Karla didn’t answer. She stared at Duane in silence. Bobby Lee found her silence unnerving. He began to fidget.
“I been working sixteen hours a day, I think I’ll go home,” he said.
“You better come to rehearsals tomorrow,” Jacy said to Duane. “Jenny will crack up if you don’t. Hardly anybody showed up today.”
“I’m gonna try to come,” Duane said. He wanted to apologize to Jacy for having called her cute, but he couldn’t very well do it in front of Karla.
“I been working sixteen hours a day, it’s time for me to get in my pickup and go home,” Bobby Lee said again, but he made no move toward his pickup, which was only ten steps away.
“Why don’t you keep out of this, Bobby Lee?” Karla suggested.
“Keep out of what?” Bobby Lee asked. “I’m just standing here trying to draw a little overtime.”
“You might draw something you don’t want if you provoke me,” Karla said.
“By the way, your dog’s fine, in case you’re worried,” Jacy said.
“What dog?” Duane said. “I don’t have a dog. If I had one he’d be living with me, helping me live a normal life.”
Jacy grinned. She seemed to have forgiven him his unfortunate remark.
“If I were you I’d try to forget about a normal life,” she said.
“I can’t,” Duane said. “I wasn’t meant to live any other kind.”
“Too bad for you, honey pie,” Jacy said, as Karla began to drive away.
“You know some scary women,” Bobby Lee said, watching the taillight vanish into the mesquite.
Duane didn’t immediately answer. The adrenaline that had kept him working all day and most of the night began to drain away. He felt a little flat.
“Why did they come out here?” Bobby Lee asked. “Why do they always pick on me?”
“I thought you were going home,” Duane said.
CHAPTER 58
THE MINUTE DUANE WALKED INTO THE FINAL meeting of the Hardtop County Centennial Committee he sensed trouble. Locating the source was not difficult, either. G. G. Rawley and four of his deacons were seated along one wall. All the deacons were wheat farmers from the northern part of the county. Duane knew a couple of them well enough to say hello to. Drought had pretty much got their most recent wheat crop, and what little wheat had come up was destroyed by a series of freak hailstorms that had peppered the county during May and June. On the whole they formed a somber group.
G.G. was not somber, however. He looked scrubbed, healthy and ready for a fight.
“Hello, folks,” Duane said. The whole committee was present, including Old Man Balt, who had acquired an empty Crisco can in which to spit his tobacco juice, an improvement over the small tomato-juice can he had used before falling out of the car.
The committee as a whole seemed indifferent to the presence of the wheat farmers. Sonny looked tense, as he had ever since his head started failing him. Suzie Nolan yawned several times—she was obviously ready to go home and take a nap. Jenny scribbled last-minute changes into her pageant script. Ralph Rolfe was studying a brochure about Nubian goats.
Despite his efforts not to let the new oil well make him unrealistically optimistic, Duane felt very optimistic. A good oil well always had a tonic effect on his spirits. If there had to be confrontation, he was up for it.
“G.G., this is an official committee meeting,” he said. “We don’t usually allow visitors.”
“Duane, you’re headed for hell,” G.G. said. “You ought to think about your immortal soul, which will be frying over a spit if you don’t change your tune.”
Sensing battle, everyone looked up from whatever they had been looking down at.
“You don’t fry things on a spit,” Suzie remarked. “You fry things in a frying pan.”
G.G. ignored that technicality.
“The devil can fry a soul as quick as you or me could fry a piece of bacon,” he informed them cheerfully.
“Be that as it may,” Duane said, “we have to keep these meetings private or pretty soon we’ll have the whole town in here.”
“Look at it this way, son,” G.G. said. “You got your committee and I’ve got mine and the Lord’s. We’re the committee for the Byelo-Baptist boycott, and we’re gonna boycott everything in sight unless you back off on these liquor sales.”
“The City Council voted unanimously to approve the sale of beer during the centennial,” Duane said. “The City Council speaks for the people of this town.”
“No, it just speaks for the sots,” G.G. said. “My committee speaks for the decent people, and we suggest you cease and desist from this immorality.”
Duane laughed. In his unrealistically optimistic mood the situation struck him as comic.
“We can’t cease and desist because we haven’t started yet,” he said.
“I’m not going to sit here and listen to a lot of verbal wordplay,” G.G. said. “Our position is simple. If you sell liquor on that courthouse lawn we’re gonna form a Broom Brigade.”
“A what?” Buster Lickle asked. Buster had been following the discussion closely.
“We mean to arm ourselves against vice and sin with brooms,” G.G. explained. “Any time we see a drinker about to drink we’ll swat the poison out of his hands with a broom. Those that get unruly will be arrested. The Liquor Control Board has promised to send us a number of well-trained agents to make the arrests.”
“Can we call the meeting to order?” Sonny asked. “It hasn’t been called to order.”
“Why bother?” Duane asked. “We can call till we’re hoarse and there won’t be any order.”
Sonny looked pained. He was a stickler for correct parliamentary procedure.
“The meeting is now called to order,” Duane said. He didn’t want to do anything that might trigger one of Sonny’s lapses.
“I move that all nonmembers be expelled from this meeting forthwith,” Suzie Nolan said with astonishing crispness. Everyone looked at her in surprise. Suzie had risen from her naplike condition to a state of blazing indignation. Her eyes shone and there was high color in her cheeks. Duane was not too surprised—he knew she was capable of amazing transformations, and so, apparently, did G. G. Rawley, who was glaring at her with bitter intensity.
“You’re another one whose soul will be sizzling like bacon one of these days,” he said.
From the looks they exchanged, Duane found himself wondering if Suzie and G.G. had ever been lovers. The mere fact that the latter had brought four solemn wheat farmers into the meeting could hardly have stirred the level of animosity they were exhibiting.
“I second that motion,” Ralph Rolfe said. As a cattleman he had an ancestral dislike of all farmers, whatever their stamp.
“Now wait a minute,” Duane said. “There’s no reason to be discourteous and kick these gentlemen out.”
Though he had been the first to question the right of the wheat farmers to be there, he had already come to feel a certain sympathy for the men, all of whom were going broke and none of whom were deriving anything but embarrassment from the controversy raging around them.
“You said yourself we don’t allow visitors,” Jenny said.
“We don’t, generally, but these men are here and they’ve gone to some trouble,” Duane said.
“G.G. put them to the trouble, not us,” Suzie said. “I think we ought to expel him too.”
“A motion has been made and seconded,” Sonny said. “We have to vote on it.”
“Now wait a minute,” Duane said. He was beginning to get annoyed. “We’re not the joint chiefs of staff or anything. Surely we can be courteous enough to let these men sit here for a few minutes.”
“You just have one vote, Duane,” Suzie said. She was looking at him angrily, the glow still in her eye. Duane found her very appealing and wondered what flaw in his character caused him to find angry women so attractive.
“Listen,” Duane said. “This committee has been known to debate things for
three or four months before actually voting. We don’t have to do something rude just because you popped off and made a motion.”
“But you wanted them out yourself,” Jenny said. “Be consistent, Duane.”
“I move we table the motion,” Duane said. Jenny’s passion for consistency annoyed him, too.
There was an awkward silence.
“I don’t think you can table a motion that’s been seconded,” Sonny said.
“I just did,” Duane said.
One of the wheat farmers smiled. Then another smiled. The twists and turns of civic affairs had begun to amuse them.
“I’ve made another decision,” Duane said. “We’re gonna give away the beer, not sell it. I’ll buy a few thousand cases myself and contribute to the centennial. That way there won’t be any question of illegality to deal with, and G.G. can go jump in the lake.”
“What I’ll do is go call the Texas Rangers,” G.G. said. “If you lowlife politicians are planning to degrade the public with free liquor I think it’s time the Rangers came in to bust some heads.”
“This meeting is adjourned,” Duane said. The statement caught everybody by surprise. Duane was even a little surprised to hear himself say it, but he was not sorry. He meant it. The meeting was silly, he was getting no help from anyone, the whole centennial was silly, he missed his family and he had had enough.
“You can’t adjourn us, we just got here,” Jenny said. “We have a lot of important things to discuss.”
“No we don’t,” Duane said. “None of this is important.”
He got up and walked out, leaving a roomful of stunned people behind him. He went to his pickup, drove it around the block and parked behind the post office. Then he hurried back to the courthouse and peeked around a corner to watch the committee take its leave. Jenny Marlow led the pack. She was in her car and off in a flash, no doubt to spread the word of his defection. The others straggled behind. The wheat farmers plodded to their pickups and drove slowly off to their battered fields. Sonny headed for the Kwik-Sack and Ralph Rolfe for his ranch.
The last people out, as Duane had hoped, were Suzie Nolan and Old Man Balt, whose faithful daughter, Beulah, was waiting for him as usual. Suzie helped the old man down the sidewalk, waiting while he emptied his Crisco can onto the courthouse lawn. The minute he was in the car Beulah whisked him off to whatever TV show was about to come on.
Duane could not tell if Suzie was still angry, but she was obviously in no hurry. She slipped her shoes off before getting into her car. Driving in shoes, or even wearing them, didn’t appeal to her.
Seeing her take her shoes off gave Duane an idea. He looked around and saw not a soul in sight except Suzie. The square and the town seemed deserted, the reason being that two crucial Little League games were being played that night on the local diamond. His son Jack was pitching in one of them, his daughter Julie playing shortstop in another. He meant to go, but had developed more immediate plans.
He quickly slipped off his boots and his pants. It generally took Suzie three or four minutes to find her car keys, comb her hair and get started. He watched her do all those things, his pants and boots in his hand. When she started the car he tip toed over and hid behind a cedar tree on one corner of the lawn.
The traffic light had no traffic to stop, but it was still doing its job of turning red and then green anyway. Suzie had to pass through it. She had started the car, but hadn’t backed away from the curb. She was lazily combing her hair. The light changed to red. Duane felt annoyed. If she had only stopped combing her hair and backed out, she would have immediately caught the light. But she was still combing. He waited, remembering how much he had wanted her that night in the hospital parking lot. The light turned to green and his heart sank, for Suzie had finally begun to back out. She would undoubtedly drive through it, leaving him with his old want and his new. Of course he could follow her home, but that was not exactly what he desired.
Then Suzie dropped something—her comb, an earring?—and bent over to retrieve it from the floorboard. She found it, and just as she did the light changed to red again. Suzie eased up to it. By the time she was fully stopped Duane was at the window on the driver’s side. Suzie looked up. She didn’t seem in the least surprised to see him standing under the traffic light in the very center of downtown Thalia with his boots and pants in his hand.
“Hi, you rat,” she said, and put her car in park. Duane stuffed his boots and pants in the back seat and kissed her. Her kisses were as quick and eager as they had been at the hospital. He considered trying to go through the window, which would have made things perfect, but he decided to be mature and settle for 98 percent. The streets were totally empty. He opened the door, still not sure how things were going to work. He was every bit as aroused as he had been the first time, but felt a momentary faltering of confidence. Cars did pose logistical problems.
Suzie had lost none of her confidence, though—in such matters she seemed to experience no doubt.
“Sit in the seat, dummy,” she said, with a grin. “We don’t have to do it like we was married.”
She slid as far from the steering wheel as she could. Duane got in, his legs stretched toward the far door. They were long legs, and the far door not really very far, but Suzie immediately straddled him. Passion, which rendered so many people awkward, brought her a heightened grace.
“This way I can watch the road,” she said, easing him into place.
“We might have to hurry,” Duane said. “We might have to set an all-time speed record.” He felt as if he easily could, though he was also highly aware of what a bizarre thing they were doing. The town looked more brightly lit than it had when he was hiding in the darkness by the courthouse.
Suzie smiled. She opened his shirt. Then she leaned back and touched her breasts.
“We don’t have to do any such thing,” she said. “We can just take our time. There’s not a soul in sight.”
CHAPTER 59
EVENTS PROVED SUZIE RIGHT. TRAFFIC FLOW through downtown Thalia obligingly lapsed for five minutes, more time than Duane needed and then some. Suzie rose and sank with an authority that quickly proved irresistible.
Though, as she said, not a soul was in sight, the fact that he was involved in a deeply exciting sex act practically beneath the red light in the epicenter of Thalia may have hastened matters too. Seconds after enjoying a fine orgasm, Duane began to wonder why he hadn’t asked her to pull around in the darkness behind the post office. That would have been an excellent site, he decided too late. Suzie soon came too, but that didn’t mean she was through. The first orgasm often merely served to heighten her interest—if she paused at all it was merely to consider what kind of little game she might enjoy next. She liked to make a leisurely selection, to rummage through the possibilities for a while, perhaps choosing one game only to stop it after a bit in favor of another. Caution played no part in her choice, or her life—she seemed to feel that whatever time was needed was hers by right. She had no intention of hurrying from one pleasure to the next.
Duane found such leisure understandable when they were in bed, but less so when they were parked under bright street lights at a public intersection.
“Let’s drive around behind the post office, where it’s dark,” he said.
“No,” Suzie said. She was seated rather firmly on his legs, and gave him a squeeze with her inner muscles to emphasize her point.
“Why not?” he asked. “Then we don’t have to worry about traffic.”
“What traffic?” she asked. “There’s not a car in sight.”
“I know, but somebody’ll come along sooner or later,” he said.
“I like to see you,” Suzie said. “The street lights make your body look different—sort of like a ghost. It’s real interesting.”
“Yeah, and it’ll be real interesting to anybody who drives by,” Duane said. “And I will be a ghost if Karla drives by.”
Suzie was unimpressed. “It might just be strang
ers,” she said. “People passing through. They won’t even know us. Didn’t you ever want to know how it would feel if people were looking?”
“No,” Duane said truthfully. “It wouldn’t feel at all, if people were looking, because I’d be too embarrassed to do anything.”
Then he saw lights, far behind them—truck lights, he guessed.
“Here comes somebody,” he said. “We gotta move.”
He attempted to squirm out from under her, but Suzie gripped him more firmly with her inner muscles. She smiled and teased her nipples.
“It feels sexy, just knowing they’re coming, don’t it?” she said.
“No,” Duane insisted. “It feels embarrassing. I can’t appreciate sexy feelings when I’m embarrassed.”
“Maybe you could learn to,” Suzie suggested.
“I don’t think I can learn to before that truck gets here,” he said.
“You could try,” Suzie pointed out. “Men don’t ever want to try anything different.”
The truck, by that time, was only a quarter of a mile away. Duane managed to reach under the steering wheel and turn on the hazard lights. If the truck rear-ended and killed them in the position they were in, the town would receive a rude shock. They themselves would be dead, and the credibility of the Centennial Committee destroyed forever.
Suzie continued to squeeze. The roar of the approaching truck aroused her even as it chilled Duane. His erection was shrinking so fast that even Suzie’s squeezing failed to hold him in.
The truck, seeing the hazard lights, cut smoothly to the right of them. The driver tapped his brakes for a second at the light, glanced east and west, and roared on toward Wichita Falls. He didn’t look at the occupants of the car at all, though one of the occupants came just as the other ceased to occupy her.
The fact that an orgasm occurred at a moment of exit didn’t seem to diminish Suzie’s pleasure at all. She grabbed his hand and stuffed it underneath her, leaning far back in ecstasy.
The streets were empty again. Duane relaxed a little. Suzie was an unusual woman, he had to admit. Though not entirely at ease in the situation, he wouldn’t have wanted to miss her.
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