Texasville (46 page)

Lester observed the scene dully. He had grown a little fuzz on his big chin. It was not much, but so far it had kept him from being ducked.

“Janine’s happy,” he remarked. “I’ve made someone happy, at least.”

“That’s true,” Duane said.

“I’ve lived nearly twenty-five years with Jenny and never made her happy a single day,” Lester said. “I never thought I’d live to see the day when I could actually make someone happy.”

“But now you have,” Duane said.

“Maybe that’s why I want to commit suicide right now,” Lester said. “I think I ought to kill myself before I spoil it.”

Duane started to point out to Lester that his death might well spoil Janine’s new happiness. It might ruin his two nice daughters’ lives. It might drive Jenny over the edge she seemed to live on. It might even have a ripple effect in Thalia itself. People who had never particularly liked Lester might blame themselves for his death. The whole town might slip into an emotional decline matching its economic decline. It might even be slipping into one anyway, with Lester still alive.

But he didn’t make any of those points. The more he thought about Lester and suicide and emotional decline, the less talkative he felt. The two of them rode in silence along the hot
dusty road. The heat had been so intense all summer that the juice had burned out of the mesquite beans within a week. They hung from the trees in brown clumps. From a distance it looked as if some madman had decorated the trees with lots of burned French fries.

Nonetheless, as they approached the well site, Duane felt his spirits rise. Somewhere, deep beneath the baking mesquites, was a lake of precious liquid, and he already had a pipe that reached into the center of that lake. As soon as storage tanks were in place he could turn the switch and liquid money would begin to flow upward—millions’ worth, perhaps. If he could just sink a couple more pipes into the lake, his troubles, and at least some of Lester’s, would be over.

“This might be the best well I’ve ever drilled,” he said, his excitement growing as they bumped along the rutted road to the site. “It might solve all our troubles.”

Lester looked at him with the same dull hopelessness.

“Didn’t you read
The Wall Street Journal
this morning?” he asked.

“No, I went to a psychiatrist this morning,” Duane said.

He never read
The Wall Street Journal.
Sonny brought his copy to the Dairy Queen each morning and read the assembled oilmen whatever it said about the international oil situation or the Texas oil situation. Sometimes there would even be something in the
Journal
about the local oil situation, but Duane never had to bother reading it for himself. The news, good or bad, would be on everyone’s lips by the time he arrived at the Dairy Queen for coffee.

“What’d it say today?” he asked.

“It said the Saudis were going to open the pipes,” Lester said. “Minister Yamani’s tired of fucking around with the British. He says he’ll make us all listen. He says he’ll show us five-dollar oil, if that’s what it takes to get our attention.”

“Minister Yamani’s probably bluffing,” Duane said. “He don’t really want to sell his oil that cheap.”

“He might, though—just to make his point,” Lester said. “What if he isn’t bluffing? What if they open the pipes?”

Duane pulled up at the well site and stopped. There was no one there—just a new oil pump, waiting to be turned on. Like
all such well sites, this place was ugly: the grass had been scraped off, the mesquites bulldozed. The slush pits stank, the soil was rutted, there was not a smidgin of shade, and the trash the roughnecks left had not been hauled away.

There was nothing about the site that offered the eye the slightest pleasure. It was just a half acre of ruined earth in the middle of a scrubby pasture. Only the liquid money that the new pump would bring from the ground could redeem the ugliness. The black flow from just such sites had built Karla her new home. It had paid their bills throughout their married lives—not to mention the town’s bills, the state’s bills, and the bills of almost everyone they knew.

But five-dollar oil? Duane tried to dismiss it from his mind. For years the Saudis and their threats had been a staple of Dairy Queen conversation. During all that time, no one had even seen a Saudi, and the pipes in Arabia had not been thrown open. To most locals OPEC was a shadowy entity, like communism—its threats were met with macho rhetoric, at least in the Dairy Queen. Some doubted that OPEC really had much muscle, but Duane was not among the doubters on that score. Billions of barrels of reserves added up to muscle, in his view. What seemed doubtful was that the matter would ever go beyond threats.

He still doubted it, but Lester’s hopeless look made him uneasy. The sense of optimism that just being near the new well usually gave him had begun to slip away. If oil went to five dollars a barrel, the costly new pump he was looking at might never be turned on. It would sit there and rust, unused. No one could afford to bring up five-dollar oil. The black lake would remain where it was, deep in its limestone cavern, if that occurred. Dickie could bring it up, or Dickie’s children.

On the drive back to town Lester kept idly pointing his cap pistol out the window and snapping it. Duane started to tell him he looked silly wearing a cap pistol, but he didn’t say it. In Lester’s present mood it wouldn’t do for him to wear any other kind of pistol.

“I hear Karla’s moving to Europe to live with Jacy,” Lester said. “That’s the rumor going around.”

“She’s just going on a vacation,” Duane said. “She’ll be back in a couple of weeks.”

“That’s not what I heard,” Lester said. “I think you’ve lost her, this time.”

“Now why do you think that?” Duane asked. “Here I take you on a ride to cheer you up and you tell me I’m losing my wife. You’re a hell of a friend.”

“The ride didn’t cheer me up, though,” Lester said. “Nothing can cheer me up now. My wife’s about to bear you a grandchild, your old girlfriend’s about to bear me a child, and unless I’m very lucky I’m headed for prison. What do you think the state of Texas will feed its felons if oil goes to five dollars a barrel? They’ll make us eat our own toenails, if they don’t make us eat one another.”

The thought seemed to cheer him slightly.

“I can see the headlines now,” Lester said. “‘Cannibalism Rife in Texas Prison System.’”

“Maybe you should stop reading
The Wall Street Journal,”
Duane said. “It just puts gloomy ideas in your head.”

Lester laughed. “Gloomy ideas,” he said. “If oil hits five dollars a barrel you’ll see some gloomy ideas, all right. When that happens I’ll take my chances in prison, because this place will be a total madhouse. Some bankrupt who’s lost everything he worked his whole life for will walk in and shoot me. People will start foaming at the mouth or having sex in the middle of the street. Every marriage in the town will break up. You should be glad your family’s moving to Europe.”

“My family’s not moving to Europe,” Duane said. “Karla and the twins are just going for a couple of weeks. Why would my family move to Europe? None of them has ever set foot in Europe.”

Lester shrugged. “You must not have heard the story I heard,” he said.

“What story did you hear?” Duane asked. He tried to sound casual, but in fact he was burning with curiosity. After all, it was quite possible that his family
was
moving to Europe. He might be the last to be informed.

“I heard Jacy and Karla were in love,” Lester said. “It didn’t particularly surprise me.”

“It didn’t?” Duane said.

“No,” Lester said. “They’re both advanced women. Any woman who’s advanced is going to get bored with men sooner or later.”

“I don’t see why,” Duane said. “We can be just as advanced as they can, I guess.”

“No, we can’t,” Lester said. “We’re not half as advanced as they are. It’s only logical that they’d come to prefer their own company, sooner or later.”

Lester sat up straighter and began to look more cheerful. The thought of how advanced women were seemed to cheer him a lot.

“It’s a good thing you came by and got me,” he said. “If you hadn’t I might be dead by now. This ride was just what I needed. Once in a while I just seem to lose my perspective.”

Duane was getting a bad headache. They were on a hardtop road and the sun glinted off it, sending arrows of pain straight into his head. The ride that had raised Lester’s spirits had sent his own plummeting. It was blindingly hot and Thalia seemed very distant, although it was only two miles away. He felt like getting out and lying down under the nearest shade tree. Lester could have the pickup—for that matter, he could have the town.

“Who told you Karla and Jacy were in love?” he asked.

It sounded like something Bobby Lee would make up. In his more demented moods Bobby Lee liked to tell wild lies involving Karla. The more far-fetched they were, the more convincing he made them seem, as in the case of the Libyan terrorists.

“I don’t know,” Lester said. “It’s been all over town for the last week or so now. I think Sonny told me.”

Duane kept driving grimly.

CHAPTER 68

B
Y THE TIME THEY GOT BACK TO THE BANK, LESTER
was in a manic mood. He rushed into the bank, snapping his cap pistol and pretending to be Jesse James. His spirits had clearly risen. Duane sat and watched the spectacle through the bank’s huge plate-glass windows. The secretaries and tellers soon got into the frontier mood and began to snap their cap pistols back at Lester.

Duane’s headache was no better, and his perplexity was worse. He decided to go home and get straight in the hot tub. He might shoot at the doghouse a few times to see if it did anything for his perplexity. He doubted that it would. The fun had largely gone out of shooting at the doghouse.

Before he could get through the red light his pickup was suddenly engulfed by a cluster of depressed citizens, led by Buster Lickle and Jenny Marlow. Duane had seen them coming, but, like a fool, he had waited in a law-abiding way for the light to change. He should have broken the law, run the light and escaped the crowd.

It struck him, just as he was being engulfed, that the trafffic light had become a nuisance, even a danger. He decided that
at the very next City Council meeting, if he lived to attend another one, he would advocate removing the light. Let people who wanted to pass through Thalia take their chances in the town’s second century. He knew it was not the light’s fault that he had accidentally had sex beneath it. His own intention had been to have sex in the comfortable darkness behind the post office, but the apprehensiveness he had felt before, during and after the act had not left him. He felt that just stopping at the light had probably helped intensify his current throbbing headache.

The crowd was oblivous to the fact that he had a splitting headache, felt terrible and just wanted to go home. He was their trouble-shooter, and it was clear there had been some trouble.

“Duane, the wagon train’s lost!” Jenny said. “It’s terrible. They won’t get here in time for the parade.”

“How can they be lost?” he asked. “They were just going fifteen miles along a road.”

“That was the plan,” Buster Lickle said. “But then somebody had the bright idea of cutting across a pasture like wagon trains did in olden times. They got down in the brush along Onion Creek and couldn’t find their way back to the highway. I think a wagon or two may have turned over. I don’t know what we’re gonna do.”

“Maybe they’ll find their way to town by tomorrow night,” Duane said.

“But the parade’s tonight!” Jenny said. “It’ll ruin the whole parade if the wagon train isn’t here to lead it.”

She was at the point of tears.

“The first settlers came in wagons,” Buster pointed out. “Wagons are a historical part of our county heritage.”

“How come a bunch of cowboys can’t find their way across a pasture?” Duane asked. He had a feeling he wasn’t getting the whole story.

“Because they’re sot drunk and your own wife hauled them the liquor,” G.G. said. He was looking more and more cheerful.

“The way I heard it, all those wagons were upside down in Onion Creek and half the people have drowned,” he added happily. “God’s punishment is swift.”

“Onion Creek is as dry as this pavement, G.G.,” Duane said.
“They might have all broken their necks but I doubt anybody drowned.”

“Sin carries a high tariff,” G.G. said to the crowd at large.

“Do something, Duane!” Jenny pleaded. “A lot of these people have come a long way to see the wagon train be in the parade.”

“It’s four-thirty,” Duane pointed out. “The parade starts in two hours. If the wagons are still out at Onion Creek they aren’t going to make it in time. A wagon only travels so fast.”

“One that was on a flatbed truck could travel faster, though,” Buster Lickle said. “We was hoping you could haul the wagons to the city limits on some of your trucks. It might save the day.”

“I thought this celebration was supposed to be sort of authentic,” Duane said. “The pioneers didn’t haul their wagons around on flatbed trucks.”

He thought that argument might at least shame Buster Lickle. Buster was such an apostle of authenticity that he had wanted to have the old boards he found carbon-dated.

“Can’t you just go get ’em, Duane?” Jenny said. “We don’t have time to argue.”

Duane drove through the light, which was red again, and pulled up at the curb in front of the courthouse. Bobby Lee and Eddie Belt, authentically drunk at least, were sitting in front of Old Texasville, surrounded by empty beer cups. They seemed to be doing a fine job of impersonating the founders of the county.

Duane poured four Excedrin tablets out of a bottle he kept in the glove compartment and got himself a beer to wash them down with.

“I guess we better go rescue the wagon train,” he said. “They say it’s lost.”

“You know why, don’t you?” Bobby Lee said.

“No, I don’t know why,” Duane said. “I thought those cowboys could at least find their way to town.”

“Dickie traded some LSD for a quarter horse,” Bobby Lee said. “It was just some old LSD he’s had laying around for a year or two. I guess it hadn’t lost its punch though.”