“Okay, he hates your guts,” Duane said. “But he still works for me and if I tell him to come pull you out of the ditch I expect he’ll do it.”
“You’re behind the times,” Ruth said. “Nobody works for you, because you aren’t there to work for. Why would anybody work for a deserter and a turncoat?”
“Because even a deserter and a turncoat can still issue paychecks,” Duane reminded her.
Ruth had locked her front door, but her back door was unlocked. Duane made the call, keeping it as brief as possible.
“Earlene, Ruth backed into the ditch in front of her house,” he said. “She’s stuck. See if you can locate Bobby Lee and tell him to get over here and winch her out.”
“We’d be better off leaving her there, if you ask me,” Earlene said. “She’s just in the way around here.”
“Earlene, nobody asked you,” Duane said, wishing Earlene were a little nicer.
“Just do what you’re told,” he added, reinforcing his point.
“Oh sure, bawl me out, why don’t you?” Earlene said. “There’s a million people want to talk to you and I don’t even know where to tell them to call.”
Then she burst into tears.
“There’s no place they can call,” Duane said. “Starting next week they can talk to Dickie—he’ll be running things.”
“Oh lord help us, that’ll be the end of us all,” Earlene gasped. Then she began to sob hysterically, so Duane hung up.
“I hate being late for work,” Ruth said, when he returned to the car. “Over the years I’ve maintained a laudable attendance record, only no one lauds me.”
“If I were you I’d go back in the house and wait for Bobby Lee to show up,” Duane advised.
“He won’t show up because he hates my guts,” Ruth said. “I told you that but you never listen to me.”
“What else have I done for the last thirty years, except listen to you?” he said.
“I don’t know—cheated on your wife, I guess,” Ruth said, a little startled by his comeback.
“That reminds me,” he said. “I accidentally made Karla cry this morning. When you get to work call the flower shop and have a big bunch of flowers sent over. Make it a real nice bouquet.
“Maybe seventy-five dollars’ worth,” he added.
“Must have been some fight, for you to spend that kind of money,” Ruth said.
“No, it wasn’t a fight, it was just a misunderstanding,” Duane said. “But please don’t forget to send the flowers.”
Ruth considered her position. She was looking straight up, into the heavens, which were clear at the moment.
“I doubt anyone will come,” she said. “I imagine I’ll just sit here all day. If it comes a flash flood it’ll drown me.”
Duane looked up. There was not a cloud in the sky.
“You’re not trapped,” he pointed out. “You could go back in your house and wait for the tow truck.”
“No thanks, I think I’d rather be a martyr,” Ruth said.
Then she looked at him with cloudy eyes.
“Duane, you’re really depressed,” she said. “I can sense it. I wish you’d see a psychiatrist. I saw one, and I wasn’t really the psychiatrist type.”
“Well, did it help?” Duane asked. “Did you find out anything important?”
Ruth considered the question. The way the Volkswagen was tilted skyward made it seem that she could just drive straight up, perhaps into heaven. She wasn’t a very orthodox Christian, didn’t believe in pearly gates or streets of gold, but she supposed there might be a place somewhere where virtuous spirits gathered—the spirits of people who had done their best all their lives, as she had. She was thinking that it would be nice just to drive off in her Volkswagen to the place of virtuous spirits—and that would be what dying was.
Then she remembered that Duane had asked her something.
“What was the question again? I was thinking about heaven,” she said.
“I asked if you learned anything important when you went to the psychiatrist,” he repeated.
“Well, I learned that my husband had never loved me—I guess that was important, since I was married to him a long time,” she said.
“Jody Carmichael’s daughter is a psychiatrist,” Duane said. “I’ve been thinking I might see her.”
“That’s good,” Ruth said. “A woman would probably be better for you than a man.”
Duane wanted to go. He didn’t want to get in a long conversation about psychiatry—or anything else—with Ruth Popper. Besides, if Earlene had actually made contact with Bobby Lee he was apt to show up at any time, wanting attention. Duane really wanted to get out of town before he had to dish out any more attention. But Ruth’s comment startled him.
“Why would a woman be better for me than a man?” he asked.
Ruth shrugged. “That’s just my opinion, Duane,” she said. “I suppose it’s because you’ve never been much like other men.
“You’re not exactly one of the guys,” she added. The sun through her windshield was hot—she was fanning herself with a crossword puzzle book. Ruth enjoyed fanning herself. It was a way of keeping active.
Duane felt as if he had one foot stuck in glue—the glue of human relations. He really wanted to be walking down the road, back to his solitary cabin, but somehow he had got stuck in a gluey conversation with Ruth. Every time he thought he saw an opportunity to leave, Ruth said something that held him again, like glue.
“Ruth, I’m president of the school board,” he reminded her. “I’m vice president of the Chamber of Commerce.”
Ruth didn’t respond.
“Those are normal things, aren’t they?” he asked.
“Oh, as far as they go, but it still doesn’t make you one of the guys,” Ruth said. “I think it’s good that you’re going to see a woman psychiatrist.”
Duane walked away. Ruth was like Lester, like Karla, like Bobby Lee, like everyone he knew. The only way to get out of a conversation with any of them was to leave. He walked home at a good clip, feeling anything but at peace. As soon as he got home he sat down at his table, opened his tablet, and wrote two short letters of resignation, one to the school board and the other to the Chamber of Commerce.
Then, feeling a little better, he tore the two letters out of the tablet, folded them neatly, and closed the tablet. He had neither envelopes nor stamps—he would have to get some the next time he went to Jody Carmichael’s, which might be as soon as later that day.
Though he couldn’t immediately mail them, just writing the letters had the effect of easing his mind. He had done something he wanted to do, taken what he considered to be a strong, positive step—he was getting his feet out of the glue. He began to relax, ceased to feel quite so tight in his chest. He took his lawn chair outside, covered himself with his poncho, and just sat, relaxing, breathing better, watching the wide sky.
26
LATER IN THE DAY Duane walked a mile and a half south of the hill to a large stock tank—he sat by the tank most of the afternoon, watching the ripples on the water as the wind blew across it. The stock tank was nothing much, as man-made ponds went in that country, but it had a line of nice willow trees across the north side. In his bass fishing days he had often sat in the shade of the willow trees, casting idly for bass and throwing back most of what he caught.
It was windy and brisk but sunny; he was still tense, and had walked over to the water to be soothed by the quiet lapping sound it made when the low waves struck the shore. Alone, with no one to argue with or banter with, he had no difficulty in admitting to himself that he felt confused. In a short space of time he had ceased to be able to interact comfortably or amiably with anyone. He couldn’t stand to be around his family, around his employees, or around his old friends. Twice during the morning, first with Karla and then with Ruth, he had actually grown short of breath, just from having to talk to them. He had often been angry or irritated with both women, over the years, but he could not recall
that just talking to them had affected his breathing before.
Something had changed—it was just difficult to say what. He didn’t want to be with his family, or even be in the town where he had spent his whole life. He could only relax when he was alone. And yet nothing obvious or dramatic had occurred to bring about the change. He wanted to be where he was, sitting on a hill or by a stock tank, alone. Not only did he not want to be with any of the people he knew, he didn’t feel that he could even survive if he had to be. He had been a stable citizen, parent, husband, friend for a long time, and then it had ended. He had no more stability to offer. He knew that it would be a while before his family and the townspeople accepted the change, but eventually they would have to, if only because he couldn’t do differently, couldn’t be, again, what he had been.
While he sat at the edge of the pond, his back against one of the willow trees, a flock of mallards banked out of the east and settled on the pond, right in front of him. If he had brought his twenty-two he could have had duck for dinner—the ducks were only fifteen feet away. Later, just as he was rising to walk back to the cabin, seven wild pigs snuffled out of the underbrush on the other side of the pond—one piglet waded into the shallows and flopped down on his belly, as if exhausted. Duane sat back down and watched as the pigs nosed through the scrub oak, foraging for acorns. A little before sunset a heron landed in a muddy inlet west of the main pond. It was smaller than the herons he had seen beside the road to the Corners. The ducks were quacking, bobbing down into the water, shaking their feathers, making a racket, but the heron was silent. Some doves came into the water. Then, as he was walking home, along the rocky south side of the hill, he noticed a covey of blue quail, scuttling from bush to bush.
Duane had never paid much attention to the animal life around him. Sometimes he hunted, but not avidly. Now and then his eye might be arrested by a line of geese in the sky, or the dash of a bobcat, or the flutter of wild turkeys along a creek bank, but his response to animal life had been occasional and brief. Now he found the company of animals soothing. They were all small animals, too—they weren’t doing anything dramatic. The blue quail seemed as modest as nuns as they hurried through the scanty cover. He decided that the study of animal life would be his new pleasure. While the family he had left behind watched television he would be keeping an eye out for the beasts of the field.
On the walk to the pond that afternoon Shorty had run off, in overpersistent pursuit of a jackrabbit—Duane considered it just as well. If Shorty had been with him at the pond he would just have barked at the wild pigs, or the ducks, or the heron.
As he approached the cabin Duane saw Shorty running around with a stick in his mouth. The dog disappeared onto the north side of the cabin and then reappeared as the same stick came flying through the air. Just then the stick thrower—Dickie—stepped into view and waved at his father. Duane waved back, but he immediately felt his chest begin to tighten. He had wanted to talk to Dickie, needed to talk to Dickie, but at the same time, didn’t feel ready to talk to Dickie. What he felt was a little tinge of sadness at the memory of his son’s long battle with drugs.
Dickie was tall and good looking, friendly and competent—everybody in Thalia liked him. He had had as much promise as anyone coming out of that high school, and yet, with Dickie, normal high school hell-raising had segued into bouts of addiction that had eaten up his youth. Dickie was thirty-five and, except for a decent wife and three nice children, had nothing to show for a third of his life. Duane and Karla both felt guilty about it. Both felt that, as parents, they had somehow nodded just when they should have been alert. They felt they should have done something more effective than paying out money to doctors and clinics as nearly twenty years of their son’s life slipped by in a haze of drugs.
There the boy stood, as handsome and as likable as ever—only he wasn’t a boy now, he was a middle-aged man, a fact Duane had a hard time remembering or believing.
“Hi, Dad,” Dickie said, when Duane approached. He held out his hand and Duane shook it. He gave his son a close look but, in the dimming light, couldn’t tell much. One puzzling facet of Dickie’s long self-abuse was that it didn’t really show. He looked good, always had—probably it was a metabolic gift inherited from his mother. Karla had had some hard-drinking years, but it had never affected her looks—it still didn’t. Lookswise both Karla and Dickie always managed to look unblemished, no matter how wild the weekend.
“Hi,” Duane said. “I was by this morning but decided to let you sleep.”
“Boy, I needed it,” Dickie said. “Rehab’s draining. I guess it’s all that talking.”
“I just hope it drained all the bad stuff out of you, this time,” Duane said.
Though Duane had twice flown to Arizona to check his son into the famous and expensive rehabilitation facility there, and had then gone back for the obligatory family day, in which Dickie and his siblings had spent several hours blaming one another for their problems—blaming him and Karla too, although not quite so venomously—he had not gained much insight into the actual day-to-day procedures of the place, or into the process of rehabilitation either. Once or twice during the high-stress days of the boom he himself had drunk too much whiskey. Karla had even urged him to go into rehab, but he had taken up bass fishing instead and found that it worked just as well—maybe better. The more he fished, the less he drank. Being alone on the water then had had the same soothing effect as being alone by the pond had now. He had needed to be calm, rather than to be drunk, and floating alone in a bass boat had seemed to calm him down.
“I’m glad you came out—let’s go inside,” Duane said. “There’s not much to eat, but I can offer you a good hot bowl of soup.”
“Can’t. Annette’s cooking dinner,” Dickie said. “She thinks I’m too skinny—she wants to put some meat on my bones.”
“You’ve come back with a good tan,” Duane said, once he looked at his son in good light.
“That Arizona sun,” Dickie said, looking around the cabin. “So, Momma says you’re kind of a hermit now. How long has that been happening?”
Duane was heating himself a can of clam chowder.
“About ten days,” he said.
Dickie was silent, waiting for his father to explain himself, but Duane didn’t. He just went on heating the chowder, stirring the chowder.
“So, what’s going on?” Dickie asked, a little nervously. “Was it a big fight with Mom, or what?”
“No, your mother and I have been getting along fine,” Duane said. He stirred some more, not sure that he could find the language in which to explain himself accurately to his nervous son.
He poured the soup, turned off the stove, sat down at the table, and looked at Dickie.
“I want a different life,” he said. “I already have a different life. I know it’s going to take a while for people to adjust to that fact—your mother particularly—but you’ll all just have to do your best to adjust. I want to live alone now. I don’t want to be a family man anymore, and I don’t want to be an oilman, either.”
Duane paused. Dickie was listening—waiting to hear what his father had to say.
“The oil business is what I need to talk to you about,” Duane said. “Starting tomorrow it’s yours to run.”
“What do you mean?” Dickie asked, startled.
“I said exactly what I meant,” Duane said. “You’re home, you’re healthy, and the oil business is now yours to run. You’re the boss man—starting immediately.”
“Gosh,” Dickie said. “I just got out of rehab and I’m supposed to run our oil business?”
“That’s right,” Duane said. “It’s not Exxon or Texaco, you know. It’s just a little family oil business. You grew up with it. You’ve worked every job connected with it—except mine. Now you need to take over and do what I’ve been doing, because I’ve done it all my life and I don’t want to do it anymore. From now on you make the deals, you hire the crews, you tell who to go where, you check o
n the rigs, you see that the leases get pumped properly. You see that the trucks are kept in good repair, you go over the contracts, you see that the bookkeeper and the accountant get the information they need. You see that the crews don’t go to work drunk and don’t go to work stoned.”
Dickie chuckled. “Dad, I’ve been in rehab three times. The crews are going to laugh in my face if I tell them not to take drugs.”
“Maybe at first, but that’s just something you have to deal with,” Duane said. “You’re clean and you need to stay clean. If you do, the crews will behave—or at least most of them will. You’re not going to find a crew that’s so perfect everybody behaves.”
“Gosh,” Dickie said, again. “I’m not saying I can’t do it, but it’s a big responsibility and it’s sort of sudden.”
“It is, but I can’t help it,” Duane said. “Sometimes things just happen sudden.”
“But what if I screw up?” Dickie asked. “I mean, I don’t think I will, but what if I do?”
Duane shrugged. “It’s yours to run, like I say,” he said. “If you fuck up, you just do. I can’t be involved with it anymore. Maybe you’ll fuck up and lose every cent we have. I don’t think you will, and I hope you don’t, but if you do, that’s just tough shit. I’ll give you advice now and then, but otherwise I’m not lifting a finger.”
“Gosh,” Dickie said again. Then he took a deep breath.
“Maybe I can do it,” he said. “Maybe I can do it fine.”
“Maybe you can even do it better than I can,” Duane said. “I hope so. It’s been twenty years or more since I really had much interest in it. Everything you do for a long time gets old—I guess that’s one reason I feel like being a hermit for a while.”
“You think it’s just for a while, Dad?” Dickie asked. “I mean, it’s fine about the oil business, I think I can do it. But what about you?”
“What about me?” Duane asked.
“Momma doesn’t know what to think,” Dickie says. “She says you just kind of walked off.”
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