Texasville (47 page)

“Those cowboys are higher than kites,” Eddie said.

“They think they’re in Colorado, having Rocky Mountain highs.”

“Why would Dickie want a quarter horse?” Duane asked. That was the puzzling part of the news. Dickie had never had any interest in horses.

“Jacy wanted a horse so she and Karla could take rides together,” Bobby Lee said. “Dickie thought the LSD was worthless so he traded and gave her the horse.”

Shorty came trotting around the courthouse carrying a beer bottle in his mouth. He dropped it at Duane’s feet and began to try and climb up his leg.

“The twins ran off and left him,” Bobby Lee said.

Duane scratched Shorty between the ears. Despite himself, he was glad to see him.

“Let’s go get the wagon train,” he said.

CHAPTER 69

T
O BE ON THE SAFE SIDE THEY TOOK TWO FLATBED
trucks. Bobby Lee and Shorty rode with Duane. Normally Bobby Lee refused to ride in any vehicle containing Shorty, but centennial fervor plus around forty beers had rendered him less cautious.

They were scarcely out of town before a red Porsche whizzed by them. Dickie was at the wheel and Suzie Nolan was with him. The Porsche, going at least a hundred, was soon out of sight.

“Where’d he get a Porsche?” Bobby Lee asked.

“I don’t know,” Duane said. He felt a stab of jealousy, soon smothered by his headache, which was no better. He realized that he liked Suzie Nolan more than was likely to be convenient for either of them.

“I wanted to marry Suzie when I was in high school but I was two grades below her and she wouldn’t even give me a date,” Bobby Lee said.

“I think the whole county’s waited till now to go crazy,” Duane said.

“Speak for yourself,” Bobby said. “I’m not a bit crazier than I was fifteen years ago.”

“I admit you got an early start,” Duane said. “Did you spread that lie about my family moving to Italy?”

“It ain’t a lie,” Bobby Lee said. “Karla says Jacy needs her worse than you do.”

“Who told you that?” Duane asked.

“Karla,” Bobby Lee said.

“Oh,” Duane said.

“I didn’t ask her to tell me,” Bobby Lee said. “I know too much about your life already.”

“I didn’t say I blamed you, did I?” Duane said. In fact, he didn’t blame him. Karla had always made a practice of confiding whatever she had to confide in anyone who happened to be handy when she felt like confiding. Bobby Lee had apparently just happened to be handy.

“How does she know how much I need her?” Duane asked. “She hasn’t been home in a week.”

“No, but she’s been home for twenty-two years,” Bobby Lee pointed out.

“I can’t tell whose side you’re on,” Duane said.

“I’m not on Shorty’s,” Bobby Lee assured him. He clutched a heavy pair of pliers, in case Shorty tried anything, though Shorty had spent most of the trip trying to give Duane dog-kisses.

They found the wagon train by following a trail of beer cans and other debris a couple of hundred yards into a pasture. Sure enough, two wagons had turned over, though neither was anywhere near the creek. Two or three cowboys stood by, looking dejected, and the rest were wandering around looking stoned. A group of happy cowgirls sat under a post oak tree painting their fingernails. Karla sat on the wheel of one of the overturned wagons, talking to her Appaloosa, named Willie Nelson in honor of her favorite singer. She was drinking vodka and grapefruit juice from a Neiman Marcus thermos. Duane knew it was vodka and grapefruit juice because she offered him some and he took a swallow.

“Pretty slow wagon train, isn’t it?” she said.

“I wish people would quit telling me you’re moving to Italy because I don’t need you anymore,” Duane said.

“Don’t believe everything you hear, Duane,” Karla said, grinning. She seemed in high spirits, and was more beautiful than all the other cowgirls put together.

“I don’t, but I’d like to believe something,” Duane said.

“Duane, I think you better just wait till after the centennial to start believing things again,” Karla said. “It’s gonna take enough energy just getting through the centennial.”

That was undeniable. No one was quite sure how the wagons happened to turn over. When questioned about the accident the cowboys who had driven the wagons turned sullen. One of them, a large cowboy named Mossy White, offered to whip Bobby Lee’s ass on the spot.

“Why mine?” Bobby Lee asked.

“Why not yours?” Mossy said.

“Let’s not scuffle, now,” Duane said.

“Scuffle?” Mossy said. “I might pound this little son-of-a-bitch into a juicy pulp. You call that scuffling?”

Eddie Belt, who had just arrived with the second truck, grabbed Bobby Lee and persuaded him not to fling himself into battle.

“There’s three of us and fifteen of them,” he pointed out.

Duane ignored the potential hostilities and set about winching the wagons back upright. That took forty-five minutes. Then he winched two of them up on one truck and two more up on the other truck. He got little help from anyone. Bobby Lee considered that his honor had been besmirched. He puffed up like a toad and tried to get Eddie to stand aside so he could attack the cowboys. Eddie, not wanting to be beaten to a pulp for someone else’s remark, held Bobby off. The two of them scuffled around in the underbrush, talking it over in loud whispers. The fact that Karla kept laughing at them didn’t improve matters.

Finally the cowboys got on their horses and rode off toward town. The cowgirls finished their nails and prepared to leave too. Duane persuaded them to drive the horses that had once been hitched to the wagons, since without the horses the wagons would have to ride in the parade on the back of his trucks, a spectacle too unauthentic to contemplate.

Once the cowboys were gone, Bobby Lee and Eddie Belt
settled down and helped him chain the wagons securely to the truckbeds.

“Shoot, I didn’t bring near enough vodka and grapefruit juice,” Karla said, as she mounted her beloved Appaloosa, Willie Nelson.

“Duane, I hope you’re not going to go around looking gloomy during the whole centennial,” she added.

“I might,” Duane said.

“If you do, it’ll just make Italy look that much better,” Karla said, before riding off.

CHAPTER 70

D
RIVING BACK TO TOWN WITH THE WAGONS ON HIS
truck, Duane’s headache began to get worse. His headaches always got worse when he was nervous, and he felt extremely nervous. He had so many things to be nervous about that he had given up trying to separate them, but one major thing he was becoming more nervous about, as the time approached, was having to appear in his bathing suit in front of the whole county. He bitterly regretted having agreed to play Adam. The dress rehearsal hadn’t been so bad, because he had kept his shirt on, but the real show was only hours away.

“Have you got butterflies in your stomach, or what?” Bobby Lee asked.

“What makes you ask?” Duane said.

“You drive funny when you’re nervous,” Bobby Lee said. “Kinda jerky.”

Duane abruptly stopped the truck and got out.

“You drive,” he said.

“I didn’t mean to insult you,” Bobby Lee said, once he was under the wheel and they were on their way to town.

“I’ll give you five hundred dollars if you’ll play Adam,” Duane said.

“I don’t look like Adam,” Bobby Lee said.

“How in the hell do you know what he looked like?” Duane asked. “Did you ever meet him?”

“No, but I’ve seen pictures of him in Sunday school,” Bobby Lee said. “Adam was taller than me. He was about your height.”

“Five hundred quick dollars,” Duane said, exasperated. “Just think of the money.”

Bobby Lee refused to discuss it further. Duane thought of asking Dickie, who loved money and had no shame, but Dickie had just been seen going south in a new Porsche at a high rate of speed. He was not available to be asked.

They got the wagons off the trucks and the teams hitched up again just in time for the parade to start. The cowboys had become jumpy and paranoid. The ones who got to remain cowboys in the pageant stayed as far away as possible from the ones who were due to become Indians.

“Maybe that LSD was spoilt after all,” Eddie Belt theorized. “Some of those old boys look like they’re having bad trips.”

Karla, who had the prettiest horse, and Old Man Balt, the oldest citizen, led the parade. Mr. Balt carried Old Glory, Karla the Lone Star flag. Riding clubs from many neighboring towns had come to assist Hardtop County in its centennial effort—the parade strung out down the Wichita highway for more than two miles. Riding clubs alternated with floats. Jenny and a team of volunteers had stayed up all night putting the finishing touches on the courthouse float. Janine, Charlene and Lavelle rode on the float dressed in crinolines and bonnets—they represented pioneer filing clerks, and waved merrily to the large crowd.

As soon as the covered wagons were off the flatbed trucks a second replica of Texasville, this one made of papier-mâché, was hoisted up on one of them. Bobby Lee and Eddie Belt continued to perform as the two Mr. Browns, assisted by Nellie as Belle Brown.

Nellie looked so beautiful that people all along the route clapped for her as the float went by. Several cowboys interrupted
their bad trips long enough to pay her compliments from horseback. Bobby Lee gazed at Nellie with lovesick eyes and made threatening gestures at any cowboy who came too close to the float.

Duane decided to sit out the parade. He walked down to the Kwik-Sack and bought some more Excedrin from Genevieve, who was watching the parade from a lawn chair in front of the store.

“There’s another chair in the back,” Genevieve said. “Sit down and watch a minute, Duane. You look tired.”

Duane got a chair and sat beside her. Karla and Old Man Balt had already passed, but he was in time to see his own company’s float go by. It was a float of a drilling rig, on the back of yet another of his trucks. Turkey Clay and a little roustabout named Squirrel stood beside the papier-mâché rig, representing the career roustabouts of the area.

Then came the bank float, with Lester and his tellers and secretaries, in their cowboy hats and cap pistols, followed by the high school float. The high school float was decorated in the school colors, purple and green, and bore a huge crepe-paper replica of the school flower—a thistle—inside a heart.

By far the most striking feature of the high school float was Jacy, who had agreed to ride in it and represent the Homecoming Queen Through the Ages. She was flanked by four of the more recent homecoming queens, all of whom faded into insignificance in comparison to her. Jacy wore an evening dress and looked supremely glamorous. She had become again, at least for an evening, the woman of mythic beauty that everyone in town had supposed she must be in the years when she was away in Europe being a movie star.

Duane, who had forgotten that Jacy had agreed to be Homecoming Queen Through the Ages, was stunned. Most of the hundreds of parade watchers were also stunned. They had clapped and hooted for Nellie, who was familiar to them, but when the float carrying Jacy came by they merely stared in silence. There in the hot street, on the back of a truck that usually hauled oil rigs, was a movie goddess looking just the way a movie goddess should look. Amid the absurdities of crinolines and cap pistols one local legend had actually come alive.

Just as Duane was unfolding the second lawn chair so he could sit in it, Jacy spotted him and walked over to the edge of the truck. She might be a legend risen up, but she was not in the least inhibited by her own prominence.

“Hey, Duane, get up here!” she yelled.

Duane made a “Who, me?” gesture.

“Yeah, you, you!” Jacy yelled. “Come on!”

She marched up and banged on the roof of the cab until the driver looked back at her.

“Stop this float!” she said.

The driver stopped so abruptly that two of the younger homecoming queens nearly fell off.

Duane set the lawn chair down. Genevieve was looking at him with an amused expression.

“That girl never would let you alone,” she said.

“She’s not a girl anymore,” Duane said.

“The older we get, the more dangerous,” Genevieve said. “You better run along.”

Duane realized again that Genevieve didn’t like him very much. He walked over to the truck and climbed on the back of it.

“I don’t know what you want me up here for,” he said.

The crowd knew, though. They began to cheer and clap. Jacy led him over by the heart with the thistle in it, linked her arm in his, and waved at the crowd as the truck moved slowly down the street.

“What’s a homecoming queen without the captain of the football team?” she asked. “She’d be like Eve without Adam.”

“Don’t remind me,” Duane said. “We’ve still got that Adam and Eve skit to get through.”

“What do you mean, get through?” Jacy said. She kept smiling but her look contained a hint of ice.

“I’m looking forward to that skit,” she said. “Don’t you think I’ll make a good Eve?”

“You’ll do fine,” he said. “I’m the one I’m worried about. I’m so nervous I’m half sick.”

“I believe that,” Jacy said. “Just holding your arm is like holding a big wire of some kind. You better learn to relax, Duane. You’re at the age when men have heart attacks if they stay too uptight.”

“I’ve been trying to relax all day, but everything that’s happened so far just makes me more nervous,” he said.

“Including being up here with me?” she asked.

“Yep,” he said.

Jacy put her arm around his waist and waved to the crowd with her free hand. People on both sides of the street were clapping and cheering.

“You should love this,” Jacy said, her eyes gleaming. “I love it, and you should love it too. Put me up here alone and they don’t know what to do with me, but put me up here with you and they love us both. We’re kind of their royalty, Duane. To them we’re a romance. They think we’ve been fucking all these years and that we’ll probably be fucking tonight. We’re more to them than we could ever be to one another. Doesn’t that move you? It
should
move you.”