Though several pickups whizzed by while Duane was at work covering the car seat, no one noticed him.
Pretty soon he had the car seat so well hidden that only a rat or a snake could have located it. If the car seat had been on his own land he would have burned it and then stuffed the springs in a hole, but he couldn’t take such a liberty when he was on Sam Tucker’s land. As it was, Sam would probably be a little puzzled by the piled-up brush by the chaparral thicket. Duane meant to explain it to him if a suitable occasion ever presented itself.
Once he was finished, Duane felt a little better. He had done what he could for the landscape, even though, in a junk-ridden county, it was the merest drop in the bucket. At least he had rendered a small stretch of one creek more pleasing to the eye. It was, in its way, a good morning’s work. Feeling less depressed, he picked up his backpack, whistled at Shorty, and continued his walk. Fortunately there were no more creeks and no more bridges between where he was and the cabin.
19
WHEN DUANE GOT BACK to the cabin he unloaded his few groceries and his few tools. He was home, but he wasn’t entirely calm. When he sat down with his file and began to sharpen the axe, he stopped after only a few strokes because he felt shaky, as if he had had an adrenaline rush and had to try to relax and come down from it. He supposed it was from the anger he felt when he saw the trash in the creek—the battery and the car seat. Probably both objects had been in that creek for months; he must have driven over that bridge at least fifty times and never noticed them; he had even walked over it a couple of times without noticing them. It was unlike him to let himself become so disturbed over something so trivial, just two pieces of common trash in a creek; yet fury had taken possession of him for a few moments, fury so intense that his hands were shaky from it. The trash wasn’t even on his land—it wasn’t even polluting his stretch of creek. He had nearly had a fit over common litter, which seemed to lend strength to Karla’s complaint that he had grown more and more irritable in the last few months.
“Could be too much caffeine. Maybe I better cut down on the coffee; what do you think?” he said to Shorty, who was dozing by the woodpile. The dog didn’t wake up.
Duane spent the afternoon sitting in his lawn chair, covered by his poncho. He liked being outside, and also liked being warm as he looked off his hill and watched the hawks circling over the scrubby plain below it.
A day or two earlier he had been trying to decide where to start, when it came to investigating some of the things he was curious about: botany, biscuit making, the pyramids. There was, after all, a bewildering abundance of things he might do. There were skills he had not mastered; he was, for example, only an indifferent woodchopper, as he had discovered the day before when he was cutting firewood. He could begin by spending a week or two perfecting his skills with an axe. He wouldn’t have to go very far from the cabin to do that, and sticking close to the cabin appealed to him. Biscuit making would have to wait until his next trip to town, which might be a few days—he had forgotten to buy flour that morning.
After an hour in his lawn chair Duane began to recover the comfortable feeling he had when he first walked out and settled into the cabin. The cabin felt like the right place—as opposed to the town, which definitely felt like the wrong place. Somehow, from being in town that morning, he had received a kind of bruise to his spirit, but that bruise was healing—his spirit was beginning to feel healthy again. It was hard to say what had caused the bruise, since all he had done was walk in to pick up some tools and a few groceries. He had chatted with his wife for a few minutes, which hadn’t really been unpleasant. Karla had been concerned and a little sad, but not rancorous. Then he had listened to Lester Marlow babble for a while—it was depressing, but visits to Lester were always depressing. Lester was just a selfish, slightly crazy man who was too big to spank. The law hadn’t even spanked him very hard, although he had stolen over one hundred thousand dollars and broken every rule in banking.
Nothing that had occurred in town should have depressed him to the extent that it had, and neither should the trash in the creek. He realized that for the first time in his life he had too much time to think; of course, he had wanted more time to think, but that was probably because he hadn’t realized how tricky thinking could be. Probably thinking was a little bit like mountain climbing—you had to give yourself time to adjust to the altitude. He wasn’t used to thinking—particularly not to thinking about himself. He had probably tried to think too much, too soon, without giving himself time to adjust to the altitude it required. He would have to slow down with the thinking, not do too much of it at one time, and maybe learn to avoid dangerous areas of thought, areas that could bruise the spirit. Probably thinking should be approached in an orderly way, done with a little care.
The wind came up, a sharp wind. He had to tuck the poncho tighter around him. Tumbleweeds were beginning to roll across the road below him. He did not want to be like a tumbleweed, sent skittering in his mind by every sharp breeze that life blew up.
Soon the temperature began to drop. It was February—spring was still a month away. Even with the poncho to cover him the lawn chair ceased to be a comfortable place to be, so he whistled at Shorty and followed him into the cabin.
He had meant to pick up some form of literature while he was in town—maybe a road atlas or a fishing magazine or something about boats—just something to distract his mind a little. If he had a road atlas he could study it and plan a trip or two. There was a rack of magazines in the Kwik-Sack but he had been so overwhelmed by the need to get out of town that he hadn’t bought any.
He had also meant to pick up a tablet and a couple of ballpoint pens. He thought he might make a list, write down some things he wanted to learn to do, some places he might want to go, and some problems he needed to grapple with.
But, thanks to his sudden depression, he had made a poor showing at the Kwik-Sack. He had meant to pick up enough stuff to render him self-sufficient for a week or two; the thought of a long stretch in the cabin, with no visits to town, appealed to him. How could he make any progress on a new life if he had to keep going back to Thalia, the old place with the old problems? He liked the simplicity and the order of his cabin, where he had a chair, table, bed, stove, fireplace, shower, and nails to hang his clothes on, each in its ordered place.
The cabin was the opposite of town—there, everything was disorderly: his kids taking drugs and neglecting their kids, his oil business crew growing more deranged every year. Of course, Karla did keep a neat greenhouse—he had to give her that, even if the winter tomatoes were only the size of pecans. But the town churned with disorder, and what he wanted for himself was order. He wanted each tool in its place at the end of the day.
Once inside, Duane surveyed his domain and decided that the oversight he regretted most from his shopping trip was the forgotten tablet. He only had three sheets of notepaper left, and the only ballpoint pen that still wrote showed signs of playing out. Until he secured a new tablet and a better pen he had to be efficient with his list making.
“Help me think, Shorty,” he said. “We’ve only got three sheets of paper left.”
He tore the three sheets of paper off the tablet and sat down to make his list, using one of the old fishing magazines as backing. He decided that the way to proceed was to use one sheet of paper for things they needed, one sheet for possibilities he wanted to consider in terms of places to go or skills to attempt to master, and the third sheet for problems he might need to deal with, if he could isolate any.
On the first sheet, after some thought, he wrote:
1. Flour
2. Magazines
3. Road Atlas
4. Spade
—this last because he now realized how useful it would be to have had a spade that morning, when he was trying to bury the battery.
On the second sheet, at the top, he wrote:
“Things to Do.” Then he put down:
1. Make biscuits
2. Pyramids in Egypt
3. Meteor crater
4. Read about World Wars
Number three, the meteor crater, near Holbrook, Arizona, was something he had always meant to go see, just as the world wars were things he had always meant to learn something about. His grandfather had been in the first war, his father in the second, but both of them had died before they could share many memories with him. Millions of people had died in those wars, one of which had occurred in his lifetime—he wanted to read something that might explain why they had come about.
His last ballpoint pen was fast running out of ink. The item about the world wars was faint on the page, but then he only had one sheet of notepaper left, the one on which he had been intending to list his problems.
After staring out the window for a few minutes he made the number one on the small piece of paper. After it, in very faint letters, he wrote the word “depression.”
20
FOR THE NEXT THREE days Duane stayed away from Thalia. Each day he took a long, slow walk around his property. One day he walked all the way around the edge of the hill where the cabin sat. He took his time, poked around, surprised a badger and two armadillos, took note of several holes that looked as if they might be entrances to a snake den, found a nice flint arrowhead, saw three wild pigs. Since he intended to live on the hill for as far ahead as he could foresee, he wanted to begin to develop a certain intimacy with it.
The second day he took an even longer walk, along the banks of the small river that snaked through the north end of the property. On that walk he twice surprised wild turkeys, and flushed a pair of prairie chickens, which pleased him a lot. Maybe the prairie chicken was going to make a comeback into the south plains.
Though seeing the turkeys and the prairie chickens pleased him, the condition of the creek bed didn’t. There were all kinds of trash in it, nothing as heavy as the battery or the car seat but many cans and bottles and miscellaneous junk. Obviously people had formed the habit of cleaning out their pickups on the bridge that crossed the little river, and their debris floated down onto his property before washing up on the banks or lodging in the shallows.
There were beer cans, beer bottles, cans that had once held motor oil or transmission fluid, empty antifreeze jugs, a toilet seat, several cardboard boxes, an old boot, a muddy dozer cap, and—the very thing Lester had told him to look for—a chair with the bottom busted out. It had been a rainy winter. High water spread the debris all along the creek, from where it entered his property, on the west side, to where it left it, on the east.
Duane didn’t immediately try to clean it up: there was too much, and it was on both sides of the creek, which was too high to wade. Besides, he had no way to collect such a variety of trash. He didn’t become angry, as he had the day before, but he did feel melancholy as he made his way along the creek bank. People were just messy—it was that thought that made him melancholy. They went about their lives creating waste materials and then just threw them off the handiest bridge. At one point he pulled a plastic bag out of the mud, to discover that it held several syringes. People were messy and they took drugs—at the moment the messiness bothered him more than the drugs.
When he got back to the cabin, about sundown, he added trash bags to the list of things he needed to get the next time he found himself in a store. Then he added the word “large.” With some good big trash bags he could clean up the riverbank in a day or two. It wouldn’t cure the problem of human messiness, but it would make the riverbed look a little nicer for a day or two.
On the third day, late in the afternoon, he saw a small, bright red car turn onto the hill. It was Nellie’s little Saab. From the moment she acquired a driver’s license, Nellie had favored red cars. “More sporty,” she said.
Duane had been half expecting his daughter to show up. He had always been closer to her than to his other three children: there was no explaining it, it was just there. He could hear her radio before she even got halfway across the hill. Nellie was not interested in the quiet life, never had been.
“Shoot, I like to drink that José Cuervo and kick up my heels,” she said. “What’s the point of living if you don’t drink tequila and kick up your heels?”
Once she turned onto the road that led to the cabin she slowed down and inched along. Although it was a perfectly good road, with only one or two tricky places on it, both Nellie and Karla liked to pretend that it was a treacherous, boulder-strewn track into the wilderness.
“If I was to go any faster a rock might shoot up right through the floor of my car,” Nellie said, when he teased her about her caution. “I got to take good care of this vehicle—if it breaks down I won’t have no way to get to a bar.”
Duane had been sitting in his lawn chair, watching a flock of geese, high to the northeast. A small plane, probably some oilman looking for a leak in a pipeline, was going in the same direction, but the plane was only a hundred feet off the ground and the wild geese were way up there. Their flight was so pure, so graceful, that it made the little airplane look tacky. It was as if a lawn mower were trying to fly.
Nellie had the radio on so loud that the car seemed to be pulsing. She waved at her father, but didn’t get out immediately—Nellie wanted to hear the rest of the song. Shorty, who liked Nellie, ran up and tried to jump in the car, but Nellie yelled at him to get lost. “I don’t want dog hairs in my car!” she yelled, over the sound of the song.
When the song finally ended—Duane had his fingers in his ears by that time—Nellie got out and ran over to him, gave him a kiss and a nice long hug.
“Daddy, what’s the deal?” she asked, looking him over to see if he looked all right.
“I got home from my trip with that miserable scumbag and you wasn’t there,” she added.
But, to her eyes, her dad looked fine.
“Nope,” he said. “You’re always zombified when you get back from Mexico. I figured you’d just want to sleep.”
“I did, but I sleep better when you’re around the house somewhere,” Nellie said. “It’s just total chaos around that house when you’re gone.”
“I know, that’s one reason I moved out,” Duane said. “Got tired of chaos.”
Once inside the cabin Nellie did a quick scan to see if she could detect any sign of a female presence. The cabin was neat as a pin. There was really no sign of any presence, not even her father’s. In fact, it was a cozy little place. There was a nice fire in the little fireplace. The dishes were washed, the bed made. The axe was leaning against the fireplace; a shirt or two hung on a nail. It all looked real basic to her. The only sign of anything unusual was that the radio was unplugged. She herself hated silence. Her own radios—she had several—were on twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes she turned them up, sometimes she turned them down, but she never turned them off. In her view, being without music was like being dead. But then her father was a lot older—he might be tired of music. Still, that unplugged radio was a little worrisome.
“It’s a nice little cabin but I can’t see that there’s much to do out here,” she said. “Don’t you get bored?”
“Haven’t so far,” Duane said.
Nellie was always active. He knew it must puzzle her that he would just like to sit around.
“I’ve worked my whole life,” he reminded her. “I was a roustabout when I was thirteen. I guess I’m just ready to do some sitting and thinking.”
“Well, that makes sense, I guess,” Nellie said—although it really didn’t. Her father seemed fine, just to look at, but she was beginning to learn that you couldn’t always tell what was going on with a man just from looking. Maybe he wasn’t as content as he appeared to be. Maybe he was real depressed, like her mother claimed, or at least a little wrought up inside. Her father had always been the most normal and the most dependable person she knew. Her mother was a pretty good mom, but she was definitely flighty, changeable, prone to pretty intense moods. Her father had always just been pretty much the same, didn’t
have too many moods, just sort of hung in there year after year in a real stable way. The thought that he might be going crazy or something was pretty disturbing. The Moore family spent most of its time teetering on the brink of hell as it was. If her father went crazy, then the likelihood was that the whole family would break to bits, or something.
“Don’t you miss us all none?” she asked. Her father frowned slightly, probably because she hadn’t used very good grammar.
“I’d probably miss you more if you used good English,” Duane said, but then he smiled. Part of Nellie’s appeal was her artlessness; she had a good brain but had not taken the trouble to train it, and she seldom subjected it to even the slightest discipline. None of his children had spent any more time than was necessary with their textbooks. Fortunately—with the exception of Dickie—they were as healthy as horses and had an abundance of energy.
“I know I ain’t supposed to say ‘none’ and stuff,” Nellie admitted. “Sometimes my talk just comes out country—too much time in honky-tonks, I guess.”
“You ought to go back to college and finish your degree, honey,” Duane said. “Right now you’re getting by on being young and pretty, but that don’t last forever.”
“It does if you go to the right spas,” Nellie said. “We’re all trying to get Mom to go to a good spa. She could go to the Canyon Ranch or the Golden Door or somewhere and eat right and get massage. She might pep up, if she’d just go to a good spa.”
“Is she low?” Duane asked. He felt silly asking the question. After all, he had been living with Karla only a week ago. He ought to know how she was himself.
Nellie decided just to be blunt with her father. She was in the habit of saying exactly what was on her mind, even if the grammar of it wasn’t too correct.
“She don’t think you’re ever coming back,” she said. “She thinks you want to just live in this cabin from now on, or else move to a foreign country or something.”