A faint light was visible down the highway to the east. The curb behind the truck was the only spot around free of eggs, so he sat down on it, to sip his beer and wait for the dawn.
Bobby Lee, who was far from free of egg, came and joined him.
“We don’t have to work today, do we?” he asked.
“Sure, we have to work today,” Duane said. “We have to set pipe on that second well. Just because you drunk beer and threw eggs all night don’t give you the right to be lazy.”
It grew a little lighter. They saw a man come walking along the street, a rolled-up sleeping bag over his shoulder.
“That might be our truck driver,” Duane said.
He was right. When the man was a block and a half away he slipped on some egg slime. Up to that point he had apparently not noticed the carnage ahead of him in the street. He noticed then, however. In front of some stores, empty egg cartons were heaped almost as high as the tumbleweeds had been.
The man tried to run to his truck and immediately fell down. He picked himself up and struggled forward, slipping repeatedly. When he finally reached the truck he was both aghast and out of breath.
“What happened here?” he asked.
“Well, it was just kind of a celebration,” Duane said.
“Celebration!” the man said. He was about sixty, thin and sandy-haired. “My eggs are gone! I had five thousand dozen eggs in that truck! Sixty thousand eggs!”
“You probably shouldn’t have gone off and left them,” Duane suggested.
“I took a nap,” the truck driver said. He seemed a little embarrassed.
“I drove all the way down from Ottumwa, Iowa,” he added. “You got such nice lawns down here in Texas. I don’t care for motels. I’d rather just walk around in these peaceful little towns and find me a nice lawn to stretch out on. Sleep under the stars. It’s more restful.”
He kept looking in his truck, as if unable to believe that the eggs which had traveled with him all the way from Ottumwa, Iowa, were no longer there.
“I never once dreamed that anything like this could happen,” he said. “What kind of maniacs could break sixty thousand eggs?”
“It was Libyan terrorists that started it,” Bobby Lee said, in his most reasonable voice. “They slipped in dressed like Baptist preachers, and the next thing we knew eggs were just flying everywhere.”
“It’s our centennial,” Duane said. “Things like this don’t happen but once every hundred years.”
“Them eggs was grade double A large,” the driver said. He looked increasingly stunned. Spotting the lone pay phone on the corner across the street, he started toward it.
“I got to call my boss,” he said. “He’s not hardly gonna know what to think about this.”
“Just send the bill to the town,” Duane said. “We’re not thieves. We’ll pay for your eggs. Send it to Thalia, Texas. The zip is 76359•”
The man carefully wrote the zip code down on a checkbook and slipped and slid his way across the street to the pay phone.
“You’re too easy on people,” Bobby Lee said. “I would have let the dumb son-of-a-bitch figure out the zip code for himself. Look at him. He hasn’t even learned that you make faster progress stepping on the beer cans than you do stepping on the eggs.”
“He’s in shock,” Duane said. “You would be too if you lay down to take a nap on a nice lawn and came back to discover you’d lost sixty thousand eggs.”
“I personally wouldn’t have sixty thousand eggs to lose,” Bobby Lee said. “I rarely eat an egg.”
CHAPTER 95
THE TRUCKER FROM IOWA MADE HIS CALL AND went on his way. He was only out of sight a few minutes when they spotted the delivery truck that dropped off the newspapers every morning. It was coming fast. Duane jumped up and waved his dozer cap, hoping the driver would slow down, but the driver came right on. He hit the egg slick going about fifty. The truck slid sideways for half a block, crunching beer cans by the score. It came to a stop only a few yards from where Duane and Bobby Lee stood. Shorty picked his way into the street on a bridge of beer cans and began to bark at it.
The driver was a stout boy in his late teens. He started to step out of the truck, but thought better of it. The bundle of papers he had to deliver dangled from one hand.
“I don’t see no place I can set these down,” he said.
Duane walked over and took them from him.
“Did an egg truck spill, or what?” the young man asked.
“It didn’t exactly spill but it did lose quite a few eggs,” Duane said.
“I hope I don’t have a flat,” the boy said. “I’d hate to change a flat in a place like this.”
He started his truck and drove carefully away.
“We got a good vantage point here,” Bobby Lee said. “I wonder who’ll come along next.”
It happened to be the twins, who appeared out of the gray dawn. They had only one carton of eggs left.
“I hope they ain’t thinking of chunking us,” Bobby Lee said. “You raised a couple of fine little chunkers there.”
Julie went in the courthouse, where she had hidden her bike, and Jack contented himself with throwing the twelve eggs, one by one, across the street, into the shattered shell of the old picture show’s ticket window. One high throw hit the dusty marquee, but the rest of the eggs passed through the ticket office and splattered against the wall where the popcorn machine had once stood.
When the carton was empty, Jack went into the courthouse, got his bike and rode off after his sister. Both kids negotiated the wasteland of eggs and beer cans without a slip.
“I wonder what those kids will grow up to be?” Bobby Lee said.
“I have no idea,” Duane replied.
“They’ll be something,” Bobby Lee said. “They won’t have quite as far to go as you did.”
“That might just make it harder on them,” Duane said. “If you have a long way to go, you just go. You don’t have as big a chance of having an identity crisis as kids do nowadays.”
“Your wife wouldn’t agree,” Bobby Lee said. “She just told me yesterday you were having an identity crisis.”
“Have you ever had one?” Duane asked.
“No, I’m planning to have mine at the same time I have my mid-life crisis,” Bobby Lee said. “Kill two birds with one stone.”
In the east the horizon was pink. It was at its brightest just where the long straight highway met the horizon. Duane noticed Sonny’s Wall Street Journal on top of the pile of newspapers. He pulled it out and opened it.
“OIL HITS FOURTEEN YEAR LOW,” the headline said. “Oil Minister Says Saudis Unwilling to Slow Production.”
The first paragraph of the story informed him that West Texas Intermediate Crude had closed at $8.89 a barrel. Experts expected it to go even lower before bottoming out. Some said $7, some said $6, and a few thought it might even sink to $5.
Duane refolded the Journal and stuck it back with the other newspapers.
“I guess you’ll get your day off, after all,” he told Bobby Lee. “You might get the rest of the year off, too.”
“How come?” Bobby Lee asked, surprised.
“I might as well let that oil stay where it is,” Duane said. “I’m not going to bring it up just to give it away, even if I could afford to. Dickie can bring it up, or Little Mike.”
“How come them Saudis can afford to, if we can’t?” Bobby Lee asked.
“They’ve got more of it,” Duane said.
“Nobody’s supposed to have more of anything than Americans have,” Bobby Lee said. “It’s unconstitutional. Shit, let’s get the Supreme Court after them.”
Duane had not opened the Journal expecting to read of rising oil prices. He knew which direction they were going. But the figure still stunned him. The price had dropped five dollars a barrel in less than a week. The old figure was severe, but not conclusive. The old figure would have daunted investors, weeded out amateurs, destroyed the most hopelessly debt-ri
dden. Over the long haul it might have had a cleansing effect, purging the business of poseurs and incompetents, forcing the professionals to work harder, stay alert and produce what they produced more economically.
But the new figure had no bright side for those throughout the oil patch who lived off small oil. Duane imagined the tens of thousands of pumps across the vast plain, from the Permian Basin east to the swamps of Louisiana, that worked the little three-and-four-barrel-a-day stripper wells. He had seen the pumps working all his life, like patient, domesticated insects, bringing up their three or four barrels every day: not enough to make anyone rich, but enough to give the old folks a little edge on their social security, or to keep the kids in school. As long as they kept pumping, pumpers would be hired to pump them, well-service crews to clean out the wells, truckers to haul the oil and equipment, welders to fix what broke down.
Now much of that life would stop. The pumps would cease to peck at the stained plains. Little businesses would fold, and little lives.
Duane felt tired and sad, thinking about it. But he didn’t feel persecuted. He knew quite well that it could easily have happened sooner, and that there was still plenty of room for it to get worse.
Bobby Lee pulled the Journal off the stack and glanced at it.
“I’ve never been out of work a day in my life,” he said. “Do you think it’ll get worse than the Depression?”
“I wasn’t alive in the Depression,” Duane said. “Basically, I’ve had forty-eight years of prosperity. One thing I don’t mean to do is start complaining.”
“You wouldn’t lay me off, would you, after all we’ve been through together?” Bobby Lee asked, staring gloomily at the Journal.
“I’d lay you off last, I’ll promise you that,” Duane said. “The bank may lay me off, you know.”
“Those motherfuckers, we should have thrown all these eggs in there,” Bobby Lee said.
They saw a Lincoln edging around the square. It stopped, and Lester and Jenny got out of it. Both of them carried cameras.
“What happened to Janine?” Duane asked, surprised to see Lester with his wife.
“Janine caught Lester kissing Lavelle,” Bobby Lee said. “I guess if you’re headed for prison you try to get all you can get.”
Duane imagined a sad Janine, alone in her little house, getting more and more pregnant. He imagined himself going to see her, too.
“If you’re worried about Janine, forget it,” Bobby Lee said. “Worry about me if you want to worry about somebody.”
“Why not worry about Janine?”
“She took up with Junior Nolan,” Bobby Lee said. “He beat me to her, if you want to know the truth. Janine’s improved in the last few years. I think me and her’d get along real well now.
“It’s hard for people around here to decide who they want to live with,” he added.
“But what became of Billie Anne?” Duane asked.
“Oh, she went back to Benson, Arizona,” Bobby Lee said. “She said it was too tame around here.”
Lester and Jenny walked over. It was not quite light enough to take good pictures. Both of them looked perky.
“This is a miracle,” Lester said, happily surveying the scene. “When I show the judge pictures of this scene and he realizes I had to try and run a bank in a town that does things like this he’ll dismiss all the charges.”
“The whole centennial’s just been real successful, all except the souvenir sales,” Jenny said.
They walked off and stood under the red light, focusing their cameras.
Bobby Lee threw The Wall Street Journal into the nearest pile of egg goop.
“I hate reading things that depress me,” he said.
They saw a black Mercedes approaching from the west. At first Duane thought it was Jacy’s, but it was a much newer model.
“Those folks picked a bad shortcut, if they’re trying to take a shortcut,” he said.
The Mercedes came into town at a fast clip. When it hit the slime it duplicated the behavior of the delivery truck. It slid sideways for half a block, spun around three times and came to a stop.
After a moment, two smoked windows on the curb side slowly lowered. A longhaired sleepy man wearing a leather hat looked out of the back seat, but the sight of sixty thousand broken eggs mixed with several thousand beer cans evidently did not strike him as unusual or worthy of note. Without so much as raising an eyelid he put his window back up.
The other traveler had more curiosity. He had red hair, wore a headband and had a beard that was mostly gray. He opened the door of the Mercedes and stepped out a minute, grinning a shy grin. He was wearing running shoes, which didn’t prevent him from slipping in the egg slime. He managed to keep himself from falling by grabbing the car door, but the slithery nature of the footing discouraged him from further exploration. He held on to the door and looked around a minute, obviously more impressed by what he saw than was his colleague. He looked at Duane and Bobby Lee and grinned.
“My lord,” he said. “You folks must have had a pretty good ratfuck around here last night.”
“We sure did,” Duane said.
The traveler got back in the Mercedes and the Mercedes edged between Lester and Jenny, who were still taking pictures. The car disappeared into the sunrise.
“I think that was Willie Nelson,” Bobby Lee said cautiously.
“You might be right,” Duane said.
CHAPTER 96
THE THOUGHT THAT HE HAD JUST SPOKEN TO WILLIE Nelson filled Bobby Lee with a kind of awe. For several minutes he was too awed to speak, but once he regained the use of his tongue he gave way to wild speculation. Perhaps Willie had decided to settle in Thalia. Perhaps he was thinking of buying Jacy’s house—the house Steve McQueen was said to have visited. Perhaps he would be coming back to town later in the day. He might give Bobby Lee an autograph. He might eat a meal at the Dairy Queen.
“He might and he might not,” Duane said. He was getting a headache. He knew he ought to get up and head straight for Dallas to try and find a decent bankruptcy lawyer. None of the miracles that might have saved him from that distasteful expedient had happened. He didn’t want to go bankrupt, but his only alternative was to let the bank take everything he had and hope it satisfied them.
Besides that little personal problem, there was a civic problem: what to do about sixty thousand broken eggs. The red rim of the sun was just about to break the eastern horizon. It was an August sun, too. In a couple of hours Thalia was going to look like the world’s biggest omelet.
“It’s a pity you stuck the fire truck to the courthouse,” he said. “It’d be a lot easier to clean up this mess if we had a fire truck.”
He saw Briscoe racing across the courthouse lawn with an egg in his mouth. It was probably the only unbroken egg left in town.
“There’s a simple solution to the problem of the fire truck,” Bobby Lee said reasonably. “It’s not the truck that’s stuck to the courthouse, it’s the ladder. All we gotta do is chop off the ladder and we’ll have us a usable fire truck.”
Before Duane could critique that solution he saw the BMW streaking back into town from the direction of Aunt Jimmie’s Lounge. He immediately ran down the sidewalk, waving his arms and trying to slow the car. If Dickie was driving his usual eighty-five, bad things were going to happen when the car hit the egg slick.
But Dickie wasn’t driving, or even in the car. Karla was driving, and no one was with her but Jacy. She stopped well clear of the eggy area.
Duane picked his way to the car, Bobby Lee close at his heels.
“Willie Nelson was just here,” Bobby Lee said breathlessly.
“You’re lying,” Karla said. “You’re just trying to make me feel bad, as usual.”
“He was here, livin’, breathin’ Willie Nelson,” Bobby Lee insisted.
“Oh, get in, we’re starving,” Karla said. “Let’s go to the Dairy Queen.”
“I’m not shitting you, Karla,” Bobby Lee said. “Your b
iggest idol in the world passed right through town. I think he’s thinking of buying a house here.”
“Just ignore him, he was the one spread the rumor about Steve McQueen, too,” Karla said to Jacy.
Duane got in. Both women were in high spirits. They had started to put on lipstick, then had decided to trade lipsticks and were admiring their new looks.
“What’s wrong with you, gloom puss?” Karla asked.
“You’ll know when you read the paper,” Duane said. “Today’s the day we finally went broke.”
“Duane, you just need a good breakfast,” Karla said. “There’s people in the oil business who’ve been broke five or six times. It’s no big deal.”
“Karla, Willie Nelson spoke to me,” Bobby Lee said.
Jacy reached back and gave Duane a pat on the knee, the only part of him she could reach.
“Cheer up, honey pie,” she said. “It’s a beautiful day and you’re riding around with the two best-looking women in Texas. That’s something.”
“It sure is,” Duane admitted. “I never intended to go broke, though.”
“Well, things don’t always work out,” Karla said. “Hitch up your belt, Duane. You’re just forty-eight. You got plenty of time to get rich again.”
The women’s high spirits were irresistible. Duane felt a lot better, just being with them. Probably he could get rich again, if he could figure out a way to steal some of their energy.
“He seemed like a real modest man,” Bobby Lee said. “He grinned his little grin.”
“Yeah, and I’m gonna kick your little dick if you don’t shut up,” Karla said. “Willie’s too much of a gentleman to come to town the one time I wouldn’t be here to meet him.”
They parked at the Dairy Queen. Several bleary-eyed celebrants were standing around in the parking lot, scraping egg off their Levi’s with pocketknives.
As they were at the door, Ruth Popper whirled into the parking lot in her dusty old Volkswagen. Her hair was wet and she looked distraught.
“I’ve lost Sonny,” she said. “He snuck out while I was showering.”