Duane's Depressed (26 page)

In the anteroom he felt confused. The doctor had told him to see the receptionist, but the receptionist wasn’t there. No one was there. He didn’t know whether to leave or to wait. Before he could decide the young woman—Natalie—popped back in.

“Sorry, I was just checking the doctor’s schedule,” she said. “We can see you again at three on Monday, if that’s convenient.”

“That’s fine,” he said.

“How would you like to pay?” she asked. “It’s one hundred and ninety dollars.”

The office seemed so much like a home that Duane had forgotten that it was a kind of hospital—he was a patient, not a guest. He still had the cash from his poker winnings, so he
counted out the money, took the little card with his appointment noted on it, and went out into the March sunlight. In his head he was still talking to Dr. Carmichael, and he continued to talk to her until he had walked a couple of miles.

Then the one-way interior conversation stopped and a feeling of bleakness and loneliness took its place. He was no longer on Dr. Carmichael’s pleasant street, either in his head or otherwise. The borders of the road were weedy and strewn with trash, and a constant stream of pickups and oil trucks passed him as he trudged back out the Seymour highway, toward the Stingaree Courts.

About a mile from the Courts he passed a tavern called the Silver Slipper, an establishment every bit as run down as the motel. The sign that spelled out the name had several bulbs burned out. Two or three pickups and a familiar-looking Buick were parked in front of the tavern.

Duane felt shaky, and his legs were leaden. Walking all the way back to the cabin was out of the question—even making it back to the motel was going to be a struggle. It was a weekend—he had meant to go home and look off his hill for two days—but somehow his short conversation with Dr. Carmichael had sapped his strength. He decided to go in the tavern, have a drink, and give his legs a rest.

Sure enough, when he went into the Silver Slipper he spotted the young drug dealer with the long hair, sitting with Gay-lee at a booth near the back of the bar. A couple of roughnecks were slamming a tiny puck around on the miniature hockey game.

The bartender, a large, fleshy man, had a white dishcloth draped over one shoulder. Duane sat on a bar stool. It had rarely felt so good just to sit and take a weight off his legs. The bartender, a man about his age, looked vaguely familiar.

“You don’t look very peppy, hoss,” the bartender said. “Is it allergies, or did you just lose someone near and dear?”

Duane didn’t know what the man was talking about, but when he put a hand to his face he discovered that his cheeks were wet. Either he had been crying or his eyes were watering from some irritant he hadn’t noticed.

“I guess it’s the damn ragweed,” he said. “Could I have a bourbon on the rocks?”

The bartender squirted a jigger into a shot glass and poured the whiskey over ice.

“You’re Duane Moore,” the man said. “You don’t remember me, but I remember you.”

Duane looked closely, but still couldn’t place the man.

“I played right guard for Iowa Park once upon a time,” the bartender said. “You were in the backfield for Thalia. We collided on the line in nineteen fifty-four. I stopped you from scoring a touchdown but broke my collarbone in the process. I’m Bub Tucker.”

He held out his hand and Duane shook it.

“Well, you did look familiar, but the damn ragweed’s screwed up my vision, I guess,” he said.

Though the man was friendly, Duane wished he had picked a different bar to drink in, just any bar where not a soul knew him. The only person in the world he wanted to talk to was Dr. Carmichael, and he especially didn’t want to have to relive a high school football game with a man whose collarbone he had broken long ago.

“That collarbone never healed right,” Bub Tucker revealed. “Lucky thing.”

“Why lucky?” Duane asked.

“Kept me out of the service,” Bub said. “Accident prone as I am generally, I’d have got killed in Korea or somewhere if they’d let me in the service.”

“That’s one way to look at it,” Duane said.

Bub Tucker, once he had reminded Duane of their one moment of contact, seemed no more inclined to reminisce than Duane was. He drifted off to polish glasses, chewing on a toothpick, only drifting back, silently, to refill Duane’s glass when Duane nodded at him and held it up.

Duane drank four whiskeys, spreading them over an hour and a half. There was a basketball game on the TV above the bar, but Duane only rarely looked up at it. He sipped his bourbon and crunched the ice in his glass, gradually growing calmer and less shaky as the whiskey took effect. The last time he could remember
feeling so shaky was when Karla almost bled to death from an undiagnosed ectopic pregnancy.

That had been a truly scary thing. His wife had been within an hour of death. And yet, walking along the Seymour highway, he had felt just as shaky, though all he had done in this case was talk to a nice doctor for an hour.

“Good to see you, Duane—you ought to get some allergy pills for the ragweed,” Bub Tucker said, when Duane put a bill on the bar and got up to leave. “Come back to see us sometime.”

“I expect I will—sorry about that collarbone,” Duane said.

Bub Tucker smiled and polished another glass.

“Hey, that’s just football,” he said.

6

B
ACK AT THE
S
TINGAREE
C
OURTS
, Duane stayed awake only long enough to drink one more whiskey and to allow Shorty to run around the parking lot for twenty minutes, lifting his leg against fence posts and dead weeds.

Then he took his shirt off, fell back on the sagging mattress, and didn’t wake again until the middle of the next morning, when the dog began to whine to go out.

Duane, who rarely slept more than five hours a night, saw that he had just slept nearly fifteen hours—and he still felt that he could sleep some more. He had intended to go to the cabin for the weekend, but quickly abandoned that plan. The eighteen-mile walk that had seemed easy only the day before now became as hard to imagine as climbing Mount Everest. He didn’t understand what had happened to him. Somehow a brief talk with a nice doctor had weakened him to the point where he couldn’t walk home—or, really, walk anywhere. Normally he would have hated the thought of spending the whole weekend at the Stingaree Courts, with no cold water and a TV that showed only sex, but his lethargy was so profound that he didn’t care. Perhaps it meant that he
was
depressed, though he could not remember that Dr. Carmichael had used that word at all. At the moment he felt weak, tired, and utterly without appetite or ambition. He didn’t want to do anything—the one prospect that
meant something was the prospect of seeing the doctor again at three on Monday.

During the long afternoon the thoughts that flickered through Duane’s mind as he lay in the hammocklike bed and dozed were inconsistent and disconnected. Several times it occurred to him that he could probably find the Thoreau book at the local bookstore, which was probably about two miles away, but he made no move to walk to the bookstore or even to call and ask if they had the book and would hold it for him. He made no move to do anything until late afternoon, when he began to feel unshaven and dirty. He needed a razor and various toiletries and had begun to feel guilty about Shorty, who had had no food since they had arrived in town.

Finally, as the afternoon was waning, Duane got up. He had decided to ask Marcie Meeks if there might be a better room he could rent—one, at least, where cold water came out of the shower.

When he opened the door to go out he almost walked right into the substantial bosom of a large black woman, who had been about to knock on his door. She had a thin towel and an even thinner wash rag in her hand, plus a tiny bar of soap.

“You all need fresh towels?” she asked, as Shorty sprinted out of the room and went running out into the weed patch.

“I’m Sis,” she added. “I’d change your sheets but we’re low on sheets this weekend.”

“That’s okay, I haven’t dirtied my sheets much,” Duane said.

“That little dog don’t bite black people, do he?” Sis asked, eyeing Shorty with some suspicion.

“No, he doesn’t bite grown-ups at all, he just likes to bite babies,” Duane assured her. “If you’re the maid could you tell me if there’s a better room to be had in this motel?”

At that the large woman looked wary.

“Better how?” she asked.

“There’s no cold water and the TV in this room won’t get but one channel,” he said. “I’m Duane, by the way. I guess I might be living here for a while.”

“You ain’t the police, is you?” Sis asked, still more wary.

“No, I’m in the oil business,” Duane said.

He knew there were motels in Wichita Falls that offered a great deal more in the way of creature comforts than the Stingaree Courts, but he was at the Stingaree Courts and didn’t feel like moving.

“Well, there’s the honeymoon suite,” Sis said. “Got a water bed. It’s high money, though. You talking about luxury when you talking about water beds.”

“I think I’ll check it out, even though I’m not on my honeymoon,” Duane said.

Marcie Meeks was behind the registration desk, watching an old Tab Hunter movie on a little TV when Duane walked in. Natalie Wood was in the movie too.

“It looks like I might be staying several days,” Duane said. “I wonder if I could move to a better room. The cold water in my shower won’t turn on, and the TV won’t get but one channel.”

“You can’t have everything for thirty-two dollars a night,” Marcie said—but she said it sadly rather than angrily. No doubt the state of things at the Stingaree Courts depressed her too.

“The maid said there was a honeymoon suite,” Duane said. “I think I might like to switch to that one if it’s unoccupied.”

Marcie Meeks emitted a dry sound that might have been a laugh.

“The last time we had honeymooners here was the night Cassius Clay knocked out Sonny Liston,” she said. “Are you old enough to remember that?”

“Just barely,” Duane said. “But I’ll take the suite anyway, if that’s agreeable.”

“I doubt Daddy would object,” she said. “It’s forty-eight dollars a night. We’re still paying off that water bed.”

Duane paid for two nights.

“I’ll just ask you to sign another card, since you’re moving,” Marcie said. “We need to keep close track of you in case the police come looking.”

“Get many visits from the police?” he asked.

“Too many,” Marcie said. “I despise police. I was in jail once myself, for a crime I never committed.”

Duane waited, expecting Marcie Meeks to describe the crime she hadn’t committed, but she said no more about it.

“You look like a married man,” she said, looking him over. “What do I tell your wife when she shows up?”

“I doubt she’ll show up, but if she does she can probably find me by smell,” Duane said. “You don’t have to get involved.”

“She’ll show up, I expect,” Marcie said. “Wives usually show up.”

Sis, the large maid, was just coming out of his old room when he walked by.

“It’s the honeymoon suite for me,” he said. “I hope the shower works.”

“Oh, it’ll work,” Sis said. “Maybe that water bed bring you luck. Maybe you’ll find a bride.”

7

T
HE ROOM WITH THE WATER BED WAS LARGER
, the shower worked, and the TV got several channels. The water bed was comfortable, though it did emit a faint, unpleasant smell that Duane could not at first identify. He thought it smelled a little bit like fish, but how could there be fish in a water bed?

The overall improvement in his living quarters energized him enough that he could walk to the nearest convenience store and buy some toiletries and a large sack of dog food. He used his plastic ice bucket as a dog dish, and Shorty was soon wolfing down the dog food.

Duane lay on the water bed for the rest of the afternoon and all through the night, watching basketball in a hazy, not very involved way. There was no traffic in the parking lot at all—out his window he could see a long stretch of West Texas prairie. He could see almost back to where his cabin was—the contemplation of such a distance made him tired.

Duane lay on the water bed, drowsing and waking, then drowsing some more, for another fifteen hours. Now and then he sipped a little whiskey. There was a telephone by his bed but he didn’t touch it. He thought of the Thoreau book, but didn’t pick up the phone to call the bookshop.

Several times it occurred to him that he ought to call his family. Dickie or Nellie or even Karla might have gone to the cabin to check on him, found him missing, and drawn dark conclusions.
They might conclude that he had left the country, or been the victim of foul play. If Karla knew he was missing she might conclude that he was living elsewhere, with a mystery woman her spies had failed to detect.

Though he had no desire to cause his family distress, Duane did not pick up the phone to inform them of his whereabouts. For reasons he couldn’t fathom, he felt completely motiveless. He had no desire to do anything. He didn’t want to eat, didn’t want to gamble, didn’t want to read, didn’t want to talk. He seemed to have lost the ability to follow through on even the simplest plan. It wouldn’t take twenty seconds to call home and let his family know that he was okay, but even twenty seconds of direct effort seemed more than he was capable of. Calling his family would be a normal thing to do, and it shouldn’t be hard—but for some reason it had come to seem irrelevant.

The only thing that
was
relevant, really, was his appointment on Monday afternoon with Dr. Carmichael. He could go back to the pleasant office and continue talking to the doctor. An undertaking that he had once been extremely dubious of—psychiatry—had somehow become the only thing he had to live for.

On Monday morning he woke up worrying that the hour would again be too brief—that he would scarcely start talking before he would have to leave. He tried to order his thoughts in such a way that he could ask about or speak about things he really needed to discuss with the doctor, but his attempt to form a mental list of priorities was a total failure. He didn’t really know what he needed to talk about most: in a way he needed to talk about
everything
, but how could you squeeze everything into an hour’s conversation?