“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.
The next morning Duane told Ruth about Sonny’s failure to find his car.
Ruth was at her desk, rapidly throwing away the morning’s mail. She believed in keeping a clean desk and speedily threw away anything that seemed likely to create clutter. If the drilling company received a hundred letters, Ruth would immediately throw away ninety-five unopened after no more than a cursory glance at their postmarks.
The sight of her blitzing the mail always made Duane nervous. He could never grasp her method, if she had one. Once, when she was out to lunch, he went through the wastebasket himself to see if she could possibly have thrown away any letters with checks in them. She hadn’t. When she returned from lunch she glanced at the wastebasket and gave him a severe look. Nothing was said, but from then on, as soon as Ruth went through the mail she put the rejects in a garbage bag and carried it right to the dumpster.
“I think Sonny wants to die,” she said, when told about the car incident. “He’s never found anything that interested him.”
“I thought you interested him once,” Duane said.
Ruth looked sad for a moment.
“No, he interested me,” she said. “He was my only chance at love. I was lucky. He was a very nice boy. But he shouldn’t have settled for me. He should have
got out of here and looked around.”
The Sonny Duane knew seemed only mildly unhappy. Duane found it hard to believe he wanted to die.
“Karla agrees with me,” Ruth said, seeing that he looked skeptical.
“Oh, well,” Duane said, “if Karla and you agree on something there’s no point in the rest of us even having an opinion. There’s only about a chance in a million that you and Karla could be wrong.”
He wondered if they agreed on anything having to do with him, but Ruth was typing a lease and he didn’t ask.
CHAPTER 9
“KARLA’S CHASED OFF ALL THE WOMEN EXCEPT herself,” Duane said. “I guess it’s time to go to work.”
“As soon as you leave I’m gonna pump Sonny like he was an oil well,” Karla said.
She made a pumping gesture with her right hand.
“I’ll pump until I get you to have total recall of everything Duane said to his girlfriend while I wasn’t here,” she said.
“That won’t take long,” Sonny said. “They barely spoke.”
“Do you think morals have declined?” Karla asked. “Ten years ago a married man like Duane wouldn’t have dared sit right in this Dairy Queen with his girlfriend.”
“Ten years ago this Dairy Queen wasn’t here,” Duane observed.
“There’s never been a dollar’s worth of morals in this whole county,” Eddie Belt volunteered. He was perking up a lot. The decline of local morals was one of his favorite topics.
Duane got up and stepped over to the window. Shorty, ever loyal, still had his head pressed against the windshield although the sun was blazing down. Duane waved at him. Shorty, overjoyed, jumped straight up, bonking himself against the roof of the cab. Then he went into a frenzy, trying to scramble onto the dashboard to be closer to Duane. In his frenzy he knocked pliers, receipts and everything else Duane kept on the dashboard onto the floorboards. Duane laughed. It always cheered him a little to see Shorty leap up like a fish and bonk himself on the roof.
“Laughing at animals is a sign of bad morals, too,” Karla said. “Shorty can’t help it that he’s the stupidest creature on earth.”
“What do you expect when a place is nearly a hundred years old?” Sonny said. “Decadence sets in.”
“Who’s going to the centennial meeting tonight?” Duane asked, since Sonny had mentioned the county’s age, a topic on everyone’s mind.
Duane was chairman of the Centennial Committee, a position he had accepted at the height of his affluence, when it seemed likely he himself would finance the whole centennial as a charitable act.
Now that his financial position was shaky—a fact known to every single person in Thalia—it was obvious that the centennial would have to be financed some other way. Tickets would have to be sold to the various events, and souvenirs vigorously marketed. Centennial T-shirts were already being made, as well as centennial ashtrays, dozer caps and key chains. There would be concessions, raffles, a carnival, street dances, a pageant that would run for a week, and even a centennial calendar.
The very thought of the centennial had begun to depress those actually responsible for planning it—mainly Duane and Sonny. It had become increasingly difficult to get people to come to the planning meetings, although the celebration was only three months away. “Who’s coming to the centennial meeting tonight?” Duane asked again.
Only Sonny raised a hand. As mayor of the town, he spent most of his evenings going to one meeting or another. The week before, in the City Council, there had been hot debate over street names, a flourish the town had done without so far. Some wanted to name streets after pioneers, others after trees. The tree faction won by three votes.
Everyone else stonily ignored Duane’s question.
“What happened to the pioneer spirit?” Duane asked.
“Who cares what happened to it?” Eddie Belt said. “I ain’t growing no beard, either.”
It had been decided to require all adult males in the county to grow beards for the centennial. Many neighboring counties had had their centennials already, and had had a beard requirement. For this one, those refusing to comply faced the danger of being ducked in a water tank situated on the courthouse lawn for that purpose.
“You’ll get ducked if you don’t grow a beard,” Duane warned.
“You’re not a dictator, Duane,” Karla said. “You can’t make people grow beards just because you’re chairman of that stupid committee.”
“I hate beards,” Bobby Lee said. “The whiskers kind of stick into you when you try to sleep at night.”
“The people of this county don’t deserve a centennial,” Duane said. “They’re too uncooperative.”
“Who asked for the damn thing anyway?” Eddie Belt asked. “I wasn’t here a hundred years ago and nobody else was either. What do we care about how the thing got started up?”
“You’re supposed to care about your history,” Karla said.
“I’d rather forget mine,” Bobby Lee said.
The pay phone rang and Louise, the cook, came out from behind her shield of taco shells and answered it.
“It’s for Duane or Karla,” she said, holding out the receiver.
“I just left,” Duane said. “Me and Shorty have urgent business on down the road.”
“It could be good news,” Bobby Lee said.
“No, it’s the police,” Louise said.
Karla got up and took the call. Duane looked out the window at Shorty, who was still jumping around.
“Why would you want a dog like that?” Eddie Belt asked. “He’s just about torn your whole pickup up.”
“He means well, though,” Duane said.
Karla hung up and came back to the table, looking only mildly peeved.
“Dickie got arrested for going eighty-five in a school zone,” she said. “Not only that, he was pulling a trailer.”
“What was in the trailer?” Duane asked. “Bales of marijuana?”
“Dickie might be the first man in history to get longer sentences for traffic offenses than he would for selling dope,” Bobby Lee observed.
“You get him out,” Duane said to Karla. “I got him out the last three times.”
“I might get him out this afternoon,” Karla said vaguely.
Duane went to the counter and bought a chocolate milk shake. Shorty loved chocolate milk shakes, and Duane thought he deserved some reward for the long days of boredom spent in the hot pickup.
Karla was wearing her WOMAN’S PLACE IS IN THE MALL T-shirt.
“I think I may go to Dallas and spend a few thousand dollars,” she said.
Duane just waved and went out. Shorty jumped out of the pickup to have his milk shake. He was overjoyed to have been remembered. He plunged his nose into the milk shake and pushed the cup all around the parking lot, trying to get the last drop. By the time he had the last drop Duane had already started the pickup and Shorty had to race or be left behind. Sometimes he didn’t make it back in time and had to run all the way to the office. It was only four blocks, but it seemed like a long way to Shorty. Fearful that he might never see Duane again, he raced like the wind on his short legs.
But this time Duane waited and Shorty leaped back in the cab.
Karla came out as they were about to drive off.
“Eddie Belt looks depressed,” she said. “Do you think he’s stable?”
“Do you think I’m stable?” Duane asked.
“Duane, you’re too stable,” Karla said.
CHAPTER 10
RUTH WAS BACK WHEN HE GOT TO THE OFFICE. SHE had taken a shower after her run. Duane thought she looked younger than she had thirty years earlier. Then, marriage to the coach had caused her to seem prematurely aged. Now, at seventy-two, she seemed girlish—a living example of how seldom life turned out to be as advertised.
“Any checks?” Duane asked.
“We finally got thirty-seven thousand from those crooks in Oklahoma, but it’s a drop in the bucket,” Ruth said. “What do you want me to do w
ith it?”
“Hide it till after lunch,” Duane said.
“Lester’s called three times,” Ruth said. “He said please send over a check for twelve million. He said the Federal regulators are coming today and he needs it.”
“He gets nervous at the thought of going to prison,” Duane said.
“He said he’d rather have a hot check than none at all,” Ruth said. “I feel sorry for Lester.”
“I doubt if those Federal regulators are within a hundred miles of here,” Duane said.
He went in his office and sat waiting for the phone to ring. While he waited he stared at the beautiful color pictures of his children and wife that filled the office. On paper, particularly photographic paper, his family looked wonderful. All of them were amazingly photogenic. The disparity between how they looked in pictures and how they behaved in real life was a subject for much thought, and Duane had given it not a little in the many long days when the phone rang only once or twice. His conclusion was that the camera lied, although Karla claimed it didn’t.
Toward noon, when Duane was still sitting, numb with boredom, the phone did ring. It was Lester Marlow, the beleaguered bank president.
“Wanta have lunch?” he asked. “I’ll buy it.”
“I’m on a diet,” Duane said. “I’m just gonna have a glass of grapefruit juice.”
“We need to talk,” Lester said.
“We talk every day,” Duane reminded him. “I don’t have twelve million. If you want my rigs, take them—just leave me in peace.”
“You’re no help,” Lester said, sounding a bit peeved.
“I could send you a check if it wouldn’t hurt to postdate it a few years,” Duane said.
“Jenny left me this morning,” Lester said. Jenny was a tall, frenetic brunette, easily the best female Softball player in town.
“Left you and went where?” Duane asked, feeling a flicker of sexual curiosity for the second time that day.
“Well, she hasn’t actually moved out of the house yet,” Lester said. “She made me take my sleeping bag when I came to work. She says I can sleep on the floor of my office for all she cares.”
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