Texasville (21 page)

“Well, that’s all the sugar supply for today, you’ll have to wait for tomorrow, Grandpa,” Jacy said, handing the baby to him.

She stood up, opened her purse and began to peel crumpled dollar bills out of a little change purse.

“That’s all right, I’ll pay for it,” Karla said. “I had this crowd to feed.”

“Thanks,” Jacy said. “Come on out in the morning, Karla. I’ll show you the house and we’ll compare notes some more.”

“Compare notes on what?” Duane asked. The sudden blooming of friendship between Jacy and Karla unnerved him a little.

“On you, honey pie, what else?” Jacy said, ruffling his hair lightly as she passed behind him on her way out.

“I want to know how you were in high school and Jacy wants to know how you turned out,” Karla said.

“Don’t tell her how I turned out, it’ll just depress her,” Duane said.

“’Bye, kids,” Jacy said. “I hope I see you again pretty soon.”

Minerva had been meticulously cutting the last niblet of fat off her T-bone. She looked up just in time to see Jacy drive away.

“They eat too much spaghetti over there in Italy,” she said. “That girl’s put on weight. She was skinny as a rail when she was in high school, wasn’t she, Duane?”

“Yep, kinda skinny,” Duane said nervously.

CHAPTER 30

W
ITHIN A WEEK
, K
ARLA AND
J
ACY HAD BECOME BEST
friends. Duane was bewildered, and so was Junior Nolan, who had taken up residence in one of the guest rooms at the Moores’.

“Where’s Karla?” Junior would ask sadly, wandering from room to room with a glass of vodka into which he had squirted a little V-8 juice to try and fool people.

Junior’s behavior rapidly became more erratic. He found one of Duane’s old coyote calls and would sit for hours in the rocks below the house, trying to call coyotes. Once a skunk came, but no coyotes appeared. Junior had lost his hat the day he planned to shoot Dickie—the blazing sun turned him a strawberry red, but he kept his vigil with the coyote call five or six hours a day. He only returned to the house to get more vodka, or to inquire about Karla.

By seven every morning Karla was in her car and off to Los Dolores. The big shipment of centennial buttons, T-shirts, ashtrays and dozer caps almost got sent back to the sender because Karla was too busy visiting Jacy to drive to Wichita Falls and sign for it.

Her forgetfulness in this regard upset Duane a good deal, since it was clear to him that without a substantial sale of souvenirs the centennial would probably lose thousands of dollars. So would Buster Lickle, who had made a deal with the county for 50 percent of the concessions.

“You could take Jacy with you to Wichita,” Duane suggested, one night when he and Karla actually happened to be home at the same time.

“No, she’s too sensitive, going places reminds her of things.”

“What could going to Wichita Falls remind her of?” Duane asked. “I doubt Wichita is much like Italy.”

“It could remind her of bad things that happened at SMU,” Karla said. “She’s real sensitive. Her mind goes back and forth real quick.”

“SMU’s in Dallas,” Duane said, turning the temperature dial on the waterbed down a little.

“Duane, stop turning down the waterbed,” Karla said. She was lying on it, reading an old issue of
Playgirl.
She kept a stack by the bed in case she woke up in the night and felt bored.

“It’s nearly summer,” he said. “We don’t even need it this hot in February. I think the reason I don’t have any energy is because this bed boils it out of me at night.”

“If a waterbed cools off in the night it can suck all the heat out of your body and you’ll be dead by morning,” Karla said. “Hypothermia.”

“If you’re so paranoid about hypothermia, why do we have to have waterbeds at all?” Duane asked.

Karla didn’t answer immediately. She had taken to wearing panties that were almost skimpier than Nellie’s bikinis—just a string with a patch of green silk at the crotch.

“Waterbeds are good for your posture,” she reminded him.

“I’d rather have bad posture than wake up feeling boiled,” Duane said.

The next day he came home to find Karla and Jacy drinking and weeping by the pool. Tears were streaming down both their faces. Four wet eyes looked at him for a moment. Neither woman spoke. Duane had been meaning to have a little swim, but he decided to go back in the house.

Frequently in the afternoon he would drive over to Aunt Jimmie’s Lounge, only to discover the black Mercedes and the white BMW parked outside. At such times he just drove on.

He began to feel that there was almost no place he could go where there was any possibility that he might enjoy himself. If he went to his office Ruth Popper made him feel like an intruder. If he went home Junior would come out from the rocks and beg for instruction in the art of coyote calling. If he went to a bar in Wichita Falls, Luthie Sawyer, whose failure to get OPEC bombed had caused him to turn to drink, would corner him and talk about how terrible it was to go broke. If he went to the tennis courts Lester and Janine—now officially in love—would show up and want him to teach them how to hit backhands. If he went to Suzie’s her kids would pop in and he would have to sit around pretending he had just come to pay a social call. If he went to his rigs either Bobby Lee or Eddie Belt would complain or ask for raises or start telling him gross stories about their love life.

Often even driving around in the pickup wouldn’t work, because Bobby Lee or Eddie would call him on the CB and tell him the same gross stories about their love life.

And if he went to the Dairy Queen Jenny Marlow would find him. She seemed to spend her day circling around in the car, watching to see if anyone she wanted to talk to showed up at the Dairy Queen. If she did catch him she would invariably remind him that his older son had some very bad habits.

About all he could do when he felt hard-pressed was to go to the lake and drift around in his boat—but it was a very hot spring, and drifting around in an unshaded boat in ninety-five-to-one-hundred-degree weather was not much fun. He did it occasionally, though. Sometimes he would slip over the side fully clothed, except for his shoes, and then lie in the boat with his cap over his eyes while the sun dried his sopping clothes.

At such times he wondered what Karla and Jacy found to talk about all day. Certainly they would have long since finished comparing notes about him. He had always thought of his courtship of Jacy as one of the high points of his life, but when he tried to reexamine it, to recall what had made it special, he found he really didn’t have many memories. He had a fairly
clear memory of standing with her on the fifty-yard line the night he, as captain of the football team, had crowned her Homecoming Queen. They had kissed, and the band had played the school song. Some of the band members and a few of the football players wept with emotion, but he hadn’t wept, nor had Jacy. They thought it was corny. That had occurred in their junior year, and they had already considered themselves about ten times more sophisticated than the rest of the kids in high school.

He couldn’t quite remember when he had fallen in love with Jacy, but he must have, because they had gone steady all their senior year, and he had smashed one of Sonny Crawford’s eyes out for daring even to date her during a period the following summer when he had been in Odessa, roughnecking. He remembered crying about her as he was riding the bus out of Thalia to go to boot camp, and he had a hazy memory of trying to call her one night from Korea. She had then been in a sorority house at SMU. The call had been unsuccessful, and he had never been sure whether he just got the wrong sorority house or whether Jacy just hadn’t wanted to talk to him.

But of the actual romance he could remember nothing, a fact which made him feel slightly guilty and strangely restless. He couldn’t remember their kisses or lovemaking or talk or dates or anything, though he thought he remembered that they had gone to bed together on their senior trip. He had always considered that it was an important romance—after all, it had cost Sonny an eye—and it was troubling not to be able to remember anything about it except a corny moment on a football field that they had both scorned at the time.

One night when Karla had taken pity on Junior Nolan and was cooking him a steak out on the patio, Duane fished around in a storage room until he found a couple of his high school yearbooks. He took them to the bedroom and looked through them, hoping they would make it all vivid again. There he was in his football uniform, and again in a sports coat he had bought when he was voted Most Handsome Boy.

And there Jacy was, as Most Beautiful Girl. There were even pictures of them at the homecoming game: one of her riding around the field in a white convertible, and one of him waiting
for her on the fifty-yard line, his helmet in one hand and a huge bouquet in the other, and a third one of their kiss. That one was mostly obscured, though, because Jacy had chosen it to write on when she signed his yearbook. “To the sweetest man in the world, I’ll love ya’ forever!!!” she had written.

The yearbooks failed to meet whatever need had caused him to dig them out, and after browsing in them for about three minutes he dropped them on the bed and lay watching the sports channel. Connors and McEnroe were hitting long slashing forehands at one another, Connors grunting audibly every time he hit the ball. The grunts reminded Duane of Janine, who, despite her efforts to be ladylike in everything, issued a series of similar grunts when she was about to come. Hearing Janine’s grunts always gave him a certain sense of relief, if not of release. The grunts meant it had worked again, at least from Janine’s point of view. He had begun to doubt that anything of that sort was really going to work from his point of view, but the margin of failure was ambiguous and didn’t trouble him much.

Janine had scarcely spoken to him since the night he had called her from the emergency room. She could be seen any day cheerfully doing her job at the courthouse or playing tennis with Lester, who had calmed noticeably under her ministrations.

Duane had had two discussions on the subject of Lester and Janine with Jenny Marlow, who took a tolerant—indeed, almost ecstatic—view of their romance.

“I just hope it lasts until I can divorce him,” she said. “You can’t imagine how hard it is to get a husband out of love with you if one wants to stay in love with you.

“I don’t know how many times I’ve had to break Lester’s heart in the last five years,” she added. “If hearts were made of pottery his would just be little ground-up pieces of glass by now.”

While he was watching Connors and McEnroe, Karla walked back into the bedroom. She was fully dressed but dripping wet.

“I don’t know if it’s gonna work out too well having Junior living here,” she said. “It all started out platonic but I don’t know if Junior’s gonna be able to keep it that way.”

“What makes you think he can’t?” Duane asked.

“He just threw me in the swimming pool,” Karla said. “He said he’d always wanted to try and do it underwater. I told him I thought we ought to keep it platonic but he misunderstood me.

“How could he misunderstand that?” Duane asked, as Karla peeled off her dripping T-shirt.

“Junior thinks a platonic is one of them little Japanese pickups,” Karla said. “He thought I meant we oughta run away together.”

“Where is he now?”

“Swimming around,” Karla said. “He’s so drunk he thinks I’m still in the pool.”

She stepped into the bathroom and emerged a minute later wearing a purple bathrobe.

“I wonder what Suzie Nolan does all day?” she asked.

Duane pretended he was concentrating on the tennis match.

“Duane, are you mad at me?” Karla asked.

“No,” he said.

“It looks like Suzie would get curious about why Junior lives out here now,” Karla said.

“Not everybody’s got curiosity,” Duane said. So far as he could tell, Suzie had no interest in Junior’s whereabouts.

“Wives usually have curiosity about their husbands, though,” Karla said. “Or even about their ex-husbands.”

“We could call her and tell her he’s swimming around in our pool, hoping you’ll run away with him in a Japanese pickup,” Duane suggested.

“I heard it on the grapevine that you’re in love with her,” Karla said.

“The grapevine’s misinformed you again, honey,” Duane said lightly.

“Every time you call me honey there’s a lie involved,” Karla said.

Duane went outside to check on Junior. He didn’t want him to drown, and fortunately Junior hadn’t. He was sitting on the diving board with his coyote call. Despite much practice, he wasn’t expert with the call. All he was producing at the moment was a kind of splutter, so weak that Shorty, who slept a few feet away, hadn’t even raised his head.

“I called a toad,” Junior said. “See him?”

In fact there was a fair-sized toad sitting by the pool. While Duane watched, it managed a lethargic hop into the thin grass.

“There he goes,” Junior said. “Where’s Karla?”

“She told me she had a headache,” Duane said.

“I don’t doubt that,” Junior said. “Women all get headaches the minute I fall in love with them.”

“I wouldn’t take it personally,” Duane said. “Quite a few have headaches around me too.”

“I’ll never really be in love with anybody but Suzie,” Junior said. “Suzie’s meant the world to me. I keep thinking she’ll call up and tell me to come home, but I guess that’s just wishful thinking.”

The look on Junior’s face made Duane feel sad. He had visited Suzie that very morning for a passionate twenty minutes. What he had told Karla was true. He wasn’t in love with Suzie. The two of them were just having an interlude of good luck involving a high level of sexual compatibility. There was no reason to suppose it would last. The day might come when Suzie would wake up missing Junior and simply call him home. It was something Duane would like to see happen, even if it meant the end of an exciting interlude.

Junior crawled off the diving board and fell asleep in a lawn chair.