Ларри Макмертри - The Last Picture Show

"Peanut butter?" he asked absently, when he noticed Jacy. She didn't want to eat, she wanted to sit in his lap, but she saw he was really watching the news and made herself refrain. They had come home in his car, she had no way to leave. During the commercial Bobby got up to fix himself another sandwich. "Oh, you're afoot, aren't you," he said. "As. soon as the news is over I'll run you back to the club."

He was quite cheerful and relaxed, but Jacy was a little surprised that he didn't take on over her more than he did. For the next four or five days she hung around the club pool almost constantly, expecting to hear that Bobbie and Annie-Annie had broken up; she was sure that as soon as that happened Bobby would call her for another date.

The next Sunday morning Jacy was in the kitchen peeling an orange when her mother came in from the bedroom to get more coffee. On Sunday mornings Lois always lay in bed and drank coffee until the coffee pot was empty. Gene was gone-he always spent Sunday morning inspecting his leases.

"Honey," Lois asked, "don't you know that Sheen boy in Wichita? Bobby Sheen?"

"I sure do," Jacy said. "Why?"

"He got married yesterday to some girl named Annie Martin," Lois said. "It's in the paper this morning. I knew I'd seen them around the club. They got married in Oklahoma a couple of days ago and it just now made the paper. You know her?"

Jacy walked into the bedroom and found the article. It was just a tiny article with no picture, the kind the paper always ran when kids of prominent families ran off and got married without their parent's consent.

When Lois came into the bedroom with her coffee, Jacy was sitting on the bed crying bitterly.

"He's the luh-ast one," she said. "I'll just be an ol' maid." Lois set her coffee down and got her daughter a box of Kleenex. She had seldom seen Jacy so upset, and least of all over a boy. Her tears were ruining the newspaper, and since she hadn't finished reading it Lois gently pulled it away.

"Oh, honey," she said. "Don't cry like that. That's the way it is, you know. Win a few, lose a few. That's really the way it goes, all through life."

chapter twenty

About a week after Bobby Sheen got married, something totally unexpected happened to Jacy, and it was led up to by an event so startling that everyone in Thalia almost went mad with surprise. Joe Bob Blanton was arrested for rape! It was one of those days when it seemed to Christian people that the Lord must have lost all patience with the town. It was a wonder he hadn't simply destroyed it by fire, like he had Sodom, and since the heat at mid-afternoon that day was 109 degrees He could easily have done so simply by making the sun a little hotter. A few degrees more and the grass would have flamed, the buildings begun to smoke, and the asphalt streets to melt and bubble.

Joe Bob didn't rape Jacy, of course, but the general confusion that followed his arrest made possible what did happen to her. Joe Bob didn't actually rape anybody, but very few would have believed that at the time.

"That poor kid's downfall started the day old man Blanton got the call to preach," Lois Farrow said, but she was the only one who took that view. No one else thought of blaming Brother Blanton for his son's disgrace, and still less did they think of blaming Coach Popper or the school board president or San Francisco or Esther Williams, the movie star. They were all quite willing to put the blame squarely on Joe Bob himself.

Joe Bob was a seventeen year old virgin. For years he had been tormented by lustful thoughts. When he was only fourteen Brother Blanton slipped into his room one night and caught him masturbating by flashlight over a picture of Esther Williams. Joe Bob had torn the picture out of a movie magazine one of their neighbors had thrown away. Of course Brother Blanton whipped him severely and disposed of the picture; he also told Joe Bob in no uncertain terms what the sequel of such actions would be.

"Joe Bob," he said, "have you ever been through the State Hospital in Wichita? The insane asylum?"

"No sir," doe Bob said.

"Well, sometime I'll take you," Brother Blanton promised. "There are three or four hundred men over there, pitiful creatures, rotting away, no good to their families or to the Lord or anybody. I don't know about all of them, some of them may have come from broken homes or been alcoholics, but I'm sure most of those men are there because they did just what you were doing today. They abused themselves until their minds were destroyed. I don't want to scare you now. You're young, you haven't hurt yourself much, and the Lord will forgive you. I just want you to know what will happen if you keep on with this kind of filthiness. You understand, don't you?"

"Yes sir," Joe Bob said.

He understood, but he soon discovered he was just too weak to stop. He kept right on playing with himself, all through high school, in the face of certain insanity. His father hadn't told him how long it took for a mind to be destroyed, but he never doubted that his would be, sooner or later.

In the summer of his junior year, when he got the call to preach, he thought there still might be hope. If he preached, girls might like him, and if they did he might be able to overcome his vices and lead a normal life. The hope was very short-lived. The very night he preached his first sermon he succumbed to the vice again. Besides that, he found he did not really like to preach. He didn't have anything to say, and he soon decided he must have heard a false call: he could always get the Lord off his mind, but the only way he could get girls off his mind was by jacking off. In San Francisco he had been with the boys who wandered into the bar where Gloria was, and the thought of Gloria haunted him for weeks. By the time he got back home he had decided to resign himself to eventual insanity, and he ceased to make any effort to curb his self-abuse. If the Lord spared him until he got through college that would be enough to ask.

Joe Bob might have got through the summer all right if it had not been for the scandal caused by Mr. Cecil's dismissal. That set the town on its ear so that it made things hard for all sinners. The church ladies decided the time had come for some widespread soul-saving. If a homosexual was teaching English in high school, there was no telling what state of degeneracy the ordinary populace had fallen into. Ruth Popper herself was known to be sleeping with a high school boy. They decided to have an All City Revival, and they didn't waste any money bringing in a slick traveling evangelist who would have charged them three hundred dollars. There were six active preachers in the town, plus Joe Bob and a few old ones that were retired, so the ladies decided to put aside denominational differences and make do with the native preaching stock.

Everybody but Joe Bob thought it was a fine idea. He didn't because it meant he would have to preach two sermons.

"Yes, sir," Brother Blanton told him. "We've all got to get out there and preach our hearts out if we're going to get this town back on the right track."

Joe Bob agreed, but he was afraid he could preach his own heart completely out in just a minute or two. During the winter his ministerial flame had burned very low—he was not even confident that he himself was saved. He knew that he harbored hatred in his heart for about three-quarters of the boys of the town, and that was surely not a Christian attitude. He had no idea what he could say that might prompt anyone in the congregation to rededicate their life to Christ, and so far as he knew, getting people to rededicate their lives was the only point of a revival.

He worried about it for two weeks, and it turned out his worries were fully justified. Joe Bob had to preach the last sermon in the first go-round of preachers, which meant that he had to preach on a Thursday night, the worst possible night to preach. The first wave of revival spirit had had time to ebb, and the second wave had not yet begun to gather. The revival was held in the local baseball park under the lights, and when Joe Bob got up to preach there was just a sprinkle of a crowd, old faithfuls from all the churches in town, people so habituated to church going that they never missed a sermon, no matter how dull. Joe Bob was dressed in his black wool suit, the only suit his father would let him preach in. The night was sweltering. For days Joe Bob had racked his brain, trying to come up with a sermon, but the only moral advice he could think of was that people ought to read the Bible more. That was his theme, and he sweated and stammered away at it for twenty minutes.