Moving On by Larry McMurtry

her care and forgave him his modest reticence. She had also seen him glance down her blouse and felt slightly flushed.
    “Read that?” she asked, grinning merrily again.
    “Read it?” Peewee grinned too and grunted a little, pleased that she was friendly again. “No, ma’am,” he said.
    “Now look, call me Patsy. If you’ll call me Patsy we can be friends and talk about literature.”
    “You read many Westerns?” Peewee asked, determined to do his best.
    “Not many. I read Destry Rides Again when I was a little girl. Are there many good ones?”
    “Uum,” Peewee said. He was still looking askance at The Decipherment of Linear-B and glanced in the box of books as if he had suddenly discovered he was sitting next to an unknown mineral that might well give him radiation burns.
    “I don’t reckon there are many good ones,” he said humbly. “I mean, they’re mostly the kind of books I read. Westerns. If you read books like this here, whatever it is, then you probably wouldn’t never think a Western was no good.”
    “I don’t know. I like all kinds of books.”
    “Why would there need to be something like this here?” he asked, laying the book carefully back in the box. “It makes me glad I quit school when I did. I ain’t got the brain power for such as that.”
    Patsy started trying to tell him what it was about, but she hadn’t read it herself—it was a relic of Jim’s flirtation with linguistics—and Peewee looked at her so raptly that it annoyed her a little. She soon broke off her lecture. It had grown hot and they all three gave themselves up to the boredom of a long desert drive. They lunched on hamburgers and shakes under the worn green awning of a drive-in in Pecos, and edged on west through the afternoon. Patsy read idly in A Charmed Life , stopping from time to time to look out the window at the bright empty country. It brought back the vacations of childhood. Every other year her parents would decide to go west and would bundle her and her sister Miri into a Cadillac and spend two or three weeks hurrying between scenic spots while the girls read comic books or Nancy Drew mysteries and waited irritably for the Grand Canyon or some other redeeming wonder to appear.
    As the sun sank, it shone more hotly into the front seat, and Patsy slipped for a while into a sweaty doze. When she awoke she had a momentary sense of bewilderment and disorientation. It seemed strange that she should be in such barren gray country. If she had any sense, she reflected, she would be in a cool bed in Connecticut, having a tremendous love affair with someone sensitive—someone who would never be likely to have anything to do with Texas, New Mexico, or Arizona. But then Jim smiled at her fondly and she realized that such a fantasy was even more unreal than the locale—it was not her at all. She felt sweaty and tired and nothing seemed clearly the right thing to do.
    “Couldn’t we just stop in El Paso for the night?” she asked.
    Jim looked slightly weary but shook his head. “Peewee needs to be there in the morning to get entered,” he said.
    She glanced around at Peewee and found that he had been exploring in the paperbacks again and had come up with Sexus —a fat red paperback and one of Jim’s recent purchases. She hadn’t read it and wasn’t especially eager to, but it was obvious that Peewee had never read anything like it in his life. He was holding the book about four inches in front of his eyes and seemed to have stopped breathing.
    “You’re getting ahead of me,” she said. “I haven’t read that one. Is it pretty sexy?”
    Peewee was stunned. When he opened the book he had forgotten everything. He had a terrific erection and when he saw Patsy looking at him he became horribly embarrassed, for he was sure his condition must be obvious. He dropped the book at once and tried to look out the window as if nothing had been happening, but his throat was dry and he had a hard time