Texasville (50 page)

“Okay,” Duane said.

“Can’t you do a little better than okay?” she asked. “I don’t guess I know what you would consider better,” he said.

“Conversation, for starters,” Jacy said, with some vehemence. “I get tired of starting every one we have. You start one for a change. When I had lovers I usually had to tell them every single thing I wanted done. Having to beg men to talk is just about as depressing, let me tell you.”

“I guess I get scared I’ll say something wrong,” Duane said.

“You talk to every other woman within a fifty-mile radius,” Jacy said. “But you won’t talk to me because you’re afraid you’ll say something wrong. What if you did say something wrong? Do you think I’d banish you forever for some small conversational lapse?”

“I guess I must think that,” Duane said.

Jacy chuckled.

“You sure do a lot of guessing,” she said. “But not very bold guessing. At least not where I’m concerned. Why are you so timid with me, Duane?”

“I’m scared in some way,” he said. “I don’t know why, exactly.”

“And you’re not scared of Karla in the same way.”

“Oh, I’m plenty scared of Karla,” Duane said.

“But not scared in exactly the way you are with me,” Jacy said.

“Karla and I have survived a lot of mistakes,” he said. “I imagine we’ll survive a lot more.”

“Uh-huh, and you could probably even survive a few with me,” Jacy said. “You
have
survived a few with me, in fact.”

Duane felt painfully confused. When he wasn’t with Jacy he sometimes imagined approaching her sexually, but in her company he immediately knew he wouldn’t—couldn’t. The timidity she complained of overcame him, blocking his desire.

And yet the moment she left him he felt filled with yearning and troubled by a sense that he had mishandled an opportunity, missing a chance to draw close to the woman he had once supposed he would spend his life being close to.

Now the timidity seemed to be increasing. His silly injury had presented him with a fine chance to talk to her, but he wasn’t talking. He was just sort of mumbling. Even his desire to talk seemed to be blocked.

“I don’t think my ribs need bandaging all that bad,” he said, feeling at a loss. “Maybe we should just go on back to the pageant.”

Jacy had been looking rather cheerful. The minute he spoke her face fell.

“Okay,” she said, in a subdued voice.

Duane felt terrible. He knew he was doing virtually everything wrong.

“Why’d you take my family away?” he asked—it was the one thing he could think of to ask.

“They’re fearless,” Jacy said. “I need that. I thought some of it must have come from you, but now I don’t know. Maybe it all came from Karla. You’re sure not fearless. You’re afraid to sit here with me. You’re scared to death you might feel something you can’t control.”

She stood up, but instead of walking out of the hospital she went down the hall and turned a corner. Duane assumed she might have needed to use the bathroom, but several minutes passed and she didn’t reappear.

Then the doctor popped in, dressed in a black frock coat, a stovepipe hat and fake side whiskers.

“Let’s hurry and get you taped up,” he said. “I have to get back in time for the doughboy skit.”

Duane followed the doctor into the emergency room to be taped. There was still no sign of Jacy.

“The cowboys and Indians had a good scuffle,” the doctor said. “The Alamo skit got pretty rough too. Some of the defenders didn’t want to lie down and play dead. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get an injury or two before all this is over.”

He rushed off the second he finished the taping. Duane walked all through the empty hospital, but didn’t find Jacy.

Stepping outside, he saw Shorty, who had ridden to the emergency room with them. Shorty was wiggling around on his back in the middle of the lawn, trying to bite his tail.

Jacy sat on the hood of the Mercedes, wrapped in a towel.

“I thought I’d lost you,” Duane said.

“As you once pointed out, you never had me,” she said.

“I meant just now,” he said.

Jacy looked at him coldly.

“I thought maybe my sweat was repelling you, so I took a shower,” she said. “You might be one of those men who gag if they have to smell a sweaty armpit or a bloody cunt.”

“Nope,” Duane said. “I was gagging on myself.”

Jacy held the towel around her with one hand and offered him the other, so he could help her off the car. She walked around and opened the car door. The light from the car’s interior shone on her white legs.

“Why aren’t you in the market for love?” he asked.

“Because of my child,” Jacy said, so sharply that Shorty immediately stopped wiggling on the lawn. He jumped to his feet and barked, as if he thought an invader might be attacking. Then he began to circle the hospital yard, his tail in the air.

“Your dead child?” Duane asked.

“His name was Benny,” Jacy said. “I’m glad you at least acknowledged that I have a dead child. Your wife confronted that issue about two minutes after I met her. It took you several months but at last you’ve done it. Not great timing, though, because I have to go sing that hymn and I can’t sing when I’m sad.”

It was the second time that evening that the problem of sadness and singing had come up.

“Would you like me to drive?” he asked.

Jacy stood in silence for a moment, her face hidden in darkness, her legs white in the light. Her legs looked too thin. The sight of them made Duane suddenly sad.

Then she got in the car and started it. She looked out at him, her pale face framed in the car window. Her look was one of deep disappointment. Duane felt that he had either done something very wrong or had failed to do the slightest thing right. He had not given her something that she needed. He wanted to stop her from leaving, afraid that if he didn’t he would be haunted by her disappointed look the rest of his life.

But he couldn’t think of what to say.

Jacy backed the car in a half circle on the gravel and drove away. Shorty chased the car a few steps, gave up, and came back to Duane.

“I’m not doing too well tonight, Shorty,” Duane said.

Shorty, thinking he had been complimented, began to try and climb his master’s leg.

CHAPTER 74

D
UANE THOUGHT HE COULD PROBABLY CATCH A
ride back to the pageant, but apparently all the cars in town were already there. Ordinarily he would have felt silly walking through town in a bathing suit with a floppy fig leaf sewn to it, but he was so depressed at having disappointed Jacy that he gave his appearance no thought.

Passing the courthouse, he noticed Billie Anne and Junior. They sat on their mattress, smoking marijuana. The band that had been hired to play for the street dances was warming up. Over at the little carnival, a young woman was spinning sticks of cotton candy off a cotton-candy machine. A thin old man with tattoos on both arms tested the bumper cars.

“We’re telling one another the story of our lives,” Billie Anne said, as Duane walked past. “I’m just up to the fifth grade.”

“Are you two still fasting?” he asked.

“No, we couldn’t resist the barbecue,” Junior said. “We may start over tomorrow.”

Duane stopped at the Kwik-Sack and got himself beer on
credit. Genevieve was watching a Mary Tyler Moore rerun on the tiny TV behind the counter.

“Didn’t you want to see the pageant?” he asked.

“Why? Life in this place has all been a pageant,” Genevieve said.

Duane walked slowly down the street toward the arena, sipping his beer. Constant gunfire came over the loudspeaker—it was probably the Iwo Jima skit, he decided. That one had been hard to cast because no one in the county wanted to be Japs. Finally some junior high girls had been talked into it.

Cars and pickups were parked everywhere, along the road, on lawns, in alleys. Hundreds filled the parking lot and slopped over onto the adjacent baseball diamond. Duane had been half drunk when he parked his pickup, and was not sure he could even find it. He did come upon the truck that carried his pulling machine—the one Turkey Clay drove—and stopped to take a leak behind it.

While he was readjusting his fig leaf he heard Karla’s voice over the loudspeaker. She had been chosen to read the names of the county’s dead, from various wars. Twenty-six local boys had died in World War I, more than forty in World War II. Three had been killed in Korea, and thirteen in Viet Nam. Karla read the names carefully, pausing between each one.

Duane leaned against the fender of a parked Oldsmobile, listening. Five of the boys lost in Viet Nam had roughnecked for him before they were drafted. He remembered each of them well.

A gawky kid named Charlie Sears had worked hard, but was hopeless with wrenches. One hot summer night he had tried four different wrenches on a recalcitrant nut, and all had slipped. Duane finally loosened the nut himself.

“I hope I get the hang of these wrenches before I die,” Charlie Sears said, embarrassed by his own ineptitude.

Duane had forgotten the remark, but when Karla said “Charles Eugene Sears, Thalia,” he remembered it. Charlie’s people had been oilfied trash, but they didn’t buy bumper stickers saying they were proud of it. None of them could have imagined any other existence.

Charlie had always had a shock of long, dirty hair hanging
out from under his dozer cap. Duane had tried to keep him off the rig floor for fear his hair might somehow get caught in the pipestem. Despite his awkwardness, he had been a popular hand, often taking shifts for older roughnecks if they turned up too drunk to work.

Charlie Sears’s name was the last Karla read. Duane noticed Shorty standing quizzically by a pickup, and realized the pickup was his. He limped over, let Shorty in, and climbed in himself. He felt like going home.

Before he started the pickup, Jacy began the closing hymn. Her rich voice floated out over the dark town. When he heard it, Shorty put his paws on the dashboard and looked around alertly, hoping to spot Jacy.

“Like the faint dawn of the morning,

Like the sweet freshness of dew …”

If sadness had threatened Jacy’s singing voice, she had overcome it. Her voice poured out, over the crowd, the cars, the town, the shadowed plain.

The beauty of her voice gave Duane a feeling of great pride, but then he remembered her hurt look and the proud feeling gave way to one of deep forlornness.

He started the pickup and began to weave his way through the lines of parked cars. He didn’t want to stay for the street dancing, the carnival, any of it. He wanted to leave.

As he passed the entrance to the arena, he caught a glimpse of Jacy, standing on the dusty turf in a white dress, her hands on a microphone. A row of little junior high girls dressed as Japanese soldiers knelt on the goal line, listening to her sing.

Duane drove slowly out of town, Jacy’s voice fading behind him:

“Hope is an action to keep us …”

He was almost two miles out before the hymn ended. The dust his wheels threw up was as white as the Milky Way. To the west, heat lightning flickered, licking the horizon with its white snake’s tongue. He bumped over his cattle guard and parked beneath the twins’ basketball goal.

Looking toward town, he could see the circle of lights above the arena, and the tiny colored arc of the Ferris wheel. Shorty whined to be let out. When the door was opened he scrambled across Duane’s lap and trotted off on a tour of inspection.

Duane couldn’t stop thinking of Charlie Sears. The boy had never been to a dentist. One of his molars had come in crooked—it bulged over the gum line. His upper lip didn’t quite cover it. Except for the one bulging tooth, he was a good-looking boy, with a lazy, self-mocking grin. Duane had offered to advance him the money to get his teeth fixed, but Charlie never took him up on the offer, nor had he ever got the hang of wrenches, before he died.

CHAPTER 75

D
UANE AWOKE TO A RAIN OF SOFT BLOWS. HE
opened his eyes and discovered that his family had returned. The blows were the work of Little Mike, who was hitting him in the head with a stuffed dog.

“That’s the stuff,” Karla said. “Wake up Grandpa. He’s been sleeping long enough.”

Karla sat on the edge of the bed in an Elvis T-shirt. She poured a big glob of expensive cream into one hand and rubbed it up and down her calf. Barbette lay on the bed beside Karla, sucking a pacifier and looking solemn.

“Other women’s makeup always seems more interesting,” Jacy said. She was at Karla’s big dressing table, experimenting with some of Karla’s innumerable shades of eye shadow.

Duane caught the stuffed dog and threw it across the bedroom. Little Mike looked surprised. He decided it must be a game, slid off the bed and went to retrieve the dog.

“Hello, Duane,” Karla said. “I hope you weren’t having a nice dream.”

Duane realized he was almost naked. Fortunately the bedsheet
had wadded itself more or less around his middle. Little Mike, stuffed dog in hand, climbed back on the bed and began to hit him with the dog again. Once Little Mike started a game, he was reluctant to stop. Duane threw the dog across the room again and held Little Mike by both ankles, hoping he would realize that the game was over. Little Mike began to struggle and squeal.

“Why’d you stay away from the dance, Duane?” Karla asked.

“Probably because I gave him a hard time at the hospital,” Jacy said. “He probably spent the evening feeling guilty and wishing he knew how to treat women.”

Minerva walked in and abruptly whacked Little Mike on the behind with the morning paper. He had stopped struggling and was practicing spitting off the bed.

“Them Mexican eggs are ready,” she announced.

“It’s a good thing Dickie stayed,” Jacy said. “He’s far and away the best dancer in town.”

“Yeah, but it don’t do me no good,” Karla said. “The little fucker won’t dance with his own mother.”

She had finished rubbing cream onto her calves, and wiped her hands on Duane’s stomach.

“Are you grumpy this morning, Duane?” she asked. “We thought you’d be glad to see a little life around here for a change.”