McMurtry, Larry - Novel 05

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Authors: Cadillac Jack (v1.0)
were gossips who felt they knew which of the major figures she had
accepted, but Boss herself was inscrutable when the great names were reeled
off. She spoke of Jack or Adlai or. Lyndon as of any other friend, though once
in a while a special light would come into her restless gray eyes at the
mention of Estes Kefauver.
                   The light was not lost on Boog, who sometimes
dropped Kefauver's name just to see it come on.
                   "Ain't women sumpin'?" he would say.
"Remember Estes Kefauver? Why that big gawky son of a bitch could get
pussy Jack Kennedy wouldn't have got the merest whiff of."
                   When Boss mentioned her threat about the famous
Yankees she was sitting at her kitchen table, drinking coffee.
                   "I learned a harsh truth as a result of
that remark," she said.
                   "Which is?"
                   "Which is that there's more cheap women than famous Yankees," she said, opening The Wall Street
Journal to the real estate ads. Boss had a pilot's license and would fly off in
her Cessna to any part of America where there was a good property to buy. Her
local operations she ran mostly by phone from her spacious bedroom, leaving the
legwork to competent young women such as Kate, Coffee, or Tanya Todd—another
old girl friend of mine, who ran her Dallas office. I sometimes called Tanya Roger the
Dodger, since over the years she had proved about as hard to sack as Roger
Staubach. Once in a while she could be blindsided, if one felt up to a sexual
blitz, but that was the only method likely to prove effective.
                   Though neither famous nor a Yankee, I was
crazy about Boss and was always shooting her looks of love. I shot her a few
while she read the Journal, but she looked up and disposed of my candidacy with
a vivid smile.
                   "Get up and go buy some doodads,"
she said. "I class you with the sportswriters."
                   "In my view that's very unfair," I
said.
                   Boss ran her fingers through her long black
hair, idly testing its texture as she smiled at me.
                   "Yeah, but your view don't count,"
she said, and turned the page.
                   Before I could get her to look at me again,
Micah Leviticus came dragging into the kitchen, wearing gym trunks and an old
C.C.N.Y. T-shirt. He was carrying a tiny TV, which he plugged into an outlet
near the sink before climbing up in Boss's lap. A Roadrunner and the Coyote
cartoon happened to be playing. Micah watched it raptly, as Boss read the
Journal The minute a commercial came on he looked up
into her beautiful face.
                   "I dreamed about Rilke again last night.
Boss," he said. "Why is it always Rilke? I don't even like Rilke.”
                   "You sweet thing," Boss said, and
gave him a couple of not-so-motherly kisses. Then she favored me with another
of her cheerful and vivid smiles.
                   I wondered sometimes if her cells weren't just
better than other people's— more ripe with the
lifestuff, or something.
                   It was one way to account for the fact that
she seemed twice as alive as the rest of us.
                   Micah Leviticus was exactly five feet one
inch—sixteen inches shorter than myself . That fact
alone blew the one solid theory I had about women, which is that even the best
of them are suckers for tall men.
                  

Chapter VI
     
                   Meanwhile—back in bed—the defiance had not entirely
faded from Cindy Sanders' face. She swallowed a big glob of Brie and washed it
down with three big gulps of apple juice, watching me closely to see if I was
going to mount a serious campaign against her engagement.
                   I kept quiet. Every single time I've gone
one-on-one with female

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