“That’s a fair description,” Duane said. “In fact, it’s a perfect description. I just kind of walked off.”
“But you’ve never done anything like that,” Dickie said. “It’s got everyone confused.”
“Well, but I did do something like this,” Duane said. “I used to fish, remember? I used to fish a lot.”
“I know, but at least you drove out to the lake,” Dickie said. “At least you had a vehicle. You didn’t just hoof it.”
“Is there something wrong with walking?” Duane asked. “It’s a pleasant thing to do. I’ve just reached a point where I enjoy a slow pace.”
“Nellie says you’re thinking of going to Egypt or somewhere,” Dickie said. “What’s that all about?”
“Curiosity,” Duane said. “I want to see the pyramids. That’s not so strange, either. Thousands of people go to see the pyramids every year.”
“Are you depressed?” Dickie asked. He had his mother’s impatience. He liked to cut to the chase.
Duane smiled. “I don’t know,” he said. “Your mother thinks so, but I’m not sure.”
Dickie looked confused.
“Seems like you’d know, one way or the other,” he said. “I sure know when I’m depressed. That’s when I go looking for the stuff.”
“Which you can’t do anymore,” Duane said firmly. “You’ve done enough stuff. Now you’ve got an oil business to run, and the family fortune’s in your hands.”
“It upsets everybody to think of you sitting out here depressed,” Dickie said.
Duane smiled again. “You’ll all just have to deal with it,” he said. “Go on about your lives and let me worry about whether I’m depressed enough or not. If I am it’s my problem.”
Dickie sighed—he looked uncertain.
“In rehab they teach you that all problems are family problems,” he said. “So if you’re depressed it’s our problem too.”
Duane shook his head. “This ain’t rehab,” he said. “This is just life. My problems don’t pertain to anybody but me. I’m not unhealthy. I’m not suicidal. I’m not drinking or doping. There’s nothing wrong with walking as a pursuit. I’m not harming myself or anybody else. I don’t want anybody coming out here preaching to me. I’m going to live the way I want to live, for a while, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t. I’m not in dire straits and neither are any of you.”
“You’ve kind of got a peace-be-with-you attitude, don’t you?” Dickie said. “I had a counselor like that. I guess there’s nothing wrong with it.”
“No, not that I can see,” Duane said. “I’ll give you one piece of advice about the oil business, the one you’re going to be running starting tomorrow, and that’s return your phone calls. Don’t put it off and don’t skip any, even if you think the person you’re supposed to call is an asshole or a flake. Make sure Earlene keeps a good list, and the minute you get to the office return those phone calls. All of them.”
He ate the last swallow of the clam chowder and put the spoon neatly in the bowl.
“That’s the secret of success,” he said. “Just return all your phone calls, and the sooner the better.”
Dickie, across the table, noticed Honor Carmichael’s business card propped against the salt and pepper shakers. He picked it up and looked at it—a psychiatrist’s card was a surprising thing to find on his father’s little table.
“Gosh!” he said, for the fourth time that evening. “Are you actually seeing a shrink?”
“Not at the moment,” Duane said. “Jody Carmichael gave me that card—that’s his daughter. She made a head doctor and he’s real proud of her. He wants everybody to know his daughter made something of herself.”
A little later, Dickie left. When he drove off Duane went back inside, picked up Honor Carmichael’s business card, and slipped it into his billfold. He didn’t want anyone else to casually pick it up, as his son had, and be shocked.
27
THE NEXT DAY Duane gave some thought to hitchhiking to Wichita Falls, largely in order to buy the book by Thoreau. A secondary purpose, which he also weighed, would be to use a pay phone to make an appointment with Honor Carmichael—counselor, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst. He considered making the appointment for the same reason that he considered traveling to Egypt: curiosity. He was curious about the pyramids and also curious about Honor Carmichael. On the complex question of his depression, he remained undecided: whether he was in a depression, whether he wasn’t, whether it really mattered, either way. He was not as convinced as Karla and everyone else that he was seriously depressed—but he had experienced two or three fits of irrational rage and had felt sad and weird when the rage subsided.
He considered himself to be a mature adult, with at least some capacity for making realistic judgments. Life was not all pie in the sky; some days were bound to be better than other days, and still other days were likely to be downright hard to get through. Some depression seemed normal to him—life was the sort of affair that, sooner or later, for one reason or another, would pull anybody’s spirits down. He didn’t know any adults who weren’t sometimes depressed. Bobby Lee was depressed because he had only one testicle. Lester Marlow was depressed because his wife wouldn’t buy him any new video games. Earlene was depressed because she had a scar from splitting her head open on the water fountain. Julie was depressed because her boyfriend would likely be in jail for three years. Karla was depressed because her husband had left her for no good reason—or none, at least, that she had been given. And in Africa and the Balkans people were depressed because they were being massacred in horrible ways, or being driven from their homes, or both: their depression was visible on CNN practically every night.
Seen in such a context, Duane didn’t believe that his depression was anything the world needed to worry about, or even notice. As long as he kept to himself he felt sure he could handle it fine. Also, it seemed little enough to ask. Nobody in his family was either starving or sick. There were several young women and a couple of highly experienced older women available to take care of the grandkids. Dickie’s situation vis-à-vis drugs would remain touchy for a while, but at least there was reason to hope.
Duane considered that he had pretty well fulfilled his duties as a father, a provider, and a citizen. He had done a reasonable percentage of the things he was supposed to do—now he just wanted to be left alone, and he didn’t feel that the question of whether he was depressed or happy was anybody’s business but his own. He had a warm house and warm clothes; anything he needed he could buy. Fortunately he had won about twenty-five hundred dollars in a poker game the night before he set out to be a walker—he had the cash in his pocket and could buy what he needed from day to day. Though he had splurged a bit on tools over at Jody Carmichael’s he still was a long way from having exhausted the twenty-five hundred dollars.
Still and all, Duane was aware that such reasonable thoughts didn’t necessarily represent the whole story. Several times lately he had felt a piercing sadness, a sadness that always took him by surprise. The sadness might pierce him while he was walking along, or while he sat in his lawn chair, or even while he was in bed. He didn’t understand where these sadnesses came from, or why they were so deep and so sharp.
Also, his dreams had become intense and often painful. Three times lately he had had a calf-roping dream which puzzled him a good deal. In all the dreams he was a calf roper who had an easy throw and the prospect of winning time—only he always missed the calf. In all three dreams his horse put him in perfect position, and yet he missed. The loop he threw at the calf seemed to dissolve, somehow, just as it was about to settle around the calf’s neck. Then he would be sitting on his horse watching the calf trot on across the arena, unroped, a sight that made Duane feel sad, intensely sad. Why had he missed the calf?
Another puzzling aspect of the dream, an aspect as curious as the dissolving rope, was the fact that there were no people in the stands to see his humiliation. Only he saw it—and his horse. The blea
chers around the arena were empty. The spectators, if there were any, had all flocked to the snow cone stand at the same time.
Duane found the roping dream both puzzling and troubling. The first time he dreamed it he shrugged it off. Anybody could dream anything once. He himself had never owned a roping horse and had never competed in a rodeo; but he had seen a lot of rodeos and knew that it was not particularly uncommon for even a skilled roper to miss a calf now and then. It was something that happened to the best of them, though of course it happened less often to the best of them.
Then Duane dreamed the dream twice more—and each time, at the moment when the calf went trotting off, he felt an intense disappointment. He remembered all three dreams quite vividly when he woke up, too. The dreams were so painful, in their way, that waking brought him the kind of intense relief that comes when you wake from a nightmare and realize that whatever bad thing had happened had only happened in a dream. Yet in all three of the roping dreams his sense of humiliation was so intense that he kept recalling it throughout the day.
Of course, three bad dreams didn’t necessarily mean that he was in a big depression. He had heard—or perhaps had read somewhere—that dreams might actually be a mechanism for getting rid of depression. The source of that theory, once he thought about it, was Mildred-Jean Ennis, who cut men’s hair as well as women’s. Sometimes when Duane felt shaggy he would go in and let Mildred-Jean cut his hair.
“Yep, that’s the way dreams work,” she assured him. “The worse the dream, the better you feel the next day. Dreams are God’s way of helping you get rid of feelings you don’t need to be carrying around.”
“If that’s true, then I wish he would send me a dream that would help me get rid of the feeling that I’m going broke,” Duane said. “I’ve been carrying that feeling around for a good many years. If I could have a dream that would help me get rid of it I’d be inclined to put a twenty-dollar bill in the collection plate.”
The main disadvantage to getting haircuts at Mildred-Jean’s was her perfume, which she splashed liberally over her large person. Sometimes the perfume was so strong that Duane got a sore throat just from smelling it, but, otherwise, he liked Mildred-Jean.
“It don’t work to ask God to get too specific when he’s helping you to get rid of bad feelings,” she told him. “Some of those bad feelings are put there to help you be a better person, Duane. If God helped you get rid of them too soon you might just go right on in the same old sinful ways.”
“I don’t think I’d be any more sinful than I am if I could relax about going broke,” Duane said.
Then he went to the café and had a cheeseburger. He wasn’t particularly hungry but the smell of grease cooking helped counteract the lingering odor of Mildred-Jean’s perfume.
The one good thing about the roping dream, Duane considered, was that it would give him a good place to start if he did get an appointment with Honor Carmichael. He could tell her how he felt after waking from the dream and she could tell him what she thought about it.
His main worry, when he thought of going to a psychiatrist, was that he’d just sit there and not be able to think of anything to say. After all, he had been brought up not to talk about his troubles, which were nobody’s business but his. And he never had talked about them much. He might get in the doctor’s office and find that he was unable to shrug off a lifetime of reticence.
But there were other problems that had to be surmounted before he could even get to that one—how to get to Wichita Falls being the first one. From where he sat in his cabin, it was probably seventeen or eighteen miles to Wichita Falls. He felt sure he could walk it comfortably enough, one way, but what about getting back? Even though he was in good walking trim, thirty-six miles or so was probably too far to walk in one day. If his appointment was in the afternoon it would take him most of the night to get home.
Another problem was Shorty, who would be certain to follow him unless he were restrained in some fashion. No matter how loud Duane yelled at him or how firmly he told him to go home, Shorty would still slink along behind him. Then, once they got to Wichita, he would either get run over or get in all kinds of fights with the local dogs.
“Shorty, you’re an impediment to long distance travel,” Duane told him. The dog, feeling vaguely guilty, laid back his ears.
Apart from the problem of Shorty, there was the question of hitchhiking itself. Was it against his rules, or wasn’t it? Of course, the rules themselves were not written in granite anywhere. One of the main points about his new life was that he got to make up his own rules as he went along. If he decided that hitchhiking was an acceptable form of travel, then he was free to hitchhike.
Duane was still weighing his options when it occurred to him that he didn’t have to make the whole thirty-six-mile round trip in one day. There were motels in Wichita Falls. He could walk in one day, spend the night, and walk back the next day. If he chose a low-end motel, which was his inclination anyway, they probably wouldn’t object if he had a pet.
He decided to walk, let Shorty accompany him, stay overnight, and not hitchhike. He would then walk both ways—it would be a way to test his seriousness about the whole business of walking everywhere. Thirty-six miles was a substantial walk. If he did it and liked it, it would sort of confirm his instinct that walking was how he wanted to travel from then on. He couldn’t walk to Egypt, of course, but he could walk to the airport in Wichita Falls and fly the rest of the way. No automobiles need be involved.
By the time Duane had worked through the options in his mind and made his decision, it was already too late in the day to set out for Wichita Falls. For such a long walk he would need to get an early start; otherwise the doctor’s office would be closed before he got there.
Duane felt restless, though. He was primed to walk somewhere, didn’t want it to be Thalia, and considered just walking the perimeter of his property, something he had never actually done. He could just follow his own fence, which would mean walking eight miles. Three different creeks crossed the land at various points. If he were lucky he might stumble upon a bee tree; having a source of wild honey would be a welcome thing. One of the few memories he had of his father, who had been killed in a rig explosion when he was five, was of watching his father cut into a bee tree on a property his grandparents had owned. Duane remembered how calm his father had been, as the bees swarmed around him, and how strong the wild honey tasted, so strong that when his father gave him a taste it burned his tongue and he tried to spit it out.
He stepped out to walk his property line, noticed that it was drizzling slightly, and went back in to get his waterproof jacket. Instead of walking his fence he headed for the Corners. He thought he might enjoy a half hour’s conversation with Jody Carmichael—he thought he might even tell Jody that he was considering making an appointment with his daughter.
The eight-mile walk seemed to take no time. Except for startling the same two herons out of the same bog, the walk just passed. Before he was really ready to be there he saw the Corners ahead. Three pickups were parked in front of it, which was a little discouraging. Duane had hoped to find Jody alone but seemed to have arrived simultaneously with a large hungry crew, all of whom were inside fueling up on cheap junk foods. He jumped the fence and sat on a big stump for a few minutes—before long, as he had hoped, the crew began to file out. The pickups filled up with dirty, shaggy men and drove away. As they passed, Duane realized that it was one of his own crews—or, rather, one of Dickie’s crews. He was glad they didn’t notice him, sitting on the stump in the drizzle, which had gotten heavier.
“Why, you just missed your own help,” Jody said, when Duane walked in. “Just as well you missed them, they’d have probably beaten you up. They weren’t in much of a mood.”
“They’re never in a good mood,” Duane said. “Roughnecking’s not a good mood kind of job. But I don’t know why they would want to beat me up.”
“Oh, for turning them over to your son,” Jody said. “I
guess young Dickie caught a couple of them smoking dope when he got to work this morning. He fired the pot smokers and gave everyone else on the crew a good cussing out.”
“Good for him,” Duane said. “That’s how I was hoping he’d behave.”
“I guess if you made Dickie boss that means it’s all off between you and the oil business,” Jody said.
“Right, all off,” Duane said. “I’ve got places to walk to now. I’ve been trying to find that Thoreau book you mentioned, but Karla lost ours. I guess I’ll have to walk to Wichita and buy it, unless you’ve got one you could lend me.”
“Me, read a book?” Jody said—his TV was tuned, as usual, to a soccer match somewhere in the world, and his computer screen had a line of figures on it. “Nope, I don’t have time to read books. The racing form’s on-line now, so I can read that right off my computer, and when I ain’t reading the form I’ve got these Portuguese soccer magazines to study. I hear they’re publishing a good soccer magazine in Prague now, too—learned about it from my E-mail. I’ve sent off for it but it ain’t shown up yet.”
“Who do you E-mail about stuff like that?” Duane asked. E-mail was a complete puzzle to him.
“Oh, this fellow who told me about the Czech magazine lives up in Siskatoon, B.C.,” Jody said. “He’s a worse soccer nut than me—he even tries to keep up with Communist soccer, or what used to be Communist soccer. I like South American soccer better myself, but then, to each his own. The point is that between soccer and horse racing I don’t have time to sit around reading Yankee assholes like Thoreau.”
“I didn’t know he was an asshole,” Duane said. “Maybe I won’t walk all that way to buy it, after all.”
“Being an asshole don’t mean he wasn’t smart, though,” Jody pointed out. He was eating Fritos at the time, keeping one eye on the soccer match. “You ought to walk on into town and get his book. He did the same thing you’re doing, and he did it over a hundred years ago. He might have figured out a few things you need to know.”
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