“I come from an eye-for-an-eye part of the country,” she reminded them.
K.K., annoyed by Bobby Lee at first, had finally taken to him. On nights when he had to stay on the guard tower she would have someone take one of Stephanie’s meals out to him.
Bobby Lee’s self-esteem, low for years, began to soar once K.K. began to pay him some attention.
“She’s a real down-to-earth gal, once you get to know her,” he claimed one day, a remark that caused both Boyd and Duane to snort.
“Bobby, she’s a billionairess—how could she be down-to-earth?” Duane asked.
“And then there’s her thoroughbreds,” Boyd mentioned. “Nobody down-to-earth would risk their lives day after day riding crazy horses.”
One day Duane discovered that Stephanie Slade, a city-bred girl, had never been to a rodeo. There was one in Olney that weekend and, on impulse, Duane agreed to take her.
Before the rodeo started the two of them were wandering around behind the chutes when they encounted a young cowboy Duane knew: Dwight Magee. Dwight was young, lean and good-looking, besides being probably the best calf roper in the area.
Duane spotted an oilman he wanted to gossip with a bit, so he left Stephanie with Dwight for a few minutes—when he came back and tried to find her he couldn’t.
Calf roping was traditionally the second event, right after bareback riding. The event came and went, and Dwight Magee did not show up to rope his calf.
Stephanie Slade was never seen in that part of the country again.
“I could have told you she’d do that, if you’d asked me,” K.K. said, later.
A year later Dwight Magee came limping back to the short grass country and quickly regained his high place in the local calf roping community.
Duane asked him once, casually, what had become of Stephanie Slade, only to have Dwight Magee walk away without answering.
48
NOT LONG AFTER Duane left Stephanie at the rodeo in Olney, he answered an ad in the Fort Worth paper and bought a cabin cruiser, which was duly delivered. It was in poor condition, but it floated.
“I guess that’s about the last we’ll see of you—us working people, that is,” Bobby Lee said.
“No it isn’t—I just want a boat I can sleep on,” Duane said.
“What about that cabin you rebuilt for no good reason, at great expense?” Bobby asked.
“A cabin isn’t a boat,” Duane pointed out, patiently, he thought.
“If I feel like sitting on a hill I can stay in my new cabin,” Duane said. “If I feel like being on the water, which I often do, I can sleep on my boat.
“It’s even got two bunks—you could sleep over and we could lay a trot line,” he added.
“I’m a little above trot line fishing,” Bobby Lee said, remembering his record bass. But in a flash he changed his mind.
“Okay, sure,” he said. “Next you’ll have a yacht, I expect.”
No yacht appeared, but the cabin cruiser eventually got repainted and repaired. While the work was being done Duane fulfilled a promise to his grandson and went to London.
Willy met him at Gatwick and took him into London on the Tube. The massiveness of the buildings in central London—Piccadilly, Westminster, the Strand, the various parks—all thrilled him. They rented a car, and Willy, by then unfazed by the fact that the English drove on the left, took him to Blenheim, Stonehenge, Chatsworth, Oxford, Cambridge and the Cotswolds. They visited several cathedrals.
Duane tried driving once but gave up at the first roundabout. They drove up to Edinburgh and then took a train back to London.
“What do you think, Grandpa?” Willy asked, once they were back in London.
“I think there was a lot of money here once,” Duane said, indicating the buildings near the Victoria and Albert Museum, the only museum Willy insisted that they see.
“Yep, and some of it’s still here,” Willy said. “Though the aristocrats mostly don’t have enough money to live in their own family houses.”
“I’d like to see an aristocrat—maybe just once,” Duane said.
“K.K.’s a kind of aristocrat,” Willy told him. “She’s probably as close as an American can get, except for one or two museum directors.”
“I don’t know K.K. well, but I don’t think she’s happy,” Duane said.
“I’ve begun to think that maybe happiness is too much to ask,” Willy said. “Though I’ve been pretty happy at Oxford.”
“It’s not too much to ask,” Duane said. “It’s just that it tends to be temporary. Your Granny and I were pretty happy for a good long time.”
“But then you weren’t,” Willy said.
“Then we weren’t,” Duane agreed.
49
THE LONG FLIGHT home from Gatwick to Dallas interested Duane quite a lot. Willy had finished the first year of his Rhodes and was accompanying his grandfather back to Texas.
Near Greenland they looked down and saw icebergs. William spent most of his time writing and receiving e-mails. Crossing Canada took hours—Duane was quite surprised at how much Canada there turned out to be.
“I hope my mom doesn’t rattle on about your Asian girlfriend,” Willy said, with a sigh. He had not much wanted to leave England, even for the month he would be home.
“Your mother doesn’t keep up very well. Dal was never my girlfriend and she left to take a job in Thailand a month ago. I miss her but her family’s in Thailand and it’s probably for the best.”
“You can’t really know, though,” Willy said. “Only time can determine what’s really for the best.”
“See, you’ve become a philosopher, like you planned to,” Duane said.
“I became a philosopher at about three, when I started trying to figure out why there was so much tension in our house—and it got worse when you started your walking.”
“Did you ever figure it out—the reason for the tension?”
“Sure, it was a house full of lunatics,” Willy said. “Even Granny seemed crazy a lot of the time.
“We’re a family of hedonists,” he added.
“Tell me again what a hedonist is?” Duane asked.
“People who spend their lives doing exactly what they want to do, regardless of the feelings and needs of others.
“I don’t really include Granny in that,” Willy said. “Sometimes Granny was totally responsible.”
“I’m glad you’re going back to England for your second year. I think England suits you.”
“In some ways it’s a broken culture, but it’s a great culture.”
Watching Illinois pass beneath him Duane began to think about his boat.
50
WHEN DUANE GOT home everybody asked him if he had snapshots of himself and Willy in all the new places he had been. They wanted, for some reason, to see him in a tourist-like context. They assumed he would come home with lots of souvenirs, but in fact he had neither snapshots nor souvenirs. Karla had always taken hundreds of pictures of everywhere they went—but Duane was not Karla.
“You didn’t even take a camera?” K.K. said. “That’s almost immoral. What is wrong with you?”
“Probably a lot,” Duane said—“So much that I don’t think I’d want a picture of it.”
Indeed, it had never occurred to him to take a camera.
51
DUANE AND BOBBY LEE began to spend a lot of their spare time on Duane’s newly painted and restored cabin cruiser.
“A boat needs a name,” Bobby observed.
“Okay, let’s call it the Bobby Lee,” Duane said. “I’ve left it to you in my will anyway.”
They were way out in the middle of Lake Kickapoo, hoping to avoid the swarms of mosquitoes that overhung the shores.
“Really?” Bobby Lee asked, stunned.
He grew misty-eyed at the thought that Duane was willing him the boat.
A fish jumped out of the water, arched and plopped back in.
“That was a three-pounder,” Duane obser
ved.
“Well, we didn’t catch it, so who cares?”
He seemed nervous for some reason.
“What’s wrong with you?” Duane asked. With Bobby, or with most people, it seemed better just to ask.
“Nothing,” Bobby said. “I been dating Lena Loftis. We’re thinking of tying the knot.”
“Oh, you’re just trying to round up a best man then,” Duane said. “Sounds like a fine match to me. I’ll be glad to be your best man.”
“The truth of the matter is a little awkward,” Bobby Lee said.
“How so?”
“We couldn’t wait. We dug up a J.P. and got it done.”
“Does the town know?”
“They will tomorrow, when the list of marriages comes out in the paper.”
“You’re a thrill a minute, Bobby,” Duane said.
Then he got back to serious fishing.
52
“I WAS UP IN British Columbia once, fishing, and a guide told me that a grizzly bear could hide so well that you could be within three feet of him and not know it,” Bobby Lee said.
“Three feet!” he insisted.
“That’s the kind of information that would deter me from chasing off to British Columbia, fishing or no fishing,” Duane said.
They were walking away from Boyd Cotton’s funeral, a small funeral, attended by maybe twenty people. It was small because most of the cowboys and cattlemen Boyd had worked with were long dead themselves.
Boyd had been in the big rhino pasture, looking for two nilgai that had somehow slipped into it, when a large rhino burst out of a small mesquite thicket and tossed Boyd’s quarter horse, with Boyd on it, several feet in the air. The horse turned in falling and landed on Boyd, killing him instantly.
The thicket was only an acre or two, but it was dense. Boyd took the rhino danger serious, and was watchful when he was in the big pasture. And yet neither Boyd nor his number-one quarter horse had sensed that nearly two tons of rhino was just a few yards away.
“Animals can do things we don’t understand, like those bears in British Columbia,” Duane reminded him.
K.K. Slater was in Mongolia when the death occurred. The quarter horse had to be put down too.
K.K. was trying to save a rare antelope, and also the wild horses of the Gobi.
She could not make it back for the funeral but the first thing she did, on her return, was visit Boyd’s grave, which was on a rise near his little house. His father, mother and sister were also buried there. At his funeral they had hung his spurs over a little cross, but the spurs were stolen within a week.
“I hope an admirer took them, at least,” K.K. said.
“Probably just a thief,” Duane said.
53
DUANE BEGAN TO notice a tone in Honor Carmichael’s voice that hadn’t been there before. She sounded weaker, for some reason. Not much weaker, but certainly not as strong as she had seemed on her visit to Thalia. Honor had always had a robust voice, calm and rich. In his days as her patient he had come to like her voice before he really liked her.
Now, something was off. He felt a nagging worry.
“Are you okay?” he asked one day, gathering his nerve.
There was a silence on the line.
“I was hoping you wouldn’t ask that,” she said.
“Well, are you?” he repeated.
“If you must know I’m dying,” Honor said. “Pancreatic cancer—a bad one.”
“Uh-oh,” Duane said.
His instinct had been right, although he hadn’t expected Honor to have something fatal.
“Ever notice how when your friends start dying there’s a kind of stampede for the door?” Honor said. “Pretty soon half your acquaintance is gone.”
“What are you going to do about it?” he asked.
“Not too much—drink a lot and take drugs,” she said. “I have a very compliant, nonpuritanical doctor. He’s given me what will ease me.”
“I might go to Paris, but probably not,” she went on. “I’ve seen a lot of Paris.”
“I guess that means you won’t be coming here,” he said.
“I won’t, honey—no,” she said. “Long Island’s not a bad place to die—and I have good friends here, and there’s the sea. Nothing more soothing than old Mother Sea.”
She sighed. “Right now I’m tired, though—I’ll talk to you in a while.”
Duane hung up. He waited two weeks and called again, only to be told that Honor was in a coma.
Two days later she died.
There was a small service in Vernon, Honor’s birthplace, that Duane went to. The only survivor was an old deaf aunt who could not be made to realize who Duane was or why he was there. The crowd was an oil patch crowd, not a ranching crowd. Rain began to splatter the mourners as they hurried to their cars and pickups, and a ferocious hailstorm caught Duane as he was driving back to Thalia. He finally stopped under an overpass, to let it hail itself out. Before it ended the whole highway might have been covered with snow.
“Bad news for the wheat farmers,” Duane said as he drove home.
54
SO NOW YOU’VE lost your sounding board,” K.K. said, when she was back from Mongolia, where she had gone three times. She was feeding him supper at her penthouse.
“It’s a wonder I ever went to her in the first place,” Duane said. “Back then it was a big deal for a man to go to a shrink. My wife hated it like crazy, and the home folks could talk of nothing else. Successful oilmen weren’t supposed to get disturbed.
“Honor helped me a lot,” he added.
“She must have been nice, but the two women she lived with weren’t one bit nice,” K.K. said. “They were cunts, both of them. One had talent and one didn’t, but they were both cunts.”
“Honor did her best to polish me,” Duane said.
“She made you less provincial,” K.K. said. “She saw a rough diamond and rubbed it a little.”
Just then a single car light came along the road from the east.
“It’s nice to be in a place where there’s only one car on the road at night,” K.K. said.
Somewhat to their surprise the one car light belonged to Willy Moore’s modest Honda. Willy was driving and he had brought a passenger.
“Hi, ma’am,” Willy said, when he and his friend reached the penthouse. “I hear you need a sculptor and I’ve brought you one. Lucas Hawkins.”
Lucas was skinnier than Willy, and had a quiet smile. They both shook K.K.’s hand.
“Lucas Hawkins? The Lucas Hawkins…the toast of New York?”
“Oh, not hardly,” Lucas said.
“He means not yet,” Willy said.
In the sorrow over Boyd Cotton’s passing they had paid only a little attention to the fact that Colby Jordan, the famous sculptor K.K. had wanted to do the statue of Hondo, had been killed in a car wreck near Cyril, Oklahoma.
Now here was a possible replacement, at least in Willy Moore’s opinion.
“Such a small world—how did you two meet?” K.K. asked.
“Same prep school,” Willy said. “I think our parents wanted to get rid of us at the same time, for the same reasons.”
“They shipped us off,” Lucas agreed.
“Lucas is already famous, and I’m not,” Willy said.
“Hey, you’re a Rhodes Scholar,” Lucas reminded him.
K.K. was watching the two young men with a smile. She liked them and soon dished them up some linguine with scallops.
“Don’t you love the jeunesse dorée? she asked Duane.
“I might if I knew what it meant,” Duane said.
“Golden youth, Grandpa,” Willy said. “Just another way of saying over-privileged kids. But Lucas really is a good sculptor—he’s even shown in Venice.
“Can Lucas stay with us at your house, while he sees if he can get this job?” Willy asked.
“If not there’s plenty of room here,” K.K. said. “I’ll do just about anything for the jeunesse dorée.”
K.K., Lucas and Willy proceeded to talk up a storn. Most of the talk was over Duane’s head.
Duane got sleepy and went home.
Far into the night, he heard the boys come in.
55
LUCAS HAWKINS SPENT the whole of the next day looking at his potential site. He walked around and around the courthouse and even got permission to go up under the roof. After that he sat on the south side of K.K.’s penthouse and looked some more.
Willy, meanwhile, was at Duane’s house, reading Descartes.
K.K., who, for the moment, was her own cook, gave them a cold pasta lunch. While they were eating, Sheriff Lena Loftis showed up—she had kept her own name when she married Bobby Lee. Since there was lots of pasta, she had a plate.
Lena Loftis kept looking at Lucas Hawkins, and he looked back just as hard.
“I know you from somewhere,” she said, finally.
“You look familiar too—where’d you grow up?” he asked.
“Crowell,” she said.
“I’m from Floydada,” Lucas said.
“You guys used to beat us in football every year—you were the field goal kicker, weren’t you?”
“By golly, I was,” Lucas said.
“You kicked the field goal that beat us the one year we thought we’d go to state,” she said. “The whole town was depressed for two weeks.”
“I kicked that field goal and then I got shipped off to prep school and never kicked again,” Lucas said.
“Of course there’s a lot to be depressed about in Crowell,” Lena said. “You make those skinny scuptures, don’t you? I saw something about you in Texas Monthly.”
“That’s me—the American Giacometti, they called me. Embarrassing.
“But I’d love to put a statue or two on that courthouse lawn,” Lucas said.
Lena made a face and shook her head.
“Nope—the town has mobilized against you. No statues permitted. K.K.’s money will be refunded. It don’t help that Crowell’s beat us at football ten years running now.”
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