“I guess I’m not as young as I used to be,” he said to Bobby Lee and Dickie, as he was being wheeled along the hall to his room.
What he said was such a cliché that neither Bobby Lee nor Dickie bothered to reply.
Their silence irritated Duane a little bit. Why wouldn’t they talk to him? He hadn’t said anything to them particularly dumb, he didn’t think. But pretty soon he was in his room and things got hectic and crowded. Two doctors showed up—both of them listened long and thoughtfully to his heart.
One of the doctors was an older man named Calvert—at one time he had been Karla’s doctor. After Karla’s death Duane had occasionally seen him at various civic events, but he didn’t know him well. The young doctor seemed to be in charge—he introduced himself, but in Duane’s half-indifferent state the name failed to stick.
“Daddy, they want to do an EKG, just to be sure your heart’s all right,” Dickie said.
Duane had had periodic EKGs, mostly at Karla’s urging—the procedure had not been particularly onerous and his heart had always been okay, so he nodded his assent. What he wanted to do was go to sleep, but inasmuch as he was in the hospital it seemed best just to let the doctors run their tests.
Then he could get an early start in the morning and reach his cabin before it got dangerously hot.
He dozed through the EKG—he heard the doctors murmuring with Dickie, but he didn’t pay a great deal of attention. When the test was over he was taken to a room and offered a meal, but he only ate a spoonful of fruit salad before drifting off to sleep. He dreamed of the ocean and of trying to set pipe in a new well in the midst of a lightning storm. All the crew ran away—he could see little flickers of blue lightning on the running men’s hard hats. Then he found himself riding his bicycle across the surface of the ocean at a time of day when the sun was very bright.
Duane woke at first light, as he usually did—he had meant to check out of the hospital and pedal away, but a lassitude seized him and he continued to lie in bed. He passed on breakfast when it was offered; he began to wonder if Bobby Lee had neglected to leave him his bicycle. He felt sure he could make it to his cabin on his bike if he didn’t wait too long to start. But with no bike he would be forced to hitch a ride, and then would be stuck in his cabin until Bobby Lee showed up with his bike. It was all faintly irritating, and yet the lassitude he could not seem to shake off kept him in his bed. He blamed only himself for this bump in the road—if he hadn’t ignored the power of the August heat he wouldn’t be off track to the extent that he was. He knew better than to try and beat nature—he had always known better—and yet he had been foolish and had done just that, only to have nature immediately slap him down.
About seven he did get up and slowly put on his clothes—just as he was about to go in search of his bike he heard footsteps in the hall and who should appear but his children: Dickie, Julie, Nellie, accompanied by the sharp-featured young doctor whose name he had forgotten.
“Good Lord, the board of governors,” Duane said. “What brought this on?”
“You—we’re all worried sick about you,” Julie said. “You had a heart attack.”
Duane was not entirely surprised by this news. Even half asleep he had been aware the night before that the doctors were not entirely pleased with his EKG. Their murmurings with Dickie had a worried tone.
“I was hoping it was just a heat stroke,” he said, looking at the young doctor, who met his eye and reintroducted himself as Dr. Joel Peppard.
Duane felt mildly annoyed, as he always did, when his family descended on him in force. He knew he was wrong to feel annoyed: they were his kids, they loved him; certainly they only wanted to help. Why it was that he didn’t want to be helped was a perversity that he could discuss with Honor Carmichael sometime. For the moment he was more interested in what came next, medically, and, since two of his children had driven up from Dallas he was determined to stay polite.
“All signs point to a heart attack, though a small one, I should add,” Dr. Peppard told him. “There are arteries no longer than my little fingernail—one of these tiny ones may have failed—there’s probably no damage to your heart muscle, if that’s what happened.”
It was at that moment, as Duane would later tell Honor, that his life ceased to feel like his own.
Honor at once attacked that notion.
“If you have real connections to your family, your friends, and your lovers, then your life is never more than partly your own,” she said. “What next?”
“A stress test was next,” he told her. “Dr. Peppard wanted me to do one before I left the hospital. He felt sure I’d pass it.
“But he was wrong—I failed it.”
“Uh-oh,” Honor said. She suddenly looked at him in a friendly way again, something she had not done since her vacation.
“I suppose that means you’ve been lucky,” she said. “You haven’t had a serious heart attack, but you can probably expect one soon. Correct?”
“That’s what the doctors think,” Duane said.
“And what do you think, Duane?”
“I don’t feel right,” Duane said. “I feel something’s off. Maybe not very off, but off.
“I guess the next thing to do is get an angiogram,” he went on.
“Good boy! Do it right away!”
“I guess that would be best,” Duane said, though he wasn’t fully convinced.
17
AS DR. PEPPARD and the technicians were preparing to proceed with his angiogram Duane was handed a form to sign, which told him, he just happened to notice, that the procedure he was about to undergo could be fatal. It startled him a little, since Dr. Peppard had never mentioned that possibility.
“You mean this could kill me?” he asked. “And if it can, why am I doing it?”
All three of his children were waiting in the hall: had they known angiograms could be fatal?
“I’ve never lost a patient to an angiogram,” Dr. Peppard said. “It’s a rare thing. But this is an invasive procedure and we have to inform the patient that there is a risk. Once in a while someone reacts negatively.”
“Dying? I guess I’d call that reacting negatively,” Duane told him; but he allowed the test to proceed. The odd sense of lassitude had not quite left him, nor had the strange detachment that he had felt ever since his crisis by the dry creek. He was allowed to watch the progress of the dye they shot into him on an overhead monitor. He watched the dye moving toward his heart, and yet felt mainly indifferent to what was going on. Somehow it didn’t really feel like it was him the dye had entered. The body was his, but his spirit, if it still existed, was somewhere else.
“Uh-oh,” Dr. Peppard said, staring intently at the monitor. “That’s what I was afraid of.”
Duane, even in his detached state, saw the problem too. The dye didn’t seem to be moving through his heart.
The test was soon concluded, and he didn’t die. In fact he walked out of the lab feeling, if anything, a little better, even though he had seen with his own eyes what the dye did. It stopped when it got to his heart, which meant that, though alive, he wasn’t problem-free.
Dr. Peppard made his report to Duane, Dickie, Nellie, and Julie. The children looked worried. Duane, having survived a procedure that could have been fatal, was feeling like himself again.
“Daddy, why are you looking so cheerful?” Julie asked. “You’ve got three major arteries that are ninety percent blocked. You could keel over any day.”
“I suppose it’s what happens if you eat ten thousand chicken-fried steaks,” he said, in an effort to inject a little humor into the proceedings. The effort failed: Nellie promptly burst into tears.
“Hey, ease up,” he said. “I’m standing on my own two feet in a hospital. The doctor isn’t going to let me die, I don’t think.”
“I’m going to try not to,” the doctor said. “You must have pretty good collateral circulation, since you bike everywhere.”
“Isn’t there some D
rano or something that could get things moving up there?” Duane asked.
“Someday we’ll have the Drano, but right now we don’t,” Dr. Peppard said. “What we have now are scalpels. What you need in my opinion is triple bypass surgery—and you need it soon.”
It was Duane’s turn to be stunned.
“You mean an operation?” he asked.
“That’s right.”
“Then what do you mean by soon?” Duane asked.
“Tomorrow wouldn’t be too soon,” the doctor said, looking nervous.
“Maybe not for you but it’s too soon for me,” Duane said. “I’d need to do some investigating before I let anything like that happen.”
“Oh, Daddy—please don’t be stubborn,” Julie said, too loudly. “Why can’t you just let them do what they need to do. It would just destroy the grandkids if you were to suddenly die.”
“I’m not going to suddenly die,” Duane assured them. “You all need to calm down and slow down. I might want a second opinion—there’d be nothing wrong with that, would there, Doctor?”
“Not a thing—I just wouldn’t put off getting it, if I were you.”
“You’re not me, though—none of you are me,” Duane said. “So please just all back off. There’s a lot to think about here, and I intend to take my time thinking about it, okay?”
“It’s not okay with me,” Nellie said. “I think you should do it and do it now.”
“Leave him alone,” Dickie said. “He’ll get around to it when he’s ready.”
“It’s all Momma’s fault,” Julie cried. “If she hadn’t run into that stupid milk truck she could have made Daddy eat good and he’d be healthy today.”
“That’s absurd,” Nellie countered. “She never made Daddy eat anything healthy—how could she when she didn’t even eat healthy herself?
“I’ve never seen Daddy eat a salad in my life,” she added.
It seemed to Duane that a normal family argument was taking place, one not much different from countless other family arguments. Since he had no interest in participating in it, he began to walk away. Honor’s office was only four blocks away, and he had a shrink appointment. He felt sure he could walk the four blocks, heart blockage or no heart blockage.
He was almost out the door when Julie noticed that he was leaving.
“Daddy you can’t just go,” she said.
“Yes, I can just go,” he said. “I have an appointment with my psychiatrist—I think I need to tell her the big news. I’d like to know what she thinks about it.”
“I hate her, we all hate her!” Julie burst out. “She’s just some terrible old dyke—you’re not crazy anyway, why do you have to go to a shrink?”
“Stop that dyke talk!” Nellie insisted. “I’m a dyke now, remember?”
“Yes, and I hate that too,” Julie said. “Even if Zenas is kind of boring it would be better for the kids if you could just stay normal for a few more years instead of taking up with a little slut like Bessie.”
“Don’t call my girlfriend a slut!” Nellie yelled, shaking her fist in Julie’s face.
Duane knew his family resented his attachment to Honor Carmichael. They might live in mansions in North Dallas, but, at heart, they were still Thalia girls—and in Thalia, for a family member to see a psychiatrist was still an embarrassment.
Lesbianism was an even worse admission.
“You two idiots shut up,” Dickie said. “You’re in a hospital. Behave yourselves.”
“Fuck you, asshole!” Julie said. “All your wife does is sit home and smoke dope and watch soaps all day.”
“At least she’s not abandoning her children to go off and be a nun,” Dickie said. Then he stalked off.
When the girls glared at one another, as they were glaring just then, they became the spitting image of their mother. No one could out-glare Karla, when her dander was up.
He turned to leave again, but Julie grabbed his arm.
“Daddy, you can’t just walk off—you’ve got ninety percent blockage,” Julie said.
“Well, that’s just one doctor’s opinion,” Duane reminded her. “And even if it’s true that leaves me ten percent blood flow. I think I can make it to Dr. Carmichael’s on my ten percent.”
“I hate her, I hate her, I hate her!” Julie said, loudly.
“Bye girls, thanks for coming,” Duane said.
18
DUANE HAD NO TROUBLE walking the four shady blocks to Honor Carmichael’s office—his arteries might be a ticking bomb within him but the fact didn’t really affect his mood. It seemed good that his kids still fought with one another—at least they hadn’t drifted so far apart that they had lost their sense of connection.
When he got to Honor’s office, to his surprise he saw a black veil draped over the door handle—his first thought was that Jody Carmichael must have died. But when he went in and asked Honor’s assistant, a lovely Hispanic girl, if that was the case she shook her head.
“Angie died, Mr. Moore,” she said. “Dr. Carmichael has gone east with her ashes. They’ll be scattering them today. Dr. Carmichael will be back tomorrow.”
“That’s a shock,” he said. “I only met Angie once, but she didn’t seem old.”
“Smoking, probably. She died of lung cancer.”
As Duane turned to go the assistant handed him a note. The note was in a heavy cream-colored envelope, with Honor’s monogram on the back.
“She left this for you, in case you dropped by,” the girl said.
Duane took the note. He felt reluctant to leave the cool offices, but he knew he must.
It surprised him that Honor had left the note—probably she was curious about his tests. He didn’t open the note immediately. There was a Dairy Queen only half a mile down the street—he thought he might walk over, get a chocolate malt, and read his note.
As he was walking along he realized he had forgotten to retrieve his bike from Bobby Lee. Now that he was feeling almost himself again he wanted his bicycle. As he was strolling he called Bobby Lee on his cell and got him on the first ring.
“I need my bike,” Duane said. “I’ll meet you at the Dairy Queen on Holiday Street.”
“Okay, but there’s a small problem,” Bobby said. “Your daughters have confiscated your bike.”
“What? Who let them?
“Hey, I only got one ball,” Bobby Lee said. “I have to be careful around angry women, or I’ll be out of business.
“Besides, to hear them tell it, you’ll be on the operating table soon—how’d you escape?”
“On foot,” Duane said. “And for your information I still have a will of my own. If you can find my bike steal it and bring it to me pronto. If you can’t find it I guess I’ll just buy a new one.”
“Actually they didn’t physically confiscate it,” Bobby said. “It was more like a moral confiscation.”
“Meaning they just told you not to let me have it?”
“Right.”
“I’m glad you’re able to grasp these subtle concepts—like moral confiscation. You haven’t been going to night school on me, have you?”
“Nope, but you’ve been signing my paychecks for most of my life, whereas your daughters have never given me a dime.”
“Oh, I see,” Duane said. “You’re a damn Marxist. Follow the money—is that it?”
“That’s right about it,” Bobby Lee said. “I’ll be there in about twenty minutes if the Highway Patrol don’t interfere. But keep in mind that it’s still hot. If you was to keel over dead riding your bike around my ass would be grass.”
“I don’t plan to keel over, but I won’t be pedaling around much in this heat, either,” Duane assured him.
“I hope not, your daughters are mean,” Bobby said.
Duane hung up and opened his note from Honor Carmichael. It was a short note—not to mention shocking.
Duane:
The oldest human wisdom is to fuck after a funeral. Be at home.
Honor
Duane was still holding the note in his hand when Bobby Lee showed up with his bicycle.
19
DUANE PUT HONOR’S NOTE back in the heavy cream envelope and stuck the envelope in his hip pocket. He didn’t want Bobby Lee, or anyone, to know what the note said. Just having it on his person made him a little paranoid. Of course there was no way that Bobby lee could read a note that was in an envelope in his hip pocket—nobody could, and yet Duane still felt paranoid. The note promised to change everything—or did it?
Bobby Lee had just lifted Duane’s bike out of the rear end of his pickup when Duane came out the door, took the bicycle, and put it right back in the rear of the pickup.
“I thought you wanted your bike,” Bobby said. “Wasn’t that why I just drove over here, risking the wrath of your daughters, I might add.”
“Life is change, Bobby,” Duane said. “The biking era just ended. The wheel has come full circle. What I need now is a pickup, one with good air-conditioning.”
Bobby Lee jerked in surprise.
“You want a pickup—after all your vows and all these years?”
“I do, take me to the office,” Duane said. “I’ll have one of the secretaries lease me a pickup for a month or two.”
On the way to the office Bobby Lee kept glancing at Duane—but Duane, as near as he could tell, seemed to be breathing normally.
“If I was ever to go to a shrink what would be the first thing I ought to talk to her about?” he asked.
“How do you know it would be a her?”
“Well, yours is a her, and I like her looks,” Bobby Lee said.
“If it’s Honor or someone like her I’d jump right into the subject of your having just one ball.”
“I might be too shy to mention a personal matter like that.”
“Then what you’ll probably do is go through life picking up girls at gas stations and watching them run off with hardened criminals—after you’ve married them, of course.”
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