The Last Picture Show Read Free Page B

the truck hard to hold. Once in a while a big ragweed would shake loose from the barbed-wire fences and skitter across the road, only to catch again in the barbed-wire fence on the other side. The dry grass in the pastures was gray-brown, and the leafless winter mesquite gray-black. A few Hereford yearlings wandered dispiritedly into the wind, the only signs of life; there was really nothing between Thalia and Megargel but thirty miles of lonesome country. Except for a few sandscraped ranch houses there was nothing to see but a tong succession of low brown ridges, with the wind singing over them. It occurred to Sonny that perhaps people called them "blue northers" because it was so hard not to get blue when one was blowing. He regretted that he had not asked Billy to ride along with him on the morning deliveries. Billy was no talker, but he was company, and with nobody at all on the road or in the cab Sonny sometimes got the funny feeling that he was driving the old truck around and around in a completely empty place.

chapter two
    Sonny's next delivery after Megargel was in Scotland, a farming community fifty miles in the opposite direction. As luck would have it he arrived at the farm where the butane was needed while the farmer and his family were in town doing their weekly shopping. The butane tank was in their backyard, and so were nine dogs, six of them chows.
    Besides the chows, which were all brown and ill-tempered, there was a German shepherd, a rat terrier, and a subdued black cocker that the farmer had given his kids for a Christmas present. When Sonny approached the yard gate the chows leapt and snarled and tried to bite through the wire. It seemed very unlikely that he could bluff them, but he stood outside the gate for several minutes getting up his nerve to try. While he was standing there five little teal flew off a stock tank north of the house and angled south over the yard. The sight of them made Sonny long for a shotgun of his own, and some ammunition money; all his life he had hunted with borrowed guns. The longer he stood at the gate the more certain he became that the dogs could not be bluffed, and he 'finally turned and walked back to the truck, a little depressed. He had never owned a shotgun, and he had never found a yardful of dogs that he could intimidate, at least not around Scotland. He sat in the truck for almost an hour, enjoying fantasies of himself carrying Jacy Farrow past dozens of sullen but respectful chows.
    Just before noon the farmer came driving up, his red GMC pickup loaded with groceries, kids, and a fat-ankled wife. Some of the kids looked meaner than the dogs.
    "Hell, you should just 'a gone on in," the farmer said cheerfully. "Them dogs don't bite many people:"
    Like so many Saturdays, it was a long work day; when Sonny rattled back into Thalia after his last delivery it was almost 10 P.M. He found his boss, Frank Fartley, in the poolhall shooting his usual comical Saturday night eigh-tball game. The reason it was comical was because Mr. Fartley's cigar was cocked at such an angle that there was always a small dense cloud of white smoke between his eye and the cue ball. He tried to compensate for not being able to see the cue ball by lunging madly with his cue at a spot where he thought it was, a style of play that made Sam the Lion terribly nervous because it was not only hard on the felt but also extremely dangerous to unwatchful kibitzers, one or two of whom had been rather seriously speared. When Sonny came in Frank stopped lunging long enough to give him his check, and Sonny immediately got Sam the Lion to cash it. Abilene was there, dressed in a dark brown pearl-buttoned shirt and gray slacks; he was shooting nine-ball at five dollars a game with Lester Marlow, his usual Saturday night opponent.
    Lester was a wealthy boy from Wichita Falls who came to Thalia often. Ostensibly, his purpose in coming was to screw Jacy Farrow, but his suit was not progressing too well and the