Texasville (56 page)

He remembered that he was already in trouble because of what he had said about Karla marrying, if he died. He was not sure why the women thought it had been such a bad thing to say.

“I was just thinking of your happiness,” he said to Karla.

Both women laughed.

He felt Jacy looking at him in the mirror again, waiting for his eyes.

CHAPTER 84

O
N HIS WAY HOME,
K
ARLA BLITHELY INFORMED HIM
that he had to get dressed up because the three of them had to judge the centennial art show.

“You have to wear a sports coat, at least, and it wouldn’t really hurt you to wear a tie,” she said.

“I could wear all the ties I own and it wouldn’t help me judge an art show,” he said. The art show was the one centennial event he thought he had no responsibility for. It had been Jenny’s idea, and Jenny, Karla and Lester were supposed to judge it.

“I know Lester’s run off but Jenny hasn’t run off,” he said. “Why can’t you three judge it?”

“We need a man on the panel to make it more balanced,” Karla said.

“Stop trying to get out of everything, Duane,” Jacy said. “It’s not going to hurt you to judge a little art show.”

“You don’t know what might hurt me,” Duane said. He felt picked on.

At home, Karla and Jacy put away huge breakfasts, stoking
their already lavish energies. Duane ate a bowl of cereal. His stomach felt nervous.

“Are you sick?” Minerva asked. She herself was fantasizing stomach cancer.

“No,” Duane said.

“You look subdued,” Minerva observed.

“I am subdued,” Duane said. “These two subdued me.”

He nodded at Karla and Jacy, who were too busy eating to pick on him, for the moment. He felt sure they would start again as soon as their meal was finished.

“He said he wanted me to marry again if he dies,” Karla informed Minerva, between bites.

Minerva shrugged. “Par for the course,” she said. “When you have stomach cancer they take out your whole stomach.”

“I’d rather they just take out your tongue,” Duane remarked.

“I take that back,” he said immediately, as silence fell around the table. “I wouldn’t want you to lose your tongue.”

“You didn’t subdue him enough,” Minerva said to Karla. “Imagine a man saying a thing like that to an eighty-six-year-old woman.”

“What do you expect from someone who wants me to go get married the minute he dies?” Karla asked.

Duane got Barbette and sat by the pool with her for thirty minutes while Karla and Jacy got dressed. Jacy came out first, carrying a selection of ties in her hand. She held two or three of them against his collar to see how they worked.

“I don’t want to wear a tie,” he said. “I don’t want to judge an art show, either.”

“I have a feeling you just want to sulk,” Jacy said. “That’s all you seem to be doing. But that’s okay with me. It adds to your hangdog charm.”

“Why is it so bad that I said I wanted Karla to marry again if I die?” Duane asked.

“Because it means you wouldn’t care if somebody else fucked her,” Jacy said.

“If I was dead, I
wouldn’t
care,” he pointed out.

“The fact that you’d be dead is totally irrelevant,” Jacy said. “Wear this tie with the white spots. It makes you look sort of Las Vegas.”

“I hate that tie,” Duane said. “Somebody gave it to me for Christmas. Somebody like Bobby Lee.”

Barbette began to cry and stretch her arms out to Jacy, who took her. Barbette immediately stopped crying.

“You’re so sulky you upset your grandbaby,” Jacy said.

The art show covered the sidewalk all the way around the courthouse and slopped over onto the sidewalk between the courthouse and the jail. Duane, under duress, had put on the tie with the white spots.

“I never felt sillier in my life,” he whispered several times, walking along the rows and rows of oils with Jacy and Karla.

“Duane, hush, we don’t care if you feel silly,” Karla said.

The people who had painted the pictures, almost all of whom he knew, stood behind their canvases. Duane was extremely surprised to see some of the people who stood behind canvases—he had not suspected that so many of his neighbors and colleagues entertained artistic impulses.

It was apparent, though, that they not only entertained the impulses, they had high hopes for the results. He had been intending just to walk through the art show and vote for whatever pictures Karla and Jacy said should win. At once he saw that it wasn’t going to be that simple. Each painter expected him to come to a full stop and give his or her picture the attention it deserved. He started to walk past an oil of a red pickup parked at a filling station—painted by Bud Wardholt, who ran the local filling station—and glanced at Bud to say hi. Bud was a jovial man, usually, with a wad of chewing tobacco tucked into his jaw. He had a kind of juicy grin. He still had the chewing tobacco, but not the grin. Duane realized, in the nick of time, that Bud was waiting for him to stop and actually look at the picture. He stopped and looked. It was a picture of a red Chevrolet pickup with a gas nozzle stuck in its gas tank.

“That pickup looks familiar,” Duane said, looking more closely.

Bud Wardholt relaxed, and the juicy grin came back.

“I thought you’d recognize it,” he said. “It’s that old Chevy Dickie used to have.”

“My gosh,” Duane said. “When’d you take up oil painting?”

“Years ago,” Bud said, looking slightly insulted.

“That’s real pretty,” Duane said. “You can almost read the license plate on the pickup.”

He moved on to an oil painting of a fat little blob with blue eyes. The painting was titled “Our Little Darling.” It sat beside two other virtually identical paintings of blue-eyed blobs. One was titled “Our First Grandbaby,” and the other “Just a Little Bundle of Love.” The artist was old lady Collins, who with her husband ran a little bait shop out by the lake. They specialized in stink bait, but also sold worms and minnows. Their daughter Cindy, mother of the three little bundles of love, had been in trouble several times for writing hot checks.

Duane felt like strangling Lester Marlow for running off at such a time and sticking him with yet another thankless job. As he walked along the sidewalk, trying to think of something to say about each picture, his annoyance with Lester increased.

“That’s real pretty,” which was what he said in most cases, plainly didn’t satisfy the artists.

Various roughnecks were exhibiting, and almost all of them had done pictures of oil rigs at sunset. The many exhibiting farmers had either done pictures of tractors or dairy cows, though one who ran a pig farm had attempted a picture of his prize pig. The cowboys submitted pictures of their horses, or portraits of Willie Nelson. The fishermen painted fish, the hunters deer. Lady artists, of which there were many, favored fields of bluebonnets, ponds at sunset—the latter outnumbered oil rigs at sunset by a slim margin. Buster Lickle had done a watercolor of his Dairy Queen. Numerous grandchildren were represented, a few grandfathers, several brides, at least thirty cats and many dogs.

Duane had been in an art museum once, briefly, in Fort Worth. His only thought during the visit had been to try and keep Jack from destroying any of the art objects. He had kept his eyes on his son most of the time and saw almost nothing of the art, except for a sculpture of a frog, which Jack destroyed despite him, somehow knocking it off its pedestal. No one could understand how he did it, because the sculpture weighed six hundred pounds and Jack only about sixty at the time, but he did it. Duane expected to have to pay millions in damages, but the museum officials were so relieved that the
frog hadn’t squashed Jack that they didn’t charge Duane anything.

As he walked through the show, Duane grew increasingly nervous. Not having to pay for a broken frog represented his only experience with the art world. How was he supposed to choose between so many little bundles of love and oil rigs at sunset? They all looked more or less alike to him.

He saw Junior Nolan looking at a picture with a sad expression on his face. Duane was startled to see that the picture he was looking at was a portrait of Dickie, sitting with his shirt off, on an orange couch. Almost before he realized it was Dickie, Duane recognized the couch. It was Suzie Nolan’s couch, the one they had made love on the day before. It must be Suzie’s painting.

Junior undoubtedly recognized the couch too. He looked sad, but not entirely sad. There was a kind of pride in his look.

“Suzie could have been an artist,” Junior said quietly. “Suzie could have been anything.”

Duane looked at the picture again. It did seem to be better than most of the other paintings in the show. There was Dickie, in all his youth and beauty, with a kind of softness in his face that Duane only rarely saw.

Jacy and Karla walked up behind him as he was looking at the painting. Junior smiled at them without losing his sad expression. Duane felt very awkward. Neither woman said anything. They just stood looking at the painting. The look on their faces resembled, for a moment, the look on Dickie’s face.

Duane would have liked to look at the painting longer. He would have liked to look at it alone. Looking at it with Karla and Jacy and Junior made him feel embarrassed. The painting made him realize that Suzie did love Dickie very much. It made him feel, again, that he had been misjudging her, not taking her seriously enough. It also made him wonder why she allowed him in her life.

The next picture he came to was Sonny’s. Duane remembered that there had been a time when Sonny tried his hand at painting. Mainly, as Duane remembered, Sonny had done
paintings of buildings around the square. A few of them had been sold at the drugstore. A few still hung in the old hotel, and one or two were in the Dairy Queen.

This painting was different. Duane had never seen anything quite like it. For one thing, it was much larger than most of the paintings in the show. In an upper corner the red light blinked over an empty street. In another corner was a high school letter jacket—empty, just the jacket, with a “For Thalia” on it. In one of the lower corners a boy with a cap on was sweeping the street in front of the picture show. In the final corner an old man bent over a pool table in an empty poolroom. The center of the picture showed a football field, a smudge of crowd in the stands. On the green field a football player embraced a homecoming queen. The painting was called “Hometown.” Duane looked at it a long time, taking in the details. Some of them were tiny. There was even the name of a movie on the marquee of the picture show. It was “The Kid from Texas,” a movie Duane had never heard of.

Eddie Belt was a few yards away, standing proudly behind a picture of his bird dog, Monroe. Duane was well aware of how much Eddie thought of Monroe, because he talked about him all the time. Monroe was a skinny pointer with big sad eyes and ears that had been chewed to shreds by coyotes and other dogs. Eddie’s passion for Monroe was, in Duane’s view, totally irrational, for as a bird dog Monroe had his failings, the principal one being a habit of immediately devouring any bird that fell to Eddie’s gun. Duane and Eddie often whiled away idle hours at the rig by arguing the relative merits of Shorty and Monroe. Eddie’s position, frequently reiterated, was that Monroe was by far the most valuable pet.

“At least Monroe does
something!”
Eddie said. “He points them birds. That’s something. Shorty don’t do nothing.”

“Shorty does plenty,” Duane maintained.

“What?”

“He bites people I don’t like,” Duane said.

“Yeah, and people you do like, too,” Eddie said.

Duane had to admit that Eddie had skill with the brush. His portrait of Monroe was far more realistic than any of the other animal portraits in the show. He had caught Monroe’s mangled
ears perfectly, Duane thought, and also his big sad eyes and protruding ribs.

“I never knew I had such a talented artist working for me,” he said. “I thought you mainly just doodled dirty pictures on the backs of envelopes.”

Eddie seemed quietly pleased with the compliment.

Jacy and Karla came over and studied the portrait of Monroe.

“That dog looks like he’s starving,” Jacy said. “If you’d feed him maybe his ribs wouldn’t stick out.”

“I feed him,” Eddie said testily. “Bird dogs are just naturally skinny.”

“He looks a little too much like one of those Ethiopian children,” Karla said. “I like it, though. I think I’m gonna vote for it.”

“Which category?” Duane said. He too was considering voting for it, both for diplomatic reasons and because he considered it an excellent likeness of Monroe.

There were only two categories in the centennial art show, Portraits and General.

“General, I guess,” Karla said. “I guess dog pictures would have to go in General.”

Eddie Belt instantly gave her a black look.

“I’ll have you know that ain’t no general dog,” Eddie said. “That’s Monroe. I raised that dog from a pup. This is a portrait. Anybody can see that.”

Karla and Jacy both smiled as if they thought Eddie was bats. While it was possible that they were right, and that he was bats, he was also subject to wild mood swings, as Duane knew better than anyone alive except Nelda, Eddie’s long-suffering wife.

Duane thought he saw a mood swing coming on. Eddie was silent, but swollen and red in the face. There was no question but that he would fight anyone in sight if he thought Monroe’s honor was being besmirched in the smallest degree.

“I think the judges had better consult,” Duane said. He took each woman by the arm and attempted to lead them a few steps away. Both immediately jerked their arms free. They were obviously ready to do combat over anything smacking of sexist treatment, such as being led by the arm by a male.

“Now look,” Duane said. “What we’ve got here is a man in love with his bird dog. I think we better put Monroe in Portraits.”

“No,” Karla said. “It’s a real good picture. I’d a lot rather vote for it than all those paintings of oil rigs and bluebonnets. If we leave it in General he could take Monroe home a blue ribbon.”