Texasville (16 page)

“Hurry up and get in the car, Daddy,” Beulah called. “We’re missing
The Waltons.”

Before they made it to the curb, Suzie Nolan strolled past on one side and Jenny Marlow passed on the other side. Old Man Balt didn’t increase his speed and Duane felt momentarily like a stalled car on a freeway, but they eventually reached the car and got the old man settled.

“Take it easy, Mr. Balt,” Duane said. “We’re counting on you to make this centennial work.”

“Daddy’ll help you out,” Beulah said. “It’ll be a good distraction for him.”

Suzie and Jenny left at the same moment. They both caught the red light at the corner, the only traffic light in town. When it changed, Jenny turned right and Suzie left. Neither of them was headed in the direction of her home.

Duane drove down to the little six-bed hospital, parked and went in. Though he tried to walk quietly, his boots rang on the hard waxed floor. No nurse appeared, so he walked on down the hall until he saw a room with a light. Lester Marlow was sitting up in bed, reading a paperback spy novel.

“How you doing?” Duane asked.

“I’m dulled out,” Lester said. “I don’t think I can sleep, though.”

Lester didn’t look dulled—he looked wired. His brown hair,
which had always run to cowlicks, now seemed to consist of nothing but cowlicks. It stuck out in all directions, and his big feet stuck out from under the covers.

“If I’d finished college I could have worked for the CIA,” he said. “They say ordinary people like me make the best spies. It’s probably a lot less stressful than being a bank president in a small town.”

Duane sat down in the one chair.

“Why would you want to be a spy?” he asked.

“I’d rather be anything than what I am,” Lester said, ruffling his cowlicks. He had a large head, a large face. It struck Duane that large faces could look sadder than small faces. Lester’s looked quite sad.

“Do you think I’ll get raped in prison?” he asked.

“I doubt you’ll even go,” Duane said. “Maybe they’ll let you do community service. You could mow the grass on the football field.”

“Butt-fucking doesn’t appeal to me,” Lester said plaintively.

“Or it’ll probably be one of those country-club prisons,” Duane said.

“You’re not going to take bankruptcy, are you?” Lester asked.

“No, I don’t plan to,” Duane said.

“Why not?” Lester asked. “Your position is hopeless. A lot of people in your shoes would have jumped into Chapter Eleven.”

“Luthie’s got a plan to bomb OPEC,” Duane said. “Once he does that, the oil business is bound to pick up.

“Nothing’s hopeless till you’re dead,” he added cheerfully.

“My marriage is hopeless,” Lester said. “Jenny says I have no common sense. We haven’t slept together in months. She goes off in a car at night and I don’t know where she goes.

“But we have sweet children,” he added. “I hope the girls don’t turn against me while I’m in prison.”

“Those girls aren’t going to turn against you,” Duane said. Lester and Jenny had two daughters, Missy and Sissy, both teenagers. They were among the best-liked children in town. They were lively and talkative but also well-behaved, and they already showed promise in softball.

“I wish the ax would fall,” Lester said. He looked at the ceiling as if he expected an ax to come dropping right through it.

“Which ax?” Duane asked, not sure whether Duane was talking about his marriage, his bank or his prison sentence.

“Any ax,” Lester said. “I’m tired of thinking all day long. Maybe I would be better off in prison, making license plates. I think I could handle a simple job like that. I just wouldn’t want to get raped.”

“You worry too much,” Duane said. “I was thinking of going fishing. Go with me. The crappie might be biting.”

“With my luck, they’d bite me,” Lester said gloomily. “What do you think’s the matter with Jenny?”

“I have no idea,” Duane said.

“Jenny likes excitement,” Lester said. “She says I’m not exciting anymore. She says I haven’t been exciting since Missy was born.”

“It’s hard to stay exciting for a whole lifetime,” Duane said, standing up. “I hope you get to feeling better.”

CHAPTER 22

S
UZIE
N
OLAN WAS WAITING IN THE PARKING LOT
when Duane walked out of the hospital. As he approached the car he could see the shine of tears on her cheek. He leaned down and looked in at her.

“Now what’s the matter with you?” he asked.

“I just feel lost,” Suzie said. “I just love Dickie so much, Duane. I just love him heart and soul.”

“Suzie, I wish you’d picked me,” Duane said. “I don’t know if you can count too much on a boy like Dickie.”

“I can’t count on him at all,” Suzie said. “I know that. It’s why I’m so lost. It’s just good fun to him but it’s heart and soul to me. Now Junior’s going broke, and it’s just all going to break down.”

She began to sob and laid her head on his arm. Duane let her cry, occasionally stroking her hair. He thought briefly of what a terrible thing it must be for a woman of Suzie’s age to be madly in love with Dickie, but his thoughts kept drifting elsewhere—specifically, they drifted to his own girlfriend, Janine Wells, for whom he had conceived a growing distaste. He
tried to remember whether he had always felt a distaste for Janine or whether he had just begun to feel it lately. If he didn’t like her, why had he started sleeping with her? She was probably sitting on her couch in a negligee at that very moment, waiting for him to come by. He hadn’t told her he would come by, but sometimes he did after centennial meetings. On such occasions Janine always dressed in a negligee, usually lavender.

Duane decided it was probably the negligees, and not Janine’s grasping ways, that were causing the distaste. He was certainly no stranger to grasping ways, and had long since concluded that it didn’t pay to be too fastidious in this life.

He looked across the top of Suzie’s car and saw that indeed the lights were on at Janine’s house. She lived two blocks from the hospital in the little house her parents had lived in.

Her parents had been killed in a car wreck while Janine was in high school. Janine had gone to work in the courthouse the minute she graduated from high school. She had been married briefly to Joe Bob Blanton, a local minister’s son. They had become close after her parents’ funeral. Janine was not popular and had no one else to be close to.

But the marriage only lasted a summer. Joe Bob had first gone to college in Wichita Falls, then had switched to Denton, then to the University of Oklahoma, then to the University of Kansas, at which point people in Thalia finally lost track of him. He removed himself one college at a time—someone had heard that he had finally reached Syracuse, New York, but that was just a rumor.

Duane began to feel guilty. He didn’t want to go to see Janine. At the same time he knew it must be sad to sit in the little house your parents had lived in, in a lavender negligee, and have your boyfriend drive right past and not come to see you. He wondered what was going on at the Howlers—maybe Karla and Junior had finally fallen in love. But the thing that bothered him most was that he had ordered a steak and was not going to get to eat it.

While he weighed his sense of duty to Janine against his hunger, depression and various other feelings, Suzie Nolan began to bite his hand. She had been crying on his arm while
he stroked her hair. One of his hands was beneath her cheek and she turned her head and began to suck her tears off his hand. Then she bit the fleshy part of his hand. Her bite was soft at first, but then she bit harder. She moved up to his fingers and bit one, fairly hard.

When Duane tried to pull his hand away, Suzie held the bite. She was looking at him out of wide, determined eyes, her teeth clamped on his finger, reminding him for a moment of how Shorty might look if he tried to remove a bone Shorty was eating.

Shorty himself watched the scene from the front seat of Minerva’s Buick, which Duane had borrowed. Shorty was happy that Duane was so close. The periods when Duane had been in the courthouse and the hospital had been agony for Shorty, but he didn’t mind at all if Duane stood by the car, feeding his hand to some woman. Shorty accepted everything about Duane except his absences.

Suzie turned her head so she could take the finger she was biting into her mouth. Duane tried once more to slide it away but Suzie set her teeth in it and bit harder. He looked around nervously to see if anyone was coming. People were always getting sick in Thalia—anyone could drive up.

Duane felt a confusing mixture of surprise, dismay and desire. Suzie’s passionate bites were having an effect. At the same time it was not lost on him that she was in love with his son—she was Dickie’s girlfriend, or one of them. Of course she was Junior Nolan’s wife, but Junior crossed his mind only briefly. He had long since reconciled himself to adultery—but sharing a lover with one of his own children was a different matter. That
had
to be different, but in his nervousness he was not exactly sure where the point of difference lay, or what it meant.

He had a sense that life was about to jump the fence of credibility and become completely unbelievable. He wanted to stop it, to keep it from racing into hopeless emotional chaos, but, unfortunately for his ethical sense, desire was growing faster than dismay. It was growing urgent, which added to the surprise and confusion—he hadn’t felt an
urgent
sexual need in two or three years. It was all he could do to make an effort to check himself, but he did try.

“Suzie, stop,” he said. She was still mouthing his fingers. “Don’t do that. It’s Dickie you’re in love with.”

Her mouth made a little pop as she released his finger. The small, intimate sound was more affecting than the bites and all but undid his resolve.

“He don’t love me,” Suzie said. “It’s just good fun to him. I do love the little rat something terrible—but don’t leave me, Duane. I don’t want you to leave.”

She pulled his wet hand down into the heat of her bosom and raised herself half out of the window to kiss him. In contrast to the aggressive biting, her mouth was soft and shy—her breath tickled his cheek. He ceased trying to stop and followed her through the window when she drew back to loosen her blouse. She began to unbutton his shirt but kept an arm around his neck, apparently thinking he could just slide in through the window. She twisted backward far enough to get her legs out from under the steering wheel.

Duane was not so limber. His erection, of which he was very aware, was jammed against the door handle and both his feet were off the ground. Suzie managed to get her legs up on his shoulder and to loosen his belt, but it did her little good because the rest of him was still out in the parking lot. Meanwhile she was still smothering him with quick, breathy kisses, and she seemed puzzled by the delay.

“I don’t know if I can get in through this window,” Duane said. He had rarely felt so horny and at the same time so silly—his legs were sticking straight out the window. By a desperate wrench he had managed to free his erection from the door handle but it still wasn’t inside the car.

“Shoot, I told Junior we needed a station wagon,” Suzie said, vexed by the logistics but unwilling to stop kissing him. She caught his hand again and thrust it between her legs, hoping that a touch there would inspire him.

Duane could not have been much more inspired, but his inspiration could not widen the window or eliminate the steering wheel or raise the roof. He was about to try to wiggle out and simply open the door when a flicker of light struck the windshield. A car was racing along the little road toward the hospital. Suzie saw it too.

“Oh, no!” she said. “Bad timing!”

“Terrible timing,” Duane said. “I’m stuck.”

Indeed, getting back out the window was no simpler than getting in. For a moment he wished he had paid a little more attention to the various diets Karla read to him while he was in the hot tub ignoring her.

His exit was not made easier by the fact that Suzie, bent on assuring herself as thorough a caress as possible, held his hand tightly to her crotch. She lay back in the seat and covered her eyes with her forearm.

“Just do that for a second,” she said. “That car’s not here yet. Just do that. That’s nice.

“I thought you’d be nice,” she added. “You know how you think about how people will be?”

Before Duane could comment, Suzie bit her forearm to stifle a nice cry of pleasure. Duane felt that it would also be very nice to have his feet back on the ground before the car arrived. He could hear it rattling as it raced up the bumpy road.

He got a crick in his back, twisting out, but left his hand with Suzie for a bit as he leaned against the door and caught his breath. A couple more nice cries of pleasure were imperfectly stifled. Duane felt sharply frustrated, but still glad to be out of the window.

Suzie sat up, her eyes gleaming, just as the car came skidding to a stop.

It was Beulah Balt, so crazed with shock that she immediately yanked the car into reverse rather than park, and almost ran over Duane, who was not at his most nimble.

“Daddy’s dead!” she said. “He fell out of the car and rolled off into the ditch.”

“Oh, no!” Suzie said, getting out of the car to comfort her. “He was gonna be the star of our centennial.”

Duane raced into the hospital to see if Buddy, the ambulance driver, was anywhere around. May, the night nurse, a woman as secretive as a mouse, was sitting in one of the closets counting packages of Q-tips.

“Buddy’s gone crappie fishing but he left the ambulance, help yourself,” May said, when Duane ran up.

“You better call the doctor,” Duane said.

“I will, but don’t make me lose count, I’m taking inventory,” May said.

Lester came out of the hall to see what all the excitement was about and just had time to grab his shoes.

They got the two women into the ambulance and went racing out the highway. Old Man Balt and his daughter lived about ten miles out.

“It’s my fault,” Beulah said, weeping. “I get on him for missing his tobacco can when he spits. He can’t hit the can in the dark in a moving car. I got on him and he opened the door and tried to spit. The next thing I knew he was gone.”