Texasville (51 page)

“Let’s eat, I’m starving,” Jacy said.

“Eye shadow can cause brain tumors,” Minerva pointed out.

“Bullshit,” Jacy said.

“I guess Duane enjoys sulking around by himself,” Karla said. “I don’t think he’s very glad to see us.”

She stood up and began doing little dance steps around the bedroom, humming to herself.

“Let him alone, he’s still sensitive because of the hard time I gave him,” Jacy said. She picked up Barbette and left the room. Minerva left too. Little Mike grabbed the newspaper and ran over and hit the stuffed dog with it.

“What did happen at the dance?” Duane asked.

He was very glad to have them back—Karla, especially. The sound of her voice, familiar, energetic, uncompromising, made him feel that living another day might be interesting.

“Jacy danced all night with Dickie and I made do with whatever drunken slobs I could get,” Karla said. She had stripped off her T-shirt and was riffling rapidly through the hundreds that hung in her walk-in closet.

“I gotta get me some more Elvis T-shirts,” she said. “That one’s about faded out.”

“I’ve about faded out too,” Duane said, hoping for sympathy.

“Oh, you always liked to stay home and hide from the world, Duane,” Karla said. “You’d have been a recluse long ago if it hadn’t been for me.”

She took a plain black T-shirt out of the closet and put it on.

“Aren’t you ever going to wear any of the T-shirts with words on them again?” he asked.

“Not until I stop being depressed,
if
I stop being depressed,” Karla said.

“You don’t look depressed,” Duane said.

“Maybe you don’t know me very well anymore,” Karla said. “Sometimes husbands and wives just grow apart.”

She danced out of the bedroom but immediately popped back in.

“If you want any huevos rancheros you better shake a leg,” she said. “I brought a few people home so the house wouldn’t seem so gloomy.”

“Like who, for example?” he asked.

“Oh, just people who didn’t want the dance to be over,” Karla said. “Bobby Lee, for one.”

“I could have guessed Bobby Lee,” Duane said. “He’s never wanted any dance to be over.”

Karla sat down on the bed.

“I could have probably married Bobby Lee,” she remarked.

“Every woman he’s ever met can say that,” Duane said.

“I know, but it’s interesting to think about what your life would have been like if you’d married another person instead of the one you did marry,” Karla said. “Don’t you ever wonder what your life would have been like if you’d married Jacy?”

“It would have been about the same, except for the month or two before we got divorced,” Duane said. “Then I would have married you and we’d have still ended up sitting on this bed wondering what to do next.”

“Let’s sell the house,” Karla said. “We don’t really need this
two-million-dollar son-of-a-bitch. Do you think there’s anyone around still rich enough to buy it?”

“Some lawyers, maybe,” Duane said. “Bankruptcy lawyers. If they’re not rich enough now, they soon will be.”

He suddenly remembered his debt. It seemed to him a big note was due. Maybe it had even been due yesterday. For at least a year he had thought about the debt several times a day, every day. Nothing had been able to distract him from it until the past few days. But in the past few days he had almost forgotten about it. The debt—the only thing in his life that had seemed crucial—had abruptly stopped seeming crucial.

“I forgot how in debt we are,” he said, surprised that he had been able to forget the one thing that had dominated his thinking for a year.

“Maybe it’s because you’re falling in love with Jacy,” Karla suggested. “Love’s the one thing that’ll take money troubles off your mind.”

“I’m not falling in love with her,” Duane said.

“She don’t think so either, but I’m the one who’s lived with you twenty-two years,” Karla said. “I know better. You do too. You’re just too scared to admit it.”

Duane thought it might be true that Jacy had helped distract him from the debt. Suzie Nolan had helped distract him too. But a capacity to be distracted was not quite the same as falling in love.

“I stop myself from falling in love before I start,” he said. “One minute I wish I could fall in love and the next minute I’m glad I don’t have to. I get scared.”

Karla was looking at him thoughtfully.

“I’m too middle-aged to be in love,” Duane said. “I’m lucky I have you to keep me moving.”

Karla grinned. “You hit that one on the button,” she said. “You’re real lucky you have me to keep you moving.”

“Only now you’re keeping Jacy moving,” he said. “You’ve left me to grind to a halt.”

“That’s right,” Karla said. She got up and slid open the big sliding glass doors. Duane looked out and saw a surprising sight. Toots Burns, the sheriff, was on the deck trying to boogie with his bride, the teenage runaway.

The phone rang and Karla picked it up.

“Hi, Ruth,” she said.

Duane got up and started for the bathroom. Before he got there he heard Karla say, “Uh-oh.”

She motioned him to her side. Duane could tell from the alarm on her face that something bad had happened.

“Okay,” Karla said. “Let’s look on the bright side. At least the little girls weren’t hurt. We’ll come right on in.”

She hung up, looking older and more tired than she had only moments earlier.

“What’d Dickie do now?” he asked.

“It wasn’t Dickie, it was Sonny,” Karla said. “He just drove his car right through the front wall of the Stauffers’ house.”

CHAPTER 76

“I
HAD TWO HUSBANDS WHO WERE CRAZY,” JACY
said, on the ride into town. “I didn’t want to admit that they were crazy and neither did they. We kept changing shrinks and trying to pretend they were just temporarily a little abnormal. Big mistake. I spent about twelve years being worried every minute. I lied to my kids, trying to come up with normal explanations for the things their fathers did.”

“What kinds of things did they do?” Karla asked.

Jacy shrugged. “Self-destructive things,” she said. “Sometimes very inventive, but always self-destructive. I used to hope that I’d just meet one man in my life who wasn’t out to do himself in.”

“Maybe Sonny was just tired from dancing all night,” Duane said.

“He didn’t dance all night,” Karla said. “I don’t think he danced at all.”

“Maybe he was drunk,” Duane said. “His hand could have slipped off the wheel.”

“He’s crazy,” Jacy said. “You better just face it. His timing gear’s broken, or something. He thinks it’s 1954.”

The house Sonny crashed into had once been Ruth Popper’s house. She had lived in it for over fifteen years with her husband, the late coach. In those years the house—an ordinary small frame house—had had a carport at the back, opening into the kitchen.

But the Stauffers, who bought the house from Ruth, had a growing family. When their last girl was born they decided they needed extra rooms worse than they needed a carport. They built two small rooms in the area where the carport had once been.

It was one of those rooms that Sonny had driven into. Fortunately both little girls had been outside when Sonny’s car hit the house.

“Sonny won’t look at me,” Jacy said. “I noticed that the first time I went into that depressing little store to buy magazines. He doesn’t really look at me.”

“He’s shy with me, too,” Karla said.

“It’s not shyness,” Jacy said. “I like shyness. In fact, as I get older, I like it more and more. With Sonny it’s something else. He wants me in the golden past, and if I hang around reading magazines too long and he has to contemplate the present me, it fucks up his fantasy or something.”

“He don’t take very good magazines, either,” Bobby Lee complained. He was riding in the back seat with Jacy; her proximity made him so nervous that he was scrunched over against one door.

“Lock that door or you’ll fall out, the way you’re scrunched up against it,” Karla said.

“Don’t pick on him,” Duane said. Bobby Lee looked fragile. One testy word from Karla might send him plummeting into depression.

“Why’s he scrunched up against the door like that?” Karla asked.

“Because he’s a rabbit,” Jacy said.

Bobby Lee accepted that description without protest.

“Jacy says worse things to him than I do,” Karla said.

“I think the town should raise taxes,” Bobby Lee said.

“Why?” Duane asked.

“They need to build a couple more quiet rooms onto the
hospital,” Bobby Lee said. “Lester hogs that one they got. Now Sonny needs one and I might need one any day.”

“You’re a working man,” Duane reminded him. “You can’t afford to sit around in a quiet room having nervous breakdowns.”

Jacy and Karla laughed.

“What’s funny about me having a nervous breakdown?” Bobby Lee asked.

“It’s just a funny thought,” Karla said.

“This is a democracy, I can have one if I want to,” Bobby Lee said. “If I do it’ll be because mean women drove me to it.”

Duane felt his spirits lift a little. It was pleasant to be riding around in the morning with Karla and Jacy, idly picking on Bobby Lee. The women seemed to be in a good mood too, and Bobby Lee had not yet plummeted into depression, although he continued to scrunch against the door.

The only threat to rising spirits was having to actually go see Sonny. In no time they were in town. Duane exchanged glances with the women. He wondered if they were thinking what he was thinking, which was that it would be nice to postpone actually seeing Sonny. It was on the tip of his tongue to ask them, but he didn’t.

“Let’s don’t go to the hospital yet,” Karla said.

“Why not?” Duane asked.

“Duane, you don’t want to either,” Karla said. “Let’s just go see how much damage he did to the house.”

The house proved to be a sobering sight. A crowd of onlookers, most of them dressed in pioneer garb, stood in the street, evidently sobered by it too. No one was saying much.

Sonny’s car was firmly embedded in one of the new rooms that had been built where the carport once stood. The two little girls who ordinarily lived in the rooms were cheerfully giving lemonade to the hung-over celebrants in pioneer clothes who had come to see the damage.

The parents, Ed and Josie Stauffer, who ran the hardware store, were far less cheerful. They were too uncheerful even to stand on their feet. Both sat glumly in lawn chairs.

“How’s it look from the inside?” Duane asked.

“It looks like something you don’t even want to think about,” Josie Stauffer said. “Go see for yourself.”

Just as Duane went inside, Shiny Miller roared up in his huge tow truck. Shiny specialized in towing trucks, buses or other large vehicles. He rarely bothered with cars, but had apparently decided to make an exception for one embedded in a house.

Bobby Lee gingerly followed Duane inside.

Sonny’s car almost filled the little girl’s bedroom. The bed was crushed under its front wheels. A shelf of stuffed animals had fallen through the car window into the front seat. The car was slightly longer than the room. Its front bumper had gone through the north wall.

“It takes a lot of luck to survive around here,” Bobby Lee said.

“A lot of luck,” Duane said.

“Do you think he thought he was just driving up to see Ruth, back when there was a carport here?” Bobby Lee asked.

“I have no idea what he thought,” Duane said.

Suddenly there was the roar of a heavy engine, and the whole house began to shake.

“Uh-oh,” Duane said. “Go stop Shiny. He’s pulling the house off the foundation.”

Before Bobby Lee could move, the refrigerator in the kitchen crashed over, right in front of him.

“Oh, shit!” he said.

As he was crawling over the refrigerator the cabinet doors swung open and all the glasses and plates slid out of the cabinets and began to break.

“Why doesn’t somebody tell him to stop?” Duane said.

Bobby Lee scrambled over the fallen refrigerator, Duane right behind him. Several drawers shot out of the kitchen cabinet, scattering knives and forks amid the broken crockery. A tide of canned goods shook off the pantry shelves and flowed into the kitchen. Duane turned his ankle on a rolling can of butter beans.

Fortunately it was a small house, and they were able to struggle outside. Most of the crowd, having witnessed a tumble-weed stampede and a dazzling centennial pageant in less than
twenty-four hours, were too jaded to react strongly to the sight of a small house being pulled off its foundations by a large tow truck. The Stauffers still sat in their lawn chairs, watching it all dully. Karla and Jacy were jumping up and down on the sidewalk, yelling at Shiny, but Shiny smiled down at them from his high cab as if he thought they were encouraging them to keep on trucking. The roar of his huge engine drowned out their words.

The little house had already been turned at right angles to its former position. Instead of facing the street, it now faced its neighbor’s dog kennels. It was being watched closely by two mournful bird dogs.

Sonny’s car, which was what the tow truck was actually attached to, had not budged from its position.

Duane hobbled across the lawn and managed to climb up to the level of the truck cab. Between his broken ribs and his newly turned ankle, it was all he could do.

“Stop, Shiny!” he yelled. “It’s not working!”

“I ain’t got her in grandma yet, either,” Shiny said.

“No, you’re towing the house!” Duane yelled.

Shiny stuck his head out the window and looked back down his tow cable.

“Oh, my lord!” he said, instantly slackening the cable.

The house, partially off its foundation, tipped slightly. One corner rested on the ground.

“What do you reckon I ought to do now, Duane?” Shiny asked.

Duane looked at the tipped house with Sonny’s car still firmly embedded in it. Canned goods from the pantry were rolling out the front door.

“I don’t know, Shiny,” he said. “I think if I were you I might just move to Mexico.”

CHAPTER 77

“I
WANT TO LIVE IN THE JAIL
,” S
ONNY SAID
. “I
T’S
just a block from my room, and it’s cleaner than my room. On days when I feel in control I can ask Toots to let me out.”