Buffalo Girls

B
Y
L
ARRY
M
C
M
URTRY

Paradise
Boone's Lick
Roads: Driving America's Greatest Highways
Still Wild: Short Fiction of the American West 1950 to the Present
Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen
Duane's Depressed
Crazy Horse
Comanche Moon
Dead Mans 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

B
Y
L
ARRY
M
C
M
URTRY AND
D
IANA
O
SSANA

Pretty Boy Floyd
Zeke and Ned

Larry McMurtry

S
CRIBNER
P
APERBACK
F
ICTION
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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 © 1990 by Larry McMurtry

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First Scribner Paperback Fiction edition 2001
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CRIBNER
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APERBACK
F
ICTION
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Designed by Colin Joh
Text set in Goudy Old Style

Manufactured in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 0-7432-1629-6
ISBN 13: 978-0-7432-1629-6
eISBN 978-1-4391-2814-5

For Diana

 

Darling Jane—

Here I sit, in the evening dews—you'll get some sopping big ones up here on the Yellowstone. I thought I'd write my hope a note before the light goes.

I call you my hope because you are, Janey. I will send your Daddy some money to get you a new dress for school—it's best to look nice, Janey, though I'm a sad one to say it. Last night I got drunk as a duck and rolled down the hill into a puddle—a pig couldn't have been muddier. If it had been later in the year I expect I'd have froze.

I dread the winters now although I've been all over these plains in the worst blizzards without a care. In my young days it would never have occurred to me to worry about such a little thing as the weather. “Powder River let 'er buck!” Blue used to say—I never did know what he meant by it but it sounded good at the time.

Blue showed up at Dora's, in Miles City, otherwise I might have escaped the puddle. Blue brings out the rowdy in me, he has since the day I met him down in Abilene or maybe it was Dodge, those cow-town days seem long ago now, Janey.

Blue fell in love with Dora in Abilene, I expect he is still in love with her but why go into it? It ain't Dora he married. After Blue comes for a little visit—he's a great one for little visits—Dora
will mope around and cry for two or three days. She'll hole up with Fred, that's her parrot, she says Fred's her only true friend but that's mush, Janey, I'm a true friend to Dora DuFran as she is to me.

I'd go to hell for Dora and she knows it, but she forgets about it when Blue rides off, I don't blame her, he is a reprobate. Ha, that's about as big a word as I would ever try to spell in a letter to my daughter, I fear it might upset you how poor your mother spells.

Well, Janey, the light's fading and I don't have much of a fire. I've gotten too lazy to gather much firewood, not that there is much on these plains. It never bothered me to sleep cold, though I will have to make better fires when winter strikes.

Tomorrow I'm heading down to Wyoming, I've heard my friends Ragg and Bone are living with the Shoshone. I wonder what they're living on, it couldn't be much, the Shoshone don't have much.

I miss Ragg and Bone, they've seen me through my life, Janey, them and Dora. I just have to go look for them when they wander off. It was Jim Ragg who finally introduced me to your father—I mean your real father, Wild Bill. I had to buy Jim twenty drinks before he would consent to introduce me, but I could get the drinks cheap and your father was the handsomest man in Dodge, still would be if he'd lived. I bought the drinks gladly but Ragg didn't introduce me gladly, I think he was scared. Ragg was a mountain man and liked to brag about all the massacres he'd seen, but saying hello to Wild Bill Hickok was another matter.

Wild Bill was known to be moody and if his mood turned cloudy he might just set down his drink and kill you. I had no worries, I knew Wild Bill wouldn't kill me, of course I admit that didn't mean he wouldn't have killed Jim Ragg.

Well, introduce is another big word, I think I got it correct though, I better stop this letter before my luck changes. Luck can change any time, it changed for Dora the day Blue met that half-breed
daughter of Granville Stuart's—they say Mr. Stuart was a great man and had done great things but to me he's an old ruffian, he hung those men on the Musselshell and some of them was only boys. Maybe they did steal his damn cow ponies, I don't care, boys that young don't deserve no hanging. I weep every time I think about those boys' mothers, and how they feel.

You will be a mother someday, Janey, and have your sorrows too, who can outrun sorrow? Not me, Janey, and not Dora DuFran, not since Blue married Granville Stuart's pretty little half-breed daughter. I hope no man will do you so, Janey—I don't even want to think about it.

Dora tried yesterday to give me Fred, she says I need a friend and a parrot's better than nothing, but I wouldn't take him. He's not a bad parrot, though he can't say anything except “General Custer”—who taught it to him or why he wants to say it I don't know. You'd think living with Dora all these years Fred would have learned a more interesting stock of words, not that they'd be words I could put in a letter to you, Janey.

It's my pride that I can afford to send your Daddy money so you can be raised among decent people, not the riffraff and ruffians you'll find out here these days. There are people who would include your mother in such a description—in fact most people would.

But I didn't take Fred, I think Dora would miss him, she's the one who should be thinking a parrot's better than nothing, because Fred and nothing's about what she's got. I have Ragg and Bone, they are my true friends. Why they would think there might still be beaver down in the Shoshone country I don't know. It's a sign to me that the boys have drunk one too many rounds—if there were beaver along the old Wind River why wouldn't the Shoshone have eaten them, what else do they have?

What it's really a sign of, Janey, is that people can't give up hoping for what they once had, youth or you name it. When Jim and Bartle come west the west meant beaver—now they're old and the beaver have been gone for twenty-five years but the boys
can't admit it, at least Jim can't. They still think there's a creek somewhere boiling with beaver that God saved for them. It's just how people are, Janey, they cling to foolish hopes.

But you will need to be studying your lessons and not wearing out your eyes reading my old gloomy words.

Don't worry about your mother, Janey, I have always got by. I'm hardy, I scarcely even coughed after sleeping in that mud puddle though I admit if it had been later in the year I wouldn't have been so lucky.