Through the years, thinking about Jacy, he had often fantasized that she would come back someday and become friends with Karla. In his fantasies it was a way of having them both. For years it had been one of his pleasantest daydreams.
Now Jacy had come back, and she and Karla were friends, but the central part of the daydream hadn’t happened. Instead of having them both, he had neither of them. He felt they had become much closer to one another than either of them was to him. It was warming to see that they provided one another with such easy, relaxed companionship; but where, in the years ahead, was his support to come from?
“Honey pie, I’m sorry,” Jacy said. “Don’t look so sad. You’re such an easy victim, I guess we just can’t resist.”
“Don’t baby that man,” Karla said. “He’s suckered me for twenty-two years with those sad looks of his.”
“I don’t think it’s an act,” Jacy said. “I think we’re looking at a sad man.”
“Duane, are you?” Karla asked.
“No,” Duane said.
Jacy’s remark startled him. In his whole life he could not remember anyone describing him as sad. He had heard hundreds of other people described as sad, but never himself.
“You shouldn’t get drunk if you’re sad,” Karla said. “It’ll just make you worse.”
“I’m not drunk and I’m not sad,” he insisted.
“You shouldn’t lie about how you feel, either,” Jacy said. “You might fool one of us but you could never fool both of us. We know you too well.”
“I don’t think either one of you know me very well,” Duane said angrily.
The women were silent a moment. They exchanged looks.
“My lord, you’re grumpy,” Karla said. “We were just joking. I remember when you had a sense of humor, Duane.”
“I still have a sense of humor,” Duane insisted.
At the moment, however, nothing seemed funny, though it should have. The children of Thalia were bombarding their elders with eggs, which had been made available for no reason by a trucker from Iowa who happened to park his truck in the worst possible place at the worst possible time. G. G. Rawley had been hit by twenty-five eggs which he thought came from the hens of hell. But G.G. didn’t seem funny, and neither did Toots Burns, normally a comical sight even when he wasn’t covered with raw eggs. None of it affected Duane as strongly as the sight of the two women sitting on the car, so self-possessed and quiet.
“Dickie’s coming in a minute,” Karla said. “It’s hard to dance on all those broken eggs. We’re gonna go out to Aunt Jimmie’s and dance to the jukebox. You want to come with us?”
“Don’t pressure him,” Jacy said. “If he’d rather stay here and feel left out, let him.”
“Duane, is it a midlife crisis or what?” Karla asked.
“I guess I’m just tired of the centennial,” he said. “It seems like it’s been going on for a hundred years.”
“I think you’re threatened by your own child,” Jacy said. “You practically said that yourself. It’s a common human experience—you don’t have to be defensive about it. Just admit it.”
“I think I’ll take a walk,” Duane said. “Maybe I’ll run into that truck driver and tell him he’s losing his eggs.”
He drained his drink and pitched the cup back in the ice chest.
Jacy got off the car and put her arms around him.
“Come on, honey pie, go dancing with us,” she said. “We’ll make up for all the mean things we said.”
“You didn’t say any mean things,” Duane said.
“No, but we hurt your tender feelings somehow,” she said.
“He’s too stubborn to have fun with us,” Karla said. “If we take him he’ll just sit there and be gloomy and none of us will have any fun.”
“Somebody responsible needs to stick around here,” Duane said. “The twins started this egg fight. They might get arrested or something.”
“See, he’s always got some excuse for not having fun,” Karla said.
Duane felt undecided. Part of him wanted to go dancing. On the other hand, he agreed with Karla’s appraisal of the situation. If he went dancing, in the mood he was in, none of them would have as much fun as they might have if he didn’t go.
“I think I’ll just take a walk,” he said.
Jacy let him go without another word. When he looked back, from half a block down the street, he saw Jacy and Karla standing by the car door, looking in his direction.
Beyond them, beneath the blinking red light and in the streets around the courthouse, there were signs of a general melee. It was no longer just the children who were throwing eggs. Everyone seemed to be throwing eggs.
While Duane watched, Dickie drove up in the Porsche and stopped by Karla and Jacy. He parked the Porsche and got in the BMW. A moment later the three of them sped past. They all waved at him gaily, but didn’t slow down to see if he had changed his mind about going dancing.
Duane could not decide what he would have done if they had stopped.
CHAPTER 93
DUANE BARELY WALKED. FLOATING IN HIS BOAT was his main form of relaxation. He could not remember when he had taken a walk through Thalia at night. Though it was a very small town, there were parts of it he had not been through in years—not since Dickie and Nellie’s first teenage years, when Karla was constantly forcing him to get out of bed and go look for them. They never came home from parties or ball games when they were supposed to, and in looking for them he had once poked through every small alley or lover’s lane in town.
At first, walking, he felt a kind of disgust with himself for not having accepted the women’s invitation to go dancing. He didn’t really know why he hadn’t, except to some extent he felt like an intruder in Karla’s life when she was with Jacy, and in Jacy’s when she was with Karla. If either of them alone had asked him to go dancing, he would have accepted, but they had come to seem like a couple, and their closeness was a barrier he was unwilling to try and penetrate. It was more relaxing not to have to tilt with the vibes they gave off when they were together.
Knowing that Dickie was safely gone for the night, he decided to walk to Suzie Nolan’s house. To avoid the egg fight, he walked along the western edge of town. He passed the little Thalia cemetery, a place he normally only came to in the capacity of a pallbearer, every year or two. Both his parents were buried there. His father had been killed overseas, in World War II; his body had been shipped back and buried when Duane was five. His mother had died in her early sixties, mainly, so far as Duane could tell, because she had little interest in living. A few roughnecks he had worked with were buried there, a few old-timers he had liked, and several classmates who had died in accidents.
It struck him, walking past the cemetery, that there was no one buried in it whom he had ever been close to. He had never really known his father, and had had only a formal relationship with his mother. All his main workmates and drinking buddies were still alive, as were all the women he had cared about, and all his children. He had lived almost half a century without death touching him. The only person buried in the cemetery for whose passing he had felt any grief was Charlie Sears, the buck-toothed kid killed in Viet Nam; and that, he knew, was a small grief. He had only known the boy a few short months.
The thought struck him, walking past the cemetery, that his own death might be the first that would really affect him. It was a novel thought, and one of the few he had ever had about death. It was obvious, as Joe Coombs had pointed out, that it could happen to anyone, anytime, but, though Duane had worked all his life at a dangerous trade, he had never come really close to it and had rarely been even momentarily scared.
He felt, with no sense of fear, a sudden mild curiosity about his own removal from the texture of daily life. “Life goes on … “: he had heard it said after every funeral, every fatal accident. He knew it would be true in his family’s case, if he were killed; their energies might be blunted for a time, but not for a long time.
/> But what of his own energies? Except for Karla, he had always been the most energetic person he knew. He had always been able to do more work and, while doing it, maintain a higher level of attention, than any of his rivals in the oil patch. It occurred to him that if something was really lost from his life, making him, as Jacy had suggested, a sad person, it was energy. For most of the past fifteen months he had worried much of the night about money, not sleeping the deep sleep that had for so long been his as a gift. He slept tired, woke tired, worked tired. The sense that he possessed an almost absolute energy was gone. He could still work, but in contrast to what he had once done routinely, his capacity seemed paltry. It was like the difference between floating in deep water and floating in the shallows. A buoyancy had been lost, but only by himself. Dickie, Karla, the twins, still had absolute energy. They were always wanting to go dancing or water-skiing, to play football, to have sex, to do something—when mainly what he wanted was to take a really satisfying nap.
It was a new thought to realize that he had reached an age when he would have to balance his energies as well as his checkbook—leave a little in the account for family life, some for his business, some for a girlfriend, if he could keep one. Karla alone necessitated keeping a substantial reserve.
Suzie Nolan’s house was totally dark when he approached it. Duane hesitated—he didn’t want to startle or frighten her. He felt he should probably just go away. He could call her on the phone and apologize the next day. It was probably silly to bring it up. Weren’t women always accusing him of trying to settle things that couldn’t be settled?
But he didn’t want to go away, however silly his feeling was. He let himself into her kitchen and turned on the light. Then he sat at the kitchen table, wondering how to wake Suzie without frightening her.
“Dickie?” she said. A light came on in the hall.
“No, it’s just me,” Duane said.
Suzie came into the kitchen in her nightgown. She looked sleepy and a little worried.
“Have you seen my kids?” she asked. “They’re not home.”
“They’re up at the courthouse throwing eggs,” he said.
Suzie looked puzzled. “Why are they throwing eggs?” she asked.
“Hundreds of people are throwing eggs,” Duane said. “Some idiot parked an egg truck right by the laundrymat and the kids got into it somehow.”
Suzie sat down at the table, looking at him sleepily.
“Just me?” she said. “I was gonna start calling you Daddy Duane, but maybe I’ll call you ‘Just Me.’ What do you want, ‘Just Me?’ “
“To be back in your good graces,” he said.
“Go find my kids for me then,” she said. “I’m the kind of mother that don’t sleep good unless her kids are home. I’ve just been tossing and turning, waiting for them to come in.”
“Finding two kids in an egg fight is a hard task,” he said.
“It’s the shortest route to my good graces, though,” Suzie said.
“Where’s your car keys?” he asked.
She pointed to a nail by the back door. Just as she did, the screen door opened and her two tall, grinning children stepped in. Both were almost as egg-drenched as Toots Burns had been.
“Stop!” Suzie said, snapping awake.
She left the kitchen briefly and returned with two bathrobes.
“Go outside and undress,” she said. “Leave those slimy clothes on the porch. And take showers. You both got egg in your hair.”
In a minute the children, in their bathrobes, slipped through the kitchen. They were good-looking kids, as lively and full of mischief as their mother could be in certain moods. Both said polite goodnights, calling him “Mr. Moore.”
The thought that Dickie would soon be their stepfather seemed strange to him, but he let it be. He felt he had been foolish to return. Suzie looked at him as she might at an un-threatening stranger—far from being angry with him, she seemed almost to have forgotten him. It didn’t bother her that he was in her kitchen in the middle of the night, but it didn’t interest her, either. Her need for sleep, plus the fact that her kids were home, erased him as a factor in her life. She poured herself a glass of ice water and stood by the refrigerator drinking it. Though almost asleep, she seemd to be savoring each swallow. There was something deeply appealing about her as she drank—a way she had of making the simplest physical act, such as drinking cold water, seem as satisfying and as necessary as an intimate touch.
Though stirred, Duane merely hung the car keys on the back of the door. She had erased him, but then he had been erased before. With Suzie, her body was always apt to take over and assert a demand to which there was no appeal. It might be for food, for sleep, for sex or just for a cold drink of water, but whatever it was for, that need became the only thing with any real existence to Suzie, for a time. He had learned a few things about her bodily needs, one of which was not to try and talk to them. Erased for now did not mean erased forever.
“’Night,” he said.
“Duane, you could sleep on the couch,” she said, setting down her water glass.
“No, thanks,” he said. “I got kids too. I better go see what mine are doing.”
“’Bye,” Suzie said, turning off the kitchen light.
CHAPTER 94
GETTING BACK TO THE COURTHOUSE PROVED TO be no simple matter. The streets around the square, covered with the slime of thousands of broken eggs, were as slippery as ice.
Surveying the scene from the comparative safety of the filling station, Duane was not sure he really wanted to go back. For one thing, the egg war still raged, though the number of participants had diminished. The band had given up, a fact which hadn’t discouraged a few die-hard dancers, who might not even have noticed it. All around the square piles of egg cartons were heaped up like shell casings.
The main battle now raged around Old Texasville, which had become the Alamo of the drinking faction. Forty or fifty cases of beer had been stacked in front of it as a barricade. Santa Anna and General Travis, or Bobby Lee and Eddie Belt, had joined forces to fight their common enemy, G. G. Rawley, who had recruited a large group of strong-armed Byelo-Baptist farm boys.
Bobby and Eddie had only a few allies, all very drunk, and ammunition was evidently running low. They also had Shorty. From time to time, at Bobby Lee’s urging, Shorty would jump up on the barricade of beer cases and pace about nervously. The plan seemed to be to have Shorty draw the Baptists’ fire, but the Baptists were too short of ammunition to waste it on a dog. They had only about a dozen cartons of eggs left. The defenders of Texasville only risked an egg when they thought they could make an easy hit.
Duane managed to tiptoe across the street, walking when possible on the thousands of beer cans that mingled with egg slime on every approach to the square.
Just as he reached the cover of the hot-dog stand he saw Jack and Julie pass under the red light in a golf cart. It was Lester and Jenny’s golf cart and their girls rode in it with the twins. Several kids came behind them on lawn tractors.
Unlike the Baptists, the kids had plenty of eggs. Julie drove the golf cart, and Jack, the strike-out pitcher, began to drill egg after egg at the outflanked Byelo-Baptists, who wasted a whole carton in fruitless retaliation. Jack’s aim was deadly—almost every egg splattered against a face, chest or crotch.
Seeing that the enemy was caught in a crossfire, Bobby and Eddie rushed out in front of the barricade and flung several eggs at G. G. Rawley. Shorty was yipping his loudest, causing friend and foe alike to wince. Some of the Baptist farm boys tried to rush the kids, but the footing was treacherous and most of them fell down.
Jack rearmed himself in mid-flight, taking cartons of eggs from the ammunition train of lawn tractors. His accuracy was something to see. Duane indulged in a brief but vivid fantasy in which Jack struck out the last man in the last game of the World Series, in Yankee Stadium.
The farm boys were stubborn foes, however. Though smacked time after time with eg
gs, they still struggled through the slime, saving their last few eggs until they were at point-blank range. Jack threw faster, hoping to slow their advance, but they weren’t slowing, and were almost through the region of slime.
Jack decided it was time for a strategic retreat. Julie whipped the golf cart into an alley and sped into the night. The rear guard, on the sluggish lawn tractors, which maneuvered poorly on a terrain of beer cans and broken eggs, tried to get away but were overtaken by the farm boys and pelted savagely.
“Let’s call a truce, G.G.,” Bobby Lee said. “We ain’t got many more eggs.”
“I ain’t truce-ing with no heathen sots,” G.G. said. Though little more than a walking column of albumen, he had not lost one whit of his fighting spirit. He threw his last three eggs, all of which splattered against the front of Old Texasville.
Bobby Lee had only one egg left and he dropped it. Shorty, who had become convinced that it was his duty to destroy eggs, pounced on it and crunched it before Bobby Lee could pick it up. Eddie Belt took a couple of last throws at G.G. but missed by several yards.
“It’s a good thing your life don’t depend on hitting somebody with an egg,” Bobby Lee remarked.
Duane walked over and reduced the barricade by one beer.
“Where was you when we was fighting the good fight?” Bobby Lee asked.
“Well out of range,” Duane said. It seemed as if the whole front of the courthouse, not to mention the lawn and the surrounding streets, was covered with egg.
“I’m so tired I’m about to drop,” Eddie Belt said, yawning.
“Go on and drop, who’d miss you?” Bobby Lee said unsentimentally. The combat seemed to have invigorated him.
“Wonder if anybody’s left out at Aunt Jimmie’s who’d like to dance with me?” he asked.
The egg truck was still parked by the laundrymat, its rear doors swinging open. Duane walked over and looked in it. It contained not a single egg.