Texasville (5 page)

“Duane, stop acting dumb,” Janine said. “If you’re worried about Karla, you don’t have to be because she’s having an affair with Junior Nolan.”

“How do you know that?” Duane asked, wishing he hadn’t agreed to go to the play. It would be delicious just to sleep for another few hours.

“Everybody knows it but you, Duane,” Janine said.

Everybody would have to include Ruth Popper, who kept well informed about local love affairs. The Monday after his visit to Fort Worth, Duane asked Ruth if she thought Karla was having an affair with Junior Nolan. Ruth had worked for him
fifteen years, and Duane was not afraid to speak frankly to her. Ruth herself was not afraid to speak frankly to anyone.

“No, he’s too tall,” Ruth said, when she heard the question.

“I thought women liked tall men,” Duane said.

“That’s a myth,” Ruth said. She had extremely firm opinions on what was myth and what wasn’t.

“Women like nice men,” she added.

“Junior seems pretty nice,” Duane said. “He’s got a nice wife and nice kids. If wife swapping ever becomes a fad around here, like exercise was, I hope to swap for Suzie Nolan myself.”

“Karla’s an above-average wife,” Ruth said.

She had been unhappy most of her life, but was being rewarded with a happy old age.

“Can’t a tall man be nice?” Duane asked. He had always felt slightly envious of tall men in the belief that women liked them better.

“Any size man can be nice,” Ruth said. “But a worried man is not going to be as nice as a man with peace of mind. I think what Karla needs is a man with peace of mind.”

“I guess that leaves Sonny,” Duane said.

Ruth looked at him sternly.

“Sonny has resignation,” Ruth said. “He doesn’t care whether he lives or dies. Resignation is not the same as peace of mind.”

“I don’t much care if I live or die, with things like they are,” Duane said.

“Yes, you do, stupid,” Ruth said. “You may think you don’t, but you do.”

CHAPTER 5

L
OOKING ACROSS THE TABLE AT JUNIOR NOLAN,
Duane could summon no feeling whatever regarding his presumed affair with Karla. Junior looked very worried, which, as he knew himself, could induce a certain apathy where once romance might have swelled.

The only cheerful person at the table was Luthie Sawyer. Luthie owned a small drilling company and was going broke like everyone else, but he talked so constantly and kept in such perpetual motion that he may not have noticed that detail. Luthie was an eternal optimist, and also an imaginative one. He was always coming up with novel solutions to problems that left everyone else totally stumped.

“I think I’ve got the answer to this oil glut,” Luthie announced, stirring his coffee so rapidly he made a little whirlpool in his cup.

“Good,” Duane said. “What’s the answer?”

“Let’s bomb OPEC,” Luthie said. He was a small, vigorous man, deeply suntanned.

“Well,” Duane said, noncommittally.

Bobby Lee and Eddie Belt looked thoughtful.

“Napalm it or use H-bombs?” Bobby Lee asked.

Luthie evidently hadn’t got that far in his planning.

“I don’t know if you could buy an H-bomb,” he said.

“Why couldn’t you buy one?” Eddie Belt asked. “It’s still a free country, ain’t it?”

“I don’t think you’d need nuc-lar weapons,” Luthie said. “I think regular bombs would do it.”

“If this means getting drafted, I pass,” Bobby Lee said.

“No army in the world would take you,” Eddie Belt said. He and Bobby Lee were longtime rivals.

“Don’t you remember Ross Perot?” Luthie said. “They stuck some of his engineers in jail and he just hired himself some meres and got ’em out.”

“What’s a mere?” Mitch Mott wanted to know.

“You know, mercenaries,” Luthie said.

The hated name of H. Ross Perot, the billionaire computer baron and educational reformer, rang like a bell in the dining room of the Dairy Queen.

Several people gave the oilmen hostile looks for having uttered it. Every time the door swung open they could all hear a low chant from the direction of the high school, three blocks away. Spring training was in progress and the squad members of the ever-hopeful Thalia Thistles were doing calisthenics under a blistering sun.

Thanks to the state’s new no-pass, no-play law, students failing even one course could not participate in extracurricular activities during the six weeks following the failure. H. Ross Perot had done all he could to lobby the bill through, and it was ruefully admitted that he could do a lot.

What it meant for the Thalia Thistles was that many of the young men now sweating through calisthenics would fail off the team at the end of the first testing period, making it doubtful that the high school could even field a complete team.

Critics of the Thistles, whose record over the past decade showed three wins, two ties, and seventy-four losses, argued that Thalia seldom fielded a complete team anyway, but their mutterings went unheard. Rage like a wall of flame had swept the state in the wake of no pass, no play. The injustice of having
teenagers sit in class all day learning boring things that their own parents often had not the slightest interest in was keenly felt.

“I’d rather just go bomb Ross Perot’s offices,” Bobby Lee said. His position on no pass, no play was not in doubt.

Duane, a closet advocate of the new law, kept his thoughts to himself. Occasionally he daydreamed about how nice it would be if his children got educations. He imagined Dickie becoming a lawyer instead of a criminal; of Jack and Julie being the first Texas twins to graduate from Harvard. Even in his sweetest daydreams he couldn’t produce a diploma for Nellie, but there were the grandkids to hope for. Maybe one of them would want to get educated.

In public he confined himself to an occasional ambiguous murmur. The hometown newspaper argued that no pass, no play was the most serious issue to confront the town since the Civil War, ignoring the fact that Thalia had been blank prairie until two decades after Appomattox.

The fear haunting every parent’s mind was that if their young ones were denied the right to play sports, twirl batons, lead cheers or blow horns in the band, they would quit school immediately and sit around the house forever, watching TV.

“How come Ross Perot ain’t going broke like everybody else up here?” Eddie Belt asked. “You think he’s a communist?”

“He’s not in the oil business,” Duane pointed out.

“I don’t like no son-of-a-bitch that’s that much richer than me,” Bobby Lee said.

“It might not cost but a few hundred thousand to bomb OPEC,” Luthie said, returning to his plan.

“I don’t think OPEC is a place,” Duane said.

Luthie looked hurt. He had always been thin-skinned. Bombing OPEC had seemed like a simple solution to everyone’s problems. All the papers made it clear that OPEC was responsible for the oil glut. But Duane’s remark shook his confidence.

“I thought it was over there by Kuwait somewhere,” Luthie said.

“Mexico don’t belong, but Venezuela does,” Duane pointed out.

“Oh, shit, don’t bomb Mexico, it’d just spread them germs,” Eddie Belt said. He had been to Mexico twice and had caught inconvenient diseases both times.

“I don’t want none of them germs coming around me,” he said, as his memories grew more vivid.

After that, conversation lagged. It was as if the various patrons of the Dairy Queen had been overtaken for a moment by events too sobering for words. The only sound was the sound of Janine popping her bubble gum—a sound that made Duane feel tense, for some reason. Janine had never given up bubble gum, though it contrasted sharply with the polished, sophisticated image she felt was required of her as an elected official. Duane knew she was watching him. She watched him constantly, but without finding out much. Janine could not be said to be a very advanced student of male behavior.

“Do you think women want it more than men?” Junior Nolan asked suddenly, staring at a saltshaker.

The table was collectively stunned. Only Duane smiled. Everyone else stirred their coffee thoughtfully, embarrassed that Junior had seen fit to ask such a question.

“Want what more?” Bobby Lee asked, though he knew perfectly well what “it” meant.

“Uh, sexual intercourse,” Junior said sadly.

The coffee in several cups was again thoughtfully stirred. Duane had already finished his, and chose to sit back and hear how the company responded to Junior’s surprising question.

Just at that moment Sonny Crawford walked in, a copy of
The Wall Street Journal
tucked under his arm.

CHAPTER 6

T
WENTY-SEVEN YEARS BEFORE, WHEN COACH
Popper, Ruth’s husband, had found out that she and Sonny were having an affair, he had fired three shots at Sonny with his deer rifle as Sonny was crossing the street in front of the courthouse. The first shot hit Sonny in the elbow, causing damage that had never been completely repaired.

The coach’s second shot missed Sonny but hit Ennis Lyons, who had been sitting on an old tractor tire outside his filling station. Ennis often took naps sitting on the big tire, which sat beside a largish pile of used tires that Ennis kept around because he could never find the time to haul them off. The shot knocked Ennis back into the tires and caused his greasy little cap to fall over his eyes.

Since Ennis could often be found sprawled out sound asleep on the tire pile, it was several hours before anyone noticed that he was soundly dead. Gene Farrow, an oilman needing gas, stepped over to complain about the slow service and made the discovery.

The coach’s third shot went wild and, so far as had been
discovered, killed no one. He then drove around to the beauty parlor, where Ruth was getting a permanent, and fired two shots into it, hitting no one but ruining a dryer.

Gene Farrow and his wife, Lois, died four months later when their small plane crashed a few miles south of Ruidoso, New Mexico, where they had planned to take in the horse races.

While awaiting trial, Coach Popper was discovered to have lung cancer. He died scarcely a month later, a bitter man. His bitterness was compounded by the knowledge that not only had Ruth, his treacherous wife, had breast cancer and survived it, but had managed to have an affair with Sonny while she had it.

“I wish I’d shot straighter, but it was windy,” he said to several people.

Nobody particularly missed the coach, though the whole county had been looking forward to the trial. That fall, to everyone’s surprise, the football team blazed through its schedule like a comet and went on to win state in its division, a thing so unexpected that many felt it must have religious significance.

In a few years the shooting was all but forgotten, remembered principally by Sonny, who went to Dallas periodically to have his elbow operated on.

Now he got himself some coffee and came over to the oilmen’s table, though he wasn’t an oilman.

“Good morning,” he said politely. Sonny was, by general agreement, the most polite man in town.

“Junior wants to know if women need more sex than men,” Duane said.

“I didn’t say need it, exactly,” Junior said, blushing into his sunburn.

“Don’t look at me, I’m a bachelor,” Sonny said.

“We need the bachelor perspective,” Duane said. “Mitch is a bachelor too. What do you think about it, Mitch?”

“Duane, I wouldn’t know,” Mitch said. “I’ve mostly done without, except during rodeos.”

Duane glanced over at the ladies from the courthouse, avoiding Janine’s steely blue eyes. He had an urge to invite them to join in the conversation, if it ever became a conversation.

He wondered what had prompted Junior to ask such a question.
His wife, Suzie Nolan, was a lovely woman, quiet and seemingly demure. She had lived in Thalia all her life, graduating in the same class as Duane and Sonny.

In those years she had been overshadowed by Jacy Farrow, only child of Lois and Gene, and Duane’s own first love. Jacy had overshadowed every female in town except her own mother, and had been Sonny’s first love too. Their graduating class was planning its thirtieth reunion that summer, and everyone wondered if Jacy would attend.

Through the years she had only returned to Thalia for a weekend or a holiday now and then. She lived in Italy, where she had been a minor movie star. In March she had returned to Thalia, driven home, some said, by the death of her youngest child, a six-year-old named Benny, who had been electrocuted in a freak accident on a movie set.

So far Jacy had rarely been seen in town. She lived in the house of a friend, twenty miles in the country. The friend, a screenwriter named Danny Deck, lived in Europe and kept an eye on Jacy’s two daughters, who were both almost grown. Danny Deck had grown up near Thalia but had not gone to high school there.

No one understood why Jacy was a movie star in Italy and not in America, or why she had had all her children by Frenchmen, if she lived in Italy, or why she had chosen to stay in the house of a man who lived in Europe with her daughters, while her own parents’ large house stood empty. Besides inheriting the house, she had also inherited Farrow Oil, a solid little company Duane would have liked to buy. It consisted of the many leases Gene Farrow had managed to acquire during his lifetime—leases which still produced a few hundred barrels of oil a day.

In the flush years he had often thought of flying over to Europe and making Jacy an offer for the oil company. It was a plan Karla adamantly opposed—not the part about him buying the oil company, but the part about him going to Europe to see Jacy Farrow. Karla and Jacy had never met, Karla having moved to Thalia just after Jacy left.

Duane was careful to point out, as unemotionally as possible, that what he had in mind was strictly a business deal. He had
a chance to get Gene Farrow’s production, and if he didn’t, somebody else would.

“No, they won’t, she’ll keep it herself and spend it in Paris buying clothes,” Karla said. At that time her favorite T-shirt read,
LEAD ME NOT INTO TEMPTATION, I’LL FIND IT FOR MYSELF.