Texasville (40 page)

“I think she just planned to scare him,” Karla said.

Jacy was sitting on the edge of the rig platform, dangling her feet. Though she had her back to them, the roughnecks were still frozen in place. Rather than continue the argument with Karla, Duane walked over and looked up at Jacy.

“Pretty night,” Jacy said. “My daddy used to take me out to his rigs sometimes. He was a nice man.”

“I know, I worked for him,” Duane said. “He didn’t want me to marry you, though.”

“That’s right, and I didn’t,” Jacy said. “I was an obedient daughter in some respects. Anyway, I was far too big a snob to marry you.”

Duane felt Karla looking at him. She was directing a steady wave of pressure at the back of his neck. He decided to ignore it.

“You didn’t show up at the pageant rehearsal,” Jacy said. “I didn’t have my Adam to practice with, and all your women decided you’d found a new girl and run off with her. They’re pretty dependent on you.”

“I guess,” Duane said.

“Did you find a new girl?” Jacy asked.

“Nope,” he said.

“Are you looking?” she asked.

“No,” Duane said.

Jacy got up, returned the hard hat to the toolshed, waved at the roughnecks and strolled down the steps.

“You’re cute with one of those hats on,” Duane said.

Jacy stopped and looked at him a moment.

“I haven’t been cute in a long time, Duane,” she said. “I’m something but I’m not cute. Don’t let your new oil well warp your judgment.”

She strolled past him and got back in the BMW.

Duane was a little deflated. He felt that he had said a silly thing and been immediately slapped down for it. Karla slapped him down for similar remarks all the time, but it felt worse when Jacy did it.

He walked over and stood by Bobby Lee, who was looking distrustfully at the women in the car. The women had fallen silent, each of them thinking her own thoughts.

“What am I gonna tell Momma?” Karla asked, looking at him pointedly.

“If you’re afraid of your own momma, why’d you bring her home?” Duane asked.

“I don’t want to have an argument in front of all these people,” Karla said. “Why can’t we just have a civil discussion for once?”

“We are having a civil discussion,” he said. “I haven’t yelled. I haven’t raised my voice.”

“Did you know he was this stubborn when you married him?” Jacy asked.

Karla didn’t answer. She stared at Duane in silence. Bobby Lee found her silence unnerving. He began to fidget.

“I been working sixteen hours a day, I think I’ll go home,” he said.

“You better come to rehearsals tomorrow,” Jacy said to Duane. “Jenny will crack up if you don’t. Hardly anybody showed up today.”

“I’m gonna try to come,” Duane said. He wanted to apologize to Jacy for having called her cute, but he couldn’t very well do it in front of Karla.

“I been working sixteen hours a day, it’s time for me to get in my pickup and go home,” Bobby Lee said again, but he made no move toward his pickup, which was only ten steps away.

“Why don’t you keep out of this, Bobby Lee?” Karla suggested.

“Keep out of what?” Bobby Lee asked. “I’m just standing here trying to draw a little overtime.”

“You might draw something you don’t want if you provoke me,” Karla said.

“By the way, your dog’s fine, in case you’re worried,” Jacy said.

“What dog?” Duane said. “I don’t have a dog. If I had one he’d be living with me, helping me live a normal life.”

Jacy grinned. She seemed to have forgiven him his unfortunate remark.

“If I were you I’d try to forget about a normal life,” she said.

“I can’t,” Duane said. “I wasn’t meant to live any other kind.”

“Too bad for you, honey pie,” Jacy said, as Karla began to drive away.

“You know some scary women,” Bobby Lee said, watching the taillight vanish into the mesquite.

Duane didn’t immediately answer. The adrenaline that had kept him working all day and most of the night began to drain away. He felt a little flat.

“Why did they come out here?” Bobby Lee asked. “Why do they always pick on me?”

“I thought you were going home,” Duane said.

CHAPTER 58

T
HE MINUTE
D
UANE WALKED INTO THE FINAL
meeting of the Hardtop County Centennial Committee he sensed trouble. Locating the source was not difficult, either. G. G. Rawley and four of his deacons were seated along one wall. All the deacons were wheat farmers from the northern part of the county. Duane knew a couple of them well enough to say hello to. Drought had pretty much got their most recent wheat crop, and what little wheat had come up was destroyed by a series of freak hailstorms that had peppered the county during May and June. On the whole they formed a somber group.

G.G. was not somber, however. He looked scrubbed, healthy and ready for a fight.

“Hello, folks,” Duane said. The whole committee was present, including Old Man Balt, who had acquired an empty Crisco can in which to spit his tobacco juice, an improvement over the small tomato-juice can he had used before falling out of the car.

The committee as a whole seemed indifferent to the presence of the wheat farmers. Sonny looked tense, as he had ever
since his head started failing him. Suzie Nolan yawned several times—she was obviously ready to go home and take a nap. Jenny scribbled last-minute changes into her pageant script. Ralph Rolfe was studying a brochure about Nubian goats.

Despite his efforts not to let the new oil well make him unrealistically optimistic, Duane felt very optimistic. A good oil well always had a tonic effect on his spirits. If there had to be confrontation, he was up for it.

“G.G., this is an official committee meeting,” he said. “We don’t usually allow visitors.”

“Duane, you’re headed for hell,” G.G. said. “You ought to think about your immortal soul, which will be frying over a spit if you don’t change your tune.”

Sensing battle, everyone looked up from whatever they had been looking down at.

“You don’t fry things on a spit,” Suzie remarked. “You fry things in a frying pan.”

G.G. ignored that technicality.

“The devil can fry a soul as quick as you or me could fry a piece of bacon,” he informed them cheerfully.

“Be that as it may,” Duane said, “we have to keep these meetings private or pretty soon we’ll have the whole town in here.”

“Look at it this way, son,” G.G. said. “You got your committee and I’ve got mine and the Lord’s. We’re the committee for the Byelo-Baptist boycott, and we’re gonna boycott everything in sight unless you back off on these liquor sales.”

“The City Council voted unanimously to approve the sale of beer during the centennial,” Duane said. “The City Council speaks for the people of this town.”

“No, it just speaks for the sots,” G.G. said. “My committee speaks for the decent people, and we suggest you cease and desist from this immorality.”

Duane laughed. In his unrealistically optimistic mood the situation struck him as comic.

“We can’t cease and desist because we haven’t started yet,” he said.

“I’m not going to sit here and listen to a lot of verbal wordplay,” G.G. said. “Our position is simple. If you sell liquor on that courthouse lawn we’re gonna form a Broom Brigade.”

“A what?” Buster Lickle asked. Buster had been following the discussion closely.

“We mean to arm ourselves against vice and sin with brooms,” G.G. explained. “Any time we see a drinker about to drink we’ll swat the poison out of his hands with a broom. Those that get unruly will be arrested. The Liquor Control Board has promised to send us a number of well-trained agents to make the arrests.”

“Can we call the meeting to order?” Sonny asked. “It hasn’t been called to order.”

“Why bother?” Duane asked. “We can call till we’re hoarse and there won’t be any order.”

Sonny looked pained. He was a stickler for correct parliamentary procedure.

“The meeting is now called to order,” Duane said. He didn’t want to do anything that might trigger one of Sonny’s lapses.

“I move that all nonmembers be expelled from this meeting forthwith,” Suzie Nolan said with astonishing crispness. Everyone looked at her in surprise. Suzie had risen from her naplike condition to a state of blazing indignation. Her eyes shone and there was high color in her cheeks. Duane was not too surprised—he knew she was capable of amazing transformations, and so, apparently, did G. G. Rawley, who was glaring at her with bitter intensity.

“You’re another one whose soul will be sizzling like bacon one of these days,” he said.

From the looks they exchanged, Duane found himself wondering if Suzie and G.G. had ever been lovers. The mere fact that the latter had brought four solemn wheat farmers into the meeting could hardly have stirred the level of animosity they were exhibiting.

“I second that motion,” Ralph Rolfe said. As a cattleman he had an ancestral dislike of all farmers, whatever their stamp.

“Now wait a minute,” Duane said. “There’s no reason to be discourteous and kick these gentlemen out.”

Though he had been the first to question the right of the wheat farmers to be there, he had already come to feel a certain sympathy for the men, all of whom were going broke and none of whom were deriving anything but embarrassment from the controversy raging around them.

“You said yourself we don’t allow visitors,” Jenny said.

“We don’t, generally, but these men are here and they’ve gone to some trouble,” Duane said.

“G.G. put them to the trouble, not us,” Suzie said. “I think we ought to expel him too.”

“A motion has been made and seconded,” Sonny said. “We have to vote on it.”

“Now wait a minute,” Duane said. He was beginning to get annoyed. “We’re not the joint chiefs of staff or anything. Surely we can be courteous enough to let these men sit here for a few minutes.”

“You just have one vote, Duane,” Suzie said. She was looking at him angrily, the glow still in her eye. Duane found her very appealing and wondered what flaw in his character caused him to find angry women so attractive.

“Listen,” Duane said. “This committee has been known to debate things for three or four months before actually voting. We don’t have to do something rude just because you popped off and made a motion.”

“But you wanted them out yourself,” Jenny said. “Be consistent, Duane.”

“I move we table the motion,” Duane said. Jenny’s passion for consistency annoyed him, too.

There was an awkward silence.

“I don’t think you can table a motion that’s been seconded,” Sonny said.

“I just did,” Duane said.

One of the wheat farmers smiled. Then another smiled. The twists and turns of civic affairs had begun to amuse them.

“I’ve made another decision,” Duane said. “We’re gonna give away the beer, not sell it. I’ll buy a few thousand cases myself and contribute to the centennial. That way there won’t be any question of illegality to deal with, and G.G. can go jump in the lake.”

“What I’ll do is go call the Texas Rangers,” G.G. said. “If you lowlife politicians are planning to degrade the public with free liquor I think it’s time the Rangers came in to bust some heads.”

“This meeting is adjourned,” Duane said. The statement
caught everybody by surprise. Duane was even a little surprised to hear himself say it, but he was not sorry. He meant it. The meeting was silly, he was getting no help from anyone, the whole centennial was silly, he missed his family and he had had enough.

“You can’t adjourn us, we just got here,” Jenny said. “We have a lot of important things to discuss.”

“No we don’t,” Duane said. “None of this is important.”

He got up and walked out, leaving a roomful of stunned people behind him. He went to his pickup, drove it around the block and parked behind the post office. Then he hurried back to the courthouse and peeked around a corner to watch the committee take its leave. Jenny Marlow led the pack. She was in her car and off in a flash, no doubt to spread the word of his defection. The others straggled behind. The wheat farmers plodded to their pickups and drove slowly off to their battered fields. Sonny headed for the Kwik-Sack and Ralph Rolfe for his ranch.

The last people out, as Duane had hoped, were Suzie Nolan and Old Man Balt, whose faithful daughter, Beulah, was waiting for him as usual. Suzie helped the old man down the sidewalk, waiting while he emptied his Crisco can onto the courthouse lawn. The minute he was in the car Beulah whisked him off to whatever TV show was about to come on.

Duane could not tell if Suzie was still angry, but she was obviously in no hurry. She slipped her shoes off before getting into her car. Driving in shoes, or even wearing them, didn’t appeal to her.

Seeing her take her shoes off gave Duane an idea. He looked around and saw not a soul in sight except Suzie. The square and the town seemed deserted, the reason being that two crucial Little League games were being played that night on the local diamond. His son Jack was pitching in one of them, his daughter Julie playing shortstop in another. He meant to go, but had developed more immediate plans.

He quickly slipped off his boots and his pants. It generally took Suzie three or four minutes to find her car keys, comb her hair and get started. He watched her do all those things, his pants and boots in his hand. When she started the car he tip
toed over and hid behind a cedar tree on one corner of the lawn.

The traffic light had no traffic to stop, but it was still doing its job of turning red and then green anyway. Suzie had to pass through it. She had started the car, but hadn’t backed away from the curb. She was lazily combing her hair. The light changed to red. Duane felt annoyed. If she had only stopped combing her hair and backed out, she would have immediately caught the light. But she was still combing. He waited, remembering how much he had wanted her that night in the hospital parking lot. The light turned to green and his heart sank, for Suzie had finally begun to back out. She would undoubtedly drive through it, leaving him with his old want and his new. Of course he could follow her home, but that was not exactly what he desired.