Texasville

by Larry McMurtry

  He began to be embarrassed by what he had done. Everyone who had been looking at Duane was now looking at him.

  “It was like I went into shock, you know,” he said. “My insides just felt real mushy, all of a sudden. Sugar’s the best thing for shock, they say. It just goes right into the bloodstream.”

  Bobby Lee seemed to be in shock himself, but not so far in that he enjoyed seeing Eddie seize all the attention.

  “It wasn’t even your pickup,” he said. “It was my damn pickup. I guess if she’d have drug off your pickup you’d have died on the spot.”

  “I might have,” Eddie admitted, too weakened to take offense.

  Duane got up and looked out the window. Karla was dragging the pickup straight through town. Cars and trucks were whipping to the side of the road, their drivers unnerved by the strange spectacle.

  “It’s the only pickup I got, too,” Bobby Lee said, his spirits falling even lower.

  “I wonder why she’s so mad at you,” Duane said.

  “I have no idea,” Bobby Lee said. “She’s just one of those kind of women that can always find something to be mad at.”

  “You mean like your wife, Carolyn?” Duane asked. Carolyn was known to be a woman of temperament, and the same people who knew her to be a woman of temperament knew Bobby Lee to be a man of easy virtue. Most people thought Carolyn had done a good job of keeping him cuffed more or less into line for the last twelve years.

  “Yeah, Carolyn’s another of them kind of women,” Bobby Lee said. “Ever’ woman in this stupid town is the kind that can always find things to be mad about.”

  Beneath his sombrero he was looking more and more depressed.

  “They just mow you down like you was grass,” he added.

  “It’s true,” Eddie Belt said, agreeing with his colleague for the first time in years.

  “This doesn’t have anything to do with Nellie, does it?” Duane asked.

  “Yeah, ’cause we’re getting married,” Bobby Lee said in a toneless voice.

  Duane laughed. It was exactly what he had expected to hear.

  “I think what this town needs is one of those boards like they have in stock exchanges,” he said. “Only instead of telling stock prices it would just keep up with divorces and pregnancies and who’s married to who, or expecting to be. We could put it on the courthouse lawn and give some kid a nice summer job, changing the names around every day.”

  “Summer job?” Charlene said. “Year-round job, you mean.”

  “That’s right,” Duane agreed. “It would have to be kept current. Otherwise, after a month of two, quite a few women wouldn’t even know what their last names was.”

  “Duane, you get some silly ideas,” Janine said, standing up. ‘I’ll always know what my last name is because I wouldn’t change it if I got married fifty times.”

  “Don’t worry, there ain’t fifty men in the universe crazy enough to marry you,” Eddie said, his old bitterness flaring up.

  Janine seemed amused. “Too much sugar causes irreversible brain damage,” she said as she walked past him.

  “I was under the impression you and Nellie both are already married,” Duane said to Bobby Lee.

  “We are but nothing’s forever,” Bobby Lee said.

  “It’s good you’ve got that attitude if you’re marrying Nellie,” Duane said. “Nothing’s for much more than a month with Nellie.”

  “He’s wrong anyway,” Lavelle said. “Dead is forever.”

  She made a little gun of her finger and pointed it right between Bobby Lee’s eyes.

  “Bang,” she said.

  Charlene Duggs gave them all a pleasant smile before following her friends outside.

  CHAPTER 46

  DUANE TOOK BOBBY LEE TO THE OFFICE AND LEFT him with Ruth.

  “Why are you leaving him with me?” Ruth asked. “I’ve got better things to do than look after men who wear sombreros.”

  “I know, but Karla stole his pickup,” Duane said. “I don’t have anything else to do with him.”

  “Go in Duane’s office and go to sleep,” Ruth commanded. “It’s dark in there.”

  Bobby Lee, who seemed numb, docilely went in the office and shut the door.

  “Could I impose on you to figure up Abilene’s hours and give me a check for what we owe him?” Duane asked. “I can’t tolerate him any longer.”

  “Who’s gonna run that rig?” Ruth asked.

  “I am,” Duane said. “It beats brooding.”

  He found some overalls in a closet and put them on. Ruth looked at him as if he were a wayward boy, but held her tongue.

  On his way to the rig he passed Los Dolores. He had been toying with the idea of stopping to pay his respects to Shorty, but he saw Dickie’s pickup parked out front and decided not to stop. He didn’t feel much shock or surprise at seeing Dickie’s pickup there.

  Shortly after passing the house he noticed a tiny dust cloud in his rearview mirror. A small blue blur was racing down the road after him. Duane stopped and opened the door. In a moment Shorty raced up and jumped in his lap. He seemed ecstatic to be back.

  “Nobody told you to leave in the first place,” Duane said, but Shorty wasn’t listening. He lay on his back and wiggled, adding a few hundred hairs to the substantial blanket that was already there. Then he looked at Duane guiltily, as if expecting to be beaten with the work glove.

  “Forget it, Shorty,” Duane said. “Worse things can happen than losing you.”

  As he approached the rig he heard the familiar sound of gunshots. The roughnecks, happy to be collecting eight fifty an hour for loafing around, were shooting at beer cans with their .22s. Their faces fell when Duane drove up.

  He worked them steadily all day. About six, Abilene drove up. Shorty hated Abilene and began to snarl. Duane stepped off the rig floor long enough to hand Abilene his check.

  “Your services are terminated,” he said.

  Abilene looked contemptuous. “You’ll be a bankrupt son-of-a-bitch before the summer’s over, anyway,” he said.

  Duane went back to work. He felt rather good. He had not forgotten how to work, and being at the rig was a nice change from sitting around the office trying not to irritate Ruth.

  As he was driving back past Los Dolores, toward town, Shorty began to whimper and look unhappy. He even went so far as to scratch at Duane’s leg. Duane stopped the pickup and held the door open. In a second Shorty was out. He trotted off toward the house.

  “She might go back to Europe, and then where would you be?” Duane said, but Shorty didn’t look around.

  Going through town, Duane stopped at the Kwik-Sack to buy a six-pack. He thought he might look in on the twins, too. He expected to see one of them handling the cash register, but instead Sonny was in his old place, watching TV. Duane looked in the storeroom but neither the twins nor their effects were there.

  “Did Karla come and get them?” he asked.

  “Jacy came and got them,” Sonny said.

  Duane thought that one over for a minute.

  “She’s in for some fun and games, then,” he said.

  “They’re very nice kids,” Sonny said. “They’re just full of mischief.”

  “Mischief, plus homicidal tendencies,” Duane said, though it always made him feel good when someone complimented his children.

  “We sold about four hundred dollars’ worth of centennial souvenirs today,” Sonny said. “Maybe this thing’s going to be a success after all.”

  He spoke in a cheerful tone, but he had a downcast look. Duane had been studiously not asking him how he felt, but it occurred to him that everyone else was probably tiptoeing around the issue of Sonny’s illness, and that perhaps Sonny found that depressing.

  “How’s your brain problem?” he asked.

  “Well, I got some pills,” Sonny said.

  “Do they work?”

  “Oh, well,” Sonny said, “I don’t see movies in the sky and I haven’t lost my car lately. I guess that’
s an improvement.”

  “You don’t seem very convinced,” Duane commented.

  “No,” Sonny said. “The pills make me feel like I have fuzz in my head. Sort of warm fuzz. It’s not a great feeling.”

  “What’s supposed to be wrong with your head, anyway?” Duane asked.

  Sonny chuckled. “I guess it’s just degenerating,” he said. “The neurologist wanted to try the fuzz pills before he did anything more drastic.

  “I’d rather see movies in the sky,” he added.

  “Seen any good ones lately?” Duane asked.

  Sonny grinned. “I saw To Kill a Mockingbird last week,” he said. “Pretty good movie. I haven’t seen one since I started taking the fuzz pills.”

  “Maybe you oughta lay off the pills until we get through the centennial,” Duane said. “Once that starts we’re all gonna need our wits about us.”

  “I think my wits live somewhere else now,” Sonny said.

  Duane drove on home. Talking to Sonny was depressing. Once he thought about it, he realized it always had been. Even in high school, Sonny had been depressing. He seemed to have convinced himself at an early age that he would never really have what he wanted, though it seemed to Duane he could have most of the things he wanted if he had just made a little effort. Not Jacy, perhaps—but a world of other things to want did exist, including many other desirable and interesting women.

  Yet Sonny had settled for a carwash, a Kwik-Sack, a laundry and a hotel that only operated three weeks a year. As for women, once Ruth left him, he had settled for nothing. He hadn’t even allowed himself to be tempted by Karla, and Karla tempted most men to distraction.

  Sometimes Duane and Karla talked of trying to fix Sonny up with someone who would make him a good wife, or at least a friendly date, but they never quite got around to it.

  “Luke’s not easy to help,” Karla said. “Maybe we better just mind our own business. If I can’t get him to fall in love with me I don’t see how I could get him to fall in love with anybody else.”

  “You aren’t the only kind of woman there is to fall in love with,” Duane informed her.

  “No, but I’m the best kind,” Karla said, laughing.

  Duane secretly agreed. He himself had stayed fairly madly in love with her for at least fifteen years. Her energy alone was a constant marvel. He had rarely seen Karla tire. Until Ruth came to work for him she ran his office, was a substitute teacher in the high school, coached several Little League teams, was secretary of the Rodeo Association, and still danced all night whenever she could get him or anyone else to go with her to a dance hall.

  Remembering the efficient way she had hitched up Bobby Lee’s pickup that morning, he suddenly felt an urge to see her, and stepped on the gas. There was no one quite like Karla.

  When he got home he saw Bobby Lee’s pickup, still hitched to the Supernova and still on its side. Karla had apparently been content just to drag it home. She hadn’t set it on fire, or rolled it down the hill with their little lawn tractor, or anything that drastic.

  He didn’t see the BMW, though—only the Supernova, and Minerva’s Buick.

  He let himself into the kitchen, where fortunately he found some smothered steak in the oven and a pot of pinto beans. Maybe everyone had gone to a dance hall. He sat at the kitchen table, idly leafing through a huge stack of bills, while he ate the steak and a large bowl of beans laced with jalapeño.

  While he was eating, Minerva came in.

  “Who told you to put on overalls and go to work?” she asked.

  “I thought of it myself,” he said.

  “You’ve been an executive too long,” Minerva said. “You just look silly wearing them overalls.”

  “Is that what I am? An executive?” he said. “No wonder I’m so far in debt.”

  Minerva studied the liquor stock for a minute or two, before choosing Cuervo Gold. She poured an iced-tea glassful.

  “Some people put ice in tequila, but I don’t,” Minerva said. “Ice has them little amebas in it.”

  “Where’s the gang?” Duane asked.

  “They’re spending the night down at Jacy’s,” Minerva said.

  Duane nearly choked on a bite of beans.

  “All of them?” he asked.

  “All of them but me,” Minerva said. “I thought I’d stay around because Karla wasn’t sure if Jacy gets the good cable.”

  “Are they just gonna stay overnight?” he asked.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Minerva said. “You can look on the calendar and see if it says anything about them coming back.”

  Karla kept a massive calendar hanging on one wall of the kitchen. The spaces for each day were the size of post cards. She believed in writing down her plans, as well as things that were not exactly plans.

  “Sometimes I think it’s things that are more like hopes,” she said.

  At that time, a year or two back, Duane had been staring apprehensively at an entry that read “Chew Duane’s ass out.”

  “Why would chewing my ass out be a hope?” he asked.

  “It might perk you up,” Karla said. “You used to get a hard-on every time I chewed you out. Remember?”

  Duane did remember. Karla on the attack had once seemed incredibly sexy to him. He liked the way her eyes flashed and the way her mouth moved when she was delivering a rapid-fire rundown of all his shortcomings. He still liked it, but the years had passed and some of the better effects were wearing off.

  Karla also encouraged the kids to scribble their plans on the calendar, on the theory that it might make it easier to find them in case of emergency. She had tried to start calendar training when Dickie and Nellie were teenagers, but it hadn’t worked well.

  Dickie liked the idea of a calendar, but his entries had often alarmed his mother. His very first entry read “Go fuck girls.” Many of his plans seemed to involve criminal violence. Once he wrote “Go start a fire.” Or he might write “Go beat the shit out of Pinky.” Pinky had briefly been a friend. Karla was always having to tear pages off calendars and buy new ones for fear that Dickie’s entries might be used against him in criminal proceedings.

  Nellie’s entries were safer but also duller. Her favorite entry was “Go to the dance,” but “Take a nap” ran it a close second.

  Duane walked over to the calendar to see if it would tell him how long his family planned to stay at Jacy’s. He already missed little Barbette.

  The entry for the present day was short. In the morning Karla had written in: “Make Bobby Lee wish he was dead.”

  Later in the day, switching from blue Magic Marker to dark red lipstick, she had written “Adiós, sayonara, goodbye!”

  Duane decided not to take it too seriously. “Adiós, sayonara, goodbye!” was a line from a hillbilly song, which might mean that Karla was getting in a good humor again.

  “You’ll have to take them clothes off or I can’t wash them,” Minerva said.

  “Were you planning to wash them right now?” he asked.

  “Once that grease sets it’s hard to get out,” she said.

  Duane found a piece of custard pie in the icebox.

  “Could I just have time to eat this piece of pie before I have to undress?” he asked.

  “Executives that go out and try to work are just fooling themselves,” Minerva said. “It won’t do you no good to pretend you’re still young. You ain’t young.”

  Duane sat down and ate the pie. He was aware that he didn’t quite have Minerva’s blessings, but then if he waited to eat until he had a woman’s blessings, he would rapidly starve. When he finished he left his dirty clothes by the washer and went out to the hot tub. It was a beautiful night, the dark sky richly speckled with brilliant stars.

  To his surprise, he found Bobby Lee stretched out on his back on the deck. A ring of empty beer cans had been meticulously placed around the rim of the hot tub. Duane had to step over them to get in. Bobby Lee’s eyes were open, but he gave no sign of being aware of Duane’s presence.
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  “Bobby, are you pretty drunk?” he asked.

  “I’m nine sheets to the wind,” Bobby Lee said. “Hell, I might even be more sheets than that. I might be a hunnert sheets to the wind.”

  Duane soaked for a while. Far off toward town, he saw the flicker of a headlight. Five minutes later a car turned onto the hill and drove up to the house.

  “Karla’s trying to destroy our love, Nellie’s and mine, but she ain’t gonna make it,” Bobby Lee informed him. “I’m a hard dog to get out from under the porch.”

  “I’ll say that for you,” Duane said, getting out of the tub.

  “Don’t you roll off into one of these pools and drown,” he cautioned, before going into the house. “You’re so drunk you might not even realize you were swimming.”

  “Nine sheets to the wind,” Bobby Lee said happily.

  Duane checked Barbette’s baby bed, but she wasn’t in it.

  He found Karla in bed. She had an old Playgirl in her lap, but she wasn’t reading it.

  “Well, I guess now Jacy’s got my dog and our kids both,” he said. He smiled.

  “Yeah, she just loves those kids,” Karla said. “I think it’s good for her to have some kids around.”

  “What brought you back?” he asked.

  Karla looked at him a little sadly. She seemed subdued again.

  “I was gonna stay but I missed my husband,” she said.

  Duane lay down beside her and took her in his arms.

  “I missed you too, honey,” he said.

  CHAPTER 47

  THE NEXT MORNING DUANE DECIDED TO HAVE A talk with Dickie. He sat on the deck and discussed it with Karla. Bobby Lee had disappeared into one of the many guest rooms and nobody had the energy to look for him.

  “If he finds his way out, talk him out of leaving Carolyn,” Duane said. “I like Carolyn.”

  “I like her too,” Karla said. “All the more reason she shouldn’t have to live her whole life with Bobby Lee.”

  “Somebody has to stay with somebody they’re married to,” Duane said.

  “Why?” Karla asked.

  “I don’t know why,” Duane admitted. “It just seems like it would be appropriate.”