Duane's Depressed (46 page)

When he got back to his cabin he built a good fire in the
fireplace and spent some time studying a map of the western United States.

Then, reluctantly and resentfully, he opened the second volume of Proust.

15

I
N
M
ARCH OF THAT YEAR
Sonny Crawford died. A roughneck coming into the Kwik-Sack to buy a six-pack found him slumped against the cash register, dead. He had not adjusted well to his prosthetic feet, or become adept at getting around on crutches. Often the shelves of the Kwik-Sack would be almost bare of foodstuffs, because Sonny simply neglected to restock them. He had been eating a bag of Fritos when he died. Cause of death was thought to be a heart attack.

“No, it wasn’t a heart attack; he died of discouragement,” Ruth said, when Duane walked over to chat with her, after the funeral.

Behind the big house the young farmer was once more plowing the big garden plot. It was time to think of gardening. Duane had ordered a great many seeds, some of them for vegetables that, so far as he knew, had never been planted in the county before. He was in a mood to experiment, and did not stint on seeds.

“I guess you’re right—but what was he so discouraged about?” Duane asked.

Ruth glared at him for a moment.

“You wouldn’t understand,” she said. “You’ve never been discouraged.”

“The hell I haven’t,” Duane said. “Why do you think I stopped riding in pickups and started walking everywhere?”

“Just to show off,” Ruth said. “You’ve always been a vain person. You want everybody to know how different you are from them.”

“I don’t think I’m very different from ‘them,’ depending on who you mean by ‘them,’” Duane said.

“You should have kept going to that psychiatrist,” Ruth said. “I thought she was helping you a little, but then you stopped going.”

“I mean to start seeing her again this summer,” Duane said.

“Just because you’re in love with her and she’s gay is no reason to give up on your therapy,” Ruth said. “She’s your doctor, remember—just get all that other stuff out of your mind.”

“I’m trying to,” Duane said. “It’s not that easy to do.”

“It wasn’t easy for Sonny, either,” Ruth said. “He never got over Jacy—isn’t that sad?”

Duane didn’t answer. In his view it was not so much sad as self-indulgent, an excuse to give up young.

While they were chatting Bobby Lee came roaring up. He had been having bad back spasms lately and had been coming to Ruth for massages. She had once studied massage therapy and was good at unknotting muscles.

“Here comes a customer,” Duane said. “Bobby’s spasming again.”

Bobby Lee had his pager in his hand, the expensive pager Dickie had given him. It not only made him reachable, it gave him instant access to the latest news developments, not to mention sports scores and other odd tidbits of information.

“Did you hear?” he asked, when he came in the door.

“Hear what?”

“They found Jacy—at least they think so,” Bobby Lee said. “They’re checking dental records now. She was in a snowbank. An ice fisherman found her.”

“The old gang is dying off,” he added, looking as if he might cry. Although the over-the-top PSA reading had turned out to be a mistake—a lab assistant had forgotten to insert a critical decimal point—Bobby Lee was still prone to ferocious outbreaks of self-pity. The slightest mention of sex, or groins, or anything below the waist would usually cause him to burst into tears.

“It’s typical that she was found on the day Sonny was buried,” Ruth said. “Even dead he can’t escape her, the hussy. He and I might have gone on longer if it hadn’t been for her.”

She looked coldly at Bobby Lee, who was experiencing a fierce back spasm. He was tilted so far to the left that it seemed he might topple over.

“If that pager of yours is so wonderful, why can’t it tell you what’s wrong with your back?” she asked.

“My pager don’t diagnose illnesses,” Bobby Lee said. “It just keeps up with things like dead movie stars.”

He sat down in front of Ruth and she began to knead his back in a professional fashion.

“I think I’ll go,” Duane said.

“You must feel odd, Duane,” Ruth said. “Sonny was your first friend and Jacy was your first girlfriend. Bobby’s right. The old gang is dying off.”

“Yes, but it hasn’t been a gang in a long time, if it was ever a gang,” he said.

“Don’t you be cynical—of course it was a gang,” Ruth said.

“It might have been a gang when I was about fourteen,” Duane said.

“I had my first car wreck when I was nine,” Bobby Lee said. He hated to be left out of any conversation, even momentarily.

“It’s about time for me to go,” Ruth said. “When you’ve lived as long as I have you don’t have much of anybody left. Just ghosts.”

Duane stood up to leave but didn’t leave. He had not read his Proust that day and also needed to go check on the plowing, but he felt reluctant to leave Ruth and Bobby Lee.

“If there was more of us left we could have a wake,” Bobby Lee said. “I might be able to scare up a few drinkers if I cruised by the Dairy Queen.”

“You need to practice meditation,” Ruth told him, kneading his shoulder muscles. “Your back wouldn’t knot up like this if you took time to do a little meditation.”

“All I’ve got to meditate about is the fact that I’ve only got one ball and it’s hanging by a thread,” Bobby Lee said.

Duane left them to their quiet bickering, checked briefly on
the plowing, bought a bottle of whiskey, and walked out toward his cabin.

The cemetery was not much out of his way, so he veered by it, though to visit Karla, not Sonny—his grave was a raw scar near the west end of the cemetery. The twilight was lengthening; it would not be dark for a while yet. The air was unusually soft for March, though there was still plenty of opportunity for chilly weather.

He sat by his wife’s grave for an hour, getting quietly drunk, wondering what it might be that Karla would be happiest about if she were still alive. The fact that both her daughters had rich boyfriends would probably be one thing, presenting her, as it would, with fine trips in private jets as well as shopping opportunities on a world scale. The fact that Bubbles and Willy were taking French and wearing uniforms was more dicey—Karla had thought they were uppity even before they left Thalia.

“We’ll never be sophisticated, will we, Duane?” she asked him once, while she was leafing through an issue of
W
, a publication that fascinated her. “Just look at all these people having a party in Paris. Nearly every single one of them looks sophisticated.”

“It doesn’t mean they’re happy,” he said.

“It might not be total happiness but I’d be happier if I had a few of those clothes,” Karla said.

That conversation had occurred during the boom, when Karla had subscribed to many fashion magazines. She had even flown off to fashionable spas occasionally, once or twice with Jacy Farrow as her traveling companion.

“Planes fly from Dallas to Paris every day,” he pointed out. “I guess we could afford a few French clothes. Go, if you want to see Paris that much.”

“Duane, I can’t go, I don’t even speak the language,” Karla said. “Besides, Jacy says French people are snippy.”

“You’re snippy yourself, and so is Jacy,” he had pointed out.

“Just with you,” she said. “I’m nice as pie to the general public,” Karla said.

Karla had never gone to Paris. What French clothes she owned had been bought at Neiman Marcus, in Dallas. She had
gone to New York several times, but mainly, when she left home, she went to Los Angeles or Santa Fe.

But she had kept up her subscription to
W
long after the boom ended, by which time French clothes were well out of their reach. To the end, though, Karla had loved to look at pictures of elegant people at fancy parties in the expensive cities of the world: beautiful people, rich people, titled people, famous people—they all fascinated her.

In the cemetery where she lay there were no such people—there were just the humble people who had lived their lives in a small country town.

Duane felt a sadness settle over him, as he walked home. He felt that he ought to have done more for Karla, ought to have seen that she got to Paris, even if the French
were
snippy. He had got as far as investigating it once. They could have flown from Dallas straight to Paris. But one of the kids got sick and the Paris trip fell by the wayside; it became just one of those things that they never quite got around to.

Of course, they hadn’t foreseen the milk truck hurtling around the curve.

When he got to the cabin he tried to get back to his Proust, but he was too drunk to make sense of the long sentences. Instead he sat in his lawn chair most of the night, watching the clouds.

16

T
HE SECOND AND MUCH OF THE THIRD VOLUME
of Proust Duane took in gulps, between long and often tiring sessions in his garden. The spring and summer were both as harsh as he had expected them to be. No rain fell in April; only a little fell in May. Duane was forced to lay a more extensive irrigation system and be vigilant with his hose and his watering can. Thanks to his attention, many of the new vegetables he planted flourished. He had become interested in the Native Seeds movement—some of the varieties of corn he planted, as well as a few root vegetables, probably hadn’t been grown in that part of the country since the time of the Kickapoos. The fact that he had brought back crops that hadn’t been grown in or around Thalia in more than one hundred years was something he felt very good about.

By now his garden had become almost too famous. Many more people stopped than had stopped the year before, some of them knowledgeable gardeners who had come specifically in hopes of talking to him. Scarcely a day passed without his having to spend an hour or more in conversation with some passerby. People from ag schools began to show up, intense young agronomists from Texas A&M, Texas Tech, and the University of Oklahoma. Often their questions were so technical that Duane couldn’t answer them. At times his own ignorance left him abashed—he even toyed with the idea of enrolling in school, in
order to take a few courses in botany. He didn’t, probably because it was just the day-to-day gardening that he liked most.

With the garden occupying most of the daylight hours he had less and less time for the long book about spoiled and finicky people in Paris. He imagined them to be much like the people whose photographs Karla had studied so closely in the pages of
W
. He found little to interest him in their quarrels and their peculiarities. Only now and then a description of a garden or a park would catch his attention.

He considered simply abandoning the book and also the notion of going back to see Honor Carmichael. When he did leave his garden it was mainly to pedal to Wichita Falls and flirt with Maria. Their flirtation was pleasant, but it was also slowly growing more intense. Duane asked her once about her husband—he wanted to know if there was a rival he should be aware of.

“Husband? Which one?” Maria asked. “I’ve had three and you know how I feel now?
No más
, that’s how I feel now.
No más
.

“Doesn’t mean I don’t like fun,” she added, leaning closer to him. “Husbands, no—fun, that’s always good if you can get it.”

Duane knew that he and Maria were moving steadily closer to the moment when all that would be left to do would be to take each other to bed. He had begun to think about it a lot—so, clearly, had Maria.

And yet he kept on, irregularly, with Proust, gulping down thirty or even forty pages in the hot afternoons when to be in the garden was to risk sunstroke. He had read more than two-thirds of the books by then—he didn’t want to give up. Nor had he stopped thinking about Honor. His consciousness seemed to be saturated with plants and with women. When he wasn’t thinking about one, he was thinking about the other. In fantasy he switched restlessly back and forth, between Honor and Maria.

“Come by, you know,” Maria said, one day. She had a small house near the café. “My kids are grown. Come by—we could watch TV, you know.”

Duane was ready to take her up on it, but before they fixed a date Maria’s mother died and she had to rush back to Sonora, to look after her old father and an equally aged aunt. A month
passed, and she had not returned. When Duane asked about her the people she worked with were vague.

“Oh yeah, she’s coming back,” they said, but one month stretched into two.

Meanwhile his garden, in only its second year as a public garden, had changed into something Duane didn’t really like. It became too famous. Poor people still came and took food, but the easy attitude they had about it the first year changed. Some came and picked their vegetables defiantly, as if they were robbing the rich. Only rarely could he persuade them to try any of the new vegetables—they rejected anything that smacked of the exotic. They just grabbed a few beans, a few tomatoes, a little corn. The more unusual vegetables went to travelers or to the more knowledgeable gardeners who stopped by. Duane began to be troubled by the local people’s attitude toward the garden. Why did the poor people slink away so meekly if he happened to be there when they came to do their picking?

“Because you’re the squire,” Ruth said. “Nobody wants to risk upsetting the squire.”

“But I’m not a squire,” Duane protested. “Those people know better than that. They know me. I’ve lived here with them my whole life.”

“Don’t care, you’re still the squire,” Ruth insisted.

“If it’s going to be this way, then I won’t plant a garden next year,” Duane said. “I didn’t set out to be a famous gardener. Maybe I’ll go see the pyramids next summer. Let somebody else plant a damn garden.”

“Go ahead,” Ruth told him. “Maybe you’ll find a girlfriend over there in Egypt.”

“Ruth, I’m going because I want to see the pyramids,” he reminded her. “I’m not going halfway around the world just to look for a girlfriend.”

“I don’t know that you need an Egyptian but you do need to get married,” she told him. “You weren’t meant for solitude.”