He had the book with him when he was ushered into the doctor’s office—in order to sit comfortably he had to remove it from his pocket, and when he did Dr. Carmichael spotted it.
“Well now,” she said. “Reading that gloomy man’s not likely to cheer you up.”
“I just started it,” Duane said, a little nervous. What would he say if she asked him a question about the book?
“I see you’ve got some clean clothes,” she said. “You didn’t walk all the way home to get them, did you?”
“Had them delivered,” Duane said. “I leave here tired—real tired. I can barely pick up my feet.”
“That’s common for people who have just gone into therapy,” she said. “They suddenly feel the weight of their history in a different way. I don’t doubt that you’re tired. I imagine you’re expecting too much, too soon. You need to understand that this process we’ve embarked on is a slow thing. It’ll take years, and there’s no guarantee it will leave you all that much happier at the end of the road. It might, or it might not.”
“I’m already happier, just from having someone smart to listen to me,” Duane said.
“That’s a relief—at least you’ve found a doctor,” she told him. “It may take three or four years for you to fully understand what brought you to me in the first place.”
Duane was shocked by the projection.
“I must be awfully sick if it’s going to take three or four years to get me cured,” he said.
Dr. Carmichael looked at him sternly.
“Mr. Moore, you don’t have a disease,” she said. “I think I can bring you to a better understanding of your life and your feelings about it, but I won’t let you pay me thousands of dollars in the expectation that I’m going to cure you of anything.
“All there would be to cure you of is life,” she added. “Which is not to say you don’t have things to learn.”
Duane didn’t know what to say, or how to take the doctor’s remarks. He was silent and so was she—silence stretched out for almost a minute.
“Well, do you want me to keep coming, or am I a waste of your time?” he asked.
“You’re not a waste of my time,” she said. “Therapy’s not a miracle cure, but it’s not a waste of time, either—not if you believe that understanding has some value. It’s an exploration, of a sort. And what we’re exploring is you.”
“Okay,” Duane said. He felt relieved—for a few minutes he had begun to fear that the doctor was just going to throw him out.
“Tomorrow’s the day we skip,” she said. “When you come in on Thursday I’d like you to try lying on the couch. I want to try that, for a few sessions. You’re a little too braced, at the moment.”
“Okay,” Duane said, though he wasn’t sure what she meant.
“I’d also like to prescribe you an antidepressant,” she said.
Duane bristled a little.
“But I thought you said I wasn’t sick,” he said.
“I didn’t say you weren’t gloomy, though,” she said. “The point of the antidepressant is to keep you from sinking any deeper into the gloom.”
Duane was silent. He didn’t want an antidepressant, but he didn’t want to flatly refuse, either.
“Let’s table that one until Thursday,” Dr. Carmichael said. “I have a final suggestion that is simply practical.”
“What’s that?”
“A bicycle,” she said. “You seem to be philosophically opposed to motor locomotion—I’m not sure why. Maybe we’ll uncover the reason in a year or two, or maybe we won’t. But a bicycle would give you a lot more mobility. Eighteen miles is nothing to a cyclist. It would give you a good deal more control over your schedule.”
“It sure would,” Duane said. He liked the idea immediately—he couldn’t imagine why he hadn’t thought of it for himself. On a bike he could probably whistle along at ten or fifteen miles an hour. But he would still be moving at his own pace, and he wouldn’t be in a pickup. If he wanted to stop and clean the trash out of a creek bed, he could.
Then he remembered Shorty, whom he had been supposed to bring to the session, but hadn’t. Shorty wasn’t called Shorty for nothing. He couldn’t travel any ten miles an hour on his short little legs.
“You could probably even get a dog seat for that pooch you don’t want me to meet,” the doctor said, with a smile. “Lots of bikes have baby seats, and I guess he’s kind of your baby.”
“No, he’s kind of my albatross,” Duane said. “But I think I will get a bike. If Shorty don’t want to ride on it he can stay home and guard the property.”
“You mentioned the other day that you were allergic to ragweed,” the doctor said. “What do you do when this allergy flares up?”
“I’ve got a pill that works pretty well,” he said.
“You might think of your depression as something rather like an allergy,” she said. “An antidepressant might work pretty well too.”
Duane didn’t answer. He didn’t want to appear to be stubborn, yet stubborn was how he felt. The doctor had said she didn’t think he was sick, exactly; she had said he couldn’t really expect a cure. And yet now she was proposing to give him a prescription, like any other doctor would. It didn’t mesh well, in his mind. The whole session was confusing to him. If he wasn’t really sick why would it take three or four years to understand his problems? It all left him feeling very off balance.
Besides, he couldn’t help associating antidepressants with Lester Marlow and Sonny Crawford, both of whom had taken every mind drug on the market without becoming any less crazy or any less depressed.
“People who have never been happy in their lives sometimes feel happy once they get on the right antidepressant,” the doctor said. “I want you to think about it until Thursday, okay?”
“Okay,” Duane said.
They chatted for a few more minutes, but did not get into the matter of his parents, or the distant past at all. The doctor asked him about his children and he described them briefly. When he left the office this time he felt energetic, rather than lethargic. He walked straight over to Tenth Street, where he knew there was a good bike shop; within an hour he had spent five thousand dollars on a top-of-the-line bicycle, complete with helmet, biking shoes, goggles, night lights, water bottles, side packs, and a dog seat. He bought shorts, gloves, a windbreaker, and various little trail packs of high-energy foods. He bought a tool kit to repair his bike, and an excellent pump for the tires. He bought an odometer and even a little device that would measure his pulse and his heartbeat as he rode. The young couple who ran the store had been looking lonely when Duane came in, but were looking extremely happy as they totaled up his purchases.
“Is there anything I’ve forgotten?” Duane asked, as he was getting ready to leave. He had changed into biking garb and was stuffing his street clothes into one of the handy side packs.
“I don’t think so,” the young wife said, as he handed her the check. “But if you think of something, come on back. We’re always here.”
12
DUANE HAD NEVER HAD A BICYCLE AS A CHILD. He had been too young for one when his father was alive, and his mother was too poor to afford one after that. At one point he had had an intense yearning for a bike, but, before he could satisfy it, he was already supporting himself and instead of buying a bike he bought a rundown pickup. Even though there was a big bike race in Wichita Falls every August—the Hotter-Than-Hell One Hundred—the extent to which the region was a pickup culture, not a biking culture, was brought home to him not three blocks from the bike shop, when a pickup pulling a long horse trailer came within an inch of sideswiping him. The cowboy driving the pickup didn’t notice that his trailer had forced Duane up on the curb.
Though the bike was street ready, Duane wasn’t. He almost fell over at the first stoplight, unable to get his feet out of the clips easily. Feeling inept, he wheeled into the parking lot of a high school and practiced stops and starts until he felt he understood the gears and the b
rakes.
When he felt a little more confident he went back to the highway and in only a few minutes was at his door.
Tommy, the young drug dealer, and Gay-lee, the young whore, were chatting when Duane wheeled in. They were so surprised to see him on a bike that they almost took flight.
“Oh my God, you made my heart race,” Gay-lee said, when Duane took his helmet off and she saw that it was only him. “We thought the cops had decided to hit us on bicycles.”
Without her makeup Gay-lee looked about the age of his daughter Julie, if considerably more weathered.
“I got tired of slow traveling,” Duane said.
“You’ll think slow if one of these trucks hits you,” she said. “People on bikes don’t get much respect out here on the Seymour highway.
“That ain’t no cheap bike,” she added, looking closely at his new equipment. “If you can afford a bike like that, why are you staying in a dump like the Courts?”
“Because it’s handy to where I need to be,” he said. “What about you? Why are you staying here?”
Gay-lee smiled, a little tiredly. “Because it’s the first motel you come to if you’re driving in from the west,” she said. “Some of these roughnecks don’t have all that much time. If they’re after pussy they’re gonna stop at the first place they can get some. See what I mean?”
Gay-lee drifted back over to continue her conversation with Tommy, and Duane went into his room. Having such a spiffy new bike put the general shabbiness of the Stingaree Courts in a new light. The look of the place suddenly depressed him. He wanted to leave immediately for the cabin but thought he probably ought to keep the room until the weekend, in case another wave of the immobilizing fatigue hit him when he saw the doctor on Thursday.
When Duane got ready to leave for the cabin he was faced with the problem of Shorty, who absolutely refused to ride in the dog seat. Time and again he wiggled out and jumped off. Gay-lee and Sis, watching from the parking lot, began to laugh as Duane struggled to keep the dog on the bike.
“Your puppy don’t want to go,” Sis observed.
“No, but he needs to get used to this dog seat,” Duane said. “It’s eighteen miles to where we live. Short as his legs are, I doubt he can keep up.”
“Shoot, leave him with us,” Gay-lee offered. “My little girls are coming this afternoon. They’d like a puppy to play with.”
“I won’t be back till Thursday,” Duane said. “I wouldn’t want him to be a burden.”
“That puppy won’t be no burden,” Sis said. “I just stick him in your room when nighttime comes.”
Duane wavered. He still felt energetic, and wanted to be off to the cabin—still, there was the fact of Shorty.
“Put him in the room until I’m out of sight,” he said. “Otherwise he’ll follow me and get lost.”
“Or stolen,” Gay-lee said. She looked around at the weedy parking lot. “People will steal about anything that’s loose, out here on the Seymour highway.”
“We’ll look after him,” Sis said, again.
“All right, then, you got yourself a dog for a day or two,” Duane said. “Watch him with your girls. He sometimes nips kids. Thinks he’s supposed to herd them.”
Gay-lee smiled. “My girls are tough,” she said. “If he’s not careful they’ll nip him.”
Sis lured the dog into the honeymoon suite, and Duane pedaled away.
13
WHEN DUANE ARRIVED AT HIS CABIN, after a trip of only an hour and a half, he found a brief note from Karla pinned to his door:
Dear Duane:
Back from Santa Fe. No rich boyfriend. Came to check on you. Bobby Lee says you’re living in a real scuzzy place. Why hasn’t your shrink done something about it?
Karla
Duane went inside and read the note again. The cabin, which had once seemed so peaceful and reassuring, now seemed bleak and empty. Being there brought him no sense of peace. Perhaps if he needed to chop wood he could have worked out of his low feeling, but he already had enough wood chopped to last through the winter. If he had woodworking tools, and some wood to work, he might have soothed himself that way, but he had no wood. It had been fun to sail along the country roads on his new bicycle, traveling thirty times as fast as he could travel on foot. But now he was home, and he felt lonely. The cabin no longer even felt like home—the Stingaree Courts, for all its squalor, felt more like home. There was no sign of life anywhere on the hill—not even a hawk flying by.
Suddenly, as he stood on the old hill in his new biking clothes, Duane began to feel himself leaving. The sensation was so sudden and sharp that at first he thought he might be having a heart attack, or a stroke, so quickly did his spirits sink and his anxiety rise. He felt as if what was left of his real self had just decided to leave: where it was going he didn’t know. He felt himself becoming only a faint outline of his old self—then it seemed that even that outline was disappearing, being rubbed out by the passing wind. He felt that somehow he had lived on past his own death, just a consciousness that was now inhabiting his own ghost. Instinctively, he shut the cabin door. He sat on the bed and held tight to a chair. For a moment he had been afraid that he might just be sucked out the door, like a vapor or a smell, to blow away and be dispersed in the wintry air.
Duane clung to the chair, uncertain as to whether he was dying or merely losing his mind. The exhilaration he had felt riding on his new bike had turned to fear. He had no phone, he couldn’t call, he was afraid to go out of the house or even to turn loose of the chair. Somehow a dreadful crisis had arrived—a crisis inside him. He felt a huge emptiness, a huge sadness; he felt desperate, and yet he was in his own cabin, with his family just a few miles away.
He wasn’t sure what to do to save himself, but then felt a desire to be in water. He stripped off, ran a tubful of hot water, and lay in it. He cupped his hands and sluiced the hot water over his face again and again. The tub was too short—he had to pull his knees up to get the water to cover him. He didn’t want to drown himself; he just wanted to be as deep in the warm water as he could get. He kept splashing it over his face. When the water began to cool he ran in more hot water. The heat was as important as the wetness. He stayed in the tub, keeping the water as warm as possible, until only cold water ran out of the tap. The little hot water heater was empty. Duane jumped out, wrapped himself in towels, and got in bed. He stayed there while the heater reheated the water, then got back in the tub and repeated the whole process. He continued that way, waiting for the water to reheat, until he had taken five baths. He felt that somehow the baths were keeping his blood flowing—keeping him alive.
Sometime long after dark, while Duane waited, wrapped in towels and bedclothes, as the water heater slowly warmed another tubful of water, Duane saw a flash of light across his window. There was a car coming along his road. In a moment he was out of bed, convinced that the light he saw was from Karla’s BMW. She was coming to check on him. He began to pull on his clothes, anxious to leave before Karla caught him. The biking clothes were unfamiliar to him—he couldn’t get into them as quickly as he could into his normal clothes, which were in one of the side packs on his bicycle. He felt a terrible need for haste. He mustn’t let Karla catch him—if she saw him in such disarray she would know he was crazy. She would want to take him to a hospital at once. If he meant to escape he had to hurry. The car was approaching from the north—Karla had probably gone to the Stingaree Courts and been told he had left for the day. The car was only about a quarter mile from the turn-in to his cabin. He had to get himself and his bike out of there quick—he didn’t wait to tie his biking shoes. He ran out the door and grabbed his bike, then ran back in to switch off the light in the cabin. Maybe if Karla saw the light go out she would conclude that he had just gone to sleep, and leave him alone for the night. He was about to run south into the brush, where it would be easy to hide, when the car lights went right on past the turn-in and continued along the road to the south. Duane felt an immense relief
, and also a sense of the absurdity of his behavior. What was he doing, running into the brush at night carrying a bicycle, just to avoid his wife? He felt abashed. What had come over him, that he would spend half a day taking baths and then flee into the darkness because he was afraid his wife might come to see him?
He had run a fair distance south before he realized the car wasn’t Karla, and was trudging back, carrying the bicycle—he was afraid to roll it for fear of puncturing a tire on some small cactus—when he saw another flash of light cross the hill. He looked and saw that another car was approaching, this one from the south.
“That’ll be Karla,” he said, out loud, but he didn’t turn back and he didn’t hurry. If it was Karla, let her come, and come she did. She had beat him to the cabin and gone inside and switched on the light before Duane arrived.
In the course of his bathing he had used up every towel in the cabin. When he propped his bike against the wall of the cabin and went inside, Karla was standing by the table, looking at the pile of damp towels.
“Hi,” he said. “I’ve been trying out my new bike.”
If the fact that he was in biking garb surprised Karla, she didn’t show it, though her glance did take him in from head to foot.
“I don’t get it about the towels,” she said. “Did you just get real dirty, or what?”
“Not real dirty—real crazy,” Duane said.
14
“I’M GOING TO MAKE COFFEE,” Duane said. “Would you like some?”
Karla shrugged and sat down at the table.
“What I’d like to know is, what the hell is going on with you?” she said. “I went to that scumbag motel where you’re staying. I know there’s no Four Seasons in Wichita Falls, but you could do a lot better than that motel. I saw a hooker and a drug dealer before I’d been there five minutes.”