Duane decided it was probably the negligees, and not Janine’s grasping ways, that were causing the distaste. He was certainly no stranger to grasping ways, and had long since concluded that it didn’t pay to be too fastidious in this life.
He looked across the top of Suzie’s car and saw that indeed the lights were on at Janine’s house. She lived two blocks from the hospital in the little house her parents had lived in.
Her parents had been killed in a car wreck while Janine was in high school. Janine had gone to work in the courthouse the minute she graduated from high school. She had been married briefly to Joe Bob Blanton, a local minister’s son. They had become close after her parents’ funeral. Janine was not popular and had no one else to be close to.
But the marriage only lasted a summer. Joe Bob had first gone to college in Wichita Falls, then had switched to Denton, then to the University of Oklahoma, then to the University of Kansas, at which point people in Thalia finally lost track of him. He removed himself one college at a time—someone had heard that he had finally reached Syracuse, New York, but that was just a rumor.
Duane began to feel guilty. He didn’t want to go to see Janine. At the same time he knew it must be sad to sit in the little house your parents had lived in, in a lavender negligee, and have your boyfriend drive right past and not come to see you. He wondered what was going on at the Howlers—maybe Karla and Junior had finally fallen in love. But the thing that bothered him most was that he had ordered a steak and was not going to get to eat it.
While he weighed his sense of duty to Janine against his hunger, depression and various other feelings, Suzie Nolan began to bite his hand. She had been crying on his arm while he stroked her hair. One of his hands was beneath her cheek and she turned her head and began to suck her tears off his hand. Then she bit the fleshy part of his hand. Her bite was soft at first, but then she bit harder. She moved up to his fingers and bit one, fairly hard.
When Duane tried to pull his hand away, Suzie held the bite. She was looking at him out of wide, determined eyes, her teeth clamped on his finger, reminding him for a moment of how Shorty might look if he tried to remove a bone Shorty was eating.
Shorty himself watched the scene from the front seat of Minerva’s Buick, which Duane had borrowed. Shorty was happy that Duane was so close. The periods when Duane had been in the courthouse and the hospital had been agony for Shorty, but he didn’t mind at all if Duane stood by the car, feeding his hand to some woman. Shorty accepted everything about Duane except his absences.
Suzie turned her head so she could take the finger she was biting into her mouth. Duane tried once more to slide it away but Suzie set her teeth in it and bit harder. He looked around nervously to see if anyone was coming. People were always getting sick in Thalia—anyone could drive up.
Duane felt a confusing mixture of surprise, dismay and desire. Suzie’s passionate bites were having an effect. At the same time it was not lost on him that she was in love with his son—she was Dickie’s girlfriend, or one of them. Of course she was Junior Nolan’s wife, but Junior crossed his mind only briefly. He had long since reconciled himself to adultery—but sharing a lover with one of his own children was a different matter. That had to be different, but in his nervousness he was not exactly sure where the point of difference lay, or what it meant.
He had a sense that life was about to jump the fence of credibility and become completely unbelievable. He wanted to stop it, to keep it from racing into hopeless emotional chaos, but, unfortunately for his ethical sense, desire was growing faster than dismay. It was growing urgent, which added to the surprise and confusion—he hadn’t felt an urgent sexual need in two or three years. It was all he could do to make an effort to check himself, but he did try.
“Suzie, stop,” he said. She was still mouthing his fingers. “Don’t do that. It’s Dickie you’re in love with.”
Her mouth made a little pop as she released his finger. The small, intimate sound was more affecting than the bites and all but undid his resolve.
“He don’t love me,” Suzie said. “It’s just good fun to him. I do love the little rat something terrible—but don’t leave me, Duane. I don’t want you to leave.”
She pulled his wet hand down into the heat of her bosom and raised herself half out of the window to kiss him. In contrast to the aggressive biting, her mouth was soft and shy—her breath tickled his cheek. He ceased trying to stop and followed her through the window when she drew back to loosen her blouse. She began to unbutton his shirt but kept an arm around his neck, apparently thinking he could just slide in through the window. She twisted backward far enough to get her legs out from under the steering wheel.
Duane was not so limber. His erection, of which he was very aware, was jammed against the door handle and both his feet were off the ground. Suzie managed to get her legs up on his shoulder and to loosen his belt, but it did her little good because the rest of him was still out in the parking lot. Meanwhile she was still smothering him with quick, breathy kisses, and she seemed puzzled by the delay.
“I don’t know if I can get in through this window,” Duane said. He had rarely felt so horny and at the same time so silly—his legs were sticking straight out the window. By a desperate wrench he had managed to free his erection from the door handle but it still wasn’t inside the car.
“Shoot, I told Junior we needed a station wagon,” Suzie said, vexed by the logistics but unwilling to stop kissing him. She caught his hand again and thrust it between her legs, hoping that a touch there would inspire him.
Duane could not have been much more inspired, but his inspiration could not widen the window or eliminate the steering wheel or raise the roof. He was about to try to wiggle out and simply open the door when a flicker of light struck the windshield. A car was racing along the little road toward the hospital. Suzie saw it too.
“Oh, no!” she said. “Bad timing!”
“Terrible timing,” Duane said. “I’m stuck.”
Indeed, getting back out the window was no simpler than getting in. For a moment he wished he had paid a little more attention to the various diets Karla read to him while he was in the hot tub ignoring her.
His exit was not made easier by the fact that Suzie, bent on assuring herself as thorough a caress as possible, held his hand tightly to her crotch. She lay back in the seat and covered her eyes with her forearm.
“Just do that for a second,” she said. “That car’s not here yet. Just do that. That’s nice.
“I thought you’d be nice,” she added. “You know how you think about how people will be?”
Before Duane could comment, Suzie bit her forearm to stifle a nice cry of pleasure. Duane felt that it would also be very nice to have his feet back on the ground before the car arrived. He could hear it rattling as it raced up the bumpy road.
He got a crick in his back, twisting out, but left his hand with Suzie for a bit as he leaned against the door and caught his breath. A couple more nice cries of pleasure were imperfectly stifled. Duane felt sharply frustrated, but still glad to be out of the window.
Suzie sat up, her eyes gleaming, just as the car came skidding to a stop.
It was Beulah Balt, so crazed with shock that she immediately yanked the car into reverse rather than park, and almost ran over Duane, who was not at his most nimble.
“Daddy’s dead!” she said. “He fell out of the car and rolled off into the ditch.”
“Oh, no!” Suzie said, getting out of the car to comfort her. “He was gonna be the star of our centennial.”
Duane raced into the hospital to see if Buddy, the ambulance driver, was anywhere around. May, the night nurse, a woman as secretive as a mouse, was sitting in one of the closets counting packages of Q-tips.
“Buddy’s gone crappie fishing but he left the ambulance, help yourself,” May said, when Duane ran up.
“You better call the doctor,” Duane said.
“I will, but don’t make me lose count, I’m t
aking inventory,” May said.
Lester came out of the hall to see what all the excitement was about and just had time to grab his shoes.
They got the two women into the ambulance and went racing out the highway. Old Man Balt and his daughter lived about ten miles out.
“It’s my fault,” Beulah said, weeping. “I get on him for missing his tobacco can when he spits. He can’t hit the can in the dark in a moving car. I got on him and he opened the door and tried to spit. The next thing I knew he was gone.”
“It might not be that serious,” Suzie said. “He might just have a few broken limbs.”
“I was in this ambulance earlier in the day,” Lester remarked. Suzie Nolan made him nervous.
Beulah had only a loose idea of where she had been when her father rolled out.
“I had the radio on and didn’t notice it when he fell out,” Beulah said. “I’ll never forgive myself for any of this. If he could just have lived three more months he would have got his letter from the President. The President writes everybody who gets to be a hundred years old.”
Precious minutes were lost in trying to pinpoint the spot where Mr. Balt fell out. Beulah thought it must have happened somewhere between Onion Creek and the next creek, which had no name. Duane finally got out and walked up the bar ditch. Lester was feeling nervous, so Suzie drove the ambulance and worked the spotlight. Duane had scarcely walked a hundred yards when he found Old Man Balt flat on his back in the ditch. He looked quite dead, but in fact was only sleeping.
When first awakened he seemed docile—“What’s on TV?” he asked—but when told that he had to come back to town and submit to a physical examination he began to show fight. It was soon clear that his arms and legs still worked because he proceeded to kick and strike with all of them. Duane finally wrestled the old man into the ambulance and clutched him in a kind of bear hug on the ride back into town.
“Mr. Balt, if you was any younger I believe we’d have to let you go,” he said.
“If I want to sleep in a bar ditch, whose business is it but mine?” the old man wanted to know. “This was a free country back before Roosevelt.”
“Hush, Daddy,” Beulah said. “You might have internal bleeding.”
“We’ll all have internal bleeding if Suzie doesn’t slow down,” Lester said. “External bleeding too.”
Suzie, looking flushed and competent, didn’t reply, nor did she slow down.
“She tries to get me to give up tobacco,” the old man said, glaring at his daughter.
“Daddy, I’ll settle for you just getting a bigger can,” Beulah said.
At the hospital it was soon determined that a skinned hand was the extent of Mr. Balt’s injuries. In their absence the emergency room had filled up. Three roughnecks had turned a truck over. They had bled all over themselves, though none was seriously hurt. Toots Burns, the sheriff, had brought in a runaway girl who seemed disoriented.
“She thinks she’s in Georgia,” Toots said sympathetically. He did not look in top form, but he looked better than the girl, who sat crying listlessly on a couch across from the bloody roughnecks.
Suzie soon left to pick up her children, to Duane’s profound relief. The brightly lit emergency room filled with depressed people made what had just occurred in the parking lot seem particularly absurd. Though Suzie did nothing more than try to comfort the miserable Beulah Balt, her behavior struck Duane as intolerably cheerful. She didn’t look at him when she left, either, which irked him, though it was illogical to feel that way when he couldn’t wait for her to leave.
He sat on the bench by the runaway girl for an hour, until it was determined that Mr. Balt could be released. He offered to drive the Balts home, but they refused his help and, after another slow trip down the sidewalk, they set off again.
Through the whole experience Duane had been nagged by the thought of the lonely Janine in her lavender negligee. Once the Balts were finally gone he went back in and called her on the pay phone.
“Well, Old Man Balt nearly got killed,” he said. “That’s why I couldn’t come by.”
“I’m already in bed,” Janine said in a small, beaten voice, the opposite of the triumphant voice she had used that morning in the Dairy Queen.
“He fell out of the car,” Duane said. “It’s a wonder he didn’t break into fifty pieces. I didn’t have a chance to call sooner.”
“You don’t have to apologize, if that’s all that happened,” Janine said, in the same hopeless voice.
“I could still come by for a minute,” he said.
“No, I’ve got grease on my face, and anyway you don’t really want to,” Janine said.
She was on the edge of tears. Duane tried to think of something he could say that would keep her from crying, but he didn’t feel very inspired.
“Maybe we can sneak off this weekend,” he said.
“You don’t really want to,” Janine said again, in toneless despair. Then she hung up.
CHAPTER 23
DUANE STOOD BY THE PAY PHONE A MOMENT WONDERING why he had tried to persuade Janine that what was actually true wasn’t true. She was an expert at hanging up in a way that would produce the maximum guilt feelings in him, but it was a trick she had used too often. He didn’t feel very guilty, and he knew that by morning Janine would have stopped despairing and be mad as hops.
It was far too late to go to the Howlers, but he didn’t particularly feel like going home either. He put another quarter in the pay phone and called his house.
“Who’s calling?” Minerva snapped.
“Just me,” Duane said.
“Well, I’m watching a movie, what do you want?” Minerva said. She loathed being interrupted when watching a movie, by casual callers or any callers.
“Is Karla home?” Duane asked.
“No, ain’t seen her,” Minerva snapped.
“Must be a pretty good movie,” Duane said.
“It’s Woody Allen, I laugh every time I see that man,” Minerva said, softening slightly. “All he has to do is walk around and I laugh till I flop on the floor.”
“If Karla shows up, tell her I went fishing,” Duane said.
“I will. ’Bye,” Minerva said, hanging up.
“I wonder who else I could call who would hang up on me,” Duane said to himself.
He started to drive out to the lake and realized he had no bait. He turned around and drove to the Kwik-Sack. Sonny sat behind the cash register, watching a talk show on his little four-inch Sony. He glanced up and smiled, but he looked depressed.
Duane went over and got a package of baloney, some cheese, a jar of pickles and a loaf of bread. He could dine on a baloney sandwich, with pickles and cheese, and use the rest of the baloney for bait. It wasn’t good bait, but then he wasn’t that serious a fisherman—just serious enough that fishing with no bait at all made him feel guilty.
“We almost lost our star pioneer tonight,” Duane said.
“What happened?”
“Old Man Balt fell out of his car and rolled off in the bar ditch,” Duane said. “He wasn’t hurt, though.”
“I think I’m losing my mind,” Sonny said.
“Why? You’re not in the oil business,” Duane said. He was joking but Sonny wasn’t.
“I’m having these lapses more often,” Sonny said. “I had one an hour ago. I started ringing up a sale and then I just forgot what I was doing. Toots wanted to buy some sandwiches for that girl he caught and I just completely forgot how to work the cash register. Toots finally had to ring up the sale himself.”
“You’re probably just cranky, like Minerva,” Duane said. “Don’t like to be interrupted when you’re watching TV.”
“I don’t mind being interrupted at all,” Sonny said. “It’s my mind that’s being interrupted. It just goes blank sometimes.”
He looked really worried. Duane didn’t say it, but the worried look was actually an improvement on the look of courteous neutrality that Sonny had worn for most of his life.
“Try ringing these groceries up,” Duane suggested.
Sonny looked at the cash register a moment, and then rang Duane’s purchases up perfectly.
“I don’t usually have two lapses in one night,” Sonny said. “But I’ve had two lapses in one week. Last week I had three or four. Maybe I have a brain tumor.”
“Now you’re really sounding like Minerva,” Duane said. “I don’t think you have a brain tumor, and I hope you won’t lose your mind before the centennial’s over, because we’ve still got a lot of organizing to do.”
“I think about Sam and Billy a lot,” Sonny said.
Sam was a man who had been a great help to Sonny in his youth, and Billy a simple-minded boy who had worked for Sam. Sonny had idolized Sam, and Billy had idolized Sonny. Both Sam and Billy had been dead for thirty years.
“I wish we could work them into the centennial, somehow,” Sonny said. “Sam kind of kept the town going at one time. Maybe there could be a skit or something.”
“There’s not too many left that remember those two,” Duane said, thinking that a skit about Sam the Lion, which was what everyone had called him, would be even more incomprehensible to most of the audience than those already planned. People had heard of Adam and Eve, and had some vague idea of who Ben Franklin was, but local figures, dead so long, were almost as lost to memory as Texasville itself. Duane couldn’t remember Sam and Billy very well himself.
“I just hate for them to be forgotten,” Sonny said.