BOBBY LEE AND BOYD were drinking straight bourbon atop their tower at the North Gate of the Rhino Ranch. A fine western sunset inflamed the distant horizon. Three rhinos stood a hundred yards away, flecked with golden light.
Bobby Lee kept looking up the dirt road to the north, hoping to see Duane coming. Duane and K.K. had spent a good part of the afternoon together, a fact which should have produced news, by now. But it hadn’t.
“Maybe there ain’t no news,” Boyd suggested.
“Sure there is—why wouldn’t there be?” Bobby Lee said. “She’s a billionairess. Everything she does is news.”
“Probably she’s got the hots for Duane,” he said. “It wouldn’t hurt him to come and tell us about it.”
“She doesn’t have the hots for Duane,” Boyd said. “She’s got too much on her mind.”
Bobby Lee thought Boyd’s reasoning was strange, to say the least.
“I’ve never yet had so much on my mind that I couldn’t get the hots,” he said.
“You’re the exception that proves the rule,” Boyd said.
“What rule?”
“No rule. I was just hoping you’d shut up so I could enjoy the sunset,” Boyd told him.
Bobby Lee continued to look up the road, but he was losing hope.
The sun-flecked rhinos had wandered off.
Boyd Cotton continued to drink.
40
DUANE PAID ONE of his rare visits to the offices of Moore Drilling, in Wichita Falls. He had had to hitchhike in, but since most of the pickups that passed belonged to his crew it didn’t prove hard to get a ride.
Dickie was in jeans and a denim work shirt. A small blizzard of e-mails flowed in from various computers—it was a far cry from the day when Moore Drilling just had one typewriter, and that jealously guarded by Ruth Popper.
Dickie looked a little frazzled, Duane thought.
“I wish Annie hadn’t run off from us,” Dickie said. “Fickle or not she’s the only one who can keep up with the flow of e-mails on a busy day.”
“Is she fired, then?”
“Well, she’s not fired—but she’s not here, either, and here is where the e-mails are.”
“It’s funny K.K. came up here broke,” Duane said.
“No, it’s normal,” Dickie said. “Her kind of rich rarely carry money. K.K. has a little handler named Roland, who normally carries her money.”
“I still kind of like to carry my own money, when I have any,” Duane said. Below them he saw a very pretty secretary strolling across the parking lot on her way to work.
“That’s our new girl, Casey Kincaid,” Dickie said. “Casey always looks as if she’s just been fucked, and she probably has just been fucked.”
“But not by me,” Dickie said, seeing his father raise his eyebrow. “I think I know enough now to keep it out of the office.”
“So what’s your real feeling about Rhino Enterprises, which I guess you’re eager to invest in, at least you were yesterday,” Duane said.
“I was and I am—it could be a tourist gold mine,” Dickie said. “We need to sort of inch it away from the nonprofits, though. It’ll take them another year just to authorize that fencing, and we need that good pipe fencing done right away.
“There’s thirty-nine rhinos now, and nothing but that crappy little barbed wire fencing to keep them in—not good.”
“That’s been worrying me too,” Duane said. “If somebody don’t get that fence up there will be be rhinos turning up all over the West, pretty soon. Or one will charge a school bus and there’ll be hell to pay.”
“Right,” Dickie said. “I think there’s some kind of contract with a fencing company out of Dallas, but so far, other than bringing the pipes, they haven’t done squat.”
“Maybe we should start a little fencing company ourselves,” Duane suggested. “I could run it—it would give me something to do that I understand.”
“That’s not a bad idea—only I wouldn’t want you to do the heavy work.”
“Bulldozers and heavy diggers and cranes and winches do the heavy work now,” Duane reminded Dickie. “I’d just sit in the cool and supervise.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” Dickie said.
But his mind was on Casey Kincaid, who was idly reading e-mails. She still looked as if she’d just been fucked.
“Let’s think about taking over the fencing, anyway,” Duane said. “And if Casey ain’t doing anything crucial maybe she could run me home.”
“I bet she could,” Dickie said. “Casey’s never doing anything important, except reminding me that I’m male.
“But you’re male too,” he added.
“Only off and on,” Duane said.
41
NO SOONER WERE they in the company pickup than Casey offered Duane a piece of gum—in fact, several pieces of gum. She was wearing plenty of perfume, so much, in fact, that he had to lower his window a bit. The perfume was so strong that he was afraid it might give him a sore throat. This had happened once or twice when he was at Dillard’s or somewhere, shopping for perfume for Karla or Annie.
“I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t chew gum,” Casey informed him.
Casey leaned over the wheel of the pickup, chewing so vigorously that it caused her young breasts to move a little as she chewed.
“Do you mind that I’m promiscuous?” she asked.
Did he mind that she was promiscuous?
“I don’t,” Duane said. “I don’t know much about you, really.”
“A lot of Texans are pretty puritanical,” she said. “It’s the only thing I don’t like about living here. I come from San Diego. The only reason I’m here is that I married an airman for a while. His dick was nearly a foot long, you know? I tried my best to get him into the porn movie business. With a dick like that he would have been a big star. But the asshole was too shy. Before I met him he’d never even fucked anyone in the butt. He was a Baptist and he said Baptists didn’t do that, but of course they do. Everybody butt-fucks, wouldn’t you say?”
“It’s that road,” Duane said, pointing to the dirt road that led through the brush to his cabin.
Casey hit the dirt road going about sixty, throwing up a huge cloud of white dust.
Duane decided to pass on the issue of butt-fucking.
“Personally I don’t see any contradiction between religion and fucking,” Casey said. “I mean, if God didn’t make cocks and cunts, who did? And if God made them there can’t be too much wrong with them?”
Uninvited, Casey began to take her shirt off while she drove. She wore a sleeveless undershirt.
“I hate scratchy old shirts,” she said. “On the beach in San Diego I mainly went nude, and nobody cared, since they were mostly nude too.”
“Not too much nudity around here,” Duane said, feeling silly.
“I’ve never fucked a real old man like you,” Casey said. “I’d kind of like to try it. What do you think?”
Duane shrugged and smiled. When Annie Cameron dumped him he supposed he had come to the end of his sex life. He looked at Casey again, a little more closely, and concluded that, despite her full breasts, he was in a pickup with a teenager.
“Are you of age, Casey?” he asked bluntly.
“Shit, you would ask me that, you old fart,” she said, pouting a little.
When they came to his cabin she braked hard and stopped. He got out and opened the gate. Then he walked around to her side of the pickup and thanked her for bringing him home.
“You’re passing on me because of two lousy months?” she said.
“I think we better hold off,” Duane said, not entirely without mixed feelings. Casey was doing her best to look trashy, but she wasn’t quite making it. She had a brief flare-up.
“Hey, I was fucking a guy with a foot-long dick,” she said. “How long do you think it would take me to wring you out, Grandpa?”
“Oh, not long,” Duane said.
Tears suddenly began to leak out of Casey’s eyes.
br /> “Why are things so hard?” she asked. “Even a simple thing like fucking gets all tangled up with laws and stuff.”
“Thanks for bringing me home,” Duane said.
Perhaps because of her tears Casey had not noticed his cabin. When he pointed at it she looked aghast.
“You live in that?” she asked. “Oh my gosh I would never want to fuck somebody who lived in that. You were right to turn me down, and you even did it kind of nicely, at that.”
She paused, spat out her gum and quickly inserted a few fresh sticks.
“I bet you reject most girls—we probably seem dopey to you,” Casey said.
“No, you don’t seem dopey,” he said. “My son doesn’t hire dopey girls.”
“Dickie, he’s not into fucking, either,” Casey said.
Duane didn’t contradict her, though he knew that chastity wasn’t Dickie’s strong suit.
“I hate working—it sucks,” Casey said.
“It has its downside,” Duane admitted.
“Yep, and fucking doesn’t, though of course you might run into a limp dick or maniac once in a while.
“Do you even have a TV?” she asked, looking at the cabin again.
“Not out here,” Duane admitted. “I’ve got one in town.”
She killed the pickup and started to walk with him toward the cabin.
“I just want to peek in,” she assured him.
And she did peek in, quickly reviewing Duane’s few possessions.
“Did you ever pee into anyone?” she asked. “I mean while you’re fucking or after you’ve fucked. Urine is a very clean liquid, you know. Ever try peeing into anyone?”
“Nope.”
“Do you at least have a hot tub, in town, maybe?”
“I do,” he said.
“Maybe when I’m legal I’ll come and visit you,” Casey said. “I can give underwater BJs too.”
Just then they heard a grunt, from outside the cabin.
Duane stepped around Casey and looked out. Sure enough, twenty feet away, stood Double Aught.
The great beast standing by the pickup didn’t seem to worry Casey Kincaid at all.
“Oh good, it’s just a rhino,” she said. “Shoo, rhino.”
Obediently, Double Aught turned and trotted off.
“That’s the first time he crossed the road,” Duane said, mainly to himself.
He was trying his best to keep the conversation off sex.
“Two months isn’t very long,” Casey said. “I bet you won’t be so puritanical once I get you in the hot tub.”
Then she got in the pickup and left.
42
NEWS OF CASEY KINCAID’S arrival on the North Texas oil and gas scene was not slow to spread.
Reports that Duane Moore had taken her alone to his cabin, where very few people had ever been, were also not slow to spread.
Evaluations of her beauty quietly circulated.
Estimates of her age were bruited about.
Bobby Lee saw her pass through a stoplight and was so smitten that he was later given a ticket for going sixty-six in a thirty-mile zone.
“I was just trying to catch up with my boss, Duane Moore,” he pleaded, but his plea fell on deaf ears.
“I think you were thinking of making cat tracks on the ceiling,” the officer, whose name was Roy, said.
“The ceiling of this car,” Roy added. “And you was hoping to be between the legs of that long-legged girl.”
“I see you have no sympathy for the workingman,” Bobby Lee said, determined to stand on his dignity.
“Girls like that one that you was chasing belong in Cancun,” Roy said. “Have you ever been to Cancun?”
“I did go there once,” Bobby Lee lied. “That was because my first wife won a raffle.”
“I don’t believe your lying ass,” Roy said, and wrote the ticket, which was for just over one hundred dollars.
“Ouch,” Bobby Lee said.
43
I DON’T WANT HER in our house,” Annie Cameron said.
The call had come out of the blue, to his cell phone, while he was sitting under his shade tree reading Desert Solitaire.
“Who?”
“Casey Kincaid, you know who, you son of a bitch,” Annie said.
“I meant our house in Patagonia,” she said. “I don’t want you bringing her there.”
“But Annie, that’s your house—it went back to you in the divorce papers,” he reminded her. “It was really your parents’. I never thought of it as mine. Anyway, I’m in Texas, at my cabin,” he said. “My only other house is the big house in town.”
“I couldn’t even ride that far with Casey Kincaid,” he went on. “Her perfume would suffocate me before we got to Abilene.”
“Cheap perfume is what you get when you date sluts,” she told him, in a cold tone.
“I don’t date Casey or anybody, for that matter,” he said. “Casey works for Dickie.”
“Then he’s probably fucking her,” Annie said.
“Last I heard she went back to her husband,” he said.
“Oh, the one with the foot-long dick? I heard about him too.”
“Then you know everything I know, if not more,” Duane said. “How are you otherwise?”
“Duane, let’s not start,” she said, and hung up.
The call had not produced one affectionate comment, a fact that made Duane sad. He sat under his shade tree all afternoon, but made little progress on Desert Solitaire.
Now and then he looked across the road, but his friend the rhino Double Aught was nowhere to be seen.
44
I WISH I STILL worked for Moore Drilling—at least I wish it sometimes,” Bobby Lee said to Boyd. “If I still worked for the Moores I could find some excuse to visit the office. Then, with luck, I could look at Casey Kincaid’s top, or up her skirt.”
“Invent an excuse and go there anyway, if it means that much to you,” Boyd suggested.
“I heard she offered to suck Dickie’s cock for two thousand dollars,” Bobby Lee said. “Of course that’s just rumor.”
“So did she?” Boyd asked, after a pause.
“Nope, said he had to refuse in order to keep down inflation,” Bobby Lee said.
Far to the west six or seven rhinos were grazing. Boyd got his binoculars and looked closely, but nothing seemed to be amiss. A few white cattle egrets were scattered among the rhinos. There was a coyote trotting along one of the feed roads in the pasture, but he paid no attention to the rhinos, nor did the rhinos pay attention to him.
Boyd had resorted to the binoculars mainly because a pretense of attention would free him, for a few minutes, from having to listen to Bobby Lee. He didn’t dislike Bobby Lee. He just got tired of listening to him.
45
“THERE’S A GIRL after me, Willy,” Duane told his grandson, on the phone.
“I know—my mom is pissed off at Dickie because he hired her. She’s supposed to be involved with an airman with a foot-long dick.”
“Things like that are often exaggerated,” Duane said.
“I haven’t had sex yet, so I wouldn’t know,” Willy said. “Maybe I’ll lose my virginity in England.”
“Don’t worry if you don’t,” Duane told him. “Sex is in your life for a long time, even if you start a little late. You’ll eventually add up a lot of sex—forty or fifty years’ worth.”
There was a silence.
“Right now you don’t believe sex could ever be boring, but it can,” Duane said.
“I guess I can accept that in theory,” Willy said. “But I’m a long way from being there yet. Will you come to see me when I’m in England? I’ll be there for two years.”
“I’ll mosey over, at some point,” Duane said.
“Good,” Willy said.
46
“I GUESS YOU’RE SOME kind of magnet for cunty women,” Honor told Duane, who was cooking sausage on the little stove in the cabin. Honor sounded mildly peeved.
&nbs
p; “I guess news travels faster than it used to,” Duane said. “E-mail, I guess.”
“Yes, e-mail,” Honor said. “I even have a few pictures of the divine Casey myself.”
“All that happened is that she gave me a ride home from the office,” he told her.
He cracked three eggs and proceeded to scramble them; he also slipped two pieces of Wonder Bread into his ancient toaster.
He was aware that both Honor and Annie, not to mention his daughters, would have scorned the breakfast, but then fortunately none of them were there.
“Nothing happened, Honor,” he said. “Why Dickie hired such a little slut I don’t know—but I didn’t hire her and I expect her to quit anyday.”
“She probably didn’t mention this, but Sid Cameron, your former father-in-law, used to chase little Casey Kincaid around his yacht,” Honor said. “The West Coast yachting set has known about little Casey for a long time.”
“She’s supposed to have an airman husband who’s pretty well hung,” he told her. “A foot in length has been mentioned. I always thought that big dick stuff was hooey.”
“It is, for most women,” Honor said. “But Casey Kincaid is a porn star—or was. In porn the requirements are a little different.”
“I see,” Duane said. He was anxious to get on with his breakfast. Honor no longer sounded peeved, so, after a little more chitchat, he hung up.
47
JENNY MARLOW did not win her battle with the Big C. Once she concluded that the battle was lost she essentially let go, dying two days after she entered hospice care.
Duane visited her the night before she died, and gave her a kiss on the forehead, but he wasn’t sure she was aware of his presence, or his kiss.
The funeral was the next day. Jenny was not religious. A lot of people liked her, though, and the burial was well attended.
“Us old-timers are thinning out quick now,” Bobby Lee said. “At least she lived long enough to see my record bass.”
Then he began to cry.
Duane was feeling a little shaky inside himself.