He was rather vain about his beard, which was thicker and glossier than many of the beards under cultivation. Both Bobby Lee and Eddie Belt sported scraggly growths that made them look like depraved fugitives from a chain-saw movie.
In general the beard ordinance was creating anxiety. A water tank had been hauled onto the courthouse lawn but nobody had been ducked yet. Duane’s son-in-law-to-be, Joe Coombs, was a likely candidate for ducking because he kept stumbling up every morning or two and shaving off his new beard before he was fully awake.
“Why don’t you get Dickie to play Adam?” Duane suggested. “He thinks he is Adam.”
“What makes you think I’d ever speak to him again, the little rat!” Jenny said.
Duane recalled that Suzie Nolan had also called Dickie a little rat. He himself had not seen the little rat lately. Evidently he and Billie Anne were in a phase of wedded bliss. Karla kept Billie Anne on the phone at least an hour a day making sure her baby boy was being cared for properly. When Duane attempted to lecture her about interfering mother-in-laws he was met with stony looks.
“He’s my own child, I don’t guess I have to stop being interested in him just because he married some girl we barely know,” Karla said. “She might not know about botulism and things.”
“Botulism?” Duane said. “After all the drugs that kid’s taken, a little spot of botulism wouldn’t stand a chance.”
Meanwhile it seemed a long ride home. Duane wondered if there was anyone else in town Jenny might enjoy going on rides with.
He didn’t dislike her. He was even rather interested in her—he was getting on quite well with one of his son’s former girlfriends; perhaps he would get along well with another. But Jenny, like Karla, contained a manic stream of talk, and in her case he didn’t have to say a word to unleash the flood. The minute she sat down in the car seat, the stream flowed out over a somnolent Shorty, who had gotten so used to Jenny that he went to sleep the moment she began to talk.
“It sure is a good thing Lester fell in love,” Jenny said. “I’d never have the energy to direct this pageant if I had to keep breaking his heart three times a day.”
“It’s kind of lucky for Lester too,” Duane observed.
Jenny looked startled for a second, as if it had not really occurred to her that Lester might not enjoy having his heart broken three times a day.
“Do you think Jacy would ever agree to be in the pageant?” she asked. “She’d be a good Eve.”
Duane said nothing, but Shorty opened one red eye for a moment.
“Maybe Karla wouldn’t mind asking her,” Jenny said. “I’d never have the nerve to ask her myself.”
“I guess you could try asking Karla,” he said. He had no idea what protocol prevailed in Karla’s friendship with Jacy. Karla gave out no details about their activities. When she mentioned Jacy at all her references were apt to be cryptic.
“Jacy’s only been married to Frenchmen,” she said one day. “All her husbands were Frenchmen.”
Duane waited hopefully, but further details were not forthcoming.
“Her children speak perfect English,” she said, at another time. “They teach kids to speak a bunch of languages over there.”
Nellie, fallen from perfection, was sprawled on a couch, watching a game show and listening to Joe Coombs breathe into the telephone. Duane tried to remember when he’d even heard Nellie speak a complete sentence in any language, but decided he would only get depressed if he started comparing his children to Jacy’s. Maybe hers weren’t really as brilliant as Karla made them sound.
Jenny Marlow was rereading the Texasville skit, lead pencil in hand.
“I think I’m getting an anxiety attack,” she said. “I never expected to be made director of the whole pageant.”
“Duane, if I let you out of playing George Washington, will you play one of the Mr. Browns in the Texasville skit?” she asked, a little later.
“Which would I be, the one who drank himself to death, or the one who lived with rattlesnakes?” he asked.
“Ed Brown, the rattlesnake one,” Jenny said. “There’s a legend that he used to carry the snakes around at night. He’d have them wrapped around his arms and even around his neck. He’d sing and the snakes would rattle and hiss. They say they made a rhythm sort of like a cha-cha.”
“I never heard that one,” Duane said. “A cha-cha?”
“A cha-cha,” Jenny said. “I think I’ll write that in. A skit like that could be real effective, even if we just use little harmless snakes.”
CHAPTER 32
A FEW DAYS LATER DUANE FOUND HIMSELF DRIVING the road to Dallas again. It was a two-hour drive and not among his favorites. This time he was accompanied by Karla and Sonny. Karla had come along to keep their spirits up, but in fact none of their spirits were up. Sonny had had his most disturbing lapse to date, and they were taking him to Dallas to see a neurologist.
The previous Sunday night he had walked out of the Kwik-Sack and disappeared. Customers came in and stood around, thinking he was in the bathroom or had just stepped over to his hotel to get something he forgot.
But an hour passed, and Sonny didn’t show up. Roughnecks made themselves hot dogs or barbecue sandwiches, used the little microwave, left piles of bills and change by the cash register and went back to their rigs. The Kwik-Sack did a good business in the early-morning hours: soon there was so much change on the counter that the roughnecks had to get a sack to put it in.
Bobby Lee wandered in and became immediately paranoid. Anything out of the ordinary always made him paranoid. He immediately hit the CB in his pickup and woke Duane.
“I think Libyan terrorists have kidnapped Sonny Crawford,” he said.
Duane leaped out of bed. Bobby Lee had a way of issuing his most paranoid conjectures in a slow, reasonable voice that made them seem totally plausible, if only for a few seconds. Duane had most of his clothes on before he realized that it was unlikely Libyan terrorists had chosen the Kwik-Sack as a target.
“It said on TV they sent in a bunch of hit squads,” Bobby Lee reminded him, when Duane got back on the radio to voice doubts.
“It didn’t say they sent them to Thalia,” Duane said.
“We was the top oil-producing county in Texas one year,” Bobby Lee reminded him. “It could be they see us as a threat to the Persian glut.”
“The Persian Gulf,” Duane corrected, wishing he hadn’t put his clothes on so quickly.
Karla turned her tiny bed light on and began to read Play girl.
“The Persian Gulf is where the glut comes from,” Duane said. Sometimes he had a compulsion to try and make Bobby Lee be reasonable.
“Anyway, they got him,” Bobby Lee said. “Maybe they’re hiding in the schoolhouse.”
Duane turned off the CB.
“Bobby Lee thinks Libyan terrorists got Sonny,” he informed Karla.
“I wonder where they find so many models with big dicks,” Karla said. “There aren’t that many big ones around here.”
“Didn’t you hear what I said?” Duane asked.
“Bobby Lee deserves to have his head bit off for waking me up,” Karla said. “Now I’ll just have to lay here all night and have fantasies.”
“Come to town with me and bite it off,” Duane suggested. “I might even help you.”
Karla decided to take him up on the offer, which made Shorty so apprehensive that it took Duane five minutes to catch him. Shorty wasn’t used to having Karla along on middle-of-the-night trips. In Shorty’s view, Karla was bad medicine. He slunk under Minerva’s Buick and stayed there until Duane poked him out with a broom.
“You could just leave the little son-of-a-bitch,” Karla said, once Duane caught Shorty and flung him in the back of the pickup.
“You’re more loyal to that dog than you are to me,” she added.
“I am not,” he said.
Just as he said it seven coyotes crossed the road in front of them. Shorty leaped out of the speeding pickup t
o pursue them. Duane braked, horrified.
“Eat him, coyotes!” Karla said, leaning out the window.
Shorty soon came trotting back, out of breath.
“See, coyotes won’t even eat him,” Karla said.
“That was a lot of coyotes,” she observed, a mile or two later. “I guess we’re surrounded by coyotes out here.
“It makes me anxious, Duane,” she added, as they topped a hill. Thalia was only a mile away, a tiny, peaceful cluster of lights under the deep black sky.
“Coyotes won’t hurt you,” he said.
“They might carry off Little Mike and raise him like Mowgli,” Karla said.
“Who?” Duane asked. More and more frequently his wife’s statements were incomprehensible.
“Mowgli, in the Jungle Book movie,” Karla said. “We took the twins to see it.”
“I didn’t,” Duane said. “You must have gone with one of your boyfriends.”
Karla looked at the peaceful lights of Thalia.
“It’s a nice little town at night, isn’t it?” she said.
“I still don’t understand about the movie you took your boyfriend to,” Duane said.
“It was about a little boy who got raised by coyotes,” Karla said. “Walt Disney.”
“I didn’t know Walt Disney got raised by coyotes,” he said. He drove past the pipeyard with the towering, expensive rigs sitting in it. A pipeyard wouldn’t make a bad place for a terrorist to hide somebody, but all he saw in his was a big jack rabbit nibbling a blade of grass beside some two-inch pipe.
They arrived at the Kwik-Sack to find half the roughnecks in the county standing around with their deer rifles or their .44 Magnums. A few of the deer rifles had starlight scopes—their owners were sighting them in on distant telephone poles. It was clear that if there were any terrorists around they had picked the wrong town.
Bobby Lee sat on the tailgate of his pickup, discussing the Persian glut in maddeningly reasonable tones.
Toots Burns, the sheriff, drove up just as Duane and Karla did. He looked horrified.
“What happened, did some war start?” he asked.
“Libyan terrorists,” Bobby Lee replied calmly.
“No war started—Bobby Lee’s brain went boing-boing,” Karla said, making her fingers into a propeller. Bobby Lee looked hurt. Karla went into the Kwik-Sack and got herself some coffee. Duane followed her in, hoping to find that Sonny had left a note explaining his absence. Considering the mood everyone was in, even a lengthy note could have been overlooked.
But no note was found. He got himself some coffee and went back outside. It was a warm, beautiful spring night, with dawn not far off. Toots Burns was nervously trying to get the crowd to sheath their weapons.
“One of them guns could go off and we wouldn’t want to be waking people up at this hour,” he said. Toots had never been a particularly forceful sheriff. He liked to park his police car in front of the courthouse and drink beer until he fell asleep. Once asleep, an army could have marched past without awakening him.
Somehow the quietly unreasonable Bobby Lee had managed to impose his fantasy on the restless crowd.
“There could be greasy little fuckers crawling all around,” one roughneck said.
Duane, unpersuaded, took a walk over to the courthouse. Shorty went with him. Karla sat in the pickup drinking coffee. Duane walked around the square and sauntered back to the Kwik-Sack, having seen no sign of Libyans.
“It’s just the same old town,” he said.
The roughnecks got in their pickups and drove off in ones and twos, looking annoyed. Some had clearly hoped for an opportunity to hone their paramilitary skills.
“It’s depressing to just have to go to work and not even shoot,” one said.
“We could shoot Bobby Lee,” another suggested. “He’s the one got our hopes up.”
“It was just a theory,” Bobby Lee admitted. He abruptly decided he was late for breakfast.
“I wish your beard would grow faster,” Karla said, before he left.
“Why?” Bobby Lee inquired. He wore a pained expression.
“Because it makes you look like a crazed idiot,” Karla said.
“You ain’t never nice to me,” Bobby Lee said as he left.
Karla and Duane went down to the old hotel that Sonny used as his home. He lived in a small apartment in it—just a room, really. They thought he might have taken a long walk for some reason. He had once liked to walk—people would come upon him far out on some little country road and stop and offer him rides, thinking his car must have broken down. Sonny would just smile and decline. Some people commented at the time that he must be mildly touched—why else would anyone take walks?
He was not in his room at the hotel, though. It didn’t contain much, just a bed, chair and card table. The card table was covered with brochures and stock offerings for the little companies that Sonny invested in. Duane leafed through some of them. They seemed like odd companies. One made earmuffs and another a machine that graded eggs according to size. He glanced through a third—it described how chicken shit could be turned into methane and used to fuel the world of the future. There were piles of checks on the card table and an old adding machine, all rather dusty. The sun was well up by then.
“Duane, come here,” Karla called, from somewhere upstairs.
He found her at the window of a tiny room on the top floor. She was looking across the roofs of the laundrymat and a hardware store, toward the jail.
The view allowed her to look into the ruined shell of the old picture show. The theater had closed in the early fifties, a victim of dwindling business. Several years later, during a violent storm, it burned down. Only the marquee, a fragment of the balcony, the ticket booth, and the stone outer wall were left standing. The old woman who owned the show died before she could even collect insurance on the building. For a few years, her children tried without success to sell the shell. Then Sonny finally bought it for two thousand dollars. At first he talked of rebuilding it and reopening it as a movie theater, but he never did. The stone wall, the marquee and the little ticket booth continued to stand, each getting shakier by the year. The City Council eventually persuaded Sonny to knock down the wall—it was so unstable that it might have blown over in a windstorm, smashing someone. He knocked it down and tried to sell the stones, but without success, though Karla bought a few of them just to be friendly. Now only the marquee, ticket booth and a small fragment of balcony remained.
Duane was surprised to find Karla crying. He looked out the window and saw Sonny, sitting in the fragment of balcony in one of the two seats that had not burned. There was nothing below him but the charred remains of the original floor, and nothing above him but the blue morning sky.
“I could cry forever, looking at him sitting there,” Karla said. “It just makes me want to cry forever.”
They left the hotel and went around to the theater. The door beside the little ticket booth had stood open for at least twenty years.
“Hey, Luke, let’s go have breakfast,” Duane said, stepping inside. Sometimes he adopted Karla’s nickname for Sonny.
In a minute Sonny came down, looking very embarrassed.
“Oh, no,” he said. “Is anybody watching the Kwik-Sack?”
“I think Toots is there,” Duane said.
After a moment of awkwardness, Karla went over and gave Sonny a big hug.
“You worry me so much I’m even losing my gift of gab,” she said in a teary voice.
Then she broke free, sat on the curb and burst into tears.
“And I’ve been too hard on Bobby Lee, too, and now I feel terrible,” she said. “What were you doing up there?”
“I was watching movies,” Sonny said. “I mean, I was imagining I was watching movies. I don’t remember leaving the Kwik-Sack though. Maybe I’m kind of like a sleepwalker.”
“Let’s go eat some breakfast, we’ll all feel better,” Duane said. He waited until Karla stopped crying, and he
lped her up.
“Bobby Lee thought Libyan terrorists got you,” he said, to make conversation.
Sonny looked depressed.
“It’ll be all over town,” he said sadly. “People will think I’m crazy. I guess the Kwik-Sack will lose business.”
“It didn’t lose any last night,” Duane assured him. “You made a good seventy-five dollars while you were watching that movie.”
“I told Bobby Lee he looked like a crazed idiot,” Karla said. “I’ve got terrible guilt feelings.”
“We can take him to breakfast and maybe he’ll forgive you,” Duane said. “I doubt it, though. Bobby Lee likes to think he’s good-looking.”
Fortunately Genevieve Morgan, who worked the morning shift for Sonny at the Kwik-Sack, had already arrived and was mopping the store. Genevieve had run the local café for many years, but had gone broke in the seventies, just before the boom started. Her husband drowned in a boating accident on Lake Kickapoo. Sonny had given her work in several of his little enterprises over the years. She had managed his laundry-mat and supervised his video parlor. Some thought Sonny had opened the Kwik-Sack mainly in order to have a way to hire Genevieve.
“I wonder if she heard I was missing?” Sonny said as they drove by.
They found Bobby Lee gloomily drinking beer in front of the TV. His wife, Carolyn, worked as a dispatcher for a trucking company in Wichita Falls, and was already gone.
“I’m sorry I said you looked like a crazed idiot,” Karla said, when Bobby Lee crawled into the pickup. “I was outa my head with worry.”
“You was not,” Bobby Lee said, his vanity deeply wounded. “If a Libyan terrorist got me you wouldn’t pay my ransom, even if it was only thirty cents.”
“Of course I would, sweetie,” Karla said, giving him a few kisses on the neck.
“I don’t think anybody would pay my ransom,” Bobby Lee said. “Nobody ever liked me in this town.”
“Shut up about terrorists,” Duane said. “There’s not a terrorist within five thousand miles of here.”
“There’s one right in this pickup, and you’re married to her,” Bobby Lee informed him. “Karla Moore’s a terrorist. She’s a big-mouth terrorist. She terrorizes me every time I get near her.”