Texasville (7 page)

“All I know is, men are scaredy-cats,” Lavelle said.

“I figure the average man tells at least a million lies a year,” Charlene observed.

“You women won’t stick to the point,” Duane said. “All we’re trying to find out is whether you girls want it more than us boys.”

“In the first place, you ain’t boys,” Lavelle said. “You look half dead to me.”

“That’s what being middle-aged means,” Sonny said. “You’re on the downhill slope.”

“I ain’t, and besides I’ve got my brakes on,” Bobby Lee said. He was five years younger than Sonny and Duane and objected to being lumped with them. He didn’t care for the downhill-slope concept either.

“What’s it say about it in
The Wall Street Journal?”
Duane asked.

Sonny liked to buy penny stocks. He generally spent an hour or two each morning at the DQ picking through the
Journal.
He wasn’t rich by any means, but he owned the laundrymat, the Kwik-Sack, the video parlor, four or five buildings and a recently installed carwash.

“It doesn’t say a word about the problem,” he said.

“I can’t believe we have to pay taxes to the county so these women can sit here and talk about stuff like this,” Eddie Belt said.

“Stuff like what?” Karla asked, materializing suddenly at Eddie’s elbow.

CHAPTER 8

T
HOUGH EVERYONE ELSE AT THE TABLE WAS FROZEN
with horror, Duane could hardly keep from laughing out loud. He alone had seen Karla’s BMW whip past the drive-in window a minute earlier. Karla was impatient with the drive-in window, as well as with other forms of service at the DQ.

What she usually did was park behind the building, come in the back door, gossip a minute with the cook, sniff the nacho dip to see if it met with her approval and pour herself some fresh coffee before anyone in the dining room even knew she was around. If there was no one there with whom she felt like gossiping, she could cut back out the rear exit and be on her way to wherever her mood took her.

Duane had decided to give Janine lots of rope and see if Karla could hang her. He knew it wasn’t a charitable thing to do, but then he was not always in the mood to be charitable toward Janine. Without bothering to ascertain whether he planned to divorce Karla and marry her, Janine had told him not to plan any custody fights because she had no intention of living with his kids.

“Living with your kids wouldn’t be my idea of a good time,” she told him, as nicely as possible.

“It isn’t anybody’s idea of a good time,” Duane said. “But they’re my kids. I have to try and raise them.”

“They’re giving fathers real generous visitation rights,” Janine pointed out. “Maybe Karla will move to Ruidoso and you can visit them up there.”

In her thoughts Janine often moved Karla to some fashionable but distant place such as Ruidoso or Vail. Even during the brief conversation she had been vaguely moving Karla around, making it all the more a shock to see her standing behind Eddie Belt, very much present. Karla was wearing sunglasses, so there was no way of knowing what she was thinking, but then Janine didn’t care to know what a person like Karla thought.

Duane, who just seemed to get the devil in him from time to time, wasn’t a bit of help. He could have asked Karla what she thought she was doing, showing up at the Dairy Queen unannounced, but instead he just sat there grinning.

Janine withdrew her arm from Duane’s shoulder as smoothly as possible, well aware that if Karla had happened to walk in with a chain saw the arm would be lying on the floor already.

“Hi, Janine,” Karla said. “Haven’t seen you in a long time.”

“I hardly ever leave the courthouse,” Janine said. “The only people who see me are people with overdue taxes.”

Karla seemed to be happy as a lark, although she hadn’t taken off her sunglasses.

“Why are you looking so red in the face, Eddie Belt?” she asked. “Were you talking about sex? I’ve noticed the mere mention of sex turns you red in the face.”

“You don’t have to call me by my whole name,” Eddie pointed out. “You’ve known me all my life.”

Eddie had a hard time concealing the fact that he was deathly afraid of Karla—more afraid of her than he would have been of a cobra. You could run from a cobra, but where could you run from Karla, if you happened to work for her husband?

“Now don’t pick on Eddie,” Duane said. “We’ve just been discussing whether women like sex more than men, or what.”

“We didn’t reach a decision yet,” he added.

“In fact we haven’t got very far in the discussion,” Sonny said. It worried him that Duane would sit there practically egging on his wife and his girlfriend. Duane had that streak in him. In certain moods, he would take any risk. His daring made Sonny nervous—he didn’t enjoy watching it operate. He himself preferred to avoid confrontations and had arranged his life so it didn’t contain many.

“Bobby Lee’s just a Peeping Tom, so he shouldn’t get a vote,” Karla said.

“I ain’t, I’m married,” Bobby Lee protested.

Pretending her finger was a piece of chalk, Karla marked a few scores in the air.

“Sonny’s a bachelor, Eddie Belt’s scared of women, and Duane says himself he’s past his prime. I don’t know if it’s fair to judge the whole male sex by this ugly little bunch.”

“Yes, it’s fair,” Lavelle said. “I lived in Olney twenty years, and men ain’t no better down there.”

“I ain’t scared of women and you ain’t no Gina Bardot yourself,” Eddie Belt snapped, wishing he’d never stopped at the Dairy Queen in the first place.

“Brigitte Bardot,” Sonny corrected.

Janine could hardly believe Duane would sit there and let his own wife insult him so bluntly. Ordinarily she would have thought it meant he suffered from low self-esteem, but Duane was tricky and couldn’t really be understood in terms of self-esteem.

“I may get a second wind any day now,” he said, grinning.

“Duane, you used up all your winds years ago,” Karla said.

“I wish I could just sit here all day, but some of us have to work,” Janine said, standing up. Charlene and Lavelle were reluctant to leave until they had heard what Karla had to say to Duane out of earshot of Janine, but they didn’t have much choice. Fortunately the cook was still listening from behind the taco shells and they knew they could get a full report from her.

“If you ever figure out who wants it most, let us know,” Charlene said. “I’ve often wondered.”

Karla took Eddie Belt’s dozer cap off and ruffled his hair to show him there were no hard feelings.

“I know you’re not really scared of women,” she said. “You’re just scared of me, and that shows you got good sense.”

“If I had good sense I wouldn’t be here,” Eddie said, though now that the horrible trio from the courthouse was gone his mood was improving.

“You oughta do like Duane, get you a girlfriend who chews bubble gum,” Karla said, still the picture of good cheer.

Duane laughed.

“I don’t know what you think you’ve got to laugh about, Duane,” Karla said, smiling at him.

“I was just laughing at nothing,” he said. “It’s either that or cry about everything, and I wasn’t in a crying mood.”

Karla put an arm around Sonny, her old friend. From time to time, in years past, she had tried to penetrate his detachment at least enough to get him to flirt with her, but she finally came to accept that his detachment was impenetrable. Since then he had been a stable source of advice, though rarely a source of fun.

“It don’t say much for your character that you’d let him sit here with that slut and not do a thing to save our marriage,” she said.

“Your marriage isn’t in any danger and it never has been,” Sonny said.

“Wrong,” Karla said. “You’d be surprised how many times it’s been in danger.”

But she knew it was pointless to talk marriage to Sonny, since his only marriage—to Jacy Farrow—had been one of the shortest, if not
the
shortest, on record.

Legend had it that Sonny and Jacy had only been married an hour when her parents had them picked up by the Highway Patrol. Jacy was immediately sent away and an annulment secured. Local cocksmen sometimes teased Sonny, urging him to try and get into the
Guinness Book of World Records,
but Sonny shrugged off the teasing. He said he imagined there had been marriages even shorter than his, and claimed to have seen an item in the Dallas paper about a bridegroom who dropped dead two seconds after he said “I do.”

Karla could hardly imagine Sonny being married even for an hour—it just didn’t seem like him. She sometimes called him
Luke, as in Luke the Drifter, because he reminded her of a great many Hank Williams songs.

Lately, to her consternation, and Duane’s as well, the drifter part had begun to come true in an ominous way. Sonny’s mind had begun to drift off.

Sometimes it only drifted for a second or two: he might be ringing up an item at the Kwik-Sack and forget what he was doing. Usually he would kick back in thirty seconds or so and finish ringing up the sale. But one or two lapses had lasted long enough and become embarrassing enough that the customers had just left money on the counter and gone away.

Several lapses had occurred in the City Council meetings that Sonny presided over once a month. Three or four times he had made a motion and then lost the train completely, sitting with a pleasant look on his face long after the motion had been voted on.

“It’s like his brain slips out of gear,” Buster Lickle, a Council member, said.

Usually, at such times, the Council could sort of move the agenda around Sonny, who always came back to himself after a few minutes. The general view was that lots of people’s brains slipped out of gear more often than Sonny’s, and with worse results. He was accorded the tolerance given to absent-minded professors, although his college experience had only consisted of a few business courses at a small university in Wichita Falls.

There had been one big lapse, however, which only Duane, Karla and Ruth Popper knew about. Sonny had been in Wichita Falls, eating barbecue at a favorite haunt of his. Upon coming out, he had failed to find his own car—he assumed it had been stolen and called Duane to ask if he could come and get him.

“It was probably just some kids, joyriding,” he speculated.

His car was a
’72
Plymouth, not the sort of vehicle kids normally went joyriding in. Duane drove over to get him and arrived just in time to see the cops giving him a breath test. The
’72
Plymouth was parked almost in front of the door of the barbecue joint. Duane thought the thief might have brought it back, but that was not the case.

“I guess I just sort of overlooked it,” Sonny admitted.

The cops had already found out that the only thing Sonny had drunk with his barbecue was a glass of iced tea. He was very embarrassed, but he clearly wasn’t drunk.

“Sir, are you on any medication that could affect your vision?” one of the officers inquired.

“No,” Sonny said.

“Did you black out, or what?” Duane asked, once the policeman left.

“I don’t know what I did,” Sonny said. “I just didn’t recognize my car.”

“It’s funny you could remember my phone number and not recognize your own car,” Duane said.

Sonny was anxious for Duane to leave. It was the most embarrassing thing that had ever happened to him, and the truth was even more embarrassing than what was obvious. Before calling Duane he had wandered around the parking lot for fifteen minutes, looking for the ‘46 Chevy pickup he thought he was driving. He had driven such a pickup in high school, but it had fallen apart soon after he graduated; since then he had mostly driven Plymouths.

The most frightening part about his lapse was that his mind had made everything old. There was hardly a vehicle in the parking lot earlier than 1980; but he had wandered among them seeing cars and pickups from the fifties.

And yet, when he called the police, he had given them his current license plate number correctly.

It was as if the door of the barbecue joint—it was called the Dripping Rib—had opened into a former time. By stepping through it he had stepped back into the fifties for several minutes.

For the next few weeks he was careful to take a hard look at his car before going into a restaurant. He didn’t want to step through that door again, and he began to avoid the Dripping Rib, although he had eaten there for fifteen years and was friends with all the help.

That night, back home, Duane and Karla discussed the incident at length.

“He could be on mood drugs,” Karla said. “His psychiatrist might have given them to him.”

“Sonny don’t have moods,” Duane said.

“Everybody has moods,” Karla said.

“Sonny don’t,” Duane insisted. “He’s had the same mood all his life.”

“He must have had a mood that day you had the fight over Jacy,” Karla said.

“No, I had that mood,” Duane said. “Sonny just defended himself. He did a poor job of it, too.”

“I wish I’d lived here then,” Karla said. “I’d like to know what was so good about her.”

“We were in high school,” Duane pointed out. “There doesn’t have to be anything so good about somebody to make you jealous when you’re in high school. Look at Dickie. He bought a machine gun just because some old boyfriend sent Billie Anne flowers for her birthday.”

“He’s still dying to massacre somebody, too,” Karla said. “Maybe Sonny’s on pills. His father was a pillhead.”

“Anything’s possible,” Duane said, though he didn’t think Sonny was on pills.

“If you two were both in love with her, why did Jacy go to Italy in the first place?” Karla asked. The events of Duane’s high school years interested her a lot.

“I think she just went with some of her sorority sisters from SMU,” Duane said. “I guess she must have liked it.”

“They just let her be in Tarzan movies,” Karla said.

At times she became obsessed with Jacy Farrow, her unseen rival. About all that anyone in Thalia knew about Jacy’s movie career was that she had gained fame playing a character called Jungla in a series of Italian movies. She wore a leopardskin bikini and swung through the trees—or so Bobby Lee said. He had seen one of her movies on late night TV in a motel in Texarkana, while returning home with a load of pipe. No one else in Thalia had ever seen one.