Texasville (19 page)

“I don’t know why I do a single thing that I do,” Suzie said, sitting up. She dried her eyes on the sheet.

“Junior could walk in and shoot us,” she added.

“No, Junior’s sleeping off a big drunk in one of my guest rooms,” Duane said.

Suzie watched him solemnly while he put his socks on. It made him feel silly. Women all seemed to feel that they needed to study him closely while he put his socks on after lovemaking—it had happened so many times that he had often resolved just to leave his socks on—after all, they were no impediment—but he always forgot.

“I have to go to Bridgeport to get the twins,” he said. “They got kicked out of church camp.”

Suzie settled back against the pillows. She had become cheerful again—watching him put on his socks seemed to
have revived her hopes for life. Her fingers drifted back to her nipples.

“I guess I’ll just have to stay here in bed and think sweet thoughts about you, Duane,” she said.

“Think a few about the centennial, too,” he said. “We got to ram that liquor provision through the City Council tonight before G.G. gets organized.”

“It’s nice to have it to look forward to that I’ll see you tonight,” Suzie said. “I’ve spent the last five years without a single thing to look forward to. Jenny’s got softball but I never was a bit good at games.”

“You’re good at some games,” Duane said.

Suzie gave him a glowing smile and idly touched herself. When he bent to kiss her goodbye she caught his hand and bit it sharply.

“Drive careful, sweetie,” she said.

CHAPTER 27

B
EFORE SETTING OFF FOR
B
RIDGEPORT
, D
UANE
stopped by his office a minute to see if any checks had drifted in.

“Yes, twenty-two thousand,” Ruth said. “That won’t hold ’em off long. When you go bankrupt, what happens to my pension?”

“I’ll dig ditches twenty-four hours a day for the rest of my life rather than see you lose a penny, Ruth,” Duane said.

Eddie Belt was in the office, high as a kite. Duane could tell he was high by the way he laughed.

“I’m glad you’re that noble,” Eddie said.

“If you fired all the drug addicts who work for you, you might not even go bankrupt,” Ruth said.

She sustained a hard line on Eddie and Bobby Lee, although both did their best to get on her good side.

Ruth had the irritated look she often got when people stood around the office. She kept both hands poised above the typewriter keys as an indication that she hoped they’d leave so she could get back to her letters.

Duane put the twenty-two-thousand-dollar check in his shirt pocket.

“If these were normal times I’d be doing all right,” he said.

“Times aren’t normal or abnormal,” Ruth said. “Times are neutral.”

“I’m neuter too,” Eddie Belt said. “It’s because I’ve went too long without sex.”

“Aren’t you still married to Jerri?” Duane asked.

“I guess so, but we wasn’t talking about slavery,” Eddie said.

“The things you joke about reveal a lot about you,” Ruth said. “Any psychiatrist will tell you that.”

“None of the motherfuckers will tell
me
that because I ain’t going near them,” Eddie Belt said. He was known for his violent mood swings, and one swung before their eyes, dropping him from manic heights to deep depression.

“He’s falling,” Ruth said. “Make him go to work, Duane.”

Duane took Eddie out in the bright sunlight, thinking that might help. Watching Eddie go through a mood swing was as unnerving as seeing someone fall out of an airplane. There was little bystanders could do to help.

Eddie stood in the sun, staring hopelessly at his feet.

“Why do you stare at your feet when you’re depressed?” Duane asked.

“When you’re depressed it don’t really matter what you stare at,” Eddie said.

“At least you’ve got a good job,” Duane said, trying to think of something cheerful to tell the man.

“Just until you go bankrupt, then I’ll probably starve,” Eddie said.

Duane left him standing in the sun. He took the check to the bank and gave it to Lester, whose hair looked as if an electric current had recently been passed through it.

“I may go back to the hospital this afternoon,” Lester said. “I’m feeling very fragile.”

“Eat a healthy lunch,” Duane suggested.

“I think the Federal investigators are coming today,” Lester said. “They may want the bank to merge with someplace like Chase Manhattan.”

“Those Federal investigators are probably in Newport
Beach, California,” Duane said, once again dispensing what he took to be a cheerful remark.

He drove to the Dairy Queen, thinking to get himself a milk shake for the road, and happened to stop in the drive-in line behind Jenny Marlow, who immediately got out of her car and came back to his, licking an ice-cream cone.

“Where are you on your way to?” she asked. She still wore the vivid eye shadow.

Duane wondered why it had to be Jenny ahead of him in the drive-in line.

“Bridgeport, to get the twins,” he said. Either her eyes or her eye shadow mesmerized him because he couldn’t think of a lie.

“I’ll park and go with you,” Jenny said. “I need to get out of this miserable town.”

“Bad news for you, Shorty,” Duane said, while waiting for his milk shake. Jenny was parking. Shorty looked guilty.

“It’s nothing personal,” Duane said, dragging Shorty out and depositing him in the back. Shorty looked abject and tried to express his shame by crawling under the spare tire.

Though Shorty was gone, something of him lingered in the cab—namely hair, a thin blue mantle of which covered much of the pickup seat.

“I’m so unhappy I’ll even sit in dog hairs,” Jenny said, getting in and sitting in them.

“I guess if there was an unhappiest-town-on-earth contest we could enter Thalia in it,” Duane said, in an effort to make conversation.

“We wouldn’t win,” Jenny said. “That place in Colombia that got covered by a mud slide would probably win it.”

Jenny stuck her hand out the window and let the air slip through her fingers. She didn’t look at all miserable. In fact, she looked perky.

“Your son’s a little stinker,” she said. “Wanta hear how he seduced me and ruined my life?”

“I don’t know if I do,” Duane admitted. “I’ve got a lot of bad news today already.”

“A little more won’t hurt you,” Jenny said.

“I think one straw has been known to break a camel’s back,” Duane remarked.

Jenny let her hand trail out the window for several miles. She was smiling mysteriously, perhaps at the memory of her own ruin.

“You certainly hit the nail on the head when you named that kid Dickie,” Jenny said. “He just walked up to me one night after a ball game and stuck my hand in his pocket. Did you know he cuts the bottoms out of his pockets so he can play with himself?”

“Yes,” Duane admitted. That peculiarity of Dickie’s was known to everyone in the family. Minerva commented on it often, though she pretended to be mystified as to its purpose.

A preference for pocketless Levi’s had also caused Dickie to lose roughly a hundred sets of car keys during his adolescence. Though he liked to be able to reach in and grasp himself he was always forgetting that pocketless pants had less convenient aspects.

“He just stuck my hand right in his pocket,” Jenny said. “It was like holding a hot little piece of pipe.”

“I don’t really want to hear this,” Duane said.

He began to wonder what the twins would think of him showing up at their camp with Jenny, and what Karla would think about it once it was reported to her. He also wondered what they would all talk about on the ride home.

It seemed to him that he was hearing talk he should not be having to hear from the lips of respectable married small-town women. He decided Ruth Popper was crazy for not realizing how abnormal the times were. Ruth herself was abnormal, and it was certainly not normal for one of the best lady softball players in Texas to be talking about holding his son’s penis.

“I personally think this sexual-liberation business has gone too far,” Duane said.

“Dickie did that three or four times before I slept with him,” Jenny said. “He’d just walk up to me anywhere and stick my hand in his pocket. I finally got curious and in no time it ruined my life.”

“I doubt Lester was too happy about it, either,” Duane said. “Maybe I should have made Dickie join the army or something.”

“Lester’s naive,” Jenny said. “He’s not a quick learner. It
took him nearly ten years to find my clitoris and by then I didn’t care whether he found it or not. He’s a good father, though. Everybody has their good points, don’t they?”

“No, G.G. don’t,” Duane said. “He’s gonna make trouble over the beer.”

“I might be pregnant,” Jenny said. “On the other hand it could just be worry and stress.”

They were in the post oak country, and they passed a little roadside park. An elderly couple were eating their lunch at one of the little concrete tables, in the shade of a large post oak. An old pickup with an Airstream trailer hitched to it was parked nearby. The old couple were having a frugal repast of cheese and crackers, but they waved in a friendly way when Duane looked over. They were neatly dressed and looked cheerful. It was clear that they were enjoying their declining years, peacefully driving around America eating cheese and crackers at nice little roadside parks. Duane envied them so much that he felt, for a moment, that he might cry. It seemed likely that he himself would have to spend his declining years trying to locate all the grandchildren that his offspring had strewn around the country, one of whom might even be growing in the belly of the woman who sat beside him.

For all he knew, his declining years had already started, too.

“Would it be Dickie’s or Lester’s?” he asked, remembering that Lester had said he and Jenny never made love.

“Oh, Dickie’s,” Jenny said. “I told Lester I couldn’t be his outlet anymore. He is a good father, though.

“I don’t think he even has an outlet,” she added, a few minutes later. “Sometimes I feel guilty but mostly I feel it’s every person for themselves. Do you know what I mean?”

“Yep, I sure do,” Duane said.

CHAPTER 28

T
HE CHURCH CAMP WAS SITUATED ON THE WEST
side of a large brown lake not unlike the one where earlier that day Jacy Farrow had swum past his boat.

Riding for an hour and a half with Jenny made Duane remember Jacy with growing fondness. She might be sad, but she carried her sorrow with a certain dignity, whereas Jenny’s conversation had not been rich in dignity. She made it clear that she was an unrepentant sinner who meant to go on sinning, but she still seemed to feel sorry for herself now that she was faced with the consequences of her behavior.

The twins were also unrepentant sinners. Locating them was not difficult, because they were sitting just outside the gate to the church camp with all their belongings piled around them. Two large teenage boys stood just inside the gate, apparently to make sure one of the twins didn’t try to dart back in.

Just as he was about to get out and confront his offspring, Jenny grasped his hand. She wore a subdued look, for the first time on the trip.

“I’m not as wild as I sound, Duane,” she said. “I talk a good
game but I don’t know if I play a good game. What if I’m pregnant by Dickie?”

In a matter of minutes, all the perk seemed to have drained out of her.

“I guess if you are we’ll just have to deal with it,” he said. The word “abortion” was on his lips, but he didn’t say it. Jenny looked as abject as Shorty had looked when he tried to crawl under the tire.

“Karla and I could adopt it and mix it in with Nellie’s,” he said.

“Of course I might want to raise it if it’s a boy,” Jenny said. “I’ve always wanted a little curlyheaded boy. I wonder if I’ll get kicked off the softball team.”

Duane left her to muse about her future and walked over to the twins. Julie wore a sullen expression, but Jack was smiling his brilliant smile, as if he had just been awarded a prize of some kind.

“I’m starving,” he said. “They feed you slop at this camp. Can we stop and get a hamburger?”

“You’re gonna be eating bread and water for a few months,” Duane said. “Why’d you drop that brick in the toilet?”

“Oh, that was a total accident,” Jack said. “I was trying to drop it on the little kid who was taking a shit, but he moved too quick.”

“Thank God he moved,” Duane said. “Otherwise you’d have broken a skull instead of a toilet.”

“I don’t see why you sent us here in the first place,” Julie said. “These people are all Jesus freaks.”

In fact, Duane had been against sending them to the church camp—that had been Karla’s idea.

“Your mother thought it would be a good idea for you to learn something about the Bible,” he said, smiling at the absurdity of such a wish as applied to the twins.

When Julie saw that he was not really mad, she gave him a smile of such pure beauty that his heart melted. It always melted when Julie smiled at him. He thought she was the most beautiful little girl he had ever seen, and the knowledge that she was his child made up for many of the ills of existence.

“All I did was let a little boy from Nocona take a few pictures
of my pee-pee,” Julie said, a cheerful lilt to her young voice. “What’s wrong with that?

“You and Momma go naked in the hot tub,” she added, while he was trying to decide how to answer her question.

“We got revenge for being kicked out,” Jack said, annoyed that his sister had managed to soften Duane up so easily. “You wanta know what we did?”

“You probably spent the whole night crawling through the rafters dropping bricks on people’s heads,” Duane said.

“Nope, we put LSD in the preachers’ oatmeal,” Jack said. “Now all the preachers are wandering around having hallucinations and seeing the devil and stuff.”

“Who gave you the LSD?” Duane asked.

“Nobody,” Jack said proudly. “I stole it from Dickie.”

“Are you and Mrs. Marlow going to get married?” Julie asked.