McMurtry, Larry - Novel 05

McMurtry, Larry - Novel 05 Read Free

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Author: Cadillac Jack (v1.0)
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a peak, and could expect to work the down side
of the hill for several months or years. I might live to find objects as great
as the vase, but not for $20. The discrepancy between quality and price that
made the find almost miraculous was a once-or-twice-in-a-lifetime thing. I
could wander through thousands of flea markets and scale an Everest of junk
without a combination such as that one coming up again, and I knew it.
                   Five months later the vase auctioned at
Sotheby's for $106,000, to a discreet Swiss collector who had probably never
happened through De Queen.
                   Of course, Boog was right not to credit me with
much sophistication. In my rodeo days I had seen a lot of America , but mostly only its filling stations and
rodeo arenas. Once I became a scout I tended to spend a lot of time in the
parking lots of the same arenas, since that's where a lot of America 's flea markets are held.
                   All in all, I had not exactly lived a
high-rent life, except for one week I spent in the Beverly Wilshire hotel in Los Angeles , as a guest of Universal Studios. The
reason I was their guest was because they were contemplating a film about my
career as a world champion bulldogger.
                   During my stay at the hotel I rode in the
elevator with Muhammad Ali and thought I saw Steve McQueen in the coffee shop.
But soon the week was up and nothing came of the movie.
                   I might have mastered the freeway system in
every major American city, but the truth was I spent most of my time with
people like Mom and Pop Cullen, who would have considered Waxahachie a
frightening metropolis. Stardom on the flea-market circuit, as Boog well knew,
does not necessarily equip one to dine with the power elite.
                   Which brings me to the
second part of Boog's admonition: the part about the stump-sucking women.
                  

Chapter II
     
                   Some horses are called stump-suckers because
they have a penchant for chewing wood. Once they get the taste they'll gnaw on
stumps, fence posts, boards, and the comers of feed sheds. This neurotic habit
is more apt to manifest itself in highly strung, overbred animals than in your
common plugs.
                   Cowboys universally distrust the stump-sucking
horse as being a beast with a mental disorder that renders them unfit for the
long-term, trust-laden relationships they like to maintain with their mounts.
                   Boog seemed to hold the women of Washington in much the same distrust.
                   I have never learned to distrust women. For
some reason the notion involved is foreign to me. However, I am quick to notice
when I’ve wandered into a game whose rules are totally unfamiliar to me, as was
the case with my first Georgetown dinner party.
                   The party was at the home of a senator named
Penrose, and I was taken there by Cindy Sanders—a California princess I had met and become infatuated
with only a few hours earlier. Cindy would not have been loath to instruct me
in the niceties of social behavior, but unfortunately she was seated several
yards away, across a good seventeenth-century table covered with equally good
nineteenth-century damask. She had been placed there to entertain an aged
statesman named Dunscombe Cotswinkle, an old man with a jaw like a Carolina mule.
                   It was obvious even to someone as naive as myself that Cindy had been assigned Cotswinkle because she
was the most beautiful woman there, whereas he was the most important man.
Unfortunately, the appropriateness of the match-up was lost on Cotswinkle—his
mind was elsewhere, or at least I judged it to be, since he kept looking down the
table and shouting "Is that you, Winston?" at a nervous little French
journalist whose name was not Winston.
                   I

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