Texasville (8 page)

The next morning Duane told Ruth about Sonny’s failure to find his car.

Ruth was at her desk, rapidly throwing away the morning’s mail. She believed in keeping a clean desk and speedily threw away anything that seemed likely to create clutter. If the drilling company received a hundred letters, Ruth would immediately
throw away ninety-five unopened after no more than a cursory glance at their postmarks.

The sight of her blitzing the mail always made Duane nervous. He could never grasp her method, if she had one. Once, when she was out to lunch, he went through the wastebasket himself to see if she could possibly have thrown away any letters with checks in them. She hadn’t. When she returned from lunch she glanced at the wastebasket and gave him a severe look. Nothing was said, but from then on, as soon as Ruth went through the mail she put the rejects in a garbage bag and carried it right to the dumpster.

“I think Sonny wants to die,” she said, when told about the car incident. “He’s never found anything that interested him.”

“I thought you interested him once,” Duane said.

Ruth looked sad for a moment.

“No, he interested
me,”
she said. “He was my only chance at love. I was lucky. He was a very nice boy. But he shouldn’t have settled for me. He should have got out of here and looked around.”

The Sonny Duane knew seemed only mildly unhappy. Duane found it hard to believe he wanted to die.

“Karla agrees with me,” Ruth said, seeing that he looked skeptical.

“Oh, well,” Duane said, “if Karla and you agree on something there’s no point in the rest of us even having an opinion. There’s only about a chance in a million that you and Karla could be wrong.”

He wondered if they agreed on anything having to do with him, but Ruth was typing a lease and he didn’t ask.

CHAPTER 9

“K
ARLA’S CHASED OFF ALL THE WOMEN EXCEPT
herself,” Duane said. “I guess it’s time to go to work.”

“As soon as you leave I’m gonna pump Sonny like he was an oil well,” Karla said.

She made a pumping gesture with her right hand.

“I’ll pump until I get you to have total recall of everything Duane said to his girlfriend while I wasn’t here,” she said.

“That won’t take long,” Sonny said. “They barely spoke.”

“Do you think morals have declined?” Karla asked. “Ten years ago a married man like Duane wouldn’t have dared sit right in this Dairy Queen with his girlfriend.”

“Ten years ago this Dairy Queen wasn’t here,” Duane observed.

“There’s never been a dollar’s worth of morals in this whole county,” Eddie Belt volunteered. He was perking up a lot. The decline of local morals was one of his favorite topics.

Duane got up and stepped over to the window. Shorty, ever loyal, still had his head pressed against the windshield although the sun was blazing down. Duane waved at him.
Shorty, overjoyed, jumped straight up, bonking himself against the roof of the cab. Then he went into a frenzy, trying to scramble onto the dashboard to be closer to Duane. In his frenzy he knocked pliers, receipts and everything else Duane kept on the dashboard onto the floorboards. Duane laughed. It always cheered him a little to see Shorty leap up like a fish and bonk himself on the roof.

“Laughing at animals is a sign of bad morals, too,” Karla said. “Shorty can’t help it that he’s the stupidest creature on earth.”

“What do you expect when a place is nearly a hundred years old?” Sonny said. “Decadence sets in.”

“Who’s going to the centennial meeting tonight?” Duane asked, since Sonny had mentioned the county’s age, a topic on everyone’s mind.

Duane was chairman of the Centennial Committee, a position he had accepted at the height of his affluence, when it seemed likely he himself would finance the whole centennial as a charitable act.

Now that his financial position was shaky—a fact known to every single person in Thalia—it was obvious that the centennial would have to be financed some other way. Tickets would have to be sold to the various events, and souvenirs vigorously marketed. Centennial T-shirts were already being made, as well as centennial ashtrays, dozer caps and key chains. There would be concessions, raffles, a carnival, street dances, a pageant that would run for a week, and even a centennial calendar.

The very thought of the centennial had begun to depress those actually responsible for planning it—mainly Duane and Sonny. It had become increasingly difficult to get people to come to the planning meetings, although the celebration was only three months away. “Who’s coming to the centennial meeting tonight?” Duane asked again.

Only Sonny raised a hand. As mayor of the town, he spent most of his evenings going to one meeting or another. The week before, in the City Council, there had been hot debate over street names, a flourish the town had done without so far. Some wanted to name streets after pioneers, others after trees. The tree faction won by three votes.

Everyone else stonily ignored Duane’s question.

“What happened to the pioneer spirit?” Duane asked.

“Who cares what happened to it?” Eddie Belt said. “I ain’t growing no beard, either.”

It had been decided to require all adult males in the county to grow beards for the centennial. Many neighboring counties had had their centennials already, and had had a beard requirement. For this one, those refusing to comply faced the danger of being ducked in a water tank situated on the courthouse lawn for that purpose.

“You’ll get ducked if you don’t grow a beard,” Duane warned.

“You’re not a dictator, Duane,” Karla said. “You can’t make people grow beards just because you’re chairman of that stupid committee.”

“I hate beards,” Bobby Lee said. “The whiskers kind of stick into you when you try to sleep at night.”

“The people of this county don’t deserve a centennial,” Duane said. “They’re too uncooperative.”

“Who asked for the damn thing anyway?” Eddie Belt asked. “I wasn’t here a hundred years ago and nobody else was either. What do we care about how the thing got started up?”

“You’re supposed to care about your history,” Karla said.

“I’d rather forget mine,” Bobby Lee said.

The pay phone rang and Louise, the cook, came out from behind her shield of taco shells and answered it.

“It’s for Duane or Karla,” she said, holding out the receiver.

“I just left,” Duane said. “Me and Shorty have urgent business on down the road.”

“It could be good news,” Bobby Lee said.

“No, it’s the police,” Louise said.

Karla got up and took the call. Duane looked out the window at Shorty, who was still jumping around.

“Why would you want a dog like that?” Eddie Belt asked. “He’s just about torn your whole pickup up.”

“He means well, though,” Duane said.

Karla hung up and came back to the table, looking only mildly peeved.

“Dickie got arrested for going eighty-five in a school zone,” she said. “Not only that, he was pulling a trailer.”

“What was in the trailer?” Duane asked. “Bales of marijuana?”

“Dickie might be the first man in history to get longer sentences for traffic offenses than he would for selling dope,” Bobby Lee observed.

“You get him out,” Duane said to Karla. “I got him out the last three times.”

“I might get him out this afternoon,” Karla said vaguely.

Duane went to the counter and bought a chocolate milk shake. Shorty loved chocolate milk shakes, and Duane thought he deserved some reward for the long days of boredom spent in the hot pickup.

Karla was wearing her
WOMAN’S PLACE IS IN THE MALL
T-shirt.

“I think I may go to Dallas and spend a few thousand dollars,” she said.

Duane just waved and went out. Shorty jumped out of the pickup to have his milk shake. He was overjoyed to have been remembered. He plunged his nose into the milk shake and pushed the cup all around the parking lot, trying to get the last drop. By the time he had the last drop Duane had already started the pickup and Shorty had to race or be left behind. Sometimes he didn’t make it back in time and had to run all the way to the office. It was only four blocks, but it seemed like a long way to Shorty. Fearful that he might never see Duane again, he raced like the wind on his short legs.

But this time Duane waited and Shorty leaped back in the cab.

Karla came out as they were about to drive off.

“Eddie Belt looks depressed,” she said. “Do you think he’s stable?”

“Do you think
I’m
stable?” Duane asked.

“Duane, you’re too stable,” Karla said.

CHAPTER 10

R
UTH WAS BACK WHEN HE GOT TO THE OFFICE. SHE
had taken a shower after her run. Duane thought she looked younger than she had thirty years earlier. Then, marriage to the coach had caused her to seem prematurely aged. Now, at seventy-two, she seemed girlish—a living example of how seldom life turned out to be as advertised.

“Any checks?” Duane asked.

“We finally got thirty-seven thousand from those crooks in Oklahoma, but it’s a drop in the bucket,” Ruth said. “What do you want me to do with it?”

“Hide it till after lunch,” Duane said.

“Lester’s called three times,” Ruth said. “He said please send over a check for twelve million. He said the Federal regulators are coming today and he needs it.”

“He gets nervous at the thought of going to prison,” Duane said.

“He said he’d rather have a hot check than none at all,” Ruth said. “I feel sorry for Lester.”

“I doubt if those Federal regulators are within a hundred miles of here,” Duane said.

He went in his office and sat waiting for the phone to ring. While he waited he stared at the beautiful color pictures of his children and wife that filled the office. On paper, particularly photographic paper, his family looked wonderful. All of them were amazingly photogenic. The disparity between how they looked in pictures and how they behaved in real life was a subject for much thought, and Duane had given it not a little in the many long days when the phone rang only once or twice. His conclusion was that the camera lied, although Karla claimed it didn’t.

Toward noon, when Duane was still sitting, numb with boredom, the phone did ring. It was Lester Marlow, the beleaguered bank president.

“Wanta have lunch?” he asked. “I’ll buy it.”

“I’m on a diet,” Duane said. “I’m just gonna have a glass of grapefruit juice.”

“We need to talk,” Lester said.

“We talk every day,” Duane reminded him. “I don’t have twelve million. If you want my rigs, take them—just leave me in peace.”

“You’re no help,” Lester said, sounding a bit peeved.

“I could send you a check if it wouldn’t hurt to postdate it a few years,” Duane said.

“Jenny left me this morning,” Lester said. Jenny was a tall, frenetic brunette, easily the best female Softball player in town.

“Left you and went where?” Duane asked, feeling a flicker of sexual curiosity for the second time that day.

“Well, she hasn’t actually moved out of the house yet,” Lester said. “She made me take my sleeping bag when I came to work. She says I can sleep on the floor of my office for all she cares.”

“Women have a heartless side to them, don’t they?” Duane said.

“This whole town’s heartless,” Lester said. “Nobody’s losing any sleep over the fact that I have to stand trial for trying to protect their interests.”

“It’s about time for my grapefruit juice,” Duane said. He didn’t think he could stand to listen again to Lester’s stories about how hard he had tried to protect people’s interests.

“I wish you’d talk to Jenny,” Lester said. “She respects you, Duane.”

“She’s on the Centennial Committee,” Duane said. “I guess I’ll see her if she comes to the meeting tonight.”

Duane had often sat through softball games that he had no interest in, just to watch Jenny Marlow pitch. She had single-handedly increased the attendance at local softball games by several hundred percent. Even people who considered Jenny too opinionated enjoyed watching her pitch.

As a committeewoman she was, if anything, too fertile with ideas. She was in charge of floats, and thought there ought to be a float of the courthouse. Others took the view that there was no need for a float of the courthouse, since the courthouse itself was there for all to see. Jenny was one of the few Republicans in town, and her sense of patriotism extended all the way down to the county level.

“That courthouse is the oldest building in the downtown area,” she pointed out. “It’s the symbol of the county. It’s what unites us as a people. There has to be a float of it.”

“I didn’t notice that we was even united as a people,” Duane said, but he had no real objection to the courthouse float, since Jenny herself would do all the work. She was a whirlwind of energy and for that reason was rarely left out of any civic undertaking. She ran the concessions at football and basketball games with relentless efficiency.

The fact that Duane voted for the courthouse float irritated Karla, who took it as a sign of weakness. Karla thought floats were boring.

“You just let women trample all over you,” she said.

“Well, I let
some
women trample all over me,” Duane said.

“That’s right, pretty ones,” Karla said. “I don’t notice you doing many favors for ugly girls.”

CHAPTER 11

I
N ORDER TO GET LESTER OFF THE PHONE, DUANE
promised to drop by the bank that afternoon. He knew it was in his interest to keep Lester soothed as much as possible.

There was absolutely nothing to do. Two years earlier there would have been fifty people passing through the office every morning—promoters bringing him investors, investors trying to get him to take their money. Now they had vanished, leaving only Ruth.

Duane went out to see what she was doing. As usual, she was writing letters at a furious pace. There was a large stack of letters on her neat desk, each with its envelope stamped and ready beside it.

“Do I need to sign any of these?” Duane asked. He had not dictated any of the letters and had no idea what they concerned.