Duane walked on into the dun countryside, obligingly stopping every half mile or so to explain to a passing cowboy, or pickup full of roughnecks, that no, his pickup hadn’t broken down, he was just walking out to his cabin, enjoying the February breeze. Although annoyed to have to explain himself to every single car that passed, he was not surprised and took care to preserve his amiability. The county had slowly come to accept C-SPAN and computers—in a few months they could probably be brought to accept a walker, too. Then his walks would get easier, more pure. A day would finally come when none of the roughnecks or the hunters would stop at the sight of him walking—not unless he waved them down. He could walk in peace, think, be alone.
Even now, on what was essentially the first solitary walk of his life, there were pleasant stretches when the road ahead was empty, free of pickups and trucks coming and going from the oil fields or the ranches. There was just the cold blue winter sky, and the whip of the wind, so strong when it gusted that the weeds by the fences rattled against the barbed wire. He could walk along, keeping a lookout for deer, or coveys of quail, or wild turkeys or wild pigs, all of which he and his son Dickie occasionally liked to hunt.
He had passed through much of his life paying only the most casual attention to the natural world, noting only whether it was cold or wet or hot, an obstruction to his business or otherwise. He had not delved much into nature’s particularities, knew the names of only a few trees, a few birds, some insects, and the common animals. The thought of his own ignorance made him feel a little guilty. He knew scarcely a thing about botany, could identify only a few of the plants he was passing as he walked. He thought he might purchase a book about weeds and flowers, and maybe a book about birds; he could at least educate himself to the point where he recognized the plants he was passing, as he walked here and there.
Rounding a bend in the road, at about the halfway point between his cabin and the town, he happened to notice a coyote, standing only twenty yards away in the pasture. The coyote, unalarmed, was watching him intently, its head cocked to one side.
“No, my pickup ain’t broke down,” Duane said. “I’m just out for a walk, if you don’t mind.”
He walked a little farther and then glanced back. The coyote was still standing there, looking at him.
4
ONCE SHE LEFT THE OFFICE Karla headed for the post office, meaning to see if any interesting catalogues had come in the mail.
Halfway there, she realized she didn’t care. If there was anything she wasn’t in the mood for just then it was one more J. Crew catalogue. Why bother to buy anything, if her husband wanted a divorce?
Nonetheless, from force of habit, she drifted on toward the post office. But when she got a block from it she noticed that seven or eight miscellaneous citizens were standing out in the wind, talking, as they might if there had been a bad accident on the highway. As soon as one of them noticed the BMW coming, eight faces looked her way, a sure indication, in her opinion, that they had spotted Duane walking and knew about the divorce. For a moment it pissed her off: half the town already knew her husband wanted to divorce her and the son-of-a-bitch hadn’t even bothered to mention it to her!
A second later she decided it might be a good day to skip the post office; J. Crew could definitely wait. She didn’t feel up to trying to explain to half the people in town why her husband was walking down the road. Explaining why he was leaving her would be easier: any two people who had been together forty years might one day just elect to say, “Enough!”
Karla blazed on past the post office, to the considerable disappointment of several people who had been hoping to ask her a few questions—discreet questions, of course. When and if it came to a showdown of some kind between herself and Duane, she was not really sure that the good citizens of Thalia would come down on her side. Duane was outrageously popular, always had been. He was president of the school board at the time, and vice president of the Chamber of Commerce. Karla, by her own admission, had had a few years when she could fairly have been described as wild and unruly. Quite a few of the people who had known her then, many of them just as wild, had paid for their wildness and were dead and gone; but some of them were still alive and they had long memories.
Of course, most of the women in Thalia had always hoped Duane would divorce her, so they could marry him themselves, or at least sleep with him without violating the Seventh Commandment—or whichever Commandment it was that forbade adultery. The fact that most of these women were now long in the tooth didn’t mean that they had entirely abandoned these hopes. Even chubby little Earlene, back at the office, had hardly been able to conceal her excitement at the thought that Duane might soon be an eligible divorcé.
Annoyed as she was by Duane’s sudden bad behavior, Karla’s view of that matter was that the women who allowed themselves to think along those lines were in for a big disappointment. Duane wasn’t by nature much of a womanizer—so far as she knew he hadn’t had a fling in years, and the few that had occurred in earlier days had mainly been forced upon him.
“You don’t dodge quick enough, Duane—that’s the whole story of you and women,” Karla had told him, years before, when dodging or not dodging had been a constant part of both their lives.
She started to drive out the road toward the cabin and have it out with him then and there; all her life she had been a confronter, and this was certainly an issue that needed confronting, but for some reason her instincts had gotten in a scrambled state. It was just possible that something physical had gone wrong with Duane; it might be that what was occurring had nothing to do with any sudden desire for a divorce. He could have had a small stroke, causing Alzheimer’s to come on him so suddenly that he had forgotten how to drive; he might even have forgotten where they lived. Maybe the divorce theory, which had seemed reasonable at first, wasn’t reasonable at all. Maybe Duane had just had a stroke and lost his mind, in which case she was going to need help when she brought him home. Dickie, their older son, was back in rehab, trying to overcome his cocaine problem, and Jack, the younger boy, was off in the next county, trapping wild pigs, a profession that suited him perfectly. Jack baited horse trailers with acorns and sold whatever pigs he trapped for five dollars a pound to someone who shipped them to Germany or somewhere.
That left Bobby Lee as the likeliest male who might have some influence with Duane in his deranged state. Karla zipped back to the office and soon had Bobby Lee on the CB.
“Bobby Lee, what are you doing?” she asked.
“Oh, not much. I just shot my little toe off,” Bobby Lee said, deadpan as ever.
“Drop everything then and come to the office,” Karla said. “I need some help with Duane.”
“What’d he do, beat you up?” Bobby Lee inquired.
“I’d rather not talk about it on the CB. Could you please just come on to the office?” Karla asked.
She assumed the part about shooting his toe off was one of Bobby Lee’s little weird jokes, but when his pickup bounced up to the office ten minutes later he was holding the driver’s door open with one hand and dangling a bloody foot out the door.
“Oh my God, what has that stupid little idjit done now?” Earlene said, whereupon she fainted, falling face forward onto her electric typewriter, which immediately emitted a wild keening sound.
“It’s all right, it was just my little toe,” Bobby Lee said, when Karla came running out. “I guess Duane didn’t beat you too bad, you don’t have no black eyes, or else if you do you’re using real good makeup.”
“I never said he beat me,” Karla said. “Now Earlene’s fainted right on her typewriter—I bet she’s ruined that whole contract.”
“Well, big deal, I ruined my whole foot,” Bobby Lee said. “And a foot’s more important than a contract. There’s a hose hooked to that faucet there by the corner of the office—if you’ll just turn it on and hand it to me I’ll sluice off some of this blood and we’ll be on our way.”
“On our way where?” K
arla asked. “I never said we were going anywhere.”
One of the reasons Bobby Lee was so hard to communicate with was that he never removed his sunglasses, no matter how light or how dark it was. Once long ago a woman he was madly in love with called him a cross-eyed runt. Despite the fact that, in the years since the insult had been delivered, hundreds of people had assured him that he wasn’t cross-eyed—a fact he could see for himself, in the privacy of his own bathroom, every morning when he shaved—Bobby Lee had refused to take any chances. He kept his dark glasses on at all times, in case crosseyedness struck unexpectedly.
“Oh, come on, Karla,” he said. “Everybody knows Duane has left you. The CB’s been cracklin’ all mornin’, about him walking off. Ten or twelve people have offered him rides, but he won’t get in no car. You two must have had the fight of a lifetime, for him to take it into his head to walk six miles.”
“Nope, no fight. I haven’t even seen him since breakfast,” Karla said. “He just parked his pickup and walked off.”
“Well, that’s not what they’re saying on the CB,” Bobby Lee assured her. “Are you going to bring me that hose, or not? I don’t want to get blood on my pickup.”
Karla brought him the hose, but declined to watch him wash his mangled toe.
“What were you aiming at that you hit your little toe?” she asked.
“A bug,” Bobby Lee said. “I was so fucking bored I tried to shoot a bug and hit my toe.”
“I guess I better go wet a washrag and see if I can bring Earlene back to life,” Karla said.
“If it don’t work I guess I could always give her mouth-to-mouth,” Bobby Lee said. He found Earlene appealing—who cared if she was a little chubby?
“I guess you would, you lech,” Karla said. “I expect I can revive her without any help from a man so stupid he would try to shoot a bug.”
But reviving Earlene proved more difficult than she had expected. Even when Earlene regained a measure of consciousness she was far from out of the woods.
“I’m all right, I’m all right, I just need a little air. Everybody stand back,” Earlene said. Her voice was wobbly but not as wobbly as her legs. When she attempted to walk across the room and get what she referred to euphemistically as her “nerve medicine”—it was actually Paxil, a fact Karla had determined long ago by sneaking a look in Earlene’s purse one day when she was in the bathroom—she began to list heavily to the left. Before anyone could grab her and set her back on course she flopped into the watercooler, knocking it over. The water bottle, which had just been refilled that morning, went rolling across the floor, gurgling as it went, and gushing nice fresh springwater freely onto the rug.
Ruth Popper, who had been deep in a nap and unaware of any commotion, woke up from her nap with the conviction that her feet were wet, which they were, the rolling bottle of water having come to rest against her chair.
“I’m soaked—what’s going on here? Has everybody in this office gone crazy?” she asked.
“No, but I guess you could say we’ve had a few setbacks,” Karla admitted. Earlene’s head had hit the corner of the watercooler when she fell, opening a gash that took nine stitches to close. Karla left Bobby Lee in charge of the office while she ran the hysterical Earlene down to the clinic.
“It’s gonna take plastic surgery, I know it is,” Earlene sobbed. “No man will ever look at me again if I have a big ugly scar.”
“Earlene, you just bumped your head on the watercooler. Calm down,” Karla said. “A little cut like that will heal up perfectly fine.”
“Will you pray for me—I figure prayer’s my best hope,” Earlene begged.
“You’ve got pretty good health insurance—I expect that’s all you’ll need,” Karla said. She did not want to commit herself to praying for a little cut on Earlene Gholson’s head. Her own husband might be wandering around the country with Alzheimer’s, for all she knew; what little credit she might have with the higher powers had best be saved for members of her own immediate family, she believed.
Once Earlene finally got her stitches, screaming all the while as if she were being tortured by Comanches, Karla took her back to the office, to discover that Bobby Lee and Ruth were at each other’s throats. Bobby Lee, sulking because his own injury had been neglected in favor of Earlene’s, had refused to accept any responsibility for Ruth’s wet feet and at some point in the discussion had told her to go to hell.
“If I do go to hell there you’ll be, roasting on a spit,” Ruth told him.
“That’s probably true, and it could happen in the next few days if I get gangrene from this injured toe,” Bobby Lee countered.
“You can’t get gangrene from your toe because your toe’s not there,” Karla pointed out, but her logic, however impeccable, was lost on Bobby Lee when he was in one of his sulky moods.
Karla, knowing she would never hear the end of it if she didn’t offer Bobby Lee at least as much attention as she had offered Earlene, took him to the clinic too. The young doctor, who had just moved to Thalia and didn’t really know the local ways, was annoyed with Bobby Lee because he had made no attempt to find the shot-off toe and bring it with him.
“If you’d just brought it with you I’m sure I could have sewed it back on,” the doctor said testily. “Frankly, I would have liked the practice.”
“Then shoot your own toe off and practice on it, you dumb fuck,” Bobby Lee said, after which the doctor’s ministrations grew noticeably perfunctory.
“Bobby, why would you insult a doctor when he was trying to help you?” Karla asked, as they were driving away from the clinic, Bobby Lee sporting a nice clean bandage.
“It’s a doctor’s duty to heal the sick, no matter how rude they are,” Bobby Lee replied.
“Yes, but people don’t always do their duty,” Karla reminded him—the sentiment prompted her to remember Duane, her sick-in-the-head husband, who must have long since walked to wherever he was going.
“Will you just ride out with me to the cabin, so I can see if Duane’s there?” Karla asked. Bobby Lee, now that he was cured, had a familiar, selfish look on his face, the look that meant he was seriously considering parking himself in a beer joint and drinking beer for a day or two.
“It’s kind of late,” he said. “I’m sure Duane will show back up when he gets good and ready to.”
“Does that mean yes, or no?” Karla asked. “I sure hope for your sake it means yes.”
“Why for my sake?” Bobby Lee asked. “It’s for my sake that I’m trying to be a little careful. Getting in the middle between a husband and a wife can be dangerous, you know.”
“Yes, but not as dangerous as refusing me on one of the rare occasions when I work up to asking you a favor,” Karla said.
“That sounds like a threat,” Bobby Lee said.
“Bobby, it is a threat,” Karla assured him. “If you’re too selfish to help me in my hour of need I’m going to wait until you’re drunk or looking off and then I’m going to kick you as hard as I can right in your one good ball.”
“Oops, let’s go right now,” Bobby Lee said, and without any more discussion, they went.
5
THEY HAD JUST ROUNDED the first curve going out of Thalia when they saw a man walking toward them, backlit by the orange winter sunset.
“That’s Duane, I know his walk,” Karla said.
“You’re right,” Bobby Lee admitted. “I didn’t really believe it until now. Duane’s about the last person you’d expect to see walking along the road.”
Karla had always been a confident woman, secure in her convictions and sure of her powers, but for some reason the mere sight of her husband walking down a country road right at sunset threw everything she had ever felt and believed into question. It stripped her of all confidence, and made her feel alone and confused.
“I think you ought to be the one to ask him if he’ll get in the car, Bobby Lee,” she said.
“Me, uh-uh, no way,” Bobby Lee said. “I done lost
a toe today—I don’t need to lose a job too.”
“Why would he fire you just for asking a question?” she asked.
Bobby Lee was silent for a while. He too was nervous about whatever was about to happen.
“A man that would get out of a perfectly good pickup and just go walking off is not in his right mind,” Bobby Lee said. “He might fire me over nothing.”
Duane had already spotted his wife’s BMW in the road ahead. Its appearance did not surprise him; what surprised him was that Karla had waited until almost sundown to show up. Karla usually jumped on a problem immediately; she had rarely been known to hesitate. The fact that she had waited nearly half a day to come looking for him probably meant one of two things: either she hadn’t actually missed him until a few minutes ago, or she had missed him but hadn’t been able to get away sooner because of one or more calamitous events. With all the grandkids living at the big house, calamitous events were not rare; two or three a day was about the norm. Duane’s guess was that his wife had had such a hectic day that she was just now getting around to him. Several cowboys and a couple of hunters had offered him rides on his walk back from the cabin, all of which he had amiably declined. He knew that the cowboys and the hunters would have spread the word that Duane Moore, president of the school board and vice president of the Chamber of Commerce, had lost his mind and was walking around on foot. That was the sort of news that spread quick.
The BMW had stopped in the road, a few hundred yards ahead, which just meant that Karla didn’t know what to make of the sight of him walking. If a grandkid had swallowed a fishhook or something equally awkward to extract she would have known exactly what to do, but this new development was more complicated, and there was no precedent for it—not unless you counted a few tennis lessons he had invested in long ago, during the heady days of the boom—it was a time when many members of the West Texas oil community briefly convinced themselves they had risen into the leisure class, when in fact they hadn’t.
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