He had never seen Monument Valley, except in movies of course, so he drove to it and idled around the great buttes for a day. There he picked up an old white-bearded hitcher who called himself Desert Johnny, who said he needed to get to Moab as soon as possible. Having nothing else to do, Duane took him, listening without comment to Desert Johnny’s endless tales of his life as a traditional hobo.
Duane was just as glad when they got to Moab and he could let the old man out. A little later that day he learned from a woman at a gas station that Desert Johnny was actually quite well off.
“It’s more like he just don’t fit with the modern age,” the woman said.
Duane wondered if he fit with the modern age—or any age.
From Moab, Duane made his way to the Canyon de Chelly, which turned out to be one of the most beautiful places he had ever seen. It was near a town called Chinle—the woman who checked him into the motel was Navaho and seemed more hostile than not. Later, when he talked to K.K. about the Canyon de Chelly she told him about the sad history of the place—what struck him as saddest was Kit Carson, on orders from higher up, cutting down the Navahos’ two thousand peach trees, reason enough, more than a hundred and fifty years later, to explain hostility on the part of the Navaho clerk.
The next day he took the Park Service tour of the canyon from the bottom—he felt he had never spent a more interesting day. When he got home he meant to read about several of the places he had seen, but particularly the Canyon de Chelly.
Later he remembered that Annie Cameron’s mother had particularly urged him to see the Canyon de Chelly. It was the nicest thing any member of Annie’s family had ever done for him.
65
DUANE DRIFTED AROUND eastern Arizona, northern New Mexico and western Colorado for several days. He admired the great bulk of Shiprock, before drifting south to the I-40, where he toured Acoma, the Sky City. The old women of Acoma sold beautiful pots but did not seem too friendly, either.
After much consideration, Duane bought two small pots, one for K.K. and the other for Lena Loftis.
Then he went home. He had several nice pictures of Annie—he had the best one framed and put it on his mantelpiece at the big house. Another, just as appealing, he put on his boat.
Bobby Lee was the first to notice this flowering of photographs of Annie Cameron.
“You didn’t get along with her for shit when she was alive,” he said. “Why all the pictures now?”
“Why not?” Duane asked.
Bobby was silent.
“I still hope to learn to mind my own business someday,” he said.
“I don’t mind your asking,” Duane said. “Small-town people almost never mind their own business. Gossip is one of the things that keeps them alive, I guess.”
“I guess you really miss Annie—it probably wasn’t all bad,” Bobby said. “Eve ate that apple and fucked us all, though.”
“I don’t lay Annie’s death on Eve,” Duane said. “I should have got there quicker.”
After that conversation Duane bought a good many staples, including some whiskey, and for a time retired to his boat, the Bobby Lee. Usually he breakfasted at Mike and Tommy’s; for reading material he made do with the fishing magazines he could buy at the bait shop.
His main visitor, Bobby Lee, despite being at the moment unemployed, had acquired a BlackBerry and consulted it frequently.
“This thing can help you keep right up with the sports news, or the oil news, either.”
“You might have noticed that I retired,” Duane pointed out. “I did it mainly to get away from news.”
“It takes all kinds, I guess.”
“I would dispute that,” Duane said. “I think there are a few kinds we could do without.”
“You mean like Hondo, or who?”
“No, Hondo wasn’t so bad. He wasn’t rude. It’s rude behavior I can’t tolerate.”
“Oh, you mean like people making jokes about my penile implant?”
“That’s exactly what I mean,” Duane said.
66
DUANE SOON GREW to like living on his boat. He considered buying a genuine houseboat and living on it, but soon rejected that notion. What he had was enough.
Little by little he ceased to mingle much with people in Thalia, though he did soon notice that most of the people he did mingle with were younger than himself—they were the sons and daughters of people he had lived his life with. His own contemporaries were mostly buried now in the grim little cemeteries northwest of town.
With the death of Jenny Marlow he lost his last real intimate in Thalia, other than Bobby Lee. And with the death of Honor Carmichael he had lost his last real intimate among the females of the world. At times K.K. Slater almost became an intimate, but then K.K. could drop the screen in an instant, fly away and not be seen for six months.
One day, to his surprise, Annie’s sister Mary did call. Mary had always seemed a lot less walled off than the rest of the Camerons.
“We buried poor Annie in Tiburon,” she told him. “We used to sort of own Marin County but now we don’t. It has a nice cemetery—go visit Annie anytime you like.”
Duane said he would do that—indeed, he meant to do that. But he never went, though he did look up Tiburon on the road atlas. He had heard that California traffic was bad. Having lost two wives to car wrecks he decided to avoid the risk of joining them just then.
The Rhino Ranch continued to make a good deal of news. The breeding program was working—six rhino calves had been born on the preserve so far.
Still, many of the reporters who came to the Rhino Ranch managed to track Duane to his boat and ask him about Double Aught.
All Duane could do was shrug. He had no more idea than anyone else where Double Aught was, or if he was alive.
There were millions of hunters in the West and Midwest, any one of whom might do like the first good old boys from Durango, Colorado, who had seen Double Aught and been unable to resist shooting him—just as the two Germans had shot the most famous elephant in Africa. It could have happened ten miles from Thalia, on some back road—and who would know? Duane himself had stopped believing that Double Aught was alive—but still, he wasn’t sure.
But then one day a perky, cute young female reporter came confidently down to his boat, and introduced herself as Nattie Grimble. She had dark hair, cut short, and wore a polo shirt and cutoffs—it seemed to Duane that nearly all young and attractive women had adopted cutoffs as their daily garb. In his early days, he recalled, women’s legs were usually white—nowadays they mainly seemed to be tanned, and nicely so.
Besides the good legs Nattie Grimble had a cute, turned-up nose, and lovely brown eyes. Duane liked her immediately and invited her and her tape recorder onto his boat.
“I’m from Abilene,” she announced. “I bet you’ve been there.”
“Everybody in the oil business has been there,” he said.
“Don’t worry, I know Abilene sucks, Mr. Moore,” Nattie said. “I really just came out here to see if you’d get drunk with me.”
She took a fifth of bourbon out of her bag and put it on the table by her tape recorder.
“I’m a little shocked,” he admitted. “You don’t really look like the drinking type.”
“Oh, I’m not,” she said. “But I’m looking for a story and I’m told you can hallucinate that famous old rhino when you’re drunk.”
“Nattie, he was a real rhino—I never had to hallucinate him, and I never did.”
“Then a lot of people in Thalia have been telling me lies,” she said. “Most of them say you can hallucinate that rhino when you’re drunk.”
“They don’t know me real well,” Duane told her.
“Shucks,” Nattie said. “How often do you shave, Mr. Moore?”
“When I’m batching, not often,” he admitted.
“I want to at least get a picture of you on your boat and you’d just look so much better if you shaved.”
Amused, Duane
obliged her. Very soon he was clean-shaven, and Nattie Grimble took about twenty pictures of him. Then she searched until she found two clean glasses and poured each of them a modest drink.
“I put ice in mine,” Duane said. “Water it down a little.”
He offered her ice but she declined.
“You could make ice from filthy water and die of E. coli,” she informed him.
“Caution never hurts,” Duane said.
“Oh, caution can hurt,” Nattie said. “Look at me. I’m so afraid I’ll have sex with the wrong guy that I end up never having sex at all.
“My friends say I’m the last virgin,” she added.
When she said it in her brash little voice Duane was flooded with déjà vu—Annie Cameron had said almost exactly the same thing to him once.
“Oh, I doubt you’re quite the last,” he told her—and then despite himself his eyes spilled over and tears washed his cheeks.
“Oh my God, I didn’t mean to make you cry, Mr. Moore,” Nattie said. “After all, my virginity is not your problem, it’s mine, or maybe my boyfriend’s.”
“It’s just the timing,” he said. “A young woman I was once married to was killed in a car wreck. What you said reminded me of her.”
“Oh gosh, here’s some Kleenex,” Nattie said, handing him some.
Duane could not remember when he had seen such an appealing girl.
“I’m just going to gulp down this whiskey and hike it on out of here.”
“Please don’t,” Duane said.
“Just don’t,” he added.
“But why not? I spoiled your morning, didn’t I?”
“No, you made my morning,” Duane insisted.
He stopped crying and wiped his eyes again with the tissues.
“Okey-doke then, I’ll stay—you might hallucinate that rhino once you’re a little drunk. It might just happen in spite of yourself.”
They dipped glasses and touched glasses and drank.
“We each made a new friend,” Nattie said.
“Just in time too,” Duane said.
Nattie didn’t quite know what he meant, but she drank with him anyway.
67
AFTER THEY FINISHED the fifth of Jack Daniel’s, Duane, who was not drunk at all, watched Nattie indulge in her passion for cleaning. In this case what she cleaned was the Bobby Lee. He had always liked bold women and Nattie Grimble was nothing if not bold.
“Mr. Moore, your sheets are rancid,” she informed him. “Is there a laundrymat anywhere near? I’ll worry myself sick over you if I have to think of you sleeping on those rancid sheets.”
“I’ve got a good washing machine at my home in town,” he said. “We can take ’em in and you can wash them there, if you really mean to go to that trouble.”
“I do mean to—this whole boat is filthy,” she told him. “Once we do the sheets I’m going to come back and do the rest of the boat, if you’ll let me.”
On the way to town they stopped at the Asia Wonder Deli, an establishment of which, at first, Nattie Grimble was deeply skeptical.
“Why would it be here?” she wondered. “We don’t even have good Asian food in Abilene.”
“It’s here because this is where Mike and Tommy wanted to put it,” he told her.
“Is it clean?” Nattie asked. “This is real difficult country for a person who likes to be clean.
“Besides, most people who run delis don’t have much knowledge of hygiene.”
But Mike and Tommy did not let Duane down. They laid out their best, spotlessly, and Nattie Grimble ate a huge amount. Tommy saw to it that she had fresh chopsticks for every course.
“Shoot, they don’t even do that in San Francisco,” Nattie said. “I’m going to tell the Texas Monthly food guy about you two. He used to be my boyfriend.
“Oh, Benny,” Mike said. “He come often. He gave us four stars.”
“Some of the people who write for the Monthly don’t love Texas that much,” she said.
“But you do?” Duane asked.
“You bet I do,” Nattie said. “Where else could I meet a man who can hallucinate a rhino but sleeps on rancid sheets?” she asked. “I’ve dealt with the sheets—boy were they rancid,” Nattie said.
“Thanks,” Duane said.
68
NATTIE WENT BACK and gathered up everything that could be washed off the Bobby Lee, and followed Duane into town.
One look at his washer and dryer and the rancid factor reared its head again.
“Gosh, Mr. Moore, these machines are so old they ought to be in a museum—they’re kind of too funky to use,” Nattie insisted.
Then Nattie made a rapid tour of the house and came back with a huge mass of towels which she insisted were also in the rancid category.
They heard a car drive up and Willy Moore walked in. His hair was longish, but very clean, as were his jeans and T-shirt.
Willy looked at Nattie and Nattie looked at Willy and, as time was to prove, something clicked. As soon as Nattie stuffed the towels into the questionable washing machine she and Willy began to talk about their favorite bands.
“Want some wine, Nattie?—I brought some chianti,” Willy asked.
Nattie immediately accepted some wine.
Duane, who had been vaguely wondering whether Nattie might have romantic designs on him, immediately stopped wondering. Willy and Nattie couldn’t take their eyes off each other, and, for the next fifty years, rarely did. They fought fiercely but cleanly as they went through life.
While they were debating the merits of various bands, none of whom Duane had ever heard of, he slipped out and began to weed his garden—or, as he liked to think of it, their garden, for he still considered that Karla Laverne Moore was his helpmate in anything involving gardening.
Except for a few lingering blister bugs on the tomatoes, the garden was in pretty good shape. He leaned on his hoe and looked into the distance, toward the Rhino Ranch—he looked a long time, but no Double Aught was there.
Willy wrote a book on Wittgenstein and Husserl that made him instantly famous in philosophical circles; he became a Harvard fellow, taught at several great universities and, always musical, in his middle years began to compose—fugues and requiems, mostly. Nattie got a degree in sports journalism from Boston College and was soon broadcasting women’s basketball, softball, track and whatever else turned up; their children grew up in locker rooms and broadcast studios, where they came to know many famous athletes and other celebrities.
They came to Thalia frequently—the sight of them made Duane deeply proud.
Nearly ten years after Willy and Nattie met and hit it off, Duane Moore quietly keeled over dead while laying a trot line. A fisherman found him within the hour.
At the modest funeral—most people living in Thalia scarcely knew Duane Moore—he was just an old man they might see at the post office—Bobby Lee Baxter, his sparse hair then white, sobbed like a baby.
“I never meant to outlive that man,” he said to Willy. “What will I do now?”
“Keep on keeping on,” Willy advised.
K.K. Slater came to the funeral. She was warm to Willy’s family, and also to Bobby Lee.
Then she was driven back to the North Gate and got into her brand-new Cessna.
Watched by three rhinos and several assistants, K.K. got in her new plane, rose, circled toward Thalia and, as she circled over the graveyard, dipped her wing.
As far as anyone knew, she was never in Thalia again.
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Rhino Ranch Page 21