“I think it’s stupid that that old rehab center won’t even let Dickie make a phone call,” Annette said. “I just miss him to pieces. What could one little phone call hurt?”
“Plenty, because he’d make it to the drug dealer, not to his loving wife,” Karla reminded her. “That’s what he did last time he was in, remember?”
“Shut up talking about dope—here comes my gourmet cooking,” Rag informed them. Soon the large kitchen table was covered with all the things Rag liked to cook: platters of round steak for the masses, bowls of her signature cream gravy, hominy, black-eyed peas, sauerkraut—a personal passion of Rag’s not shared with much intensity by the people she fed—okra, a mound of baked potatoes, grilled onions, and hot rolls.
“Sit down and eat with us, Rag,” Duane said. “I hate to eat when somebody’s working.”
He said it every night; asking Rag to eat with them was a prelude to every meal, as grace had once been, but Rag had no interest in eating her gourmet cooking. Instead, she repaired to the little pantry, where she smoked and watched I Love Lucy reruns on a small TV, occasionally popping back in to pile more food on the table or check on the cobbler she held in readiness for dessert.
“In my day the help didn’t eat with the family,” she said, when Duane asked her to sit down and eat.
“What if we adopt you, would you eat with us then?” he once asked, out of curiosity.
“No, because if I start eating my gourmet cooking I’ll get fat and lose my figure,” Rag replied. The truth was that she preferred to stop by the Dairy Queen and pick up a cheeseburger and a few tacos to munch while watching the midnight reruns, her favorite being The Mary Tyler Moore Show, all one hundred and sixty-eight episodes of which she had seen at least once; she could recite whole episodes almost verbatim, and would, if asked. She could do passable imitations of Mary, Phyllis, Lou Grant, Rhoda, Ted, Georgette, and Murray. All the grandkids listened attentively but the one most won by Rag’s performances was Little Bascom, who would roll on the floor laughing hysterically, although he had never seen The Mary Tyler Moore Show and had no idea what Rag was doing.
Although both Julie and Annette were professing vegetarianism at the time, they each forgot their vows and ate several pieces of round steak, washing it down with beer.
“If either of you are pregnant you oughtn’t to be drinking that beer,” Karla informed them sternly. “We have enough addicts in this family without producing any little alcoholic fetuses.”
“Mom, don’t talk about things like that, it’s creepy,” Julie said. “I don’t even want my kids to know what a fetus is—they’re too young.”
“We already know. Don’t you ever watch the Discovery Channel?” Willy asked.
“A fetus grows in the uterus,” Barbi said, in her dark way. “And it’s sperm that makes them and sperm lives in the balls of the male.”
“That’s right—I think I’ve already got some in my balls,” Willy said.
“Balls,” Little Bascom said. “Balls, balls.”
“Now see what you started,” Annette said to Karla. They had never been close.
“Yes, but I started it for a good reason—so you won’t drink when you’re pregnant and produce some little baby that won’t never have good math skills,” Karla said. “Anyway, as soon as kids get big enough to watch television now they know all about the facts of life.”
“And penises and vaginas too,” Willy said.
“Daddy, stop him,” Julie said. “I don’t want him talking about dicks at the dinner table.”
“Okay, Julie’s right, everybody shut up about the facts of life,” Duane said. “Anyway I need to talk to all of you about a decision I made today.”
“Uh-oh, I knew this was coming,” Karla said. “I think we ought to get the children to bed before we get into this.”
“Not on your life,” Duane said. “I particularly want the children to hear what I have to say.”
“Oh sure, so you can brainwash them into believing that anything you do is just fine and dandy,” Karla said.
“There’s free speech in this country—I have the right to say what I want to say to my own children and grandchildren, don’t I?” Duane demanded to know.
Karla refused to answer, but there was a chorus from the crowd and the chorus was in favor of hearing what Duane had to say. Rag, intrigued, turned down I Love Lucy and stuck her head out the pantry door so she could listen.
“You can talk,” Karla said, reluctantly. “But then I get the last word, okay?”
“Okay—but on condition you don’t interrupt me until I’ve finished,” Duane said. “I want you to shut up until I’ve said what I have to say. Then we can all talk it over.”
“If you go off the deep end and start brainwashing my grandkids I guess I have the right to interrupt,” Karla said. “What kind of democracy is this, anyway?”
“Shut up, Grandma, I want to hear what Grandpa has to say,” Willy said.
“As for that, you ain’t too big to spank, young man,” Karla said.
She looked severely at Willy, but then, noticing that everyone at the table was frowning at her, and realizing that Duane, with his gift for sweet reasonableness, was costing her whatever advantage she might have in the court of public opinion, Karla quickly shut up.
7
“I GUESS SOME PEOPLE in town and maybe one or two people in this house were a little upset with me today because I decided to take a walk,” Duane began.
“Right, Grandma freaked out,” Willy said.
“Right, ’cause you went crazy,” Bubbles said.
“You should have taken me. I like to walk and nobody ever lets me,” Barbi said.
“I don’t walk, I run,” Sami said.
Loni, the shy one, who rarely spoke, as usual kept her own counsel.
“I didn’t go crazy, Bubbles,” Duane said. “You don’t have to be crazy just to want to take a walk.”
“Yes, you do,” Bubbles insisted. “You want to walk away and leave us all to starve, that’s what my momma said.”
“It was a joke, Bubbles,” Julie said, horrified that her own daughter would betray a casual comment she had happened to make.
“You kids shut up, and you too, Julie,” Karla said. “Let Pa-Pa finish.”
“Thanks,” Duane said. “It’s simple, really. Walking is very good exercise, and a man my age needs exercise. Walking keeps people from having strokes and heart attacks, whereas riding around in pickups smoking cigarettes is a good way to get lung cancer and keel over and die.”
“Don’t die, Pa-Pa!” Bubbles said, horrified at the prospect.
“Well, I won’t, honey, if everyone will just leave me alone to do my walking,” Duane assured her. “All of you are little right now, but I want to live a long time so I can see you grow up and meet who you marry and see what kind of kids you have. Don’t you think it would be nice if I could do that?”
All the children nodded, even Little Bascom and Baby Paul, neither of whom had any notion as to what was going on. Little Bascom and Baby Paul continued to nod, long after the others had stopped.
“Of course, nobody would really starve—not as long as I’m here to do my gourmet cooking,” Rag said.
She had taken the remark as a slight on her loyalty.
“I didn’t say anything about starving,” Duane assured her. “I just want everybody to think about this calmly. Just because walking isn’t a popular thing around Thalia doesn’t mean it’s crazy. Actually it’s a smart, healthy thing to do. It just means I have a good attitude and want to stay healthy and live a long life.”
He stopped and surveyed his audience.
“There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?” he asked.
“No, but you don’t have to stay alive to see what kind of kids I have because I hate girls and I’m not going to have any,” Willy informed him.
“I hated them too, when I was your age, but I changed my mind and you might change yours,” Duane said. “I’d j
ust kind of like to stay alive to see what happens.”
“Okay,” Willy said. “I don’t mind, Pa-Pa.”
“If I just keep walking people will gradually get used to it and then they’ll notice that I’m losing weight and looking a little healthier—some of them might start walking too,” Duane said.
“That would be good,” Barbi said. “There are too many people with fat ugly butts in this town. They all need to get liposuction on their big fat asses.”
“My lord, where did you hear about liposuction?” Duane asked.
“From Grandma,” Barbi said.
“Duane, I was just discussing it in the abstract,” Karla said.
“All your friends are too fat, Grandma,” Barbi said, pressing on. “Bobbie is fat and Candy is fat and Jolene is the fattest of all.”
“That’s not a kind way to put it, Barbi,” Karla said. “But some of them are a little heavy, I’ll admit.”
“I know,” Bubbles said. “Pa-Pa can take all the fat people with him when he walks and pretty soon they won’t be fat anymore.”
“Fat chance of that,” Rag said, to Duane’s relief. He had no intention of leading a pack of fat walkers, but to say so directly would damage his case, just when he thought he pretty well had it made.
“So, does everybody understand now?” Duane said. “Walking doesn’t mean I’m crazy—it just means I want to be healthy and stay alive a long time.”
“What if it takes you too long and you get lost in the weeds?” Barbi asked. She was good at spotting possible flaws in whatever arguments came her way, particularly the arguments that came her way from her parents, when they wanted her to do something she didn’t want to do. Often she was able to convince them that for her to do what they wanted would mean almost certain death—of course, that worked best when both her parents were too stoned to think clearly.
“I’m taller than the weeds; I won’t get lost,” Duane said.
“Yes, but what if a bad witch made the weeds grow taller than the water tower, then you might get lost,” Barbi said.
“Well if that happened Grandma could just hire a helicopter to come and rescue me,” Duane said.
“Shut up, you’re the only witch around here, you little slut,” Willy said. Barbi was always talking about disasters bad witches could make and some of them sounded so real he had bad dreams about them.
“Don’t be calling your own cousin a slut, little boy,” Annette said.
“Now see what you’ve done, Duane—you’ve got all these kids talking ugly,” Karla said.
“Honey, they’re kids,” he reminded her. “They can talk ugly without any help from me.”
“What about Six Flags? Have any of you kids thought of that?” Karla asked.
“What about Six Flags, are we going?” Willy asked.
“Yeah, are we going?” Bubbles asked, and the others chimed in, all except Barbi, who refused to join the clamor. Baby Paul banged his spoon and threw his carrots off his high chair.
“The reason I mention it is because Pa-Pa is the only person I trust to drive on those Arlington freeways and Arlington’s where Six Flags is,” Karla said. “If he won’t drive we can’t plan trips to Six Flags because it’s too far for all of us to walk.”
“Hey, that’s not fair, I’m the grandparent,” Duane said. “It’s the parents’ job to take kids to amusement parks.”
Nonetheless he and Karla were usually the ones who took the grandkids to Six Flags. When Julie and Jack and Nellie and Dickie went they left the kids at home.
“We wouldn’t have any fun ourselves if we took the kids,” Nellie said, succinctly summarizing the prevailing attitude.
Duane noticed that all the young eyes had swiveled in his direction. The thought that his walking might deprive them of trips to Six Flags put the whole matter in a different light.
“Well, it’s really no problem,” he said. “The next time you kids all want to go to Six Flags I’ll just hire a limo. And Grandma can ride along with you to chaperone.”
“Oh boy, a limo...a limo!” Bubbles said, so ecstatically that Duane congratulated himself on the clever way he had trumped Karla’s ace.
It was a clean victory, too. All of the kids had seen limos galore on TV but none of them had ever ridden in one. The consensus was that riding in a limo would be even more fun than Six Flags itself—after all, they had been to Six Flags quite a few times already.
Karla, who knew when she had been trumped, didn’t say a word. If Duane turned out to be serious about walking, then it was going to be a long campaign. Better to fight and run away, and live to fight another day.
“Cobbler time!” Rag announced. “There’s not many things better on earth than blackberry cobbler.”
“Riding in a limo is better,” Willy assured her.
“I hope the driver is a member of the Mafia,” Barbi said. “I hope he wears a dark suit and is a member of the Mafia.”
“Why would you want to be driven to Six Flags by a member of the Mafia, honey?” Annette inquired. Sometimes the things that came out of her daughter’s mouth shocked her a little. She never had that problem with Loni, who was so quiet she often wouldn’t even say what color socks she wanted to put on in the morning.
“I love the Mafia. I want to join it when I get big,” Barbi said. “It’s my favorite thing in the whole world.”
Then, while everyone was absorbed with their cobbler, Baby Paul somehow managed to push with his feet and tip his high chair over backward; when it hit the floor he popped out of it like a living cork and went sliding far across the kitchen floor. The fall didn’t hurt him at all but when everybody rushed over to see if he was injured he got rattled and began to shriek at the top of his lungs.
“I told Nellie that high chair was no good; she just doesn’t listen,” Karla said.
“Shrieks and screams, typical day,” Rag said, contemplating the mess of dishes she had to clean up.
8
DUANE HAD PUT A SLIDING GLASS DOOR along the wall of the master bedroom, so he could step outside at night and gauge the weather, sniff the breeze, look at the stars, or just sit in a lawn chair for a while, relaxing. On a dark night, when there were no stars to look at and no moon to light the patio or the yard, accidents could happen. Once when Duane left the glass door open a little, a granddaddy rattlesnake, almost eight feet long, sidled into the house and made itself comfortable on the bed. Karla noticed it just as she was about to throw back the covers: she let out a shriek that could have been heard in Wichita Falls. The sight of a huge rattlesnake—the largest anyone had seen around Thalia in more than twenty-five years—on her very own bed so unnerved Karla that she slept on the couch in the living room for the next two months. The snake had been killed, stuffed, and given to the county museum, where it was on permanent display, but even so Karla was a long time freeing herself of the conviction that the big snake or one of its kinfolk was under her bed or in her walk-in closet. The incident scared her so badly that she had every object taken out of every closet in the house, to be sure no snakes were lurking among them. The house contained seventeen large closets; the objects they disgorged while Karla was hunting for snakes made a pile the like of which had not been seen by anyone in Thalia, ever.
“They didn’t even have this much stuff in Babylon, Grandma,” Barbi said. She had only been four at the time, but, even then, she had a good vocabulary.
“Where’d you hear about Babylon, honey? You don’t even go to Sunday school,” Karla asked. The answer, of course, was the Discovery Channel.
“I don’t know about Babylon but this is too much stuff,” Duane observed. “No wonder I’ve already been bankrupt twice.”
“Duane, it just kind of filtered in—you know, like sand does when there’s a sandstorm,” Karla said.
After contemplating the great pile for a few days, Karla decided there might be something to be said for the simple life after all. Rather than try to fit the thousands of objects back in the seventeen closet
s, she and the girls indulged in an orgy of weeding, carried a whole pickup load of designer clothes to an orphanage in Waco, and got rid of much of the rest in a gigantic garage sale which drew patrons from as far away as Odessa.
“That old snake had a good effect after all,” Duane observed. “Now I can go in my own closet and look for some clean underwear without suffocating.”
“Duane, don’t even mention that snake, I might get a migraine,” Karla said.
That night, though, it was far too cold for there to be any rattlesnakes about. The sky was inky, the stars like white diamonds. Though the norther had mostly blown itself out, it still sighed and whistled a bit; the wind chimes Annette had hung up behind the trailer house tinkled in the distance.
Duane, in his bathrobe, blew in his hands a few times and considered the various places he could walk on the morrow. He knew every road in the county, from his years in the pickup, but there were plenty of them he had yet to traverse on foot. The decision to walk for a while, made on the spur of the moment, had already changed his perspective and improved his attitude. Instead of going to bed with the dull sense that he would just have to get up in the morning and do the same things he had done more or less every day for sixty years, he had a new experience to look forward to.
“Duane, get in here; it’s too cold for you to be standing out there,” Karla said, sticking her head out the glass door for a moment.
Duane obeyed, yawning. He felt invigorated, rather than sleepy, but he yawned anyway, hoping Karla would just let him go to bed with no more discussion of the walking. He didn’t expect it to work, but he gave it a try, anyway.
Sure enough, it didn’t work.
“Duane, if you’re that depressed maybe you should just get counseling,” Karla said.
He didn’t respond.
“Lots of normal people go into counseling now—it’s not a stigma, like it used to be,” she said.
“If it’s not a stigma, why don’t you get it, instead of liposuction?” Duane suggested, slipping into bed.
“Duane, I’m not the one that’s depressed,” Karla said.
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