Ларри Макмертри - The Last Picture Show

A few weeks before Sonny would not have believed it, but the world had become so strange that he could believe anything. Genevieve was wiping the counter with a gray washrag.

"Sam was quite a man, you know," she said. "And Lois was just beautiful when she was young—I always envied her her looks. She was prettier than her daughter ever will be, and nine times as wild. She had more life than just about anybody in this town."

Sonny didn't tell her about the bet at the tank dam, but he thought about it a lot, just as he thought about many of the things Sam the Lion had done. Some of them were very strange things—the will he left, for instance. He left the poolhall to Sonny and Billy; he left the picture show to Old Lady Mosey and her nephew Junior Mosey, who was the projectionist; he left the café to Genevieve, five thousand dollars to the county swimming-pool fund, and strangest of all, a thousand dollars to Joe Bob Blanton. No one knew what to make of it, not even Joe Bob. People thought it was a damned outrage, but that was what the will said.

Two weeks after the funeral the seniors left for San Francisco, on their senior trip. Sonny was glad to go. It seemed to him he had jumped up and gone to Mexico on the spur of the moment and had never quite managed to get back to Thalia, really. The town had become strange to him, and he thought it might be easier to return to it from San Francisco.

The bus left Thalia at midnight and when dawn came was crossing the Pecos River, a dry winding rut cutting through the naked flats of west Texas. Most of the seniors had cut up all night and worn themselves out, but Sonny was awake, and just tired enough that his memory could do what it pleased. The sky was completely cloudless, a round white moon hanging in it. He had not thought of Sam the Lion much since the funeral—in Thalia it was no good thinking about him—but for some reason the bitter flats of the Pecos brought him to mind and Sonny remembered the way he used to slop around the poolhall in his house shoes, complaining about the ingrown toenail that had pained him for years. A bronc had stomped on his foot once, and the toenail had never recovered. Sam the Lion, the horsebreaker, pissing off the tank dam while Lois Farrow watched—it was too much to be thinking about on the way to San Francisco, and his eyes kept leaking tears all the way to Van Horn.

They got to San Francisco in the middle of the night and checked into an expensive cheap motel on Van Ness Avenue, not far from the bay. Duane and Jacy were full of secret plans about the Thing they were going to do, and all the boys were itching, to go bowling or find whores. The first day there the room mothers kept them all herded together and saw to it that they rode a cable car, visited the Top of the Mark, and went across the Golden Gate bridge. All the Californians looked at them as if they were freaks, whereas it seemed to the kids it was the other way around. The room mothers were scandalized by the number of bars in the city and kept everyone in a tight group to protect them against lurking perverts.

The second day was unscheduled and most of the boys spent it on Market Street, looking at dirty magdzines and talking to girls and sailors in the cheap sidewalk lunch counters. Sonny and three other boys wandered into a bar between Market and Mission and were met by a tall blackheaded girl named Gloria who offered to let them take pictures of her naked. The bar itself was plastered with pictures of Gloria naked, a great inducement to photography. Unfortunately her fee for the privilege was twenty dollars and none of the boys could afford it.

The major event of the trip occurred on the afternoon of the second day in San Francisco when Jacy finally allowed Duane to seduce her. The girls were all supposed to accompany the room mothers to the De Young Museum that afternoon, but Jacy cleverly got out of it. She was rooming with an obliging little girl named Winnie Snips, and she got Winnie to tell the room mothers that she had taken to her bed with menstrual cramps. No one ever doubted the word of Winnie Snips. She was valedictorian, and just unpopular enough that she was glad to do anything anyone wanted of her.

After-the girls and the room mothers left, Sonny stationed himself in the lobby of the motel so he could give the alarm if the party got back early. It was an ugly lobby full of postcard racks and it depressed him a little to sit in it. The only senior who bothered with postcards was Charlene Duggs who sent about a dozen a day to an airman boy friend of hers in Wichita Falls. She wanted everyone to know how much in love she was, but she didn't have much to say and just wrote "Gee, I miss you, Love and kisses, Charlene" on every card. When Sonny thought about Jacy he got even more depressed, but Duane was his friend and a scheme of such daring had to be supported.

As it turned out, Sonny's depression was nothing at all compared to the one Duane had to cope with in the seduction chamber upstairs. The glorious moment had arrived, and was going to be just perfect: they could even see the bay and a part of Alcatraz through the window. "I love you," Duane said, as soon as they had kissed a few times. "I love you too," Jacy said, breathing heavily. It was the way things were done. Then she let Duane take absolutely all her clothes off, something she had never done before. For some reason, being naked with him was different than being naked around a bunch of Wichita kids. She caught him looking right at the place between her legs, and that seemed rather discourteous. Still, there was no backing out, so she stretched out on the bed while Duane undressed. He had been in a state of anticipatory erection for at least half of the 1,800-mile drive, and could hardly wait to get his socks off. They kissed again for a moment, but both supposed speed to be of the essence and Duane soon rolled on top. Jacy sucked in her breath, preparing to be painfully devirginized. For a moment or two she did feel something that was hard and slightly painful, but it wasn't nearly as painful as she had expected it to be and in a moment it ceased to be hard at all and became flexible and rather wiggly. It certainly wasn't hurting her, but it wasn't going in, either. It sort of tickled, and kept sliding off into her pubic hair. Curiosity got the better of her and she opened her eyes. Duane had a very strange look on his face. He was horrified at himself, unable to believe his member should betray him—not then, of all times.

"What's wrong, honey?" Jacy asked, wiggling slightly. She couldn't stand to be tickled.

"Um," Duane said, a little choked. "I don't know."

He held himself above her, embarrassed to death but hoping beyond hope that his body would come to its senses and enable him to go on. He hoped for two or three long minutes, while Jacy offered her intimate of intimates, but his body continued to register complete indifference. Duane didn't have the faintest idea what to do: no emergency had ever been more unlocked for.

After a time Jacy felt a rising sense of exasperation. "Well get off a minute," she said. "You might get tired and fall on me."

Duane complied, too disgraced to venture speech. He sat hopelessly on the edge of the bed, looking out at the bay. Jacy sat up and shrugged her hair back across her shoulders. Obviously they were faced with a crisis. The situation had to be salvaged or they would be the laughing stock of the class. Suddenly she felt furious with Duane. She looked with vexation at the offending organ.

"It was Mexico," she said. "I hate you. No tellin' what you got down there. I don't know why I ever went with you."

"I don't know what happened," Duane said glumly. He got up and crept reluctantly back into his clothes, but Jacy stalked about the room, indignantly naked and not giving a damn.

"What'll we say," she said. "The whole class knows what we were going to do. I just want to cry. I think you're the meanest boy I ever saw and my mother was so right about you."