CHAPTER 50
KARLA DID ASK SONNY, BUT SONNY REFUSED TO GO to the Howlers or anywhere. He pointed out politely that it was nearly time for him to do his shift at the Kwik-Sack.
“Genevieve wouldn’t mind if you were late,” Karla said. “She probably needs the overtime.”
But Sonny wouldn’t go with them, a fact that plunged Karla into depression.
“He won’t do anything I ask him to,” she said, on the gloomy ride to Wichita Falls. “He’s stubborn.”
“He’s not married to you like I am,” Duane said. “He don’t owe you total obedience.”
“Fuck you,” Karla said.
“I was just trying to joke,” Duane said.
“You couldn’t be funny if you tried, Duane,” Karla said.
Duane shut up and they rode in silence. The Howlers was a place where people tended to get rowdy, and then get loud. In order to be heard it was often necessary to be rowdy oneself. Karla was often rowdy enough to be heard all over the restaurant, but not that night. Duane ate his steak and she ignored hers. She stared into space.
Luthie Sawyer weaved past the table, towed by his tall, stringy wife. He was very drunk.
“Luthie, if you’re gonna bomb OPEC, I wish you’d hurry,” Duane said. “This glut’s gettin’ serious.”
Luthie was too glazed to respond. As he and his wife went out, Bobby Lee and Carolyn came in. They went briskly to a table, looking tense. Though Duane and Karla were only using half of a table for four, Bobby Lee and Carolyn did not offer to join them. Carolyn had coal-black hair and, for the moment at least, a demeanor to match.
“I guess they’re negotiating,” Duane offered.
Karla exhibited no interest in the domestic life of Carolyn and Bobby Lee, though in other moods she had been known to speculate about it for hours.
“I should have made Sonny have a love affair with me years ago,” Karla said.
“What stopped you?” Duane asked.
Karla’s eyes were more icy than the ice in her iced tea.
“You probably won’t believe it, Duane, but I’m not the kind of woman that just goes up and grabs somebody by the dick,” she said.
Duane gave up on conversation. The customers of the Howlers got rowdier and louder. By the time they finished eating, Duane could not remember why he had thought he wanted a square meal. He had just eaten one, but Karla’s silence was so unnerving that he felt as if he might throw it up. Only an hour before, at the rodeo arena, she had been in a fine humor, too.
They walked out into the parking lot in time to see old Turkey Clay, the cocaine-happy swamper, have a fistfight. Turkey was squared off against a younger man Duane didn’t know, a tall, brawny roughneck. Before he could move to stop it, the two flew at one another and exchanged a flurry of blows, none of which really struck home. Then the fighters glared at one another for a second, breathing heavily, and walked off in opposite directions.
The fight had the happy effect of distracting Karla briefly from her depression. She walked after Turkey, whose truck was parked at the far end of the lot. Duane followed.
“What was that all about?” she asked Turkey.
“It was a fistfight,” Turkey replied in an unfriendly tone. It was not clear that he realized who he was talking to, or that he cared, one way or the other. He was getting a beer out of the front seat of his truck and didn’t look around.
“Turkey, this is Karla,” she said cautiously. “I know it was a fistfight. I just wondered why you two were fighting.”
“I told him he was nothing but a walking sack of snot, that’s why we were fighting,” Turkey said.
“Turkey, you’ve got to quit jumping these younger men,” Duane said mildly.
Turkey looked at him coldly. “I guess if I see a sack of snot walking around on two legs I can hit it a time or two,” he said. He got in his truck, drained the beer, dropped the can out the window and left.
“You shouldn’t tease him about his age, Duane,” Karla said, becoming depressed again.
“Well, hell, I can’t open my mouth anymore without somebody jumping down my throat,” Duane said.
As they were walking back to the BMW the phenomenon occurred which had given the restaurant its name: the howling began.
The howling could be started by any patron who happened to be feeling good—or bad—enough to howl like a hound. But once one happy or unhappy diner howled, the tradition was that everyone in the restaurant must howl too. The waitresses stopped with plates in their hands and howled. The cooks howled from the kitchen, the dishwashers from the sink. Children too young to produce a proper howl cried or screamed. Couples in the parking lot often rushed back inside to howl with the group.
The howling might last only three or four minutes, or it might go on for half an hour, depending on the spirits of the group. Since the restaurant stood three miles out of town, on the edge of the weedy prairie, the howling disturbed no neighbors—although travelers, unfamiliar with the tradition, approaching Wichita Falls on the lonely road that led from the Staked Plains, were sometimes unnerved by it, particularly if it was summer and they happened to have their car windows down.
Just as they approached the glimmering lights of the city, buoyed up by the sense that they might be about to reach civilization again, they heard the howling. From a distance it sounded as if a pack of starving dogs waited only a turn or two down the highway in the darkness. People immediately rolled up their windows. Some stopped and sat in terrified indecision. One gentle couple from Seattle lost all hope, turned around, and drove in panic all the way back to Lubbock. Their story made the headlines; the Howlers magnanimously offered to pay their way to Wichita Falls and give them a free steak dinner, but the couple did not accept.
Karla and Duane had heard the howling countless times. The restaurant offered a Howler-of-the-Year award, and only last year Karla had made news by winning the award two years in a row, an unheard-of honor.
“You wanta go back in and howl a little?” Duane asked. “I guess your title’s on the line.”
Karla got in the BMW. “I don’t, for your information,” she said. “I’m surprised my own husband don’t think I’ve got anything better to do than sit around with a bunch of drunks and howl like a dog.”
Then she lapsed back into silence.
“God!” Duane said. “What’d I do now?”
As Duane was about to get in the car the door of the restaurant flew open and a man staggered out. Duane looked around and recognized him—he was a driller from Duncan, Oklahoma. Duane assumed he was just drunk, but as he started to get in the BMW he saw the man’s legs go out from under him. He folded like a shot bird, not ten feet away. Thinking he might have had a heart attack, Duane stepped over to him. The driller, whose name was Buddy, straightened up, looked around a time or two, curled himself into a fetal position and went to sleep in the gravel. Duane caught him under his arms and dragged him over near the building, where at least he wouldn’t get run over.
He heard a car start, turned and saw that it was the BMW.
“Adiós, sayonara, goodbye, Duane!” Karla said.
“You already used that line!” he yelled. “Come back here.”
For an answer Karla delivered the long soprano howl that had made her a two-time winner of the Howler-of-the-Year award. She was soon out of sight.
Duane sat in Bobby Lee’s pickup until he and Carolyn came out. Carolyn was in no better mood than Karla, but they gave him a ride home. Karla was nowhere to be seen.
CHAPTER 51
THE NEXT MORNING DUANE WOKE TO A HOUSE THAT seemed very empty. Dickie, who had only moved back in yesterday, had not spent the night there. Karla was gone. It appeared that he had twelve thousand square feet of unpaid-for house entirely to himself.
Then, while he was cooking eggs, he remembered Junior Nolan, who had been living there when last seen. He went in search of Junior and found him in a remote guest room, sitting on the floor with a box of Cheerios at his side.
He had a handful of Cheerios and was eating them dry, as if they were popcorn, meanwhile watching Sesame Street.
“Junior, how about some eggs?” Duane asked. “I’ve got some pretty good sausage, too.”
“No, thanks, Duane,” Junior said. “I’m on a diet.”
“Why?” Duane asked, reflecting that the man already looked like the survivor of an around-the-world walkathon.
“Actually it’s not a diet, it’s a fast,” Junior said. “You know, when you starve yourself for a cause.”
“What cause are you starving yourself for?” Duane asked.
“The oil cause,” Junior said. “I’m fasting for an embargo on foreign oil. And if that don’t work I’m gonna call up some of these rock singers and get ’em to give an Oil Aid concert, to help out starving oilmen.
“Gandhi did fasts,” Junior added. “I think I could do one.”
Junior’s impressive familiarity with world history startled Duane a little.
“Junior, we barely even know you’re in the house,” he said. “We don’t see you for days. You could sit here and starve to death and not a soul would know it. You wouldn’t get an oil embargo. You’d just be dead.”
“Yeah, but I ain’t on the real fast yet,” Junior said. “I’m just practicing with Cheerios. Once the centennial opens I plan to set up a tent on the courthouse lawn and do my fast there. I might even get statewide coverage on TV.”
“I don’t know if your starving away on the courthouse lawn in going to mix too good with the centennial activities,” Duane said. “Tourists might look at you and get so depressed they wouldn’t stay around to buy T-shirts.”
The T-shirt-and-souvenir shop had started off promisingly, but after a day or two sales had slipped to a discouraging level. The initial flurry had been caused by local buyers snapping up cheap birthday presents. A few people who found themselves passing through Thalia—mainly because of a too-casual attitude toward map reading—stopped and visited the souvenir shop, but most of them just wanted to ask directions. One or two soreheads, unhappy at finding themselves in a place they didn’t want to be, even criticized the souvenirs. One blunt old customer from Nevada offended the saleswomen by volunteering the opinion that towns with nothing to offer shouldn’t be celebrating their own existence.
“Oh, yeah, what’s Nevada got to offer except crooked slot machines?” Lavelle asked him.
“If you’re so ignorant you ain’t even heard of Boulder Dam you ought to put a sack over your head and drown yourself,” the old man said. “Besides, ever’ damn inch of Nevada is prettier than this hellhole.”
“We didn’t ask you to come here and we’ll all be glad when you go,” Lavelle said.
The man left, in a Winnebago so ancient it was hardly larger than a Volkswagen. Lavelle’s bold stand made her a heroine for a day, but did not produce a rush of suitors.
Junior followed Duane back to the kitchen and moodily consumed several eggs and some sausage. Duane felt relieved. The man had a hearty appetite and might soon forget the notion of a fast.
“Hell, ain’t there anybody here but us?” Junior asked, becoming aware of the ringing emptiness.
“Nope, they’re all gone doing errands,” Duane said. He didn’t want to have to try and explain why his whole family had moved in with Jacy.
He went outside and tried to set the expensive sprinkler system, which was not much less intricate than the stove. He had agreed to the system reluctantly, but his interest in it had increased.
He tried to tell himself that the absence of his family was just some temporary joke, but part of him suspected that it wasn’t a joke. He wanted his family back, and studied the dials of the sprinkler system a little desperately. If it could just be made to work properly, a soft green lawn might flower almost overnight—given adequate moisture the lawns of Thalia grew so rapidly in the summer that most people spent most of their time doing nothing but cutting them.
He felt sure that Karla, for one, would not be able to resist a nice green lawn, and if he could just get Karla back, on a more or less regular basis, the others would eventually follow.
He finally got the sprinkler going and drove into town, wishing he had Shorty to talk to, or at least look at. He was supposed to help Eddie Belt and some other volunteers string centennial banners across the main street, but no volunteers were in evidence so he went to his office and sat in silence for a while.
A glance at the oil news was not reassuring. So little drilling was in progress that a glance allowed him to grasp not only the main developments, but all the developments. He found himself wondering if the legendary C. L. Sime had returned from Norway yet, or if he had even gone. He had the nervous feeling that the old man’s enthusiasm for his well-typed proposal might have waned, and that no millions would be forthcoming from Odessa.
The nervous feeling made him feel restless, so he got in his pickup and drove out to Suzie Nolan’s house, but well before he got there he saw Dickie’s pickup parked in front. Duane made a U-turn and drove back into Thalia, feeling disappointed. There was no getting around the fact that Suzie Nolan was very pleasant to be in bed with. Though he was feeling well disposed toward Dickie, it seemed a little unfair that a twenty-one-year-old should be getting such a high percentage of what pleasure was available around Thalia.
The Dairy Queen was deserted, but the main intersection in front of the courthouse was packed with people. As Duane parked, he saw a body lying on the sidewalk. Bobby Lee was standing over the body, fanning it with his sombrero. Meanwhile Ruth and Jenny, evidently indifferent to the body, were up on tall stepladders, trying to string a centennial banner between two light poles.
Duane walked over and saw that the body was Lester Mar-low’s. Janine sat beside him on the pavement, chewing gum and holding his hand. Toots Burns, the sheriff, was also there.
Toots, a lifelong bachelor, had recently startled the electorate by marrying the runaway girl who had strayed into Thalia thinking she was in Georgia.
Lester had his eyes open, but he wasn’t moving.
“Lester tried to commit suicide,” Bobby Lee said, in the same reasonable tones with which he had announced the arrival of Libyan terrorists.
“He did not, you can’t prove it, shut up,” Janine said.
Bobby Lee, who was sporting a promising black eye, looked unhappy. Any challenge to his statements always caused his confidence to slide.
“Well, he dove off the stepladder,” he said.
“He fell off the stepladder,” Janine insisted.
Lester’s wife, Jenny, tying a banner right over her husband’s head, sided with Janine.
“He probably fell,” she said. “I don’t think he knows how to dive.”
Duane squatted down by Lester, who was politely staying out of the controversy about his own recent fall.
“Howdy,” Duane said. “How do you feel?”
“I’d like to go to the quiet room,” Lester said. “Sonny’s gone to get the ambulance.”
“How come you to fall off the ladder?” Duane asked.
“I was thinking about having to sit on that board with the water underneath me and the next thing I knew I fell,” Lester said.
With true civic spirit, Lester had agreed to take the least popular job in the whole centennial. He was going to sit in a cage over a tank of water all day. For a quarter people could throw baseballs at a trip-board, and if they hit it Lester would be plunged into the water. Since he was the bank president he was thought to be the victim most likely to produce an unending flow of quarters. All the people nearing bankruptcy could take out their frustrations by trying to duck the bank president.
“I only like to swim in heated pools,” Lester said.
“That ambulance probably won’t even start,” Janine said cheerfully. She seemed to be enjoying the crisis.
“I could just walk to the quiet room,” Lester said. “It’s only three blocks.”
“No, no,” Bobby Lee said. “Your neck might be broken
.”
Duane asked Lester to move his fingers and lift his leg. Lester not only moved his fingers, he pretended he was typing on an invisible word processor. He typed rapidly.
“His neck isn’t broken,” Duane said. “Let him walk if he wants to.”
Lester got up and he and Janine ambled down the street hand in hand.
Jenny Marlow was having trouble pulling the banner tight. She climbed down the ladder and Duane climbed up to finish the job. Ruth watched his efforts critically from her perch on the other ladder, across the street. Despite Duane’s efforts, the banner continued to droop. The crowd watched and offered advice. The consensus was that it was a very droopy banner and would not encourage travelers to stop, buy souvenirs and enjoy the centennial.
“If I saw a banner hanging down like that I’d stomp on the gas pedal and keep on going,” one old man said.
“It won’t be there long, anyway,” another old-timer allowed. “The first truck that comes through with a rig on it will tear it right down. It’s too low.”
Duane stopped and looked down at the crowd. It was, it seemed to him, a typical, thankless Thalia crowd.
“Anybody who thinks they can do better is welcome to my job,” he said.
Eddie Belt, whose job it was supposed to have been anyway, drove up and parked.
“Haven’t you two got that banner up yet?” he asked nonchalantly.
Duane stopped working. He climbed up a step or two and sat on the top of the ladder, gesturing to Ruth to do the same. Ruth climbed up and sat on the top of her ladder, too.
“If we ain’t appreciated, why should we work?” he asked, looking over at Ruth, who sat inscrutably on her ladder. She gave no indication that she was in sympathy with his sentiment. She might simply have been resting.
From the top of the ladder Duane could see to the far ends of the town. No cars were in sight, no tourists turning back in annoyance. Across the street, Richie Hill was putting the finishing touches on the replica of Old Texasville. He was painting the brand-new shack with a paint called Antique Gray. Buster Lickle had selected the color, which he said was very close to that of the authentic Texasville boards he had kicked up.