Texasville (30 page)

Duane looked in the storeroom. The twins were there all right, sitting on their sleeping bags watching rock videos on a small TV which sat on some cartons of canned chili. Before leaving home they had given themselves punk hairdos. They both wore dark glasses. They had managed to turn the storeroom into a small but well-equipped apartment. Among the modern conveniences it contained was their mother’s brand-new compact-disk player and a tote bag full of compact disks.

“Hello,” Duane said.

The twins stared at him from behind their dark glasses. Although their hair had become different colors, they had never seemed more twinlike. They were totally expressionless.

“I hope Bobby Lee don’t wander in here,” Duane said. “If he was to, he’d probably have a heart attack. He’d think you were Libyan terrorists.”

“We won’t hurt Bobby Lee,” Jack said. “He’s not on our list.”

“Well, who is on your list?” Duane asked.

“They’ll find out when we strike,” Julie said.

Duane took a seat on some crates of dishwashing liquid.

“You look kinda settled in,” he said.

“We’re gonna live here,” Julie said. “It’s more interesting than living at home. Uncle Sonny says we can shower in the hotel when we get dirty.”

“I don’t see how anything could be more interesting than living at our house,” Duane said. “Seems to me life at our house is a thrill a minute. Just last night we had three people lost, for example.”

The twins didn’t regard that remark as worth answering. They turned their attention back to the video.

Duane saw no point in attempting to drag them back home. The storeroom seemed like a peaceful environment; if anything he felt rather envious of them for finding it first.

“It wouldn’t hurt you to give your mother a call,” he said.

“She’d just try to browbeat us into giving back the CDs,” Jack said.

“I think she’s more worried about your safety than she is about the CDs,” Duane said.

“She can find us if she really looks,” Julie said. “Our bicycles are right outside.”

“Okay,” Duane said. “Don’t get in Genevieve’s way, though. Or Sonny’s.”

“We’re going to help him at night,” Jack said. “He forgets how to do the cash register, but don’t worry, we won’t let him get robbed.”

“Maybe I’ll stop in once in a while,” Duane said.

He drove out to Suzie Nolan’s. Suzie was in the backyard in a hammock Junior had strung for her. She was still in her blue
nightgown and was leafing through a fat paperback called
Isle of Passion.

“Dickie came by last night,” she said, yawning cheerfully. “I told him it was about time he came by, the little rat.”

Duane hadn’t been sure what tack to try and take with Suzie. The news of Dickie made him even less sure. He pulled up a lawn chair.

“I ought to get dressed and go to Wichita,” Suzie said. “The kids are both in the finals of the tennis tournament. But they’re always in the finals of something, and they always win. Do you think I’m a bad mother for not wanting to go?”

“Yes,” Duane said. He felt rather annoyed with Suzie in general.

Suzie seemed undismayed by his disapproval. She marked her place in the fat paperback with a nail file and idly touched herself here and there.

“I sorta wish you’d let Junior come home,” he said. “He’s in pretty bad shape, and having those loans called didn’t help.”

“I’m a bad everything,” Suzie said. “Bad wife and bad mother too.”

Duane didn’t comment.

“After a night with Dickie there’s nothing nicer than just lying in a hammock,” Suzie said.

The recognition that she was a bad wife and mother was clearly not causing her much mental anguish. Duane knew his own position was weak, since he had helped make certain negative contributions to her record as a wife.

“I’m really worried about Junior,” he said. “I don’t think Junior’s gonna make it unless he gets a little more support.”

“He could get a girlfriend if he’d just start wearing his hat more so his sunburn wouldn’t always be peeling,” Suzie said.

“I guess if worst comes to worst I can get a job,” she said. “I can clerk in a drugstore or something. But I don’t want Junior to come home.”

“Don’t you like him at all?” Duane asked. He himself liked Junior. Suzie seemed to like almost everyone else in her life. It struck him as sad that she had hardened her heart against her own unfortunate husband, of all people. It made him wonder if he really understood anything about women.

“I been married to him twenty-one years,” Suzie said. “He’s only been happy five times that I can remember. You know what I’m like, Duane. I’m a happy person. It’s not good for a happy person to constantly get their spirits brought down by an unhappy person. I’m a lot happier now that I just see Dickie and you than I ever was when I was living with Junior. I don’t think I can go back to being the other way.”

Duane had no answer to that. It was becoming clear to him, after only a few weeks, that Junior’s unhappiness could become oppressive. It was not hard to imagine that twenty-one years of it would produce enough oppressiveness that a person might not want to see Junior ever again.

Suzie took his hand and held it to her breast in a way that seemed friendly, not passionate.

“He don’t want to just hold hands,” she said. “He don’t like to just sit and touch.”

Duane knew she was referring to Junior. He was at an awkward distance from the hammock, and moved a little closer, so as to be more comfortable.

In a few moments he noticed that Suzie was asleep, his hand folded against her breast. He sat beside her for a while. The yard was shaded by a nice sycamore tree. Suzie liked birds, and a mockingbird and a blue jay were quarreling at one of her feeders. The mockingbird flew over and sat on the clothesline.

Duane bethought himself of his idle rig, and Abilene, his missing driller. He gently disengaged his hand. As he stood up Suzie opened her eyes and mouthed him a little kiss before settling back into her nap.

CHAPTER 44

H
E HAD HARDLY BACKED OUT OF
S
UZIE’S DRIVEWAY
before Jenny Marlow raced up behind him, horn blaring. She parked and was in the pickup in a flash.

“You’ve been neglecting me,” she said, chewing gum a mile a minute. “You better not neglect me.”

“Why can’t I?” Duane asked. He felt oppressed himself. It seemed to him that his life had become a bewildering melange of responsibilities. There were people who welcomed neglect, such as the twins, and people he wasn’t allowed to neglect, such as Jenny, and people in between who sometimes demanded attention and at other times welcomed neglect. Karla was a good example of the in-between category, whereas his drilling business was an even more clear-cut example of something that needed attention but received neglect.

“If you neglect me in my time of need I’ll go crazy and you won’t have anyone to direct this pageant,” Jenny said.

Duane took her to the Dairy Queen and bought her coffee. He had decided that long solitary rides with Jenny were a kind of ride he wanted to avoid.

“Lester’s told everybody in town my baby isn’t his,” Jenny said. “Do you think he really knocked up Janine?”

“I hope he did,” Duane said honestly. “I hope it wasn’t anybody else I know.”

At that point a white Lincoln roared up to the Dairy Queen and Abilene got out from under the wheel. He still dressed as he had when he was thirty years old: very dark glasses, well-pressed gabardine pants and a cowboy shirt with pearl buttons. His hair had thinned quite a bit and the unforgiving sun had given him several skin cancers, but Abilene confidently ignored his own blemishes.

The girl who got out of the other side of the Lincoln looked a year or two younger than Nellie. Abilene had recently concentrated his attentions on farm girls a week or two into their first secretarial jobs in Wichita Falls or Lawton. He found them in obscure discos all over Texhoma—a region of North Texas and southern Oklahoma overlapping the Red River. The farm girls tended to be breasty, and wore a painful abundance of makeup.

The one with him at the moment was tall and looked frightened. She clutched Abilene’s hand tightly when they came in. She stood nervously with him at the cash register, looking at the menu for the day, which was scrawled on a blackboard. She seemed to be as unnerved by having to choose between a cheeseburger, a Mexican plate and a chicken-fried steak as some might be if faced with a menu written in French in an elegant establishment in Dallas.

Duane felt sorry for the girl and didn’t look around when they passed behind his chair, though he was very much in the mood to fire Abilene on the spot for taking an unauthorized leave.

Seconds later Janine, Charlene and Lavelle walked in, taking an early coffee break. Duane heartily wished he hadn’t come to the Dairy Queen. He didn’t want to confront Abilene in front of his frightened date, nor did he want to gossip with the ladies from the courthouse. Janine’s year in psychotherapy had given her a strong belief in eye contact. Whenever she and Duane happened to find themselves in the same public place she expected a virtual orgy of eye contact and would be bitterly
critical if she didn’t get it. She wasn’t far away, either. The room had filled up so quickly that the courthouse crew was forced to sit at the next table.

He wasn’t too eager to look at Jenny, for that matter. She had given up blue eye shadow in favor of a color that she claimed was champagne—it matched her new lipstick.

“Now they’ll eavesdrop,” Jenny said, meaning the courthouse crew. “Every word we say will be all over town.”

“Every word anybody says is always all over town no matter where they say it,” Duane pointed out.

“Hi, girls,” he said, feeling that he could not well ignore the women of the courthouse any longer.

“I hear a human fly is going to climb our courthouse during the centennial,” Charlene Duggs said. Charlene would often take it upon herself to relieve awkward silences, an attribute for which Duane felt grateful. Almost everyone else in town made awkward silences yet more awkward.

“Oh, yes, he’s a nice little human fly,” Jenny said. “He lives in Megargel.”

“Does he climb people or just buildings?” Lavelle said with a bold grin. “If he’s so nice I might get him to try and climb me.”

Janine meanwhile was staring fixedly at Duane, determined to have a least a flicker or two of eye contact. Duane obliged. He knew from the way she was frowning that Janine was trying to communicate something to him, though he had no idea what.

A boothful of wheat harvesters had just finished a vast meal and were headed for the door.

“I wonder where those wheat harvesters are headed?” Duane said, aware that it was the stupidest imaginable comment. Wheat harvesters always headed north, toward Saskatchewan and Alberta.

“Isn’t this hot weather we’ve been having?” Janine said, as if to show that she could match him inane remark for inane remark. The thermometer had hit one hundred and seven the day before.

To Duane’s relief, Bobby Lee’s pickup came flying off the highway and braked to a stop in a cloud of dust, inches from the plate-glass windows of the Dairy Queen. Bobby Lee drove
as if he were a horseman in an old cowboy movie. He flung his pickup back on its heels right at the hitch rail outside the saloon.

“Someday that little dumbbell’s foot is going to slip off the brake pedal and he’ll go right through this Dairy Queen as if it was tarpaper,” Lavelle said. “And I’ll probably be the person that gets turned into a grease spot.”

In a moment the little dumbbell sauntered in, with his usual elan. He had recently gone to a Western-wear store meaning to buy himself a new cowboy hat to wear during the centennial festivities—but in a moment of frivolity he had bought a huge, drooping Mexican sombrero instead. His beard was still not much more than an advanced stubble. The sombrero and the stubble made him look so funny that Duane burst out laughing every time he saw him.

He burst out laughing immediately. One of the reasons he treasured Bobby Lee was that he had only to look at him to be reminded that life had its comic aspects.

“If they hold a contest for the ugliest beard, you’ll win without even trying,” Lavelle told Bobby Lee bluntly. None of the women were as charmed by him as Duane was.

“If you keep talking like that I won’t let you be the president of my fan club,” Bobby Lee said amiably, straddling a chair.

Duane knew that if Bobby Lee had arrived, Eddie Belt could not be far behind, and he wasn’t. Before Bobby Lee’s coffee had even grown cool enough to sip, Eddie came in. He had given up on a beard and was trying to grow a handlebar mustache.

“They can’t duck you if you’ve got a big handlebar mustache, can they?” he asked Duane several times.

Duane promised to refer the matter to the committee on ducking, a nonexistent body. In any case, Eddie was a redhead, not the perfect hair color for a prominent handlebar mustache. At the moment he looked as if he had a few flecks of cinnamon toast stuck to his upper lip.

Eddie was somewhat affronted by Bobby Lee’s sombrero. As a serious oilman, he disdained cowboy trappings, and Mexican trappings as well. New cowboy hats were blossoming all over the county, but Eddie still wore his oily dozer cap.

“Seeing you in that sombrero makes me want to puke,” he informed Bobby Lee.

“It’s a free country—puke,” Bobby Lee replied. He seemed to be in an unusually good mood.

“If you was in a Pancho Villa movie you’d be the peon that has to hold the horses while the
jefe
goes into the saloon and gets drunk on tequila,” Eddie said.

Even this insult failed to stir the placid Bobby Lee. He had a beatific smile on his face.

“Has Abilene quit, or what?” he asked, glancing at the couple in the rear booth.

“He better hope that girl’s rich and wants to marry him,” Duane said. “He’s not gonna have a job after today.”

At that point, to everyone’s surprise, conversation died. Duane thought he might try to reopen the entertaining question of whether women want sex more or less than men—after all, most of the original panel had assembled—but he didn’t reopen it. He remembered that it had been Junior Nolan who had asked the original question about women and sex, and where was Junior now? A bankrupt man whose wife didn’t want to put up with his glooms anymore, and whose perfectly nice children had to keep winning athletic tournaments unobserved by either parent. It seemed like a sad time, or a sad place, or both.