Duane's Depressed (3 page)

“I’m just testing her,” Ruth said, when Duane chided her about this habit. “A good secretary ought to be able to find anything in this office in three minutes, hidden or not.”

“Even if you hid it in your car?” Duane asked—though almost blind, Ruth still drove herself to work, making use of a tortuous network of back alleys and avoiding all contact with what she called the “big roads.” The worst she had done so far was knock down a row of garbage cans.

“Well, if it’s in my car I guess it’s stuff I need to work on myself, in the peace of my home,” Ruth informed him. She did not enjoy having her methods questioned—she never had.

“Where’s Duane?” Karla asked, peeking into the office.

Earlene was typing and Ruth was swiveling her magnifying glass back and forth. She had just caught a glimpse of the word “Mississippi,” an excellent word, and she wanted to count the letters and see if she could fit it into her puzzle anyplace. Karla’s sudden entry caused her dictionary to fall off her knee.

“Ain’t here; he just stuck his head in the door and said he was going to the cabin,” Earlene said, without lifting her eyes from the lease contract she was typing.

The cabin was just a frame shack Duane had built a few years ago, when all their kids and grandkids were temporarily living at home. Nellie, Dickie, and Julie were all in the process of quarrelsome divorces, and Jack—Julie’s twin—was serving a twelve-month probation for possession of a controlled substance, in this case four thousand methamphetamine tablets. All the grandchildren liked living in their grandparents’ big house, though Nellie’s two oldest, Barbette and Little Mike, preferred living in a commune in Oregon, where they had been for the last three years. The children themselves hated living at home and were constantly at one another’s throats. Karla, who was auditing a few courses at Midwestern University at the time, audited one in art history and came home one day eager to explain a few new concepts to Duane.

“Now Baroque came along in real old-timey times,” she explained one morning, after an evening when they had both underestimated the force of some tequila they were drinking, with
the stereo in their bedroom turned up high enough to drown out the sounds of Nellie screaming at T.C., her boyfriend of the moment.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Duane said. He didn’t mind Karla auditing courses—in fact, he encouraged it—but he did mind having to audit her auditings, particularly when he had a hangover.

“Baroque, Duane—Baroque,” Karla said. It always pleased her to learn a complicated new word that no one else in Thalia knew the meaning of.

“I heard you. What does it mean?” he asked.

“Well, it kinda means ‘too much,’ you know?” Karla said, thinking that was probably the simplest way to explain it to someone like Duane, who had never given ten seconds’ thought to art of any kind, unless it was just pictures of cowboys loping around in the snow or something.

“Okay, too much,” Duane said. He was slightly addicted to antihistamine nose sprays at the time—he quickly squirted some nose spray into his nose before Karla could stop him.

“‘Too much’ is like our family,” he said. “Would it be fair to say our family is Baroque?”

“Duane, of course not, our family is perfectly normal,” Karla said. “They might have a few too many hormones or something but otherwise they’re perfectly normal.”

“Nope, if ‘Baroque’ really means ‘too much,’ then our family is Baroque and I’m leaving,” he informed her.

Ten days later he and Bobby Lee hammered the cabin together, on the edge of a rocky hill on some property Duane owned a few miles out of town. It was built in a place with no shade and lots of rattlesnakes, so many that none of the grandkids were permitted anywhere near it, at least not in the warm months. Karla had only set foot in it twice, and the only satisfaction she got on either visit was to confiscate two or three containers of nose spray.

Rough and lonely as it was—or perhaps
because
it was rough and lonely—Duane loved the cabin and spent many weekends in it. The only regular visitor was Bobby Lee, and he only became a regular visitor after the trouble developed with his
testicle, when he became so depressed and in need of company that Duane didn’t have the heart to turn him out.

The existence of the cabin had always made Karla a little uneasy, though—it still did.

“I’d just like to know what you find to do out there all by yourself,” she asked, several times.

“I don’t do anything,” Duane explained.

“Duane, that’s worrisome to me,” Karla said. “It’s not normal for a healthy man to sit off on a hill and not do anything.

“You could at least get a telephone,” she said later.

“I don’t want a telephone,” Duane said. “I’ve got a radio, though.” He thought he might throw his wife that small crumb of normality, a quality she had come to put a great deal of stock in, now that she was plunging on through middle age.

“Big deal,” Karla said. “What if I need you quick? What do I do?”

“Call the radio station and have them page me,” he suggested.

“Duane, don’t be perverse,” Karla said, the perverse being a concept she had learned about in a psychology class she had audited.

“Now you made me drop my dictionary and lose my place,” Ruth Popper complained, while Karla was snooping around the office seeing what she could find.

“I’m sorry, Ruth—what word were you looking up?” Karla said, picking up the dictionary.

“I was looking up ‘Nepal,’” Ruth said. She always had a few good words like “Nepal” ready when busybodies asked her how she was coming along with her puzzles.

Karla opened the dictionary to the
N
s but before she could find the word “Nepal” her sense of something not being quite right returned. It wasn’t a full-scale panic attack, just a sense that a gear had slipped, somewhere in her life.

“If Duane went to the cabin what did he drive?” she asked.

Earlene stopped typing—she looked blank.

“Why, his pickup, I guess,” she said.

“No, his pickup is parked in the carport,” Karla said. “Could he have taken one of the trucks?”

Earlene shook her head.

“The trucks are where the rigs are,” she said.

“He didn’t take a truck; he’s walking it,” Ruth said.

“Ruth, he couldn’t be walking it,” Karla said. “The cabin is six miles out of town and there’s a norther blowing.”

“Don’t care—he’s walking it,” Ruth said, wishing everybody would leave her alone so she could start counting the letters in “Mississippi.”

“Maybe he borrowed your car,” Karla suggested to Earlene.

Earlene shook her head. Her car keys were right there by the ashtray on her desk. Nonetheless she got up and ran over to peek out the door, just to make absolutely sure her blue Toyota was still there. If there was one thing Earlene couldn’t tolerate it was the thought of being afoot.

“He’s walking it,” Ruth said again. “If you don’t believe me go down the road and you’ll see.”

“Oh lord, I guess he
does
want a divorce,” Karla said, thinking out loud. Her first instinct had been right; the situation was now crystal clear.

Her remark proved to be an immediate showstopper. Ruth Popper forgot about Nepal and Mississippi. Earlene ceased typing. Her fingers were still poised above the keys, but she wasn’t moving a muscle. Earlene had long had a crush on Duane—perhaps, at last, there was a chance. Wild hope sprang up in her heart.

“Oh well, I’m surprised it lasted this long,” Ruth said. “You two never did have a thing in common.”

“Nothing in common—what about those nine grandkids?” Karla asked. For a moment she felt like strangling Ruth Popper. Maybe after the murder she could plead temporary insanity and be put on probation like her son Jack.

Heartened as Earlene was by the news that Duane was finally divorcing Karla, she didn’t believe for a minute that he was actually walking around in the street.

“We forgot about the toolshed,” she said. “He’s probably out there playing with wrenches or something. I’ll go look.”

“I’ll go with you,” Karla said. She was well aware that Earlene had a crush on Duane.

But the toolshed proved to be cold, oily, and empty. There were plenty of wrenches on the workbench, but Duane wasn’t playing with any of them. Earlene had convinced herself that Duane—for the moment her boss, but soon, possibly, her beau—must be in the toolshed. Now that it was clear that he wasn’t, she didn’t know what to think. Only three cars had been parked at the office that day: her Toyota, Ruth Popper’s Volkswagen Bug, and Karla’s BMW. All three were still there. The unpleasant possibility that Ruth was right and that Duane actually
was
walking to his cabin had to be faced.

“I guess the divorce must have really got that man torn up,” she said.

“I don’t know, Earlene,” Karla said. “People get divorced every day, I guess.”

“I know it—
I
even got divorced,” Earlene said. “And I’m Church of Christ, too.”

“If you ask me, a simple divorce is no excuse for doing something crazy, like walking six miles in a norther,” Karla said.

The thought that Duane, her favorite boss of all time, might be crazy was not a thought Earlene really wanted to entertain. Karla didn’t want to entertain it either, but the fact was, Duane was gone and the cars weren’t. What else were they to think?

The two women, who had rushed out to the toolshed eager and hopeful, convinced that they would find Duane in it, trudged back to the office depressed and uncertain, while the cold wind blew dust against their legs.

3

D
UANE, MEANWHILE
, was walking briskly along the dirt road toward his cabin, the collar of his Levi’s jacket turned up against the norther. He had skirted the downtown area, such as it was, slipping through some of the same alleys that Ruth Popper used on her way to and from work. He was well aware that the fact that he was walking would attract attention, so he chose an obscure route out of town—a route along which there would be little attention to attract.

Even so, by the time he reached the city limits, a dozen passing motorists had stopped to ask if his pickup was broken down. All twelve offered him a ride.

“No thanks,” Duane said, twelve times. “I’m just out for a walk.”

“Out for a what?” Johnny Ringo asked—Johnny was a wheat farmer who owned a fine patch of cropland in the Onion Creek bottoms.

“A walk, Johnny,” Duane repeated.

Johnny Ringo was a tough old bird who took little interest in the doings of his fellowman. Of the twelve people who stopped to offer Duane a ride, he was the least disturbed by the notion of pedestrianism.

“Well, a walk’s something I never tried,” he said. And then he drove off.

Duane knew that it would take a while to accustom the citizens
of the county to the notion that he was tired of driving pickups and just wanted to walk around for a few years. By his reckoning there were fewer committed pedestrians in the county than there were followers of Islam. Pedestrians, by his count, numbered one—himself—whereas two lonely and diminutive Muslims had somehow washed up in the nearby town of Megargel, where they worked in a feed store. Anyone who cared to visit Megargel could see them struggling with huge sacks of grain, their turbans covered with the dust of oats and wheat.

Duane walked on into the dun countryside, obligingly stopping every half mile or so to explain to a passing cowboy, or pickup full of roughnecks, that no, his pickup hadn’t broken down, he was just walking out to his cabin, enjoying the February breeze. Although annoyed to have to explain himself to every single car that passed, he was not surprised and took care to preserve his amiability. The county had slowly come to accept C-SPAN and computers—in a few months they could probably be brought to accept a walker, too. Then his walks would get easier, more pure. A day would finally come when none of the roughnecks or the hunters would stop at the sight of him walking—not unless he waved them down. He could walk in peace, think, be alone.

Even now, on what was essentially the first solitary walk of his life, there were pleasant stretches when the road ahead was empty, free of pickups and trucks coming and going from the oil fields or the ranches. There was just the cold blue winter sky, and the whip of the wind, so strong when it gusted that the weeds by the fences rattled against the barbed wire. He could walk along, keeping a lookout for deer, or coveys of quail, or wild turkeys or wild pigs, all of which he and his son Dickie occasionally liked to hunt.

He had passed through much of his life paying only the most casual attention to the natural world, noting only whether it was cold or wet or hot, an obstruction to his business or otherwise. He had not delved much into nature’s particularities, knew the names of only a few trees, a few birds, some insects, and the common animals. The thought of his own ignorance
made him feel a little guilty. He knew scarcely a thing about botany, could identify only a few of the plants he was passing as he walked. He thought he might purchase a book about weeds and flowers, and maybe a book about birds; he could at least educate himself to the point where he recognized the plants he was passing, as he walked here and there.

Rounding a bend in the road, at about the halfway point between his cabin and the town, he happened to notice a coyote, standing only twenty yards away in the pasture. The coyote, unalarmed, was watching him intently, its head cocked to one side.

“No, my pickup ain’t broke down,” Duane said. “I’m just out for a walk, if you don’t mind.”

He walked a little farther and then glanced back. The coyote was still standing there, looking at him.

4

O
NCE SHE LEFT THE OFFICE
Karla headed for the post office, meaning to see if any interesting catalogues had come in the mail.

Halfway there, she realized she didn’t care. If there was anything she wasn’t in the mood for just then it was one more J. Crew catalogue. Why bother to buy anything, if her husband wanted a divorce?

Nonetheless, from force of habit, she drifted on toward the post office. But when she got a block from it she noticed that seven or eight miscellaneous citizens were standing out in the wind, talking, as they might if there had been a bad accident on the highway. As soon as one of them noticed the BMW coming, eight faces looked her way, a sure indication, in her opinion, that they had spotted Duane walking and knew about the divorce. For a moment it pissed her off: half the town already knew her husband wanted to divorce her and the son-of-a-bitch hadn’t even bothered to mention it to her!