Texasville (48 page)

“It confuses me,” Duane said, looking down at the crowd, which had gone wild. People were honking horns and climbing on cars.

“You’re an idiot!” Jacy said. “It’s not confusing. It’s wonderful.”

He saw tears in her eyes, but she blinked them back and continued to smile at the crowd.

“Wave!” she said. “Wave at them.”

Duane waved. He kept waving as the truck eased slowly along. The knot of tension in his chest gradually loosened. He felt that he too might cry, even as he smiled and waved. Jacy kept her arm around his waist, and he put an arm around hers. The crowd became wilder. The float was almost blocked by people who ran into the street with cameras. Duane kept waving. A swell of emotion drowned his confusion, and then his headache. He waved at friends, he waved at strangers. At one point, with a start, he realized he had just waved at his wife. Karla sat on her Appaloosa, Willie Nelson, the Lone Star flag stuck in her stirrup, watching them as they glided by. Then she waved her flag and cheered.

“Hey, that’s more like it,” Jacy said, smiling at him. “You’re finally loosening up.”

Duane stood beside her and kept waving all the way to the last car, parked almost a hundred yards past the city limits on the far south edge of town.

CHAPTER 71

B
EFORE THE LONG PARADE HAD FINALLY TRICKLED
through Thalia, Duane was miserably drunk. He sat in a lawn chair behind Karla’s BMW, which had been preparked beneath a shade tree on Jenny Marlow’s lawn.

Around him swirled the thirtieth reunion of the class of 1954. Jenny had not been a member of the class of 1954, but she was married to Lester, who had. They were hosting the reunion because their house was easy to get to, and the reunion had to be squeezed into the brief hour and a half between the parade and the pageant.

Karla and Duane had spent almost a year arguing about whether to host the reunion at their new mansion. Duane had argued against it, reasoning that no one would want to drive five miles out of town on a dirt road to see classmates they had long since forgotten anyway.

“Yeah, but you don’t really like people, Duane,” Karla said. “You wouldn’t drive six feet out of your way to see Rita Hay-worth. Other people
like
people. Besides, this is Texas. It only takes four minutes to drive five miles.”

“I like people,” Duane insisted. “I’d drive a long way to meet Rita Hayworth.”

In the course of the year the argument grew more and more baroque. One element that affected it was that the thirtieth reunion was actually the thirty-second reunion. Plans had been made for a reunion in the true thirtieth year, but that turned out to be the year that about 75 percent of the class decided to get divorced. Adding a reunion to so many divorces would only have piled trauma on trauma. Nearly everyone would have had to decide whether to bring ex-husbands and ex-wives or current boyfriends and girlfriends.

“It doesn’t matter to me who anybody brings,” Duane said. “I don’t remember but two or three of the people I graduated with anyway.”

“It’s because you don’t really like people,” Karla pointed out. “I remember almost every single person I graduated with. Just one or two of the boys are growing a little fuzzy.”

Duane himself had begun to grow fuzzy immediately after the parade from drinking too much Stolichnaya and papaya juice, a concoction Karla often mixed up on festive occasions. It was profoundly intoxicating, as Duane knew, but he was both euphoric and very hot, and drank two or three cups of the punch hoping to cool off. Karla was drinking it, Jacy was drinking it, Jenny and Lester were drinking it, many old classmates whom he only dimly remembered were drinking it, along with a great many friendly strangers who could not have been members of the class of 1954.

Duane was not sure how so many nonclassmates had got invited to the class reunion, but before he could start wondering too much about it he found his hand being pumped by a legitimate classmate, Joe Bob Blanton, the preacher’s son and first lover of Janine, who had removed himself university by university until no one was quite certain where he was.

Duane’s impression, after looking into Joe Bob’s face for the first time in at least a quarter of a century, was that his grip had certainly improved. He was pumping Duane’s arm so vigorously that for a second Duane felt he had turned into an oil pump. He saw himself as a pump, pumping steadily night and day, bringing rich, expensive oil up from the earth.

It was at that moment that he realized he had been incautious in regard to the punch. He knew he was drunk. He had meant to put on the brakes, not drink too much of the punch. After all, he was president of the Centennial Committee; whatever went wrong would be blamed on him. Now he himself had gone wrong. He was drunk and that was that, although it was really Karla’s fault. She didn’t need to be so lavish with the Stolichnaya. She didn’t even need to
use
Stolichnaya.

“Duane, it’s just great to see you,” Joe Bob said. “It really is great.”

“Nice to see you too,” Duane said. It seemed to him that Joe Bob had changed a great deal. As a youth he had been skinny—now he was plump. He had a thin little mustache that hung down at the corners, past his mouth. It was a Fu Manchu mustache, but instead of having a hard lean face, such as Fu Manchu had in the movies, Joe Bob had a round soft face. His hair was mostly gray and he wore a shiny blue coat and corduroy pants. His shoes seemed to be made of plastic.

“Where do you live now, Joe Bob?” Duane asked. The realization that he was drunk made asking even the simplest question a struggle. He had decided at once to ask Joe Bob where he lived, but getting the words out seemed to take several minutes.

“Oh, I’m still in Syracuse,” Joe Bob said. “I’ve been there twenty-two years.”

Karla wandered up. She had been slugging down Stolichnaya and papaya juice herself, but it seemed to have no effect on her.

“Hi, you must be Joe Bob,” she said. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“Probably the part about me molesting little girls,” Joe Bob said, smiling a soft smile.

Duane remembered that he was mad at Karla for having caused his awkward drunkenness.

“I wish you’d quit buying that Russian vodka,” he said. “I don’t like making communists rich just in order to get drunk.”

Karla waved her hand in front of his eyes, her new way of indicating that she thought he had gone crazy.

“Actually, more of a case can be made for pedophilia than you might think,” Joe Bob said.

“Don’t you have to have a lot of blood transfusions, though?” Karla said.

Joe Bob looked slightly taken aback. “That’s hemophilia,” he said. “That’s different.”

Minerva happen to overhear a snatch of the conversation. “I was told I’d die of nosebleeds by several doctors, but I beat the odds,” she said.

She wore an ancient cowboy hat, inherited from her father. It stood a fair chance of winning the prize for the Most Authentic Cowboy Hat, one of several such prizes to be given.

“Gosh, I miss Texas,” Joe Bob said, still smiling. “Lots of times I think of coming back.”

“Shit, come on back,” Bobby Lee said. He had wandered up.

“Yeah, pack up and come,” Karla said. “Why live your life in agony?”

“Oh, the truth is the pedophilic community in Syracuse kind of needs me,” Joe Bob said. “I’m sort of their spokesperson. We put out a little newsletter and I edit it. It’s called
Child’s Play.”

“Well, it’s nice to be needed,” Bobby Lee said amicably.

Duane walked off and sat down in a lawn chair. His head was whirling. If he closed his eyes for even a moment he became dizzy. Bright particles seemed to be swimming around behind his eyelids.

While he had his eyes closed, waiting for the particles to stop swirling, he smelled perfume at his elbow. It didn’t smell like Karla’s perfume, or Jacy’s either. After thinking a bit he decided it was Janine’s perfume. He opened his eyes to see Janine herself kneeling beside his chair.

“I found out the sex today,” she said. “I’m gonna have a little curlyheaded boy, just like I always dreamed.”

“Goodness,” Duane said.

“You don’t sound a bit impressed,” Janine said, chewing gum. “It’s the one thing I’ve wanted all my life.”

“I’m drunk or I’d sound more impressed,” Duane assured her. “I got hot and drank too much of the punch.”

Janine leaned close to whisper—he felt her breath in his ear.

“I want you to be my boyfriend again,” she whispered.

That was startling news. “Why?” he asked.

“Lester’s afraid of germs,” Janine said, giggling.

Duane decided to shut his eyes and think that over. The little particles swirled wildly for a while. He thought of them as brightly colored germs, irritating but nothing to be afraid of. While they were swirling he felt Janine’s breath in his ear again. She was so close he could smell both her perfume and her chewing gum.

“You don’t have to decide right now,” she said.

Duane was grateful for that. He was thinking of opening his eyes when the perfume changed. He opened his eyes just in time to see Jenny Marlow bend down and give him a big kiss. Duane decided to pretend that he was unconscious. If he opened his eyes he might find out that Jenny, too, was soon going to have a curlyheaded boy.

“He’s asleep,” Jenny said to someone. Then her perfume gave way to Karla’s perfume.

“If I ever find any more of that Russian vodka in our house I’m gonna pour every drop of it out,” he said, his eyes still closed.

“Duane, you haven’t introduced me to a single one of your old classmates,” Karla said. “I think that’s real tacky.”

Duane opened his eyes and looked around at the classmates he hadn’t introduced her to. A tall, gawky woman in a green dress stood nearby. She seemed familiar—he thought she had been a classmate. In high school she had also been tall and gawky—he seemed to remember that she had even then been partial to green. He tried hard to locate her in his memory, but his memory was drunk too. He thought he remembered a basketball trip long ago in which something had happened between himself and the tall, gawky girl who had become a tall, gawky woman. Hadn’t they sat together in the back of the school bus, going to Crowell? Hadn’t they necked, petted, done something? He thought he remembered kissing her once and being surprised when she kissed back.

But the memory was very vague, and he could not attach a name to the woman. Maybe it was Wilma—hadn’t there been a Wilma somewhere in the class of 1954? But all he really
remembered was how sexy the girls’ basketball uniforms had seemed then. The uniforms were silky or satiny, as well as being loose. It was easy to get a hand inside them—though just stroking the silky uniforms was almost as exciting as stroking the bodies inside them.

“I think that’s Wilma,” he said, in response to his wife’s accusation.

“Wilma who?” Karla asked.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I’m not even sure it’s Wilma.”

“You sure don’t care much about your old classmates,” Karla said. “You can’t even remember their names for thirty years.”

“Most of them moved away,” Duane said, though he knew it was a poor excuse. Most of them had not moved all that far away. Only Joe Bob and one or two others had actually moved out of the state; the majority had gone no farther than the suburbs of Fort Worth, and many not even that far. He had gone straight through school with most of them—twelve years, first grade to senior trip. It seemed unthinkable that he could ever forget their names, and yet the unthinkable had happened. All but a few had become nameless. He watched them drink Stolichnaya and papaya juice and eat chicken gizzards. They were all trying hard to make merry, but none of them really looked very merry—in fact, none of them even looked modestly happy.

Jacy was chatting with Joe Bob, doing her best, but she no longer looked happy and excited, as she had on the homecoming queen float. She seemed listless, melancholy.

“This reunion was a terrible idea,” he said. “Everybody looks disappointed. Nobody looks successful.”

“They’re trying, though,” Karla said. “Everybody’s trying real hard. You’re the only one that’s just sitting around sulking.”

“I’m not sulking,” he said. “I got drunk on that stupid communist vodka you’re so fond of.”

“Why was Janine Wells licking your ear right in front of everybody?” Karla asked. “She wasn’t even in your class.”

“Where’d Dickie get that Porsche?” Duane asked, deciding to counter a question with a question.

“Suzie Nolan bought it for him,” Karla said. “They’re real lovey-dovey now.”

“Suzie bought it for him?” he said, astonished. “Her husband’s had his notes called and is fasting to death on the courthouse lawn and she buys Dickie a Porsche?”

“I think it’s nice that Dickie likes older women,” Karla said. “He’s not a snob about it like some men.”

“This reunion depresses the shit out of me,” Duane said. “I hate to see people pretending to be happy when they’re miserable.”

“It’s nearly time for the pageant to start, anyway,” Karla said. She drained her drink and left.

Duane felt a little less drunk, but he didn’t get up. He sat and watched his classmates and their wives. In most cases he was unable to remember whether it had been a wife or a husband who was his classmate. Collectively, though they might be disappointed, they were far from quiet. Many had voices so loud that it made him feel like putting his hands over his ears. One woman he couldn’t identify had a voice that reminded him of the screech of air brakes. Listening to it made him feel like he was starting his hangover before he could even stop being drunk.

Just as he was about to get up, someone walked up behind him and put a hand lightly on each of his shoulders. He looked up and saw Jacy. She seemed sad.

“Coming to this reunion was a terrible idea,” she said.
“Having
it was a terrible idea.”

“I agree,” Duane said. “I can’t remember a tenth of these people.”

“That’s not the point,” Jacy said.

“Well, I’m drunk,” Duane said. “I can’t be expected to get the point.”

“What we can’t expect anymore
is
the point,” Jacy said. “We can’t expect most of the things we once could have had, if we’d just been smarter, or had more guts.”