Ларри Макмертри - The Last Picture Show

"I knew you wasn't dependable," she added, taking the football jacket and laying it in the seat between them. "Boys that act like you do never are. That jacket's got a hole in the pocket, but you needn't ask me to sew it up. And you can give me back my pictures. I don't want you showin' 'em to a lot of other boys and tellin' them how hot I am."

Sonny stopped the pickup in front of her house and fished in his billfold for the three or four snapshots Charlene had given him. One of them, taken at a swimming pool in Wichita Falls, had been taken the summer before. Charlene was in a bathing suit. When she gave Sonny the picture she had taken a ballpoint pen and written on the back of the snap-shot, "Look What Legs!", hoping he would show it to Duane. The photograph showed clearly that her legs were short and fat, but in spite of it she managed to think of herself as possessing gazelle-like slimness. Sonny laid the pictures on top of the football jacket, and Charlene scooped them up.

"Well, good-night," Sonny said. "I ain't got no hard feelings if you don't."

Charlene got out, but then she bethought herself of something and held the pickup door open a moment. "Don't you try to go with Marlene," she said. "Marlene's young, and she's a good Christian girl. If you try to go with her I'll tell my Daddy what a wolf you was with me and he'll stomp the you-know-what out of you."

"You was pretty glad to let me do what little I did," Sonny said, angered. "You just mind your own business and let Marlene mind hers."

Charlene gave him a last ill-tempered look. "If you've given me one of those diseases you'll be sorry," she said. She could cheerfully have stabbed Sonny with an ice pick, but instead, to impress Marlene, she went in the house, woke her up, and cried for half the night about her blighted romance. She told Marlene Sonny had forced her to fondle him indecently.

"What in the world did it look like?" Marlene asked, bug-eyed with startled envy.

"Oh, the awfulest thing you ever saw," Charlene assured her, smearing a thick coating of beauty cream on her face. "Ouuee, he was nasty. I hope you don't ever get involved with a man like that, honey-they make you old before your time. I bet I've aged a year, just tonight:"

Later, when the lights were out, Marlene tried to figure on her fingers what month it would be when Charlene would be sent away in disgrace to Kizer, Arkansas to have her baby. They had an aunt who lived in Kizer. Marlene was not exactly clear in her mind about how one went about getting pregnant, but she assumed that with such goings on Charlene must have. It was conceivable that her mother would make Charlene leave the picture of Van Johnson behind when she was sent away, and that thought cheered Marlene very much. In any case, it would be nice to have the bedroom to herself.

chapter three

After he let Charlene out Sonny drove back to town. He was amazed that breaking up with her had been so easy: all he felt was a strong sense of relief at having his football jacket back. It was the jacket he had earned in his junior year when he and Duane had been cocaptains, and it had "Cocaptain" stitched across the front in green thread. He was proud of it, and glad to have it safely out of Charlene's hands.

When he got back to the square it was midnight and the town looked just as deserted as it had looked that morning. The night watchman's old white Nash was parked where it always was, and the night watchman, a man named Andy Fanner, was asleep in the front seat, his heels propped on the dash. As usual, he had his motor running and his windows rolled up; the town thought Andy a very likely candidate for monoxide poisoning and expected any morning to find him a purplish corpse, but he slept comfortably through hundreds of winter nights with no apparent ill effects. Sonny didn't share the general worry: he had ridden in the Nash and knew there were holes enough in the floorboard to provide ample ventilation.

He drove to the all-night café and started in, but when he looked through the window he saw that his father, Frank Crawford, was sitting at the counter, sipping defensively at a cup of coffee and talking to Genevieve Morgan, the night waitress. His father liked Genevieve and Sonny liked her too, but they couldn't both talk to her at the same time so Sonny returned to the pickup and backed down the street to the square to wait for his father to come out. Waiting made him a little uneasy; somehow he couldn't help begrudging his father the nightly conversations with Genevieve. She was a shapely black-headed woman in her mid-thirties whose husband had been busted up in a rig accident almost a year before. He was not yet well enough to go back to the oil fields, and since they had two boys and were paying on a house, Genevieve had to go to work. The waitressing job was ten at night to six in the morning, and she didn't like it, but in Thalia there were not many jobs open at any hour. When she took over the night shift Sam's business had improved enormously: half the truckers and roughnecks and cowboys in that part of the country would hit the café at night, hoping to make out with Genevieve. She was beginning to thicken a bit at the waist, but she was still pretty, high-breasted, and long-legged; men accustomed to the droopy-hipped plod of most small town waitresses liked the way Genevieve carried herself. Sonny liked it himself and had as many fantasies about Genevieve as he had about Jacy Farrow.

He hadn't been parked long when he saw his father leave the café and come walking up the empty street toward the square, shivering and shaking, All he ever wore was summer slacks and a thin cotton jacket, too short at the wrists. Sonny felt briefly guilty for not offering him a ride to the hotel. He would have, but his father would only try to give him ten dollars and that would make them both nervous. It would not be worth it to either of them to get in a money argument that late at night. Money arguments often upset them for hours. Frank couldn't help offering it and Sonny couldn't help refusing to take it. Sonny did not want it, nor could he see how his father could possibly do without it, as high as his prescriptions were. Frank Crawford was not the town's only drug addict, but he was the one with the best excuse: he had been high-school principal in Thalia, until his car wreck. One night he was coming home from a high-school football game and sideswiped a cattle truck. Sonny's mother was killed and Frank was injured so badly that six operations failed to restore him to health. He couldn't stand the strain of teaching, tried to learn pharmacy and failed, and finally had to settle for the job at the domino hall. He got through life on prescriptions, but the prescriptions didn't make him feel any better about the fact that his son was living in a rooming house rather than in a proper home.

Sonny was a little afraid his father might spot the pickup, but Frank Crawford had his chin tucked down and the cold wind made his eyes water so badly that he hardly even saw the street. He passed under the blinking traffic light and went into the hotel, and Sonny quickly started the pickup and drove back to the café. Five soldiers had just come out and were standing around their car flipping quarters to see who drove the next stint. Their car had Kansas license plates and the boy who lost the toss looked depressed at the thought of how far there was to go.

When Sonny went in Genevieve was back in the kitchen cleaning off the grill. He sat down at the counter and tapped the countertop with a fifty-cent piece until she came out of the kitchen to see who the customer was.

"Surprise," he said. "I guess I'll have a cheeseburger to go to bed on."

"You would," Genevieve said, far from surprised. She went back to the kitchen and slapped a hamburger patty on her clean grill. When the burger was ready she carried it right past Sonny and set it down at one of the red leatherette booths. Then she got a glass of milk for him and a cup of coffee for herself.