Texasville (17 page)

“It might not be that serious,” Suzie said. “He might just have a few broken limbs.”

“I was in this ambulance earlier in the day,” Lester remarked. Suzie Nolan made him nervous.

Beulah had only a loose idea of where she had been when her father rolled out.

“I had the radio on and didn’t notice it when he fell out,” Beulah said. “I’ll never forgive myself for any of this. If he could just have lived three more months he would have got his letter from the President. The President writes everybody who gets to be a hundred years old.”

Precious minutes were lost in trying to pinpoint the spot where Mr. Balt fell out. Beulah thought it must have happened somewhere between Onion Creek and the next creek, which had no name. Duane finally got out and walked up the bar ditch. Lester was feeling nervous, so Suzie drove the ambulance and worked the spotlight. Duane had scarcely walked a hundred yards when he found Old Man Balt flat on his back in the ditch. He looked quite dead, but in fact was only sleeping.

When first awakened he seemed docile—“What’s on TV?” he asked—but when told that he had to come back to town and submit to a physical examination he began to show fight. It was soon clear that his arms and legs still worked because he proceeded to kick and strike with all of them. Duane finally wrestled the old man into the ambulance and clutched him in a kind of bear hug on the ride back into town.

“Mr. Balt, if you was any younger I believe we’d have to let you go,” he said.

“If I want to sleep in a bar ditch, whose business is it but mine?” the old man wanted to know. “This was a free country back before Roosevelt.”

“Hush, Daddy,” Beulah said. “You might have internal bleeding.”

“We’ll all have internal bleeding if Suzie doesn’t slow down,” Lester said. “External bleeding too.”

Suzie, looking flushed and competent, didn’t reply, nor did she slow down.

“She tries to get me to give up tobacco,” the old man said, glaring at his daughter.

“Daddy, I’ll settle for you just getting a bigger can,” Beulah said.

At the hospital it was soon determined that a skinned hand was the extent of Mr. Balt’s injuries. In their absence the emergency room had filled up. Three roughnecks had turned a truck over. They had bled all over themselves, though none was seriously hurt. Toots Burns, the sheriff, had brought in a runaway girl who seemed disoriented.

“She thinks she’s in Georgia,” Toots said sympathetically. He did not look in top form, but he looked better than the girl, who sat crying listlessly on a couch across from the bloody roughnecks.

Suzie soon left to pick up her children, to Duane’s profound relief. The brightly lit emergency room filled with depressed people made what had just occurred in the parking lot seem particularly absurd. Though Suzie did nothing more than try to comfort the miserable Beulah Balt, her behavior struck Duane as intolerably cheerful. She didn’t look at him when she left, either, which irked him, though it was illogical to feel that way when he couldn’t wait for her to leave.

He sat on the bench by the runaway girl for an hour, until it was determined that Mr. Balt could be released. He offered to drive the Balts home, but they refused his help and, after another slow trip down the sidewalk, they set off again.

Through the whole experience Duane had been nagged by the thought of the lonely Janine in her lavender negligee. Once the Balts were finally gone he went back in and called her on the pay phone.

“Well, Old Man Balt nearly got killed,” he said. “That’s why I couldn’t come by.”

“I’m already in bed,” Janine said in a small, beaten voice, the opposite of the triumphant voice she had used that morning in the Dairy Queen.

“He fell out of the car,” Duane said. “It’s a wonder he didn’t break into fifty pieces. I didn’t have a chance to call sooner.”

“You don’t have to apologize, if that’s all that happened,” Janine said, in the same hopeless voice.

“I could still come by for a minute,” he said.

“No, I’ve got grease on my face, and anyway you don’t really want to,” Janine said.

She was on the edge of tears. Duane tried to think of something he could say that would keep her from crying, but he didn’t feel very inspired.

“Maybe we can sneak off this weekend,” he said.

“You don’t really want to,” Janine said again, in toneless despair. Then she hung up.

CHAPTER 23

D
UANE STOOD BY THE PAY PHONE A MOMENT WONDERING
why he had tried to persuade Janine that what was actually true wasn’t true. She was an expert at hanging up in a way that would produce the maximum guilt feelings in him, but it was a trick she had used too often. He didn’t feel very guilty, and he knew that by morning Janine would have stopped despairing and be mad as hops.

It was far too late to go to the Howlers, but he didn’t particularly feel like going home either. He put another quarter in the pay phone and called his house.

“Who’s calling?” Minerva snapped.

“Just me,” Duane said.

“Well, I’m watching a movie, what do you want?” Minerva said. She loathed being interrupted when watching a movie, by casual callers or any callers.

“Is Karla home?” Duane asked.

“No, ain’t seen her,” Minerva snapped.

“Must be a pretty good movie,” Duane said.

“It’s Woody Allen, I laugh every time I see that man,” Minerva
said, softening slightly. “All he has to do is walk around and I laugh till I flop on the floor.”

“If Karla shows up, tell her I went fishing,” Duane said.

“I will. ’Bye,” Minerva said, hanging up.

“I wonder who else I could call who would hang up on me,” Duane said to himself.

He started to drive out to the lake and realized he had no bait. He turned around and drove to the Kwik-Sack. Sonny sat behind the cash register, watching a talk show on his little four-inch Sony. He glanced up and smiled, but he looked depressed.

Duane went over and got a package of baloney, some cheese, a jar of pickles and a loaf of bread. He could dine on a baloney sandwich, with pickles and cheese, and use the rest of the baloney for bait. It wasn’t good bait, but then he wasn’t that serious a fisherman—just serious enough that fishing with no bait at all made him feel guilty.

“We almost lost our star pioneer tonight,” Duane said.

“What happened?”

“Old Man Balt fell out of his car and rolled off in the bar ditch,” Duane said. “He wasn’t hurt, though.”

“I think I’m losing my mind,” Sonny said.

“Why? You’re not in the oil business,” Duane said. He was joking but Sonny wasn’t.

“I’m having these lapses more often,” Sonny said. “I had one an hour ago. I started ringing up a sale and then I just forgot what I was doing. Toots wanted to buy some sandwiches for that girl he caught and I just completely forgot how to work the cash register. Toots finally had to ring up the sale himself.”

“You’re probably just cranky, like Minerva,” Duane said. “Don’t like to be interrupted when you’re watching TV.”

“I don’t mind being interrupted at all,” Sonny said. “It’s my mind that’s being interrupted. It just goes blank sometimes.”

He looked really worried. Duane didn’t say it, but the worried look was actually an improvement on the look of courteous neutrality that Sonny had worn for most of his life.

“Try ringing these groceries up,” Duane suggested.

Sonny looked at the cash register a moment, and then rang Duane’s purchases up perfectly.

“I don’t usually have two lapses in one night,” Sonny said.
“But I’ve had two lapses in one week. Last week I had three or four. Maybe I have a brain tumor.”

“Now you’re really sounding like Minerva,” Duane said. “I don’t think you have a brain tumor, and I hope you won’t lose your mind before the centennial’s over, because we’ve still got a lot of organizing to do.”

“I think about Sam and Billy a lot,” Sonny said.

Sam was a man who had been a great help to Sonny in his youth, and Billy a simple-minded boy who had worked for Sam. Sonny had idolized Sam, and Billy had idolized Sonny. Both Sam and Billy had been dead for thirty years.

“I wish we could work them into the centennial, somehow,” Sonny said. “Sam kind of kept the town going at one time. Maybe there could be a skit or something.”

“There’s not too many left that remember those two,” Duane said, thinking that a skit about Sam the Lion, which was what everyone had called him, would be even more incomprehensible to most of the audience than those already planned. People had heard of Adam and Eve, and had some vague idea of who Ben Franklin was, but local figures, dead so long, were almost as lost to memory as Texasville itself. Duane couldn’t remember Sam and Billy very well himself.

“I just hate for them to be forgotten,” Sonny said.

“Most people are forgotten,” Duane said.

It struck him that Sonny’s problem was that he had forgotten himself throughout most of his own life. Only now, with his mind developing a tendency to wander, had he finally begun to remember that he was alive.

“Sam and Billy lived here,” Sonny said. “They were part of this place. Adam and Eve didn’t live here. Ben Franklin didn’t live here. It seems like the pageant ought to be more about people who did something for the county.”

It had taken months of discussion to get the pageant into even rough shape—the last thing Duane wanted was for it to unravel before they could even begin rehearsals.

“I just want it to be enough of a pageant that people will enjoy seeing it,” Duane said. “I think I’ll go find out if the crappie are biting.”

Sonny gave Duane his change and turned without comment back to the TV set.

CHAPTER 24

S
HORTY HATED FISHING TRIPS
. H
E DIDN’T LIKE TO
stay in the pickup worrying that Duane might never return, nor did he like riding in boats, with water all around. He didn’t like water at all. It was hard to chase anything in it. Once he had jumped out of the boat to chase a turtle and had promptly disappeared. The turtle also disappeared. Another turtle appeared and he tried to chase that, but it, too, disappeared. Turtles kept appearing and disappearing. When he tried to bark at them he almost drowned. Then he lost sight of the boat and had to swim all the way to shore, an effort that left him prostrate with exhaustion.

When he saw that they were approaching the lake, he began to whimper unhappily. Duane hated to hear him whimper.

“The last thing I need, after a day like this, is to listen to you whine, Shorty,” he said.

In fact, the day had not been notably more stressful than most other days. Every time he thought he had at last experienced every possible variation of stress, new variations appeared to surprise him. The effect of all of them was to make
the prospect of a night on his boat, floating on the calm if smelly bosom of Lake Kickapoo, seem amazingly restful. All he would have to do was eat baloney-and-cheese sandwiches, watch the moon and occasionally put a new piece of baloney on his hook for the turtles to nibble.

The prospect lifted his spirits and he sped along through the dark mesquites, eating a sandwich he had put together with one hand under the very nose of Shorty. He gave Shorty a pickle as a consolation prize, and Shorty ate it.

The lake was low, thanks to a dry spring, and smelled muddy. A coon had cracked a mussel and was eating it on the boat dock when Duane drove down to the water. Shorty had gone to sleep and didn’t notice the coon, which ran off.

Duane took his fishing gear and little sack of groceries down to the boat, started the outboard and was soon out in the middle of the lake. The shore was rimmed with small houses, many with a vapor light stuck over the carport or dock. The lights at the far end of the lake, several miles away, seemed as remote as stars.

Duane decided that even the pretense of fishing was too much trouble. He cut the motor, ate another baloney sandwich and let the fishing go. He napped for an hour, but had a heavy dream about trying to check into a motel somewhere with Janine. The dream woke him. It seemed more restful just to lay in the boat and watch the stars.

All night he drifted on the lake, dozing now and then. Not long before dawn he heard a car, then saw it moving along the north shore of the lake, its headlights slanted across the water. The car pulled down to a dock, and the lights went out. Duane decided it was probably just teenagers looking for a place to do what he and Suzie Nolan had been about to do. If it had been burglars waiting to break into one of the lake houses, they wouldn’t have waited until almost daylight.

He lay back in the boat and watched the gray light spread over the water. The sky was absolutely clear, and soon the horizon turned a fiery gold, as if a forge stood just beyond the hills.

Duane was making himself a sandwich when he heard a soft sound in the water, a little splashing. He looked around, thinking
the fish might be jumping, and saw a woman swimming right toward the boat. A Martian wouldn’t have startled him more. The woman was a powerful swimmer. She wore goggles and a swimming cap and evidently hadn’t noticed the boat. She was swimming right across the lake, which at that point was not quite half a mile wide.

Duane decided it must be some girl from Wichita, training for a swim team or something. When it seemed as if she would swim right into the boat, he started to call out, but then saw that she would miss it by five or six feet. He said nothing.

Just as the swimmer passed across the front of the boat, she saw it or sensed it and stopped swimming. Probably she was as startled as he was.

“Howdy,” Duane said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“I’m not scared,” the woman said. “I guess I just assumed I had this lake to myself.”

She lifted her goggles and Duane saw that it was Jacy. To the north, a black Mercedes, the one that had passed him at the stoplight, was parked at the dock below the old Farrow lake house, unused, so far as he knew, since the death of Jacy’s parents, Lois and Gene.

The boat had drifted toward her. She stroked once and caught the side.

“Don’t I know you from somewhere?” she asked, looking at him closely.