“I’ve never claimed to be especially normal, have I?” he asked. He had found his old backpack in a cabinet in the garage—he put the few tools in it. The backpack was a relic of an earlier era, when he had done a good bit of camping. It still had a couple of pieces of jerky in it, purchased nearly ten years earlier.
Karla seemed to have lost interest in the question of his normalcy. Her shoes were muddy from working in the greenhouse after she had just watered the tomatoes. She was trying to knock the mud off them with her trowel.
“You can’t get many groceries in that backpack,” she observed. “You ought to try to eat healthy food even if you are going crazy.”
“I’m not going crazy—I’ll see you in a few days,” Duane said. “Come on, Shorty.”
“Acupuncture really does work,” Karla said, when he was at the edge of the driveway. “You could at least think about it.”
“Okay,” Duane said. “I’ll think about it.”
He was two blocks away before he realized he had forgotten to go in and kiss Nellie. He looked back at his house for a moment, wishing he hadn’t forgotten. But the house seemed a long way back down the road, and, also, it was the place where the vines of habit grew the most thickly. In his house one familiar thing led to another familiar thing—if he went to kiss Nellie he would be unlikely to slip past Little Bascom, or Baby Paul, or Rag, or even Bubbles, Willy, and Barbi, all of whom tended to hang out in the kitchen in the mornings, annoying Rag and doing everything they could to avoid getting ready to go to school on time. His children had once held the all-time local record for tardies, but his grandchildren had already broken it by a wide margin. If he walked in just as Rag was trying to assemble all their lunches it would only make a bad situation worse. All the children would want to tell him about the most recent injustices that had been visited on them, and if Rag’s car wouldn’t start—it frequently stalled just as the tardy bell was about to ring—he would be the one who would have to fix it. It was too much to risk just to kiss his daughter, who was welcome to come out to his cabin and be kissed anytime.
“I doubt she’s up, anyway—she got in real late,” he said, as if he were required to excuse this omission and had no one to excuse it to except his dog.
A few minutes later he saw a dust cloud on the road where he had just been: it was Rag, racing the bell in her old Chevy, which was packed with his grandkids. They didn’t make it, though. Before they even reached the school yard Duane heard the tardy bell ring.
18
AS DUANE WAS PASSING Lester Marlow’s house he saw the former banker himself, sitting on his own front porch in a green bathrobe, aiming a twenty-two at something in his own yard. Before Duane could get close enough to make out what he was shooting at, Lester fired off three quick rounds. There was some torn-up earth and quite a few clods in Lester’s yard—when Duane got a little closer it became apparent that Lester was shooting at the clods, an unusual thing to do even for someone who had spent several lengthy stretches in the mental hospital, and also the kind of thing that might attract the attention of the authorities. After all, it was morning—kids had just been walking to school.
When Lester saw Duane he put down his rifle and walked out to the gate to greet him. Just as he did his wife, Jenny, came whipping out of the driveway in her small black Yugo, the only Yugo in Thalia. Jenny had flown to Newark, New Jersey, to pick up her car. What with Lester’s legal bills, doctor bills, and expensive medication, Jenny had to see that they watched their pennies, and a car that claimed to get one hundred and thirty miles to the gallon was nothing to sneeze at. Jenny worked as a court reporter now—when she sped out of the driveway she was holding a coffee mug that seemed almost as big as the car. It left her no hand to wave with, so she nodded at Duane instead.
“Jenny loves her Yugo,” Lester said. He was proud of his wife’s thriftiness, in going to such lengths to get a car they could afford. He himself, despite extensive counseling, had never managed to attain thrifty habits. When Lester got money he still spent it immediately. Now and then, to his wife’s distress, he even spent it before he got it, due to some tricks he was able to play at the ATM machines.
“Why are you shooting at clods, Lester?” Duane asked, when he walked up.
“I wasn’t shooting at the clods, I was shooting into the ground,” Lester said. “There’s a mole down under those clods, somewhere. I figure if I keep plunking bullets into the ground I’ll get him sooner or later. Want to sell me your pickup cheap?”
“What would you want with my pickup?” Duane asked. “I’ve never thought you were the pickup type.”
“No, but I’m thinking of taking a booth at that big swap meet in Fort Worth,” Lester said. “I need a pickup to haul the junk I plan to sell. You can’t get much junk in a Yugo.”
Duane stepped into the yard and examined the clods, which looked as if they had been rooted up by an armadillo, a creature that was known to have a bad effect on lawns.
“You’re hunting the wrong animal—all this rooting was done by an armadillo,” he informed Lester.
“Could be,” Lester said. “That business about the mole is just what I tell the new deputy sheriff, when the neighbors complain about my plinking. I’ve got the man convinced there’s a mole in my yard. Basically I just like to shoot at clods. It’s a harmless pursuit.”
“Well, it is, unless you hit a neighbor,” Duane said.
“Come on, I’ve only nicked one neighbor in all these years,” Lester said.
“I know, but the one you nicked was Karla, which is the wrong one to nick,” Duane said. Years before, when she was interested in photography, Karla had been trying to take a picture of a roadrunner when a bullet fired by Lester ricocheted off a fire hydrant and blew the flashbulb out of her camera. Though Lester had been half a mile away at the time and didn’t know she was trying to photograph roadrunners, Karla had given him so much hell over the incident that Lester tried to claim he had been shooting at a mad dog, a claim no one believed, even though a mad dog showed up in town a day or two later and bit an old man who was mowing his lawn.
“Karla holds grudges, don’t she?” Lester said. “Is that why you walked off?”
“No, I just started walking because I like it,” Duane said.
“That’s the same reason I shoot at clods,” Lester said. “It gives me a feeling of peace to shoot at things.”
“You could join a gun club,” Duane suggested.
“If you’re going to be walking all over the place, keep an eye out for things I could sell at the swap meet,” Lester said.
“I haven’t noticed much swap-meet-quality material along the roads,” Duane told him. “What sort of things do you mean?”
“Haven’t you ever been to a swap meet?” Lester asked. “People bored enough to go to swap meets will buy anything. They’ll even buy interesting rocks if they can’t find anything else to spend their money on. Surely you can find an interesting rock, once in a while.”
Duane was beginning to wish he hadn’t walked by Lester’s house. Now and again he would begin to feel slightly guilty where Lester was concerned; then he would convince himself that he was being a bad neighbor or a bad friend, for visiting Lester so seldom. For all he knew Lester was more depressed than ever—without a visit now and then to lift his spirits he might have to go back into the hospital. He might even kill himself, which would be a terrible blow to Jenny, who loved him, despite all.
“Bullshit,” Karla always said, when Duane confessed that he was feeling bad about not seeing much of Lester. “Some crazy people are perfectly happy being crazy. And they like it that all the sane people they know feel guilty about them.”
That remark had been made years ago, long before Karla had ever dreamed that her own husband would ever do anything that might cause people to think he was unbalanced—abandoning his brand-new pickup in favor of foot transportation, for example. She had merely been trying to discourage Duane from hanging around Lester’s too much. I
t was widely known that Jenny Marlow had a big crush on Duane. She had had it since the first grade, or maybe even longer.
Whenever Duane weakened and went by Lester’s house to check up on him, he invariably regretted his decision, usually within minutes. Before Duane had even been there ten minutes Lester would somehow manage to off-load his depression onto him. Duane would arrive feeling noble for being such a good, loyal friend, but would always depart feeling miserable, as if he were about to come down with the flu or something.
It always happened, and it happened this time as well. He had been walking along in a pretty good humor and had merely stopped by Lester’s to see what he was shooting at, and now Lester was trying to get him to sell him his pickup, so he could haul junk to a swap meet in Fort Worth.
“Just think about it while you’re walking along,” Lester suggested. “Be on the lookout for chairs people have thrown out beside the road. People are always throwing out ratty old chairs.
“One man’s junk is another man’s treasure,” he added. “That’s the first principle of swap meets. If you see any pocketknives people have dropped, pick them up. Pocketknives sell real quick at a swap meet.”
Duane couldn’t remember ever having found a pocketknife that somebody had dropped—but then his eyes had only been operating at ground level for the last couple of days. There might be dropped pocketknives everywhere, for all he knew.
“If your grandkids have any video games they’re tired of, ask them if they’d mind if I borrowed them,” Lester said. “I’ve only got about two—Jenny won’t buy me any more, even though my psychiatrist says I really need to recover my inner child.”
“Why won’t she buy you any more?” Duane asked.
“Too expensive,” Lester said. “Some of those video games cost almost as much as her car.
“Nobody told her to go off to New Jersey and buy a Yugo,” Lester added, as if it were a point that had just occurred to him. “She could do what you’re doing—walk. It’s not that far to the courthouse.”
Duane had no comment. The only way to get out of a conversation with Lester was to leave in the middle of it, so he began to amble off. Lester followed him, but only as far as the corner of his yard.
“I don’t think Jenny agrees with my shrink about the inner child stuff,” Lester said. “Jenny’s always telling me to grow up. But how can I grow up if I’m supposed to encourage my inner child? Who do I mind, my wife or my shrink?”
Duane didn’t answer. He wished he had chosen to walk down another road. The road to Lester’s house was the road to the too familiar, and the too familiar was exactly what he was tired of. The day no longer seemed as fresh and lovely as it had that morning when he walked into town. A problem that occurred to him was that almost everyplace he could reach on foot, starting from where he had started from, was too familiar.
For a moment, the thought made him feel stupid—his spirits dropped. What did he think he was accomplishing, by walking rather than riding? What it really meant was that he was just being forced to take a slower look at the very things he didn’t want to see. Here he was on foot, halfway between his home and town, and he didn’t feel free and purposeful anymore; he felt confused and uncertain. His walk was not a rich pleasure anymore: it was just something he had to go on with until he got to someplace where it made sense to stop—and that place was his cabin.
He stopped at the Kwik-Sack only long enough to buy a loaf of bread, bacon, peanut butter, four more cans of tomato soup, Fritos, and a small sack of dog food. Sonny Crawford had gone home for the day, which was good. Just seeing Lester Marlow had lowered Duane’s spirits enough for one day.
Once he got back on the dirt road and was well out of town he began to feel a little better, though not as good as he had felt only a couple of hours ago, when he was walking in. Something had changed. For two days he had felt really happy, and now he didn’t.
As he was crossing a short wooden bridge over a shallow stream he stopped for a moment and looked down at the shallow brown water. Somebody had thrown an old car battery off the bridge. The battery was just on the edge of the stream. A mud turtle sat on it. If Lester saw it he would probably try to drag it up and take it to the swap meet.
Standing on the bridge, watching the brown stream play around the abandoned battery—just an ugly piece of debris—Duane remembered something he had paid no attention to at the time, which was that Karla had said he was depressed. She felt it so strongly that she had driven out and waited in his road at night just to check on him. Karla was not always entirely right, but she was seldom entirely wrong, either, where her family was concerned. Maybe he was depressed?
One thing Duane knew for sure was that he hated the fact that the battery was in the water. In that part of the country people habitually threw their junk off bridges, to get rid of it in the quickest way. Cross almost any small bridge in the county and you would see the equivalent of the battery with the turtle on it. People took the easy way, when it came to disposing of possessions. They stopped on the bridge and threw whatever it was they no longer wanted out of their pickups. It had been going on all his life. It was unsightly—always had been unsightly—but the unsightliness had never particularly bothered Duane before.
Now it bothered him so much that he would have liked to see huge fines levied against anyone caught throwing junk off a bridge.
“I’d like to kill him,” he said, to Shorty—referring to the man who had thrown the battery off the bridge.
Then he realized he had just said something crazy, and to a dog, at that. Littering was a nuisance—it wasn’t a capital crime. If he didn’t like the sight of the battery in the creek, he should just go and remove the battery, instead of threatening to kill the man who threw it off the bridge.
Duane walked off the bridge and crawled through the barbed-wire fence near where the battery lay. When he did the mud turtle plopped into the water. The stream was too shallow to cover the turtle completely. It swam out a few feet and stopped.
Finding a place to stuff the battery, so as to prevent it from being an eyesore, was not easy, but Duane walked along the creek bank until he found a good-sized hole, a kind of cave-in. By good luck the battery fit the hole like a hand fits a glove. Duane threw four or five good-sized rocks on top of the battery, covering it completely. He became a little obsessive about covering the battery; he didn’t want any part of it to show. If he piled dirt on the battery the next rain would just wash it away, so he searched until he had enough rocks to build a good-sized cairn over the hole where the battery was concealed. Then he walked around the pile of rocks several times, making sure that no trace of the ugly battery was visible from the road.
While he was doing that Shorty flushed an old mother skunk, with four skunk babies trailing her in a line. Shorty barked furiously at the family of skunks, but he had been skunked a number of times in his life and had learned his lesson where little black-and-white animals were concerned. He barked, but he didn’t engage.
Hiding the battery made Duane feel a little better. He felt he had made a small but important contribution to the beautification of the landscape. But as he was crawling through the fence to get back to the road he saw something worse: on the other side of the bridge, in the same creek, somebody had thrown out a car seat. He hadn’t noticed it when he crossed the bridge because a post-oak limb obscured it, but from creek level there it was, plain to see. Almost all the stuffing had been pulled out of it, leaving an ugly tangle of spring. No doubt the pack rats and other small animals had made good use of the stuffing: what had once been padding for a car seat now probably lined many small dens in the pastures the creek ran through.
What was left, though, was every bit as ugly as the battery, and much larger and harder to hide. There was not likely to be a hole anywhere around large enough to hold a car seat. For a moment Duane felt the same murderous hatred of the person who had chosen to dispose of a car seat by throwing it off a bridge. It was terrible, trashy behavior; a
nd yet he was uneasily aware that one of his own employees might have done it: Juan and Jesus and Rafael, for example. The wetback fencing crew had owned a number of verminous, rattly old station wagons, which they would frequently trade in for others just as bad. Of course, you couldn’t really blame men as poor as the three Mexicans for disposing of an unwanted car seat in the easiest way. The men worked hard, and they were honest, but they had no energy to spare for the beautification of the land they would never own. His own son Dickie had once tried to dispose of a whole pickup by shoving it off a small bluff into a lake. Dickie’s intention had been to claim that the pickup had been stolen, so he could collect the insurance money and spend it on drugs. But the lake at the point where the pickup went in was only four feet deep—all Dickie got for his troubles was a wet pickup full of water moccasins and turtles. Six months later, when Dickie was in jail, Duane and Bobby Lee had winched the pickup out of the lake and sold it for junk.
It was pretty muddy where the car seat was, but Duane managed to hook it with a long stick and pull it up on the bank. Several tiny frogs hopped out when he did. It was a wretched, peeling thing that he couldn’t immediately decide what to do with—finally he tucked it as neatly as possible behind a big clump of chaparral. It was pretty weedy where the chaparral grew—a person would have had to be walking right by the chaparral to be able to see the car seat. Probably only cattle and an occasional coyote would ever be that close to that spot.
Still, Duane wasn’t fully satisfied. He became as obsessive about the car seat as he had been about the battery. He didn’t want the slightest trace to show. There weren’t enough rocks around to cover the car seat with rocks, so he began to drag up brush and small logs to pile around it. It occurred to him that if Sam Tucker, a taciturn old rancher whose land he was on, had happened to come by and see him going to such lengths to conceal a cast-off car seat, the man would think he was crazy. Sam Tucker had a low opinion of the mental stability of his fellowmen, anyway. He had been sheriff of the county for twenty years, during which time he had had ample opportunity to see human nature at its worst.