Texasville (3 page)

“I said I’d commit suicide before I’d go anywhere else with these kids,” he said.

“Duane, don’t brag,” Karla said. “You know you’re too big a sissy even to go to the hospital and get a shot.”

She noticed the little old lady, who was writhing more desperately as the ice cubes worked their way down her back.

“I hope that old lady isn’t going into convulsions,” she said.

Duane had been trying to decide where his duty lay. Should he try to help the old lady get the ice cubes out, which would practically mean undressing her? Should he grab Jack and break his neck? Should he demand that his son apologize? Jack was an ingenious liar and accepted no punishment meekly. The more blatant his crimes, the more brilliant he became in his own defense. Duane began to get a headache. He felt like strangling his son. He wondered if the stewardesses realized that his beautiful little daughter was playing with her crotch. Dallas-Fort Worth seemed very far away.

“Duane, don’t sulk, it was a real nice trip in some ways,” Karla said.

CHAPTER 3

D
UANE WAS WELL AWARE THAT HIS IGNORANCE OF
the world, and his unwillingness to go and see much of it, were shortcomings that particularly enraged Karla, though why they enraged her he had no idea, since she was every bit as ignorant of the world beyond Texas. He had been to California three times, and she had only been once. He had been to Las Vegas twice and had asked her to go both times. Both invitations had led to fits—the fit being one of Karla’s favorite forms of self-expression.

“No, thanks, the only reason you’re going is to get laid, and I’m not giving you a chance to accuse me of standing in the way of
that,”
she said.

Duane knew perfectly well she wasn’t standing in the way of it. Karla was a firm believer in sexual freedom, especially for her.

“I just thought you might like to see one of those shows,” he said.

“If I wanta see tits all I have to do is take my bra off,” Karla said.

She didn’t really even have to do that, since her daughter
Nellie’s fine young bosom was frequently on view around the house. For almost a year dinner had been eaten to the sound of Little Mike slurping at his mother. Nellie was too lazy to wean him, despite repeated entreaties from Karla, who had not cared for breast-feeding and didn’t enjoy watching it take place.

Bobby Lee, Duane’s number one tool pusher, was the only one who got much of a thrill out of watching Nellie nurse Little Mike or Barbette, the baby girl. With oil at twenty-one dollars a barrel and sinking, there wasn’t too much drilling to do. Bobby Lee had plenty of leisure to devote to watching Nellie nurse her kids. His desire was obvious, but so far Nellie had refused him—and being refused by Nellie was virtually a unique distinction.

Bobby Lee had worked for Duane for over twenty years and made it plain that he hoped to marry into the family someday, although he was already married.

“I don’t know why you’d want to, except that you never have been in your right mind,” Duane said.

He had no serious objections, though. Bobby Lee would make at least as good a son-in-law as the first three Nellie had presented them with.

Karla, however, had plenty of objections, which she aired whenever she could get Bobby Lee alone. Unbeknownst to Duane, she and Bobby Lee had had a messy one-night stand several years back. Duane had been off deer hunting. It left Karla unaffected but caused Bobby Lee to fall madly in love.

The fact that she was completely uninterested in him as a boyfriend didn’t mean—as Karla repeatedly pointed out—that she wanted him sleeping with her daughter, or daughters. Bobby Lee was a small man with mournful brown eyes. If Nellie wasn’t around, the mournful eyes would frequently linger on Julie, who was just coming into bud.

“It does look like, with all the horny women there are in this country, you could find someone not related to me, if you’d just look,” Karla told him.

“What horny women?” Bobby Lee asked. He liked to project an image of asceticism, although he could be found every night at Aunt Jimmie’s Lounge, and Aunt Jimmie’s was not exactly a monastery.

When Barbette was born, two months previously, Karla decided
she was going to have to take the weaning of Little Mike into her own hands. In his two years he had shown no interest in restraint, and if he felt his food source threatened there was no telling what he might do to his baby sister.

Karla started kidnapping him every day. She drove him around in her new BMW, plugged in via Walkman to the loudest music she could find in the hope of drowning out his screams. Little Mike threw several bottles out the window, but he eventually broke.

Duane had a deep fondness for the tiny, helpless Barbette. She fulfilled his old longing for a quiet, gentle child. He would sit with her for hours on the deck of the hot tub, shading her with a cowboy hat. Sometimes he dreamed that he and Barbette were living somewhere else—where was never quite clear, though it might have been San Marcos, where he and Karla had once contemplated moving.

His urge to protect Barbette was very strong, and his biggest worry was the twins, who pitched her around like a ball. One day they left her on a kitchen cabinet and went outside to swim. By a miracle of timing Duane came in from work just in time to keep her from rolling off. The shock flooded him with so much adrenaline that he began to tremble; it produced a rage that frightened even the twins, who put on tennis shoes and immediately ran off. They planned to hitchhike to Disneyland and get jobs as concessionaires.

Nellie and Karla, returning from a quick shopping trip to Wichita Falls, accidently intercepted the twins just before they reached the highway. They were in their bathing suits. Both claimed that Duane had threatened to kill them.

“Oh, I doubt he would have,” Karla said, not absolutely convinced. Duane did love that baby girl.

The twins were convinced, though. They didn’t want to go back home. Jack crawled through a barbed-wire fence and ran off into a pasture. Julie calmed herself by appropriating her big sister’s Walkman and listening to a little Barbara Mandrell. Little Mike, sensing an opportunity to regain a lost paradise, clawed his way under Nellie’s blouse and fastened himself blissfully to a nipple.

“Let’s go back to town and get the sheriff,” Nellie said.

“Don’t let that child nurse,” Karla said. “What about his baby sister? She might want something to eat when we get home.”

“I don’t want to go home,” Nellie said. Little Mike was draining her so fast she felt dizzy.

“Nellie, we have to go home,” Karla said. “We live there.”

Meanwhile, Jack had disappeared into the pasture.

“I want to stay with Billie Anne,” Nellie declared. Billie Anne was Dickie’s girlfriend. She worked in a savings-and-loan and had an apartment in the small community of Lakeside City.

Little Mike, not wasting a second, switched to the other breast.

Karla began to blow the horn, thinking it might make Jack come back. Instead, it caused Julie to open the door and slip out. Karla and Nellie were both too agitated to notice her departure. When they got home and discovered she wasn’t in the car, they were dumbfounded. She had been right in the car, listening to Barbara Mandrell, except now they were home and she wasn’t.

Nellie refused to get out until Karla determined whether Duane was still planning to murder his family.

“Don’t kill the motor,” she said. “I might be leaving quick.”

Duane was out by the pool, giving Barbette a bottle. His rage has passed, leaving him only mildly irritated.

“I guess you’d all go off and leave this baby to starve,” he said.

Karla quickly regained the initiative.

“Duane, the twins have run completely off because of you, and Nellie won’t even come in the house,” she said. “You’ll have to go out to the car and promise not to murder her.”

“Have I ever murdered anybody?” he asked. Giving Barbette her bottle gave him a lot of satisfaction.

“No, but you’re not usually under this much stress,” Karla said. “You could try calling that stress hot line in Fort Worth when you feel sort of pent up.”

“That stress hot line is for broke farmers,” he said. “It ain’t for destitute oil millionaires.”

It occurred to him, looking at the scrubby oil-stained acres
below the bluff, that in a sense he did live on an oil farm, one that was about farmed out.

“Duane, it’s for anybody that’s feeling terrible, like people do when they go berserk,” Karla said. “They ain’t gonna ask if you’re a farmer—they’ll just give you helpful advice, like don’t murder your children or anything.”

“That baby could have been brain-damaged for life falling off the cabinet,” Duane pointed out. “Where’s Minerva? I thought we were paying her to watch this baby.”

“I have no idea where Minerva could have got to,” Karla said. Minerva had worked for them for more than a decade without becoming any more predictable.

“If she comes back I’m going to offer to trade jobs with her,” Duane said. “She can run the oil company and I’ll watch the baby.”

Karla got a blue Magic Marker and wrote the number of the stress hot line on a piece of note paper. Then she stuck the paper onto the cabinet, right by the phone. Duane watched her with a disquieting look of amusement on his face. Karla remembered reading in
Cosmo
that people who were about to go berserk often seemed perfectly normal up until the moment when they started blasting away with a gun.

That very morning she and Duane had seen a TV report about a Midland oilman who had carbon-monoxided himself in the garage of his new mansion. He had thoughtfully turned off his brand-new security system so that if one of his kids happened to glance at a TV monitor they wouldn’t see him turning black, or whatever you did if you monoxided yourself.

“Duane, Nellie’s just sitting out there wasting gas,” Karla said. “You’re going to have to do something about the twins, too.”

Duane walked Barbette until she went to sleep, and laid her gently in her baby bed. Then he went outside and whistled at Shorty, who was in the pickup in a flash, so excited at getting to take an unexpected trip that he barked his piercing bark a few times.

On the way to town Duane called the Highway Patrol to see if the twins had been picked up. They hadn’t. He saw a dust cloud approaching and pulled well to the right. In a moment
Minerva flashed by, the back seat of her ancient Buick piled high with groceries.

Minerva had been their household help for the past ten years. Well into her eighties, she had been rich once herself. Her father made a fortune in the oil boom of the early twenties, and lost it a few years later. Minerva learned to drive in a muddy Pierce-Arrow and continued, from then on, to take her half of the road out of the middle.

This habit had resulted in five head-on collisions, all of which Minerva had come through without a scratch. As a result of these infractions Minerva spent most of her evenings at Bad Driver’s School in Wichita Falls. She was indifferent to the traffic laws, but rather enjoyed Bad Driver’s School, acquiring several boyfriends there over the years.

Most humans fantasized pleasures of one sort or another, but Minerva Hooks was different. She fantasized mortal illness. When Karla hired her she was fantasizing cancer in both lungs. Karla thought it would be nice to give the poor old soul a home during her last years. Now Minerva’s soul was ten years older and she was fantasizing a brain tumor, the lung cancer, as well as several other cancers, having miraculously gone away.

“It might have been cooking on the microwave that cured me,” Minerva theorized. “Or else it could have been watching TV. I’ve heard that TV gives off little rays that are good for curing up cancers.”

She had been the prime mover behind the purchase of the satellite dish, in fact. A poor sleeper, she often felt the need for a dose of the little rays during the night. Sometimes Duane would have to get up at three or four in the morning to go deal with a problem at one of the rigs, and would often find Minerva in the den, watching a sex show that had been relayed through the heavens from Copenhagen or somewhere.

Minerva regarded sex shows with considerable skepticism.

“Now I’ve never seen one that big and I’ve lived eighty-three years,” she said. “It’s bigger than that girl’s whole head. You think that’s done with special effects, or what, Duane?”

“I have no idea,” Duane said.

“You ain’t really interested in it anymore, are you?” Minerva asked, switching her attention to him.

“Oh, sure,” he said. “I’m interested in it.”

“No, you ain’t,” Minerva said. “You ain’t, but I am. Not this here show, particularly—I think one that big has got to be special effects. I’d rather watch them Jap wrestlers than stuff like this anytime.”

Minerva was a passionate fan of sumo wrestling and would study the cable guide for hours in the hope of locating some.

Driving through the dark toward the rig that had developed the problem, Duane felt a little aggrieved. It was getting so he couldn’t turn around without someone reminding him that he was off his feed, sexually. Karla reminded him, Janine reminded him, and now even Minerva was reminding him. His wife and his girlfriend might be expected to notice a lack of appetite, but why was it obvious to Minerva? Duane didn’t know.

Next to watching sumo wrestling, the thing Minerva liked to do best was rip into town and charge a couple of hundred dollars’ worth of groceries to Karla’s account. That was what she had just done.

Duane found both twins playing video games at Sonny Crawford’s small video arcade. It was in the rundown building that had once housed the town’s pool hall and domino parlor. Sonny had done well with the arcade for a few years, but video glut soon became as widespread as oil glut, and Sonny had been talking of closing it. He had already moved a few of the more popular games into the Kwik-Sack, his convenience store.

Over the years, Sonny had acquired four or five of the buildings around the square, including the old hotel. He only operated the hotel a few nights a year, during the opening days of quail or dove season, when it would fill up with hunters. Otherwise it stood empty and dusty. Ruth Popper had lived on the top floor for a few years, after her husband had tried unsuccessfully to kill her, but then she bought a trailer house and moved out. For most of the year Sonny was the only person in the hotel.