McMurtry, Larry - Novel 05 Read Free Page B

people.
                   Cindy Sanders was long of limb, but short of
patience. Her approach to life was emphatic, an approach she shared with my two
former wives.
                   After ten minutes of watching me eye the
ormolu, Cindy expressed herself by coming over and giving me an elbow in the
ribs that would have done credit to an NBA guard. In fact, she had once been
involved with an NBA guard.
                   "Stop looking at the furniture," she
said. "You'll never own any of it."
                   "That's okay," I said. "I don't
deal in French furniture much."
                   She gave me a smile that would have sold about
a million tubes of any toothpaste.
                   "Stop yukking around and talk to these
people," she said. "You said you knew Big John. They'd love some
fresh poop on Big John."
                   "Is that the only reason you brought
me?" I asked. "Because I know Big John?"
                   The question seemed to interest her. She
tilted her head to one side for a moment, a gesture I took to be introspective.
A moment was enough. Her purse might be a jumble, but not her soul.
                   "Naw," she said. "It wasn't
decisive, which doesn't mean you can just stand around. I expect a little
social support when I ask a man out."
                   "I see," I said. "If I turn out
to be a dud people will think you're slipping, right?"
                   Cindy laughed, a loud California laugh that boomed right out into the room,
startling a number of pale people who were sipping drinks and having muted
conversations nearby. I loved it. It was such a healthy laugh that it even
affected my scrotum, which immediately tightened. Her laugh reminded me of the
absolutely confident way she had ripped a check out of her checkbook that
afternoon, when she paid me for a earful of cowboy
artifacts.
                   "I'm not slipping," she said,
faintly amused by the thought that anyone could suppose she might be.
                   Then she turned on her heel and marched off to
start a conversation with our hostess. Pencil Penrose.
                  

Chapter III
     
                   One of my recurrent dreams is of driving
backward down the highway of my life.
                   When the dream begins I will usually just be
drifting gently backward in the pearly Cadillac over some broad, beautiful
stretch of Interstate—perhaps the wonderful stretch of 1-90 between Buffalo and Sheridan , Wyoming , with the Big Horn Mountains off to the north.
                   But as the dream progresses the cuts get
faster and I regress through ten years of cars, back at least to the GMC pickup
I used during my first year on the rodeo circuit. The roads get worse,
too—often I find myself zooming backward over the gritty wastes near Monahans , Texas , before the little psychic balance bar that keeps me from becoming an
insane person tilts me back toward wakefulness.
                   Once in a while one of my wives is with me, in
the dream—always Coffee, my first wife, the more pliable of the two. Everyone
called her Coffee because she drank so much of it. From dawn to midnight , if Coffee was awake, she was never without
a cup with a swallow or two left in it. Her kisses tasted of mountain-grown
Folger, and I could never make love to her without the absurd conviction that
Mrs. Olson—the Swedish lady in the Folger commercial—was apt to pop in on us
while we were fucking, in order to compliment us on our choice of brands.
                   Coffee allowed me to drag her around America for nearly a year before she bailed out and
went back to Austin to work in one of Boss Miller's real estate offices.
                   Kate, my second wife, also worked for Boss,
but in the Houston office. Boss also had offices in Dallas ,