To the north the marathoners were still coming, jogging relentlessly, perhaps not yet aware of what was sweeping down on them. The two in the lead were almost to the city limits sign; they matched one another stride for stride.
“It might just be temporary,” Sonny said. “The wind might die.”
Duane looked south. The wind was not dying, and the tumbleweeds in their tens of thousands were still racing into Thalia. He heard a droning noise. A speck that could have been a bird but sounded more like a helicopter hovered over the marathoners.
“Here comes the Governor,” Duane said. “We gotta get down there.”
They raced down the stairs and out into the street. The marathon was to finish right under the red light. Duane remembered his moment of bliss in that spot but had no time for pleasant reminiscence—stretching a finish line with tumble-weeds the size of Volkswagens bearing down on one was no simple feat. The little scurrying tumbleweeds they could jump, but the larger ones presented problems.
Just as they were about to get the line stretched, a tumble-weed of modest size bounced right between them and yanked the line out of Sonny’s hands. Duane hung on to his end, but the tumbleweed, unwilling to stop, bucked and cracked around like a roped animal. The line was soon hopelessly snarled. Sonny tried to get it loose but merely lost his twelve-dollar hat in the process. Duane, seeing that it was hopeless, turned his end loose. The tumbleweed immediately carried the finish line down the street toward the marathoners.
“Let’s just line up,” Duane said. “Whoever goes between us first is the winner.”
“I don’t think they’re gonna make it,” Sonny said. “They seem to be slowing down.”
Indeed, both the marathoners and the helicopter were tiring. The adverse wind factors seemed to be holding them in suspended animation. The marathoners’ legs still went up and down, the helicopter’s blades went round and round, but neither were making more than minimal forward progress.
Duane glanced around and saw a phalanx of at least fifty tumbleweeds bearing down on them. Dodging one only brought one into the path of another. Sonny did just that, and a middle-sized tumbleweed smacked into him with such force that he was caught, his legs entangled, as if he had jumped into the weed. As Sonny tried to pull the weed off his legs, another struck and stuck. A barricade began to form around Sonny as more weeds quickly added themselves to the pile.
Duane started to run for the shelter of the bank but decided that would be cowardly—he concentrated on dodging. He felt like laughing at Sonny’s plight. Sonny could be the victim of a horror movie—the man attacked by killer weeds. Soon the weeds would cover him completely, and when they were finally pulled off him he would be found to be a bloodless corpse. Or perhaps the weeds would incorporate him into their species, and he would stalk the town on windy days, the dread Tumbleweed Man, a huge hulk of weeds ensnaring beautiful women in his thorny clasp.
Sonny was trying to drag his heap of weeds over to the courthouse before so many piled on that he couldn’t move.
Duane found that by facing the oncoming weeds he could dodge them if he stayed nimble. It reminded him of a football drill—sometimes he had to dart right, sometimes left.
Meanwhile the runners and the helicopter had inched a block closer to the intersection. They were only three blocks away. The runners, Ruth Popper and John Cecil, were tired but game. So many tumbleweeds rolled down the street that they too had to keep dodging left and right, making only lateral progress. Both looked determined, though.
The helicopter was only a few yards ahead of them. Duane could see three men in it, one of them undoubtedly the Governor. Trying to be hospitable, he waved. He felt a little awkward, being the sole welcomer of the Governor of the state. The helicopter inched closer and came lower. Duane, still dodging weeds, could not give it his full attention, but when the noise of its motors began to drown out the wind he glanced up again. The helicopter had come level with the hardware store. It was only thirty feet off the ground. Two men in suits seemd perplexed as they looked down upon the huddled crowd and the wilderness of tumbleweeds. Wherever cars were parked, walls of tumbleweeds had formed, and the walls were rising higher.
Duane recognized the helicopter pilot, too. It was Karla’s old friend Randy, who had a knack for turning up just when no one wanted him. He looked as cocky as ever, but the Governor’s aide, sitting beside him, didn’t look cocky. The aide turned to the Governor and gestured hopelessly. The Governor looked dazed, and with some reason. From where he sat he must have been seeing a strange sight—a town buried by an eruption, not of lava, but of tumbleweeds.
Ruth and John were only fifty yards away. Duane tried to concentrate on his duties as an official finish line. He pretended he was holding up a tape. It looked as if John might win. He had a step on Ruth, but John had never been lucky, and the bad luck that had dogged him all his life smacked right into him in the form of four tumbleweeds that were traveling as a pack. Two veered slightly toward Ruth, but she managed to hurdle them. When her feet left the ground the wind blew her back a step. John Cecil tried to slip between the two that were headed for him, and miscalculated. A tumbleweed hit each leg. He didn’t fall, but it was all he could do to lift his feet. Game to the end, he tried dragging the tumbleweeds over the finish line, but other tumbleweeds, as if sensing a victim, began to pile on. Ruth crossed the finish line and ran for shelter. Duane went to help John, who was making no forward progress at all. Together they reached the bank building. John was too winded to speak.
Above them, the helicopter hovered. Duane waved, trying to indicate to Randy that he could land in the shelter of the bank building. Randy, with his usual insolence, ignored him. The helicopter hung just over the red light. The Governor and his aide were whispering to one another. Tumbleweeds continued to bounce down the street. They were piling up against the front of every building that faced south. Some buildings were covered almost to their roofs. The gas pumps behind which Bobby Lee cowered were completely covered. He could barely be seen, crouched with his sombrero in an igloo of tumbleweeds.
The Governor looked down at Duane and made a gesture of helplessness. He waved vigorously at the people beside the courthouse. Then the helicopter banked sharply and headed back north. Soon it was just a speck in the distance.
Duane watched it go with mixed feelings. It was too bad to lose the Governor, but who could regret losing Randy? The wind had reached its height—they could scarcely see ten feet in the dust. John Cecil had stopped trying to get the tumble-weeds off his legs and stood quietly, catching his breath. Another Volkswagen-sized tumbleweed rumbled beneath the red light, followed by a host of little ones as a mother hen would be followed by her chicks.
Duane felt a sudden, inexplicable pride of place. The same land that had broken the two Mr. Browns had lost none of its power or its capacity for surprise. It had shown its strength once again, driving away a Governor and temporarily stopping the Hardtop County centennial dead in its tracks.
“I guess the Governor doesn’t like our weather,” he said.
“I didn’t vote for him anyway,” John Cecil said.
CHAPTER 67
IN ANOTHER FORTY-FIVE MINUTES THE WIND BLEW itself out and the tumbleweeds stopped tumbling. The people stepped out from behind the courthouse and looked in awe at their town. Walls of tumbleweeds covered every store front, every fence, every line of cars.
People with cameras took pictures. The tiny TV crew, sent from Wichita Falls to cover the Governor’s visit, covered the tumbleweeds instead. The barbecue team went to John Cecil’s grocery store and Sonny’s Kwik-Sack and bought every paper plate in town. Pitchforks were secured from the feed store, tumbleweeds were raked off doorways, and the centennial was soon proceeding merrily. People wandered around with plates of barbecue, staring at the tumbleweeds with pride.
Everyone was in a remarkably good humor. Any county could have a centennial, but how many had had a tumbleweed stampede? Junior Nolan and Billie Anne, who had
survived it with only a mattress for cover, felt that their fast for an oil embargo and no-fault divorce was off to a good start.
G. G. Rawley was equally cheered. In his view the Lord had given the town a mild but unequivocal warning. Always a big eater, he consumed several plates of barbecue, assuring people, between bites, that unless they kept the celebration sober they were sure to reap the real whirlwind next time.
Almost everyone was outraged that the Governor had not cared to wait out the little storm. Bobby Lee, who had to be cut out of his igloo of tumbleweeds with a chain saw, was the most indignant. He favored taking a delegation to Austin to picket the Capitol with signs declaring the Governor a cowardly chicken-shit.
A report, relayed through Toots Burns, that the Governor had merely rushed back to Austin so he could immediately recommend the county for disaster aid, fooled no one.
“What disaster?” Eddie Belt asked. “The only bad thing that’s happened is that a woman won the marathon.”
Duane ate a little barbecue and then walked over to the bank. He had about twenty thousand dollars’ worth of production checks to deposit. The sight of even modest deposits usually cheered Lester Marlow up, but this one didn’t. He sat in his office staring blankly at some computer read-outs. His hair looked wilder than ever and he was still in his running clothes. He took the deposit listlessly and put it on his desk.
“That’s twenty thousand dollars,” Duane said. “Don’t forget I gave it to you.”
“Somebody will find it after I’m gone,” Lester said.
“Gone where?”
“After I’ve committed suicide,” Lester said. “The centennial’s off to a good start now, I don’t see any reason to wait.”
“Ride out to the well with me,” Duane suggested. “It might cheer you up.”
Lester agreed, but decided to change clothes first. While he was changing, Duane reclaimed his deposit and gave it to a teller. The tellers were all wearing cowboy hats in honor of the centennial. Some wore cap pistols too. When Lester came back he wore a shirt and tie but also a cowboy hat and a cap pistol.
“You won’t need a tie out at the well,” Duane remarked.
“It makes me feel more confident that I’ve made the right choice,” Lester said.
Over the last two years, Lester had often talked of suicide, but had never attempted it. The town had grown complacent, and Duane with it, but looking at Lester’s wild hair, cap pistol and dull eyes, he decided complacency might be a mistake. Lester might really do it. He might just be taking slow aim at himself.
They drove past the square, Duane rehearsing antisuicide arguments. On the square they saw a struggling knot of men. For a moment Duane thought a fight had broken out between the Byelo-Baptists and the drinkers, but then he spotted Joe Coombs at the center of the knot and revised his opinion. It was just a group of celebrants trying to duck the beardless little Joe. There seemed to be about ten men trying to duck him, but so far little Joe Coombs was holding his own.
“That little Joe Coombs has got a low center of gravity,” Duane remarked.
Lester observed the scene dully. He had grown a little fuzz on his big chin. It was not much, but so far it had kept him from being ducked.
“Janine’s happy,” he remarked. “I’ve made someone happy, at least.”
“That’s true,” Duane said.
“I’ve lived nearly twenty-five years with Jenny and never made her happy a single day,” Lester said. “I never thought I’d live to see the day when I could actually make someone happy.”
“But now you have,” Duane said.
“Maybe that’s why I want to commit suicide right now,” Lester said. “I think I ought to kill myself before I spoil it.”
Duane started to point out to Lester that his death might well spoil Janine’s new happiness. It might ruin his two nice daughters’ lives. It might drive Jenny over the edge she seemed to live on. It might even have a ripple effect in Thalia itself. People who had never particularly liked Lester might blame themselves for his death. The whole town might slip into an emotional decline matching its economic decline. It might even be slipping into one anyway, with Lester still alive.
But he didn’t make any of those points. The more he thought about Lester and suicide and emotional decline, the less talkative he felt. The two of them rode in silence along the hot dusty road. The heat had been so intense all summer that the juice had burned out of the mesquite beans within a week. They hung from the trees in brown clumps. From a distance it looked as if some madman had decorated the trees with lots of burned French fries.
Nonetheless, as they approached the well site, Duane felt his spirits rise. Somewhere, deep beneath the baking mesquites, was a lake of precious liquid, and he already had a pipe that reached into the center of that lake. As soon as storage tanks were in place he could turn the switch and liquid money would begin to flow upward—millions’ worth, perhaps. If he could just sink a couple more pipes into the lake, his troubles, and at least some of Lester’s, would be over.
“This might be the best well I’ve ever drilled,” he said, his excitement growing as they bumped along the rutted road to the site. “It might solve all our troubles.”
Lester looked at him with the same dull hopelessness.
“Didn’t you read The Wall Street Journal this morning?” he asked.
“No, I went to a psychiatrist this morning,” Duane said.
He never read The Wall Street Journal. Sonny brought his copy to the Dairy Queen each morning and read the assembled oilmen whatever it said about the international oil situation or the Texas oil situation. Sometimes there would even be something in the Journal about the local oil situation, but Duane never had to bother reading it for himself. The news, good or bad, would be on everyone’s lips by the time he arrived at the Dairy Queen for coffee.
“What’d it say today?” he asked.
“It said the Saudis were going to open the pipes,” Lester said. “Minister Yamani’s tired of fucking around with the British. He says he’ll make us all listen. He says he’ll show us five-dollar oil, if that’s what it takes to get our attention.”
“Minister Yamani’s probably bluffing,” Duane said. “He don’t really want to sell his oil that cheap.”
“He might, though—just to make his point,” Lester said. “What if he isn’t bluffing? What if they open the pipes?”
Duane pulled up at the well site and stopped. There was no one there—just a new oil pump, waiting to be turned on. Like all such well sites, this place was ugly: the grass had been scraped off, the mesquites bulldozed. The slush pits stank, the soil was rutted, there was not a smidgin of shade, and the trash the roughnecks left had not been hauled away.
There was nothing about the site that offered the eye the slightest pleasure. It was just a half acre of ruined earth in the middle of a scrubby pasture. Only the liquid money that the new pump would bring from the ground could redeem the ugliness. The black flow from just such sites had built Karla her new home. It had paid their bills throughout their married lives—not to mention the town’s bills, the state’s bills, and the bills of almost everyone they knew.
But five-dollar oil? Duane tried to dismiss it from his mind. For years the Saudis and their threats had been a staple of Dairy Queen conversation. During all that time, no one had even seen a Saudi, and the pipes in Arabia had not been thrown open. To most locals OPEC was a shadowy entity, like communism—its threats were met with macho rhetoric, at least in the Dairy Queen. Some doubted that OPEC really had much muscle, but Duane was not among the doubters on that score. Billions of barrels of reserves added up to muscle, in his view. What seemed doubtful was that the matter would ever go beyond threats.
He still doubted it, but Lester’s hopeless look made him uneasy. The sense of optimism that just being near the new well usually gave him had begun to slip away. If oil went to five dollars a barrel, the costly new pump he was looking at might never be turned on. It would sit there
and rust, unused. No one could afford to bring up five-dollar oil. The black lake would remain where it was, deep in its limestone cavern, if that occurred. Dickie could bring it up, or Dickie’s children.
On the drive back to town Lester kept idly pointing his cap pistol out the window and snapping it. Duane started to tell him he looked silly wearing a cap pistol, but he didn’t say it. In Lester’s present mood it wouldn’t do for him to wear any other kind of pistol.
“I hear Karla’s moving to Europe to live with Jacy,” Lester said. “That’s the rumor going around.”
“She’s just going on a vacation,” Duane said. “She’ll be back in a couple of weeks.”
“That’s not what I heard,” Lester said. “I think you’ve lost her, this time.”
“Now why do you think that?” Duane asked. “Here I take you on a ride to cheer you up and you tell me I’m losing my wife. You’re a hell of a friend.”
“The ride didn’t cheer me up, though,” Lester said. “Nothing can cheer me up now. My wife’s about to bear you a grandchild, your old girlfriend’s about to bear me a child, and unless I’m very lucky I’m headed for prison. What do you think the state of Texas will feed its felons if oil goes to five dollars a barrel? They’ll make us eat our own toenails, if they don’t make us eat one another.”
The thought seemed to cheer him slightly.
“I can see the headlines now,” Lester said. “‘Cannibalism Rife in Texas Prison System.’”
“Maybe you should stop reading The Wall Street Journal,” Duane said. “It just puts gloomy ideas in your head.”