Duane's Depressed (17 page)

He realized, sitting in his bed, that he was rapidly speeding away from his family—he didn’t know why. Halley’s comet had just gone past the earth and was now speeding away from it, and it seemed to Duane that he was doing the same thing: speeding away, speeding away. So far Karla had been the only one in his family to intuit how he really felt, which was that he had left a place to which he would never be likely to return. Karla couldn’t help wanting to understand why. A why, even if it was a why she didn’t agree with or even really grasp, would give her a place to put her feet in relation to this unexpected and puzzling event. Karla liked for there to be reasons for human actions.

“I’ll take a wrong reason over no reason,” she had told her children often, when they misbehaved, when they did something inexplicable. So the kids invented reasons, to keep their mother happy—a mistake, since once Karla got them telling lies she would soon track through the lies to somewhere near the truth.

Sooner or later, he knew, Karla would try the same tactic with him. She would try to get him to confess to an affair he hadn’t had in order to get him talking: once she got him talking
she would find her way to a reason that explained the matter to her satisfaction.

Duane knew such a conversation was coming, but he didn’t think it would work this time. He didn’t know why he had left. He hadn’t been getting along badly with Karla, or the children or his employees or anyone in his life. What had happened to him had nothing to do with a deterioration in his major relationships. Even to say something simplistic, such as that it was time for a change, would not be stating the matter accurately. It wasn’t that it was
time
for a change, particularly; it was that he had just
changed
. He had driven his pickup into his carport, gotten out, locked the pickup, put the keys in the old chipped cup, and, at about that moment,
changed
. He didn’t become a different man, but when he stepped out of his house he found himself in a different life. He hadn’t given any forethought to taking a walk, or to living a different life, either. For the first few minutes of his new life he felt a distinct surprise at finding himself walking, but it was a
pleasant
surprise one with no dark shadows in it. He had been riding—now he was walking. It seemed to be a very simple, very satisfying change; but he knew it could hardly have seemed simple or satisfying to the people he left. His forty years with Karla had contained many surprises, but probably none as major as this one. He had just walked off: with no animosity toward anyone, with no intent to harm, wishing everybody well—just walked off. He knew it must seem puzzling to everyone, but he couldn’t help that. The change had just come, as naturally as a change in the weather—one day cloudy, one day fair. He could imagine that his future life would take many unexpected twists and turns, but what he couldn’t imagine was going back home. Over the years he had adjusted to a great many things—in some cases difficult things—for the sake of other people; now it was the other people, his nearest and dearest, who would have to do the adjusting, because he couldn’t. His old skin, or his old self, no longer fit. It would mean a sadness for his family, for a while at least—there was no getting around that fact.

What was evident, as day came—with a glowing line in the east—was that he still needed groceries. He got up, cleaned up,
put the list of things he needed into his shirt pocket, and prepared to walk to town. When he first stepped outside, the lights of Thalia were like a sprinkle of fallen stars. He dreaded going there—he would just have to buy his supplies from the same old people, who would wonder why he wasn’t in his pickup. He paused for a moment, as he was about to turn off the hill, not reluctant to walk but reluctant to walk in the direction of Thalia. It was stronger than reluctance—it was dread: he didn’t want to go to Thalia, and his resistance to going there was solid enough that he considered just trying to live for a while off what he could shoot with his twenty-two. There were ducks on most of the little creeks and ponds, and besides ducks, there were rabbits and quail and wild pigs. No species would be endangered if he lived off game for a while.

For a moment this option excited him, but then he began to feel silly. Did he think he was a mountain man or a survivalist or something? The little twenty-two was just for plinking—it didn’t have a scope. It was ridiculous to suppose he could live off game; and anyway, he didn’t like duck, and wild pigs were tough meat.

Then, just as he was about to trudge off to a place he didn’t want to go, he remembered the Corners, a small crossroads store on a farm-to-market road seven or eight miles to the northwest. It never closed—indeed, had been in business twenty-four hours a day long before the notion of round-the-clock convenience stores had taken hold. The Corners existed mainly to serve the needs of oil field workers who didn’t have time to drive to Thalia or Wichita Falls to eat; it was a dim little two-lightbulb store run by a cranky old man named Jody Carmichael, who ran it alone, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Jody Carmichael rarely bathed, and even more rarely slept.

“Nope, my nerves got mangled on the Burma Road,” he informed those who considered it odd that one man could run a twenty-four-hour convenience store year in and year out with no help. Jody spent his life on an old couch behind the counter, catnapping when there were no roughnecks in the store microwaving burritos or wolfing down the variety of junk foods
that Jody carried. Lately, Jody—who had been valedictorian of his class before getting drafted for World War II—had become a compulsive sports gambler, doing his gambling on a tiny computer he had set up behind his counter, next to an equally tiny TV set. Jody Carmichael was perhaps a little demented, but he wasn’t dumb. Duane always enjoyed chatting with him when he was out that way, grappling with a problem on one of his rigs. He remembered that Jody had once been married to a beautiful heiress from somewhere in the panhandle—he had seen them at rodeos a few times in earlier years, and remembered, or thought he remembered, that they had a daughter. The rumor in law enforcement circles was that Jody was the mastermind behind a string of methamphetamine labs that snaked through the oil patch. It was a rumor that Duane didn’t credit. Jody Carmichael was obviously smart enough to be a drug baron, and the Corners was remote enough to make a good headquarters, but Jody’s interests just seemed to lie elsewhere: keeping up with forty or fifty horse races a day via his computer, or betting on South American soccer matches. Jody never bragged about his winnings, if any, but his dull blue eyes suddenly lit up and began to dance around in his head at the mention of horse races or South American soccer.

Duane took his list of needs out of his pocket and studied it a minute—it was just light enough to make it out. To his relief he discovered that he didn’t need to go to Thalia at all. Jody Carmichael would have everything on the list, with the possible exception of large trash bags—the few residents of the Corners area were not overly concerned about proper trash collection.

The Corners was two miles farther than Thalia, but it was in a direction Duane had never walked and distance was not a problem, in any case. He felt sure he could walk all day, just as long as he didn’t have to see people he didn’t want to see while he was walking. The very notion that he was going dead away from Thalia, rather than toward it, was enough to put a spring in his step. He had a packet of the old crackers in his backpack, and ate the crackers as he walked along. Several pickups passed him, some coming and some going, but no one stopped to offer him a ride. In only a week’s time he had managed to convince people
in that part of the country that he didn’t want a ride. They might think that he was crazy, but they no longer stopped and pestered him to get in the pickup.

Duane had never gone directly from his cabin to the store and soon realized that he would have to zigzag a little, if he hoped to get there by staying off the paved roads. He had to swing east through a large pasture and then back west past some fields where the winter wheat was just greening. He figured he had walked almost nine miles when he finally came in sight of the Corners. Along the way he had seen a field full of white cattle egrets, standing in a greening wheat field, with no cattle to attach themselves to. The delicate white birds made a pretty picture against the deep green of the sprouting wheat. A little later he saw two gray herons standing in a kind of bog—one of the herons was almost as tall as he was. When he passed, both the huge birds flapped away, rising as slowly as small airplanes, barely lifting above the line of the mesquite. Still later, the same small airplane that he had noticed the day before sputtered overhead and flew east, above the line of trees that bordered the little creek.

When he was within a mile of the Corners he began to see an increase of litter in the barditches. Beer cans, bottles, empty cans of motor oil, Styrofoam cups, packing, spent shotgun shells, abandoned packing crates large enough to have contained a washing machine or a refrigerator lay beside the road. He saw a car radiator, and an old pink plastic hair dryer that someone had thrown out. Duane began to get angry again, at the sight of the litter. In contrast to the white birds in the green field, the tawdry spectacle in the ditches seemed the more deplorable. Fifty large trash bags would hardly have sufficed to bag the trash just from that one stretch of road, and it wasn’t even a paved road. Duane had driven past such sights every day of his life and given them no thought, but walking past them was an entirely different experience. It suggested that the people who drove along that road had no pride, either in themselves or in the place they lived. They consumed trash and then excreted it, indifferent to what they were doing. The sight grated on Duane so much that he thought he might start doing his grocery shopping at night, so
he wouldn’t have to see what he was walking past—the Corners was a twenty-four-hour establishment, after all.

The whole back wall of the little store was hidden by a towering pyramid of empty beer cans and beer bottles, the creation of at least two generations of all-night rig crews who decided to drink their fill right behind the store. It was a well-known pyramid of empty beer cans—Jody Carmichael had finally built a little fence around it for the express purpose of discouraging can collectors.

“What’s mine is mine, and it’s always going to be mine,” he told people who asked if they could poke in the pyramid of cans.

“What’s mine is mine, and it’s always going to be mine,” he told anyone who had the gall to point out that he had already been paid for the cans once—that is, when the customers bought the beer. “They were discarded on my property, which means they still belong to me, and what’s more, they ain’t for sale. I don’t intend to sell the same beer can twice, if I can help it—and I can help it.”

Not far to the west of the store Jody had installed a giant satellite dish, the largest and most sophisticated satellite dish in that part of the world. With the help of the dish Jody could bring in most sporting events in the Western Hemisphere, though the little TV he brought them in on only had an eight-inch screen. Somehow the discrepancy between the enormous dish and the tiny screen bothered Bobby Lee, who was often with Duane when they got hungry enough to drive to the Corners to microwave a burrito.

“If you’re going to have that big a dish, looks like you’d at least have a regular-sized TV—I’d ruin my eyes squinting at that little old screen,” Bobby Lee told Jody once.

“Ain’t you got anything smaller than a twenty?” Jody asked, noting that Bobby Lee’s purchase only totaled a dollar and a half.

“You didn’t answer my question, and my change is all the way out in the pickup,” Bobby Lee said. “I keep it in a paper cup.”

Jody made the change with some reluctance, but did not respond at all to Bobby Lee’s question, which ticked the latter off.

“You need to learn to mind your own business,” Duane told him, as they were driving away.

“I just asked a question; is that a crime?” Bobby Lee complained. “You and Jody Carmichael are two of a kind, if you ask me.”

“Two of what kind?” Duane asked.

“The closemouthed kind,” Bobby Lee said.

Bright sunlight was glinting off the hundreds of cans and bottles as Duane approached the Corners; the great white satellite dish was still pointed toward the southern sky. Shorty flushed a pack rat but the rat got under the building before Shorty could get him. Shorty didn’t give up, though. He was still scratching madly, trying to get under the house and get the rat, when Duane stepped inside the store.

22

J
ODY
C
ARMICHAEL WAS RESTOCKING
the barbecued potato chips and hot pork rinds when Duane walked in. A Portuguese soccer magazine lay on the counter—at least, Duane assumed it was in Portuguese, since it was in a foreign language that looked different from Spanish. Among the locals Jody had the reputation for being a highly educated man. Duane had the vague sense that after World War II Jody had gone off to Michigan or somewhere and gotten his schooling on the G.I. Bill.

“Ah, it’s our pedestrian. Good morning to you, sir,” Jody said. When he was in a good mood he was apt to indulge in flowery talk—flowery, at least, by roughneck standards.

“You got pack rats under your house, Jody,” Duane informed him. “I just saw a big fat one run right under it.”

“And pack rats carry the hanta virus, is that your point?” Jody asked. One of his bets must have come in—his eyes were dancing.

“Well, and bubonic plague and a few other things,” Duane said. “I just thought I’d tell you.”

Jody finished filling the trays with pork rinds and barbecued potato chips and came back behind his counter. He cast a quick glance at his computer before turning to Duane.

“Brazil, now there’s a country—the whole society is soccer mad,” he said. “Screwing and soccer, those are the national pastimes in Brazil. What’s on your mind today?”