Texasville

  “Duane,” Suzie said, “can I give you a hug?”

  “A hug?” he asked. “Why?”

  “Because I just want to,” Suzie said. “You’re a real sweet man and you look sad enough to die.”

  Duane stretched out on the couch in her arms. They were very comfortable arms. Somehow he had never been able to lie down comfortably with Janine. They endlessly adjusted their limbs, posture, heads. But with Suzie he felt immediately comfortable, however he happened to fall.

  Lulled by the comfort, he soon dozed off. He dreamed he was in Odessa, talking with C. L. Sime. It was a pleasant conversation. Duane had the blissful sense that Mr. Sime was going to buy his rigs.

  When he awoke the blissful sense vanished. He felt he had slept much too long. Outside the sky was white, meaning the sun was blazing straight down. It must be almost noon. He started to rise, but he was still enfolded in Suzie Nolan’s arms, and they held him no less comfortably than they had when he lay down. Suzie just tightened them a little when he tried to sit up.

  “Lay still,” she said. “You’re just the jumpiest man.”

  Duane accepted her mild command. She smoothed his hair, arranging it around his ears in a way that pleased her. Her touch felt easy and relaxing, but not just relaxing. He felt sleepy and excited both. Once in a while Suzie slipped her hand inside his shirt and caressed him. Duane liked the combination of relaxation and excitement so much that for a moment he felt like marrying her. It was the first time the notion of marrying someone had crossed his mind for twenty-two years. He dimly remembered how desperate he had been to marry Karla. He had felt that he might as well die if she refused him. Without her there could be no happiness in life.

  Fortunately Karla had married him, and life had been exciting and lucky. Now it felt neither exciting nor lucky. He still loved Karla, but he couldn’t imagine lying in her arms for two hours. He couldn’t imagine being either very excited or very relaxed by her touch. Perhaps the two of them should just let one another go.

  “Would you ever marry me?” he asked.

  Suzie laughed. “What’s Karla gonna do, die?” she asked.

  “Oh, no,” Duane said. “Karla’s gonna go on being Karla.”

  “Then nobody’s gonna marry you,” Suzie said.

  “Karla and I have been happy for a long time,” Duane said. “But we might be losing our happiness.”

  “You just need a little pussy, sweetie,” Suzie said.

  “No, I need a different life,” he said.

  Suzie shrugged her gown off her shoulders. “Pussy is a different life,” she said. “At least it is if it’s mine you’re getting.”

  Duane felt an awkward confusion of feelings. The casualness of her sexual preparations aroused him and yet her calm also reminded him of Junior’s tension. He realized that he was not doing much better in relation to Karla than Junior had in relation to Suzie. It made him sad that his wife had to wear suggestive T-shirts—sad and guilty. But the low truth was that he was capable of ignoring his own beautiful, vivacious wife but incapable of ignoring Suzie, who was already moving over him, inexorably arranging him to her liking.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” he said, after Suzie had proceeded to prove her point.

  “What question?” Suzie asked, yawning.

  “Would you marry me?”

  “I might under certain conditions,” Suzie said.

  Pleasure changed her eyes. They remained large and brown, but a keenness came into them after sex. At such moments, looking into her eyes, he felt that he was probably underestimating her, neglecting to credit her with her full intelligence.

  She was unusually comfortable with herself, and because she was he slipped into the habit of thinking of her as a dreamy, unambitious woman, with nothing to distinguish her except an unusual sexual responsiveness. But the way she looked at him after lovemaking made him feel shallow. He came to her because it was easy, uncomplicated and very exciting. But her eyes convinced him that the uncomplicated part could easily change.

  “What conditions?” he asked.

  “We’d have to wait until Dickie finds himself a nice girl,” Suzie said. “I wouldn’t want to do anything to hurt Dickie—such as marrying his daddy.”

  “Why don’t you marry him?” Duane asked. “You seem to love him a lot. I think you’d be real good for him.”

  “I am very good for him,” Suzie said. “It’s child’s play to be good for a kid like Dickie.”

  “I don’t know why you even sleep with me, if he’s such a prize,” Duane said.

  “I like to,” Suzie said. “Two things don’t have to be equal to be good. Besides, you need me and I usually go where the need is.”

  “Junior thinks he needs you,” he reminded her.

  Suzie smiled and ruffled his hair.

  “That’s like hinting that you’re gonna get divorced,” she said. “You’re not gonna get divorced, and Junior don’t need me. Sitting on that mattress trying to do a hunger fast is the most interesting thing he’s done in his life. If I stay out of his way he might develop into something yet.

  “Junior’s an addict, and I was his drug,” she added. “But I got tired of being a drug for a man who never even smiles.

  “It makes a lot of difference, if someone just smiles,” she said.

  Duane looked again into her smart, mysterious eyes.

  “You’re the most interesting woman in this town,” he said. He meant it, although he was aware even as he said it that if Karla were hearing him say it he would be in deep trouble.

  Suzie looked amused—the compliment did not overwhelm her.

  “It took you long enough to figure that out,” she said, rubbing his chest lightly.

  Duane thought of Dickie, his lucky son, whom Suzie regarded so fondly. Would the day come when Dickie realized what an exceptional woman had loved him when he was twenty-one? How old would he be when that realization struck? There was no knowing, but Duane felt a moment’s sadness at the thought of the regret, and perhaps the longing, awaiting his son on some day far in the future, when life turned dull and he remembered Suzie Nolan.

  Suzie got off the couch and bent to pick up her gown. Watching her, Duane felt sad. There was always something sad about bodies after sex, he thought. Suzie’s body was well-preserved—a little skinny in the legs, but lovely. It would not be long before it was old—his would be old, and Karla’s, and Jacy’s.

  He stood up too, and began to pick up his clothes, thinking that if he moved he might avoid feeling even more sad.

  “Dickie might live a long life and not find a woman who’ll be as good for him as you,” he said, putting an arm around her shoulders.

  Suzie held her gown in her hands. She was looking out the window at her bird feeders.

  “Sad but true,” she said.

  CHAPTER 79

  WHEN DUANE LEFT SUZIE HE DROVE OUT TO A large stock tank where he often fished. He didn’t fish, though. Suzie had given him three nice tomatoes from her garden, and some salt in a Baggie. He sprinkled a little salt on the tomatoes and lunched on them. Then he stretched out under a large oak tree and napped. When he awoke he sat under the tree for another hour, watching the turtles’ heads bobbing in the brown water.

  Looking at water, even comparatively ugly water, usually made him feel peaceful, but this time it didn’t. Questions that had begun to trouble him at Suzie’s continued to trouble him. His family was planning to go away without him, something that had never happened before. It occurred to him that he could just get on a plane and leave before they left. He had always wanted to see a glacier and a rain forest—though not with his kids along. They would just fall off the glacier, or get lost in the rain forest.

  He imagined how surprised everyone would be if he did just get on a plane and leave. The thought cheered him a little. The sinking sun was whittling at his shade, slowly moving it to the other side of the tree, so he got in his pickup and headed back to town. Riding along, he realized that he reall
y missed Jack and Julie. They irritated him constantly, but he missed them anyway, and Karla too.

  The thought of Karla made him apprehensive. It had occurred to him often in the past few weeks that most people in Thalia were disappointed with their lives. Falling oil prices hadn’t caused the disappointment, though in some cases they might have exposed it. Lately he had begun to see disappointment in every face, but he had rarely seen it in his wife’s face. Karla complained with such force and energy that he had taken her complaints at face value and assumed that she was complaining about what really bothered her.

  He wondered, though. It was possible that from Karla’s point of view he was a complete bust as a husband. The few hours he had spent in Suzie Nolan’s assured embraces had somehow awakened his doubts about himself. After all, Karla had left. She was essentially living with Jacy now. Was it because Jacy needed her, or because she needed Jacy, or because they needed one another more than either of them needed him?

  He hurried to his office, hoping to ask Ruth’s opinion. He had lost all confidence in his ability to assess his own record as a person, but he hadn’t lost confidence in Ruth’s ability. Ruth was never loath to assess people’s records, particularly his.

  When he opened the office door he thought for a moment that someone in town had died. Ruth had put the cover on her typewriter. She sat stiffly in her chair, her few belongings in a cardboard box at her feet.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked, forgetting Karla, his doubts, and everything else. He had never seen Ruth look so sad.

  “They closed the bank today,” Ruth said. “I turned the phone off to keep people from driving me crazy.”

  “Oh, shit!” Duane said. “What’d Lester do?”

  “Well, he got ducked eleven times in a row,” Ruth said. “That little pitcher from Iowa Park showed up. They say he hit the bull’s-eye eleven times in a row. I guess having the bank closed on top of all those duckings was the last straw for Lester.”

  “Did he kill himself?” Duane asked.

  “Of course not,” Ruth said. “He just jumped in his Lincoln sopping wet and headed out of town doing about ninety.”

  “People are always racing out of this town,” Duane said. “I guess they think they can go fast enough to escape gravity and get in orbit somewhere else. But mostly they just turn around and come back.”

  “That wasn’t the sad part,” Ruth said. “The sad part is that Sonny jumped out of his room at the hotel.”

  “His room was just on the second floor,” Duane said apprehensively. “That little fall wouldn’t kill him.”

  “It wasn’t a suicide attempt,” Ruth said. “He thought he was jumping on some Indian who was stealing his horse. He just skinned his knees a little and broke his wrist.”

  “If nobody’s dead, why are you packed up to leave?” Duane asked.

  “You’re broke, that’s why,” Ruth said. “You’re absolutely broke. You can’t afford to pay me and there’s nothing left to do anyway. This business is dead.”

  “It ain’t dead,” Duane said. “I’ve still got three rigs working.”

  “I don’t see why you won’t face it, Duane,” Ruth said. “You’re broke.”

  “When you came to work for me oil was about three dollars a barrel,” Duane reminded her. “Now it’s sixteen. That’s not as good as thirty, but it’s a lot better than three.”

  “When I came to work for you you weren’t twelve million dollars in debt,” Ruth said. “And sixteen is just the price today. It’s going to go a lot lower before it stops going lower.”

  “Okay,” Duane said, discouraged suddenly. “You win. Leave if you want to.”

  He walked into his dark office and raised the shades. Briscoe sat on the windowsill, as if he had been waiting for the shade to be raised so he could stare at Duane. He immediately began to peck at the window in an annoyed but persistent way. His pecking reminded Duane of Ruth’s typing. He had grown used to hearing her type while he sat in his office, brooding. With the typewriter silent and no potbellied oil promoters standing around—with no one standing around, not even Bobby Lee—the office was a lonely place.

  “Don’t sit there and look like that,” Ruth said. She stood in the doorway.

  “I didn’t think you’d quit me,” he said.

  Ruth came in and sat down in the chair where the potbellied oil promoters usually sat.

  “I can’t take a salary from you when you don’t have any money,” Ruth said. “My conscience won’t let me. You’ve been very good to me.”

  Duane remembered that he had been going to ask her what she thought of him as a husband, since the conviction that he was a failure as a husband had been rapidly growing on him. The conviction was starting to weigh him down, but other weights were accumulating so swiftly that that one was already way down in the pile.

  “Where’s Sonny now?” he asked.

  “At my place,” Ruth said. “He’s going to live with me.”

  “It’s really swift, this life,” Duane said. “I just left town to go fishing for an hour or two, and now the bank’s closed, and Lester’s left town, and Sonny jumped out a window, and you quit.”

  “I’ll stay if you just want me around, Duane,” Ruth said. “But I won’t take a salary. That wouldn’t really be right.”

  “Do you think I’ve lost Karla?” he asked.

  Ruth looked at him solemnly.

  “Do you want to keep her?” she asked.

  “I’ll put it another way,” he said, sighing. “Do you think I’ve been a bad husband?”

  “Do you want to keep her?” Ruth asked again.

  Duane shook his head. One of his major pet peeves was people who replied to questions with other questions. He didn’t want to tell Ruth it was one of his pet peeves, though. If he did she might get up and leave and he’d never see her again.

  “Let’s pass that problem,” he said. “Why is Sonny at your place? Why do you think you can live with someone who’s crazy?”

  “He’s a very mild person, and he loved me once,” Ruth said. “I would have been dead long ago if Sonny hadn’t loved me. I think it’s my place to take him in.”

  “You’re getting awful Christian in your old age,” Duane said. “Too Christian. Sonny’s getting sicker. Last week he just thought he saw movies that weren’t there. This week he thinks he’s in movies that aren’t there. He’s way past being helped by amateurs like us.”

  “You don’t know that,” Ruth said. There were tears on her cheeks.

  “I wish you could have seen his face,” she said. “He was just so shocked when he realized there was no movie, and no Indian, and no horse.”

  “What if he’s living-in your trailer and he thinks he’s in a movie and it’s The Boston Strangler?” Duane asked.

  Ruth took out a Kleenex and wiped her cheeks.

  “I wish you’d just let me try this, Duane,” she said. “I’m an old woman. Nobody would care much if he strangled me.”

  “I’d care,” Duane said. “I’d kill him if he hurt you.”

  Ruth looked at him a moment. Then she shut her purse in a businesslike way.

  “Well, maybe he won’t,” she said. She got up and went back to her desk. Duane put his finger against the glass of the window to see if Briscoe would peck it. Briscoe ignored it.

  In a moment he heard Ruth begin to type. Duane got his cap and started to leave. When he stepped out of his office, she stopped, waiting for him to pass through. She looked at him and smiled.

  “Would you like to try the question about Karla again?” he asked.

  Ruth resumed her typing. She typed at a furious clip. Duane had to resist an impulse to lean over and see what she was typing.

  “You should have stayed clear of Suzie Nolan,” Ruth said, pausing for a second. “I told you to stay clear of her but you never listen to me. Suzie’s not like most of the women around here, and now you’ve got a taste for her. I don’t know where it will end.”

  “I was asking if
you thought I’d lost Karla,” Duane reminded her.

  Ruth resumed her typing. She finished a page, laid it face down on her desk and rapidly rolled another sheet of paper into the typewriter.

  “I don’t know why you ask me questions if you aren’t going to listen to me when I give you advice,” she said, and started typing again.

  CHAPTER 80

  DUANE DROVE BY THE BANK TO SEE IF IT WAS really closed, and discovered that virtually everyone else in town wanted to find out too. There was both a traffic jam and a people jam in front of the bank. The only parking place he could find was several blocks away, beside the Byelo-Baptist church. He pulled in next to a pickup whose rear end was filled with brooms. G. G. Rawley leaned on the tailgate, looking happily at the brooms.

  “Going in the broom business?” Duane asked.

  “No, but I plan to sweep away a heap of sin, starting tonight,” G.G. said.

  “I didn’t know sin would sweep,” Duane said. “I thought it was more like an indelible stain.”

  “You’re gonna wish you hadn’t grown up to be so mockful,” G.G. said.

  Duane managed to get close enough to get a good look at the bank. Several unfamiliar men in suits were visible through the plate-glass walls. They seemed to be trying to ignore all the worried people who clustered around the building.

  He heard a car, almost at his elbow, and looked around to see Jacy’s Mercedes. Jacy, Jack, Julie and Shorty were in the front seat. All but Shorty wore sunglasses. Duane went around and got in the back seat.

  Jacy was already wearing the body stocking she used in the Adam and Eve skit, which was due to start in only forty-five minutes.

  “I guess that bank’s really closed,” Duane said.

  “Momma says those banker men have been calling you all day,” Julie said. “She says you’ll have to live like a communist now.”

  “Not like a communist, like a guerrilla,” Jacy said.

  “That’ll be easy, I already live like a gorilla,” Duane said.

  “They’re gonna take everything we own, as soon as they catch you,” Jack said. He was popping his knuckles, something he was apt to do if cooped up in a car, plane or movie theater too long.