Duane's Depressed (36 page)

“Well, you’re missing a great heat wave,” Duane said once or twice, to Karla’s ghost. “It’s ruined the wheat farmers already, and it will ruin the cattlemen if it don’t rain in July.”

Every day, without fail, Duane walked in the middle of the afternoon to the cemetery and sat in the narrow shade of a little cedar tree not far from Karla’s grave.

Even though he sat in the one spot of shade in the cemetery, the sweat poured from him as the sun slanted downward in the west. At four it was hot—at five it was hotter still. The heat at its zenith was so powerful it wiped out thought. Duane came with two quarts of water each day and drank them both before he left the cemetery.

He came at the hottest hour because Karla loved such heat. No day was too hot for her. She would lie by the pool for hours, shaded only by an umbrella, reading or listening to music. Duane considered it a small tribute to Karla that he came at the hottest hour—an act of remembrance and respect. When they had been young and poor and had made love in such heat in their hot little room the bedclothes would be as wet afterward as if they had been dipped in a river. Those were the heats of youth, long past but not so long past but that Duane remembered them.

Several times, without the children, he had pedaled the fifteen miles to the curve where the accident had occurred and studied the scene of the two deaths. The curve, badly banked on a narrow farm-to-market road, was known to be treacherous. Twenty years before, two teenagers had been killed on it, rolling their car at almost exactly the same spot. Then, a few years later, a cowboy hurrying home from work had turned both a pickup and a horse trailer over on that curve, killing the best cutting horse in that part of the country, and himself to boot. The deceptive thing about the curve was that the long road beyond it was visible from each direction—drivers sped into the curve thinking it was gentle when actually it was sharp. Both he and Karla had driven around it many times, cutting through the farmlands in order to get over to the road that would take them to Dallas, which was where Karla was going when she was killed.

Duane often sat for an hour by the curve, just thinking. Hay trucks and milk trucks and pickups passed him—but no one stopped. The drivers, many of whom knew him, respected his grief and let him alone.

Death on the highway was as much a part of the culture of that country as rodeos or fistfights. When their children were at the reckless age, all parents lived in terror of the death call, and, for too many of them, it came.

What held Duane’s attention, as he sat on his bike well off the pavement and watched people pull into the curve and pull out of it, was the precision that went with fatal timing. The milk truck that killed Karla had been traveling west at a high rate of speed, heading for some nearby dairy, and Karla had been traveling east, just as fast, headed for Dallas and a day of shopping with her friend Babe, who was already there. The two vehicles, speeding in opposite directions, arrived at the sharpest angle of the curve at exactly the same moment. If Karla had hit the curve even a second earlier, or the truck even a second later, the badly banked angle would have been passed or not arrived at, and both drivers would still be alive.

But no: they met head-on, each making, simultaneously, a momentary misjudgment about the angle of the curve, and that was all it took. Karla might have been trying to slip a tape into the tape deck; she may have looked down to set her coffee cup in its holder. The trucker, at the same moment, might have looked out the window, sneezed, yawned. The two small errors came at precisely the same moment and in a blink two lives ended. The driver of the truck was thrown through the passenger window and killed; the truck jackknifed and split open, flushing thousands of gallons of milk into the ditch. Two weeks later the roadside grass was still pale and milky for some fifty yards. The mangled BMW had to be cut away from Karla, although by then she was dead—killed instantly, as Bobby Lee had said.

Duane looked at the wreckage of the milk truck, looked at the smashed, twisted BMW, and knew that death had come so quickly that his wife had not felt anything. He knew it, and yet his mind kept reaching for her last thoughts. In his first hours of guilt at having deserted her in the last weeks of her life he wondered
if there could have been a suicidal element in the accident—but then he thought of Karla’s attachment to her children and grandchildren and knew that was wrong. Besides, several people had seen Karla on the morning of her death and all had reported her to be in high spirits. She had helped Rag get the kids off to school and then had gone to Mildred-Jean’s to get her hair fixed.

“Oh no, we were laughing and cutting up—I mean, why not? She was going off to Neiman’s to shop all day,” Mildred-Jean informed him when he asked how his wife had seemed.

“Mom was fine,” Julie said—she had been home that morning and had helped her mother choose the outfit she wore.

“Grandma didn’t even spank me,” Sami volunteered, one day when they were putting flowers by her grave.

Then Sami burst into tears. All the children cried a lot when he brought them to their grandmother’s grave, or to the cross by the spot where she had been killed. The only one who didn’t cry was Barbi, whose response to the tragedy was more considered.

“I’m going to learn ESP so I can talk to her,” Barbi said. “I know she’s living in a bird. When I learn ESP I’ll signal to the bird and when it hears me it will come down and peck on my window. And then I’ll go outside and talk to Grandma. Could you get me a book on ESP, Pa-Pa? I want to learn it quick.”

Duane pedaled to Wichita Falls, got Barbi the book, and read most of it to her. Very soon afterward Barbi began to talk to birds, and was unshakable in her conviction that she was talking to her grandmother.

“She moves from bird to bird,” she informed the household. “Right now she’s in a roadrunner and she kills bugs and lizards. But sometimes she’s in a crow.”

“Bull,” Willy said. He was deeply grieved by the loss of his grandmother—she had often taken him fishing when no one else had time. He wanted Barbi to shut up about her and just let her be dead, because when they talked about her he began to cry and felt like a sissy all day.

Rag and Bubbles shared that view. Bubbles liked the thought that her grandmother might have wings, but she wanted them to be clean, white angel wings, the color of white sheets
just after they were washed. She didn’t want to think of her grandmother having dirty old bird’s wings—bird’s wings, as everyone knew, were filled with lice. Twice she and Barbi had wild fights because Barbi insisted that her grandmother was in an ugly old crow.

Rag sided with Bubbles in these disputes. Karla’s death upset her so that she developed a kind of talking hysteria. Although she had not been to church, except for funerals, in more than forty years, she began to read the Bible and attempted to reacquaint herself with Christian doctrine, in which she could find no mention of the souls of good women going into birds. At one point in her life her favorite song had been “The Great Speckle Bird,” but she searched in vain in the Bible itself for any mention of a great speckle bird. When the talking hysteria hit Rag she would just casually mention something she had remembered about Karla and then, unable to dam up her words, would begin to recapitulate events of her own life—her memories would pour out for hours.

When the talking hysteria took hold of Rag everyone except the two babies left the house. The school-age children poured out of the house and ran to school, often beating the tardy bell by several minutes. Rag would talk on and on for hours, often in competition with whatever happened to be on the Cartoon Channel at the time. Little Bascom and Baby Paul watched the Cartoon Channel most of the day. Since they were too young for play school no one could figure what else to do with them. Baby Paul rolled around on the floor for hours at a stretch, gumming rubber toys. Little Bascom’s favorite pursuit, other than watching cartoons, was to sneak out into the garage and pull the stuffing out of an old couch that had once been in Dickie’s room. The stuffing stuck to his clothes. Sometimes he would come back in the house looking as if he had been dipped in cotton candy.

Though Karla’s absence was felt keenly by everyone every day, somehow the household veered just short of collapse. Meals got cooked and eaten, dirty clothes eventually got washed, minor injuries got treated, and small resentments soothed.

“It makes me sad—she died away! Who’ll see me get married?” Bubbles said one morning, before bursting into tears.

Duane took the child in his lap and held her until she felt better.

“You’re right, honey,” he said. “Grandma died away too soon.”

“So did Jesus,” Willy pointed out. “He was only thirty-something.

“Get it? Thirty-something,” he said, and laughed at his own joke.

“Life goes on,” Rag said, as a familiar cloud of despondency descended over the household.

“If you say life goes on one more time I’ll strangle you,” Duane told her. “It does, but who cares?”

All the children were shocked. Their grandfather had sounded like he meant it, when he said he would strangle Rag. What if he did strangle her?

“Would that be murder, or just manslaughter?” Barbi asked. She was always interested in the technicalities.

“That would just be Rag-slaughter,” Duane said. He smiled, to show that he hadn’t meant it, though, for a moment, he
had
meant it.

“It was just an old saying,” Rag said, and burst into tears. In a way, Karla had been her best friend; everything was different, now that she was gone. She was just stuck there with the two babies all day. There was no one she could talk to about hairstyles, or the messy lives of movie stars, or the many catastrophes that would befall mankind once the ozone layer was finally destroyed and the rain forests cut down.

“I don’t know what will become of me,” Rag sobbed. Duane and all the children had to hug her and give her many pats of reassurance before she quieted down.

3

E
VEN THOUGH HE WAS STAYING AT HOME
and wishing he could be living in his cabin, Duane continued to rent the honeymoon suite at the Stingaree Courts, on the Seymour highway west of Wichita Falls. Sometimes, even after the heat came, he would bicycle over to the Stingaree Courts, pay his bill in cash, and lay in his room for a few hours, listening to the whirr of the air conditioner while watching a slow baseball game on TV. Shorty would usually be laying just outside Gay-lee’s door when Duane arrived. He would hurry over and yip at Duane a few times, to show Duane that he recognized him, but his response was not really passionate—when Duane left, a few hours later, Shorty rarely did more than lift an ear.

Usually Duane would knock on Gay-lee’s door, hoping to chat with her a few minutes. If it was late in the day she would usually be blow-drying her hair. Without makeup she looked like a teenager.

Gay-lee always seemed glad to see him, but she was a little formal with him, perhaps unsure whether to address the fact of his grief.

Sis, the maid, was more forthright.

“I done had two husbands killed off—I know how you feel,” Sis said, when Duane told her he had lost his wife. “Why do you keep coming back here, Duane? Ain’t you got no place better than this to live?”

“I guess I just got used to being at this motel,” Duane said.

Marcie Meeks asked him the same question and he gave the same reply.

“You’re an odd one,” Marcie Meeks said. “Got a big house over there in Thalia that you could live in and you’re still spending forty-eight dollars a night on our honeymoon suite.”

Marcie Meeks didn’t mince words.

“Everything doesn’t have to make sense,” Duane told her.

Marcie disagreed with that sentiment too.

“Maybe not if it’s happening to you,” she said. “But if it’s happening to me it needs to make more sense than that. Forty-eight dollars a night adds up quick, even if you are a plutocrat.

“A plutocrat. You know, like Daddy Warbucks in
Little Orphan Annie
,” Marcie Meeks said. “There was a comic strip of it when I was a kid.”

Duane knew that his desire to keep a room at the Stingaree Courts would seem odd to almost everyone, but having that room was part of an effort that was still important to him. Karla was dead and adjustment to that fact would have to be made, but the tragedy had not changed the fact that he wanted a different life. Perhaps he would fail and have to go back to the old life—but he was not going to do that unless he absolutely had to. He still refused to ride in motorized vehicles, he still spent time alone in his cabin, and he still drew reassurance from the knowledge that he had a room all his own at the Stingaree Courts.

Bicycling around the county—or walking, as he sometimes still did—Duane had Karla almost constantly in his mind. It troubled him that the last few months of her life had not been a very happy time for her, but of course there was no changing that now. At first what he felt most acutely was the fact that there could be no more conversation. Often, in the long spaces of their marriage, he and Karla had stopped talking to one another for long periods of time, though there would be no obvious reason for the stoppage. Sometimes they would just find themselves with nothing to say to each other.

But always, sooner or later, they would casually pick up the thread again and resume their conversation—then, for a year or more, they might be in conversation with one another several
times a day, before losing interest again. Duane supposed that was just how a long marriage worked. There were lapses and interruptions of various kinds, but sooner or later the engagement kicked in again.

Now it couldn’t. Never again would he hear Karla say “Duane” in a way that meant she had something on her mind. And yet he kept expecting it, and would sometimes dream that he and Karla were talking. Waking from those dreams made him particularly sad.

The person who helped him most, in the first hot months after Karla’s death, was Ruth Popper. Ruth was almost completely blind now, but she was so familiar with her small house, from having lived in it most of her long life, that she was still able to get around and do for herself. She subscribed to the large-print editions of
Time
and
Newsweek
and peered at them through her large magnifying glass.