“A six-foot-five man takes up a lot of room,” she added.
Duane found that he had to grit his teeth when Suzie talked about Dickie, as she did frequently. Just as Duane would conclude that he was beginning to be in love with Suzie, a conclusion based on what seemed to him an unusually good sexual relationship, she would drift casually into a conversation about what a prize Dickie was. Duane found himself becoming more and more passionate about her. Suzie seemed richly responsive, and yet it became increasingly clear that she regarded him as someone sweet and cuddly. It was Dickie who elicited more lip-smacking remarks.
“That Billie Anne probably don’t know what a prize she’s got,” Suzie said. “She’s not old enough to know. You should be proud of yourself, Duane, for having a son like that.”
The remark came while Duane was putting on his socks—he continued to fail in his resolve to keep them on.
“I guess I am proud,” he said, though in fact he felt a little chagrined. Several times he wanted to ask what Dickie did that was so special, but he always changed his mind and choked off the question. If he himself hadn’t done it yet, or done it as well, then it was probably better not to know.
Had he asked, though, he had no doubt that Suzie would have told him. She was quiet, but not reticent, and would describe her own sexual responses as casually as if she were reporting on a high school basketball game. She regarded her body complacently and took attentive, though not compulsive, care of it. She considered it a handy plaything and frequently played with it. She loved to take little naps—her “yawny” periods, she called them—and upon awakening would always let her hand stray downward to give herself a little touch. It seemed to Duane that she spent much of the day in light masturbation, frequently interrupted but just as frequently resumed. Her mysterious smile contained a large component of laziness—Suzie was always willing just to lay back and rest, and usually willing to let someone do to her what she had just been doing to herself.
“That Dickie,” she said often. “That little rat, he’s just a treasure.”
Duane spent much of the meeting wondering what his son had to offer that caused women to talk about him with such appetite.
The Reverend G. G. Rawley had been sullenly silent throughout the last two meetings. Duane knew it was a tactical silence. G.G. was just waiting. He had taken to bringing his Bible to the meetings. When a proposal came up that seemed to him to be in patent violation of the Scriptures, he would tap the Bible with a heavy forefinger. Now and then he would open it, purse his lips and pretend that he was reading the rule that had just been violated. He became a kind of silent umpire, calling moral balls and strikes in his head—mainly strikes. His attitude became patiently condescending. When the time came, the Lord’s team would annihilate the sinners’ team with a few towering home runs.
The last item on the agenda that evening was the selection of a carpenter to build the replica of Texasville on the courthouse lawn. It was to be called Old Texasville, to help people get the point.
“That which the heathen raises up can always be struck by lightning,” G.G. pointed out. “And if it ain’t rainy it can be struck with crowbars and a sledgehammer or two.”
Duane awoke from his revery about what Jacy and Shorty might be doing to discover that the committee was about to award the plum assignment of building Old Texasville to none other than Richie Hill, the one carpenter in town that he couldn’t stand.
“I don’t think much of Richie’s work,” he said. “He can’t even put in a garbage disposal right.”
The committee looked embarrassed.
“But Duane,” Jenny said, “we just voted to give it to him. We thought you were abstaining.”
Duane felt silly. He had not even noticed the vote. Now if he tried to wrest the job away from Richie everyone would know the carpenter had once had an affair with his wife.
“Well, it’s hard to have confidence in a man who can’t put in a garbage disposal,” he said lightly, and let the matter drop.
He was halfway home before he remembered that Janine thought she was pregnant. He had promised her he would come by. He swung around in the road and drove back to Thalia. Without Shorty in the front seat the pickup seemed strangely light—even a little unbalanced, although Shorty only weighed thirty pounds.
He realized he would soon have to explain Shorty’s absence to Karla and the kids. He had no idea what he would say. A few hours earlier he would have assumed it would take the Budweiser Clydesdales to drag Shorty away from him. Shorty’s obsession with him was a staple of conversation in Thalia, and had been for years.
His defection would no doubt become a staple too. Duane felt stunned by it. On the whole it was more surprising than the oil bust. Rational men knew that oil could always go down, if only because there was always the possibility that somewhere, in some country where no one had thought to look, a strange old man like C. L. Sime might find a trillion barrels of it.
But Shorty had been at his side since his days as a short, fat puppy. He had seemed like a dog born to worship, and Duane happened to be the one person he worshipped. And yet, he had just trotted away. Jacy hadn’t even had to beg, plead or cajole. Shorty had just switched.
It was profoundly puzzling.
“It’s stupid to get involved with dogs,” Duane remarked, as he pulled up in front of Janine’s house.
A few minutes later he felt he could expand his remarks considerably. It was also stupid to get involved with someone who would get pregnant by Lester at a time when Lester was not only still married but indicted on seventy-two counts of bank fraud.
Janine, so confident in the Dairy Queen, so saucy on the tennis court, had had the wind taken out of her sails, the light out of her eyes, and the appetite out of her stomach. She existed primarily as a lack, too weak even to open the door for him. He found her lying on her bed, covered by a wreath of wet Kleenex. The cartons from a couple of drugstore pregnancy tests were in the wastebasket. The person who invented pregnancy tests must be at least as rich as the person who invented fertility drugs, Duane decided.
“There’s no hope and there never will be none again,” Janine said, in her dullest, most broken voice.
“Yes there is hope,” Duane said. “People survive lots worse messes than being pregnant by Lester. Your family could have been killed by a tornado.”
“But mine was already killed in a car wreck,” Janine pointed out.
Duane felt like an idiot for not remembering that fact before he spoke. The sight of a woman plunged into total despair always unnerved him and caused him to say stupid things. It was a common problem, since every woman he knew, however merry they might look, stood only a step or two from total despair.
‘I’ll never have a family,” Janine went on, seeming to gain strength from the very blackness of her own plight. “I’ll never have a single thing I want, especially not you.”
“I thought you were in love with Lester now,” Duane said.
“No, we’re just dating,” Janine said. “I hate his tall ugly guts for getting me and his wife pregnant both.”
“I don’t think he got his wife pregnant,” Duane said. “He might be telling the truth about that.”
“Who got her pregnant then, a stork?” Janine snapped, brushing the wet Kleenex off her lap and sitting up.
“I think Dickie might have gotten her pregnant,” Duane said.
Janine thought that one over carefully.
“Yeah, he probably did, I forgot they was even dating,” Janine said.
“I think it was a little more than dating,” he said.
“No, it’s just dating, unless there’s a commitment,” Janine said dogmatically. “I will admit Dickie’s cute—he just don’t have no morals. I’m surprised you didn’t raise your kids better, Duane.”
“I’m surprised I didn’t either,” Duane said. “Do you want to have an abortion?”
“I certainly don’t,” Janine snapped. “I’d eat grass off the lawns and be
disgraced before I’d give up this little curly-headed baby I’m gonna have.”
“Curly-headed?” Duane inquired. Neither Lester nor Janine could be described as curlyheaded.
“Well, that’s the way it is in my dreams of happiness,” Janine said.
“What does Lester think about this development?” Duane asked.
“He thinks I’ll make a real good mother,” Janine reported proudly. “He thinks we might want to hire a PR person to explain things to the county so I won’t lose the next election.”
Duane wondered if he himself had developed a brain sickness of some kind. For the past several months it had seemed to him that the citizens of Thalia were talking utter nonsense. Each wildly aberrant remark, many of them miles beyond the boundaries of rationality, would be followed by one even more aberrant. Who had ever heard of hiring a PR firm to protect a county clerk’s job?
“Lester says everything’s just images, these days,” Jenny said. “He says a good PR person can show things in a positive light. My psychiatrist thinks it’s good to be positive too.”
She opened a package of gum, of which she kept a plentiful supply close at hand, and popped two sticks into her mouth.
“Lester thinks he might get a reduced sentence if he can show that he has lots of responsibilities here at home,” she said.
“Could be,” Duane said.
To his surprise Janine came over and curled up in his lap.
“I feel like we’re just best friends now, so you behave,” she said, poking him sternly in the crotch to emphasize her point.
“I’m behaving,” Duane assured her.
She put her head back against his chest and lay still for several minutes, the working of her jaws and the popping of gum the only sound. Duane thought for a moment she might be asleep, but when he looked he saw that her eyes were not only open, they were glowing. The despairing creature blanketed in Kleenex had vanished, and a young woman in the bloom of early pregnancy had taken her place. Total despair might be only two steps away, but it was also, in some cases, only two steps wide, as well.
“My tits already feel bigger,” Janine said, in a soft happy voice. “I’m glad you’re here—it’s nice when there’s a man that behaves.”
Duane held her for a while, marveling at the changeability of women. It seemed to him he had been the same forever—it would require a decade for him to change as much as a woman could change in a few minutes.
“You don’t really hate Lester’s tall ugly guts, do you?” Duane ventured.
“Naw,” Janine said cheerfully. “I just said that. Don’t you ever say things like that?”
Duane didn’t answer. Now that she had risen like a bubble from total despair to cheerful equanimity his own thoughts had drifted back to Shorty, who was spending his first night in his new home. Duane wondered if he was homesick.
Janine poked Duane’s crotch again—more gently this time—to see if he was still behaving.
“I guess I can trust you,” she said, evidently a little surprised by his impeccable behavior. “Do you think I’ll get fired?”
“I doubt it,” Duane said. With things as they were, it seemed unlikely anyone would get too outraged over the fact that the county clerk was pregnant out of wedlock.
“Will you loan me the money to build a fence around my house?” Janine asked. “If it’s a boy it’ll be out in the streets in no time.”
“I can probably manage that,” Duane said. “What will it be doing if it’s a girl?”
“Little girly things, of course,” Janine said, unpeeling another stick of gum. It was obvious that she was no longer depressed about being pregnant. In fact, he had never seen her look so happy or so appealing.
“It’ll be something that’s mine,” she said wonderingly. “I’ve always wanted something that’s mine.”
Duane tried to weigh that statement against his twenty erratic years of parenthood. Only rarely, and then for fleeting moments, did he have any sense that his children were his, in the way Janine seemed to mean. Of course he had produced the seed that met the egg which formed them, but otherwise, from birth on, they had mainly seemed like little strangers, belonging to themselves, not to him or Karla. Of course at times they swept close to him and he found himself loving them keenly; at other times their orbits swung apart and he was mainly conscious of the distance between himself and them, as they raced around Texas like human comets, trailing crises in their wake.
But why tell such things to Janine? It might be different for her. It might be very different.
“Duane, are you upset because we’re just gonna be friends now?” Janine asked, feeling, for a third time, between his legs. She seemed to have a new confidence in her appeal and felt the need to keep checking.
“Oh, well, I’ll live,” Duane said, trying to walk the fine line between cheerfulness and depression which the question seemed to require.
“We’ll still do lots of things together,” she assured him. “You have to help me think of names, for one thing. Names of boys, particularly. If it’s a girl I’ve already got the name picked out.”
“What?” Duane asked.
“Danielle,” Janine said. “Don’t you think that’s a great name?”
“Pretty great,” Duane said.
CHAPTER 41
ALL DUANE COULD THINK OF, DRIVING HOME, WAS how nice it would be just to go to bed. He was so tired he felt it would even be nice to go to bed in a vast waterbed. But he arrived to find his house a blaze of lights and confusion. Even his backyard was a blaze of lights and confusion.
Only Minerva, reading the National Enquirer at the kitchen table, seemed unconfused.
“Little Mike climbed up the satellite dish,” she said. “I never knew a kid his age who could climb like he can. I guess he’ll climb Mount Rushmore before he’s through.”
“Isn’t that the one with the Presidents’ faces?” Duane asked. “Why would he want to climb that?”
“Why would he want to climb a satellite dish?” Minerva said.
Sure enough, Little Mike was perched on the very top of the dish, crooning his favorite word, “Ball.”
Karla, looking grim, stood on a kitchen chair a few feet below him, promising amnesty from all punishment if he would just climb down.
“You try,” Karla said to Duane. “I’ve stood on this chair so long I’m getting dizzy.”
Duane got up on the chair but found Little Mike well beyond his reach.
“Where’s Julie?” Duane asked. “He’d come down for her.”
Little Mike worshipped Julie and would immediately do anything she commanded. He was also apt to do things she didn’t command, such as spitting on her. Little Mike regarded spitting as an act of love, and was always shocked when Julie kicked him into the furniture for spraying her with saliva.
“I have no idea where the twins are,” Karla said. “I think they left. They said it was getting too crazy around here, which is right.”
“I’m gonna whip your little butt if you don’t get down here right now,” she yelled at Little Mike, abandoning the amnesty tactic.
“Where’s Nellie?” Duane asked. “She’s his mother, let her get him down.”
“No, Nellie’s over at Joe Coombs’s explaining why she don’t want to be engaged to him anymore,” Karla said.
Duane heard sobbing from the swimming pool and saw the long skinny figure of Billie Anne paddling on a blue floatie in the middle of the pool. She was sobbing loudly.
“What’s wrong with her?” he asked.
“Dickie smashed all their new furniture with a tire iron,” Karla said. “You oughtn’t to leave me alone on days like this, Duane. I can’t even get drunk. The faster I drink vodka the faster things happen that sober me up.”
“Little things like a broken engagement and a broken marriage?” Duane said.
“Yeah, and broken furniture,” Karla said. “Plus I’m real worried about Junior. The bank called his notes today.”
“They
called his notes?” Duane said.
That was a real shocker. Everyone knew Junior was deeply in debt, but no one expected the bank to actually call his notes. Even he hadn’t expected matters to go that far, and he considered himself a skeptic where banks were concerned. He had expected Junior to muddle through, perhaps losing his ranch or his drilling company but not everything.
“How many notes did they call?” he asked.
“All of them,” Karla said. “Junior just went down the tubes.”
Duane walked over and sat down in a lawn chair. He felt weak in the legs all of a sudden.
“If they could call his, they can call mine,” he said. “Where is Junior?”
“He took a lariat rope out of his pickup and went walking off down the hill,” Karla said. “He’s probably hung himself by now.”
“Why didn’t you stop him?”
Karla dropped into the lawn chair beside him. She looked a little wobbly in the legs herself.
“I can’t do everything, Duane,” she said. “I meant to call the stress hot line, but then Billie Anne came in screaming and yelling and I forgot all about Junior until it was too late.”
As if on cue, Billie Anne began to scream and yell again. She paddled around the pool on her blue floatie, flailing her arms rapidly.
“Maybe the world’s coming to an end,” Karla said. “Do you think Jesus would help us if we went and rededicated our lives?”
“No,” Duane said. “Anyway, I never dedicated mine in the first place.”
“That’s right, you never even tried to be religious,” Karla said. “No wonder bad things are happening to us.”
“Most of them are happening because there’s too much oil on the market,” Duane pointed out. “It’s got nothing to do with religion.”
“Do you think oil really comes from squashed dinosaurs?” Karla asked.
“It’s fossil fuel,” Duane said. “More things got squashed than dinosaurs. Ferns and plants.”