Duane's Depressed (16 page)

“If I was to go any faster a rock might shoot up right through the floor of my car,” Nellie said, when he teased her about her caution. “I got to take good care of this vehicle—if it breaks down I won’t have no way to get to a bar.”

Duane had been sitting in his lawn chair, watching a flock of geese, high to the northeast. A small plane, probably some oilman looking for a leak in a pipeline, was going in the same direction, but the plane was only a hundred feet off the ground and the wild geese were way up there. Their flight was so pure, so graceful, that it made the little airplane look tacky. It was as if a lawn mower were trying to fly.

Nellie had the radio on so loud that the car seemed to be pulsing. She waved at her father, but didn’t get out immediately—Nellie wanted to hear the rest of the song. Shorty, who liked Nellie, ran up and tried to jump in the car, but Nellie yelled at him to get lost. “I don’t want dog hairs in my car!” she yelled, over the sound of the song.

When the song finally ended—Duane had his fingers in his ears by that time—Nellie got out and ran over to him, gave him a kiss and a nice long hug.

“Daddy, what’s the deal?” she asked, looking him over to see if he looked all right.

“I got home from my trip with that miserable scumbag and you wasn’t there,” she added.

But, to her eyes, her dad looked fine.

“Nope,” he said. “You’re always zombified when you get back from Mexico. I figured you’d just want to sleep.”

“I did, but I sleep better when you’re around the house somewhere,” Nellie said. “It’s just total chaos around that house when you’re gone.”

“I know, that’s one reason I moved out,” Duane said. “Got tired of chaos.”

Once inside the cabin Nellie did a quick scan to see if she could detect any sign of a female presence. The cabin was neat as a pin. There was really no sign of
any
presence, not even her
father’s. In fact, it was a cozy little place. There was a nice fire in the little fireplace. The dishes were washed, the bed made. The axe was leaning against the fireplace; a shirt or two hung on a nail. It all looked real basic to her. The only sign of anything unusual was that the radio was unplugged. She herself hated silence. Her own radios—she had several—were on twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes she turned them up, sometimes she turned them down, but she never turned them off. In her view, being without music was like being dead. But then her father was a lot older—he might be tired of music. Still, that unplugged radio was a little worrisome.

“It’s a nice little cabin but I can’t see that there’s much to do out here,” she said. “Don’t you get bored?”

“Haven’t so far,” Duane said.

Nellie was always active. He knew it must puzzle her that he would just like to sit around.

“I’ve worked my whole life,” he reminded her. “I was a roustabout when I was thirteen. I guess I’m just ready to do some sitting and thinking.”

“Well, that makes sense, I guess,” Nellie said—although it really didn’t. Her father seemed fine, just to look at, but she was beginning to learn that you couldn’t always tell what was going on with a man just from looking. Maybe he wasn’t as content as he appeared to be. Maybe he was real depressed, like her mother claimed, or at least a little wrought up inside. Her father had always been the most normal and the most dependable person she knew. Her mother was a pretty good mom, but she was definitely flighty, changeable, prone to pretty intense moods. Her father had always just been pretty much the same, didn’t have too many moods, just sort of hung in there year after year in a real stable way. The thought that he might be going crazy or something was pretty disturbing. The Moore family spent most of its time teetering on the brink of hell as it was. If her father went crazy, then the likelihood was that the whole family would break to bits, or something.

“Don’t you miss us all none?” she asked. Her father frowned slightly, probably because she hadn’t used very good grammar.

“I’d probably miss you more if you used good English,”
Duane said, but then he smiled. Part of Nellie’s appeal was her artlessness; she had a good brain but had not taken the trouble to train it, and she seldom subjected it to even the slightest discipline. None of his children had spent any more time than was necessary with their textbooks. Fortunately—with the exception of Dickie—they were as healthy as horses and had an abundance of energy.

“I know I ain’t supposed to say ‘none’ and stuff,” Nellie admitted. “Sometimes my talk just comes out country—too much time in honky-tonks, I guess.”

“You ought to go back to college and finish your degree, honey,” Duane said. “Right now you’re getting by on being young and pretty, but that don’t last forever.”

“It does if you go to the right spas,” Nellie said. “We’re all trying to get Mom to go to a good spa. She could go to the Canyon Ranch or the Golden Door or somewhere and eat right and get massage. She might pep up, if she’d just go to a good spa.”

“Is she low?” Duane asked. He felt silly asking the question. After all, he had been living with Karla only a week ago. He ought to know how she was himself.

Nellie decided just to be blunt with her father. She was in the habit of saying exactly what was on her mind, even if the grammar of it wasn’t too correct.

“She don’t think you’re ever coming back,” she said. “She thinks you want to just live in this cabin from now on, or else move to a foreign country or something.”

“I might visit a foreign country,” Duane said. “I might go to Egypt and see the pyramids. But I don’t think I’ll move to a foreign country.”

“So, do you think you’ll ever move back in with us?” Nellie asked. “Everybody thinks you’ll come on back except Mom. She don’t think you’ll ever be back.”

“Ever and never—that’s looking a long way ahead,” Duane said. “I’m not looking that far ahead, just at this time. I want to be alone for a while. I want to think about some things I can’t seem to think about when I’m crowded all up with you.”

“I can understand that,” Nellie said. “I can’t think two
thoughts in a row myself without the phone ringing or some kid squalling somewhere in the house.”

“I’ve just been out here about a week,” Duane pointed out. “I need some time to myself, and I like walking around. It’s good exercise.”

“You could join a health club,” Nellie said. “All these gyms are giving big discounts now.”

“I don’t think I’m the gym type,” Duane said.

Nellie decided not to press the matter of the gym, or the matter of when her father might come back and rejoin the family, either.

“But if I really needed you I could run out here and get you, couldn’t I?” Nellie said, thinking out loud.

“Sure,” Duane said. “I’m only six miles away. Six miles is not very far.”

“It’s not far but it’s dusty,” Nellie said. Although casual about her own appearance, she liked for her little red Saab to be dust free. The car wash in Thalia had no better customer than Nellie Moore. Even if the sand wasn’t blowing she liked to pop her car into the car wash every day or two. In fact, looking at her car, she thought it seemed a little grimy—it occurred to her that she should probably hit the car wash on the way back home.

Duane walked out with her.

“You didn’t really answer the question about whether you were ever coming home, did you?” Nellie asked.

“Nope—it’s too big a question,” Duane said.

“Well, couldn’t you take a guess?” Nellie asked.

“Nope,” he said. “It’s not really as important a question as you think it is. You’re too old to be living at home, but you’re living at home. You asking me when I’m coming back home is like me asking you when you’re moving out.

“You’re a grown woman,” he added. “It’s probably not a particularly good idea for you to be living with your parents.”

“I know,” Nellie said. “I get in your hair, and so does Dickie and that bunch, and so does Julie and her two. Momma’s always threatening to kick us out, but she never goes through with it.”

“Some mothers like their own kids better than they like anybody else,” Duane observed. “Besides, your mother likes lots
of company. I’m different. I can do without company for a while, now and then.”

“I guess that’s why you don’t mind living out here on this hill,” Nellie said. Her father’s remarks depressed her a little. He was right. What was she doing living at home, at her age? She always got jobs easily—she just usually didn’t keep them very long, and she had none at the moment. But there was the problem of the babies. Who would watch them if she moved away and got a job? Little Bascom was about ready for play school, but Baby Paul had just been born. It wasn’t easy being a mom if you lacked a dad, and neither Billy Deeds nor Randy McGregor, the fathers, respectively, of Little Bascom and Baby Paul, had been heard from in quite a few months. Neither was lavish with child support, either. Nellie had waited a good long time to start having babies again after her first two husbands, the fathers of Barbette and Little Mike, had also been stingy with child support. One reason she waited was because she wanted to be mature and make good choices the next time around—and yet she
hadn’t
made good choices. She had just ended up having her babies by two more cowboys who happened to be good dancers. It didn’t hurt that they had good butts, too. In fact she had had her first date with Randy McGregor the night he won the Best Wrangler Butt contest at a nearby honky-tonk. But life was a cruel thing. The fact was, a woman could get tired of even the best butt, and the getting tired, in Randy’s case, had only taken her about three weeks, in the middle of which she had somehow gotten pregnant with Baby Paul.

Seeing her father, who seemed as sane as ever and was leading a well-ordered life in his little cabin, reminded Nellie a little too sharply of how little she had done to establish any kind of satisfactory life for herself.

Besides that, there was definitely dust and grime on her car. Nobody had taken it to the car wash while she was in Mexico. The garage had a door, but no one ever thought to shut it, so a lot of dust had undoubtedly blown in. She had meant, every day since her return, to run it over to the car wash but something had happened to distract her—mainly just Tommy calling to beg her to please take him back. Some of Tommy’s pleadings went
on for as long as four hours, him begging every minute of it. Even though he was no fun to go to bed with, Tommy
was
somebody to talk to; by the time she finally got him off the phone she would be too worn out from his entreaties to take her car to the car wash. What she mainly did, when she wasn’t on the phone with Tommy, was sit in the kitchen and listen to Rag tell stories about disasters that had befallen her in her long and varied life: tornadoes, oil booms, spousal abuse. Rag had experienced it all.

“Daddy, I guess I’ll go,” Nellie said, the thought of the car wash uppermost in her mind. “Is there anything you want me to tell Momma?”

“Oh sure—just tell her not to worry, I’m fine,” Duane said. “You can see that for yourself.”

“I guess you are,” Nellie agreed, reluctantly. “It’s just hard to get used to the idea of you living way out here by yourself.”

“Well, it’s quiet,” Duane said. He thought he had explained enough.

“Okay, bye,” Nellie said. She gave him a real big hug, a tight hug. For a moment she felt like asking if he’d just get in the car and come home with her. She knew he didn’t want to, but she felt like asking anyway. Things just seemed so much more normal when her father was at home.

Nellie knew that things changed—they changed, they changed—but she didn’t like it. Driving back to town along the country road she suddenly started to cry so hard that for a second she got confused and thought she must be in a cloudburst. She couldn’t see a thing, but when she turned the windshield wipers on they only scraped the dust on her windshield. The cloudburst wasn’t outside, it was inside, and it was all because her father didn’t want to live at home—not anymore.

21

A
FTER
N
ELLIE LEFT
, Duane made himself some soup and had crackers with it. The crackers had probably been in his cupboard for at least a year, but they were still tasty.

After some thought he added “Fried Pies” to the list of groceries he needed to pick up next time he went shopping.

Shortly after eating, he went to bed. It occurred to him that he was leading a go-to-bed-with-the-chickens life, only he had no chickens. A banty hen or two might be good company, but he’d have to bring them in at night if they were to survive the coyotes, owls, and bobcats; hens weren’t neat housemates, either, so he decided to table that idea.

Duane fell asleep immediately, but two hours later came wide awake. Out his window he could see the lights of an oil rig, to the northwest. Now and then a pickup would rattle along the road, roughnecks either going out to the rig or coming in from it. Many times, throughout his life, he had ridden out to a rig at night, to deal with one problem or another. The scurryings that went on in the oil business were incessant, nocturnal as well as diurnal. The roughnecks and tool pushers were night animals, as much so as the coons and possums. Karla too was a night animal—she rarely turned off the TV before two in the morning.

“Why sleep, if you don’t need to?” she asked. “Why just lay there, letting your life pass?” she would say, if he tried to get her to go to bed a little earlier.

“But your body needs sleep,” he said.

“Speak for yourself, mine don’t,” Karla said. “There could be something important happen, and if I was asleep I’d miss it.”

Now, it seemed, he was the one who didn’t need sleep, although he was walking several miles a day and by rights should have been tired.

“No tension in the environment, I guess,” he said to Shorty, who was sleeping beside the fireplace.

Duane realized, as he sat in bed looking at the lights of the distant oil rig, that he didn’t miss his family at all. Even Nellie’s visit had produced mixed emotions in him. Of course, he loved Nellie—that would never change. Despite her day-to-day approach to life she was an appealing girl, who, in the main, had normal instincts. It was unlikely that she would ever go bad. He wasn’t sure he could say as much for Dickie and Jack, his boys, both of whom were a little too enamored of the notion of being bad—not that either of them had ever done a really bad thing—not so far, at least.