“I didn’t know you bred bullfrogs,” Duane said.
“I don’t, but I could,” Eddie said.
“You’re gonna have to breed ’em for a living if you don’t get that generator going pretty soon,” Duane said. “I don’t like paying roughnecks to take naps.”
“That generator will probably have to be taken apart, and I’m not mechanic enough to do it,” Eddie Belt said. He shot again, and another frog flew high in the air.
“I’m going back to work in a minute, though,” he said.
“This is a strange oil company,” Duane said. “I wish there was real money in bullfrogs.”
He got up and went back to the well. The roughnecks were still napping. As soon as he got in his pickup he honked the horn loudly. The roughnecks all jumped up, groggy from the heat. Shorty also jumped up, no less groggy.
Duane drove closer to the roughnecks. Two or three were rubbing sleep out of their eyes.
“If that generator ain’t running before I’m out of hearing distance all you lazy sons-of-bitches are fired,” he said. “And I don’t want to hear any more lies about baling wire.”
As he was bumping out of the pasture back onto the county road he heard the generator whine like a jet.
CHAPTER 13
DRIVING HOME, DUANE PASSED THE LARGE HOUSE where Jacy Farrow was staying. It was adobe and, from a distance, blended in with the rocky bluff on which it sat. So far as he knew, no one in Thalia had ever been inside it. Danny Deck, the screenwriter, had had it built nearly fifteen years before. A group of Indians from New Mexico, who knew how to work with adobe, had lived on the bluff in trailer houses for almost a year, building it.
The house overlooked a valley known locally as The Sorrows. Long before, Indians had traded captives in the valley. Many sad scenes had been enacted there. A mailbox near the house had Los Dolores written on it.
When the house had first been built, excitement ran high in the county. There were rumors of movie stars having been glimpsed going to or from the house. Bobby Lee thought he saw Steve McQueen drive through town.
But the rumors all remained rumors. No one managed to establish that Steve McQueen, or any other movie star, had actually been to the house, or even to the county.
The mailman who served that route reported that he delivered more mail to Los Dolores than to all the rest of the route put together. Sometimes the big mailbox—it was also adobe—got emptied regularly, but other times it filled and overflowed, and mail had to be stacked in the post office for weeks, or even months, until the writer reappeared.
No one kept house for him, and no one looked after the yard. In summer grass and weeds grew thick around the adobe.
Danny Deck himself was never seen in Thalia. Roughnecks going out for the midnight shift would sometimes see lights in the house. Then it would be dark for months at a stretch.
The excitement that had prevailed when the house was being built had long since faded. People who moved to the county during the oil boom didn’t even know of its existence. There were only a few die-hard ranchers left in the part of the county where the house stood, some of them glimpsed almost as rarely as Danny Deck.
Prior to Jacy’s return, the only person who had expressed much interest in Los Dolores itself had been Karla, who wanted to buy it.
“I bet he’d sell it if you made a high enough offer, Duane,” she said every few weeks for a couple of years when they were richest.
“How do you know what he’d do?” Duane asked. “You’ve never met him.”
“I saw him once, though,” Karla said. “He was getting gas at the same station I was getting gas at. He looked real friendly.”
“That don’t mean he wants to sell his house,” Duane pointed out.
“Duane, it don’t hurt to ask,” Karla said.
For a while she drove by Los Dolores often, though she had no earthly business in that part of the county. Nobody had any business there except a few drillers and one or two cowboys. Karla’s hope was that someday Danny would be standing outside. If he waved, she could wave back. Then the next time they stopped at the same gas station they could strike up a conversation.
Karla prided herself on her friendliness. She often struck up conversations with total strangers for no reason at all and was eager to strike one up with Danny Deck. She had never met a writer, unless you counted the reporters who covered the petroleum industry for various Texas papers. From her one glimpse of Danny Deck at the filling station she was convinced they would like knowing each other. For a while she drove past Los Dolores three or four times a week, hoping to see him puttering around in the yard.
“It doesn’t have a yard,” Duane said. “The house is just built out on that bluff.”
In fact, the absence of a true lawn was the one thing that drew comment from people who passed the house. In Thalia, even the humblest dwelling had a yard with a few sprigs of Bermuda grass out front. The houses of the more affluent were completely surrounded by lawns.
But Los Dolores, which must have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to build, had buffalo grass and broom weeds growing right up to its walls. It was the only house in the county without a lawn, a fact that drew adverse comment in some circles.
“I’m glad it’s way off down there because he must be a weirdo not to have a lawn,” Wanda Hawkins said. Wanda, the wife of the town’s lone insurance agent, had reigned for a time as Karla’s best friend.
“It could have an inside patio, it’s a real big house,” Karla pointed out. Despite her irritation at Danny Deck for not puttering around outside so she could meet him, Karla had appointed herself his defender. She defended him vigorously even against the mild criticisms of her best friend, Wanda.
“I’ve got a patio, and a lawn too,” Wanda pointed out. “I don’t know what to think of people who don’t have enough self-respect to have a nice lawn.”
“Broom weeds are pretty from a distance,” Karla said, not about to concede any point to Wanda.
Privately, she grew more and more irritated with Danny Deck for not appearing. She had thought about the conversation she planned to have with him so many times that it was frustrating not to get to have it. It all took place at a filling station and ended with their becoming such good friends that he agreed to sell her his house.
But months passed, and he didn’t appear. One day, passing the house, she decided just to ring the doorbell and pretend she had to use the telephone. She even invented an excuse, which was that her father was having a kidney transplant and she needed to check on him. Her father had been dead for years but she sometimes resurrected him and pretended he was in some emergency room if she needed an excuse.
Los Dolores didn’t have an ordinary doorbell. It had a little screen you spoke into. The screen hummed a little, and Karla promptly spoke into it.
“Hello, I’m Karla Moore, I have an emergency and need to use the telephone, please,” she said, but then the screen stopped humming and no one came to the door.
Karla was disgusted. It had taken a certain nerve to march up and speak into the screen. Karla didn’t like to waste nerve, much of which she needed just to manage her home life. She went around in a sour mood for several days.
“Write him a letter,” Duane suggested.
“Fuck you,” Karla replied.
“It was just a suggestion,” Duane said, grinning. “Maybe the man’s shy.”
“If he’s too shy to open his own door he’s too shy for me,” Karla said. “He could at least hire a housekeeper so we’d have some way of finding out what’s going on.”
Her friend Wanda was horrified when told that Karla had just gone up and rung a strange man’s doorbell.
“You could have been dragged in and raped,” Wanda said. “I’ve never rung someone’s doorbell in my life unless I knew them first.”
“At least I would have got to see the house,” Karla said.
Her mood remained sour. The existence of a house she couldn’t buy was a major
frustration to her. It looked as if it might be the perfect house, too.
“He might as well sell it to me, everyone around here thinks he’s a weirdo,” Karla said.
“I don’t see why he would care,” Duane said. “He don’t know any of them.”
“He could know me if he’d just stay home,” Karla said.
“Why don’t you just go tack an offer on his door?” Duane said. “That might get his attention.”
“I might do that,” Karla said. “I might leave a note offering half a million and see what he says.”
Duane shut up. He had often suggested obviously ridiculous courses of action to his wife only to have her adopt them immediately.
Nothing was said for a few weeks and Duane thought Karla might have lost interest. He was wrong. Karla had a friend named Randy Royt, with whom she liked to flirt—or possibly do more than, for all Duane knew. Randy was a helicopter pilot—he mostly helicoptered investors or oil company officials to remote oil wells. Karla had the brilliant idea of hiring Randy to fly over Los Dolores.
“It’s got an inside patio and a swimming pool too,” Karla reported, when she returned from the flight. Her eyes were dancing. Duane had never been particularly fond of Randy Royt and he began to feel even less fond.
“Did you go in and check out the bedrooms?” he asked. “Has it got waterbeds, by any chance?”
Karla was a passionate advocate of waterbeds. She had bought the first one ever seen in Thalia, and had had forty or fifty since.
“Duane, are you jealous?” she asked.
“It could be I just wish you had better taste,” he said.
Karla laughed. “Randy’s just the best-looking helicopter pilot in north Texas,” she said. “We didn’t land, though. How would you like it if somebody landed a helicopter in our patio?”
“I didn’t even know we had a patio,” Duane said, looking out the window at their lawn. It was a modest lawn, by Thalia standards. Karla watered it lovingly every day in the summertime and it produced a modest covering of Bermuda grass and a splendid crop of grass burs.
“We don’t,” Karla said. “But we will in our next house.”
CHAPTER 14
AFTER HER TOUR BY HELICOPTER, KARLA RAPIDLY lost interest in Los Dolores.
“It’s too spread out,” she said. “Minerva could never keep it clean even if she tried, and she probably wouldn’t even try.”
The next year they bought a small ranch on the rolling plain northwest of town. The ranch had several low bluffs on it. Karla replaced Randy Royt with an articulate young architect from Fort Worth who soon designed them the house they had just moved into.
Duane reminded his wife several times that she had rejected Los Dolores on the grounds that it was too spread out for Minerva to clean. The new house—stucco over brick—was much larger than Los Dolores, weighing in at twelve thousand square feet.
“I thought you wanted adobe,” Duane said. “It’s all you’ve talked about for years.”
“I don’t want that writer to think I’m copying him,” Karla said.
“He’s never heard of you,” Duane said. “Why would he care what kind of house you build?”
“Arthur says Italian style looks better anyway,” Karla said. Arthur was her young architect.
“I think we ought to build two houses,” Duane said. “One for us and one for the children and grandkids. We could put the one for the children and grandkids several miles away.”
“Duane, you should have read that article I showed you that said kids really want discipline,” Karla said. “If you’d ever disciplined them they wouldn’t be like this.”
“If you believe our kids really want discipline, you’ll believe anything,” Duane said. “I still think two houses is a great idea.”
But he soon gave up on that idea, or any idea having to do with the house. Karla would listen to no one but Arthur, her new love slave. The result was a house covering most of the top of the bluff it was built on. It had several wings, each one meant for a different child. The children ignored their spacious wings and spent most of their time clustered in the den off the kitchen, screaming at one another.
“Go scream in your own rooms,” Duane screamed at them from time to time. “The reason we built this house was so we’d each have our rooms to scream in.”
“When I scream in my room I get scared,” Julie said. “It’s so big I hear echoes.”
“I hate this house,” Jack said. “You shouldn’t have built it so far from town. We can’t get any kids to come and play with us.”
“That’s not because of the house, it’s because of the way you play,” Duane said.
Only the week previous they had lured a little playmate out, tied him hand and foot and thrown him off the diving board.
“We just wanted to see if he could do magic,” Jack said. “We were pretending he was Houdini. Besides, we know lifesaving.”
“Why didn’t you use it, then?” Duane asked. “Minerva had to jump in with all her clothes on and pull him out.”
“He’s not a very nice kid,” Jack said. “He talks back and stuff.”
“Your mother talks back to me but I don’t try and drown her,” Duane said.
“Anyway, Arthur’s a wimp,” Julie said. “He always wears those dumb bow ties.”
That night Duane was unable to resist passing along Julie’s judgment.
“Your youngest daughter thinks your new boyfriend’s a wimp,” he said. “She don’t like his bow ties.”
Karla had just returned from a little shopping trip to Fort Worth. She wore a T-shirt that said, PEOPLE WHO THINK MONEY CAN’T BUY HAPPINESS DON’T KNOW WHERE TO SHOP. Her eyes were dancing again.
“Go tie a knot in your dick, Duane,” she replied cheerfully. Her hands were full of shopping bags.
“Don’t you think we oughta build a guesthouse while we’re at it?” she asked, a moment later.
“Who for?” Duane asked. It was one of those moments when life seemed unfair. Karla got better-looking every year, whereas he just got more tired.
“For guests, Duane,” Karla said. “That’s who you need a guesthouse for.”
“This house will sleep about a thousand people,” he pointed out. “And the only guest we ever have is Bobby Lee, when he passes out after supper.”
“He might like privacy, though,” Karla said.
“All he’d have to do is walk off down any hall,” Duane said. “He’d have so much privacy we’d have to call the Highway Patrol to find him.”
“It’s not the same as a guesthouse, though,” Karla said. “A lot of people wouldn’t care to be surrounded by our family.”
Duane was lying on their most recent waterbed, which was larger in terms of square footage than the little house he and Karla had lived in when they were first married. He was watching cable news with the sound off. A tidal wave had hit somewhere in India, washing hundreds of thousands of people into the sea.
“I don’t care to be surrounded by our family, either,” he said. “I might build myself a guesthouse. We could buy a golf cart and park it in the kitchen.”
“Why would we want to park a golf cart in the kitchen?” Karla asked, momentarily intrigued by her husband’s line of thought.
“Then if any guests show up they could drive around in it until they find a bedroom,” Duane said.
“I guess we could use a golf cart,” Karla allowed. “Little Mike’s too speedy for Minerva. She could use it to chase him down.”
“Karla, I was just kidding,” Duane said.
“Sometimes you have your best ideas when you’re kidding,” she said.
“I’ve had another one,” he said. “Let’s don’t build a guesthouse, let’s build a jail. It can be Jack and Dickie’s room. We’ll have real bars on the windows. It will be good to give those boys a taste of prison life right here at home so they’ll know what to expect when they wind up in Huntsville.”
“The reason there’s women’s lib is because husba
nds don’t take their wives seriously when they want to build guesthouses,” Karla said.
She changed T-shirts, slipping into one that said, MARRIED BUT STILL ON THE LOOKOUT. Duane wondered if there was any significance to the fact that she hadn’t worn a bra to Fort Worth. He wondered if there was any significance to anything people did with their bodies. The older he got, the more he doubted that there was. Who people slept with seemed too circumstantial to worry about. It wasn’t the fact that Karla had boyfriends that annoyed him—it was the boyfriends she picked, none of whom made any effort to be friendly to him, or even civil. Arthur treated him like a yardman.
Meanwhile, on the big screen of the TV, in vivid color, the survivors of the tidal wave wandered around looking stunned, on a white beach. They had lost everything: their homes, their loved ones, their meager possessions had all been swept into the sea.
“There’s some people with real trouble,” Duane said aloud, half to himself.
Karla was brushing her hair. She could see the TV in the mirror.
“I know, don’t lay there and watch it,” she said. “Turn the channel.”
“A hundred and twenty thousand people got washed away,” Duane said. “That’s more people than there are in Wichita Falls.”
“It’s way over there and we can’t do a thing about it, Duane,” Karla said. “It’s what can happen if you live too near the ocean.”
“It wasn’t two years ago that you wanted to buy a beach house on Padre Island,” he reminded her.
Karla brushed her shining brown hair for a while.
“You once told me you’d give me anything my heart desired,” she reminded Duane.
“I must have been drunk when I said it,” he said.
“You were not—it was about twenty years ago,” Karla said.
“Oh, no wonder,” Duane said. “A young man’s even more unreliable than a drunk.”
“Arthur’s young and he’s reliable,” Karla said. “I should go snatch that child baldheaded for calling him a wimp.”