“She’s got a right to freedom of speech,” Duane said.
Shorty was standing just outside the glass doors that led to the deck and the hot tub. He often stood there for hours, staring longingly into the bedroom. It was a sand-stormy day—pellets of West Texas grit occasionally peppered the glass.
“I can’t stand the way that dog stands there with his tongue hanging out,” Karla said. She left the room.
Duane continued to look at the wet, stunned people wandering dejectedly along a beach on the other side of the world. One hundred and twenty thousand of them had been washed away forever, which should have brought his own troubles into perspective, only it didn’t. He felt just as depressed as ever. His huge debt depressed him, his unruly children depressed him, his smug girlfriend depressed him, and the huge house that he didn’t like and would probably never manage to pay for depressed him most of all. He even hated the bed he was lying on—it was so vast that he often had to crawl twenty feet just to answer the phone.
The survivors of the tidal wave actually seemed to inhabit a more beautiful world than he did. The sea that had swallowed their loved ones was a vivid blue. The palm trees that had been spared were a lush green. The large new Sony TV transmitted all the colors perfectly—the scene of devastation actually looked like a South Seas paradise, whereas out his window all he saw was grayness, grit, and Shorty with his tongue out.
The sand the survivors walked around on was brilliantly white and far more beautiful than the sand that peppered his glass doors. West Texas sand looked and felt like ground rocks. Duane had felt it often and hated it. He often thought it would be nice to live in a place where the wind wasn’t strong enough to blow little rocks around.
His imagination refused to accord the Asian tragedy anything like the gravity it deserved. Despite himself, he imagined a freak tidal wave, in the form of a waterspout, arching over four hundred and fifty miles of Texas and striking the Thalia courthouse dead center, washing away the courthouse and everyone in it. He knew it was an unworthy thought, since many innocents would die; on the other hand, it was an appealing solution to the problem of Janine—a problem he would have to face up to pretty soon.
As he drove past Los Dolores, its brown adobe walls somber even in the bright sunlight, Duane’s mind chose to replay the afternoon he had watched the tidal-wave coverage. When he was depressed, his memory proved particularly uncooperative. Instead of replaying scenes of happiness and mirth—of which there had been many in his life—it only replayed other depressions. Though he had been happy for most of his life, and seriously depressed only for a year or two, it was an effort for him to remember much of what had happened during his forty-six happy years. His mental processes seemed to be the opposite of Minerva’s, with whom he had discussed the problem several times.
“Shoot, I just remember the good,” Minerva said. “I forget the bad right off.”
At the time she was convinced she was getting spinal meningitis, though so far she had none of the symptoms.
“I guess you’re more of an optimist than me,” Duane said.
“No, I’m crazier,” Minerva replied. “You’re too sane, Duane. There’s not a saner man in this county, and right there’s your problem.”
CHAPTER 15
LOOKING AT LOS DOLORES, DUANE WONDERED what Jacy felt. It occurred to him that he could just stop and ring the doorbell, as Karla had. Perhaps Jacy was inside, depressed, hoping someone would ring the doorbell.
She might be lying on a bed as vast as his own, watching TV coverage of some disaster and sinking ever deeper into her own depression. She might enjoy talking over old times, even though the old times just consisted of a year or two of dates and a few brief weeks of lovemaking, thirty years before.
Duane could remember thinking that he would never get over her; but long before he had returned to Thalia from Korea he was over her. Karla had moved to town in his absence. She worked as a checker in the grocery store. They had a few dates, got married, stayed married.
Even Sonny Crawford had finally gotten over Jacy, and, of the two of them, he had been the more in love.
Duane thought Ruth Popper’s theory was wrong. He wasn’t afraid of falling back in love with Jacy. Nothing was much less likely than that they would ever be in love again. He was just afraid of violating her privacy. He had almost no privacy himself, and valued it so highly that he would drive around on dirt roads all afternoon just to have a little. He was not about to interfere with Jacy’s, and he watched Los Dolores disappear in his rearview mirror without remorse.
On his way back to town he stopped at Aunt Jimmie’s Lounge for a few minutes to meditate over a beer. Aunt Jimmie’s was a dilapidated little county line honky-tonk. The clapboards it was made of hadn’t been painted in thirty years, and neither had the proprietress, Aunt Jimmie, a plain, solemn little woman who sat by the cash register all day and much of the night, smoking cigarette after cigarette and ignoring what went on around her. She had gone broke running a dime store in Thalia. Aunt Jimmie’s did a booming business, but Aunt Jimmie herself still looked like a woman who ran a dime store.
Duane was relieved to see that for once none of his employees were getting drunk on his time. Why would they need to, when they could take long naps in the shade?
“The waitress is gone to the beauty parlor, you’ll have to get your own beer,” Aunt Jimmie said. She was not liberal with conversation, which suited Duane fine.
The bar was empty except for the local highway patrolman, a mournful widower named P. L. Jolly. P.L. was rumored to have designs on Aunt Jimmie, but, so far as Duane could observe, had done little to advance them.
Duane got a beer and sat down by P.L. He tried to maintain good relations with the local police, since the day seldom passed without a family member or an employee being arrested for something.
“Hi, P.L.,” he said. “How’s Dickie behaving?”
“Terrible,” P.L. said. “He says he’s gonna organize a prison riot if we don’t let him out. It’s a good thing for us there’s nobody else in jail but a nigger and the nigger’s in a coma.”
“That doesn’t sound good,” Duane said. “How’d he get in a coma?”
“He just slid into it in the night, some way,” P.L. said. “The doctor was gonna come have a look at him this afternoon.”
“Was Dickie really going eighty-five in a school zone?” Duane asked.
“Yep,” P.L. said. “That little sucker sure flies along, don’t he? I like Dickie, though. He don’t mean no harm. It’s just he’s lively.”
“I hope that other prisoner’s okay,” Duane said. “We’ve got this centennial coming up. We don’t want to get any bad marks if we can help it.”
P.L. smoked for a while. The thought of black marks made him seem more depressed than ever.
“We get quite a few that do go into comas,” he said. “They get their heads beat in, but it don’t take hold for a while. Then they wind up in jail over here and the next thing you know they slide off into comas. It’s a big strain on our personnel.”
“I wouldn’t try to tell you how to run your business,” Duane said. “But couldn’t you just call an ambulance and have them sent to the hospital?”
“Well, we can,” P.L. said, “but I like to give them a day or two to see if they’re faking. If they’re faking, and you send ’em to the hospital, they might get after the nurses or something. Or else you have to send a guard with them, and that means overtime wages.”
“I thought Karla was gonna bail Dickie out,” Duane said.
“She came by, but Dickie popped off and got smart with her and she changed her mind and left him in,” P.L. said. “That little sucker don’t care what he says, does he?”
“Nope,” Duane said. “And if there’s anybody who could get a man in a coma to help out with a riot, it’d be him.”
P.L. grinned an approving grin.
“That little sucker, he livens things up, don’t he?” he said.
CHAPTER 16
DICKIE WAS NOT PARTICULARLY GRATEFUL WHEN Duane came by and got him out of jail. He was a tall, rangy boy with spiky, oat-colored hair and lively blue eyes.
“I could have done a day’s work if you’d got me out sooner,” he pointed out.
“A day’s work for who?” Duane asked.
In the course of racing eighty-five miles an hour through a school zone, Dickie had also managed to crack the head on his pickup. He seldom drove at anything less than top speed and went through three or four pickups a year. The local Ford dealer kept a pickup with Dickie’s specifications sitting on the lot at all times.
The injury to his pickup forced Dickie to ride home with Duane, which delighted Shorty. He loved Dickie almost as much as he loved Duane. He tried to show his affection by giving Dickie a playful bite on the elbow, but Dickie didn’t enjoy such love play. He promptly threw Shorty out the window.
Fortunately they had just turned off the pavement onto the dirt road, and were not going fast. Shorty was more puzzled than hurt. Like the twins, Dickie played strange games. The twins threw rocks at Shorty, whereas Dickie threw him at the road. Shorty thought it was all love, of a sort. He picked himself up and raced along after the pickup as if nothing had happened.
“Don’t be throwing that dog out of the pickup,” Duane said. “He’s not your dog.”
“He’s not going to be anybody’s dog if the little blue fucker bites me again,” Dickie said. He was wearing one of his mother’s T-shirts. It read, WHEN THE GOING GETS TOUGH, THE TOUGH GO TO COZUMEL.
The Moore family had once made one of their frequent attempts at an idyllic family vacation in Cozumel. Dickie had got in a fistfight with the doorman of the hotel before their luggage was even unloaded. He claimed the doorman sneered at him, but Duane thought that several hours’ contact with his siblings had caused Dickie to hit the first person he saw.
That same afternoon Nellie took some kind of strange drug, the nature of which could never be determined. She turned greenish and stopped breathing several times without warning. The twins were their usual selves. Only Karla enjoyed Cozumel. She played on the beach all day, while Duane dispensed a fortune in bribes in order to keep his children from being deported.
Duane kept an eye on Shorty, who raced along two or three hundred yards in the rear. The local coyotes regarded Shorty as their plaything and frequently ambushed him, though they seldom did more than rip up his ears.
It depressed Duane that he didn’t know what to say to his son on the few occasions when he actually had the opportunity to talk to him. He felt he ought to give Dickie some sound fatherly advice, but when presented with an opportunity—such as just getting him out of jail—he rarely came up with any.
“You’ve got a world of opportunity ahead of you,” Duane said. Dickie might not be listening, but he felt better if he thought he was at least trying to influence his son for the better.
“You could be anything you want to be,” he added. “You’ve got energy, and that’s a wonderful resource.”
“Money ain’t a bad resource, either,” Dickie said. “Let’s buy some airplanes and sell cocaine for a while.”
“No, I’m not going to sell cocaine and neither are you,” Duane said. “You ought to try and do something useful while you’re young.”
“Selling dope is useful,” Dickie said. “It cheers people up when there’s northers and sandstorms and they’re going broke.”
“You’ll think useful when a Mexican catches you and chops you up with a chain saw,” Duane said, but he felt boring even to himself, and shut up.
Just then Karla came blazing around them in the BMW, burying them in dust. She honked, and her horn played the theme from Urban Cowboy, one of her favorite movies. She had stopped and picked up Shorty, who looked at them inscrutably as he passed.
“Mom drives faster than I do,” Dickie observed.
“BMWs run faster than pickups,” Duane said. He still felt depressed. Being with Dickie often depressed him. Dickie was likable, lively and competent. Practically everyone in the county, male and female, doted on him. He was sort of the star of the county. What bothered Duane was a sense that he had never managed to give his son a clear sense of what ought to be, of how life ought to be ordered or even of what to expect of it. He himself had proceeded into adulthood without such a sense, but his father had had no time to influence him, and his mother was too bewildered to try.
But he had been Dickie’s father for twenty-one years and yet didn’t feel that he had made any constructive impression on the boy at all. He couldn’t tell that he had made any impression on any of his children. It was a haunting feeling, because in most respects he knew he had been a fairly effective man. He had started with nothing and built a successful little oil company. Building the rigs had been a mistake, but a mistake he didn’t reproach himself for. Booms induced such behavior, and thousands had made worse mistakes than he had.
But he did reproach himself for his inability to civilize his children. Collectively or individually, they seemed as uninfluenceable as wild animals. You could yell at them or put them in cages, but how could you make them less wild?
“They’ve got your genes,” Ruth Popper often said, whenever one of his children did something particularly outrageous.
“They’ve got Karla’s too,” he always said plaintively, not wanting his genes to have to shoulder all the blame.
The longer he contemplated the children, the more he wondered about genes. He bought two books about genes and tried to understand how they worked, but the more he tried to apply what he read to his children the more puzzled he grew. Looking at the kids, he couldn’t detect any signs of his genes at all. They all had Karla’s sharp blue eyes, her oat-colored hair, her perfect teeth. His mouth was filled with bridges, but Karla had never had a cavity in her life, and neither had any of the kids.
But the principal thing the children seemed to have taken from Karla was a kind of unstoppability. You just couldn’t stop any of them from doing anything they wanted to do unless you met them with superior force, and that had become increasingly hard to do. They were all totally convinced by their own impulses and acted accordingly. In a way, Duane supposed, such conviction was a form of integrity, but if so, it was a frightening form. The children were true to their natures, but what natures!
Duane couldn’t remember when he had been as convinced by one of his own impulses as his children were by their most vagrant whims. At times he envied them. It must be nice never to be indecisive. But then he would have to spend half a day undoing the results of one of their decisions, and envy would be replaced by a murderous feeling. They could all sense it when he got the murderous feeling, too. They weren’t dumb.
“Oh, shit, Billie Anne’s here,” Dickie said, when they turned into what Karla liked to call the driveway—in reality an old feed road that ran along the bluff for a quarter of a mile before it dead-ended at a basketball goal. There was a concrete parking space between the basketball goal and the six-car garage.
Dickie could tell Billie Anne was there because he could see her pickup looming over the scrubby mesquite that lay between them and the house. Billie Anne’s pickup had a small cab, but giant wheels of a type more commonly found in the desert country of Arizona. Billie Anne, though born and raised in Thalia, had spent her first two marriages in Benson, Arizona.
“One advantage to big tires is you’re up high enough that you can tell if the truck drivers are good-looking,” she said, when kidded about her pickup, which looked, from a distance, as if it were on stilts. “If they ain’t, then that’s that.”
Dickie treated the remark as a joke. Karla didn’t think it was a joke and occasionally needled her son about his girlfriend’s independent ways.
“What would you do if you caught her with a cute truck driver?” Karla asked.
“The same thing I’d do if I caught her with an ugly truck driver,” Dickie replied. “And you don’t want to know.”
�
��Let’s stop a minute,” Dickie said to Duane. “I need to think this out.”
“Think what out?”
“That woman’s got a temper,” Dickie said. The lights had stopped dancing in his blue eyes. He kept looking nervously in the rearview mirror.
“I might want to hitchhike back to town,” he said. “I don’t think I want to go home right now. Take me back to jail so I can pay my debt to society.”
Dickie showed traces of panic, a sight Duane found mildly exhilarating. Just as he had concluded that his children were all inhuman monsters, one of them exhibited slight traces of vulnerability.
He stopped the pickup.
“Are you scared of Billie Anne?” he asked. Billie Anne was a tall, fairly good-looking girl with lank brown hair and a demeanor that could fairly be described as comatose, unless she happened to be water-skiing. Water sports were her passion. After a few hours spent skimming over the brown surface of Lake Kickapoo behind Dickie’s speedboat she became voluble and talked a blue streak.
“Back up,” Dickie said. “She might spot me.”
“Now look,” Duane said. “I’m tired and I wanta get home. Billie Anne’s probably in the hot tub. What are you so worried about?”
“She’s been taking shooting lessons,” Dickie said. “Remember, I gave her that Thirty-eight Special for her birthday so she’d have protection when I’m not around.”
“What’s she so mad at you for that you’re worried about getting shot with your own birthday present?” Duane asked.
“Gossip,” Dickie said. “I wish we lived in New York, so people wouldn’t gossip so much. They should pass laws against it. Gossip does a lot more damage than drugs.”
Duane wanted to laugh. “Who are you sleeping with that Billie Anne’s found out about?” he asked.
Dickie kept up a nervous surveillance of the hill as if he feared Billie Anne might be crouched behind one of the many mesquite bushes with her .38 leveled.
“You know that song called ‘War Is Hell on the Home Front Too’?” Dickie asked, glancing at his father.
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