’t cry. Sonny wouldn’t have liked being married to anybody, I don’t think.”
“That’s true,” Dixie said. “That’s true. I guess I did him a favor without either of us knowing it.
“But he was gorgeous,” she added in a quieter voice.
Patsy cried a little after she hung up, no less for her aunt than for Sonny. She didn’t believe that Sonny had ever proposed to Dixie, but she knew Dixie would believe it and tell it to everyone as long as she lived, or could remember. Such would be Sonny’s few years of immortality, the stories the women he had briefly wanted would tell about him. How many women would beat their husbands with Sonny’s ghost in the next few years?
For weeks after that she wanted to call Dixie again and ask if Eleanor Guthrie had been at the funeral, but she never did. The next day in a moment of sentiment she sent flowers, and she walked out of the flower shop after ordering them feeling somehow lightened and cheerful. It occurred to her that as a tribute to Sonny she ought to have gone to the funeral wearing a sign that said, “I’m the one that got away,” and she imagined how all the fattening, fading Dixies that might be there would hate her, and how Sonny, could he know, would applaud the joke. Could he know, it would almost make up for her having got away.
But her light mood was deceptive. That afternoon, at the seedy laundrymat that she and Emma used, she broke into tears. An old wo
man caused it by giving her a laundry cart. The place was crowded, for once, and carts in short supply, and Patsy was carrying a load of sopping clothes to the dryer by hand when the old lady saw her problem and brought her a cart she was just emptying. “Here, honey,” she said. “You’re getting your skirt wet.” It seemed so kind a thing to do that Patsy was undone. Who else would do something kind for her? The Hortons, maybe, but they were her fast friends. Her eyes dripped as the clothes spun in the dryer.
That night Jim called, wanting to talk about Sonny, but she refused to talk about him. She was calm and wanted to stay calm, and besides it seemed fatuous to talk about him as if they had been close friends when they hadn’t. Jim surprised her a great deal by telling her he was thinking of taking a job with IBM.
“You?” she said. “At IBM? Why, for god’s sake?”
“Because Ed can get me one. If I’m going to stay out here I ought to get some kind of job. That’s the one place I’ve got a contact.”
“And you’ve decided to stay out there?” she asked calmly.
“I think I better, for a while. If I come back right now we’ll just start it all again. You know that.”
“Okay. I wasn’t arguing. I was just asking.”
“It’s tragic,” he said, “but we’re just at cross purposes when we’re together.”
“Oh, shit,” she said. “There’s nothing tragic about it. We’re both just spoiled. Do what you damn well please but don’t go tragicizing it, if that’s a word. Tell all that to her, if she’s still around.