Duane's Depressed (2 page)

“Willy, have you seen Pa-Pa?” she asked. “I thought sure I heard his pickup drive up, and his gloves are in the kitchen, but I can’t find him anywhere.”

“Pa-Pa walked off,” Willy said, his fingers dancing expertly on the buttons of the video game.

“What?” Karla asked, supposing she had heard wrong.

“Pa-Pa walked off down that road—that road right out there,” Willy insisted. He didn’t point—matters on the screen were critical—indeed, domination of the world was at stake. He couldn’t spare a hand.

“Willy, I’ve told you not to lie to me,” Karla said. “Just because your little sister lies to me constantly don’t mean you have to start.”

“It wasn’t a lie!” Willy protested indignantly. Unfortunately the brief shift in his attention proved fatal: the Ninja Master kicked him off the cliff.

“Oh no!” Willy said. “I was winning and now I’m dead.”

His grandmother was unmoved.

“I’m gonna talk to your mother about you, young man,” she said. “I think you spend too much time playing those dumb video games. They’re screwing up your cognition or something. Pa-Pa’s never walked anywhere in his life, much less on a day when there’s a norther.”

Willy saw no point in arguing with his grandmother. Grownups who were that old could never be convinced of anything anyway—indeed, all grown-ups had a tendency to deny the plainest facts. One of the few things he and his sister, Bubbles, agreed on was that grown-ups were weird.

Just as his grandmother was about to leave the room the phone rang and she picked it up.

“Maybe it’s Pa-Pa—he might be on the cell phone,” she said, but instead it was Julie, mother of Willy and Bubbles. Julie was just returning from visiting her boyfriend, Darren, who was in jail in Lawton, Oklahoma, awaiting trial on a charge of armed robbery and aggravated assault, a charge Julie was convinced was unjust. Julie was making the call from the edge of her parents’ driveway; she was not about to rush into the house without making a few inquiries, not after what she had just seen.

“Did you and Daddy just have a big fight?” Julie asked. “If you did I’m going back to Wichita Falls and spend the night in a motel.”

Karla was too surprised to answer right away. She had just put in a peaceful morning watching the international table tennis championships on cable—it was amazing how fast a little Ping-Pong ball could travel if someone from China whopped it.

“It’s bad enough seeing Darren in custody just because he hit some old fart with a wrench,” Julie said. “I shouldn’t have to come home and be a witness to parental violence.”

“Julie, Darren was
robbing
the old man he hit with the wrench,” Karla reminded her. “Darren’s a criminal. That’s why he’s in custody.”

“I don’t want to talk about that—I want to talk about you and Daddy,” Julie insisted. She was close enough to the house to be able to see into the kitchen, but was not close enough to be able to tell whether there was blood on the walls.

“Honey, your father and I haven’t been violent in years, and then it was just me throwing things,” Karla told her. “Bubbles is watching
Barney
and Willy is right here playing video games.”

“Then why is Daddy walking down the road?” Julie asked.

Karla threw Willy a quick, slightly guilty glance, but Willy was in space, trying to keep aliens from destroying planet Earth.

“Duane’s
walking down the road?” she said. “Are you sure it’s him—a lot of men look alike from the back.”

“I guess I know my own daddy; he’s been my daddy my whole life,” Julie said.

“I told you Pa-Pa was walking down the road,” Willy said, without taking his eyes from the TV screen. “You should apologize for calling me a liar.”

“I
do
apologize for calling you a liar,” Karla said. “I just hope I don’t have to call your mother something worse. There’s all kinds of dope available in those Oklahoma jails. I don’t think your mother’s lying but she could be hallucinating.”

“Momma, all I took was a little speed so I wouldn’t fall asleep driving and leave my children without a mother,” Julie said. “I’m not hallucinating!
My daddy is walking down the road! Get it?
”

“Then oil prices must have really tanked, or else some-body’s died,” Karla said, suddenly convinced. “There’d be no other reason why Duane would get out of his pickup and go walking down a road.”

“Momma, I wish you’d just ask him,” Julie said. “He hasn’t gone very far.”

“Oh, I mean to ask him,” Karla said. “What does he think he’s doing, scaring us this way?”

2

B
EFORE LEAVING TO GO CHASE DOWN HER HUSBAND
, Karla put in a call to Mildred-Jean Ennis at the beauty parlor—Mildred-Jean was the person to check with about sudden fatalities in the community, the reason being that her beauty parlor was right across the street from where they parked the local ambulance. Karla was so upset by the thought of Duane walking around in a norther that she felt a panic attack coming on—calling Mildred-Jean might be a way to keep herself on an even keel until she found out what lay behind her husband’s strange behavior. When it came to local disturbances Mildred-Jean was at least as reliable as the Weather Channel was about the weather. It didn’t take ambulance-level emergencies to prompt her interest, either. She was a solid source of information about adulteries, and even mild flirtations seldom escaped her notice.

“My antennae are always out; that’s what antennae are for,” Mildred-Jean liked to say; besides that she was a psychic, who sometimes gave card readings when she wasn’t styling hair. Mildred-Jean hailed from Enid, Oklahoma, a garden spot by comparison with Thalia, in her opinion, but, unfortunately, she had ended up in Texas when her passionate romance with a crop duster named Woody suddenly lost altitude and deposited her on a dusty corner by Highway 79.

“Well, I just thought somebody might have died this morning,”
Karla said. “Most people seem to die in the morning rather than the afternoon—I don’t know why that is.”

“Nope, nobody died—not that there ain’t two or three ignorant sons-of-bitches around here who deserve to have their asses killed.” She was thinking particularly of Woody, who lived a few blocks away with a redhead he had formed an unseemly relationship with.

“Well, I just wondered. Bye,” Karla said, and hung up. She didn’t want to give Mildred-Jean an opportunity to start in about Woody—hearing about other men’s treachery was not likely to help quell her panic attack, not while her husband, a male himself, was wandering the streets.

“Maybe aliens came down in a spaceship and took possession of Pa-Pa’s mind,” Willy offered, helpfully. He was resting his fingers again.

“It could be aliens but I bet it’s oil,” Karla said. She raced into her bedroom and shot the TV by her bed all the way up the cable to the Financial Channel, convinced that the Saudis had opened the floodgates at last, producing a tidal wave of oil that would drop the price of West Texas crude to around two dollars a barrel, ruining everybody in Texas, or at least everybody in Thalia. Anxiety about the Saudi tidal wave had been a constant in the oil patch for years; nobody knew when it would come but everyone agreed that once it
did
come, ruin would be complete: no more platinum AmEx cards, no more frequent-flier miles, no more fun trips to Las Vegas or Bossier City.

Apparently, though, the tidal wave still hadn’t come. The commentators on the Financial Channel evinced no sign of panic.

If it’s not death and it’s not oil I guess he wants a divorce, Karla thought. No sooner had the notion entered her head than the last few barricades separating reason from panic were swept aside. He wanted a divorce: she knew it, should have known it immediately. There wasn’t anything wrong with Duane: he just wanted a divorce and was too chicken to come in the house and spit it out.

Julie was in the kitchen making herself and Bubbles bacon
sandwiches when Karla wandered in, looking for her car keys. Now that she knew what the truth was she was in no special hurry to go chase her husband down.

“Bacon sandwiches, I love ’em,” Bubbles said. “I wish they’d kill every pig in the world so there’d always be plenty of bacon sandwiches.”

Bubbles, eight, had frizzy blonde hair and a blue-eyed gaze that melted the hardest hearts.

“I don’t think the world needs to lose a whole species of animal just so you can stuff yourself with grease, Miss Bubbles,” Karla said.

Bubbles regarded her grandmother coolly. They did not always see eye to eye.

“You shut up that talk or I’ll never hug your wrinkled old neck again,” Bubbles said, although without rancor. She was dipping a table knife into a big jar of Miracle Whip and licking the Miracle Whip off the knife blade.

“Thanks a lot. Who bought you that stupid purple dinosaur you sleep with?” Karla said, as she stood in the door. She glanced at Julie, hoping her daughter would offer Bubbles a word or two of correction, but Julie was gazing absently out the window, wondering what she was going to do for fun until Darren Connor got out of jail.

“If she’s this rude at eight, what’s she going to be like at fifteen?” Karla asked. “You need to be thinking about things like that, Julie, instead of just wasting your life on violent criminals.”

“Bacon and Miracle Whip and Barney are the three best things in the whole world,” Bubbles said airily, waving the knife around as if it were a wand.

Julie was wishing her mother would leave, so she could pop an upper—handling her kids in the morning was really tiring work.

Once in her little white BMW, Karla found that her panic attack was subsiding a little. Duane’s sudden desire for a divorce was annoying, but it probably wasn’t the end of the world. She whirled out of her driveway in a cloud of dust, as usual, but then sat with the driver’s-side window down, smelling the dust and feeling the cut of the norther, wondering
why
he suddenly
wanted a divorce. He hadn’t been especially restless lately—Karla was even reasonably sure he didn’t have a girlfriend. One of her many spies would have immediately alerted her to any romantic development. He must already be in his office; there was no sign of him on the road. She had known Duane for much of her life and had been married to him just over forty years. They had never in their lives been strangers to each other, she and Duane; but, once she thought about it a few more minutes, sitting in her car with the motor idling, she realized that the part about them not being strangers wasn’t quite true. Living with Duane
had
become sort of like living with a stranger: a pleasant stranger, to be sure, and an attractive stranger, but not a person she could truthfully say she knew very much about. They still lived in the same house, ate at the same table, talked about the same kids, worried about the same crises, even slept in the same bed, but what did they know of each other now, really? Not much, it seemed to Karla, a thought that aroused only a faint sadness in her. Somehow forty years of constant intimacy had betrayed them finally, in some sly way. The very fact of being together so long had imperceptibly swirled them farther and farther apart. If such a realization had come to her sooner,
she
might have been the one to act, the one to ask for a divorce.

Coming out of a panic attack was not much different from awakening from a nightmare. Once you woke up and realized you were really lost or dead, then the things of the earth slowly settled back into place. By the time Karla had made the short drive to Duane’s office she had begun to feel a little like a fool. Duane might not even want a divorce. He might just have been low on gas and walked back to the office to get something he had forgotten. He might have sneaked off on foot so as not to stir up the grandkids, who were pretty demanding where their Pa-Pa was concerned. Reassured, Karla gave her hair a lick or two with a comb before going into the office.

Ruth Popper, the old secretary whom Duane refused to push into retirement, sat in a chair in one corner of the office, peering through a big magnifying glass at a book of crossword puzzles. Ruth had a dictionary balanced on one knee and a pencil
between her teeth. The big magnifying glass was attached to the chair Ruth sat in. The whole office staff and even a few of the roughnecks had chipped in to buy Ruth the big magnifying glass, but it soon became apparent that they had wasted their philanthropy.

“Hell, she couldn’t see a crossword puzzle if she was looking at it through the Mount Palomar telescope,” Bobby Lee said, putting the matter caustically. A year or two back, testicular cancer had forced Bobby Lee to surrender one ball, a circumstance that had rendered him notably testy. Bobby Lee, the drilling company, and to a degree everyone in Thalia were almost as anxious about the other testicle as they were about the coming tidal wave of Saudi oil. If the cancer should come back and force him to surrender the other ball, the general view was that Bobby Lee would get two or three young women pregnant just prior to the operation and then buy an assault rifle and shoot down everybody he had ever quarreled with, which was, in essence, the whole population of Thalia.

“If he sees he’s gonna lose that other ball I expect him to fuck up a storm and then get seven or eight guns and take us all out,” Rusty Aitken told Duane. Rusty was the local drug dealer, though officially he just ran a body shop on the west edge of town. Karla didn’t like Rusty Aitken, largely because her own children had done their best to make him a rich man, and had largely succeeded.

Bobby Lee was right about Ruth and the magnifying glass, though. All she could see when she held the crossword puzzle book under the glass was an occasional wavy line.

“It’s all right,” Duane invariably said, when some busybody pointed out that he was employing a blind woman who sat in a corner all day pretending to do crossword puzzles. “Moving the magnifying glass back and forth gives her a little something to do.” A young secretary named Earlene did all the actual secretarying. Earlene and Ruth did not have a harmonious relationship, mainly because Ruth would sneak over during Earlene’s lunch break and hide whatever lease orders Earlene had been working on when she left for lunch.