Texasville Read online

  TEXASVILLE

  A NOVEL BY

  Larry McMurtry

  Praise for Larry McMurtry’s Texasville

  “As Texasville unfolds, sentences practically tumble over one another in a race for laughs. … McMurtry is hot after a seriocomic study of a man trying to find mental balance in a Texas of which he observes, ‘Seems to me it’s so glorious it’s just about driven us all crazy.’ … There are plenty of eye-catching roadside sights to enjoy along the route.”

  —New York Post

  “Mr. McMurtry’s town, Thalia, is glutted with bed hoppers, maniacs, juvenile delinquents, stupid pets, suicidal bankers, and war mongering OPEC bashers—all brought to peaks of comic energy. … Madness reigns and it is quite amusing.”

  —The Wall Street Journal

  “Texasville is just as funny as can be. … Such a kick to read that I predict its popularity may well outstrip Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winner, Lonesome Dove.”

  —Liz Smith, New York Daily News

  “Texasville is simply great.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “With Texasville, McMurtry has written an ideal sequel. The characters from The Last Picture Show have grown deeper, wiser, and more interesting, just as McMurtry’s writing has done.”

  —United Press International

  “Texasville is a big ol’ mess of a book: long, haphazardly plotted, exuberant, populous, good-spirited … the sexual activity is vigorous and varied and described with considerable relish … the novels intelligence and its compassion are what really matter, and in this, Texasville is of a piece with all of McMurtry’s best work.”

  —The Washington Post

  “Unrestrained humor … McMurtry doesn’t ask us to feel sorry for his characters, but to laugh at their crude one-liners and to be appalled at, and yet admiring of, their raw, material decadence. … The individual scenes are sharp, spare, full of longhorn humor and color. … Texasville is filled with local idioms, tall stories, and unabashed one-liners.”

  —Louise Erdrich, The New York Times Book Review

  “Texasville is just slightly off center and loony … but look beyond the gags and you’ll find a penetrating work. …McMurtry is the rare male writer who knows his women. With Texasville, he shows he knows his men, too.”

  —Houston Post

  “He is precise and lyrical, ironic and sad. … There aren’t many writers around who are as much fun to read as Larry McMurtry.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Uproarious goings-on … when sliding from humor into pathos, McMurtry lets us down easy, with our laughter making bubbles as we sink. …Though Thalia is a small north Texas town, Texasville is really about contemporary America. … Texasville is funny and sad, ludicrous and penetrating, farcical and poignant. But it is above all entertaining.”

  —The Denver Post

  “Dark but hilarious humor … McMurtry’s agile literary hand is evident in every quick-moving chapter.”

  —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  “McMurtry’s … wonderfully loose-jointed narrative style slips in and out of comic exaggeration with practiced ease. There are no seams beneath the ambling yarn spinner (his literary heritage) and the slick ambiguities of the twentieth-century novelist.”

  —Time

  “McMurtry is such an engaging writer, you really don’t mind being kept up way past your bedtime finding out everything about his characters. … By the time you finish Texasville, you’ll feel as though you’ve spent a pleasant few weeks in Texas and that you’d like to go back pretty soon.”

  —Cosmopolitan

  BY LARRY MCMURTRY

  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

  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 © 1987 by Larry McMurtry All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  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: 1-800-456-6798 or [email protected]

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McMurtry, Larry.

  Texasville.

  I. Title.

  PS3563.A319T48 1987

  813’ .54 86-31520

  ISBN 0-684-85750-2

  ISBN-13: 978-0-6848-5750-3

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4516-0768-0

  Texas Ville

  * * *

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

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sp; Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  For Cybill Shepherd

  CHAPTER 1

  DUANE WAS IN THE HOT TUB, SHOOTING AT HIS NEW doghouse with a .44 Magnum. The two-story log doghouse was supposedly a replica of a frontier fort. He and Karla had bought it at a home show in Fort Worth on a day when they were bored. It would have housed several Great Danes comfortably, but so far had housed nothing. Shorty, the only dog Duane could put up with, never went near it.

  Every time a slug hit the doghouse, slivers of white wood flew. The yard of the Moores’ new mansion had just been seeded, at enormous expense, but the grass had a tentative look. The house stood on a long, narrow, rocky bluff, overlooking a valley pockmarked with well sites, saltwater pits and oily little roads leading from one oil pump to the next. The bluff was not a very likely place to grow Bermuda grass, but six acres of it had been planted anyway. Karla took the view that you could make anything happen if you spent enough money.

  Duane had even less confidence in the Bermuda grass than the grass had in itself, but he signed the check, just as he had signed the check for the doghouse he was slowly reducing to kindling. For a time, buying things he had no earthly use for had almost convinced him he was still rich, but that trick had finally stopped working.

  Shorty, a Queensland blue heeler, blinked every time the gun roared. Unlike Duane, he was not wearing shooter’s ear-muffs. Shorty loved Duane so much that he stuck by his side throughout the day, even at the risk of becoming hearing impaired.

  Shorty had the eyes of a drunkard—red-streaked and vacant. Julie and Jack, the eleven-year-old twins, threw rocks at him when their father wasn’t around. They were both good athletes and hit Shorty frequently with the rocks, but Shorty didn’t mind. He thought it meant they loved him.

  Karla, Duane’s beautiful, long-legged wife, came out of the house, a mug of coffee in her hand, and started walking across the long yard to the deck. It was a clear spring morning; she had already put in an hour in the garden. Her tomatoes were under threat from the blister bugs.

  When he saw Karla coming, Duane took off the earmuffs. It annoyed her severely if he kept them on while she was complaining.

  “Now you’re ruining that brand-new doghouse, Duane,” she said, sitting down on the deck. “I guess I’m trapped out here in the country with a man that’s going crazy. I’m glad we sent the twins off to camp.”

  “They’ll probably get kicked out in a day or two,” Duane said. “They’ll commit incest or something.”

  “No, it’s a church camp,” Karla said. “They’ll just pray for their horrible little souls.”

  They were quiet for a minute. Though it was only seven in the morning, the temperature was close to ninety.

  “You can die if you stay in a hot tub too long,” Karla remarked. “I read it in USA Today.”

  They heard screams from the distant house. They came from Little Mike, Nellie’s terrible two. In a moment the baby joined in.

  “Nellie may not even hear them,” Karla said. “She’s probably got her Walkman on.”

  Nellie, nineteen, had just moved out on her third husband. She liked getting married, but regarded the arrangement as little more binding than a handshake.

  Karla wore a T-shirt with a motto stenciled on the front. The motto said, YOU’RE THE REASON OUR CHILDREN ARE UGLY, which was the title of a song sung by Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty. Karla laughed every time she heard the song.

  She had thirty or forty T-shirts with lines from hillbilly songs printed on them. Every time she heard a lyric which seemed to her to express an important truth, she had a T-shirt printed. Occasionally she took the liberty of altering a line in some clever way, though no one around Thalia seemed to notice.

  Duane had once pointed out to her that their children weren’t ugly.

  “They got personalities like wild dogs, but at least they’re good-looking,” he said.

  “That’s true, they take after me,” Karla said. Her complexion was the envy of every woman she knew. Karla’s skin was like cream with a bit of cinnamon sprinkled on it.

  Dickie, their twenty-one-year-old son, had been voted Most Handsome Boy in Thalia High School, both his junior and senior years. Nellie had been Most Beautiful Girl her sophomore year, but had lost out the next two years thanks to widespread envy among the voters. Jack and Julie were the best-looking twins in Texas, so far as anyone knew. Dickie made most of his living peddling marijuana, and Nellie—with three marriages in a year and a half—would probably pass Elizabeth Taylor on the marriage charts before she was twenty-one, but no one could deny that they were good-looking kids.

  Karla, at forty-six, remained optimistic enough to believe almost everything she saw printed on a T-shirt. Duane was more skeptical. He had started poor, become rich, and now was losing money so rapidly that he had come to doubt that much of anything was true, in any sense. He had eight hundred and fifty dollars in the bank and debts of roughly twelve million, a situation that was becoming increasingly untenable.

  Duane twirled the chamber of the .44. His hand ached a little. The big gun had a kick.

  “You know what I hate worse than anything in the world?” Karla asked.

  “No, and I’m not going to guess,” Duane said.

  Karla laughed. “It’s not you, Duane,” she said.

  She had another T-shirt which read, I’VE GOT THE SADDLE, WHERE’S THE HORSE? It was, it seemed to her, a painfully clear reference to Mel Tillis’s sexiest song, “I’ve Got the Horse if You’ve Got the Saddle.” But of course no one in Thalia caught the allusion. When she wore it, all that happened was that men tried to sell her overpriced quarter horses.

  “The thing I hate most in the world is blister bugs,” Karla said. “I wanta hire a wetback to help me with this garden.”

  “I don’t know why you plant such a big garden,” Duane said. “We couldn’t eat that many tomatoes if we ate twenty-four hours a day.”

  “I was raised to be thrifty,” Karla said.

  “Why’d you buy that BMW then?” Duane asked. “You could have bought a pickup if you wanted to be thrifty. A BMW won’t last a week on these roads.”

  Their new house was five miles from town, dirt roads all the way. When they started building the house they intended to pave the road themselves, but the boom ended before they even got the house built, and it was clear that dirt roads would be their destiny for some time to come.

  Duane had started hating the new house before the foundation was laid. He would have moved tomorrow, but he was surrounded by a wall of debtors, and anyway Karla loved the house and would have resisted any suggestion that they face up to straitened circumstances and try to sell it as soon as the paint dried.

  He poked the barrel of the .44 into the water. Refraction made the barrel seem to grow. Shorty moved closer to the edge of the hot tub and peered in at it. Everything Duane did seemed interesting to Shorty. Many human actions were incomprehensible to him, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t watch.

  “Duane, why are you poking that gun in the water?” Karla asked.

  “I was thinking of shooting my dick off,” he said. “It’s caused me nothing but trouble my whole life.”

  Karla took that news with equanimity. She scratched her shapely calf. Karla believed that the way not to have your figure ruined by childbearing was to have your kids young and then get tied off. Shortly after producing Nellie she got tied off, but ten years later something came untied. Int
ermittently religious, she decided it must be God’s will that they have twins. It should have been medically impossible—and besides that, she and Duane only rarely made love.

  But one afternoon, after ten days of rain, with the rigs all shut down, they did make love and the twins resulted. During the pregnancy Karla tried to cheer herself up by imagining that she was about to produce little human angels, perfect in every way. Why else would God give her twins when her husband wasn’t even giving her a sex life?

  The twins were born, and as soon as Jack grew four teeth he bit completely through his sister’s ear. The angel theory was discarded—indeed, while sitting in the emergency room getting Julie’s ear fixed Karla stopped being religious for good.

  Jack and Julie were terrible babies. They bit and clawed one another like little beasts. They shouldered one another out of their baby bed, and stuffed toys in one another’s mouths. As soon as they could lift things they hit each other with whatever they could lift. It seemed to Karla that she spent more and more of her life in emergency rooms—indeed, the twins were not safe from themselves even there. Once Julie grabbed some surgical scissors off a tray and jabbed her brother in the ear with them.

  “My kids believe in an ear for an ear,” Karla told her friends, who enjoyed gallows humor.

  She learned never to take the twins to the hospital at the same time: there were too many weapons in hospitals.

  In time Karla concluded that the twins’ conception had nothing to do with Divine Will, and everything to do with medical incompetence. She wanted to bring a malpractice suit against Doctor Deckert, the young general practitioner who tied her off.

  “No, you can’t sue him,” Duane said. “You might run him off, and if you do half the people in town will die of minor ailments.”

  “Shit, what about us?” Karla said. “We got a life sentence because of him.”

  Shortly after that Karla had a T-shirt printed which read, INSANITY IS THE BEST REVENGE. The line wasn’t original with her, nor was it from a hillbilly song. She had seen it on a bumper sticker and liked it.

  In fact, Karla found almost as many important truths on bumper stickers as she found in songs. One which hewed very closely to her own philosophy of life said, IF YOU LOVE SOMETHING SET IT FREE. IF IT DOESN’T RETURN IN A MONTH OR TWO HUNT IT DOWN AND KILL IT.