“I might visit a foreign country,” Duane said. “I might go to Egypt and see the pyramids. But I don’t think I’ll move to a foreign country.”
“So, do you think you’ll ever move back in with us?” Nellie asked. “Everybody thinks you’ll come on back except Mom. She don’t think you’ll ever be back.”
“Ever and never—that’s looking a long way ahead,” Duane said. “I’m not looking that far ahead, just at this time. I want to be alone for a while. I want to think about some things I can’t seem to think about when I’m crowded all up with you.”
“I can understand that,” Nellie said. “I can’t think two thoughts in a row myself without the phone ringing or some kid squalling somewhere in the house.”
“I’ve just been out here about a week,” Duane pointed out. “I need some time to myself, and I like walking around. It’s good exercise.”
“You could join a health club,” Nellie said. “All these gyms are giving big discounts now.”
“I don’t think I’m the gym type,” Duane said.
Nellie decided not to press the matter of the gym, or the matter of when her father might come back and rejoin the family, either.
“But if I really needed you I could run out here and get you, couldn’t I?” Nellie said, thinking out loud.
“Sure,” Duane said. “I’m only six miles away. Six miles is not very far.”
“It’s not far but it’s dusty,” Nellie said. Although casual about her own appearance, she liked for her little red Saab to be dust free. The car wash in Thalia had no better customer than Nellie Moore. Even if the sand wasn’t blowing she liked to pop her car into the car wash every day or two. In fact, looking at her car, she thought it seemed a little grimy—it occurred to her that she should probably hit the car wash on the way back home.
Duane walked out with her.
“You didn’t really answer the question about whether you were ever coming home, did you?” Nellie asked.
“Nope—it’s too big a question,” Duane said.
“Well, couldn’t you take a guess?” Nellie asked.
“Nope,” he said. “It’s not really as important a question as you think it is. You’re too old to be living at home, but you’re living at home. You asking me when I’m coming back home is like me asking you when you’re moving out.
“You’re a grown woman,” he added. “It’s probably not a particularly good idea for you to be living with your parents.”
“I know,” Nellie said. “I get in your hair, and so does Dickie and that bunch, and so does Julie and her two. Momma’s always threatening to kick us out, but she never goes through with it.”
“Some mothers like their own kids better than they like anybody else,” Duane observed. “Besides, your mother likes lots of company. I’m different. I can do without company for a while, now and then.”
“I guess that’s why you don’t mind living out here on this hill,” Nellie said. Her father’s remarks depressed her a little. He was right. What was she doing living at home, at her age? She always got jobs easily—she just usually didn’t keep them very long, and she had none at the moment. But there was the problem of the babies. Who would watch them if she moved away and got a job? Little Bascom was about ready for play school, but Baby Paul had just been born. It wasn’t easy being a mom if you lacked a dad, and neither Billy Deeds nor Randy McGregor, the fathers, respectively, of Little Bascom and Baby Paul, had been heard from in quite a few months. Neither was lavish with child support, either. Nellie had waited a good long time to start having babies again after her first two husbands, the fathers of Barbette and Little Mike, had also been stingy with child support. One reason she waited was because she wanted to be mature and make good choices the next time around—and yet she hadn’t made good choices. She had just ended up having her babies by two more cowboys who happened to be good dancers. It didn’t hurt that they had good butts, too. In fact she had had her first date with Randy McGregor the night he won the Best Wrangler Butt contest at a nearby honky-tonk. But life was a cruel thing. The fact was, a woman could get tired of even the best butt, and the getting tired, in Randy’s case, had only taken her about three weeks, in the middle of which she had somehow gotten pregnant with Baby Paul.
Seeing her father, who seemed as sane as ever and was leading a well-ordered life in his little cabin, reminded Nellie a little too sharply of how little she had done to establish any kind of satisfactory life for herself.
Besides that, there was definitely dust and grime on her car. Nobody had taken it to the car wash while she was in Mexico. The garage had a door, but no one ever thought to shut it, so a lot of dust had undoubtedly blown in. She had meant, every day since her return, to run it over to the car wash but something had happened to distract her—mainly just Tommy calling to beg her to please take him back. Some of Tommy’s pleadings went on for as long as four hours, him begging every minute of it. Even though he was no fun to go to bed with, Tommy was somebody to talk to; by the time she finally got him off the phone she would be too worn out from his entreaties to take her car to the car wash. What she mainly did, when she wasn’t on the phone with Tommy, was sit in the kitchen and listen to Rag tell stories about disasters that had befallen her in her long and varied life: tornadoes, oil booms, spousal abuse. Rag had experienced it all.
“Daddy, I guess I’ll go,” Nellie said, the thought of the car wash uppermost in her mind. “Is there anything you want me to tell Momma?”
“Oh sure—just tell her not to worry, I’m fine,” Duane said. “You can see that for yourself.”
“I guess you are,” Nellie agreed, reluctantly. “It’s just hard to get used to the idea of you living way out here by yourself.”
“Well, it’s quiet,” Duane said. He thought he had explained enough.
“Okay, bye,” Nellie said. She gave him a real big hug, a tight hug. For a moment she felt like asking if he’d just get in the car and come home with her. She knew he didn’t want to, but she felt like asking anyway. Things just seemed so much more normal when her father was at home.
Nellie knew that things changed—they changed, they changed—but she didn’t like it. Driving back to town along the country road she suddenly started to cry so hard that for a second she got confused and thought she must be in a cloudburst. She couldn’t see a thing, but when she turned the windshield wipers on they only scraped the dust on her windshield. The cloudburst wasn’t outside, it was inside, and it was all because her father didn’t want to live at home—not anymore.
21
AFTER NELLIE LEFT, Duane made himself some soup and had crackers with it. The crackers had probably been in his cupboard for at least a year, but they were still tasty.
After some thought he added “Fried Pies” to the list of groceries he needed to pick up next time he went shopping.
Shortly after eating, he went to bed. It occurred to him that he was leading a go-to-bed-with-the-chickens life, only he had no chickens. A banty hen or two might be good company, but he’d have to bring them in at night if they were to survive the coyotes, owls, and bobcats; hens weren’t neat housemates, either, so he decided to table that idea.
Duane fell asleep immediately, but two hours later came wide awake. Out his window he could see the lights of an oil rig, to the northwest. Now and then a pickup would rattle along the road, roughnecks either going out to the rig or coming in from it. Many times, throughout his life, he had ridden out to a rig at night, to deal with one problem or another. The scurryings that went on in the oil business were incessant, nocturnal as well as diurnal. The roughnecks and tool pushers were night animals, as much so as the coons and possums. Karla too was a night animal—she rarely turned off the TV before two in the morning.
“Why sleep, if you don’t need to?” she asked. “Why just lay there, letting your life pass?” she would say, if he tried to get her to go to bed a little earlier.
“But your body needs sleep,” he said.
&n
bsp; “Speak for yourself, mine don’t,” Karla said. “There could be something important happen, and if I was asleep I’d miss it.”
Now, it seemed, he was the one who didn’t need sleep, although he was walking several miles a day and by rights should have been tired.
“No tension in the environment, I guess,” he said to Shorty, who was sleeping beside the fireplace.
Duane realized, as he sat in bed looking at the lights of the distant oil rig, that he didn’t miss his family at all. Even Nellie’s visit had produced mixed emotions in him. Of course, he loved Nellie—that would never change. Despite her day-to-day approach to life she was an appealing girl, who, in the main, had normal instincts. It was unlikely that she would ever go bad. He wasn’t sure he could say as much for Dickie and Jack, his boys, both of whom were a little too enamored of the notion of being bad—not that either of them had ever done a really bad thing—not so far, at least.
He realized, sitting in his bed, that he was rapidly speeding away from his family—he didn’t know why. Halley’s comet had just gone past the earth and was now speeding away from it, and it seemed to Duane that he was doing the same thing: speeding away, speeding away. So far Karla had been the only one in his family to intuit how he really felt, which was that he had left a place to which he would never be likely to return. Karla couldn’t help wanting to understand why. A why, even if it was a why she didn’t agree with or even really grasp, would give her a place to put her feet in relation to this unexpected and puzzling event. Karla liked for there to be reasons for human actions.
“I’ll take a wrong reason over no reason,” she had told her children often, when they misbehaved, when they did something inexplicable. So the kids invented reasons, to keep their mother happy—a mistake, since once Karla got them telling lies she would soon track through the lies to somewhere near the truth.
Sooner or later, he knew, Karla would try the same tactic with him. She would try to get him to confess to an affair he hadn’t had in order to get him talking: once she got him talking she would find her way to a reason that explained the matter to her satisfaction.
Duane knew such a conversation was coming, but he didn’t think it would work this time. He didn’t know why he had left. He hadn’t been getting along badly with Karla, or the children or his employees or anyone in his life. What had happened to him had nothing to do with a deterioration in his major relationships. Even to say something simplistic, such as that it was time for a change, would not be stating the matter accurately. It wasn’t that it was time for a change, particularly; it was that he had just changed. He had driven his pickup into his carport, gotten out, locked the pickup, put the keys in the old chipped cup, and, at about that moment, changed. He didn’t become a different man, but when he stepped out of his house he found himself in a different life. He hadn’t given any forethought to taking a walk, or to living a different life, either. For the first few minutes of his new life he felt a distinct surprise at finding himself walking, but it was a pleasant surprise one with no dark shadows in it. He had been riding—now he was walking. It seemed to be a very simple, very satisfying change; but he knew it could hardly have seemed simple or satisfying to the people he left. His forty years with Karla had contained many surprises, but probably none as major as this one. He had just walked off: with no animosity toward anyone, with no intent to harm, wishing everybody well—just walked off. He knew it must seem puzzling to everyone, but he couldn’t help that. The change had just come, as naturally as a change in the weather—one day cloudy, one day fair. He could imagine that his future life would take many unexpected twists and turns, but what he couldn’t imagine was going back home. Over the years he had adjusted to a great many things—in some cases difficult things—for the sake of other people; now it was the other people, his nearest and dearest, who would have to do the adjusting, because he couldn’t. His old skin, or his old self, no longer fit. It would mean a sadness for his family, for a while at least—there was no getting around that fact.
What was evident, as day came—with a glowing line in the east—was that he still needed groceries. He got up, cleaned up, put the list of things he needed into his shirt pocket, and prepared to walk to town. When he first stepped outside, the lights of Thalia were like a sprinkle of fallen stars. He dreaded going there—he would just have to buy his supplies from the same old people, who would wonder why he wasn’t in his pickup. He paused for a moment, as he was about to turn off the hill, not reluctant to walk but reluctant to walk in the direction of Thalia. It was stronger than reluctance—it was dread: he didn’t want to go to Thalia, and his resistance to going there was solid enough that he considered just trying to live for a while off what he could shoot with his twenty-two. There were ducks on most of the little creeks and ponds, and besides ducks, there were rabbits and quail and wild pigs. No species would be endangered if he lived off game for a while.
For a moment this option excited him, but then he began to feel silly. Did he think he was a mountain man or a survivalist or something? The little twenty-two was just for plinking—it didn’t have a scope. It was ridiculous to suppose he could live off game; and anyway, he didn’t like duck, and wild pigs were tough meat.
Then, just as he was about to trudge off to a place he didn’t want to go, he remembered the Corners, a small crossroads store on a farm-to-market road seven or eight miles to the northwest. It never closed—indeed, had been in business twenty-four hours a day long before the notion of round-the-clock convenience stores had taken hold. The Corners existed mainly to serve the needs of oil field workers who didn’t have time to drive to Thalia or Wichita Falls to eat; it was a dim little two-lightbulb store run by a cranky old man named Jody Carmichael, who ran it alone, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Jody Carmichael rarely bathed, and even more rarely slept.
“Nope, my nerves got mangled on the Burma Road,” he informed those who considered it odd that one man could run a twenty-four-hour convenience store year in and year out with no help. Jody spent his life on an old couch behind the counter, catnapping when there were no roughnecks in the store microwaving burritos or wolfing down the variety of junk foods that Jody carried. Lately, Jody—who had been valedictorian of his class before getting drafted for World War II—had become a compulsive sports gambler, doing his gambling on a tiny computer he had set up behind his counter, next to an equally tiny TV set. Jody Carmichael was perhaps a little demented, but he wasn’t dumb. Duane always enjoyed chatting with him when he was out that way, grappling with a problem on one of his rigs. He remembered that Jody had once been married to a beautiful heiress from somewhere in the panhandle—he had seen them at rodeos a few times in earlier years, and remembered, or thought he remembered, that they had a daughter. The rumor in law enforcement circles was that Jody was the mastermind behind a string of methamphetamine labs that snaked through the oil patch. It was a rumor that Duane didn’t credit. Jody Carmichael was obviously smart enough to be a drug baron, and the Corners was remote enough to make a good headquarters, but Jody’s interests just seemed to lie elsewhere: keeping up with forty or fifty horse races a day via his computer, or betting on South American soccer matches. Jody never bragged about his winnings, if any, but his dull blue eyes suddenly lit up and began to dance around in his head at the mention of horse races or South American soccer.
Duane took his list of needs out of his pocket and studied it a minute—it was just light enough to make it out. To his relief he discovered that he didn’t need to go to Thalia at all. Jody Carmichael would have everything on the list, with the possible exception of large trash bags—the few residents of the Corners area were not overly concerned about proper trash collection.
The Corners was two miles farther than Thalia, but it was in a direction Duane had never walked and distance was not a problem, in any case. He felt sure he could walk all day, just as long as he didn’t have to see people he didn’t want to se
e while he was walking. The very notion that he was going dead away from Thalia, rather than toward it, was enough to put a spring in his step. He had a packet of the old crackers in his backpack, and ate the crackers as he walked along. Several pickups passed him, some coming and some going, but no one stopped to offer him a ride. In only a week’s time he had managed to convince people in that part of the country that he didn’t want a ride. They might think that he was crazy, but they no longer stopped and pestered him to get in the pickup.
Duane had never gone directly from his cabin to the store and soon realized that he would have to zigzag a little, if he hoped to get there by staying off the paved roads. He had to swing east through a large pasture and then back west past some fields where the winter wheat was just greening. He figured he had walked almost nine miles when he finally came in sight of the Corners. Along the way he had seen a field full of white cattle egrets, standing in a greening wheat field, with no cattle to attach themselves to. The delicate white birds made a pretty picture against the deep green of the sprouting wheat. A little later he saw two gray herons standing in a kind of bog—one of the herons was almost as tall as he was. When he passed, both the huge birds flapped away, rising as slowly as small airplanes, barely lifting above the line of the mesquite. Still later, the same small airplane that he had noticed the day before sputtered overhead and flew east, above the line of trees that bordered the little creek.
When he was within a mile of the Corners he began to see an increase of litter in the barditches. Beer cans, bottles, empty cans of motor oil, Styrofoam cups, packing, spent shotgun shells, abandoned packing crates large enough to have contained a washing machine or a refrigerator lay beside the road. He saw a car radiator, and an old pink plastic hair dryer that someone had thrown out. Duane began to get angry again, at the sight of the litter. In contrast to the white birds in the green field, the tawdry spectacle in the ditches seemed the more deplorable. Fifty large trash bags would hardly have sufficed to bag the trash just from that one stretch of road, and it wasn’t even a paved road. Duane had driven past such sights every day of his life and given them no thought, but walking past them was an entirely different experience. It suggested that the people who drove along that road had no pride, either in themselves or in the place they lived. They consumed trash and then excreted it, indifferent to what they were doing. The sight grated on Duane so much that he thought he might start doing his grocery shopping at night, so he wouldn’t have to see what he was walking past—the Corners was a twenty-four-hour establishment, after all.