Texasville (22 page)

Duane went back in to find Karla looking at his yearbook. She had it open to the page with the homecoming photographs and was reading what Jacy had written across their picture.

“Well, she didn’t love you forever, did she, Duane?” Karla said.

“Nope,” he said.

Karla closed the book. “Duane, are you sad?” she asked.

“I guess,” he said.

“Why? You can tell me. I’m your wife,” Karla said.

Duane felt the beginnings of a headache. He went in the bathroom and splashed cold water on his forehead for a while. Sometimes that stopped headaches. He wet a washrag with cold water and when he lay back down put the washrag across his forehead.

“It’s a lot better if a husband and wife communicate and tell
one another the reasons when they’re happy or sad,” Karla said.

“Well,” Duane said, and got no farther. He was thinking of Junior. From feeling sorry for him he had begun to envy him. Junior had taken less than a minute to fall asleep in the lawn chair. Perhaps he was already in the midst of a nice dream. He could be dreaming of his years of wealth, when two thirds of the wells he drilled turned out to be producers. Or he might be dreaming of even earlier years, when his passionate young wife had still wanted him. The moment he had fallen asleep the sadness had left his face, to be replaced by a look of peace.

Duane wished he could gain peace so easily. His own dreams were of bank meetings or of obscure but total breakdowns at one of the rigs. His dreams only left him the more tired.

“You don’t look too happy yourself,” he said to Karla.

“No, because I was brought up to believe it’s a wife’s duty to make her husband happy and you’re laying there with a rag on your head looking as sad as a hound dog,” Karla said.

“I’m not
that
sad,” Duane said. “I’m just a little miserable.”

“Is it because I spent sixty thousand on a duplex we can’t afford?” she asked. “I was just thinking it would be nice if the children had a decent place to be married in.”

“It would be even nicer if the children would stay married a decent length of time,” Duane said.

“Do you think we raised them wrong?” Karla asked.

Duane tried to think back over the years when they had been raising Dickie and Nellie, before the twins were born. It seemed to him they had done all the things parents were supposed to do. They had taken the children to Sunday school, made them do chores, spanked them for particularly gross behavior, given them lavish praise when they were good. Obviously their attention had slipped at some point, but he was too tired to try and pick out the point, and so far his headache wasn’t letting up.

“It makes me nervous when you don’t answer me, Duane,” Karla said.

“I’ve got a headache,” Duane said. “I can’t think of too many answers when I’ve got a headache.”

“It makes me feel guilty when you get those headaches,” Karla said. “It’s probably because of me that you’re so stressed.”

“Blame it on OPEC,” Duane said. “It’s simpler, and we can both go to sleep.”

Karla got out of bed, put on her gown and came back to bed. She picked up the remote TV control and roved through the channels for a minute before switching it off.

“Every night there’s less and less on TV,” she said.

“Karla, stop worrying,” Duane said. “It’s not much of a headache, and it’s not your fault.”

“I didn’t really mean to spend all that money today,” Karla said. “I guess it would have been better if we’d never got rich. I started spending money and now I can’t stop. Every time I go to Dallas I think I’ll buy one dress and then I buy ten.”

“It’s not the dresses, it’s the oil rigs,” he said. “A thousand dresses doesn’t cost as much as one of those fuckers.”

“Jacy’s real curious about you,” Karla said. “I think sometimes she wishes she had just stayed here and married you.”

Duane didn’t believe for a minute that Jacy wished anything of the kind. His curiosity was piqued, but he could tell from Karla’s wide eyes that one question from him would set loose a manic flow of talk, which might flow for hours. He decided against setting it loose.

“You never did tell me why you were sad,” Karla reminded him.

Duane couldn’t remember, if he had ever known. His memory of the evening didn’t want to go back farther than the time he spent splashing cold water on his forehead. The washrag wasn’t cool anymore. He wished he had more cold water, but didn’t feel like getting up to get it.

“I wasn’t as sad as a hound dog,” he said, hoping to reassure his wife.

“No, but your face gets kind of long when you’re real depressed,” Karla said.

She got up, unbidden, went to the kitchen, and returned with a large bowl filled with ice and water. She wet the washrag in the icy water, squeezed it out and returned it to him. It was very cold.

“Thanks,” Duane said.

“I guess I’d just like to lead a sensible life,” he added, thinking about the question of his sadness. “Do you think this is a sensible life?”

Karla had turned on a tiny reading light and was leafing through a
Play girl.

“It may not be too sensible but at least we know the difference between a platonic relationship and a Japanese pickup,” she said.

CHAPTER 31

D
UANE SOON FOUND IT ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO
leave Thalia without Jenny Marlow catching him and demanding to ride wherever he was going. There were four roads out of town and his attempted exits became a game of tic-tac-toe, which Jenny almost always won. She seemed to have nothing to do but lay ambushes.

If he went north, toward Rising Star, she usually flagged him down at Aunt Jimmie’s Lounge. If he tried to make a break to the south, she headed him off at Sonny’s carwash. If he went west, she caught him at the Dairy Queen. And if he attempted a dash toward Wichita Falls, she would zip out of the alley behind the grocery store and honk until he pulled over.

It was true that he could have sneaked out along the little paved road that ran behind the cemetery, rejoining one of the major arteries a few miles out, but for years he had been accustomed to merely driving out of town at will, and he always forgot about Jenny until she roared up behind him and began to honk.

The sound of honking would catapult Shorty into a maddening
sequence of loud yips, which only a forceful beating with the work glove would silence. Duane decided travel was hardly worth it.

It was not that Jenny was seeking romance—apparently romance was the farthest thing from her mind. The thing closest to her mind was her new job as director of the centennial pageant, a job that had fallen to her by default.

The gentleman from Brooklyn who had been a tentative candidate to direct the pageant had not exactly worked out, a fact that was really no fault of his own. His name was Sally Balducci. Duane had finally persuaded the committee to bring him down for an interview, although the committee was not without qualms.

“I never heard of a man named Sally,” Jenny said. “I hope he isn’t a transvestite.”

“Or if he is, I hope he’s good enough to fool G.G.,” Duane said.

Sally Balducci was definitely not a transvestite. He was a short, fat gentleman with bushy gray curls who arrived wearing a green sports coat and a wide white tie, casually knotted. He got off the commuter plane that had brought him from Dallas groaning and holding his hands over his ears. Apparently the little plane had not been pressurized adequately.

While waiting for his luggage, Sally Balducci reeled around the little airport, weeping. He muttered in a strange dialect, frightening the few elderly matrons who had flown in with him. Occasionally he groaned loudly and kicked the wall of the airport.

To Duane’s dismay, the flight seemed to have rendered Sally stone deaf. As he drove into Thalia he kept whacking his head with the heel of his hand in hopes of getting his hearing started again. It didn’t work. He looked with an expression of profound sadness at the few dusty buildings that made up the town.

Duane took him home and gave him two or three of Karla’s quart-sized vodka tonics, which unfortunately put him to sleep. Efforts to awaken him were unsuccessful. He slept most of the night in a lawn chair by the pool, just as Junior Nolan had a few nights before Sally’s arrival.

He missed the committee meeting at which he was supposed
to be interviewed, giving G. G. Rawley the opportunity to lecture everyone for fifteen minutes on the unreliability of papists.

Sally awoke in the wee small hours and watched a sumo wrestling match with Minerva. His deafness did not abate, though Minerva, ever the skeptic, claimed he could hear perfectly well.

“That man can hear a worm crawl,” she claimed. “He don’t want to hear. If he could, he might have to stay around here all summer putting on that stupid pageant.”

That was not likely, for the committee had hardened its heart against the man. That afternoon, in a twenty-minute rump session held in Sonny’s laundrymat, the committee voted to make Jenny director of the pageant. Meanwhile Sally sulked in Duane’s pickup, growing hotter and hotter. Out of sympathy Duane drove him to Dallas so he wouldn’t have to ride the commuter plane again. Jenny rode along. She had the script of the pageant with her, but Sally was in such a foul mood that he refused to look at it. The minute they arrived at the airport he headed for the bar.

On the way home Jenny hauled out the script and began to brood about casting. It was not lost on anyone that the centennial was thundering down on them. Beards were sprouting on male faces all over the county, including Duane’s.

“Please say you’ll play Adam,” Jenny said. “If you’ll just play Adam it might give me some confidence. It’s one of the best parts.”

Duane had already agreed to play George Washington. The thought of playing Adam didn’t excite him. “I’ve already grown a beard,” he pointed out. “I don’t think Adam had a beard.”

He was rather vain about his beard, which was thicker and glossier than many of the beards under cultivation. Both Bobby Lee and Eddie Belt sported scraggly growths that made them look like depraved fugitives from a chain-saw movie.

In general the beard ordinance was creating anxiety. A water tank had been hauled onto the courthouse lawn but nobody had been ducked yet. Duane’s son-in-law-to-be, Joe Coombs, was a likely candidate for ducking because he kept stumbling
up every morning or two and shaving off his new beard before he was fully awake.

“Why don’t you get Dickie to play Adam?” Duane suggested. “He thinks he
is
Adam.”

“What makes you think I’d ever speak to him again, the little rat!” Jenny said.

Duane recalled that Suzie Nolan had also called Dickie a little rat. He himself had not seen the little rat lately. Evidently he and Billie Anne were in a phase of wedded bliss. Karla kept Billie Anne on the phone at least an hour a day making sure her baby boy was being cared for properly. When Duane attempted to lecture her about interfering mother-in-laws he was met with stony looks.

“He’s my own child, I don’t guess I have to stop being interested in him just because he married some girl we barely know,” Karla said. “She might not know about botulism and things.”

“Botulism?” Duane said. “After all the drugs that kid’s taken, a little spot of botulism wouldn’t stand a chance.”

Meanwhile it seemed a long ride home. Duane wondered if there was anyone else in town Jenny might enjoy going on rides with.

He didn’t dislike her. He was even rather interested in her—he was getting on quite well with one of his son’s former girlfriends; perhaps he would get along well with another. But Jenny, like Karla, contained a manic stream of talk, and in her case he didn’t have to say a word to unleash the flood. The minute she sat down in the car seat, the stream flowed out over a somnolent Shorty, who had gotten so used to Jenny that he went to sleep the moment she began to talk.

“It sure is a good thing Lester fell in love,” Jenny said. “I’d never have the energy to direct this pageant if I had to keep breaking his heart three times a day.”

“It’s kind of lucky for Lester too,” Duane observed.

Jenny looked startled for a second, as if it had not really occurred to her that Lester might not enjoy having his heart broken three times a day.

“Do you think Jacy would ever agree to be in the pageant?” she asked. “She’d be a good Eve.”

Duane said nothing, but Shorty opened one red eye for a moment.

“Maybe Karla wouldn’t mind asking her,” Jenny said. “I’d never have the nerve to ask her myself.”

“I guess you could try asking Karla,” he said. He had no idea what protocol prevailed in Karla’s friendship with Jacy. Karla gave out no details about their activities. When she mentioned Jacy at all her references were apt to be cryptic.

“Jacy’s only been married to Frenchmen,” she said one day. “All her husbands were Frenchmen.”

Duane waited hopefully, but further details were not forthcoming.

“Her children speak perfect English,” she said, at another time. “They teach kids to speak a bunch of languages over there.”

Nellie, fallen from perfection, was sprawled on a couch, watching a game show and listening to Joe Coombs breathe into the telephone. Duane tried to remember when he’d even heard Nellie speak a complete sentence in any language, but decided he would only get depressed if he started comparing his children to Jacy’s. Maybe hers weren’t really as brilliant as Karla made them sound.

Jenny Marlow was rereading the Texasville skit, lead pencil in hand.

“I think I’m getting an anxiety attack,” she said. “I never expected to be made director of the whole pageant.”

“Duane, if I let you out of playing George Washington, will you play one of the Mr. Browns in the Texasville skit?” she asked, a little later.

“Which would I be, the one who drank himself to death, or the one who lived with rattlesnakes?” he asked.

“Ed Brown, the rattlesnake one,” Jenny said. “There’s a legend that he used to carry the snakes around at night. He’d have them wrapped around his arms and even around his neck. He’d sing and the snakes would rattle and hiss. They say they made a rhythm sort of like a cha-cha.”