McMurtry, Larry - Novel 05 Read Online Free PDF

lacked even a vague notion of what I might
want to do next, and kept on desultorily dogging steers.
                   In early February the Fort Worth Fat Stock
Show rolled around. On the first night. Goat was
sitting on the fence by the bucking chutes, smoking and watching, as he had
done for thousands of nights.
                   Tex Ritter—Goat's favorite singer—was there
that night. During one of the breaks in the action he sang "Hillbilly
Heaven"—it was not long before he departed for it himself. The crowd burst
into tears, overcome by the memory of immortals like Patsy Cline and Cowboy
Copas. Tex didn't sing his well-known rodeo classic,
"Bad Brahma Bull," fearing, perhaps, that it would be an augury.
                   Twenty minutes after he sang, a very bad and
very black Brahma bull smashed through the chute gate, threw his rider,
narrowly missed killing a clown, then whirled and leaped the arena fence right
where Goat was sitting. The fence, like the gate, smashed as if it were
plywood. The bull came down with Goat right underneath him, the bull's front
feet hitting Goat in the chest—his cigarette was still in his mouth and still
lit when he died, by which time the bull had trotted back to the bullpen, as
placid as a milk-pen calf.
                   So died Goat Goslin, a small
legend in his own time. Everyone agreed that the spirit of Sudden Death
had finally come back to claim him. Some went so far as to allow that it was
fitting.
                   But a lot of hard-drinking, fast-fucking
grandmothers had lost their hero.
                   I sold Dandy, my wonderful dogging horse, that
night. The next day I accompanied Goat home to Guthrie and paid for his
funeral. The minute it ended I left for Houston, with a station wagon half full
of what Boog Miller called Indian doodads, sure of nothing except that I had
gained an exit, and lost a friend.
                  

Chapter V
     
                   The peculiar thing about my first date with
Cindy Sanders was that the whole thing was arranged more or less directly under
the anguished gaze of her fiance, Harris Fullinwider Harisse.
                   I say more or less directly because the first
thing I noticed about Harris was that it was hard for him to fix his gaze
directly on anything—up to and including a woman as easy to look at as Cindy.
His gaze wandered nervously from place to place, object to object, and person
to person, darting away like a hummingbird if it seemed likely that other eyes
were about to make direct contact with his own.
                   When I mentioned this to Cindy, in bed the
next morning, she sighed, up to then the first evidence I had that she was
capable of even momentary discouragement.
                   "He looks that way because he can't decide
whether to come in or go out," she said.
                   It was early morning—my brain hadn't started
its day.
                   "Come in or go out what?" I asked.
                   "The door, of course," Cindy said.
"Doors confuse him. He gets one leg through and then he can't decide
whether to put the other leg through. So he stands there looking that
way."
                   It was true that Harris had neither come in
nor gone out during the hour I was in Cindy's shop. But, apart from noting his
anguished gaze, I had been so entranced with Cindy that I hadn't paid him much
attention.
                   "That's a strange problem to have,"
I said, for so it struck me. I had known confused people in my day, but none so
confused they stopped in doorways.
                   "Not at all," Cindy said. "It's
a perfectly well-bred indecision. Choice for Harris is like poetry for poets.
It's so filled with nuance that he usually just stops. You have to respect
it."
                   Maybe you did, but it was hard