Duane's Depressed (31 page)

Both of them looked at Rag. It was never easy to predict which side she’d come down on in a family dispute.

“I don’t officiate, I’m not an umpire, I’m not a referee,” Rag said. “Even if you pay me ten million dollars I don’t officiate.”

“I don’t think either one of us was thinking about paying you ten million dollars to decide if Karla’s mad,” Duane said. “She’s been mad at me before, once or twice.”

“I looked your doctor up in the yearbook, to see if she was pretty,” Karla informed him. “You can tell a lot from looking at pictures in a yearbook.”

“What yearbook?” Duane asked. “She didn’t go to high school here.”

“No, but she went here until she was in the sixth grade,” Karla said. “So she’s in the yearbooks, too. She was real cute when she was in the sixth grade.”

“So were you and a lot of other girls,” Duane said. “I doubt you can really tell much about her from how she looked when she was in the sixth grade.”

“Maybe not, but it’s better than nothing,” Karla said. “All this has stressed me so that I need to be in therapy myself.”

“Then go—it wouldn’t be a bad idea,” Duane said.

“Why go? You’ve already got the best therapist in town. I’d just be spilling out my guts to some dopey man.”

While he was in the den getting a fresh checkbook out of a
drawer he noticed a pile of
Monty Python
videos on the floor.
Monty Python
had been one of the first shows he and Karla had watched, when they first got cable, years ago. There was quite a stack of videos on the floor—so many that Duane stopped and counted them. There were twenty-three in all.

“What’s with all the
Monty Python?
” he asked, when he went back to the kitchen.

“What do you mean, what’s with them?” Karla asked. “I watch them, that’s what’s with them.”

“There’s twenty-three videos there. That’s a lot of videos.”

“Yep, and I have a lot of lonely nights to get through, now that my husband’s left me,” Karla said. “When nighttime comes it’s either laugh or cry, and I’d rather laugh.”

“I tried to watch one but it didn’t make a word of sense,” Rag said. “But then, to each his own, I guess.”

“It’s comedy, it’s not supposed to make sense; it’s supposed to make you laugh when otherwise you’d be crying your eyes out,” Karla told her.

“I think you’re overreacting, frankly,” Duane said. “I haven’t done anything except take some walks, sleep in my cabin, and go see my doctor. That’s nothing to make anyone cry their eyes out. You used to vanish for a week at a time, when you were young and wild.”

“I wasn’t vanished, I was just over in a honky-tonk dancing up a storm,” Karla said. “You took it way too personally.”

“Okay, so why are you taking this personally now?” he asked.

“I’d go into therapy if I could find a Chinese doctor,” Rag said. “I guess no one liked my gourmet Scottish porridge.”

“Why would you need a Chinese doctor?” Duane asked.

“Because I believe in yoga and meditation,” Rag said. “The cure for everything is right there in your mind—you just need to know how to get to it.”

“Why can’t I be in therapy with you?” Karla asked. “Lots of marriage counselors see the husband and wife together.”

“But what I’m doing isn’t marriage counseling,” Duane said. “I didn’t start all this because I was unhappy in my marriage—I wish you could believe that.”

“You can say that till you’re blue in the face and I won’t believe
it,” Karla said. “When a woman’s husband leaves her to live in a cabin, it’s going to cause her to think there’s something wrong with her marriage.”

“What if I told you that our marriage is the best part of my life and it’s all the other parts that I’m upset about?” Duane asked.

Karla shrugged.

“It’s nice to hear but when nighttime comes I still don’t have nothing to fall back on but
Monty Python
,” she informed him.

“At least the kids seem to be doing better,” he said, trying another tack. “Dickie’s put the fear of God in all the crews, and Julie’s working. I don’t know about Nellie and Jack.”

“Nellie’s getting a tryout on the Weather Channel and nobody’s heard from Jack,” Karla said. “He leads his own life, like his father.

“I just wish I understood,” she added, sadly. “I just wish I understood.”

When she began to cry again Rag vanished into the laundry room. Duane went over and hugged his wife until she stopped crying and blew her nose.

“If
I
understood it well enough to explain it I wouldn’t need to go to a doctor,” Duane said.

Unable to think of anything more consoling to say, he went outside and checked on the greenhouse—at once he saw that it was in a neglected state. Usually when Karla was depressed she gardened until she felt better, but now the greenhouse was bleak, untended. It was March, time to get the big garden they always planted started too. Normally they grew a great variety of vegetables in the outside garden: corn and peas, green beans, turnips, okra, cabbage, kale, onions, and a fair variety of herbs. They also made sure of an abundance of tomatoes, which they both particularly liked. Sometimes they tried strawberries, and, always, cantaloupe and watermelon.

It looked, though, that if somebody didn’t get busy and prepare the ground they would miss their chance to grow much of anything. The thought troubled him sufficiently that he went back in the house. Karla was still where he had left her, smoking and flipping through the morning paper.

“Dickie or Jack or somebody needs to get busy and plow that garden plot,” he said. “It’s planting time, you know.”

Karla seemed cheered by the fact that he had noticed that they were behind on the garden.

“I know it, but the tractor’s got a flat,” she said. “Dickie’s so busy now that you’ve made him the big boss that he doesn’t have time to tend to things like gardens.”

“If I take the tire off and carry it to the filling station will you see that somebody picks it up and puts it back on?” he asked. “I hate to see you lose any more time on that garden.”

“We didn’t raise very helpful boys,” Karla pointed out. “They’ve both got better things to do than fix the tractor when it breaks.”

“It doesn’t take ten minutes to put a tire back on a tractor,” Duane said. “If the filling station can get the flat fixed in the next hour or so I’ll put it back on myself.”

“Why thanks, Duane—that’d be nice,” Karla said.

16

A
LMOST IMMEDIATELY
, Duane regretted his offer to tend to the flat tractor tire. Gardening was something that
must
be done in a timely fashion, if it was to be done successfully. Once he got the tractor tire off it proved too heavy to be carried on the bicycle. He had to roll it to the handiest of the filling stations, a distance of twelve blocks. While he was rolling the tire along the street, aware that every motorist who passed was gawking at him because he was in his brand-new biking clothes, he began to feel discontent with himself. The kind of chore he was in the process of doing was just the kind of chore he had meant to walk away from when he left home to live in his cabin. The oil company employed twenty-three men, any one of whom could have quickly taken care of the flat tire on the garden tractor. Why employ twenty-three men plus a cook and an office staff if you still had to be the one to roll the tractor tire to the filling station, so that the family garden plot could be plowed on time? It was the long accumulation of such irritating chores that had caused him to park his pickup in the first place—and yet he was doing exactly the kind of thing he had gone away to avoid. The very thing Mr. Thoreau warned about had happened: he had become a slave to his machine.

The Fina station where he took the tire was no particular favorite of his—it just happened to be the closest station. It was
owned by three brothers: Joe Bond, Bill Bond, and Roy Bond, none of them quick workers. Though they had owned the station for more than forty years they had never arrived at a clear division of labor. The fact that there were three of them meant that the simplest tasks, such as putting gas in a car, or checking someone’s oil, became a matter for negotiation. The older brothers, Joe and Bill, thought that Roy ought to do most of the work, since he was the youngest, but Roy often refused to do any work at all. Roy owned a cheap calculator and liked to calculate with it. If left to himself he would sit in the sun on a pile of old tires for hours at a stretch, putting his calculator through its paces. Sometimes he made it add, sometimes he made it subtract; occasionally he even made it multiply and divide. While Roy calculated, Joe and Bill would sometimes take as much as fifteen minutes to service one car. Very often they would be unable to locate the gauge needed to check the air pressure in a customer’s tires. They had only one gauge and would pass it from hand to hand until someone mislaid it.

Duane felt himself beginning to tense up, even before he reached the Fina station, just from the thought of having to interact with the Bond brothers. But the other stations were farther away and he was finding it awkward to roll the tire with one hand and his bike with the other. He knew already, from long experience, that none of the three brothers was going to want to snap to and fix the tire. To them their filling station was simply a convenient spot from which to view the world, or contemplate human folly, or something. They were quick to flare into argument, both with one another and with anyone who happened to stop at their station, hoping for services that they might well not be in the mood to render.

Still, the tire needed to be fixed.

Roy Bond, as usual, sat on the pile of tires with his calculator in his hand, involved in an act of pure calculation—that is, one that had no meaning to anyone but himself.

“Why have you got on them funny clothes—is it time for the parade?” Roy asked, when he looked up from his calculating and saw Duane in his biking garb.

“Those are biking clothes, you moron,” Joe Bond said. “There’s no parade, it’s March. The parade happens in July, when they have the rodeo.”

“Don’t be calling Roy a moron,” Bill Bond said. “If you hurt his feelings this early he won’t do a lick of work all day.”

“He won’t anyway—he never does,” Joe said. “I’ll hurt his feelings with a tire iron if he don’t snap to the next time a customer shows up.”

“One just showed up,” Duane said. “I need this tractor tire fixed and I need it fixed now.”

None of the Bond brothers said a word. They all stared into space. “Now” was not a concept they welcomed around their Fina station.

“If you’re too busy to fix it I’ll do it myself,” Duane said, hoping the brothers would recognize that he spoke with heavy irony. The road was empty in both directions. Besides himself there were no customers in sight.

There was more silence. The Bond brothers were as passive as possums.

“If I can just borrow your tools I’ll fix it,” Duane said. His tensing continued. He couldn’t remember why he had come to town, or been foolish enough to eat breakfast at home. He felt like heaving the tire through the plate glass window just behind where Bill and Joe Bond were sitting.

Bill Bond shook his head.

“We ain’t insured for customers to use our tools,” he said. “A nut could fly up and hit you in the eye and blind you and then you’d sue the shit out of us.”

“What nut?” Duane asked. “I’m just trying to fix a flat. The nuts are already off the wheel. They’re back at the house.”

Bill Bond was unmoved.

“Well, but there’s nuts laying around here that could fly up and blind you,” he said. “If one did we’d be in a pickle.”

“Okay then, how soon could you fix it for me? I’m in a hurry,” Duane asked. He attempted to stare them down, but it was hard, since their three gazes wandered willy-nilly over the landscape.

“What do you think, Joe? How soon could we get to it?” Bill asked his brother.

“I guess we can get to it after while,” Joe said. “Of course we’re at the beck and call. We might get busy pumping gas. Anyone could drive up needing gas.”

“Yes, but I’m here now and none of you are doing a damn thing except sitting on your asses,” Duane said. “I’m a cash customer and this is a job you can do in twenty minutes if you hustle. So what’s the holdup?”

The Bond brothers looked shocked, perhaps at the thought of hustling. No one alive had ever seen them hustle.

“I don’t see what the hurry of it is,” Bill Bond said, finally. “You ain’t a farmer.”

“I didn’t come here to debate you, Bill,” Duane said. “When can you fix this fuckin’ tire?”

“Roy, get to it,” Joe Bond said, without much force.

“No, you called me a moron,” Roy said. “Anyway I’m trying to add up the years since the Big Bang and it’s a lot of years.”

“Here’s a big bang for you, you lazy farts,” Duane said. Then he did what he had wanted to do earlier. He heaved the tractor tire through the plate glass window just behind Joe and Bill Bond, who, for once, hustled out of the way. The window exploded with a very satisfying sound, and the tire landed on a messy desk, knocking several ashtrays up in the air. A cat that had been dozing dashed out and ran into the weeds. Ash from the ashtrays blew up to the ceiling of the small office and then filtered slowly down through the rays of sunlight.

“Fix this goddamn tire and then take it up to my house and put it on the tractor,” Duane said in a tone meant to be threatening. “And send the bill to my office.”

The Bond brothers were all staring dully at what had once been a plate glass window when Duane got on his bicycle and pedaled away.

17

W
HEN, ON
T
HURSDAY AFTERNOON
, Duane told Dr. Carmichael what he had done she put her long fingers together and tapped them a few times against her lips, looking directly at him as she did it.

“The interesting thing is the garden,” she said. “You left your family. You’ve intimated to me that you think it’s unlikely you’ll ever go back to your wife. You’ve changed directions—that’s all we know right now.”

She paused and looked out the window. Two blue jays were flitting around on her lawn.