Larry McMurtry - Comanche Moon

"To be polite--why shouldn't he bow?" Augustus asked.

"That's right, a bartender ought to bow," Lee Hitch said--alth, so far as he could remember, none of the bartenders of his acquaintance had ever bothered to bow to him before.

"I say it's a goddamn trick," Ikey declared. "I think he means to get us drunk and steal all our money." "Ikey, if you've got cash money on you, you don't need to wait for a Frenchman to steal it," Gus said. "Loan it to me and I'll invest it for you." "Invest it in whores--t's all you know about, Gus," Ikey said.

"Well, that way you wouldn't have to be anxious about it," Gus told him.

Th@er@ese Wanz, a smile on her lips, seemed to be studying the rangers closely. Pea Eye had elected to help Deets with the horses, but Jake Spoon had boldly taken his place at the table and was drinking whiskey as if he had a right to, a fact that annoyed Gus McCrae a good deal. Even more annoying was the fact that the Frenchwoman was looking at Jake with interest.

"Jake, you ought to be helping with the horses," Gus said, in an irritable tone.

Jake knew well that when Gus was out of temper it was better to walk small. He saw the Frenchwoman watching him, but didn't connect it with Gus's angry tone. After all, the woman's husband was standing right behind her.

Th@er@ese decided right away that she liked Monsieur McCrae, but she saw nothing wrong with flirting a little with the curly-headed boy.

Opportunities to flirt were limited in Lonesome Dove.

Opportunities to make money were no less rare, and Th@er@ese liked money. Captain and Th@er@ese liked money. Captain King assured her there would soon be a brisk trade in the town--he seemed to think that merchants would rush to Lonesome Dove in order to take advantage of the fine river crossing, but, so far, very few merchants had appeared, a fact which frustrated Th@er@ese's commercial instincts severely.

Now, at the sight of the tired, dusty, unshaven men, Th@er@ese began to think in terms of money.

She quickly decided that the first task would be to barber them--they could all use shaves and two or three of them needed haircuts as well.

"Xavier! The woods, monsieur!" she said crisply, with a glance at her husband. "I want to shave these men and give them the hair-offs." Xavier Wanz, severely depressed as he was by the many differences between Texas and France, walked over to a campfire that smouldered in front of the tent. He would have preferred, himself, to sit at the table all day, enjoying the seemliness of his clean tablecloth, and perhaps drinking just enough liquor to blind himself to the ugliness of the mesquite trees that surrounded the clearing where, if Captain King was to be believed, a town would one day exist.

Th@er@ese, of course, had her own ideas; every day Lonesome Dove presented some new challenge to her energies, and her energies were not small. Every day, in this new land, Th@er@ese arose, impatient; every day Xavier was the man who bore the brunt of her impatience. Yesterday, Th@er@ese's impatience had overflowed and scared away the carpenters; today, at least, there were these men to occupy her, these rangers. If she wanted to barber them it was fine with him.

With his foot he nudged a few more sticks of firewood into the fire, before returning to his bar.

"Hair-offs--hair-offs!" Th@er@ese said, coming to the table. "You first, monsieur," she said, tapping Augustus on the shoulder.

"All right, I'll volunteer--d I get a shave too?" Gus said.

Th@er@ese didn't answer--she had already marched off to her tent. When she emerged, carrying a razor, a razor strop, and several other tools of the barbering trade, she pulled another chair from under the wagon sheet and insisted that Gus sit on it.

The rangers, most of them now drunk, watched with interest as Th@er@ese vigorously stropped her razor.

"I'm shaggier than Gus, she ought to have barbered me first," Stove Jones complained.

"What you complaining about? I'll be lucky to even get a shave," Lee Hitch said, well aware that his bald head offered little incentive to a barber.

Jake Spoon gulped down what was left of the whiskey and went off to sit with Pea Eye and Deets. It .was vexing that Gus McCrae seemed to get the first attentions, if a woman was around. Now the woman was wrapping Gus in a sheet and cooing over him as if he were something special. The sight put Jake in such a hot mood that he picked up three clods and threw them at the blue sow, who had consumed the bull snake and had flopped down under a small bush to rest. The clods missed but Xavier Wanz noticed and immediately walked over to Jake.

"Monsieur!" he said sternly. "Do not disturb the pig." "That's right, it ain't your pig, don't be chunking it," Gus said, from his barber chair. "That pig's the pride of the community--it needs its rest." His pride stung, Jake walked straight past Pea Eye and on toward the river. He had merely thrown three clods at a sow. What right had Gus to speak to him in such a tone? He felt like quitting the rangers on the spot. He could hammer and saw; maybe the French couple would hire him to carpenter. With Gus gone the Frenchwoman might even come to like his curly hair, as Madame Scull once had.

Perhaps she would take him up and teach him the language; he imagined how chagrined Gus McCrae would be if, the next time the rangers stopped in Lonesome Dove, he and Madame Wanz were chattering in French.

"Where do you suppose he's going?" Pea Eye asked, when Jake walked past.

"Could be going to take a wash," Deets said.

"Now you've run Jake off, picking on him," Lee Hitch remarked.

"The pup, he's welcome to drown himself for all I care," Gus said, well aware that he was the envy of the troop, by virtue of having been chosen to receive the first haircut.

Th@er@ese Wanz, though flirtatious in her approach to barbering, was all seriousness when she got down to the business itself. She decided to start with the shave and promptly lathered Gus's face liberally with a nice-smelling soap.

"Boy, this beats that old lye soap," Gus said, but Th@er@ese rapped his head sharply with her knuckles, indicating that the time for talk was over.

Th@er@ese then shaved him carefully and expertly, not omitting to do some careful work under his nose. Then she wrapped his face in a hot towel and began the haircut, moving his head this way and that, touching him, making him sit up straighter, or insisting that he turn one way or another. With the hot towel steaming on his face and Th@er@ese's deft hands working it with scissors and comb, Gus drifted into a kind of half sleep, in which he allowed himself to imagine that it was Clara doing the barbering. On occasion, dissatisfied with the work of the local barbers, Clara had barbered him, sitting him down on the steps behind the store and scissoring away until she had him looking the way she wanted him to look, a process that took much squinting and inspecting.

Th@er@ese Wanz, more expert than Clara, was also more decisive. When she took the hot towel off his face she produced some small tweezers and began to yank the hairs out of his nose. Gus had never had his nose hairs interfered with before. He was relaxed, half asleep, and a little drunk--the first extraction took him so completely by surprise that he yelped.

His companions had been watching the barbering operation closely, all of them filled with envy. When Th@er@ese yanked out the first nose hair Gus's reaction struck them as the funniest thing they had ever seen. They howled with laughter. Lee Hitch was so amused that a chair could not hold him--he lay on his back on the floor of the saloon, laughing violently. Stove Jones laughed nearly as loud. Far down the street, Jake Spoon heard the laughter and turned, wondering what could be so funny.

Pea Eye and Deets, who had been trimming a gelding's hoof, had not been paying too much attention to the barbering. When they saw the Frenchwoman pulling hairs out of Gus's nose they began to laugh too.