McMurtry, Larry - Novel 05 Read Online Free PDF Page B

for me to
imagine Cindy Sanders waiting sweetly while Harris worked out the nuances of
every doorway they came to, as if it were a sonnet.
                   Cindy got up and tromped off to her kitchen.
She returned in a minute, clutching a knife, an expensive Italian salami, a big slab of Brie, and a half-gallon of apple juice. Then she
sat cross-legged on the bed and ate heartily, occasionally whacking me off a
hunk of salami or swiping up a glob of Brie and offering it to me on her
finger.
                   I was at a loss to understand how a man so
indecisive had managed to become engaged to Cindy, a girl who expected
immediate contact, eye, mouth, and genital. She liked direct looks and direct
kissing.
                   "Tell the truth," I said.
"You're not really engaged to Harris."
                   Cindy had her mouth full of salami and
couldn't talk, but she shook her head vigorously and looked slightly outraged.
                   "I certainly am engaged to him," she
said indignantly, as soon as the salami was on its downward path, somewhere
between her breasts.
                   "Who are you to question it?" she
asked, with the open defiance I seem to inspire in emphatic women.
                   What was I supposed to say to that? I was
nobody to question it. I wasn't particularly ill-disposed toward Harris, just
curious as to how such an arrangement had come about.
                   After all, Cindy had made the moves, where I
was concerned. When I drove up and parked In front of her shops—she had three,
all in one elegant nineteenth-century building on O Street—all I had meant to
do was sell a earful of cowboyana. The only reason I was in Washington was because Boog insisted that the East had
gone cowboy crazy.
                   "The twain's done met," he said.
"Cowboy boots is sellin' quicker than two-dollar pussy, even up in New York , where two-dollar pussy
don't have to stand on the street comer very long."
                   "Not if you're in town, you
pot-gut," Boss said. She was making biscuits in her big airy kitchen and
Boog just happened to wander past, drinking what he called his breakfast toddy,
a mixture of vodka, gin, tequila, and orange juice. Boss turned around and
plastered him right in the face with a big wad of biscuit dough, laughed heartily,
and immediately set about mixing some more dough.
                   Boog's uncontrollable lust for cheap women,
unabated through three decades of marriage, had inadvertently contributed to
Boss's own fame, since she had long since chosen to fight fire with fire.
                   "What I told the old fatty," she
confided one day, '*was that rd fuck six famous Yankees for every little pot he
stuck his dipstick in."
                   Boss had implemented her threat with vigor, if
legend was to be believed. She was a tall woman, with raven hair and looks that
still stopped people in their tracks, though she was fifty-two and had been
married to Boog over thirty years, an experience that would have marked most
women deeply.
                   Since most of those years had been spent in Washington , Boss had not lacked opportunity. Writers
were her over-all favorites, though she excluded most journalists and all
sportswriters from contention.
                   "Why would I want a sportswriter when
I've already got six kids to raise ?" she asked,
when the subject came up.
                   Scarcely a poet or novelist of consequence had
escaped her, in her time. It was not uncommon to find her latest, a tiny Jewish
poet named Micah Leviticus, sobbing quietly in her motherly lap, or else
perched on the cabinet watching television, depending on his mood. Micah lived
upstairs, sharing a room with Tommy, the Millers' youngest child.
                   About politicians Boss was more discreet.
There