“We’re supposed to be rich, why can’t we just buy a new garbage disposal?” Karla countered.
Duane didn’t answer, but the fact that he hated Richie’s kitchen was one reason he had agreed to the building of the new house.
CHAPTER 7
JUNIOR NOLAN HAD NOT TAKEN HIS EYES OFF THE saltshaker since asking his unexpected question—a question which had given his tablemates a bad surprise. The specter of female need had been raised, and the response of most people at the table was to look discreetly away.
Junior himself abruptly decided not to wait for opinions, since none had been forthcoming in almost a minute.
“Mitch, we better hit it,” he said. “It ain’t getting any cooler outside.” He got up and headed for the door, carrying his hat in his hand. Duane saw him toss it in his pickup.
“How come Junior only wears a hat inside?” Eddie Belt asked.
“He’s always been a little eccentric,” Sonny said.
Mitch Mott got up and ambled out, trying to walk bow-legged. He affected the walk of a lifelong cowboy, but for most of his life he had been a short-order cook who rodeoed a little on the side. Junior had gone up to the Panhandle to buy some calves, had met Mitch at a small rodeo, mistaken him for a cowboy and hired him on the spot.
Since he had lived in Thalia for a mere ten years, Mitch was not deeply versed in its lore, which only a lifetime’s residence could make intelligible—and sometimes not then.
Duane had spent a lifetime there and still found much of what went on to be incomprehensible, but he didn’t care. He was beginning to find the thought of Suzie Nolan interesting. After all, as he knew better than most, what looked demure from one angle might not look so demure from another. Janine Wells sat just behind him looking like the woman who invented Sunday school, while in fact possessing the heart of a slaver.
“Maybe Junior should call up Dr. Ruth,” Sonny suggested.
One reason Sonny’s little Kwik-Sack did such a booming business at night was because he took the night shift himself and kept the radio tuned to Dr. Ruth Westheimer’s popular call-in show, Sexually Speaking. He kept the radio turned up loud so that all the customers could hear it, even if they were back in the far corner by the detergents. Roughnecks and truck drivers, stepping in to buy cigarettes or beer, would fall under the spell of Dr. Ruth’s brisk Central European voice; often they lingered for fifteen or twenty minutes, piling up item after item they didn’t need, while Dr. Ruth discussed the pros and cons of anal intercourse or offered helpful tips on how not to drip too much spit into one’s partner’s mouth while tongue kissing.
“Hell, let’s get the women in on this,” Duane said, suddenly feeling in an impish mood for the first time in months.
“They’re the ones who know the answer,” he added.
Sonny smiled when he said it. Sonny could smile without looking one bit less sad, a fact that had bothered Duane slightly during all the years of their friendship.
Elsewhere around the table the suggestion met with something akin to panic. Bobby Lee nearly swallowed the toothpick he had been masticating for the last ten minutes.
“I don’t think we ought to ask them,” he said. “They’re women.”
“Well, wasn’t Junior asking about women?” Duane said.
Eddie Belt, who rarely agreed with Bobby Lee about anything, agreed with him this time. “If Junior wants to know, let Junior ask them,” Eddie said. “I ain’t gonna ask one of them nothing.”
He started to shut up, but then remembered the many injustices he had suffered at the hands of women.
“I wouldn’t ask one of ’em for a Dr. Pepper if I was dying of thirst,” he said. “I wouldn’t ask them to connect the hose if my house was burning down. If both my legs was broke and one offered me a wheelchair I wouldn’t take it.”
“What’s he raving about?” Janine said. She and her friends, Charlene Duggs and Lavelle Bates, were on their way out, but Eddie’s outburst had been delivered in such a loud voice that they all stopped. Janine had the bold urge to chat with Duane a minute and felt that Eddie Belt, whom she couldn’t stand, had provided her with a sufficient excuse.
“I wasn’t raving about nothing, and if I was, it was none of your business,” Eddie said. His memories had raised him to such a pitch of outrage that he forgot for a moment that he was talking to his boss’s girlfriend.
“That’s not very polite,” Janine said crisply. “I just asked.”
“You girls sit down,” Duane said, jumping to his feet. He was not willing to be cheated of his first impish mood in months. Who knew when he would see another?
He secured chairs so quickly that the women were nonplused.
“Duane, we just got up,” Charlene said. “We got jobs to do. We ain’t allowed to sit back down.”
“Yeah, you ought to been doing the jobs all this time instead of sitting there telling lies,” Eddie said. Once he got up a headful of outrage, it took it a while to drain.
“What’d he do, take an ugly pill this morning?” Janine asked.
Some years earlier she and Eddie had been engaged for three months. Over the years Janine had indulged in a number of engagements, complete with rings and the selection of wallpaper. She had been responsible for some of the very episodes Eddie was remembering with such ire, but Janine had undergone two years of very helpful therapy with a psychologist in Wichita Falls. The therapist had taught her how unproductive it was to dwell on past mistakes.
One mistake nobody could ever accuse her of dwelling on was Eddie Belt. She had traded in his engagement ring for a bracelet she liked, and when they met she treated him with cool formality. The one time he reproached her for this coolness she pointed out that she had only been practicing good mental health, and recommended that he try to do the same.
“You never cared no more for me than a bug,” Eddie had said bitterly.
“We’ll both get over it quicker if we try to keep a positive attitude,” Janine said.
“I been over it for years, you whore!” Eddie said.
Janine realized then that he was a man on whom tact was wasted, and had refrained from wasting another ounce on him after that.
Therapy was the one thing she had in common with Sonny Crawford, who had driven to Fort Worth once a week and seen a psychiatrist. No one could tell that he was the least different as a result; the general view was that he would have done better to try and get a girlfriend.
Karla had gone to a psychiatrist twice and concluded that he was too bossy, which didn’t surprise Duane.
“You won’t take my advice either,” he said.
“Why should I pay ninety dollars an hour to be griped at when you’ll do it for nothing?” Karla said.
Since Duane had pulled up chairs, the ladies from the courthouse all sat down. All of them had worked there since graduating from high school. It occurred to Charlene and Lavelle that it was a fine opportunity to see how Duane and Janine behaved toward one another in public. At the very least it would provide meat for analysis.
Luthie Sawyer nodded to the ladies, got up and left, a hurt look on his face. The fact that his plan to bomb OPEC had bombed in Thalia was clearly a letdown.
“We hurt that old boy’s feelings,” Duane said. “He had a scheme cooked up to keep us from all going broke.”
“Oh, you ain’t going broke, you just like to feel sorry for yourselves,” Janine said.
She knew that a person in good mental health didn’t dwell on the bad things that might happen. Her view was that the oil business was just in a lull between booms. By the time she and Duane got married he would be richer than ever.
“What was you men talking about that’s so important we have to neglect our jobs to hear about it?” she asked.
Bobby Lee had recovered from his moment of panic. He was one of the few men in town who had not been engaged to Janine. He felt she was nowhere near smart enough to get Duane away from Karla—therefore he had little to fear from her.
 
; “We was talking about sex,” he said.
“We knew that, we ain’t dumb,” Charlene said.
“Junior Nolan was wondering whether women want more sex than men,” Duane said. “When I was growing up the boys all wanted it and the girls didn’t. Now it’s the other way around. I wonder why that is.”
Charlene laughed. She had been married three times, but all three husbands had died after only modest use.
“We’ve got prettier and you’all have gotten uglier,” she said.
It was certainly true that Charlene had gotten prettier. She had been overweight and sloppy as a teenager, but had turned into a good-looking woman.
“Men are all wimps anyway,” Lavelle Bates said. She was a tall, raw-boned brunette who had recently become the first employee of the Thalia courthouse to go to a Club Med on her vacation. It gave her a slight aura of mystery, and even a slight aura had proven enough to intimidate local suitors. The Club Med had not been very eventful romantically, but at least she had got to snorkel. Since coming back she hadn’t got to do anything.
“If any woman wants much she’s out of luck around here,” she said, looking pointedly at Bobby Lee, who had been flirting with her for the last several years in his languid fashion.
Janine tried to look thoughtfully aloof. It was the first time since the affair began that she had sat in public with Duane unless they were out of town. She found that she liked being in public with him. It was good for her self-esteem, the thing she had had to work on most assiduously with her therapist. The men she had been engaged to thought she had far too much self-esteem, while her therapist thought she had much too little.
“I think they should need it equal, the males and the females, don’t you, Duane?” she asked.
Being able to sit in public with him raised her self-esteem to the highest pitch in her memory.
“There ain’t a man alive that can think up as much dirt as a woman,” Eddie Belt said.
“He must have taken two ugly pills this morning,” Janine said. “Ugly as he is, he isn’t usually this ugly.”
Janine had a sense that she was finally getting the situation to swing her way. The sense was so strong that she casually put an arm across Duane’s shoulder, a move not lost on anyone in the Dairy Queen. Even the cook was watching from behind a stack of taco shells.
“All I know is, men are scaredy-cats,” Lavelle said.
“I figure the average man tells at least a million lies a year,” Charlene observed.
“You women won’t stick to the point,” Duane said. “All we’re trying to find out is whether you girls want it more than us boys.”
“In the first place, you ain’t boys,” Lavelle said. “You look half dead to me.”
“That’s what being middle-aged means,” Sonny said. “You’re on the downhill slope.”
“I ain’t, and besides I’ve got my brakes on,” Bobby Lee said. He was five years younger than Sonny and Duane and objected to being lumped with them. He didn’t care for the downhill-slope concept either.
“What’s it say about it in The Wall Street Journal?” Duane asked.
Sonny liked to buy penny stocks. He generally spent an hour or two each morning at the DQ picking through the Journal. He wasn’t rich by any means, but he owned the laundrymat, the Kwik-Sack, the video parlor, four or five buildings and a recently installed carwash.
“It doesn’t say a word about the problem,” he said.
“I can’t believe we have to pay taxes to the county so these women can sit here and talk about stuff like this,” Eddie Belt said.
“Stuff like what?” Karla asked, materializing suddenly at Eddie’s elbow.
CHAPTER 8
THOUGH EVERYONE ELSE AT THE TABLE WAS FROZEN with horror, Duane could hardly keep from laughing out loud. He alone had seen Karla’s BMW whip past the drive-in window a minute earlier. Karla was impatient with the drive-in window, as well as with other forms of service at the DQ.
What she usually did was park behind the building, come in the back door, gossip a minute with the cook, sniff the nacho dip to see if it met with her approval and pour herself some fresh coffee before anyone in the dining room even knew she was around. If there was no one there with whom she felt like gossiping, she could cut back out the rear exit and be on her way to wherever her mood took her.
Duane had decided to give Janine lots of rope and see if Karla could hang her. He knew it wasn’t a charitable thing to do, but then he was not always in the mood to be charitable toward Janine. Without bothering to ascertain whether he planned to divorce Karla and marry her, Janine had told him not to plan any custody fights because she had no intention of living with his kids.
“Living with your kids wouldn’t be my idea of a good time,” she told him, as nicely as possible.
“It isn’t anybody’s idea of a good time,” Duane said. “But they’re my kids. I have to try and raise them.”
“They’re giving fathers real generous visitation rights,” Janine pointed out. “Maybe Karla will move to Ruidoso and you can visit them up there.”
In her thoughts Janine often moved Karla to some fashionable but distant place such as Ruidoso or Vail. Even during the brief conversation she had been vaguely moving Karla around, making it all the more a shock to see her standing behind Eddie Belt, very much present. Karla was wearing sunglasses, so there was no way of knowing what she was thinking, but then Janine didn’t care to know what a person like Karla thought.
Duane, who just seemed to get the devil in him from time to time, wasn’t a bit of help. He could have asked Karla what she thought she was doing, showing up at the Dairy Queen unannounced, but instead he just sat there grinning.
Janine withdrew her arm from Duane’s shoulder as smoothly as possible, well aware that if Karla had happened to walk in with a chain saw the arm would be lying on the floor already.
“Hi, Janine,” Karla said. “Haven’t seen you in a long time.”
“I hardly ever leave the courthouse,” Janine said. “The only people who see me are people with overdue taxes.”
Karla seemed to be happy as a lark, although she hadn’t taken off her sunglasses.
“Why are you looking so red in the face, Eddie Belt?” she asked. “Were you talking about sex? I’ve noticed the mere mention of sex turns you red in the face.”
“You don’t have to call me by my whole name,” Eddie pointed out. “You’ve known me all my life.”
Eddie had a hard time concealing the fact that he was deathly afraid of Karla—more afraid of her than he would have been of a cobra. You could run from a cobra, but where could you run from Karla, if you happened to work for her husband?
“Now don’t pick on Eddie,” Duane said. “We’ve just been discussing whether women like sex more than men, or what.”
“We didn’t reach a decision yet,” he added.
“In fact we haven’t got very far in the discussion,” Sonny said. It worried him that Duane would sit there practically egging on his wife and his girlfriend. Duane had that streak in him. In certain moods, he would take any risk. His daring made Sonny nervous—he didn’t enjoy watching it operate. He himself preferred to avoid confrontations and had arranged his life so it didn’t contain many.
“Bobby Lee’s just a Peeping Tom, so he shouldn’t get a vote,” Karla said.
“I ain’t, I’m married,” Bobby Lee protested.
Pretending her finger was a piece of chalk, Karla marked a few scores in the air.
“Sonny’s a bachelor, Eddie Belt’s scared of women, and Duane says himself he’s past his prime. I don’t know if it’s fair to judge the whole male sex by this ugly little bunch.”
“Yes, it’s fair,” Lavelle said. “I lived in Olney twenty years, and men ain’t no better down there.”
“I ain’t scared of women and you ain’t no Gina Bardot yourself,” Eddie Belt snapped, wishing he’d never stopped at the Dairy Queen in the first place.
“Brigitte Bardot,” So
nny corrected.
Janine could hardly believe Duane would sit there and let his own wife insult him so bluntly. Ordinarily she would have thought it meant he suffered from low self-esteem, but Duane was tricky and couldn’t really be understood in terms of self-esteem.
“I may get a second wind any day now,” he said, grinning.
“Duane, you used up all your winds years ago,” Karla said.
“I wish I could just sit here all day, but some of us have to work,” Janine said, standing up. Charlene and Lavelle were reluctant to leave until they had heard what Karla had to say to Duane out of earshot of Janine, but they didn’t have much choice. Fortunately the cook was still listening from behind the taco shells and they knew they could get a full report from her.
“If you ever figure out who wants it most, let us know,” Charlene said. “I’ve often wondered.”
Karla took Eddie Belt’s dozer cap off and ruffled his hair to show him there were no hard feelings.
“I know you’re not really scared of women,” she said. “You’re just scared of me, and that shows you got good sense.”
“If I had good sense I wouldn’t be here,” Eddie said, though now that the horrible trio from the courthouse was gone his mood was improving.
“You oughta do like Duane, get you a girlfriend who chews bubble gum,” Karla said, still the picture of good cheer.
Duane laughed.
“I don’t know what you think you’ve got to laugh about, Duane,” Karla said, smiling at him.
“I was just laughing at nothing,” he said. “It’s either that or cry about everything, and I wasn’t in a crying mood.”
Karla put an arm around Sonny, her old friend. From time to time, in years past, she had tried to penetrate his detachment at least enough to get him to flirt with her, but she finally came to accept that his detachment was impenetrable. Since then he had been a stable source of advice, though rarely a source of fun.
“It don’t say much for your character that you’d let him sit here with that slut and not do a thing to save our marriage,” she said.