Texasville (20 page)

“Of course not,” Duane said. “She just felt like taking a little ride.

“We’re just friends,” he added, but he could tell from the look the twins exchanged that neither of them believed him.

“You oughta drive up and see the preachers,” Jack said. “It’s real funny. Some of them are rolling around on the ground.”

“It’s because we started laughing that they stuck us out in the road,” Julie said. “I don’t think that’s very nice. Some hairy old man could come along and try to molest us.”

“You’ve got sex on the brain,” Jack said. “You think everybody in the world wants to molest you.”

“I wish somebody would molest you,” Julie said. “I wish they’d beat you black and blue till you vomit.”

“Let’s go home,” Duane said. “Your mother might want to say a few words to you.”

“I wanta ride in the back with Shorty,” Julie said.

“Me too,” Jack said.

“It’s a long way home,” Duane said. “You’ll get dust in your eyes.”

“I don’t care,” Julie said. “It’s better than having to ride up front with you and your girlfriend.”

“Mrs. Marlow is not my girlfriend,” Duane said, but he let them ride in the back anyway.

CHAPTER 29

L
ATER THAT AFTERNOON, WHILE THE HOUSE WAS
deserted, Duane went out by the hot tub and shot thirty or forty shots at the doghouse with his .44 Magnum. Karla, Minerva, Nellie and the kids had gone to Wichita Falls to inspect a duplex where Billie Anne and Dickie hoped to start their married life.

Earlier in the day Karla tried to persuade the twins that their behavior at the church camp had been disgraceful, but the twins flatly refused to buy her line of reasoning.

“I think it’s a disgrace that our own parents try to get rid of us by sending us to a dumb camp full of Jesus freaks,” Julie said.

“We’re gonna run off for a few days anyway,” Jack informed his mother. “How would you like it if we became child prostitutes?”

“You don’t even know what a child prostitute does,” Karla said. “At least you better not know, if you happen to know what’s good for you.”

Duane had once seen a television program about Zen. He
often remembered the program when he was shooting at the doghouse. What seemed impressive about Zen was the level of concentration the Zen masters were able to command. This remarkable concentration enabled them to see things that a normal eye, linked to a normal brain, could not see: the flight of bullets, for example.

Since no one was around to make him feel silly, Duane tried to attain the concentration of a Zen master and follow the flight of the bullets he was shooting. The doghouse was only fifty feet away, so he had to watch close. Once or twice he thought he glimpsed a bullet, just as it was about to hit the log he was aiming at.

The big gun made his hand sore, but it was worth it to try and concentrate, unobserved. He didn’t know much about Eastern religions, but he knew that raising his powers of concentration would have many advantages. If he had started concentrating sooner he probably wouldn’t be in half the trouble, financial or otherwise, that he was in. Better concentration would have enabled him to avoid such mistakes as borrowing millions of dollars just because the price of oil happened to be rising when the dollars were offered to him.

Another common mistake a little increased concentration might help him avoid was his habit of sleeping with women he had no business sleeping with, just because they happened to lie in his path.

When he got tired of shooting he put the gun away and drove to Janine’s house. He was not eager to see her, but he didn’t want to sit through a whole City Council meeting thinking guilty thoughts about Janine in her negligee. He knew he was going to have to break up with her, and he rehearsed several speeches as he drove into town.

The speeches were aimed at casting both of them in a noble light. He hoped to convince her that breaking up would only be the civic-minded thing to do. Having worked for the county all her adult life, Janine considered herself nothing if not civic-minded.

Still, Duane doubted that the argument would work, and if it didn’t he was prepared to lie and tell her that the doctors had told him he would probably have a heart attack if he didn’t
lead a less stressful life. He had not actually been to a doctor in something like fifteen years, but people did often have heart attacks and die.

To his surprise, Janine was not home. The only sign of her was a can of sauerkraut which was sitting, unopened, by a saucepan on the stove. Evidently she had been planning to have sauerkraut for supper.

Her absence was a little annoying. He felt he had worked up enough resolution to break with her, and now it would only go to waste.

Also, it left him with nothing to do for forty-five minutes, the time he had allotted for presenting his arguments and hearing Janine’s responses, which would undoubtedly be heated. Janine was not likely to let him, or anyone else, escape unscathed.

The fact that she wasn’t home left him feeling sort of silly. He drove over to his office to see if Ruth had left any important messages, and was startled to see Janine on the tennis courts playing tennis with Lester Marlow.

Like virtually everyone else in town, Janine had taken a few tennis lessons during the height of the boom. Lester had taken a few, too, but neither could be said to have mastered the game. Lester had never been able to play anything, while Janine had spent most of her life being the kind of girl who could never get anyone to play anything with her, or at least nothing except sex.

Duane recognized that her inability to get anyone to play anything with her had had something to do with his decision to play at romance with her. He had never been able to ignore certain forms of hopelessness—and despite a proud disposition and quite a few boyfriends Janine had seemed quietly hopeless.

The sight of her on the tennis court amazed him, for she seemed far from hopeless there. She was wearing a saucy new tennis outfit that he had not even known she owned, and was chewing gum and whacking balls merrily over Lester’s head as if she were playing softball and scoring hits.

Lester, looking livelier than he had looked in months, cheerfully retrieved them from the dusty tumble weeds.

Duane was so surprised that he just waved and drove on by. The messages could wait for morning.

He drove to the Dairy Queen only to be smacked in the face by an even greater surprise: Jacy’s black Mercedes was parked right between Karla’s white BMW and Dickie’s new Super-jeep. Through the big window of the DQ he could see the unaccustomed sight of his whole family eating together in apparent harmony.

More startling still, Jacy sat beside Karla, holding little Barbette in her lap. Jacy and Karla seemed to be chatting happily.

The sight of them all sitting together was such a shock that it made Duane feel lonely and strange. He would have liked to just drive past and wave, as he had at the tennis court, but he had parked and got out, visible to all. Shorty had his paws on the dashboard and was looking at the strange sight. Jack was giving Shorty the finger. Then he held up a nacho, dripping with cheese and jalapeño, to induce Shorty to try and jump through the windshield. Shorty had never quite grasped the principles of glass, and Jack was often able to tempt him to race into glass doors and bonk himself.

Duane walked on in, stopping at the counter long enough to order himself a cheeseburger. Jacy and Karla paid his arrival no mind—they seemed absorbed in their conversation. In fact, no one paid his arrival any mind except Nellie, who smiled at him charmingly, as Julie had that morning.

Nellie wore a white dress and looked absolutely beautiful, and nice as well. It interested Duane that at any given moment each of his children was capable of looking like the nicest kid on earth, as well as the best-looking. Ten minutes later the same child might seem a monster of self-indulgence. Nellie was momentarily at her best. She was feeding Little Mike a banana split as quietly and efficiently as any young mother could.

Dickie and Billie Anne were necking and giggling. To amuse themselves they were passing jalapeños from mouth to mouth on their tongues. The twins were slurping malts and foraging at will from a heap of cheeseburgers, French fries, nachos, steak fingers, tacos and other delicacies. Jack occasionally pelted Little Mike with pieces of taco shell.

It was the slack time between lunch and dinner, and they had the DQ to themselves, except for John Cecil, who sat in a back booth. Fired from his teaching position years before for alleged homosexuality, John had stubbornly refused to leave town. Instead he bought one of the town’s two grocery stores, hung on and eventually prospered. He kept a tidy store, extended indefinite credit to those down on their luck, and finally came to be well liked in the town. A believer in exercise, he ran every day, and had done so long before the craze struck. Duane would sometimes see him cruising Ohio Street, Wichita Falls’s grim little two-block tenderloin. He looked very lonely at such times, peering in the bars, hoping to meet an equally lonely recruit from the nearby air base.

The staff of the Dairy Queen, having done its duty, peeked out at Jacy from behind stacks of malt cups. They stared at her avidly—a legend who had suddenly walked into their midst.

She had combed out her long hair—longer but no blonder than the hair Duane remembered from high school. She wore a T-shirt and running shorts. He saw her lay her hand on Karla’s arm while making a point. Karla laughed and Jacy laughed, too, and they both looked at him.

He got a chair from one of the empty tables and carried it over. Jacy gave Barbette several sucking kisses on the neck, and Barbette chortled.

“I just stole all your sweetest sugar, Grandpa,” Jacy said, when Duane sat down.

Duane held out a finger to Barbette, who chortled some more but ignored the finger.

“It’s mighty good sugar,” he said.

“Guess what I did, Duane,” Karla said. It seemed to him she had a gloating look in her eye.

“Every time I’ve guessed in my whole life I’ve been wrong,” Duane said.

“See?” Karla said to Jacy. “He’s got that dour personality, just like you said. Duane just plods along. He’s real reluctant to take a chance.”

Minerva stopped eating a T-bone steak long enough to come to his defense.

“A man that ends up with a bunch like this has taken a chance or two,” she said.

“Good point,” Jacy said, surveying the table. She held Barbette in her lap and ate a bite or two of her taco salad.

“He takes them, but he don’t notice that he’s taking them, or he wouldn’t, if he could help it,” Karla said.

“Momma bought us a house,” Dickie said. He and Billie Anne had stopped necking.

“Yeah, I went on and bought that duplex,” Karla said. “Dickie and Billie Anne can move in one side, and when Joe and Nellie get married they can move in the other. It’ll save a lot on rent.”

“How much did this money-saving duplex cost?” Duane asked.

“Just sixty thousand,” Karla said.

“Momma’s real good at finding bargains,” Dickie said.

“I know, I just wish I was as good at finding money,” Duane said. He felt very watched. Once he glanced at Jacy and saw that she was watching him. Her look was not unfriendly, nor was it amused. It was matter-of-fact. Meanwhile, Karla was watching him look at Jacy and she did seem to be amused. He wondered how the two of them had met but didn’t feel he should ask.

He found it rather difficult to adjust to the fact that he was sitting by Jacy after so many years. She wore no makeup and seemed indifferent to her looks, a thing he wouldn’t have thought possible in her high school years.

“Is it fun to be a movie star?” Julie asked.

“Not much,” Jacy said. “Not unless you’re more of one than was.

“I think I’ll be one,” Jack said. “I don’t want to be an oil millionaire.”

“All you kids could be movie stars,” Jacy said. “I’ve never seen a better-looking bunch of kids, and I have beautiful kids myself.”

“You should bring your girls home sometime,” Karla said. “They could stay at our house if they get on your nerves.”

Jacy looked at Duane again in the same matter-of-fact way.

“It’s the other way around,” she said. “I get on
their
nerves.”

She picked up a paper napkin and wiped her mouth. “They’re very critical, my girls,” she said.

“How many girls do you have?” Julie asked. It was clear that Jacy intrigued her.

“Two,” Jacy said. “One your age and one Nellie’s age.”

“Girls can be real picky,” Karla said. “I don’t think they understand what their mothers go through.”

“I’m not picky,” Julie said.

Nellie gave them all a radiant smile. When she entered her nice phase she was so beautiful that it caused men to choke up. Duane only had to look at her, as she was at that moment, to understand why men fell in love with her on sight and proposed within fifteen minutes.

She had always been an affectionate girl, too. He remembered how wonderful it had been to have her run out of the house and jump in his arms and kiss him when she had been a little girl. She would sit in their backyard on a rocking horse and wait for him to spray her with a hose on hot days, shivering when the cold water hit her. When Karla washed Nellie’s hair she would wrap the child in one of her big terry-cloth bathrobes and plop her, a tiny, wet-haired thing, in Duane’s lap. Nellie would sit, quiet as a bird, swaddled in the robe. Duane could still remember how her hair smelled when it was wet. She had seemed the very definition of innocence then, and at times she still seemed so. It was just that she had unexpectedly acquired the habit of sleeping with all the men who proposed after fifteen minutes, and of marrying a fair percentage of them.

“My girls are such little Europeans,” Jacy said. “I don’t know what they’d think of Thalia. I can barely get them to go to New York.”

Barbette looked at Jacy and made little welcoming sounds. She wanted Jacy to steal more sugar. Jacy held her high above her head and wiggled her around, lowering her slowly until she could cover her neck with kisses. Barbette laughed happily.