Texasville (2 page)

Duane had once pointed out to her that their children weren’t ugly.

“They got personalities like wild dogs, but at least they’re good-looking,” he said.

“That’s true, they take after me,” Karla said. Her complexion was the envy of every woman she knew. Karla’s skin was like cream with a bit of cinnamon sprinkled on it.

Dickie, their twenty-one-year-old son, had been voted Most Handsome Boy in Thalia High School, both his junior and senior years. Nellie had been Most Beautiful Girl her sophomore year, but had lost out the next two years thanks to widespread envy among the voters. Jack and Julie were the best-looking twins in Texas, so far as anyone knew. Dickie made most of his living peddling marijuana, and Nellie—with three marriages in a year and a half—would probably pass Elizabeth Taylor on the marriage charts before she was twenty-one, but no one could deny that they were good-looking kids.

Karla, at forty-six, remained optimistic enough to believe almost everything she saw printed on a T-shirt. Duane was more skeptical. He had started poor, become rich, and now was losing money so rapidly that he had come to doubt that much of anything was true, in any sense. He had eight hundred and fifty dollars in the bank and debts of roughly twelve million, a situation that was becoming increasingly untenable.

Duane twirled the chamber of the .44. His hand ached a little. The big gun had a kick.

“You know what I hate worse than anything in the world?” Karla asked.

“No, and I’m not going to guess,” Duane said.

Karla laughed. “It’s not you, Duane,” she said.

She had another T-shirt which read,
I’VE GOT THE SADDLE, WHERE’S THE HORSE
? It was, it seemed to her, a painfully clear reference to Mel Tillis’s sexiest song, “I’ve Got the Horse if You’ve Got the Saddle.” But of course no one in Thalia caught the allusion. When she wore it, all that happened was that men tried to sell her overpriced quarter horses.

“The thing I hate most in the world is blister bugs,” Karla said. “I wanta hire a wetback to help me with this garden.”

“I don’t know why you plant such a big garden,” Duane said. “We couldn’t eat that many tomatoes if we ate twenty-four hours a day.”

“I was raised to be thrifty,” Karla said.

“Why’d you buy that BMW then?” Duane asked. “You could have bought a pickup if you wanted to be thrifty. A BMW won’t last a week on these roads.”

Their new house was five miles from town, dirt roads all the way. When they started building the house they intended to pave the road themselves, but the boom ended before they even got the house built, and it was clear that dirt roads would be their destiny for some time to come.

Duane had started hating the new house before the foundation was laid. He would have moved tomorrow, but he was surrounded by a wall of debtors, and anyway Karla loved the house and would have resisted any suggestion that they face up to straitened circumstances and try to sell it as soon as the paint dried.

He poked the barrel of the .44 into the water. Refraction made the barrel seem to grow. Shorty moved closer to the edge of the hot tub and peered in at it. Everything Duane did seemed interesting to Shorty. Many human actions were incomprehensible to him, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t watch.

“Duane, why are you poking that gun in the water?” Karla asked.

“I was thinking of shooting my dick off,” he said. “It’s caused me nothing but trouble my whole life.”

Karla took that news with equanimity. She scratched her
shapely calf. Karla believed that the way not to have your figure ruined by childbearing was to have your kids young and then get tied off. Shortly after producing Nellie she got tied off, but ten years later something came untied. Intermittently religious, she decided it must be God’s will that they have twins. It should have been medically impossible—and besides that, she and Duane only rarely made love.

But one afternoon, after ten days of rain, with the rigs all shut down, they did make love and the twins resulted. During the pregnancy Karla tried to cheer herself up by imagining that she was about to produce little human angels, perfect in every way. Why else would God give her twins when her husband wasn’t even giving her a sex life?

The twins were born, and as soon as Jack grew four teeth he bit completely through his sister’s ear. The angel theory was discarded—indeed, while sitting in the emergency room getting Julie’s ear fixed Karla stopped being religious for good.

Jack and Julie were terrible babies. They bit and clawed one another like little beasts. They shouldered one another out of their baby bed, and stuffed toys in one another’s mouths. As soon as they could lift things they hit each other with whatever they could lift. It seemed to Karla that she spent more and more of her life in emergency rooms—indeed, the twins were not safe from themselves even there. Once Julie grabbed some surgical scissors off a tray and jabbed her brother in the ear with them.

“My kids believe in an ear for an ear,” Karla told her friends, who enjoyed gallows humor.

She learned never to take the twins to the hospital at the same time: there were too many weapons in hospitals.

In time Karla concluded that the twins’ conception had nothing to do with Divine Will, and everything to do with medical incompetence. She wanted to bring a malpractice suit against Doctor Deckert, the young general practitioner who tied her off.

“No, you can’t sue him,” Duane said. “You might run him off, and if you do half the people in town will die of minor ailments.”

“Shit, what about us?” Karla said. “We got a life sentence because of him.”

Shortly after that Karla had a T-shirt printed which read,
INSANITY IS THE BEST REVENGE
. The line wasn’t original with her, nor was it from a hillbilly song. She had seen it on a bumper sticker and liked it.

In fact, Karla found almost as many important truths on bumper stickers as she found in songs. One which hewed very closely to her own philosophy of life said,
IF YOU LOVE SOMETHING SET IT FREE. IF IT DOESN’T RETURN IN A MONTH OR TWO HUNT IT DOWN AND KILL IT.

With more amusement than alarm, she watched Duane point the pistol into the water.

“Duane, I don’t think you ought to try and shoot your dick off,” she said.

“Why not?” he asked. “It don’t work half the time anyway.”

“Well, I wouldn’t be the one to know about that,” Karla said. “But it’s a small target and if you miss you’ll just ruin our new hot tub.”

She laughed loudly at her own wit. Shorty, excited by the laughter, began to roll around on the redwood deck. He attempted to bite his own tail and came close to nipping it a time or two.

“Don’t sulk, Duane,” Karla said. “You left yourself wide open for that one.”

She stood up and kicked Shorty lightly in the ribs. Shorty was too excited by the pursuit of his own tail to take any notice.

“I guess I’ll go in and see if I can talk Nellie into acting like a parent for a few minutes,” Karla said.

Duane took the gun out of the water. In the far corner of the vast yard the new white satellite dish was tilted skyward, its antenna pointed toward a spot somewhere over the equator. The dish was the most expensive one available in Dallas. Before they had even got it aligned properly Karla had gone to Dallas and returned with a Betamax, a VHS and four thousand dollars’ worth of movies she had purchased from a video store. So far they had only watched two of them:
Coal Miner’s Daughter,
which Karla and Nellie watched once or twice a week, and a sex movie called
Hot Channels.

Duane pointed out to her that it was possible to rent movies. They could even be rented from Sonny Crawford’s small convenience store, in Thalia.

“I know that, Duane,” Karla said. “Just because I’m horny don’t mean I’m dumb. The ones I want to see are always checked out, though.”

However, on her next visit to Dallas she considerately bought only eight hundred dollars’ worth of movies.

Duane had been in the hot tub nearly half an hour and was beginning to feel a little bleached. He climbed out and dried himself and his pistol. He felt weary—very weary. Sometimes he would wake up in the night needing to relieve himself and would feel so tired by the time he stumbled into the bathroom that he would have to sit on the pot and nap for a few minutes before going back to bed. Getting rich had been tiring, but nothing like as tiring as going broke.

The minute Duane climbed out, Shorty stopped rolling around on the deck and raced across the yard to park himself expectantly beside Duane’s pickup. He knew it was almost time for Duane to go to town, and he was ready to roll.

CHAPTER 2

O
N THE WAY TO TOWN DUANE GOT ON THE
CB
AND
tried to check in with Ruth Popper, his outspoken secretary, who was actually no more outspoken than Karla, his wife, or Janine Wells, his girlfriend, or Minerva, his maid.

While he was becoming rich, the women in his life had become outspoken. He had stopped being rich, but they had not stopped being outspoken. Any one of them would argue with a skillet, or with whatever was being cooked in the skillet, or with whoever came by—Duane himself, usually—to eat what was being cooked.

He didn’t really want to talk to Ruth, but there was always the faint chance that oil prices had risen during the night, in which case somebody with a little credit left might want an oil well drilled.

The CB crackled, but Ruth didn’t answer. Shorty watched the CB alertly. At first he had barked his characteristic piercing bark every time it crackled, but after Duane had whacked him with his work gloves several hundred times Shorty got the message and stopped barking at it, though he continued to
watch it alertly in case whatever was in it popped out and attacked Duane.

Just as the pickup swung onto the highway leading into Thalia, Ruth Popper jogged off the pavement and began to run up the dirt road. Ruth was a passionate jogger. She passed so close to the pickup that Duane could have leaned out and hit her in the head with a hammer—though only if he’d been quick. Despite her age, Ruth was speedy. She wore earphones and had a Walkman, a speedometer, and various other gadgets attached to her belt as she ran. She also carried an orange weight in each hand.

She showed no sign of being aware that she had just passed within a yard of her boss and his dog. Feeling slightly foolish, Duane hung up the CB and watched her recede in the rearview mirror, her feet throwing up neat identical puffs of dust from the powdery road.

Ruth Popper was the only person left in Thalia who had preserved a belief in exercise, now that the oil boom was over. It had taken the greatest bonanza in local memory to popularize exercise among people who had worked too hard all their lives to give it the least thought, but once it caught on it caught on big.

Duane himself started jogging four miles a day, and devoted an evening or two a week to racquetball at the Wichita Falls country club. Roughnecks and farmers, finding themselves suddenly rich, floundered painfully over the county’s gravelly roads in their expensive running shoes.

In the case of Jimbo Jackson, briefly the richest person in the county, a devotion to exercise had tragic results: a truckful of his own roughnecks, on their way to set pipe on one of his own wells, ran over him. Two or three trucks were ahead of them, carrying pipe to other wells, and Jimbo, flopping along patiently in the choking dust, not far from his newly completed mansion, accidentally veered into the middle of the road. The roughnecks thought they had hit a yearling—Jimbo was not small—but when they got out to look, discovered they had killed their boss.

The local paper, in a mournful editorial, advised joggers to keep to the bar ditches—a stance that infuriated Karla.

“The bar ditches are full of chiggers and rattlesnakes,” she said. “What does he think this is, the Cots wolds?”

Duane wondered if it could be Cotswold, Kansas, she was referring to. During the virtually sleepless year when he had driven a cattle truck, Karla had sometimes come with him on his runs. He was just back from Korea; they were just married. It seemed to him he had passed through a town called Cotswold, though it might have been in Nebraska or even Iowa. But it didn’t seem to him that the bar ditches in Kansas could be that much better to jog in than the bar ditches in Texas.

“Duane, it’s in England,” Karla said. “Don’t you remember? We read about it in that airlines magazine the time we took the kids to Disneyland.”

Duane didn’t enjoy being reminded of the time they took the kids to Disneyland. Jack had almost succeeded in drowning Julie on the log ride. Dickie, who hated to spend money on anything except drugs, got caught shoplifting. He tried to steal his girlfriend a stuffed gorilla from one of the gift shops. Nellie disappeared completely, having decided to run off to Guaymas with a young Mexican she met on one of the rides. They stopped in Indio so Nellie could call her boyfriend in Thalia and tell him she was breaking off their engagement. The boyfriend managed to reach Karla and Duane, and the runaways were stopped at the Arizona line.

Nine months later, having married and divorced the boy she had meant to break up with, Nellie had Little Mike, their first grandchild. He did not look Hispanic, or bear any resemblance to the husband she had had so briefly.

“They say travel’s broadening,” Karla remarked, on the flight home from Disneyland.

Duane looked up just in time to see Jack slip two ice cubes from his Coke down the neck of a little old woman who had been brought on board in a wheelchair and dumped in the seat in front of him.

“Whoever said that never traveled with our kids,” Duane said as the old lady began to writhe in her seat. “I’m telling you right now I’ll commit suicide before I’ll go anywhere with them again.”

He glanced at Julie to see what evil she might be contemplating.
Julie wore dark glasses with huge purple frames. She had a teen magazine spread over her lap and her hand under the magazine. Duane decided to his horror that she was playing with her crotch.

“What did you say, Duane?” Karla asked. “I was reading and didn’t hear.”