The Evening Star

  Praise for Larry McMurtry’s The Evening Star

  “Mr. McMurtry’s quick, eager sympathy for his characters, his uncanny ability to zip in and out of all their minds, and his effortless narrative inventiveness all combine to create a story that’s as emotionally involving as it is entertaining. . . . Utterly satisfying.”

  —The New York Times

  “Larry McMurtry is one of Americas most cinematic writers.”

  —Newsweek

  “The Evening Star is a bittersweet testament to the precariousness of life. Aurora and Rosie are wonderfully drawn women whose witty exchanges crackle like the dialogue in classic films from the 1930s.”

  —Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “Aurora Greenway is one of the finest characters McMurtry or anyone else has created lately—wonderfully well-spoken and kaleidoscopic in her emotional range.... For all the humor and snappy dialogue The Evening Star offers, there is a lot of sadness too.... A rich, emotional read.”

  —The Virginian-Pilot and the Ledger-Star

  “Larry McMurtry ‘grabs’ his readers in the first paragraph of narrative and continues his hold on them to even beyond the final one. . . . The Evening Star again underscores his talent for weaving the unexpected turns and failures in the lives of his believable characters into an imaginative, highly readable narrative of substance that is, at the same time, hilariously funny and soberly sad. Characteristically, there are no slow passages, no wasted words—only exuberant action.”

  —The Daily Press, Newport News

  “McMurtry is a master narrator. . . . The Evening Star closes another satisfying chapter in a growing body of work destined for status among the classics.”

  —The Commercial Appeal, Memphis

  “The latest link in a chain detailing some of the juiciest characters in contemporary fiction . . . Their stories, told in deceptively simple language, are terrific meditations on age, sex, and the wayward heart McMurtry’s ability to get us deep inside these people is uncanny . . . an experience not soon forgotten.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “Big, good-natured . . . entertaining.”

  —The Sacramento Bee

  By Larry McMurtry

  The Wandering Hill

  Sin Killer

  Paradise

  Boone’s Lick

  Roads: Driving America’s Great Highways

  Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen:

  Reflections at Sixty and Beyond

  Duane’s Depressed

  Comanche Moon

  Dead Man’s Walk

  The Late Child

  Streets of Laredo

  The Evening Star

  Buffalo Girls

  Some Can Whistle

  Anything for Billy

  Film Flam: Essays on Hollywood

  Texasville

  Lonesome Dove

  The Desert Rose

  Cadillac Jack

  Somebody’s Darling

  Terms of Endearment

  All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers

  Moving On

  The Last Picture Show

  In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas

  Leaving Cheyenne

  Horseman, Pass By

  By Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana

  Pretty Boy Floyd

  Zeke and Ned

  Larry McMurtry

  THE

  EVENING

  STAR

  A NOVEL

  Simon & Schuster

  Rockefeller Center

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1992 by Larry McMurtry

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  First Simon & Schuster trade paperback edition 2003 SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-800-456-6798 or business@simonandschuster.com

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  McMurtry, Larry.

  The evening star / by Larry McMurtry.

  p. cm.

  Sequel to: Terms of endearment.

  I. Title.

  PS3563.A319E94 1992

  813′.54—dc20 92-2596

  ISBN 0-671-68519-8

  eISBN 978-1-4516-0772-7

  0-684-85751-0 (Pbk)

  FOR

  GRACE DAVID,

  MYRTLE BOONE,

  AND CURTIS

  I

  The Children and the Men

  1

  On their monthly visits to the prison, Aurora drove going and Rosie drove home. That was the tradition, and there was good reason for it: seeing her grandson behind bars, being reminded yet again that he had killed a woman, realizing that in all likelihood she would be seeing him only in such circumstances for the rest of her life, left Aurora far too shaken to be trusted at the wheel of a car—particularly the sputtery old Cadillac she refused to trade in. Aurora managed the Cadillac erratically under the best of circumstances, and visiting Tommy in prison could not be called the best of circumstances.

  Rosie and everyone else who knew Aurora felt sure the Cadillac would be the death of her someday, but it would not have been wise to reiterate this fear on the return trip from Huntsville, when Aurora would have been only too happy to die on the spot.

  Aurora, in the midst of a bitter fit of sobbing, nonetheless reached up and twisted the rearview mirror her way, in order to regard her own despair. It was an old habit: when sorrow beset her, as it now did regularly, she often grabbed the nearest mirror, hoping, through vanity alone, to arrest it in its course before it did her too much damage.

  This time it didn’t work, not merely because she was crying so hard she couldn’t see herself at all, but because Rosie—a woman so short she could barely see the traffic in front of her, much less that which she knew to be in pursuit, immediately grabbed the mirror and twisted it back.

  “Don’t do that, hon, I got to have my mirror!” Rosie said, panicked because she heard the sound of a huge truck bearing down on them, but lacked a clue as to exactly how close it might be.

  “There’s an eighteen-wheeler after us—if that sucker ran over us we’d be squished like soup in a can,” she added, wishing they were in Conroe, so perhaps Aurora would quit crying, shaking, and scattering wet Kleenex around.

  The prison where Tommy was doing fifteen years to life was in Huntsville, Texas. Conroe, Texas, thirty-two miles to the south, down an Interstate rife with eighteen-wheelers, was the nearest point at which Aurora could reasonably be expected to regain control of her emotions. Until then, all Rosie could do was stay out of the fast lane and drive for dear life.

  “I just wish you’d do something I ask you for once in your life and buy us a Datsun pickup,” Rosie said. “We’d stand a lot better chance on this racetrack if we had a vehicle I could see out of.”

  To her relief she noticed the eighteen-wheeler sliding smoothly past them on her left.

  Aurora didn’t respond. Her mind was back with Tommy, the pale, calm boy in the prison. He had always been the brightest of her dead daughter’s three children. His grades had never been less than excellent, unlike those of her other grandchildren, Teddy and Melanie, both such erratic scholars that it was hard
ly even fair to use the word “scholar” when referring to their academic careers.

  “We’re almost to Conroe,” Rosie said unwisely, hoping it might cause Aurora to stop crying a little sooner than usual.

  “Who gives a fuck where we are!” Aurora yelled, flaring up for a moment before crying a fresh flood.

  Rosie was so shocked she almost rear-ended a white Toyota suburban. Only three or four times in their long acquaintance had she heard her employer use that particular word.

  Shortly after they sped past the first Conroe exit, Aurora calmed a little.

  “Rosie, I’m not a robot,” she said. “I do not have to stop crying just because we happen to be passing Conroe.”

  “I wish I hadn’t brought it up,” Rosie said. “I wish I hadn’t never been born. But most of all I wish we had a Datsun pickup—the seat of this car is so old it’s sinking in, and if it sinks in much farther I won’t be able to see anything but the speedometer. Then an eighteen-wheeler will probably run over us and squish us like soup in a can.”

  “This car is not a can and we will not be squished like soup,” Aurora declared, sniffing. “You’ve chosen a bad figure.

  “Yeah, I was always flat-chested, but I didn’t choose it, God did it to me,” Rosie said, thinking it odd that Aurora would mention her lifelong flat-chestedness at such a time.

  “Oh, figure of speech, I meant,” Aurora said. “Of course you didn’t choose your bosom. What I meant to point out is that there’s nothing souplike about either one of us. If you get squished, it’ll be like a French fry, which is what you resemble.”

  Aurora felt no better, but she did feel cried out, and she began to mop her cheeks with a wad of Kleenex. She had already scattered several wet wads on the seat. She gathered these up, compressed them into one sopping mess, and threw the mess out the window.

  “Hon, you oughtn’t to litter,” Rosie admonished. “There’s signs all up and down this highway saying don’t mess with Texas.”

  “I’ll mess with it all I want to,” Aurora said. “It’s certainly messed enough with me.”

  When her vision cleared a bit more, she noticed that a stream of cars and trucks was flowing past them. Looking back, she saw with alarm that a very large truck seemed to be practically pushing them.

  “Rosie, are you going the correct speed?” she asked. “We’re not exactly leading the pack.”

  “I’m going fifty-five,” Rosie said.

  “Then no wonder that truck just behind us has such an impatient aspect,” Aurora said. “I tell you every time we come here that the legal speed is now sixty-five, not fifty-five. You had better put the pedal to the metal, if that is the correct expression.”

  “The pedal’s to the metal, otherwise we wouldn’t be moving at all,” Rosie said. “Why do you think I been bugging you about a Datsun pickup? I could push the pedal through the radiator and this old whale wouldn’t go more than fifty-five. Besides, the speed limit’s only fifty-five when you’re going through a town, and we’re going through Conroe.”

  “Don’t be pedantic when I’m sad,” Aurora said. “Just try to go a little faster.”

  Rosie, in a daring maneuver, attempted to pass the sluggish white Toyota just as a truck behind them pulled out to pass them. The driver honked, and Rosie instantly whipped her arm out the window and gave him the finger. Then, not appeased, she actually stuck her head out the window, turned it, and glared at the truck driver.

  Unimpressed, the truck driver honked again, while Rosie, pedal to the metal, inched grimly past the white suburban.

  “Well, you don’t lack spunk—you never have or I’d have squished you myself,” Aurora said.

  The trucker, perhaps annoyed, perhaps amused, began to tap his horn every few seconds, and Rosie—definitely not amused—stuck her arm out the window and left it there, with her middle finger extended for his benefit.

  The sight of her maid sustaining a rude gesture while virtually beneath the wheels of a giant truck made Aurora laugh. A vagrant bubble of mirth rose unexpectedly from inside her, but she had no more than started a little peal when sorrow came back in a flood and overran amusement, just as her Cadillac seemed about to be overrun by the eighteen-wheeler.

  “I hope it kills us, then this will be over!” she cried, as she was crying.

  “I’m from Bossier City, and I ain’t about to be bullied by no truck,” Rosie said. She calculated that she now had at least a three-or-four-inch lead on the Toyota and was nerving up to make her cut to the right.

  When Aurora calmed for the second time they were well down the road past the airport exit—she could see the skyscrapers of downtown Houston through the summer haze.

  “I can no longer laugh without beginning to cry,” she reported, rolling down her window. She proceeded to mess with Texas to the extent of another fifteen or twenty Kleenex.

  “You wasn’t really laughing, you was just mainly crying,” Rosie said.

  2

  “The unbearable part is that he likes being in prison,” Aurora said, finishing her second pig sandwich.

  In the bleak hours after a visit to Tommy, the two of them had formed the habit of stopping at the old Pig Stand on Washington Avenue, in the hope that a little something to eat would help them lift their spirits off the floor.

  Rosie, true to her recently acquired vegetarianism, which she hoped would enable her to live to at least one hundred, had a salad. Aurora ate an order of onion rings and two Pig Stand sandwiches.

  “You won’t be the first person to commit suicide by eating fatty foods,” Rosie informed her.

  “I’m serious,” Aurora said. “I think Tommy likes being in prison.”

  “He don’t really like it,” Rosie said. “I doubt anybody really likes being in Huntsville.”

  “No, but he prefers it to being outside,” Aurora said. “That’s the tragic fact. He prefers it to being out, which means that you and I totally failed him.”

  “Maybe so, but you need to stop gnawing on it,” Rosie said. “Gnawing on it’s worse than eating pig sandwiches. We done the best we could, and that’s all anybody can do.”

  Aurora, realizing that it would be a biological outrage to consume three pig sandwiches at a sitting, nonetheless called the waitress and ordered a third.

  “Well, I feel weak and empty,” she told Rosie. “You’re a wisp, compared to me. I can’t survive on desiccated lettuce.”

  As she waited for her sandwich, Aurora reviewed—in memory—Tommy’s life, and realized sadly that she could not really remember having seen a truly happy look on his young face.

  She had seen smart looks, though, and had hoped he might go on to win intellectual distinction, a hope that was probably ended by a single gunshot in a house in the Austin suburbs. Tommy shot at a rival dope dealer and hit the man’s girlfriend in the head. The girl, whose name was Julie, was from a military family in San Antonio, and had been Tommy’s first real girlfriend, whatever being a real girlfriend meant in contemporary terms.

  “If only he hadn’t met that girl,” Aurora said, angered that such a mouse of a girl had brought such a harsh and bitter destiny upon them all. That Julie had been in some ways more than a mouse was borne out by the fact that $134,000 in cash and half a kilo of cocaine had been found in her closet, hidden beneath her large collection of stuffed animals.

  Though Rosie’s heart ached for Tommy, too, she felt she had to take a stoic line on his tragedy, otherwise Aurora would mope for hours, behavior she couldn’t afford. Tommy was not the only problem they had to deal with.

  “I didn’t much cotton to Julie either, but she’s dead, let her rest in peace,” Rosie said. “Tommy was a dope dealer. Them kinds of things just happen to dope dealers.

  “If you ask me we’re lucky he didn’t shoot two or three people,” she added. “Tommy’s been mad at the world ever since his momma died.”

  She thought for a moment, and amended her conclusion. “Actually, Tommy’s been mad ever since he was born,” she sai
d. “He’s one of those people who are just born mad, and it don’t do no good to look for a why because there ain’t no why you can find.”

  “Thank you for your advice, O fount of wisdom,” Aurora said, casting her eyes toward the pies—there was a long line of them, in gleaming pie racks. Somehow, through the magic of lighting, the gleaming racks seemed to magnify the pies’ appeal. She knew the pies couldn’t possibly be as good as they looked, but that didn’t mean they weren’t fully good enough to eat. She waved at Marge, the waitress, and decided on mince, with pistachio ice cream.

  Rosie watched Aurora eat the pie and the ice cream with silent, austere disdain, secure in the knowledge that she herself weighed only ninety-six pounds—whereas the other customers of the Pig Stand, a typical assortment of human flotsam and jetsam, most of them possessed of a fatigue not yet quite emptied of curiosity, merely wondered why Aurora, a woman who looked like she had enough money to eat elsewhere, kept showing up at the Pig Stand in the company of a frizzy-haired little old lady who, in their acute estimation, was some kind of Louisiana cracker.

  Like many residents of the north side of Houston, most of the Pig Standers tended to take life steady and take it slow. A few chubby Don Juans in Hawaiian shirts mustered snap enough to flirt with Marge or one of the other waitresses, and a few truckers or delivery men, all too well aware that time is money, strode in, ate a cheeseburger or a few eggs, and strode out. But the majority of the customers were in no hurry; from long experience they had learned that the best way to handle the Houston humidity was to ease through it slowly, one step or one thought at a time.

  Aurora was not quite ready to let go of her anger at the treacherous Julie. To her annoyance, Tommy himself had no interest in her anger, and would not react at all when Julie was mentioned.

  “Julie was a little squirrely,” he had said, and that was all he said.

  “There are often problems in military families,” Aurora remarked. She finished her pie and took out her mirror, but she could not muster enough interest in her appearance to do anything about it. What was there would have to do—perhaps forever, but at least until they got home.