Ларри Макмертри - The Last Picture Show

Leroy swiped the vodka and the three of them drove to the poolhall, which generally stayed open until one or two o'clock on Saturday nights. A good many of the younger kids trailed up also, hoping to get a swallow or two of vodka.

They all bought cokes and took them back to the john one at a time and spiked them. None of them were used to vodka and it was not long before it began to have an effect on their behavior, not to mention their pool shooting. They shot so badly that it took them thirty minutes to finish an eight-ball game.

"Boys, from the way you all are shootin' a feller would think you were drunk," Sam the Lion said innocently, breaking them all up.

Leroy Malone was very inventive when it came to pestering Billy, and when eight-ball began to get tiresome it occurred to him that it might be fun to get Billy drunk. He drew Sonny and Duane aside.

"Let's take Billy somewhere and get him drunk," he said. "Think how funny he'd be drunk."

The boys were not against it. Anything for mischief and adventure. They grabbed Billy and waltzed him outside. Several of the younger boys got wind of the plot and tagged along.

"We could go on down to the stockpens," Leroy suggested. "There's a blind heifer down there we could fuck. She belongs to my uncle. There's enough of us we could hold her down. It'd be as good a place as any to get Billy drunk."

The prospect of copulation with a blind heifer excited the younger boys almost to frenzy, but Duane and Sonny, being seniors, gave only tacit approval. They regarded such goings on without distaste, but were no longer as rabid about animals as they had been. Sensible youths, growing up in Thalia, soon learned to make do with what there was, and in the course of their adolescence both boys had frequently had recourse to bovine outlets. At that they were considered overfastidious by the farm youth of the area, who thought only dandies restricted themselves to cows and heifers. The farm kids did it with cows, mares, sheep, dogs, and whatever else they could catch. There were reports that a boy from Scotland did it with domesticated geese, but no one had ever actually witnessed it. It was common knowledge that the reason boys from the dairy farming communities were so reluctant to come out for football was because it put them home too late for the milking and caused them to miss regular connection with the milk cows.

Many of the town kids were also versatile and resourceful—the only difficulty was that they had access to a smaller and less varied animal population. Even so, one spindly sophomore whose father sold insurance had once been surprised in ecstatic union with a roan cocker spaniel, and a degraded youth from the north side of town got so desperate one day that he crawled into a neighbor's pig pen in broad daylight and did it with a sow.

"I say a blind heifer beats nothing," Leroy said, and no one actively disagreed with the sentiment. They all got in the pickup and headed for the stockpens, eight or nine of the younger boys shivering in the back.

The stdckpens were a mile or two north of town, surrounded by mesquite. When they got there all the boys in the back piled out and went to locate the heifer, but Sonny and Duane stayed in the cab a minute and took a final drink of vodka to warm them up. They gave Billy a coke that was about a third full of vodka and he drank it happily.

"We better slow him down," Duane said. "If he gets too drunk he may want a turn at the heifer. I doubt old Hank Malone. would want an idiot screwin' his livestock."

Sonny got out, not saying anything. It bothered him when people called Billy an idiot. Billy didn't seem that much dumber than other people, and he was a lot friendlier than most.

When they got to the lots Leroy was sitting on the fence watching the younger kids chasing the scared, sightless heifer around the dark pen.

"They're after her," he said. "They'll get her in a minute." The little heifer didn't weigh over three hundred pounds and in a few minutes the boys cornered her by the loading chute and wrestled her to the ground. She struggled for awhile but finally gave it up and lay still. A freshman was sitting on her head and her frightened breath raised little puffs of dust from the sandy lot. Sonny, Duane, and Leroy got off the fence and went over to watch. Billy had climbed up on the fence, but he didn't know what was going on and just sat there sucking the empty Coke bottle.

"You boys are holding her wrong," Leroy said in a superior tone. "Ain't you ever fucked a heifer before? You little piss-ants must be virgins. Let her up on her knees:"

The younger boys thought that was bitter news: the heifer had been trouble enough to get down. Leroy was a senior, however, and they respected his authority. When they let her up she almost got away, but there were nine of them and they managed to hang on and stop her.

It had come time to decide who went first, and the younger boys, nearing exhaustion just from holding the heifer, pressed for a decision. It would be one of the three seniors, of course.

"You all decide," one of them pleaded. "We can't hold her all night."

At that point Sonny surprised everyone, even himself, by suddenly withdrawing from the competition.

"You all help yourselves," he said hastily. "I drunk too much,_ I think I'm gonna have to puke."

It was the best excuse he could think of. When he agreed to come to the stockpens he supposed he would naturally be a participant, but the moment he saw the little blind heifer he knew he didn't want to. It had something to do with Mrs. Popper, though he was not certain just what. It didn't seem right to kiss Mrs. Popper and still fiddle around with heifers, blind or not blind. Not only did it not seem right: it no longer seemed like fun. Kissing Mrs. Popper even once was bound to be more fun than anything he could possibly do with the skinny, quivering little heifer. He suddenly felt like he had graduated, and it was an uneasy feeling. He knew Duane and the other boys would think it awfully strange of him not to take a turn, so to fool them he went off in the mesquites and pretended to be sick.

When he came back to the fence the orgy in the lot was in full progress. Duane was attacking the heifer, and Leroy, who had already finished, was helping hold. Two or three of the younger boys had their pants down and were parading lustfully around the lot. One sophomore was in something of a predicament because, by an unexpected stroke of luck, he had actually made out with a girl that night, a pig from Holliday who had come to the dance. As a consequence of that success the boy was feeling somewhat enervated and was attempting to restore himself by beating his member against a cold aluminum gate. When the freshmen started in on the heifer it was even more hilarious: many of them were too short to reach the target comfortably and had to struggle on tiptoe.

Then in the midst of it all the heifer finally broke loose and went dashing across the lot with one of the freshmen hanging furiously to her tail. Sonny was just as glad. Somehow it wasn't as exciting as it had been when he was a freshman.

"Look at or Billy takin' that in," Leroy said. "What we ought to do is buy him a piece. We could get the carhop for a dollar, if it was just Billy."

"Hell, if she's that cheap we ought to gone to her ourselves," Duane said. "I heard she was a five-dollar whore:"

"Naw," Leroy said. "Anybody with five dollars can do better than Jimmie Sue. That heifer's got prettier legs than she has. She'd be okay for Billy, though. I've heard that idiots die when they're fifteen or sixteen-we oughtn't to sit around and let Billy die a virgin."

"I don't know if we ought to try anything like that," Sonny said. "What if it upset Billy and Sam the Lion found out about it? I'd just as soon not get crosswise with Sam:"