When the Light Goes

by Larry McMurtry

  Some of the things she said to him, without turning a hair, would have turned the hair of any woman he had ever been involved with, including Karla, who liked to think she called a spade a spade.

  “In my straight years I never liked plain fucking very much, but I always liked giving head,” she said, before taking his dick in her mouth again.

  Then there were the darker revelations—Angie Cohen and the dildo, for example. Why would Honor allow it? And yet the picture of her being anally penetrated by a big dildo wouldn’t entirely leave his mind.

  In the afternoon he drove into Wichita Falls and did his laundry. He went to his office and picked up a few phone messages, one of which was from Honor’s receptionist. What the message said was that Dr. Carmichael was terminating her practice, effective immediately. All patients were referred to Dr. David Morgan, who would attend to prescription refills and the like.

  There was a beep, and that was that. Honor was gone, leaving him with a fine but confusing memory. It still bothered him that they had never kissed. On the way home he stopped at a supermarket and filled the whole rear of his pickup with groceries. He bought lots of frozen food and lots of liquor. He bought everything that he might need if he decided to withdraw even farther than he had already withdrawn. He might sit on his hill for a month or more. If he did that, slowly, eventually, he would begin to forget Honor Carmichael. She had enriched his life immensely, but now she had left his life. He knew that he couldn’t will her out of his thoughts, but gradually, if he were patient, his thoughts would find a way around her. A month might do it, so he provisioned for a month. If he got tired of frozen pizza he could always drive his new pickup over to Mike and Tommy’s and eat a few spring rolls or some barbecued pork.

  23

  THREE DAYS after retreating to the grocery-filled cabin, Duane saw a dust cloud of unusual magnitude filling the air above the road. It was Bobby Lee, he imagined, but the old Toyota pickup Bobby Lee nursed along wouldn’t make a dust cloud of that magnitude. It must mean that Bobby had bought a new pickup with oversized wheels—which proved to be the case.

  “New wheels,” Duane remarked, when Bobby Lee braked his new red pickup to a stop.

  “Have you taken Miss Cameron for a ride in it yet?” he added.

  “No—that snooty bitch is the bane of my existence,” Bobby Lee said. “You ought not to have inflicted her on me at this stage of my life.”

  “I didn’t inflict her, Dickie did,” Duane reminded him. “Anyway she’ll be gone to Indonesia in a few months—you’ll just have to tough it out till then.”

  “You got a FedEx from your doctor,” Bobby Lee told him. “I rescued it from Annie. I think she was about to trash it.”

  Duane took the envelope, supposing it was from Dr. Peppard—there was still the matter of the clogged arteries to think about. Duane was doing nothing, other than a lot of staring into space, the matter of the arteries didn’t feel urgent—not to him, anyway. Of course it felt urgent to his daughters, who called him frequently—so often that he finally turned his cell phone off.

  The FedEx, though, was from Honor, and it didn’t just contain a letter. It contained plane tickets from DFW to Boston, a hotel reservation at the Ritz-Carlton, and a sheet of information from Massachusetts General Hospital, where he was set to see a cardiologist named Thomas Higginson, who would do another angiogram and other tests as needed. There was a short letter from Honor, written in her firm hand:

  Duane:

  Mass General is the best diagnostic hospital in America, and Tommy Higginson and I are old friends. Please submit to whatever tests he says you need. My niece Cherry will meet your plane, take you to the hotel, then the hospital, and back to the airport. I’ll be in Europe a few weeks—don’t balk on me. We need to know what’s what about your heart.

  Your physical heart, that is.

  I’ll be in Texas the week you get home. You’ll hear from me.

  Honor

  P.S. I enjoyed our day of sex perhaps more than you realized. You’ve got a lot of loosening up to do. Maybe I can help.

  “Good news?” Bobby Lee asked.

  “Well, news,” Duane said. “I guess I’m going to Boston to get tested.”

  Bobby Lee looked uncomfortable—he took off his dozer cap and put it back on. He was looking into the distance—the same distance Duane often stared into.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Bad arteries ain’t the only kind of problem a person can have,” Bobby Lee reminded him. “For example, an old friend and family employee could find himself in the middle of a family dispute that’s no business of his to even know about.”

  “What in hell does that mean?”

  “It means your daughters are both dead set against your going to Boston—they want you to have the tests done in Dallas.”

  “Wait a minute,” Duane insisted. “I just found out ten seconds ago that Honor wanted me to go to Boston for the tests. How would my daughters know anything about it?”

  “Good question, Sherlock,” Bobby Lee. “Somebody might have found out by reading your e-mail—that’s one possibility.”

  Duane realized that was the likely explanation. Lots of e-mails flowed through his office—he only bothered to collect them every week or so.

  Duane began to get an annoyed feeling. The FedEx envelope had been open when Bobby handed it to him, and Honor’s envelope had not been sealed.

  “Who do you think might have read my e-mail?” he asked.

  Bobby shrugged. “Miss Nipples has been to Dallas twice lately—she and your girls are best buddies, now, you know.”

  “I didn’t know. Been to Dallas to do what?”

  Bobby shrugged again.

  “I wasn’t invited, so how would I know?” he said. “I suppose they eat fancy food and go dancing. Probably they spend a lot of time cussing your shrink.”

  “I wish Dickie had never hired that girl,” he said. He was feeling more annoyed by the minute.

  “Dickie likes money a lot more than you ever did,” Bobby Lee said. “I could always get you to go fishing now and then. Hell, we even went to Ruidoso to the horse races quite a few times. Dickie don’t fish and I doubt he’s ever given a thought to the ponies. He used to spend all his time taking drugs, and now he spends all his time making money.”

  “I’m glad you mentioned the horse races,” Duane said. “Maybe we ought to go out and watch the ponies for a couple of weeks. That way I wouldn’t have to fight with my girls over Boston or whatever.”

  Bobby Lee looked distressed.

  “I’d love to but I can’t,” he said. “Jessica’s home.”

  “Uh-oh. Is that good or bad?”

  “Enjoy the races,” Bobby Lee said.

  24

  DUANE THOUGHT his decision to spend a couple of weeks at the horse races in New Mexico was a good one. He could just get in his new pickup and go. Nobody need be worried and perhaps the argument about where his heart tests were to take place might never happen.

  He didn’t want a discussion to happen, since it would only boil down to another chance for his daughters to attack Honor Carmichael. Running off seemed the best solution—besides, he did like to watch the ponies run.

  Somehow, though, this smart plan never got put into action. Once he even packed his backpack—the same one he had taken to Egypt—but he didn’t leave. It was easier just to sit on his hill and pay an occasional visit to Mike and Tommy at the Asia Wonder Deli. Once he took his rod and walked over to the nearby stock tank to fish. He only caught perch, and he threw them back, but it was something to do.

  It wasn’t that he expected Honor to show up and have sweaty sex with him anytime soon. He didn’t expect anybody to show up, and, except for Bobby Lee, few did. He went to his office in Wichita Falls once in a while, but he did not go to Thalia. He didn’t want to be in Thalia—not for a while, at least.

  Once, remembering his day of sex with Honor, he found he had an erection—a rare erection. So he ma
sturbated and, afterward, felt sad. What he had just done, at his age, represented a kind of sexual defeat.

  Sometimes he spent a whole day just looking off his hill. The great emptiness to the northwest seemed to equalize the emptiness inside him. August ended and September began. Dove season opened—he could hear the pop of shotguns from the fields and pastures around him. He phoned Bobby Lee and asked him to drop off a shotgun and a box of shells, which Bobby Lee did. His old friend had a black eye. Bobby Lee didn’t mention it and Duane didn’t inquire.

  Duane spent a week of almost total silence, during which the only people he saw were roughnecks or cowboys passing on the road. One afternoon he walked down to the tank and shot three doves with three shots. He dressed the birds, wrapped them in bacon, and broiled them. They were excellent, and yet he did no more hunting. Instead of eating dove every night he ate Fritos and bean dip, or a pizza, or a peanut butter sandwich, or spring rolls from Mike and Tommy’s. He forgot about Ruidoso and the horses. He spent more and more time doing less and less.

  Then, a week before he was to fly off to Boston, his daughters came, bringing Anne Cameron with them.

  25

  “WE’RE YOUR FAMILY, Daddy—don’t you think we have your best interests at heart?” Nellie asked, loudly.

  It was still hot in the cabin—he offered the three of them beers, which they accepted, and they all walked over to a big tree, a sycamore, whose shade Duane used as a kind of patio. He had cut a number of mesquite stumps to serve as chairs. Nelly and Julie each sat on a stump, but Anne Cameron just crossed her long legs and sat on the ground. Duane made do with a stump.

  “Sure, honey,” he said. “I know you both have my best interests at heart.” He was making every effort to be friendly and pleasant.

  “Then why are you going to let that woman drag you off to that old Yankee hospital?” Julie asked. “We’ve got perfectly good hospitals right here in Dallas.”

  “What’s Yankee got to do with it?” Duane asked. “The Civil War’s been over a long time. Boston’s just as much part of America as Dallas—I’ve always heard it’s a good town.”

  “It’s a great town—went to school there,” Anne Cameron said. “I love Boston.”

  Nellie whirled on her indignantly.

  “Whose side are you on, Annie?” she asked. “We don’t want him to go to Boston. That’s the whole point of this visit—to talk him out of it.”

  “I know that,” Annie said calmly. “That’s your desire and, if you’ll remember, I advised you not to bother.”

  “Well, we happen to want to bother!” Julie said.

  Annie looked at Duane and shrugged.

  Duane decided he might as well stir the pot a little. Right at the moment he was not feeling pleased with his daughters. They wore too much makeup, had on too much jewelry, and both had their jaws set in the way that he had always disliked in their mother. Karla enjoyed pushing people around. She never relented, and seldom forgave those, like himself, who just ignored her orders, her wishes and her rage.

  Both his daughters now looked just as their mother had looked when somebody crossed her.

  “We don’t like it that you’d rather do what some old dyke wants you to than to listen to your own daughters who love you.”

  “Nellie, I don’t want to hear any more of that,” Duane said. “Don’t be calling Dr. Carmichael names—seems like it wasn’t so long ago that you were gay yourself. Am I right?”

  Anne Cameron smiled to herself.

  “No, she’s normal again—Bessie ran off with a barrel racer,” Julie said. Another bad trait of his daughters was their tendency to gloat over one another’s romantic disasters—of which there had been plenty over the years.

  “Momma hated that woman! Hated her!” Nellie said. “Why won’t you even be loyal to Momma’s memory?”

  “Your mother was the jealous type,” Duane said. “She managed to find something to hate about every woman I was ever friendly with. I don’t care what she thought of my doctor—nor what you think about her either. She’s an MD and she knows a lot about hospitals. I have a serious heart condition. I want the best doctor I can find to advise me about it—and if Dr. Carmichael thinks Mass General is the place to go then I have every intention of taking her advice.”

  There was a silence. Anne Cameron seemed to be thinking her own thoughts.

  “Can’t you say something, Annie?” Julie asked. “Can’t you make him see that he’s making a fool of himself with that old hag?”

  “I suppose I could try to get him to let me set him up at UCLA—that’s a good hospital too. But I don’t think he’s likely to change his plans, and he’s right to look farther than Dallas. I wouldn’t get a hangnail treated in Dallas, much less anything serious.”

  Both the sisters looked at her in shock.

  “You said you were on our side—you said you hated her too,” Julie managed.

  “No, now you’re confused,” Anne said. “What I said was that my aunt Linda hated Angie Cohen. My family’s very anti-Semitic. My father resigned from the yacht club the day they admitted their first Jew.

  “I don’t think anyone in my family really knew Dr. Carmichael,” she went on. “They just assumed that if she was living with Angie Cohen then she must be bad.”

  “The girls wouldn’t know about anti-Semitism,” Duane said. “There’s not been a single Jew living in Thalia in my lifetime.”

  “No, but there’s plenty of the greedy fuckers living in North Dallas,” Nellie said.

  “Look,” Duane said. “You don’t seem to know it but Dr. Carmichael has closed her practice in Wichita Falls. She’s in Europe. I don’t know that I’ll ever see her again, but I hope I see her again because without her help last year I’d probably be dead. I understand that you don’t want me to replace your mother with another woman—that’s normal enough.”

  “Oh, we don’t care if you have a girlfriend, Daddy,” Julie said. “We just want it to be someone from our part of the country, not some Yankee dyke.”

  Duane stood up.

  “Honor Carmichael was born and raised in Vernon—not even fifty miles from here,” he said.

  “I don’t care where she was born—she’s not like us,” Julie cried.

  “Well, that’s true—she’s not like you,” Duane said. “But it might be that you’d be happier women if you were more like her.”

  “Whoa!” Annie Cameron said, suppressing a giggle.

  “Shut up, you’re a fucking snob yourself,” Nellie cried.

  Duane felt a sadness—he had thought he and Karla had done a good job of raising their daughters—but now he wasn’t so sure.

  “I’m not a snob,” Annie Cameron said. “I work in a dingy little office. But I am educated, and you two aren’t.”

  “You said you’d help us but you didn’t, didn’t!” Julie said, bitterly.

  “Say not the struggle naught availeth,” Annie said.

  “What the fuck does that mean?” Nellie asked.

  “It means I might help you yet—I’m thinking of a plan,” Annie said, with a girlish grin.

  “A plan—what fucking plan?” Julie asked.

  “I’m getting tired of hearing the F-word from you two,” Duane put in.

  “Didn’t I tell you that the hospital where he means to do the tests is a great hospital?” Annie said. “Dr. Carmichael was right to send him there. He’ll be gone two days—big deal. It’s how he spends the rest of his life that you two really ought to be thinking about.”

  “Well, he’s not spending it with her!” Julie declared.

  “What if I got him to spend it with me—would you like that any better?” Annie said quietly.

  “I once thought you were our friend,” Nellie said. “I thought you’d help us. But now I think you’re just a snobby little cunt from California.”

  “You were just pretending to be like us,” Julie said. “You’re not really like us at all.”

  “What do you think, Boss Man?” A
nnie asked.

  “I’m going to Boston to get my tests,” Duane said. “That’s as far as my thinking will take me right now.”

  “And you’ll see her, won’t you?” Julie said.

  “Nope,” he said. “Dr. Carmichael is in Europe and I think she means to stay there for a while. I’m going to get some tests done in a good hospital, that’s all.”

  “It’s not all—it’s just the beginning of us losing you!” Nellie said. “We’ve been losing you more and more ever since you parked your pickup and started that stupid walking. Everyone in town thinks you did it because we drove you crazy taking drugs and having wild boyfriends. Not only did you embarrass us by walking everywhere, you had to start seeing a psychiatrist too. Now everyone thinks we’ve got mental illness in our family.”

  “Honey, what the people in Thalia think doesn’t really matter,” Duane said—he was still determined to be calm and reasonable. “None of us live in Thalia anymore. I think myself that I’d be a happier man today if I’d moved out of Thalia fifteen years ago.”

  “Whoa!” Annie Cameron said again.

  “Stop saying ‘Whoa!’ What do you think we are, horses?” Nellie said.

  “In this context ‘whoa’ is merely a term of astonishment,” Annie said. She had remained cool and unruffled throughout the conversation. She had remained courteous—an ability Duane admired.

  Unfortunately neither of his daughters seemed to care about courtesy. Their mother hadn’t cared that much for it, either; it saddened him to realize that he’d raised an unmannerly brood of mostly spoiled children.

  Julie was determined to make one last try.

  “Look, Nellie and I have two big mansions mostly going to waste,” she said. “If you’d just have your tests done in Dallas you could stay with us and be waited on hand and foot.”

  Duane just shook his head.

  “I like waiting on myself—that’s why I live alone,” Duane said.