Lester Marlow was there, but not Jenny. When they sang “Rock of Ages,” Lester cried. Duane and Bobby Lee had about decided that Ruth’s romance on a cot with Lester Marlow had been some kind of old lady’s fantasy, but they had to revise their opinion when they saw big tears coursing down Lester’s cheeks.
“Gosh, if she had been dishing it out all during the boom I don’t know why she didn’t just seduce me. There was plenty of times during that boom when I could have used the pussy.”
Both of Duane’s daughters stayed away—neither of them had particularly liked Ruth Popper; but, rather to his surprise, both of his sons-in-law came: Goober Flynn and Zenas Church. Since neither of them knew Ruth he wondered why they had bothered to come from Dallas in such heat. Zenas had a pilot’s license and flew them in his Cessna, but, still, it was an unexpected effort.
The Methodist preacher whom Ruth claimed to have had such a hot, dirty time with had come back from his retirement home in Oklahoma to perform the brief service. He hobbled up to the pulpit in his walker and mumbled a few words that no one could hear. Earlene Jacobs, who had fought bitterly with Ruth for forty years, produced a lot of loud sobs.
The grass in the grim little cemetery was burned to a golden crisp by the August heat. The graveyard was on the edge of a low bluff. Duane walked to the bluff to be alone for a few minutes. Earlene’s sobbing, the preacher’s walker and Bobby Lee’s yellow tie combined to bring his spirits even lower than they had been; and they hadn’t been high.
He walked over a few yards to Karla’s grave. The little box he had made himself—really his first effort as a woodworker—with his letter to Karla in it, was where he had placed it, in front of the gray monument. He had put it there as he was leaving for Egypt—that had been only about two weeks ago, and yet, in a mere two weeks, Thalia had seemed to have become bleaker, hotter, dustier, and more sparsely peopled than it had been the day he left. The laundrymat had closed, and the biggest local insurance company had, like Moore Drilling, relocated to Wichita Falls. Not only had he outlived his own wife, and Ruth Popper—it seemed to Duane that he had sort of outlived the town of Thalia itself. All the stores the locals really needed—Wal-Mart, Target, Office Max, a twenty-four-hour Albertson’s—were right there on the south side of Wichita Falls, barely fifteen minutes by pickup from where he stood. It seemed to him that there could only be less and less need for Thalia, Texas, as a town. A few old-timers such as Lester Marlow, Bobby Lee and himself would stick it out; but his children had already left and it was unlikely that even his grandkids would bother coming to Thalia for more than a weekend now and then, maybe in hunting season. They were city kids now—and just as well. He himself wasn’t a city person, and didn’t really want to try and learn to be one, which meant, probably, that he would pedal from cabin to town to suburb, growing lonelier and older, as the people he had lived his life with continued to die, or else move into retirement homes in Wichita Falls. When he looked back at Thalia from the graveyard there already seemed to be less of it.
Deep in regret, Duane did not notice when Anne Cameron walked up to him and gave his hand a gentle squeeze.
“Penny for your thoughts, Mr. Moore,” she said.
“They’re not worth a penny,” he said. “I was just thinking what a miserable, windblown drying-up town this is.”
“It’s a hole all right,” Anne said.
“But you came here,” he said. “Why on earth did you let Dickie talk you into it?”
“By offering me a good chunk of money that I can make quick—our deal is for six months, no more,” she said. “After that I’m going to Indonesia, to do roughly the same thing for a larger company. I figured I could stand anything for six months.”
“I suppose if you’re good enough with that computer you can work anywhere,” he said.
“That’s right,” Anne said. “And I’m good enough.”
“How are the little pickles?” he asked—his own comment shocked him. He had probably never made a bolder statement to a woman in his life. Desperation made him say it. He had a vision of how much he was going to hate it when Anne Cameron left for Indonesia.
She didn’t seem surprised by the remark; she looked at him directly.
“This is a funeral,” she said. “No tittie action today. You’re being a little naughty, seems to me.”
She walked away, said a word or two to Bobby Lee, and proceeded to her Lexus.
The casket was being lowered when Bobby Lee strolled over, taking off his yellow tie.
“Where did Dickie find Annie?” Duane asked. “How would he know how to find someone like her?”
“Chat-boards,” Bobby Lee told him. “Oil industry chat-boards. That’s how people find other people now, Duane. You’re behind the times.”
“Way behind the times,” Duane said.
11
WHEN HE SAW Anne Cameron drive away in her green Lexus, Duane’s spirits, low enough to begin with, sank lower still. Why in God’s name had he asked Anne Cameron about her nipples at a funeral? Of course she herself had called attention to them the day before—but that might have just been a moment of girlish playfulness. But for him to have mentioned them at Ruth Popper’s funeral was a big error—and a confusing one. She had squeezed his hand in a friendly way and he had responded coarsely, although he had almost never been coarse in his dealings with women.
What it meant, he supposed, was that he had been alone and sexless so long that he had forgotten the language of women—a language that involved hints and smiles and necklines that might show a little bosom. Duane realized that he no longer knew how to approach a woman he wanted to seduce. After all, he had made two attempts to kiss Honor Carmichael and Honor, though polite, had clearly not taken him seriously as a would-be lover.
He had the lowering feeling that young Anne Cameron wouldn’t take his advances seriously either—if he made any. Standing in the hot wind, as Ruth’s few mourners shuffled to their cars, Duane realized that he was an aging man who had long since forgotten how to get women he was interested in to go to bed with him. Even in his last years with Karla there had been practically no sex, a fact that was probably more his fault than hers. Karla had complained bitterly about his inattention, though he suspected that that complaint had been made mainly for the sake of complaint. With three kids and most of the grandkids living with them in the big house, domestic chaos tended to quash desire. For the two of them to isolate sexual desire long enough to strip off and actually make love was a rare thing.
He had gone into his house and put on a suit for the funeral, and was just about to mount his bike and pedal back to the house and take the suit off, when he was caught by his two sons-in-law, Zenas and Goober.
“We want to buy you lunch, Duane,” Zenas said. He didn’t look happy.
“Things are a little weird in Dallas—we thought you might want to be brought up to date,” he added.
Duane liked both of his sons-in-law—they seemed like nice men. Goober looked no happier than Zenas—in other words, not happy at all. Of course his daughters, Julie and Nellie, had had their way with lots of men—even if Julie wanted to give up married life and go be a nun, the two sisters could still find ways to be rough on husbands.
“There’s something more than the convent?” Duane asked.
“Yep,” Zenas said. “Let’s go to the Dairy Queen. I’ll buy you a chicken-fry.”
“Okay, but I want to go by the house and get out of this suit,” Duane said.
A half hour later the three of them were in the Dairy Queen, staring at the three tough-as-a-boot examples of the staple food of West Texas: chicken-fried steak with cream gravy, the very dish he had served Ruth Popper just before she fell dead.
“I hate to think how many of these dried-out pieces of meat you must have eaten in your years in the oil patch,” Goober said.
“Thousands,” Duane assured him. “What else don’t I know that I might need to know?”
“Nellie’s gay—she thr
ew me out,” Zenas said.
“And I’m gay too—that is I mostly am,” Zenas admitted. “Right now I have a nice boyfriend who’s a high school basketball coach. But I’m really AC/DC. And, to be fair, when I say Nellie threw me out I should mention that she didn’t throw me very far. I live in the guesthouse, which is pretty nice.”
Duane had stayed in the guesthouse several times—a two-story guesthouse with a wall-sized TV and all the comforts of home, including a state-of-the-art barbecue.
For a moment Duane wished he could be back on the freighter Tappan Zee, looking down at the great green ocean.
“Nellie has a girlfriend named Bessie,” Zenas said. “She manages a foundation.”
None of the three had so far touched their chicken-fried steaks, though Goober had gone so far as to pepper his gravy.
“What about the kids?” Duane asked. Nellie’s kids weren’t by Zenas, nor Julie’s by Goober, but both men seemed to have been admirable stepfathers.
“Oh, you know how kids are, nowadays,” Zenas said. “They’re cool with it.”
“Sexual orientation is just not that big a deal, anymore, Duane—at least it isn’t in the circles the kids move in,” Goober said.
Duane carefully ate a bite of steak. He felt grateful to the two men—both decent men—for coming to Ruth’s funeral to tell him what they had told him. Both men, usually jolly and even boisterous, were subdued and obviously anguished by the situation with his daughters. He wasn’t so convinced about the kids, himself.
“How come you’re not throwing them out?” he asked. “You’re the husbands—you own the houses—or the mansions, to be accurate. Seems like my daughters have just kind of deserted you—why don’t you throw them out?”
“Oh well, we still love them,” Goober admitted, with a bobble in his voice. “We both feel we might as well stick around—keep an eye on things, you know. Do some carpooling for the kids—coach a little soccer.”
“When did Nellie decide she was gay?”
“About eight months ago, when Bessie moved in,” Zenas said. “We saw no reason to rush up and tell you—after all, it could have just been a phase.”
“But now you don’t think it’s a phase?”
Both men shook their heads. Their faces told him plainly enough that they didn’t think their wives were just going through a phase.
Duane tried to focus—to be helpful—after all, the men had flown from Dallas. He wanted to offer them some words of encouragement—but he couldn’t think of any. He had been brought up not to leave food on his plate, so he slowly ate his chicken-fried steak, his green beans, his mashed potatoes—even his little salad.
Goober and Zenas were not so spartan. They left most of their food.
“It’s a little like chewing wood,” Goober observed.
Duane felt for a second time that it was just as well Karla was gone. She wouldn’t have wanted to know that Julie had never enjoyed sex, or that Nellie had taken up with a woman named Bessie who ran a foundation.
He biked out to the little one-hangar airport and saw the men off.
“I appreciate your coming,” he said. “If I can help just call.”
“We appreciate your being here—you’re solid and you’re about the only one who is,” Zenas told him.
But I’m not solid, Duane thought, as he watched the little yellow airplane nose into the white afternoon sky. Once he had been solid, or at least had felt solid—but not anymore.
12
DUANE BIKED past his office, saw Anne Cameron’s Lexus parked there, and didn’t stop. Instead he biked to his house, found a tablet and an envelope and wrote Anne a note of apology, which read:
Dear Miss Cameron:
I want to apologize for saying what I said to you at the graveyard. It was totally inappropriate. I hope you can overlook it. I’d like to be your friend.
Duane Moore
As he was putting the note in an envelope the phone rang—caller ID told him it was Nellie, so he picked up.
“Hi, honey,” he said. “What’s up with you?”
“Oh well, I guess Zenas told you how things stand,” Nellie said. “I suppose I should have told you myself and told you sooner.”
“Are you happy?” he asked.
“I am happy, Daddy—I’m very happy.”
“And the kids are okay about Bessie?”
“Oh, they love her, she’s a sports nut,” Nellie said. “She takes them to Mavericks games and keeps up with all the cool bands.”
“Well, that’s good,” he said. “Is she your age?”
There was a pause.
“Bessie’s twenty-eight,” Nellie said. “That’s why it’s easy for her to keep up with the right bands.
“Does it upset you that I’m with a woman?”
“Not if you’re happy,” he said. “I think it upsets Zenas though.”
“You think we’re hard on men, don’t you, me and Julie,” Nellie said.
“Yes—but both those men are grown-ups,” he said. “They can move on if they want to.”
“Nope, they’re hung up on us—that’s part of the problem,” Nellie said. “What do you think about Julie and the convent?”
“Fine—I sometimes wish I was in a monastery myself.”
“You are—your cabin’s your cell,” Nellie said. She felt nervous. Bessie was due home any moment, and Bessie was really possessive. Even though it was only her father she was talking to, Bessie would come in wanting instant attention. If she didn’t get it, she might flare up.
“Don’t worry too much about Goober and Zenas,” she told him. “After all, they’re both good-looking millionaires. They’ll do okay.”
“I wish you’d bring Bessie home sometime—I’d like to meet her,” Duane said.
Nellie tried to imagine herself and Bessie in Thalia, but on that one her imagination drew a blank. The two of them were so obviously attracted that even in North Dallas they occasionally drew stares. A visit to Thalia was just not in the picture—at least not anytime soon.
“Just try to talk your sister out of getting assigned to El Salvador, or anyplace else dangerous,” he asked.
“We’ll see, Daddy,” Nellie said—then she got an anxious note in her voice. Probably her young girlfriend had just pulled in, which meant that the call was over.
Duane was just as glad. He really didn’t like being in his house.
Before he left he carefully peeled all the family snapshots off the refrigerator door and put them in a drawer.
13
DUANE PEDALED BACK to his office and slipped the envelope containing his apology under the windshield of Anne Cameron’s Lexus. He felt a little cowardly for taking such a formal approach—he could just have stopped into the office, which, after all, was his office—and apologized directly, but somehow he thought the note under the windshield was a better way to do it, mainly because he was a little intimidated by Anne Cameron, ridiculous as that seemed. She was highly educated; he had rarely set foot on a college campus and in fact had not even urged his kids to go to college—Karla hadn’t either. Neither of them wanted their children to get educated above them—it was a wrong attitude in a parent and they both knew it, but, since none of their children showed the slightest interest in college it was the attitude that prevailed.
It was still windy—he wanted to make sure that the note didn’t blow away. He really wanted Anne Cameron to see it.
While he was making the envelope secure the door opened and Anne came out. Instead of the black dress she had worn to the funeral she now wore cutoff jeans and the shirt she had worn the day Duane met her—the shirt that showed her small breasts. Her legs were long and tan.
“I bet that’s a note of apology you’re sticking under my windshield wiper,” she said. “You’re a strange one, Mr. Moore—why didn’t you just hand it to me?—or, better yet, why didn’t you just step inside and apologize?—after all, I started the whole silly nipple business, and what you said today at the funeral wa
s not the biggest deal in the world. We both ought to be able to talk to one another about something besides tits.”
“I’m ready to try,” he said.
Anne Cameron regarded him silently.
“Are you always this weak with women?” she asked, unsmiling.
Duane was dumbfounded by the charge. Nobody had ever suggested to him that he was weak with women. After all, he had been married to Karla Laverne Moore for forty years—a woman half the men in Thalia were scared to death of. If he was weak with women, what about Karla?
There was a long, awkward silence. Duane considered just pedaling away, leaving Anne Cameron’s question unanswered, since he realized he didn’t know how to answer it. Was he weak with women?
Anne Cameron yielded no ground. She waited, impatience in her eyes. She folded her arms over her small breasts and waited.
“I guess I don’t know the answer to that question,” Duane said. “I guess I better ask my psychiatrist and see what she thinks.”
“Would that be the shrink everybody says you’re in love with?” she asked.
“That’s the one.”
“If you really ask her she’s going to tell you you’re weak with women,” Anne said.
She stepped down off the porch and took the envelope that he had just stuck under the windshield wiper. She raised it above her head and squinted at it, as if to read it through the envelope. When she raised her arms Duane noticed that she had a dark tuft of armpit hair. It startled him—he couldn’t remember when he had seen a woman with armpit hair.
Anne Cameron noticed his reaction and regarded him with a hint of a smile.
“Oh that,” she said, showing him both armpits for a moment. “That’s a legacy of my French years—I hate shaving under my armpits. Ever see Diary of a Chambermaid? The Buñuel movie?”
Duane shook his head.
“I mentioned it because Jeanne Moreau plays the chambermaid and she didn’t shave under her armpits—I thought that was so sexy.”
Duane noticed, what he hadn’t before, that Anne Cameron had green eyes.
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