Texasville (27 page)

“I don’t have any idea what they do,” he admitted.

Jacy looked amused. “You certainly have a dull attitude toward television,” she said. “What’s the point of it, if you’re not going to speculate about the sex lives of people on game shows?”

“I hardly ever watch game shows,” Duane said.

“I can see that,” Jacy said. She got out of bed, picked up her T-shirt and running shorts and went into the bathroom. She shut the door and came out a minute later, dressed. She reached around the TV and turned it off without looking at it.

“If I see another couple I’ll just get interested and you’ll have to sit here and be bored,” she said. “Come on, puppy, I guess we’re leaving our little home away from home.”

Once in the Mercedes she carefully buckled her seat belt, carefully locked the door and then leaned back against the door she had just locked and kicked off her sandals.

“Are you so far in debt that it would bother you to rub my feet?” she asked.

“Nope,” Duane said. He massaged one foot and then the other. Soon they passed Midland with its little cluster of skyscrapers. The skyscrapers, shrouded in a haze of dust, seemed as forlorn as the occasional hitchhikers they passed.

“You oughta watch more game shows,” Jacy said. “You see some lucky people on game shows.”

“It’s one thing I haven’t tried, getting on a game show,” Duane said.

“You’d just lose,” Jacy said. “You don’t have an open mind. A lot of people think soap operas are successful because they’re like life, but that’s horseshit. Soap operas are successful because they
aren’t
very much like life. Game shows are what’s really like life. You win things that look great at the time but turn out to be junk, and you lose things you might want to keep forever, just because you’re unlucky.”

She reached into the back seat, got her towel, wadded it into a pillow and was soon asleep.

From time to time, back through Big Spring and across the gray range country west of Abilene, Duane looked over at Jacy. In sleep some people became peaceful and looked younger. Karla did. No matter how hard her day, how filled with shouting, tears and trauma, sleep returned her beauty to her, and also her youth. Asleep, Karla could be taken for a woman in her late twenties.

With Jacy the opposite occurred. The deeper she sank into slumber, the more her unhappiness seeped into her face. She did not sleep silently, either. Occasionally she jerked and made sounds that were like grunts. The composure with which she carried herself soon vanished. Her body sagged; her mouth fell open.

Duane soon stopped looking at her—it seemed inconsiderate.
He felt depressed, not so much by the change in Jacy as by the change in everything.

He didn’t notice when she woke, but happened to glance over and catch her looking at him, her eyes big. The mere fact of waking had restored her dignity—she had not bothered to correct the sag of her body, but her look was tranquil, even a little amused.

“Well, you’re pretty good at foot rubs, but I don’t believe you get fucked every five minutes,” she said. “I guess married people always believe their mates are doing better than they are.”

“You’ve been married, I hear,” Duane said. “How’d you do?”

Jacy smiled. “I did fine,” she said.

CHAPTER 39

’ARE YOU REALLY ATTACHED TO THAT DOG?’
J
ACY
asked, when they drove up beside his pickup in the supermarket parking lot.

The question took Duane by surprise.

“He’s my dog,” he said. “Or else I’m his person, however you want to look at it.” Shorty, in the back seat, was looking particularly drunken. He was not the sort of creature one easily confessed an attachment to.

“I hate to tell you, but I think I’ve won him away from you, despite my vow not to,” Jacy said. “I think he’d go with me in a minute.”

“Well, he might,” Duane said, though previous to that moment infidelity was the last thing he would have accused Shorty of.

“Maybe it’s time you two tried a trial separation,” Jacy said. She was brushing her hair, but without much energy.

“You mean you want him?” Duane asked. “You want Shorty?”

“Well, kind of,” Jacy said, grinning.

“He’s probably the single most hated animal in Hardtop County,” Duane said. “He’s more hated than any living thing in these parts, people included.”

“He might just be misunderstood,” Jacy said. “Maybe he just needs a good woman’s love.”

Duane realized that she really wanted Shorty. He had assumed at first that she was only joking. He looked so puzzled that Jacy laughed.

“Come on, he’s not Hitler, he’s just a dog,” she said. “I’m too alone, Duane. I have to start trying to let some living creature back in my life, even if it’s just your scroungy old dog. Just tell me what to feed him—I wouldn’t want to hurt his digestion.”

“Shorty’s digestion?” Duane said, his amazement growing. Shorty had eaten parts of several human elbows, along with a great variety of dog food, road kill and scraps. It had never occurred to anyone that his digestion need be considered.

“Feed him dead skunks,” he said. “Feed him ground-up rocks or nearly anything else.”

“Can I have him, then?” Jacy asked.

“Yeah, if you really want him,” Duane said, though he realized it was all happening too fast for him to believe.

“Thanks,” Jacy said. “I just want to try a companion and see how it works out. Otherwise there’s a big chance I’ll spend the rest of my life totally alone.”

“But you wouldn’t want to try a human companion?” Duane asked.

Duane got out. He felt the conversation was unfinished in some way, but he didn’t know how to finish it.

“Thanks for letting me have the dog,” Jacy said. “And for showing me the ugliest town in the world.”

“I’m glad you could come,” he said. “We didn’t really catch up, though.”

Jacy scooted under the wheel.

“Let’s not bother catching up,” she said. “I hate talking about the past, and not just because Benny got killed. And if there’s one person I really don’t want to talk about the past with it’s my first boyfriend.”

She looked at him with sudden hostility, a spot of color in her pale cheeks.

“I’m sorry,” Duane said. “It’s just one of those things you say. I guess it was stupid to say it.”

Jacy was squeezing the steering wheel of the Mercedes. He could see her hands tightening on it.

Duane was not quite sure what he had said wrong, or what he might say to correct it. He felt very awkward.

“I’m real glad you went with me,” he said finally.

Jacy gave him an irritated look and then relaxed and leaned back in the seat.

“Yeah,” she said. “I liked that motel room. The longer I lived in Europe the more American I felt. Staying in a motel room like that was perfect. That motel room was pretty American.”

She started the car. Shorty was wide-awake—Duane thought there was a good chance that he would try to jump out of the window as soon as he realized that a momentous change was about to take place in his life.

To make Shorty aware of just how momentous, he walked over to his pickup and opened the door.

“Hey, tell that woman I’ll be Eve,” Jacy said. “I’ve gotta stop being so reclusive. Causing the fall of humanity might be just the kind of challenge I need.”

“She’ll be thrilled to hear that you want to do it,” Duane said.

Jacy looked at him for a moment and then drove slowly off. Duane was not sure what the look meant. The Mercedes turned toward the street and then made a slow circle and came back toward him. Obviously she had had second thoughts about Shorty, Duane thought.

But Jacy completed her circle and drove slowly up to where he stood, his pickup door open.

“Hey, I’m not mad at you, honey pie,” she said, smiling.

Then she drove on and turned up the highway. Duane waited for Shorty to come flying out of the car. Soon he would be racing back on his little short legs. But in a minute the Mercedes was no more that a dot, and the racing Shorty did not appear.

“Shorty, you’re too damn dumb even to know what’s happening,” Duane said, though all the way to Thalia he expected to see his dog running back to him.

CHAPTER 40

U
NDER THE CIRCUMSTANCES
D
UANE FOUND THE
centennial meeting hard to focus on. He spent much of it wondering what Jacy and Shorty were doing. Several times he lost track of the agenda, causing Suzie and Jenny to look at him anxiously. He was as absent on this occasion as Sonny was during his lapses.

Sonny, fortunately, showed no trace of his problem and conducted much of the meeting himself. Few of the issues to be settled were large. Jenny, the universal den mother, was in charge of getting people to take tickets, run concessions, print programs, pick up trash, etc., and she delivered a brisk report on her efforts to line up volunteers.

Meanwhile Suzie Nolan smiled her mysterious, unusually fetching smile. Duane decided she smiled that way because for some reason she looked at life happily, unlike almost everyone else he knew. Suzie didn’t tax herself with knowledge of the world and was not even particularly interested in what was going on in Thalia. She took the committee work, like almost everything else, lightly. The burning issues over which the
committee raged did not burn for Suzie. She took her days slow, watching a little television, reading a fat paperback romance, doing a little washing, delivering her kids to the athletic events in which they always triumphed. She might wash a window if one seemed particularly dirty, she might do a spot of yard work; but she was always happy to lay aside her modest chores or her fat paperbacks if Duane showed up. Adultery interested her more than dirty windows, but neither blemished her serenity.

“It’s funny,” she reflected. “I was totally faithful to Junior for fifteen years. Then we got rich and that loosened me up. Then we went broke and I was all loosened up and started sleeping with Dickie. Now Junior’s gone and all I can think of is that there’s lots more room in the house.

“A six-foot-five man takes up a lot of room,” she added.

Duane found that he had to grit his teeth when Suzie talked about Dickie, as she did frequently. Just as Duane would conclude that he was beginning to be in love with Suzie, a conclusion based on what seemed to him an unusually good sexual relationship, she would drift casually into a conversation about what a prize Dickie was. Duane found himself becoming more and more passionate about her. Suzie seemed richly responsive, and yet it became increasingly clear that she regarded him as someone sweet and cuddly. It was Dickie who elicited more lip-smacking remarks.

“That Billie Anne probably don’t know what a prize she’s got,” Suzie said. “She’s not old enough to know. You should be proud of yourself, Duane, for having a son like that.”

The remark came while Duane was putting on his socks—he continued to fail in his resolve to keep them on.

“I guess I am proud,” he said, though in fact he felt a little chagrined. Several times he wanted to ask what Dickie did that was so special, but he always changed his mind and choked off the question. If he himself hadn’t done it yet, or done it as well, then it was probably better not to know.

Had he asked, though, he had no doubt that Suzie would have told him. She was quiet, but not reticent, and would describe her own sexual responses as casually as if she were reporting on a high school basketball game. She regarded her
body complacently and took attentive, though not compulsive, care of it. She considered it a handy plaything and frequently played with it. She loved to take little naps—her “yawny” periods, she called them—and upon awakening would always let her hand stray downward to give herself a little touch. It seemed to Duane that she spent much of the day in light masturbation, frequently interrupted but just as frequently resumed. Her mysterious smile contained a large component of laziness—Suzie was always willing just to lay back and rest, and usually willing to let someone do to her what she had just been doing to herself.

“That Dickie,” she said often. “That little rat, he’s just a treasure.”

Duane spent much of the meeting wondering what his son had to offer that caused women to talk about him with such appetite.

The Reverend G. G. Rawley had been sullenly silent throughout the last two meetings. Duane knew it was a tactical silence. G.G. was just waiting. He had taken to bringing his Bible to the meetings. When a proposal came up that seemed to him to be in patent violation of the Scriptures, he would tap the Bible with a heavy forefinger. Now and then he would open it, purse his lips and pretend that he was reading the rule that had just been violated. He became a kind of silent umpire, calling moral balls and strikes in his head—mainly strikes. His attitude became patiently condescending. When the time came, the Lord’s team would annihilate the sinners’ team with a few towering home runs.

The last item on the agenda that evening was the selection of a carpenter to build the replica of Texasville on the courthouse lawn. It was to be called Old Texasville, to help people get the point.

“That which the heathen raises up can always be struck by lightning,” G.G. pointed out. “And if it ain’t rainy it can be struck with crowbars and a sledgehammer or two.”

Duane awoke from his revery about what Jacy and Shorty might be doing to discover that the committee was about to award the plum assignment of building Old Texasville to none other than Richie Hill, the one carpenter in town that he couldn’t stand.

“I don’t think much of Richie’s work,” he said. “He can’t even put in a garbage disposal right.”

The committee looked embarrassed.

“But Duane,” Jenny said, “we just voted to give it to him. We thought you were abstaining.”

Duane felt silly. He had not even noticed the vote. Now if he tried to wrest the job away from Richie everyone would know the carpenter had once had an affair with his wife.

“Well, it’s hard to have confidence in a man who can’t put in a garbage disposal,” he said lightly, and let the matter drop.

He was halfway home before he remembered that Janine thought she was pregnant. He had promised her he would come by. He swung around in the road and drove back to Thalia. Without Shorty in the front seat the pickup seemed strangely light—even a little unbalanced, although Shorty only weighed thirty pounds.