“Most people are forgotten,” Duane said.
It struck him that Sonny’s problem was that he had forgotten himself throughout most of his own life. Only now, with his mind developing a tendency to wander, had he finally begun to remember that he was alive.
“Sam and Billy lived here,” Sonny said. “They were part of this place. Adam and Eve didn’t live here. Ben Franklin didn’t live here. It seems like the pageant ought to be more about people who did something for the county.”
It had taken months of discussion to get the pageant into even rough shape—the last thing Duane wanted was for it to unravel before they could even begin rehearsals.
“I just want it to be enough of a pageant that people will enjoy seeing it,” Duane said. “I think I’ll go find out if the crappie are biting.”
Sonny gave Duane his change and turned without comment back to the TV set.
CHAPTER 24
SHORTY HATED FISHING TRIPS. HE DIDN’T LIKE TO stay in the pickup worrying that Duane might never return, nor did he like riding in boats, with water all around. He didn’t like water at all. It was hard to chase anything in it. Once he had jumped out of the boat to chase a turtle and had promptly disappeared. The turtle also disappeared. Another turtle appeared and he tried to chase that, but it, too, disappeared. Turtles kept appearing and disappearing. When he tried to bark at them he almost drowned. Then he lost sight of the boat and had to swim all the way to shore, an effort that left him prostrate with exhaustion.
When he saw that they were approaching the lake, he began to whimper unhappily. Duane hated to hear him whimper.
“The last thing I need, after a day like this, is to listen to you whine, Shorty,” he said.
In fact, the day had not been notably more stressful than most other days. Every time he thought he had at last experienced every possible variation of stress, new variations appeared to surprise him. The effect of all of them was to make the prospect of a night on his boat, floating on the calm if smelly bosom of Lake Kickapoo, seem amazingly restful. All he would have to do was eat baloney-and-cheese sandwiches, watch the moon and occasionally put a new piece of baloney on his hook for the turtles to nibble.
The prospect lifted his spirits and he sped along through the dark mesquites, eating a sandwich he had put together with one hand under the very nose of Shorty. He gave Shorty a pickle as a consolation prize, and Shorty ate it.
The lake was low, thanks to a dry spring, and smelled muddy. A coon had cracked a mussel and was eating it on the boat dock when Duane drove down to the water. Shorty had gone to sleep and didn’t notice the coon, which ran off.
Duane took his fishing gear and little sack of groceries down to the boat, started the outboard and was soon out in the middle of the lake. The shore was rimmed with small houses, many with a vapor light stuck over the carport or dock. The lights at the far end of the lake, several miles away, seemed as remote as stars.
Duane decided that even the pretense of fishing was too much trouble. He cut the motor, ate another baloney sandwich and let the fishing go. He napped for an hour, but had a heavy dream about trying to check into a motel somewhere with Janine. The dream woke him. It seemed more restful just to lay in the boat and watch the stars.
All night he drifted on the lake, dozing now and then. Not long before dawn he heard a car, then saw it moving along the north shore of the lake, its headlights slanted across the water. The car pulled down to a dock, and the lights went out. Duane decided it was probably just teenagers looking for a place to do what he and Suzie Nolan had been about to do. If it had been burglars waiting to break into one of the lake houses, they wouldn’t have waited until almost daylight.
He lay back in the boat and watched the gray light spread over the water. The sky was absolutely clear, and soon the horizon turned a fiery gold, as if a forge stood just beyond the hills.
Duane was making himself a sandwich when he heard a soft sound in the water, a little splashing. He looked around, thinking the fish might be jumping, and saw a woman swimming right toward the boat. A Martian wouldn’t have startled him more. The woman was a powerful swimmer. She wore goggles and a swimming cap and evidently hadn’t noticed the boat. She was swimming right across the lake, which at that point was not quite half a mile wide.
Duane decided it must be some girl from Wichita, training for a swim team or something. When it seemed as if she would swim right into the boat, he started to call out, but then saw that she would miss it by five or six feet. He said nothing.
Just as the swimmer passed across the front of the boat, she saw it or sensed it and stopped swimming. Probably she was as startled as he was.
“Howdy,” Duane said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“I’m not scared,” the woman said. “I guess I just assumed I had this lake to myself.”
She lifted her goggles and Duane saw that it was Jacy. To the north, a black Mercedes, the one that had passed him at the stoplight, was parked at the dock below the old Farrow lake house, unused, so far as he knew, since the death of Jacy’s parents, Lois and Gene.
The boat had drifted toward her. She stroked once and caught the side.
“Don’t I know you from somewhere?” she asked, looking at him closely.
“Jacy, I’m Duane Moore,” he said. “We went together in high school for a while.”
“Duane?” she said, smiling. “My lord, what a place to run into an old boyfriend. Do you live in a boat now, or what?”
“No, I just hide out in one now and then when I’m depressed,” Duane said.
“I heard you got rich,” Jacy said. “What are you depressed about?”
“Nothing serious,” he said, remembering her loss.
“Did you get rich?”
“Yeah, pretty rich,” he said.
Duane had often wondered how Jacy might have changed, but with swim goggles on her forehead and her hair under a cap, all he could be sure of was that she still had the large blue eyes that had once mesmerized him. His memories of the flirty girl she had been didn’t go far toward describing the woman who looked up at him from the brown lake. The swim goggles had left marks on her face. He remembered how vain she had once been, studying her face or body for the slightest blemish. She bruised easily, and though she liked wrestling and rough-housing, she always scolded him fiercely if a bruise resulted.
Looking at her made him feel a little foolish—through the years he had been imagining that she was still the most beautiful woman in the world, forgetting that those same years might have roughhoused with her more decisively and destructively than he ever had. Though amply good-looking, she was no longer the supreme beauty of his fantasy, and he felt silly for having held it so long.
“Were you going to swim all the way across the lake and back?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Jacy said. “I lived on the Mediterranean a long time and got used to swimming in open water. This is about the best I can do around here.”
“I drive by Los Dolores once in a while,” he said. “I’ve often thought of ringing the doorbell since I heard you were there.”
“Why didn’t you?” she asked.
“I have to sit in a boat all night to get any privacy myself,” he said. “I’m shy about meddling with other people’s.”
“That’s mature of you,” Jacy said. “If you had rung my doorbell I’d probably have been rude.”
She seemed about to kick off for the muddy south shore, but then noticed the open jar of pickles he held in his hand. She reached in, took a pickle and ate it.
“An old girlfriend’s privilege,” she said, smiling. Then she lowered her goggles.
“I hope the Mediterranean don’t stink as bad as this frog pond,” Duane said. In the slight morning breeze the water smelled particularly froggy.
“Oh, the Mediterranean’s filthy,” Jacy said. “But it’s open water.”
She looked up at him through her goggles.
“Don’t you have a large family?”
she asked.
“Yep,” Duane said. “It’s what’s driven me to spending my nights in a motorboat.”
Jacy kicked off and backstroked lazily a time or two.
“Was it you that I went skinny-dipping with?” she asked.
“No, that was Lester,” he said.
“But I was your Esther Williams anyway, wasn’t I?” she said. She straightened in the water, raised her arms to a point over her head and did an Esther Williams back somersault, her long white legs pointing straight toward the sky for a moment.
When she came up she was close to the boat again.
“Ring the doorbell sometime, Duane,” Jacy said. “I’d like to hear about your family.”
Then she turned and swam smoothly away.
CHAPTER 25
WHEN DUANE DROVE HOME, FISHLESS, AT six-thirty A.M., it was to find the house in an uproar. Karla was walking around the kitchen, a phone in each hand, trying to keep up with fast-breaking events.
Minerva had installed herself at the kitchen table and was reading the want ads with painstaking care.
Nellie sat across from her, sobbing, Barbette in her lap. Barbette was crying too.
A sound of screaming and banging came from the pantry—it could only be Little Mike. Duane picked up Barbette, who immediately hushed, and walked over to the pantry to liberate Little Mike, who had been banging on the closed door with a can of soup. The minute Duane released him he ran outside into the grass burs, sat down in them, and resumed his screaming. He was naked.
“Dickie didn’t go to Ruidoso,” Karla said, covering the receiver of one phone for a moment.
Duane had assumed that much, since the pickup he had loaned his son was parked in the driveway, looking as if it had just returned from a trip across Mongolia. Dickie was the only person Duane knew who could take a perfectly new pickup and reduce it to rent-a-wreck status in only a few hours.
“Is he in jail, dead or what?” Duane asked, rocking Barbette in his arms.
“No, he’s married,” Karla said. “He and Billie Anne have been secretly married for three weeks and didn’t even tell us. Billie Anne’s mother is having a nervous breakdown at the news.”
“She won’t be the only one,” Duane said, thinking of Suzie and Jenny. “Psychiatrists will make plenty off this one.”
“You have to go get the twins,” Karla said. “I’m talking to the camp director now. They got kicked out, just like you predicted.”
“What are you crying about?” Duane asked Nellie. It was almost a relief to think of Dickie married, however briefly, and he had never in his wildest dreams imagined the twins lasting a full term at church camp.
“Her fiancé disappointed her,” Minerva said. “I’m looking for a new job. A household like this is no place for an old lady with stomach cancer.”
“I thought you had a brain tumor,” Duane said. “It was last year that you had stomach cancer.”
“Anyway, it’s no place for a lady as sick as I am, whatever I got,” Minerva said testily. She took her illnesses with dead seriousness and did not like to be twitted about them just because she hadn’t died of any of them yet.
Karla hung up both phones and immediately disconnected them.
“Will you hush that crying?” she said to Nellie. “Joe Coombs never meant to be unfaithful to you. It’s just that after the twenty-fifth beer he goes blind and can’t tell one woman from another.”
“What’d he do?” Duane inquired.
“He tried to kiss Billie Anne, my own sister-in-law,” Nellie wailed.
“He’s told you a million times he thought it was you,” Karla said. “He’s real contrite, but if you want to break off the engagement, that’s your business.”
Little Mike came waddling back in, a picture of misery, seven or eight grass burs stuck to each fat little leg. He tried to climb up on his mother’s lap, but Nellie stiff-armed him and he went reeling over to Minerva, who caught him by the arm and swiftly extracted the grass burs before going back to her scrutiny of the want ads.
“What’d the twins do?” Duane asked.
“Julie posed for naked Polaroids and Jack climbed up into the rafters of the shithouse and dropped a brick into one of the toilets,” Karla said. “I guess the toilet broke and pretty much flooded things. They said they’d appreciate it if you’d come and get them before lunch.”
“Who took the Polaroids?” Duane asked.
“A sixth-grader from Nocona,” Karla said. “Where were you all night while I was going crazy?”
“I told Minerva to tell you I was going fishing,” Duane said.
Karla turned a stern eye on Minerva, who ignored it.
“When people interrupt my movies I’m apt to forget their alibis,” Minerva said.
“Joe could have told it was Billie Anne if he’d looked ’cause she’s a lot taller than me,” Nellie sobbed.
“What became of Junior?” Duane asked. “Did he ever calm down?”
“He’s asleep in one of the guest rooms,” Karla said. “He got so calm his legs stopped working. We had to carry him in the house.”
“He wasn’t so much calm as glassy-eyed drunk,” Minerva observed.
“I think he wants to room here for a while until he can straighten things out at home,” Karla said.
“Where’s the newly weds?” Duane asked.
“They went to Bowie on a honeymoon,” Nellie said, still morose. “I’ll never get a honeymoon.”
“Bowie?” Duane said. It was a small town of no distinction about fifty miles away. As a honeymoon spot it seemed an unlikely choice.
“You’ve had plenty of honeymoons,” Karla reminded Nellie. “You have one every time you meet a boy.”
“I caught TB on my honeymoon,” Minerva said. That surprised everyone. It was the first indication they had had that Minerva had ever been married.
Having revealed that much, Minerva clammed up and refused to provide any more details.
“Just tell us what color eyes he had,” Karla asked, as Duane left the room.
He put Barbette in her crib and looked in on Junior Nolan, who was lying with his head hanging off the bed in one of the many guest rooms. Karla had thoughtfully put a bucket under his head, in case he woke up feeling puky.
Duane shaved and went out to the garden to have a word with Karla, who was now hard at work on her tomatoes. Just as he walked outdoors Bobby Lee drove up—summoned, no doubt, by Nellie. Bobby Lee’s was the shoulder of choice when she needed one to cry on.
“Poor little Nellie, she sounds distraught,” Bobby Lee said, coming over for a minute. Duane and Karla maintained a hardhearted front.
“Did you get that bit out of the hole?” Duane asked.
Bobby Lee looked blank, as if he had forgotten the meaning of words such as “bit” and “hole.”
“Oh, that thing,” he said, and went into the house without further explanation.
“Tomatoes are considered a fruit in some countries,” Karla said in the tone she was likely to take when furious.
“What’d I do now?” Duane asked.
“You’ll know when you get the divorce papers,” Karla said—a favorite line. She threw a green tomato at him. It missed and rolled toward Shorty, who regarded it with grave attention.
“Let’s take a trip before you get in worse trouble than you’re in,” Karla said.
“Okay, as long as it ain’t to Bowie,” Duane said agreeably.
“They just went to Bowie because there’s a café there that makes gravy Dickie likes,” Karla said.
Duane decided Karla was operating solely on intuition, with no real knowledge to back it up. In any case he was in a mood to live dangerously.
“Guess who came swimming across Lake Kickapoo this morning, while I was fishing,” he said.
“Probably Priscilla Presley, with your luck,” Karla said.
“No, Jacy,” he said. “She’s kind of a long-distance swimmer. She was swimming across the lake.”
“T
hey say she’s aged a lot,” Karla said. “I’d like to meet her. I think she’s interesting.”
They saw another pickup approaching. This one belonged to Joe Coombs, who was coming to try and make up with Nellie.
“Oh, no,” Karla said. “What if Joe and Bobby Lee get in a fight?”
“Joe will win,” Duane said. “Bobby Lee couldn’t whip Little Mike, unless he surprised him.”
Joe, scrubbed to an unusual state of cleanliness, parked his pickup, waved stiffly at them and hurried into the house. He had had the forethought to provide himself with a box of chocolate-covered cherries, Nellie’s favorite candy.
“Maybe we oughta start going to church again,” Karla said.
“Again?” Duane said. “I can’t remember that we ever went to church.”
“We didn’t, but we made the kids go to Sunday school a few times,” Karla said.
“I thought you said religion was just for cowards,” Duane said.
Karla looked thoughtful. “It is for cowards,” she said. “Maybe I’m feeling cowardly. I’m about ready to resort to magic.”
“I’m not,” Duane said.
“Just make them give you all those dirty Polaroids when you get down to that camp,” Karla said. “And I want you to lecture the twins all the way home.”
“I’ve been lecturing them since the minute they were born,” Duane reminded her, but Karla, obviously dying to know what Bobby Lee and Joe Coombs were finding to say to one another, was already walking toward the house.
CHAPTER 26
DUANE WHISTLED FOR SHORTY AND TWENTY MINUTES later was lying in bed with Suzie Nolan, feeling only slightly let down. It had taken at least fifteen of the twenty minutes to drive to Suzie’s house. She had been in the laundry room doing a washing when Duane walked in. The washing machine made a sound that seemed sexual as it thumped the clothes inside it.
What occurred between him and Suzie was in the nature of a gulp, and didn’t seem quite as thrilling as it might have if they had got to gulp it in the car outside the hospital. The gulp had been far from boring, but when it was over Duane found that he could not entirely banish from his mind thoughts of consequences.