Ларри Макмертри - The Last Picture Show

That morning he hadn't bothered to make his bed and the quilts were all in a heap. He undressed and snuggled under the heap, his mind returning at once to Genevieve. Not Genevieve at the café, though—Genevieve naked, just out of her bath, with the ends of her black hair dampened and drops of water on her breasts. In a room so dry, with the dusty air chafing his nostrils, the thought of Genevieve dripping water was very exciting; but unfortunately the fantasy was disturbed by his feet poking out from under the ill-arranged covers into the cold air. For a moment he attempted to kick the covers straight but they were too tangled. He had to get up, turn on the light, and make the bed, all the while somewhat embarrassed by his own tumescence. Like most of his friends he went through life half-convinced that the adults of Thalia would somehow detect even his most secret erections and put them down in the book against him. The chill of the room and his own nervousness were distracting, and by the time the quilts were spread right his only thought was to get under them and get warm. Before he could reestablish his picture of Genevieve naked he was asleep.

chapter four

The one really nice thing about high school in Thalia was that it gave everybody a chance to catch up on their sleep. Sonny and Duane habitually slept through their three study halls and were often able to do a considerable amount of sleeping in class. Working as hard as they did, school was the only thing that saved them. Occasionally they tried to stay awake in English class, but that was only because John Cecil, the teacher, was too nice a man to go to sleep on. When they got to English class on Monday morning Jacy was already there, wearing a new blue blouse and looking fresh and cheerful. Mr. Cecil sat on his desk, and he also looked happy. He had on a brown suit and an old green tie that had been knotted so many times the edges were beginning to unravel. His wife Irene kept the family accounts and had decided the tie was good for one more year. She was a fat bossy woman and their two little girls took after her. Yet somehow, despite his family, Mr. Cecil managed to keep liking people. When he wasn't actually teaching he was always hauling a carload of kids somewhere, to a fair or a play or a concert. In the summertime he often hauled carloads of boys over to an irrigation ditch where they could swim. He didn't swim himself but he loved to sit on the bank and watch the boys.

"Well, I wonder what my chances are of interesting you kids in John Keats this morning," he said, when the class was settled.

"None at all," Duane said, and everybody laughed. Mr. Cecil laughed too—it was all in fun. The kids didn't hold it against him that he liked poetry, and he didn't hold it against them that they didn't. He read them whatever poetry he felt like reading, and they dozed or got other homework done and didn't interrupt. Once in a while he told good stories about the poets' lives; Lord Byron and all his mistresses interested the boys in the class a good deal. They agreed among themselves that Lord Byron must have been a great cocksman, but why he had bothered to write poetry they couldn't figure.

While Mr. Cecil was trying to decide what poetry to read that day Sonny got Joe Bob Blanton's algebra homework and began to copy it. For a year or two it had been necessary to threaten to whip Joe Bob before he would hand over his problems, but in time he began to want to be popular and handed them over willingly. That morning, to everyone's surprise, he held up his .hand and got in an argument with Mr. Cecil over one of Keats' poems.

"I read the one about the nightingale," he said. "It didn't sound so good to me. It sounded like he wanted to be a nightingale, and I think it's silly of all these poets to want to be something besides what the Lord made them. It's criticizing the Lord."

Everybody snickered except Mr. Cecil. Joe Bob was sort of religion crazy, but nobody could blame him for it, considering the family he had. He was even a preacher himself, already: the summer before he had gone to church camp and got the call. Everybody figured Joe Bob had just done it to get a little extra attention from the girls at the church camp, but if that was it it sure backfired. So far as Brother Blanton was concerned the Lord's call was final: once you heard it you were a preacher forever. He started Joe Bob preaching sermons right away.

Mr. Cecil never quite knew what to do when Joe Bob got started. "Oh, I don't really think he wanted to be a nightingale, Joe Bob," he said. "Maybe he just wanted to be immortal."

Joe Bob was not satisfied with that either; he took out his pocket comb and slicked back his blond hair.

"All you have to do to be immortal is lead a good Christian life," he said. "Anybody can do it if they love the Lord, and you can't do it by writing poems anyway:"

"Maybe not, maybe not," Mr. Cecil said, chuckling a little. "Here, now let me read you this."

He started reading the "Ode on a Grecian Urn," but the class was not listening. Joe Bob, having said his say, had lost interest in the whole matter and was doing his chemistry. Duane was catching a little nap, and Jacy was studying her mouth in a little mirror she kept behind her English book—she had been considering changing her lipstick shade but didn't want to do so hastily. Sonny looked out the window, and Mr. Cecil read peacefully on until the bell rang.

Civics class was next, a very popular class. Sonny and Duane had taken the precaution to sit in the back of the room, so they could cheat or sleep or do whatever they wanted to, but actually, in civics class, they could have done about as much if they had been sitting in the front row. Coach Popper taught civics—if what he did could be called teaching—and he could not have cared less what went on.

Not only was the coach the dumbest teacher in school, he was also the laziest. Three days out of four he would go to sleep in class while he was trying to figure out some paragraph in the textbook. He didn't even know the Pledge of Allegiance, and some of the kids at least knew that. When he went to sleep, he never woke up until the bell rang, and the kids did just as they pleased. Duane usually took a nap, and Joe Bob made a big point of reading the Bible. The only girl in class was a big ugly junior named Agnes Bean; the boys who didn't have anything else to do teased her. Leroy Malone, Old Lady Malone's grandson, sat right behind Agnes and kept the class amused by popping her brassiere strap against her back. Once he made her so mad popping the strap that Agnes reached under the desk, slipped off her brogan shoe, and turned and cold-cocked him with it before he could get his guard up. His nose bled all over his desk and he had to get up and sneak down to the rest room and hold wet towels on it until it stopped.

Another time, for meanness, the boys all ganged up on Joe Bob and stuck him out the window. They hung onto his ankles and let him dangle upside down a while, assuring him that if he yelled and woke up the coach they would drop him. Nobody was sure whether they really would have dropped him or not, but Joe Bob was sensible and kept quiet. The classroom was just on the second floor, so the fall might not have hurt him much even if they had dropped him.

After civics there was a study hall, and then lunch, a boring time. One year Duane and Jacy had been able to sneak off to the lake and court during lunch, but it was only because Lois Farrow was drinking unusually hard that year and wasn't watching her daughter too closely. Lois was the only woman in Thalia who drank and made no bones about it. That same year Gene Farrow gave a big barbecue out at a little ranch he owned, and all his employees were invited. Duane was roughnecking for Gene then and took Sonny along on his invitation. Lois was there in a low-necked yellow dress, drinking whiskey as fast as most of the roughnecks drank beer. She was also shooting craps with anyone who cared to shoot with her. That was the day that Abilene won over a thousand dollars shooting craps, six hundred of it from Lois and the other four hundred from Lester Marlow, who was Jacy's official date. Lois thought Abilene cheated her and wanted Gene to fire him on the spot, but Gene wouldn't. She cussed them both out, got in her Cadillac, and started for town, but the steering wheel got away from her as the Cadillac was speeding up and she smashed into a mesquite tree. Lois just got out, gave everybody a good hard look, and started to town on foot. Nobody stopped her. Gene Farrow got drunk and Abilene kept gambling. While he was rolling dice with Lester, Duane took Jacy over behind some cars and in the excitement almost got her brassiere off. Sonny himself won $27 in a blackjack game, and he was not even an employee. That night somebody busted Lois' lip and blacked her eye; some thought Gene Farrow did it but others claimed it was Abilene. He had known the Farrows before they were rich, and he wasn't a man to put up with much name calling, and nobody but Lois would have had the guts to call,him names in the first place; if there was anything in the world she was scared of nobody knew what it was. She was a tall, rangy blond, still almost as slim as her daughter, and she was not in the habit of walking around anyone.