Moving On by Larry McMurtry Page B

it, of course,” she said. “Have you ever been married, Peewee?”
    “Me?” Peewee asked. “Who would marry me?”
    He said it so simply, with no trace of self-pity or melancholy, that it made Patsy stop feeling tense. There was always someone with a problem worse than hers. She wiped her eyes with a Kleenex and smiled back at him, and he looked at her with bewilderment and relief. They were curving west out of El Paso, with the thin winding Rio Grande visible in the valley to the south.
    “Why, you look very eligible,” she said. “You could use a shirt that fits but other than that there’s no reason why you shouldn’t get married and be as miserable as everyone else.”
    “All I can do to get a date oncet an’ a while,” he said, sure that he was being flattered.
    “What do you do when you aren’t riding professional broncs?”
    “This an’ that. Work in fillin’ stations.”
    The sun was lowering, dropping more rapidly toward a horizon far into New Mexico. The face of the great bare mountain to their right, El Capitan, was shining from the late sun, and the desert around them was cooler and more fragrant as the evening came.
    “I never had a job,” Patsy said. “I wonder what one would be like.”
    “You never?” he said. “You don’t look like you have, now you mention it. They ain’t so bad, most of ’em. The best one I ever had was in Houston.”
    “Goodness. That’s where we live when we’re home. What did you do there?”
    “Drove a little train. It’s over by the zoo, in Hermann Park. We lived in Houston a year. None of us ever liked the town much but I liked drivin’ that train. It just goes around the park, you know.”
    “I know. How strange. I ride it all the time, or every time I go to the zoo. Maybe I rode it while you were driving it. Wouldn’t that be odd?”
    “Shore would,” Peewee said, grinning at the thought. “We couldn’t take that humid weather so we all moved back to the plains.”
    “Let’s eat in Las Cruces,” Jim said. Peewee’s talk of jobs made him strangely envious. All his jobs had been arranged by his father and had been with oil companies owned by his father’s friends. He had never felt that he could have gotten any of them if he had been applying strictly on his own merits.
    They ate in the coffee shop of a large new motel, with red leatherette booths and fancy trays of syrups and jellies on each table. The place had a large plate-glass window; as they ate they watched the sun go down. Peewee had two cheeseburgers and Jim had a steak that was mostly gristle and Patsy had soup and a not-very-fresh salad and some rolls and butter; her legs were chilled from the air conditioning. When they left, the gray horizon had turned purple. As they drove away from Las Cruces, darkness came across the desert to meet them. The afterglow faded, there were taillights ahead and headlights coming and a swish from cars they met and a solid shock of air when they met one of the huge trucks. Before they reached Deming both Patsy and Peewee had fallen asleep again, Patsy on her pillow, Peewee under his hat.
    Jim felt fresh and drove easily. After a bad stretch of dippy road they entered Arizona and he could drive faster. He could not see the scattered mountains, but he knew they were there. Patsy shivered. He rolled his window up and lost himself in fantasies of himself as a photographer. For a time the road went through a valley, through little towns that were asleep and scarcely lit, and when he rolled his window down to freshen the air he smelled alfalfa fields. Once, just outside a little town, he saw some people walking on the shoulder, and he slowed and saw that they were Indian teenagers walking home from somewhere. The boys were fat and wore cowboy hats, and the girls wore sweaters and clumped together. Off the roads he saw lights, but very low to the ground, as if they came from tepees or little huts. The lights were scattered along a gentle slope. Except for