Duane hadn’t been sure what tack to try and take with Suzie. The news of Dickie made him even less sure. He pulled up a lawn chair.
“I ought to get dressed and go to Wichita,” Suzie said. “The kids are both in the finals of the tennis tournament. But they’re always in the finals of something, and they always win. Do you think I’m a bad mother for not wanting to go?”
“Yes,” Duane said. He felt rather annoyed with Suzie in general.
Suzie seemed undismayed by his disapproval. She marked her place in the fat paperback with a nail file and idly touched herself here and there.
“I sorta wish you’d let Junior come home,” he said. “He’s in pretty bad shape, and having those loans called didn’t help.”
“I’m a bad everything,” Suzie said. “Bad wife and bad mother too.”
Duane didn’t comment.
“After a night with Dickie there’s nothing nicer than just lying in a hammock,” Suzie said.
The recognition that she was a bad wife and mother was clearly not causing her much mental anguish. Duane knew his own position was weak, since he had helped make certain negative contributions to her record as a wife.
“I’m really worried about Junior,” he said. “I don’t think Junior’s gonna make it unless he gets a little more support.”
“He could get a girlfriend if he’d just start wearing his hat more so his sunburn wouldn’t always be peeling,” Suzie said.
“I guess if worst comes to worst I can get a job,” she said. “I can clerk in a drugstore or something. But I don’t want Junior to come home.”
“Don’t you like him at all?” Duane asked. He himself liked Junior. Suzie seemed to like almost everyone else in her life. It struck him as sad that she had hardened her heart against her own unfortunate husband, of all people. It made him wonder if he really understood anything about women.
“I been married to him twenty-one years,” Suzie said. “He’s only been happy five times that I can remember. You know what I’m like, Duane. I’m a happy person. It’s not good for a happy person to constantly get their spirits brought down by an unhappy person. I’m a lot happier now that I just see Dickie and you than I ever was when I was living with Junior. I don’t think I can go back to being the other way.”
Duane had no answer to that. It was becoming clear to him, after only a few weeks, that Junior’s unhappiness could become oppressive. It was not hard to imagine that twenty-one years of it would produce enough oppressiveness that a person might not want to see Junior ever again.
Suzie took his hand and held it to her breast in a way that seemed friendly, not passionate.
“He don’t want to just hold hands,” she said. “He don’t like to just sit and touch.”
Duane knew she was referring to Junior. He was at an awkward distance from the hammock, and moved a little closer, so as to be more comfortable.
In a few moments he noticed that Suzie was asleep, his hand folded against her breast. He sat beside her for a while. The yard was shaded by a nice sycamore tree. Suzie liked birds, and a mockingbird and a blue jay were quarreling at one of her feeders. The mockingbird flew over and sat on the clothesline.
Duane bethought himself of his idle rig, and Abilene, his missing driller. He gently disengaged his hand. As he stood up Suzie opened her eyes and mouthed him a little kiss before settling back into her nap.
CHAPTER 44
HE HAD HARDLY BACKED OUT OF SUZIE’S DRIVEWAY before Jenny Marlow raced up behind him, horn blaring. She parked and was in the pickup in a flash.
“You’ve been neglecting me,” she said, chewing gum a mile a minute. “You better not neglect me.”
“Why can’t I?” Duane asked. He felt oppressed himself. It seemed to him that his life had become a bewildering melange of responsibilities. There were people who welcomed neglect, such as the twins, and people he wasn’t allowed to neglect, such as Jenny, and people in between who sometimes demanded attention and at other times welcomed neglect. Karla was a good example of the in-between category, whereas his drilling business was an even more clear-cut example of something that needed attention but received neglect.
“If you neglect me in my time of need I’ll go crazy and you won’t have anyone to direct this pageant,” Jenny said.
Duane took her to the Dairy Queen and bought her coffee. He had decided that long solitary rides with Jenny were a kind of ride he wanted to avoid.
“Lester’s told everybody in town my baby isn’t his,” Jenny said. “Do you think he really knocked up Janine?”
“I hope he did,” Duane said honestly. “I hope it wasn’t anybody else I know.”
At that point a white Lincoln roared up to the Dairy Queen and Abilene got out from under the wheel. He still dressed as he had when he was thirty years old: very dark glasses, well-pressed gabardine pants and a cowboy shirt with pearl buttons. His hair had thinned quite a bit and the unforgiving sun had given him several skin cancers, but Abilene confidently ignored his own blemishes.
The girl who got out of the other side of the Lincoln looked a year or two younger than Nellie. Abilene had recently concentrated his attentions on farm girls a week or two into their first secretarial jobs in Wichita Falls or Lawton. He found them in obscure discos all over Texhoma—a region of North Texas and southern Oklahoma overlapping the Red River. The farm girls tended to be breasty, and wore a painful abundance of makeup.
The one with him at the moment was tall and looked frightened. She clutched Abilene’s hand tightly when they came in. She stood nervously with him at the cash register, looking at the menu for the day, which was scrawled on a blackboard. She seemed to be as unnerved by having to choose between a cheeseburger, a Mexican plate and a chicken-fried steak as some might be if faced with a menu written in French in an elegant establishment in Dallas.
Duane felt sorry for the girl and didn’t look around when they passed behind his chair, though he was very much in the mood to fire Abilene on the spot for taking an unauthorized leave.
Seconds later Janine, Charlene and Lavelle walked in, taking an early coffee break. Duane heartily wished he hadn’t come to the Dairy Queen. He didn’t want to confront Abilene in front of his frightened date, nor did he want to gossip with the ladies from the courthouse. Janine’s year in psychotherapy had given her a strong belief in eye contact. Whenever she and Duane happened to find themselves in the same public place she expected a virtual orgy of eye contact and would be bitterly critical if she didn’t get it. She wasn’t far away, either. The room had filled up so quickly that the courthouse crew was forced to sit at the next table.
He wasn’t too eager to look at Jenny, for that matter. She had given up blue eye shadow in favor of a color that she claimed was champagne—it matched her new lipstick.
“Now they’ll eavesdrop,” Jenny said, meaning the courthouse crew. “Every word we say will be all over town.”
“Every word anybody says is always all over town no matter where they say it,” Duane pointed out.
“Hi, girls,” he said, feeling that he could not well ignore the women of the courthouse any longer.
“I hear a human fly is going to climb our courthouse during the centennial,” Charlene Duggs said. Charlene would often take it upon herself to relieve awkward silences, an attribute for which Duane felt grateful. Almost everyone else in town made awkward silences yet more awkward.
“Oh, yes, he’s a nice little human fly,” Jenny said. “He lives in Megargel.”
“Does he climb people or just buildings?” Lavelle said with a bold grin. “If he’s so nice I might get him to try and climb me.”
Janine meanwhile was staring fixedly at Duane, determined to have a least a flicker or two of eye contact. Duane obliged. He knew from the way she was frowning that Janine was trying to communicate something to him, though he had no idea what.
A boothful of wheat harvesters had just finished a vast meal and were headed for the door.
“I wonder w
here those wheat harvesters are headed?” Duane said, aware that it was the stupidest imaginable comment. Wheat harvesters always headed north, toward Saskatchewan and Alberta.
“Isn’t this hot weather we’ve been having?” Janine said, as if to show that she could match him inane remark for inane remark. The thermometer had hit one hundred and seven the day before.
To Duane’s relief, Bobby Lee’s pickup came flying off the highway and braked to a stop in a cloud of dust, inches from the plate-glass windows of the Dairy Queen. Bobby Lee drove as if he were a horseman in an old cowboy movie. He flung his pickup back on its heels right at the hitch rail outside the saloon.
“Someday that little dumbbell’s foot is going to slip off the brake pedal and he’ll go right through this Dairy Queen as if it was tarpaper,” Lavelle said. “And I’ll probably be the person that gets turned into a grease spot.”
In a moment the little dumbbell sauntered in, with his usual elan. He had recently gone to a Western-wear store meaning to buy himself a new cowboy hat to wear during the centennial festivities—but in a moment of frivolity he had bought a huge, drooping Mexican sombrero instead. His beard was still not much more than an advanced stubble. The sombrero and the stubble made him look so funny that Duane burst out laughing every time he saw him.
He burst out laughing immediately. One of the reasons he treasured Bobby Lee was that he had only to look at him to be reminded that life had its comic aspects.
“If they hold a contest for the ugliest beard, you’ll win without even trying,” Lavelle told Bobby Lee bluntly. None of the women were as charmed by him as Duane was.
“If you keep talking like that I won’t let you be the president of my fan club,” Bobby Lee said amiably, straddling a chair.
Duane knew that if Bobby Lee had arrived, Eddie Belt could not be far behind, and he wasn’t. Before Bobby Lee’s coffee had even grown cool enough to sip, Eddie came in. He had given up on a beard and was trying to grow a handlebar mustache.
“They can’t duck you if you’ve got a big handlebar mustache, can they?” he asked Duane several times.
Duane promised to refer the matter to the committee on ducking, a nonexistent body. In any case, Eddie was a redhead, not the perfect hair color for a prominent handlebar mustache. At the moment he looked as if he had a few flecks of cinnamon toast stuck to his upper lip.
Eddie was somewhat affronted by Bobby Lee’s sombrero. As a serious oilman, he disdained cowboy trappings, and Mexican trappings as well. New cowboy hats were blossoming all over the county, but Eddie still wore his oily dozer cap.
“Seeing you in that sombrero makes me want to puke,” he informed Bobby Lee.
“It’s a free country—puke,” Bobby Lee replied. He seemed to be in an unusually good mood.
“If you was in a Pancho Villa movie you’d be the peon that has to hold the horses while the jefe goes into the saloon and gets drunk on tequila,” Eddie said.
Even this insult failed to stir the placid Bobby Lee. He had a beatific smile on his face.
“Has Abilene quit, or what?” he asked, glancing at the couple in the rear booth.
“He better hope that girl’s rich and wants to marry him,” Duane said. “He’s not gonna have a job after today.”
At that point, to everyone’s surprise, conversation died. Duane thought he might try to reopen the entertaining question of whether women want sex more or less than men—after all, most of the original panel had assembled—but he didn’t reopen it. He remembered that it had been Junior Nolan who had asked the original question about women and sex, and where was Junior now? A bankrupt man whose wife didn’t want to put up with his glooms anymore, and whose perfectly nice children had to keep winning athletic tournaments unobserved by either parent. It seemed like a sad time, or a sad place, or both.
Also, whenever he raised his eyes, he noticed that everyone at his table, as well as the three women at the courthouse table, were looking at him. They instantly looked away when he looked up—all except Charlene Duggs, who didn’t try to pretend she hadn’t been looking at him. Charlene continued to look at him, with what seemed like sympathy. The others, before they glanced away, all seemed expectant. They wanted him to start a sexy conversation. They wanted him to make a joke about Bobby Lee’s hat, or Eddie Belt’s little cinnamon-toast mustache.
Mainly, as he read it, they wanted him to initiate something that might relieve the boredom or anxiety they each lived with. They weren’t picky. They’d follow any move he wanted to make, but they wanted him to be the one to make the move.
Duane felt a sullen impulse to deny them what they wanted. Why should he always have to be the starter-upper? Let someone else start something up, for once. Let Janine do something besides practice eye contact. Let Jenny do something besides dump insecurities at people’s feet.
He kept resolutely silent, nursing his sense of unfairness. He was more deeply in debt than anyone in town. His kids caused more trouble than anyone else’s kids. His wife spent more money than anyone else’s wife. His employees were at least as lazy and incompetent as anyone else’s employees. Why, with those things to worry about and more, did he also have to provide lively conversation for anyone who happened to straggle into the Dairy Queen? He wasn’t the president of the town, or the master of ceremonies of the Dairy Queen.
He determined not to say a word, to force one of the others to show at least a whisper of initiative. It was bad enough that he was president of the Centennial Committee and would be held responsible if the glorious celebration was a fiasco—as there was every reason to suspect it would be. Just once, he didn’t intend to be the one who came up with the first move.
Silence lengthened. Bobby Lee and Eddie Belt, who would instantly begin an argument if they happened to arrive in the office at the same time, seemed to have become mutes. Bobby Lee grinned idiotically from beneath his sombrero. Duane remembered that Nellie had broken up with Joe Coombs. He tried to push dark thoughts from his mind. Surely Nellie couldn’t have succumbed to Bobby Lee, after resisting him almost daily since she was fourteen.
Silence spread like a winter cloud across the Dairy Queen. Jenny took out a mirror and cautiously studied her new makeup. The women from the courthouse had the stoic look of people who were about to attend the funeral of someone they had scarcely known.
Only Abilene, secure in his vanity, was unfazed by Duane’s refusal to bring life to the party. Soon he finished his meal and sauntered out, his sunglasses in place and his toothpick held at a jaunty angle. He was followed by the big, unhappy-looking girl. Abilene didn’t so much as glance at Duane. He and his date got in the Lincoln and left.
“He didn’t even hold the door open for her,” Lavelle observed, but the remark failed to ignite much feminist rage. No one expected Abilene to be nice.
“I don’t doubt he made her pay for her own cheeseburger, too,” Lavelle added. “I hate to think there’s men that won’t even pay for a stupid cheeseburger.”
“He’s always been loose with his mouth and tight with his money,” Duane said, feeling that Lavelle deserved at least a little help.
Out the window he saw a large blue pickup bounce off the highway, and immediately felt a sense of relief. Karla was on the prowl in her Supernova. He felt a rush of admiration for his wife—perhaps even love. Karla might have her flaws, but when she showed up something would happen. She was not loath to initiate conversations, or fights either.
The Supernova slowly circled the Dairy Queen, observed by all. Everyone perked up a little. Karla was just sizing up the crowd, seeing if there was anyone there she was feeling particularly friendly—or perhaps particularly unfriendly—toward. In a minute she would walk in, ready to rev up on coffee and get things crackling. The ladies from the courthouse took out their mirrors and looked at themselves.
To everyone’s surprise, Karla didn’t come in. After circling the building she drove off a little distance and then backed up, rapidly and expertly, braking to a stop a
few inches from the rear bumper of Bobby Lee’s pickup. In a flash she jumped out of the Supernova and disappeared from view.
Duane glanced at the happy Bobby Lee and noticed that he had stopped looking happy. In fact, he had turned pale beneath his stubble.
“What’s she doing to your pickup?” he asked Bobby Lee.
“I’m just hoping for the best from all this,” Bobby Lee said weakly. “I’m just hoping it will all work out for the best.”
Karla reappeared and reached into Bobby Lee’s pickup, to take it out of gear. Then she tapped on the window of the Dairy Queen. Everyone looked. Karla gave Bobby Lee the finger. There were gasps from a few wheat harvesters who hadn’t left for Saskatchewan yet—they were unaccustomed to local ways.
Then Karla jumped in her Supernova and raced away, dragging Bobby Lee’s greasy little pickup like a puppy on a leash. When Karla whipped onto the pavement the little Datsun bounced a foot or two in the air and landed on its side. Karla kept accelerating. Showers of sparks flew everywhere as she dragged the small pickup up the highway.
Duane decided the dark thoughts he had had regarding Bobby Lee and Nellie were almost certainly accurate thoughts.
Of all the spectators, Eddie Belt seemed most unnerved by the sight of a pickup being dragged up a highway.
“Oh, shit, look at what that woman’s doing now,” he gasped.
To everyone’s astonishment, he grabbed the sugar jar, tilted his head back, and poured a thick stream of sugar directly into his mouth.
Duane burst out laughing. He decided he loved his wife, after all. Who else could scare Eddie Belt so badly that he would start drinking sugar straight from the jar?
CHAPTER 45
JENNY MARLOW WAS THE FIRST TO SPEAK.
“What’d you do that for?” she asked Eddie.
Eddie wiped sugar off his lips and took a sip of water.
“I thought I was gonna black out,” he said. “The sight of that poor little pickup made me feel real weak. She drug that little thing off like a calf to the branding fire.”
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