The whole back wall of the little store was hidden by a towering pyramid of empty beer cans and beer bottles, the creation of at least two generations of all-night rig crews who decided to drink their fill right behind the store. It was a well-known pyramid of empty beer cans—Jody Carmichael had finally built a little fence around it for the express purpose of discouraging can collectors.
“What’s mine is mine, and it’s always going to be mine,” he told people who asked if they could poke in the pyramid of cans.
“What’s mine is mine, and it’s always going to be mine,” he told anyone who had the gall to point out that he had already been paid for the cans once—that is, when the customers bought the beer. “They were discarded on my property, which means they still belong to me, and what’s more, they ain’t for sale. I don’t intend to sell the same beer can twice, if I can help it—and I can help it.”
Not far to the west of the store Jody had installed a giant satellite dish, the largest and most sophisticated satellite dish in that part of the world. With the help of the dish Jody could bring in most sporting events in the Western Hemisphere, though the little TV he brought them in on only had an eight-inch screen. Somehow the discrepancy between the enormous dish and the tiny screen bothered Bobby Lee, who was often with Duane when they got hungry enough to drive to the Corners to microwave a burrito.
“If you’re going to have that big a dish, looks like you’d at least have a regular-sized TV—I’d ruin my eyes squinting at that little old screen,” Bobby Lee told Jody once.
“Ain’t you got anything smaller than a twenty?” Jody asked, noting that Bobby Lee’s purchase only totaled a dollar and a half.
“You didn’t answer my question, and my change is all the way out in the pickup,” Bobby Lee said. “I keep it in a paper cup.”
Jody made the change with some reluctance, but did not respond at all to Bobby Lee’s question, which ticked the latter off.
“You need to learn to mind your own business,” Duane told him, as they were driving away.
“I just asked a question; is that a crime?” Bobby Lee complained. “You and Jody Carmichael are two of a kind, if you ask me.”
“Two of what kind?” Duane asked.
“The closemouthed kind,” Bobby Lee said.
Bright sunlight was glinting off the hundreds of cans and bottles as Duane approached the Corners; the great white satellite dish was still pointed toward the southern sky. Shorty flushed a pack rat but the rat got under the building before Shorty could get him. Shorty didn’t give up, though. He was still scratching madly, trying to get under the house and get the rat, when Duane stepped inside the store.
22
JODY CARMICHAEL WAS RESTOCKING the barbecued potato chips and hot pork rinds when Duane walked in. A Portuguese soccer magazine lay on the counter—at least, Duane assumed it was in Portuguese, since it was in a foreign language that looked different from Spanish. Among the locals Jody had the reputation for being a highly educated man. Duane had the vague sense that after World War II Jody had gone off to Michigan or somewhere and gotten his schooling on the G.I. Bill.
“Ah, it’s our pedestrian. Good morning to you, sir,” Jody said. When he was in a good mood he was apt to indulge in flowery talk—flowery, at least, by roughneck standards.
“You got pack rats under your house, Jody,” Duane informed him. “I just saw a big fat one run right under it.”
“And pack rats carry the hanta virus, is that your point?” Jody asked. One of his bets must have come in—his eyes were dancing.
“Well, and bubonic plague and a few other things,” Duane said. “I just thought I’d tell you.”
Jody finished filling the trays with pork rinds and barbecued potato chips and came back behind his counter. He cast a quick glance at his computer before turning to Duane.
“Brazil, now there’s a country—the whole society is soccer mad,” he said. “Screwing and soccer, those are the national pastimes in Brazil. What’s on your mind today?”
“Oh, I need a few things,” Duane said. “I was hoping you stock those large trash bags—somebody’s made a mess in my creek.”
“I stock everything, but that don’t mean I can find everything I stock,” Jody said. “The lawn-and-leaf bags are over in the corner there—the corner where the light don’t quite penetrate.”
Sure enough the bags were there—Duane took all six packages. Jody Carmichael had settled comfortably back on his couch. He raised an eyebrow when he saw his entire stock of lawn-and-leaf bags piled on the counter.
“You must have a noble mess in your creek, to need three hundred large white trash bags,” he said. “That means I’ll have to reorder, pronto. What do you think about the Unabomber?”
“I’m not expecting any packages from him,” Duane said. “I haven’t given him that much thought.”
“I figure he’s some old nut like me, stuck off somewhere in Kansas or Wyoming,” Jody said. “When he ain’t restocking groceries he makes bombs and sends them off to big shots who are ruining people’s minds with these computers.”
“Why would he be in Kansas?” Duane asked.
“Oh, there’s plenty of wild men in Kansas,” Jody said. “I figure he’s off somewhere between Wichita and Salina, where the country is real flat. An excessively flat landscape can do bad things to the human personality, and lord knows it’s flat up there north of Wichita.
“It’s flat enough right around here,” Jody continued. “That could be why you’ve started acting like Thoreau or somebody. Walking off from your family and cleaning up creek beds and such. That could be the actions of a mind unsettled by too much exposure to flat countryside.”
Duane remembered that Karla had brought home a Thoreau book or two, some years back, when she was auditing literature courses at the university in Wichita Falls. All he personally knew about Thoreau was that he had lived at a place called Walden Pond—developers were trying to develop it and a bunch of rock stars and country singers were trying to stop the development. That much had been in the papers.
“Of course it ain’t really that flat around here,” Jody said. “The land’s got a gentle roll to it, so you probably won’t get as crazy as this Unabomber fellow. You’ve got all the roughnecks worried, though.”
“Worried about what?” Duane asked.
“The rumor I heard is that you’ve got a sniper’s rifle with a nightscope on it,” Jody replied. “The roughnecks figure that a man with a sniper’s rifle and a nightscope might get the urge to use it some night when they’re on their way to the rig.”
“Those roughnecks must have a little touch of this flat disease you’re talking about,” Duane said. “I don’t have a sniper’s rifle.”
Then he remembered that in fact Dickie did own such a rifle—he had won it shooting craps in the back of a pickup somewhere. Duane had never seen the gun himself, but Bobby Lee had mentioned that it had a nightscope. The rumor that he was likely to snipe on roughnecks was to him just an example of how paranoid people could get when they took too much speed—a not-unheard-of practice among roughnecks.
Jody watched with interest as Duane fitted the trash bags into his backpack.
“You don’t sell spades, do you?” Duane asked. He was happy to have found the trash bags and a few other groceries he needed, and wanted to get back on the road.
“You bet. I sell spades and sling blades too, and I think I’ve got a posthole digger or two and several pickaxes and crowbars, if you’re needing hardware,” Jody said. “They’re all out in my hardware shed. I don’t make a practice of keeping heavy items where somebody who wasn’t right in the head could pick one up and whack me with it. There have been people in this store who weren’t entirely in their right minds. I expect one of them would have laid me out by now if there had been a spade or crowbar handy.”
“Good point,” Duane said. “Mind if I look in the shed?”
Jody handed him a key affixed to a short piece of wire—the
n he went back to watching his soccer game. Duane heard a faint roaring, like the sound of the sea in a seashell, the cheers of a wild crowd in faraway Brazil.
The padlock on the old rusty metal shed behind the store was reluctant to open at first, but Duane persisted and finally got it unlocked. He switched on a light—bright, in this case, not dim—and was startled to see that he was in a well-organized miniature hardware store, one that was as neat and carefully arranged as the other store was cluttered. All the items Jody had mentioned were there, plus adzes and awls, two anvils, giant wrenches and tiny wrenches, hammers, sledgehammers, saws, a wheelbarrow, screws and nails, and all manner of wires and tubing, all of it neatly arranged on hooks or on shelves. The equipment was so clean it looked as if it had been polished. One shelf held a selection of carpentry tools so old that they might have been in a museum. He puzzled over some of the older tools for several minutes, trying to figure out what they could be used for. The shed was so clean and well organized that being in it was almost shocking. Duane chose a spade, a hammer, and a saw, but mainly he just stood and looked. Where had Jody Carmichael found the time to organize his toolshed so well? The attractive array of hardware suggested not just another man but another life. Yet the shed was only ten yards from the store—it was as if the man had split himself somehow: he brought order to his hardware and let disorder spread among his groceries.
After the shock wore off, Duane began to feel better than he had felt all day, just from looking at all the good equipment he could have if he needed it. If he decided to make major improvements in his new living quarters he could easily get all the equipment he needed just a short walk from his cabin. He decided it was lucky that he was on foot—if he had been in his pickup he might have bought half the items in the shed, just to have them in case of future need.
“That was a surprise,” he told Jody, when he handed him back the key. “You’ve got a regular hardware store back there.”
“Not only that; things out there are easy to find,” Jody said. “My daughter done that. The shed was in as big a mess as the store until she moved back here. She claims she’s going to do the same for the store, one of these days. Honor can’t tolerate messes—no sir, no messes.”
“I thought I remembered that you had a daughter,” Duane said.
“A fine daughter, too,” Jody said, with evident pride. “She’s the one thing her mother and I did right. We’re both proud as hell of Honor.”
“What does she do when she’s not cleaning out sheds?” Duane asked.
Jody gave him a sort of sly look and pointed to a little tray of business cards sitting by the cash register. In the dim light Duane had not seen them. He took one and sought a better light in which to read it:
Honor Carmichael, M.D.
Counseling, Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis
900 Taft Street
Wichita Falls, Texas 76302
Duane was momentarily flabbergasted at the thought that Jody Carmichael’s daughter had become—of all things—a psychiatrist, though he didn’t know why he was so startled. So far as he could remember he had only seen Jody’s daughter a few times, when she was a little girl in pigtails. Psychiatry was just not a profession many people in that part of the country went into—particularly not if they were women.
“Good lord,” he said. “I guess you would be proud of her, if she can do all that and arrange hardware too.”
“Yes, I’m real proud,” Jody said simply.
“Where’d your daughter go to school?” Duane asked.
“Baltimore,” Jody said. “She moved back here a few years ago, mainly so she could get better acquainted with her old dad. You ought to make an appointment, Duane. A session or two with Honor might clear your head.”
“Me?” Duane said. “I don’t know that my head is cloudy enough that I need psychiatry—though I guess some people think so.”
“You might not be too crazy now—but you could always get crazier,” Jody said. “I did—went crazy and started betting on these soccer games. Honor could probably help you figure out why you started acting like Thoreau.”
“Or I could just go to a library and get a book by the man and read it,” Duane said. “Maybe I could puzzle it out for myself, if the writing’s not too complicated.”
“Doubtful, very doubtful,” Jody Carmichael said. “If people could really figure themselves out, Honor wouldn’t have such a booming business.”
Duane tucked the card into his shirt pocket, slipped on his backpack, and picked up his spade.
“I don’t know about psychiatry, but I’ll probably be back to look over the hardware again,” he said. “You’ve got some real nice hardware.”
Jody had picked up the Portuguese soccer magazine and was leafing through it. He seemed to have lost interest in Duane, who, for some reason, felt a little reluctant to leave.
“Is that magazine in Portuguese?” he asked. Jody seemed surprised by the question.
“Sure is, why?” he asked.
“I just wondered,” Duane said. Then he waved and went out the door.
23
DUANE HAD A FINE WALK HOME—somehow the little bit of conversation and the knowledge that there was a plentiful supply of tools available only a few hours’ walk away had put him in a good mood. The minute he came in sight of his cabin he began to think of improvements he might make, using all the tools he could buy from Jody’s nicely arranged hardware store.
There was not a shade tree anywhere near the cabin—it sat on a bare knob. Sitting out in front of it in a lawn chair would work fine in the cool months, but the cool months would soon be over, after which sitting out on the hill in a lawn chair would be a warm experience. The notion that came to him was that he might put awnings around three sides of the cabin. Then he could sit wherever he pleased and be reasonably assured of shade.
Duane was so pleased with the notion of awnings that, once he got home, he immediately wanted to take some measurements; then he discovered that he lacked a tape measure. The discovery didn’t upset him too much—at least he had remembered to buy a tablet and some ballpoint pens. What he needed to do was make careful plans, draw up a more comprehensive list, walk back to Jody’s the next day, and add to his arsenal of essential tools. He had been tempted to buy a wheelbarrow on his visit that morning, but had held off mainly because he thought that if he had a wheelbarrow he’d go on a buying spree and fill it up with things he didn’t really need. Then, too, the notion of walking along a public road pushing a wheelbarrow struck him as being a pretty eccentric thing—perhaps a little too eccentric. The roughnecks who expected him to snipe at them with a sniper’s rifle would really think he had gone around the bend if they saw him pushing a wheelbarrow filled with hardware along one of the roads where they were expecting to be assassinated.
Once he had a wheelbarrow, though, he could transplant a few little saplings from down in the river valley and eventually grow his own shade trees. That would take a few years, admittedly, but it wouldn’t hurt to go on and get started with a few schemes to give the outside of the cabin a more pleasing aspect. As it was, the grandkids wouldn’t be able to visit him at all in the summer months without risking both snakebite and heat stroke. He hadn’t given the grandkids a thought since leaving home, but he knew that could change. The time might come when he would want to have his grandkids, or his kids, or even Karla out to visit.
Duane was so pepped up by the idea of improvements on the cabin that it was all he could do to keep from hiking off back to Jody’s, to buy himself a tape measure, the wheelbarrow, and perhaps a T square and a leveling tool. He restrained himself, though. One trip a day to the Corners was really enough. He napped a little and woke up so refreshed that he decided to walk to the Corners and come back with the wheelbarrow after dark. If a pickup full of roughnecks came barreling along he could probably conceal the wheelbarrow in the barditch until they passed.
This time, with the luxury of a thick tablet and a good ballpoint pen, Dua
ne began to make a lengthy and careful list of items it would be good to have around. Of course, Jody Carmichael couldn’t be expected to stock awnings—but he might be able to order some for him. Duane listed a dozen items and his mind suddenly went blank. He began to feel saggy, although only a few minutes before he had felt refreshed. After all, a walk to Jody’s store and back was at least a sixteen-mile round trip. Twice in one day would be more than thirty miles, a long walk by any standards. Besides being tired, he began to feel a little foolish. Did he really need a wheelbarrow badly enough to walk thirty miles just to buy one? If Karla knew he was even contemplating such a thing she would no doubt laugh her head off, a thought which made him miss her. Karla was never more appealing than when she was laughing her head off about some hilarious act of human folly—which, he had no doubt, was how she would consider his thirty-mile walk.
Just thinking about Karla’s reaction caused Duane to conclude that he was too tired to make another trip to the Corners that day. He sat with his tablet a good while, considering other staples that might go on his list. While he was thinking he remembered Jody Carmichael’s daughter, the psychiatrist. He took her little card out of his pocket and propped it against the salt and pepper shakers. He remembered how Jody had beamed when he spoke of his daughter, and how moved he had sounded when he said he was proud of her. The little girl Duane had seen only once or twice at rodeos long ago had gone off to school and made something of herself. Now she was a licensed doctor, qualified to help people with their emotional problems, an endeavor that undoubtedly took brains and judgment.