Texasville (12 page)

That same afternoon Nellie took some kind of strange drug, the nature of which could never be determined. She turned greenish and stopped breathing several times without warning. The twins were their usual selves. Only Karla enjoyed Cozumel. She played on the beach all day, while Duane dispensed a fortune in bribes in order to keep his children from being deported.

Duane kept an eye on Shorty, who raced along two or three hundred yards in the rear. The local coyotes regarded Shorty as their plaything and frequently ambushed him, though they seldom did more than rip up his ears.

It depressed Duane that he didn’t know what to say to his son on the few occasions when he actually had the opportunity to talk to him. He felt he ought to give Dickie some sound fatherly advice, but when presented with an opportunity—such as just getting him out of jail—he rarely came up with any.

“You’ve got a world of opportunity ahead of you,” Duane said. Dickie might not be listening, but
he
felt better if he thought he was at least trying to influence his son for the better.

“You could be anything you want to be,” he added. “You’ve got energy, and that’s a wonderful resource.”

“Money ain’t a bad resource, either,” Dickie said. “Let’s buy some airplanes and sell cocaine for a while.”

“No, I’m not going to sell cocaine and neither are you,” Duane said. “You ought to try and do something useful while you’re young.”

“Selling dope is useful,” Dickie said. “It cheers people up when there’s northers and sandstorms and they’re going broke.”

“You’ll think useful when a Mexican catches you and chops you up with a chain saw,” Duane said, but he felt boring even to himself, and shut up.

Just then Karla came blazing around them in the BMW, burying them in dust. She honked, and her horn played the theme from
Urban Cowboy,
one of her favorite movies. She had stopped and picked up Shorty, who looked at them inscrutably as he passed.

“Mom drives faster than I do,” Dickie observed.

“BMWs run faster than pickups,” Duane said. He still felt depressed. Being with Dickie often depressed him. Dickie was likable, lively and competent. Practically everyone in the county, male and female, doted on him. He was sort of the star of the county. What bothered Duane was a sense that he had never managed to give his son a clear sense of what ought to be, of how life ought to be ordered or even of what to expect of it. He himself had proceeded into adulthood without such a sense, but his father had had no time to influence him, and his mother was too bewildered to try.

But he had been Dickie’s father for twenty-one years and yet didn’t feel that he had made any constructive impression on the boy at all. He couldn’t tell that he had made any impression on any of his children. It was a haunting feeling, because in most respects he knew he had been a fairly effective man. He had started with nothing and built a successful little oil company. Building the rigs had been a mistake, but a mistake he didn’t reproach himself for. Booms induced such behavior, and thousands had made worse mistakes than he had.

But he did reproach himself for his inability to civilize his children. Collectively or individually, they seemed as uninfluenceable as wild animals. You could yell at them or put them in cages, but how could you make them less wild?

“They’ve got your genes,” Ruth Popper often said, whenever one of his children did something particularly outrageous.

“They’ve got Karla’s too,” he always said plaintively, not wanting his genes to have to shoulder all the blame.

The longer he contemplated the children, the more he wondered about genes. He bought two books about genes and tried to understand how they worked, but the more he tried to apply what he read to his children the more puzzled he grew. Looking at the kids, he couldn’t detect any signs of his genes at all. They all had Karla’s sharp blue eyes, her oat-colored hair, her perfect teeth. His mouth was filled with bridges, but Karla had never had a cavity in her life, and neither had any of the kids.

But the principal thing the children seemed to have taken from Karla was a kind of unstoppability. You just couldn’t stop any of them from doing anything they wanted to do unless you met them with superior force, and that had become increasingly hard to do. They were all totally convinced by their own impulses and acted accordingly. In a way, Duane supposed, such conviction was a form of integrity, but if so, it was a frightening form. The children were true to their natures, but what natures!

Duane couldn’t remember when he had been as convinced by one of his own impulses as his children were by their most vagrant whims. At times he envied them. It must be nice never to be indecisive. But then he would have to spend half a day undoing the results of one of their decisions, and envy would be replaced by a murderous feeling. They could all sense it when he got the murderous feeling, too. They weren’t dumb.

“Oh, shit, Billie Anne’s here,” Dickie said, when they turned into what Karla liked to call the driveway—in reality an old feed road that ran along the bluff for a quarter of a mile before it dead-ended at a basketball goal. There was a concrete parking space between the basketball goal and the six-car garage.

Dickie could tell Billie Anne was there because he could see her pickup looming over the scrubby mesquite that lay between them and the house. Billie Anne’s pickup had a small cab, but giant wheels of a type more commonly found in the desert country of Arizona. Billie Anne, though born and raised in Thalia, had spent her first two marriages in Benson, Arizona.

“One advantage to big tires is you’re up high enough that you can tell if the truck drivers are good-looking,” she said, when kidded about her pickup, which looked, from a distance, as if it were on stilts. “If they ain’t, then that’s that.”

Dickie treated the remark as a joke. Karla didn’t think it was a joke and occasionally needled her son about his girlfriend’s independent ways.

“What would you do if you caught her with a cute truck driver?” Karla asked.

“The same thing I’d do if I caught her with an ugly truck driver,” Dickie replied. “And you don’t want to know.”

“Let’s stop a minute,” Dickie said to Duane. “I need to think this out.”

“Think what out?”

“That woman’s got a temper,” Dickie said. The lights had stopped dancing in his blue eyes. He kept looking nervously in the rearview mirror.

“I might want to hitchhike back to town,” he said. “I don’t think I want to go home right now. Take me back to jail so I can pay my debt to society.”

Dickie showed traces of panic, a sight Duane found mildly exhilarating. Just as he had concluded that his children were all inhuman monsters, one of them exhibited slight traces of vulnerability.

He stopped the pickup.

“Are you scared of Billie Anne?” he asked. Billie Anne was a tall, fairly good-looking girl with lank brown hair and a demeanor that could fairly be described as comatose, unless she happened to be water-skiing. Water sports were her passion. After a few hours spent skimming over the brown surface of Lake Kickapoo behind Dickie’s speedboat she became voluble and talked a blue streak.

“Back up,” Dickie said. “She might spot me.”

“Now look,” Duane said. “I’m tired and I wanta get home. Billie Anne’s probably in the hot tub. What are you so worried about?”

“She’s been taking shooting lessons,” Dickie said. “Remember, I gave her that Thirty-eight Special for her birthday so she’d have protection when I’m not around.”

“What’s she so mad at you for that you’re worried about getting shot with your own birthday present?” Duane asked.

“Gossip,” Dickie said. “I wish we lived in New York, so people wouldn’t gossip so much. They should pass laws against it. Gossip does a lot more damage than drugs.”

Duane wanted to laugh. “Who are you sleeping with that Billie Anne’s found out about?” he asked.

Dickie kept up a nervous surveillance of the hill as if he feared Billie Anne might be crouched behind one of the many mesquite bushes with her .38 leveled.

“You know that song called ‘War Is Hell on the Home Front Too’?” Dickie asked, glancing at his father.

“I’ve heard it,” Duane said.

“It’s about wives that don’t get enough because their husbands have gone to war,” Dickie said. “And this ol’ boy—he’s not very old—has to help them out of their suffering.”

“I didn’t know there was a war on,” Duane said. “Who are we fighting?”

“I just used that as an example,” Dickie said. “The same thing can happen even if there isn’t a war on.”

“Are you involved with a married woman?” Duane asked.

“I tell you what, loan me the pickup,” Dickie said. “I think I wanta go to Ruidoso, and this is a good place to start from.”

“Which married woman are you involved with?” Duane asked.

“It’s not necessarily just one,” Dickie said. “There’s more of them than you think who have that war-is-hell-on-the-home-front-too attitude.”

“Yes, I know,” Duane said. “Your mother’s explained that to me. So which two married women are you involved with?”

“Mrs. Nolan and Mrs. Marlow,” Dickie said.

Duane killed the motor.

“Say it again, just so I’ll know I’m not going crazy,” he said.

“Mrs. Nolan and Mrs. Marlow,” Dickie said. “I don’t know how it got started, but now Mrs. Marlow’s left her husband and Mrs. Nolan’s fixing to.”

“Do Junior and Lester know about this?” Duane asked.

“Yeah, because Billie Anne called them up and told them this afternoon,” Dickie said.

“You were in jail this afternoon,” Duane pointed out. “Maybe she changed her mind. Maybe she even plans to forgive you.”

“This ain’t a good time to sit around and talk,” Dickie said. “I figured she’d just take all the dope money I got hidden and go to Fort Worth and buy clothes with it. But if she’s out here, it probably means she wants revenge.”

“You know, Ruidoso ain’t the worst idea in the world,” Duane said. “It might be a good idea to let the dust settle for a day or two.”

He stepped out of the pickup, and before he could even close the door, Dickie was in the driver’s seat and gone. The pickup spun around like a top, throwing up a cloud of dust that could be seen ten miles away. Duane walked through the dust cloud toward the basketball court. In a minute Shorty came racing along the road. Then he stopped and looked puzzled. His beloved master had returned, but where was the pickup?

“That’s okay, Shorty,” Duane said. “It ain’t the only pickup in the world.”

CHAPTER 17

A
S HE WAS WALKING INTO THE GARAGE
, D
UANE
heard shots from the backyard. He began to run, causing Shorty to grow excited and bark his piercing bark. Because of the ingenuity of Arthur the architect, it was necessary to run most of the length of a twelve-thousand-square-foot house in order to reach the backyard.

When he finally reached it, he saw that Karla and Billie Anne were in the hot tub, delicately sipping the quart-sized vodka tonics that Karla favored in hot weather. Minerva, shooting from a prone position, was trying to hit several balloons that floated over the new doghouse. The balloons were left over from the twins’ last birthday party. She was hitting them, too, popping the last one just as Duane trotted up.

“It’s about time you came home,” Minerva said. “Where’s that boy?”

“Gone to Louisana,” Duane said, lying with what he thought was passable casualness.

“I don’t guess he cares that he broke this girl’s heart,” Karla said.

Billie Anne didn’t exactly look like a tragedy victim. She giggled as she might if she had just had a nice swirl around Lake Kickapoo on water-skis.

“I like shooting this little gun,” Minerva said, still in the prone position.

Then she got up, laid the loaded gun beside Billie Anne’s quart-sized vodka tonic and sauntered back to the house. As she went in, Nellie came out, carrying Barbette under one arm and dragging Little Mike with the other hand. Little Mike was holding the pliers with which he liked to try to hit the cat.

Nellie wore a string bikini so brief that Duane felt embarrassed. The bikini would barely conceal a clitoris. Nellie, oblivious to his embarrassment, handed him Barbette and dropped Little Mike in the pool, pliers and all.

“They say the best way to teach kids to swim is just to drop them in the water,” she said.

Barbette cooed, as she often did when Duane was holding her.

Little Mike was not making rapid progress as a swimmer, though. The top of his head was all that was visible. Duane placed Barbette carefully on the deck and went over and fished him out. Little Mike still clung to his pliers. He began to trot toward the house. He had once been stung by a wasp and hated being outdoors.

“Guess what, Daddy, me and Joe got engaged today,” Nellie said as she sank into the hot tub. “Momma wants you to build us a house as a wedding present. It don’t have to be very big.”

“I think that doghouse would make a nice residence for a young couple just starting out,” Duane said. “It’s one of the few two-story doghouses around.”

He looked at Karla, to see what her mood might be. Her mood seemed to be noncommittal.

“I suppose you know that Dickie has wrecked two homes,” she said, without much outrage.

“Three,” Billie Anne said. “He wrecked ours too, and we hadn’t even started it yet.”

“I wouldn’t pay too much attention to rumors,” Duane said. “A lot of idle gossip gets gossiped in Thalia.”

“They carried Lester off to the quiet room today,” Karla informed him.

“Why?” Duane asked. “I talked to him this afternoon and he didn’t seem any nuttier than usual.”

“He went crazy and threatened to cut his own throat with a razor,” Karla said. “He said he’d had about enough.”

“He probably just felt like a day in the quiet room,” Duane said. “He won’t cut his own throat.”

“Junior Nolan was last seen buying shells for his deer rifle,” Karla added. “It ain’t deer season, Duane.”

“It’s Dickie season,” Nellie said cheerfully.

Duane picked up Barbette and walked across the sparse yard to where the bluff dropped off. The sun sank majestically toward the western plains, turning the lower sky golden as it sank. The sunset made the country seem beautiful, a transformation Duane loved to watch. Sundown brought with it a quality of peace that belied almost everything that happened during the day—not to mention the night.