Read McMurtry, Larry - Novel 05 for Free Online Page A

defiance, I've ended up face down on the floor,
twitching weakly. One thing I've learned to do without is the myth of male
dominance. Possibly there had actually been male dominance in other eras, but
constant exposure to women on the order of Boss Miller and Tanya Todd convinced
me it had gone the way of the dodo and the great auk.
                   "I want to get something straight,"
Cindy said. "Did you really know Big John Connolly, or were you just
conning me?"
                   "Sure I know him," I said. "Why
would you doubt it?"
                   "Let's put it this way," she said.
"Why would you doubt that I'm engaged to Harris? Do you have some notion
that you're better than he is?"
                   "Not better," I said. "Maybe just a little more practical. What if you start the
wedding and Harris can only decide to put one leg through the door of the
church?
                   "Of course you could marry him in the
park," I added. "No doors."
                   For some reason her mood lightened.
                   "In L.A. , maybe," she said. "If
I wanted some freako LA. wedding , I'd marry the
head of Fox and get the Dalai Lama to preside. Members of Harris' family do not
get married in parks."
                   "I guess he did look pretty proper,"
I said, trying to remember Harris. All I could remember was that he was tall,
aristocratically thin, wore a suit, and had an anguished gaze.
                   "Changes clothes three times a day,"
Cindy said, tapping me gently on the chest with the handle of the knife.
"I didn't have to make him buy a dinner jacket the first time I took him
out."
                   " My gosh ,"
I said. "I'm just a scout. It's not every day I meet a girl like
you."
                   "I'd like to hear more about your
wives," she said. "They don't seem to have taught you much."
                   "They weren't teachers, just wives,"
I said. "They both work for Boss."
                   Frankly I was beginning to be sorry I had
popped off about her engagement, since the remark had set in motion an
interrogation whose purpose was more or less a mystery to me. Cindy was now
gathering historical data of a sort all women feel they have an automatic right
to. Even Coffee had suspended her antihistorical bias long enough to secure a
thorough account of my prior relationships, when we first met.
                   "I know a flea-marketer's daughter who
doesn't work for Boss," I said, to change the subject.
                   "Where does she live?"
                   " Zanesville , Ohio ," I said, a direct lie. For some reason I
wasn't ready to come clean about the flea-marketer's daughter, who actually
lives near Augusta , West Virginia , not much more than a two-hour drive from Washington .
                   "Yeah," Cindy said, looking at me
closely. She had probably activated her truth radar, an instinctive
lie-detecting mechanism I'm convinced all women have. It is an enormously
sophisticated mechanism which frequently enables women to skip quickly over the
fact of the lie and zero in on the motive behind it.
                   I've often been stunned to discover that women
can discern with great precision the true motive behind lies I had thought I
had merely wandered into casually, as I might wander into a junk shop.
                   There's really no winning against equipment so
finely calibrated, but there are certain evasionary tactics that will sometimes
delay the inevitable reckoning. I decided to try and camouflage the lie with a
sprig of truth.
                   "I have a confession to make," I
said. "I wasn't conning you yesterday. I do know Big John Connolly. But
the Big John I was actually referring to was Big John Flint."
                   Big John Flint is a phenomenal trader