Texasville (35 page)

Through it all, Duane floated quietly in a world of emotion and memory. People smiled and let him alone, not because they realized the singing had moved him so deeply, but because they saw a sleeping child in his arms and didn’t want to
risk waking her. Though the tide of emotion was ebbing, he enjoyed sitting quietly with his granddaughter, enjoying the receding waves.

Then a hand waved back and forth in front of his eyes. It was Karla’s.

“Have you sat there and gone crazy?” she asked.

“You’re always trying to get me to say I’m crazy,” Duane said. “I don’t think I’m crazy.”

“Then give Nellie the baby and let’s go home,” Karla said.

“Hey you, let’s go,” Jacy said loudly.

For a second Duane thought she meant him, but then saw that she was talking to Little Mike, who was wandering in circles on the twenty-yard line. He instantly made a dash for the corner of the arena. Jacy just as instantly ran in pursuit. Little Mike was on the top rail of the fence, about to drop over into the calf pens, when Jacy caught him. She snatched him casually from the top rail as if she had planned it that way all along.

Minerva cackled. “He’s finally met his match,” she said.

Little Mike seemed to feel that he was in the hands of a power who would brook no resistance. When Jacy sat him down he toddled along after her as docilely as Shorty had.

Shorty, who had been dozing with his head on Duane’s leg, suddenly awoke, looked around in his usual bleary way and immediately trotted after Jacy and Little Mike.

Nellie, who was back in a phase of serene beauty, came over and took her baby.

Soon Karla was the only one left with Duane. She waved her hand in front of his eyes again.

“What are your thoughts, if you’re not crazy?” Karla asked.

“You’re supposed to offer at least a penny for a person’s thoughts,” he said.

“Too much, Duane, just tell ’em to me free,” Karla said.

“I was thinking it might be nice to have a square meal,” he said. “Do you want to go to the Howlers?”

“Okay, but I’m gonna ask Sonny,” Karla said. “If he ate better he might not lose his mind.”

“Leave him alone,” Duane said. “Life might be easier for Sonny if he had a different mind.”

CHAPTER 50

K
ARLA DID ASK
S
ONNY, BUT
S
ONNY REFUSED TO GO
to the Howlers or anywhere. He pointed out politely that it was nearly time for him to do his shift at the Kwik-Sack.

“Genevieve wouldn’t mind if you were late,” Karla said. “She probably needs the overtime.”

But Sonny wouldn’t go with them, a fact that plunged Karla into depression.

“He won’t do anything I ask him to,” she said, on the gloomy ride to Wichita Falls. “He’s stubborn.”

“He’s not married to you like I am,” Duane said. “He don’t owe you total obedience.”

“Fuck you,” Karla said.

“I was just trying to joke,” Duane said.

“You couldn’t be funny if you tried, Duane,” Karla said.

Duane shut up and they rode in silence. The Howlers was a place where people tended to get rowdy, and then get loud. In order to be heard it was often necessary to be rowdy oneself. Karla was often rowdy enough to be heard all over the restaurant, but not that night. Duane ate his steak and she ignored hers. She stared into space.

Luthie Sawyer weaved past the table, towed by his tall, stringy wife. He was very drunk.

“Luthie, if you’re gonna bomb OPEC, I wish you’d hurry,” Duane said. “This glut’s gettin’ serious.”

Luthie was too glazed to respond. As he and his wife went out, Bobby Lee and Carolyn came in. They went briskly to a table, looking tense. Though Duane and Karla were only using half of a table for four, Bobby Lee and Carolyn did not offer to join them. Carolyn had coal-black hair and, for the moment at least, a demeanor to match.

“I guess they’re negotiating,” Duane offered.

Karla exhibited no interest in the domestic life of Carolyn and Bobby Lee, though in other moods she had been known to speculate about it for hours.

“I should have made Sonny have a love affair with me years ago,” Karla said.

“What stopped you?” Duane asked.

Karla’s eyes were more icy than the ice in her iced tea.

“You probably won’t believe it, Duane, but I’m not the kind of woman that just goes up and grabs somebody by the dick,” she said.

Duane gave up on conversation. The customers of the Howlers got rowdier and louder. By the time they finished eating, Duane could not remember why he had thought he wanted a square meal. He had just eaten one, but Karla’s silence was so unnerving that he felt as if he might throw it up. Only an hour before, at the rodeo arena, she had been in a fine humor, too.

They walked out into the parking lot in time to see old Turkey Clay, the cocaine-happy swamper, have a fistfight. Turkey was squared off against a younger man Duane didn’t know, a tall, brawny roughneck. Before he could move to stop it, the two flew at one another and exchanged a flurry of blows, none of which really struck home. Then the fighters glared at one another for a second, breathing heavily, and walked off in opposite directions.

The fight had the happy effect of distracting Karla briefly from her depression. She walked after Turkey, whose truck was parked at the far end of the lot. Duane followed.

“What was that all about?” she asked Turkey.

“It was a fistfight,” Turkey replied in an unfriendly tone. It was not clear that he realized who he was talking to, or that he cared, one way or the other. He was getting a beer out of the front seat of his truck and didn’t look around.

“Turkey, this is Karla,” she said cautiously. “I know it was a fistfight. I just wondered why you two were fighting.”

“I told him he was nothing but a walking sack of snot, that’s why we were fighting,” Turkey said.

“Turkey, you’ve got to quit jumping these younger men,” Duane said mildly.

Turkey looked at him coldly. “I guess if I see a sack of snot walking around on two legs I can hit it a time or two,” he said. He got in his truck, drained the beer, dropped the can out the window and left.

“You shouldn’t tease him about his age, Duane,” Karla said, becoming depressed again.

“Well, hell, I can’t open my mouth anymore without somebody jumping down my throat,” Duane said.

As they were walking back to the BMW the phenomenon occurred which had given the restaurant its name: the howling began.

The howling could be started by any patron who happened to be feeling good—or bad—enough to howl like a hound. But once one happy or unhappy diner howled, the tradition was that everyone in the restaurant must howl too. The waitresses stopped with plates in their hands and howled. The cooks howled from the kitchen, the dishwashers from the sink. Children too young to produce a proper howl cried or screamed. Couples in the parking lot often rushed back inside to howl with the group.

The howling might last only three or four minutes, or it might go on for half an hour, depending on the spirits of the group. Since the restaurant stood three miles out of town, on the edge of the weedy prairie, the howling disturbed no neighbors—although travelers, unfamiliar with the tradition, approaching Wichita Falls on the lonely road that led from the Staked Plains, were sometimes unnerved by it, particularly if it was summer and they happened to have their car windows down.

Just as they approached the glimmering lights of the city, buoyed up by the sense that they might be about to reach civilization again, they heard the howling. From a distance it sounded as if a pack of starving dogs waited only a turn or two down the highway in the darkness. People immediately rolled up their windows. Some stopped and sat in terrified indecision. One gentle couple from Seattle lost all hope, turned around, and drove in panic all the way back to Lubbock. Their story made the headlines; the Howlers magnanimously offered to pay their way to Wichita Falls and give them a free steak dinner, but the couple did not accept.

Karla and Duane had heard the howling countless times. The restaurant offered a Howler-of-the-Year award, and only last year Karla had made news by winning the award two years in a row, an unheard-of honor.

“You wanta go back in and howl a little?” Duane asked. “I guess your title’s on the line.”

Karla got in the BMW. “I don’t, for your information,” she said. “I’m surprised my own husband don’t think I’ve got anything better to do than sit around with a bunch of drunks and howl like a dog.”

Then she lapsed back into silence.

“God!” Duane said. “What’d I do now?”

As Duane was about to get in the car the door of the restaurant flew open and a man staggered out. Duane looked around and recognized him—he was a driller from Duncan, Oklahoma. Duane assumed he was just drunk, but as he started to get in the BMW he saw the man’s legs go out from under him. He folded like a shot bird, not ten feet away. Thinking he might have had a heart attack, Duane stepped over to him. The driller, whose name was Buddy, straightened up, looked around a time or two, curled himself into a fetal position and went to sleep in the gravel. Duane caught him under his arms and dragged him over near the building, where at least he wouldn’t get run over.

He heard a car start, turned and saw that it was the BMW.

“Adiós, sayonara, goodbye, Duane!” Karla said.

“You already used that line!” he yelled. “Come back here.”

For an answer Karla delivered the long soprano howl that
had made her a two-time winner of the Howler-of-the-Year award. She was soon out of sight.

Duane sat in Bobby Lee’s pickup until he and Carolyn came out. Carolyn was in no better mood than Karla, but they gave him a ride home. Karla was nowhere to be seen.

CHAPTER 51

T
HE NEXT MORNING
D
UANE WOKE TO A HOUSE THAT
seemed very empty. Dickie, who had only moved back in yesterday, had not spent the night there. Karla was gone. It appeared that he had twelve thousand square feet of unpaid-for house entirely to himself.

Then, while he was cooking eggs, he remembered Junior Nolan, who had been living there when last seen. He went in search of Junior and found him in a remote guest room, sitting on the floor with a box of Cheerios at his side. He had a handful of Cheerios and was eating them dry, as if they were popcorn, meanwhile watching
Sesame Street.

“Junior, how about some eggs?” Duane asked. “I’ve got some pretty good sausage, too.”

“No, thanks, Duane,” Junior said. “I’m on a diet.”

“Why?” Duane asked, reflecting that the man already looked like the survivor of an around-the-world walkathon.

“Actually it’s not a diet, it’s a fast,” Junior said. “You know, when you starve yourself for a cause.”

“What cause are you starving yourself for?” Duane asked.

“The oil cause,” Junior said. “I’m fasting for an embargo on foreign oil. And if that don’t work I’m gonna call up some of these rock singers and get ’em to give an Oil Aid concert, to help out starving oilmen.

“Gandhi did fasts,” Junior added. “I think I could do one.”

Junior’s impressive familiarity with world history startled Duane a little.

“Junior, we barely even know you’re in the house,” he said. “We don’t see you for days. You could sit here and starve to death and not a soul would know it. You wouldn’t get an oil embargo. You’d just be dead.”

“Yeah, but I ain’t on the real fast yet,” Junior said. “I’m just practicing with Cheerios. Once the centennial opens I plan to set up a tent on the courthouse lawn and do my fast there. I might even get statewide coverage on TV.”

“I don’t know if your starving away on the courthouse lawn in going to mix too good with the centennial activities,” Duane said. “Tourists might look at you and get so depressed they wouldn’t stay around to buy T-shirts.”

The T-shirt-and-souvenir shop had started off promisingly, but after a day or two sales had slipped to a discouraging level. The initial flurry had been caused by local buyers snapping up cheap birthday presents. A few people who found themselves passing through Thalia—mainly because of a too-casual attitude toward map reading—stopped and visited the souvenir shop, but most of them just wanted to ask directions. One or two soreheads, unhappy at finding themselves in a place they didn’t want to be, even criticized the souvenirs. One blunt old customer from Nevada offended the saleswomen by volunteering the opinion that towns with nothing to offer shouldn’t be celebrating their own existence.

“Oh, yeah, what’s Nevada got to offer except crooked slot machines?” Lavelle asked him.

“If you’re so ignorant you ain’t even heard of Boulder Dam you ought to put a sack over your head and drown yourself,” the old man said. “Besides, ever’ damn inch of Nevada is prettier than this hellhole.”

“We didn’t ask you to come here and we’ll all be glad when you go,” Lavelle said.

The man left, in a Winnebago so ancient it was hardly larger
than a Volkswagen. Lavelle’s bold stand made her a heroine for a day, but did not produce a rush of suitors.

Junior followed Duane back to the kitchen and moodily consumed several eggs and some sausage. Duane felt relieved. The man had a hearty appetite and might soon forget the notion of a fast.

“Hell, ain’t there anybody here but us?” Junior asked, becoming aware of the ringing emptiness.

“Nope, they’re all gone doing errands,” Duane said. He didn’t want to have to try and explain why his whole family had moved in with Jacy.

He went outside and tried to set the expensive sprinkler system, which was not much less intricate than the stove. He had agreed to the system reluctantly, but his interest in it had increased.

He tried to tell himself that the absence of his family was just some temporary joke, but part of him suspected that it wasn’t a joke. He wanted his family back, and studied the dials of the sprinkler system a little desperately. If it could just be made to work properly, a soft green lawn might flower almost overnight—given adequate moisture the lawns of Thalia grew so rapidly in the summer that most people spent most of their time doing nothing but cutting them.