Texasville (11 page)

Karla had just returned from a little shopping trip to Fort Worth. She wore a T-shirt that said,
PEOPLE WHO THINK MONEY CAN’T BUY HAPPINESS DON’T KNOW WHERE TO SHOP
. Her eyes were dancing again.

“Go tie a knot in your dick, Duane,” she replied cheerfully. Her hands were full of shopping bags.

“Don’t you think we oughta build a guesthouse while we’re at it?” she asked, a moment later.

“Who for?” Duane asked. It was one of those moments when life seemed unfair. Karla got better-looking every year, whereas he just got more tired.

“For guests, Duane,” Karla said. “That’s who you need a guesthouse for.”

“This house will sleep about a thousand people,” he pointed out. “And the only guest we ever have is Bobby Lee, when he passes out after supper.”

“He might like privacy, though,” Karla said.

“All he’d have to do is walk off down any hall,” Duane said. “He’d have so much privacy we’d have to call the Highway Patrol to find him.”

“It’s not the same as a guesthouse, though,” Karla said. “A lot of people wouldn’t care to be surrounded by our family.”

Duane was lying on their most recent waterbed, which was larger in terms of square footage than the little house he and Karla had lived in when they were first married. He was watching cable news with the sound off. A tidal wave had hit somewhere in India, washing hundreds of thousands of people into the sea.

“I don’t care to be surrounded by our family, either,” he said. “I might build myself a guesthouse. We could buy a golf cart and park it in the kitchen.”

“Why would we want to park a golf cart in the kitchen?” Karla asked, momentarily intrigued by her husband’s line of thought.

“Then if any guests show up they could drive around in it until they find a bedroom,” Duane said.

“I guess we could use a golf cart,” Karla allowed. “Little Mike’s too speedy for Minerva. She could use it to chase him down.”

“Karla, I was just kidding,” Duane said.

“Sometimes you have your best ideas when you’re kidding,” she said.

“I’ve had another one,” he said. “Let’s don’t build a guesthouse, let’s build a jail. It can be Jack and Dickie’s room. We’ll have real bars on the windows. It will be good to give those boys a taste of prison life right here at home so they’ll know what to expect when they wind up in Huntsville.”

“The reason there’s women’s lib is because husbands don’t take their wives seriously when they want to build guesthouses,” Karla said.

She changed T-shirts, slipping into one that said,
MARRIED BUT STILL ON THE LOOKOUT
. Duane wondered if there was any significance to the fact that she hadn’t worn a bra to Fort Worth. He wondered if there was any significance to anything people did with their bodies. The older he got, the more he doubted that there was. Who people slept with seemed too circumstantial to worry about. It wasn’t the fact that Karla had boyfriends that annoyed him—it was the boyfriends she picked, none of whom made any effort to be friendly to him, or even civil. Arthur treated him like a yardman.

Meanwhile, on the big screen of the TV, in vivid color, the survivors of the tidal wave wandered around looking stunned, on a white beach. They had lost everything: their homes, their loved ones, their meager possessions had all been swept into the sea.

“There’s some people with real trouble,” Duane said aloud, half to himself.

Karla was brushing her hair. She could see the TV in the mirror.

“I know, don’t lay there and watch it,” she said. “Turn the channel.”

“A hundred and twenty thousand people got washed away,” Duane said. “That’s more people than there are in Wichita Falls.”

“It’s way over there and we can’t do a thing about it, Duane,” Karla said. “It’s what can happen if you live too near the ocean.”

“It wasn’t two years ago that you wanted to buy a beach house on Padre Island,” he reminded her.

Karla brushed her shining brown hair for a while.

“You once told me you’d give me anything my heart desired,” she reminded Duane.

“I must have been drunk when I said it,” he said.

“You were not—it was about twenty years ago,” Karla said.

“Oh, no wonder,” Duane said. “A young man’s even more unreliable than a drunk.”

“Arthur’s young and he’s reliable,” Karla said. “I should go snatch that child baldheaded for calling him a wimp.”

“She’s got a right to freedom of speech,” Duane said.

Shorty was standing just outside the glass doors that led to the deck and the hot tub. He often stood there for hours, staring longingly into the bedroom. It was a sand-stormy day—pellets of West Texas grit occasionally peppered the glass.

“I can’t stand the way that dog stands there with his tongue hanging out,” Karla said. She left the room.

Duane continued to look at the wet, stunned people wandering dejectedly along a beach on the other side of the world. One hundred and twenty thousand of them had been washed away forever, which should have brought his own troubles into perspective, only it didn’t. He felt just as depressed as ever. His huge debt depressed him, his unruly children depressed him, his smug girlfriend depressed him, and the huge house that he didn’t like and would probably never manage to pay for depressed him most of all. He even hated the bed he was lying on—it was so vast that he often had to crawl twenty feet just to answer the phone.

The survivors of the tidal wave actually seemed to inhabit a more beautiful world than he did. The sea that had swallowed their loved ones was a vivid blue. The palm trees that had been spared were a lush green. The large new Sony TV transmitted all the colors perfectly—the scene of devastation actually looked like a South Seas paradise, whereas out his window all he saw was grayness, grit, and Shorty with his tongue out.

The sand the survivors walked around on was brilliantly white and far more beautiful than the sand that peppered his glass doors. West Texas sand looked and felt like ground rocks. Duane had felt it often and hated it. He often thought it would be nice to live in a place where the wind wasn’t strong enough to blow little rocks around.

His imagination refused to accord the Asian tragedy anything like the gravity it deserved. Despite himself, he imagined a freak tidal wave, in the form of a waterspout, arching over four hundred and fifty miles of Texas and striking the Thalia courthouse dead center, washing away the courthouse and everyone in it. He knew it was an unworthy thought, since many innocents would die; on the other hand, it was an appealing solution to the problem of Janine—a problem he would have to face up to pretty soon.

As he drove past Los Dolores, its brown adobe walls somber even in the bright sunlight, Duane’s mind chose to replay the afternoon he had watched the tidal-wave coverage. When he was depressed, his memory proved particularly uncooperative. Instead of replaying scenes of happiness and mirth—of which there had been many in his life—it only replayed other depressions. Though he had been happy for most of his life, and seriously depressed only for a year or two, it was an effort for him to remember much of what had happened during his forty-six happy years. His mental processes seemed to be the opposite of Minerva’s, with whom he had discussed the problem several times.

“Shoot, I just remember the good,” Minerva said. “I forget the bad right off.”

At the time she was convinced she was getting spinal meningitis, though so far she had none of the symptoms.

“I guess you’re more of an optimist than me,” Duane said.

“No, I’m crazier,” Minerva replied. “You’re too sane, Duane. There’s not a saner man in this county, and right there’s your problem.”

CHAPTER 15

L
OOKING AT LOS DOLORES, DUANE WONDERED
what Jacy felt. It occurred to him that he could just stop and ring the doorbell, as Karla had. Perhaps Jacy was inside, depressed, hoping someone
would
ring the doorbell.

She might be lying on a bed as vast as his own, watching TV coverage of some disaster and sinking ever deeper into her own depression. She might enjoy talking over old times, even though the old times just consisted of a year or two of dates and a few brief weeks of lovemaking, thirty years before.

Duane could remember thinking that he would never get over her; but long before he had returned to Thalia from Korea he was over her. Karla had moved to town in his absence. She worked as a checker in the grocery store. They had a few dates, got married, stayed married.

Even Sonny Crawford had finally gotten over Jacy, and, of the two of them, he had been the more in love.

Duane thought Ruth Popper’s theory was wrong. He wasn’t afraid of falling back in love with Jacy. Nothing was much less likely than that they would ever be in love again. He was just
afraid of violating her privacy. He had almost no privacy himself, and valued it so highly that he would drive around on dirt roads all afternoon just to have a little. He was not about to interfere with Jacy’s, and he watched Los Dolores disappear in his rearview mirror without remorse.

On his way back to town he stopped at Aunt Jimmie’s Lounge for a few minutes to meditate over a beer. Aunt Jimmie’s was a dilapidated little county line honky-tonk. The clapboards it was made of hadn’t been painted in thirty years, and neither had the proprietress, Aunt Jimmie, a plain, solemn little woman who sat by the cash register all day and much of the night, smoking cigarette after cigarette and ignoring what went on around her. She had gone broke running a dime store in Thalia. Aunt Jimmie’s did a booming business, but Aunt Jimmie herself still looked like a woman who ran a dime store.

Duane was relieved to see that for once none of his employees were getting drunk on his time. Why would they need to, when they could take long naps in the shade?

“The waitress is gone to the beauty parlor, you’ll have to get your own beer,” Aunt Jimmie said. She was not liberal with conversation, which suited Duane fine.

The bar was empty except for the local highway patrolman, a mournful widower named P. L. Jolly. P.L. was rumored to have designs on Aunt Jimmie, but, so far as Duane could observe, had done little to advance them.

Duane got a beer and sat down by P.L. He tried to maintain good relations with the local police, since the day seldom passed without a family member or an employee being arrested for something.

“Hi, P.L.,” he said. “How’s Dickie behaving?”

“Terrible,” P.L. said. “He says he’s gonna organize a prison riot if we don’t let him out. It’s a good thing for us there’s nobody else in jail but a nigger and the nigger’s in a coma.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” Duane said. “How’d he get in a coma?”

“He just slid into it in the night, some way,” P.L. said. “The doctor was gonna come have a look at him this afternoon.”

“Was Dickie really going eighty-five in a school zone?” Duane asked.

“Yep,” P.L. said. “That little sucker sure flies along, don’t he? I like Dickie, though. He don’t mean no harm. It’s just he’s lively.”

“I hope that other prisoner’s okay,” Duane said. “We’ve got this centennial coming up. We don’t want to get any bad marks if we can help it.”

P.L. smoked for a while. The thought of black marks made him seem more depressed than ever.

“We get quite a few that do go into comas,” he said. “They get their heads beat in, but it don’t take hold for a while. Then they wind up in jail over here and the next thing you know they slide off into comas. It’s a big strain on our personnel.”

“I wouldn’t try to tell you how to run your business,” Duane said. “But couldn’t you just call an ambulance and have them sent to the hospital?”

“Well, we can,” P.L. said, “but I like to give them a day or two to see if they’re faking. If they’re faking, and you send ’em to the hospital, they might get after the nurses or something. Or else you have to send a guard with them, and that means overtime wages.”

“I thought Karla was gonna bail Dickie out,” Duane said.

“She came by, but Dickie popped off and got smart with her and she changed her mind and left him in,” P.L. said. “That little sucker don’t care what he says, does he?”

“Nope,” Duane said. “And if there’s anybody who could get a man in a coma to help out with a riot, it’d be him.”

P.L. grinned an approving grin.

“That little sucker, he livens things up, don’t he?” he said.

CHAPTER 16

D
ICKIE WAS NOT PARTICULARLY GRATEFUL WHEN
Duane came by and got him out of jail. He was a tall, rangy boy with spiky, oat-colored hair and lively blue eyes.

“I could have done a day’s work if you’d got me out sooner,” he pointed out.

“A day’s work for who?” Duane asked.

In the course of racing eighty-five miles an hour through a school zone, Dickie had also managed to crack the head on his pickup. He seldom drove at anything less than top speed and went through three or four pickups a year. The local Ford dealer kept a pickup with Dickie’s specifications sitting on the lot at all times.

The injury to his pickup forced Dickie to ride home with Duane, which delighted Shorty. He loved Dickie almost as much as he loved Duane. He tried to show his affection by giving Dickie a playful bite on the elbow, but Dickie didn’t enjoy such love play. He promptly threw Shorty out the window.

Fortunately they had just turned off the pavement onto the
dirt road, and were not going fast. Shorty was more puzzled than hurt. Like the twins, Dickie played strange games. The twins threw rocks at Shorty, whereas Dickie threw him at the road. Shorty thought it was all love, of a sort. He picked himself up and raced along after the pickup as if nothing had happened.

“Don’t be throwing that dog out of the pickup,” Duane said. “He’s not your dog.”

“He’s not going to be anybody’s dog if the little blue fucker bites me again,” Dickie said. He was wearing one of his mother’s T-shirts. It read,
WHEN THE GOING GETS TOUGH, THE TOUGH GO TO COZUMEL.

The Moore family had once made one of their frequent attempts at an idyllic family vacation in Cozumel. Dickie had got in a fistfight with the doorman of the hotel before their luggage was even unloaded. He claimed the doorman sneered at him, but Duane thought that several hours’ contact with his siblings had caused Dickie to hit the first person he saw.