Texasville (4 page)

He had no children of his own, and doted on Duane’s. He had given each twin two dollars in quarters.

“Just because I threaten to kill you don’t mean I’m serious,” Duane said, on the ride home. “Running away from home in your bathing suits is not too smart.”

“You can get arrested for child abuse,” Jack reminded him.

“I wish Nellie would get married and move out,” he added. “Those brats of hers squall all the time.”

“Barbette is just two months old,” Duane said. “She’s a baby, not a brat.”

“You’re a brat,” Julie said to her twin. “You’re the worst brat that ever lived.”

“Lick my dick,” Jack said, his standard retort to almost anything his sister said.

Duane tried to imagine what possible discipline might work on the twins. None seemed to stand much chance.

“I’m going to put you out and let you walk home if you keep talking like that,” he said. He realized it was an absurd threat, since he had just driven to town in order to prevent the twins from walking anywhere.

Jack still had several of the quarters Sonny had given him. Shorty dozed on the car seat with his head on Duane’s leg. Jack grabbed Shorty’s tail and began to yank it up and down.

“I’m pretending Shorty’s a slot machine,” he said, trying to stick one of the quarters up Shorty’s ass. Shorty woke up and snapped at him but missed. Duane whacked Jack with his work glove. Shorty cringed, thinking the blow had been meant for him. He was too sleepy to know what was going on.

“Don’t treat that dog that way,” Duane said.

Jack snickered. The little pop with the glove hadn’t hurt at all.

When they got home Karla was wearing a T-shirt that said,
I’M NOT DEAF I’M JUST IGNORING YOU
. Nellie lay on the couch talking to her boyfriend on the phone.

Joe Coombs, her boyfriend, was a slow talker insofar as he was a talker at all. Joe worked for a well-service company in Jacksboro. He was short and chunky—the work was so dirty that when he got home in the evening he was often almost indistinguishable from a barrel of oil. Home was a small trailer house on the north edge of Thalia, furnished with a bed and a TV set. Joe Coombs didn’t believe in spending money on frills.

Joe had a good spirit, though. Just being alive seemed to thrill him, and talking to Nellie on the phone thrilled him so much that he often couldn’t think of anything to say for ten or fifteen minutes at a time. Nellie didn’t mind. She was not a big
talker herself. Just having Joe on the phone gave her a feeling of peace, even though all they did was hold the phones to their ears for long periods of time.

Their nonconversation drove Karla almost crazy.

“Talk!” she said. “One of you talk! He’s not saying anything! You’re not saying anything! Why don’t you get a message machine for a boyfriend? At least a message machine can say a message. That’s more than Joe Coombs can do.”

“I don’t care, Momma!” Nellie said. “I love Joe a whole bunch and he loves me.”

“Is Barbette his child by any chance?” Karla asked. Barbette, like Little Mike, bore no resemblance to any of Nellie’s husbands.

“Of course not, I never even knew Joe way back then,” Nellie said.

Nellie often thought of moving out so she could talk on the phone to Joe without her mother screaming at her. She could easily get an apartment in Wichita Falls, but whether she could get Minerva to come and help her with the kids was another question. Minerva was reluctant to leave the satellite dish. She liked having two or three hundred movies to choose from every day.

Unfortunately, Minerva was the only authority Little Mike respected, mainly because she would haul off and whop him with the
Cable Guide
at the slightest provocation. The
Cable Guide
was to Minerva what the work glove was to Duane—a handy, nonlethal weapon.

Although Karla had on the T-shirt that she wore when she wanted to ignore everybody, the sight of her daughter holding a silent phone to her ear for fifteen minutes at a stretch made it difficult for her to practice what her T-shirt preached.

“Say something!” she yelled. “One of you say something!”

Nellie remained firmly silent. She knew there was no use explaining to her mother how nice it was just to listen to Joe Coombs breathe. There was something very reassuring about the way he breathed when he was on the phone.

It was quite a bit better than the way he breathed in person, Nellie thought. In person he tended to get too excited. But over the phone his breathing had a wonderful effect. Nellie would
be feeling tense and Joe would call and breathe into her ear for a while and help her relax. It was almost like magic how much better she felt sometimes if she could just curl up on her bed and listen to Joe breathe for a few minutes.

“Joe just breathes real sweet,” she said, talking about it to her girlfriend Billie Anne.

CHAPTER 4

S
OMETIMES, DRIVING INTO TOWN—AS HE DID JUST
after he met Ruth Popper on the road—Duane found it hard to tell whether he was going forward or backward.

The pickup was going forward, of course. He was not yet so crazy as to drive into town in reverse. And yet, internally, he ran mostly in reverse. He spent hours replaying old conversations in his head, or reliving past events. If they had been important conversations or crucial events, the habit might have been understandable, but they weren’t. They were just ordinary conversations of the kind he had with Karla or Janine or Sonny Crawford every day. Having such conversations once was enough, yet his brain would sometimes play them back three or four times, as if his brain was a cassette player that kept rewinding and replaying unimportant tapes.

Driving toward his office, he felt depressed by the knowledge that Ruth wouldn’t be back for at least half an hour. If he went to his office he would have no one to talk to and lots of unpleasant things to think about. He had already thought about
most of them while sitting in the hot tub and had no desire to do more thinking that morning.

Just inside the city limits he passed his own pipeyard with the four towering rigs sitting in it, representing doom. They were all deep rigs and had cost nearly three million dollars apiece. One of them had occasionally been used to drill a well, but the other three had never been out of the pipeyard where they were built. Looking on the bright side—as everyone constantly advised him to do—he could tell himself how lucky he was that there weren’t
ten
rigs sitting there accumulating rust along with interest he couldn’t pay.

Lester Marlow, the president of the local bank—and recently indicted on seventy-three counts of bank fraud—had encouraged him to build ten rigs. That had been in the height of the boom, when every headline spoke of the energy crisis. It had been hard to get drills in the ground fast enough to meet the demand for West Texas crude. Duane’s four small rigs operated around the clock, month after month, but they could only drill shallow wells. There was plenty of money to be made from shallow wells, and Duane was making as much of it as anyone in the area, but every banker he brushed elbows with assured him that deep oil was the wave of the future. Lester Marlow breezily offered to loan him thirty million dollars to build deep rigs with.

After much brooding, Duane decided to build four. Before they were even completed, the wave of the future knocked him right off the surfboard, along with plenty of other surfers. The energy crisis somehow changed into an oil glut. The four new rigs were dead in the water, or, at least, dead in the pipeyard, but the money it had taken to build them was very much alive, hungrily consuming interest payments of more than one hundred thousand dollars a month.

Lester Marlow’s trial for bank fraud was coming up in three months. He was planning to plead ignorance. Everyone in town agreed that he was ignorant but cheerfully assumed that he was headed for prison.

Bobby Lee, who hated Lester for having once repossessed a pickup, argued strongly for the death penalty. Never having worn a white collar, he took a tough line on white-collar crime.

“I’d like to see Lester walk the last mile,” Bobby Lee said whenever the subject came up.

“Why, he couldn’t walk no mile,” Eddie Belt said. “Too fat. I doubt he’d make it three hundred feet.”

Eddie, who also worked for Duane, was the local realist.

It was true that Lester Marlow was substantially overweight. As bank president he had been too busy loaning money to participate in the exercise boom. Shuffling through mounds of loan applications was exercise enough. Never skinny, he soon became fat. Then, as the financial horizons darkened, he became fatter. He could be seen at the Dairy Queen every afternoon, eating banana splits in an effort to forget his problems.

Duane pulled up in front of his modest office, but didn’t kill the motor or get out. Across the street were the new municipal tennis courts, the latest addition to the Thalia skyline. The west edge of town was so flat and ugly that a tennis net could legitimately count as an addition to the skyline.

The tennis courts were another product of the brief popularity of exercise. Built during the height of the boom, the courts were in constant use for several months. But tennis proved more complicated than jogging or sitting in hot tubs. Several marriages that were about ready to go anyway collapsed under the unaccustomed stress of mixed doubles. Now the courts were little used. Duane, who played decent tennis, kept a racquet in his office. Sometimes he would go over in the late afternoon and serve a bucket of balls at the tumble weeds piled up against the north fence.

Rather than go into the empty office, he turned the pickup around and drove to the Dairy Queen. It was ringed with pickups, many of them belonging to his employees. Bobby Lee was there, and also Eddie Belt.

When Duane got out, Shorty put his front paws on the dashboard and watched him closely. Although Duane went into the Dairy Queen at least twice a day and always came out sooner or later, Shorty was anxious while he was gone. Shorty liked to keep Duane in sight, which was hard to do once he entered the Dairy Queen. By pressing his head against the glass of the windshield, Shorty could catch wavery glimpses of him through the plate-glass windows of the Dairy Queen. It was better than nothing.

The Dairy Queen was filled with the usual hard-bitten but dejected crowd—nouveau riche only a few months earlier, now nouveau bankrupt.

“I see you brought your land shark,” Eddie Belt said, when Duane took his seat at the oilmen’s table. Eddie was referring to Shorty, who could be seen through the big plate-glass window, his head still flattened against the windshield.

It was a remark Duane heard several times a week. Bobby Lee, whose wit was often indebted to
Saturday Night Live,
had once referred to Shorty as a land shark, and the phrase had caught on. Shorty was hated throughout the oil patch for his habit of unannounced attacks. He would lie motionless in the pickup seat for hours, looking like a dog that had had a sunstroke, but if some roughneck or old friend of Duane’s so much as leaned an elbow against the pickup, Shorty would strike, instantly and unerringly. He preferred to nip heels, but would make do with elbows, as most of the people who worked for Duane had learned to their sorrow.

“Good morning,” Duane said. He had no interest in defending Shorty or in talking about him at all. The thought that most of the people he knew could think of nothing to talk about except the bad habits of his dog often depressed him.

Junior Nolan was looking particularly low. Junior was fair-skinned, and his forehead had sunburned a fiery red. He wore a cowboy hat when he was in the Dairy Queen but often forgot to put it on when he was outside. It could usually be found on the seat of his pickup.

Junior had made so much money in the oil business that he had been able to buy a ranch and realize his lifelong dream, which was to be a cowboy. Unfortunately he had to run his ranch almost alone, since most of the cowboys in the area had long since given up and gone to work for oil companies. Junior made do with one ranch hand, an elderly chain-smoker named Mitch Mott, who was sitting beside his boss chain-smoking when Duane sat down.

“Mitch, I thought you quit smoking,” Duane said.

“I did,” Mitch said, lighting a cigarette off the one he was just finishing. “I quit for part of last week. But then I got down in the dumps and the first thing I knew I was smoking again.”

Junior Nolan was well on his way to losing his oil company
and his ranch too. He was six foot five, one of the tallest men in the county. Karla had often expressed an interest in him, but so far little seemed to have come of her interest.

“I’ll be damned if I’ll make the first move,” she told Duane, during one of the many discussions they had about her love life. “I don’t see why I should.”

“I don’t see why you should either, honey,” Duane said. Some of his lighter moments were spent in the hot tub with Karla, discussing her love life. It was her view that she didn’t have nearly enough of one.

Duane felt vaguely guilty about it, but only vaguely. He was too worried about going broke to give even lip service to the notion that he should be providing someone with a love life.

Janine Wells, his girlfriend, was sitting a table or two away, having coffee with her girlfriends from the courthouse. Janine had got herself elected county tax collector. She was a petite blonde, and also a complainer on the subject of a love life.

Duane was glad that he and Janine had agreed to ignore one another in public. Or he guessed he was glad: sometimes he thought he would have done better to strike a deal allowing him to ignore her in private. Their last tryst or two had been uneventful from Janine’s point of view, although Duane had taken two much-needed naps.

“You’re not supposed to ignore me in private, just in public,” Janine corrected, when he woke up from one of them. They were at an expensive hotel in Fort Worth, and were planning to go to a dinner theater and see a play starring Jack Palance.

“I’m not ignoring you, we’re in Fort Worth,” he pointed out.