Just as he had convinced himself that that was likely to be the case, and had opened a can of soup for his supper, he saw a pair of headlights coming across his hill.
“Just when we don’t want company we’re getting company,” he said, to Shorty. But he opened the can of soup anyway, and was trying to decide whether cream of chicken soup would go well with English peas, when Bobby Lee stepped into the cabin, his sunglasses in place, as dark as clouds.
“Goodness me, what’s for supper?” he asked. “If it’s cream of chicken soup can I have a bowl?”
“Help yourself,” Duane said.
14
“IF YOU’RE JUST GOING TO SIT THERE and act nervous I wish you’d leave,” Duane said. It didn’t take long for the two of them to consume a bowl of soup and a few crackers; while they were eating Bobby Lee did an unusual amount of twitching, sniffing, shuffling his feet. After such a peaceful day it took very little in the way of human anxiety to set Duane’s teeth on edge.
“I didn’t move all this way out here to eat soup with nervous people,” he added.
“Why did you move out here, boss?” Bobby Lee asked. “You own the best house in this whole part of the country and here you are out on a hill, living in a shack with a dog.”
“I moved out here to get away from people who are so nervous they can’t even sit still long enough to eat a bowl of soup,” Duane said.
“Want me to take Shorty back to the wetbacks?” Bobby Lee asked. “I bet they’re missing him by now, and even if they ain’t it would be an excuse to leave.”
“Shorty is not going back to the wetbacks,” Duane informed him. “He lives with me now. I’m going to be his foster parent.”
“You could have adopted me instead of him,” Bobby Lee said. “I’ve been needing a foster parent ever since I lost my left nut.”
“Unless I’m mistaken it was your right nut you lost,” Duane reminded him.
“It might as well have been both nuts, for all the pussy I’m getting,” Bobby Lee said.
“I hope you didn’t drive all the way out here to talk about your sex life,” Duane said. But he offered him a cup of coffee, moved by the sad look Bobby Lee had worn ever since the loss of his testicle.
“I take that back,” Bobby Lee said. “As long as I’ve still got one nut I might get some pussy eventually.”
“Don’t wait too long,” Duane said. “You might get to the point where you don’t want any.”
“Women don’t look twice at a man with one ball,” Bobby Lee said. Even before his operation he had been prone to sudden plunges into bottomless self-pity.
“It’s not the women, it’s you,” Duane said. “You’re a goddamn baby. You go around feeling so sorry for yourself that you don’t try.
“If you tried as hard as you used to, at least the law of averages would be on your side,” Duane added.
“Ain’t you got any hamburger meat?” Bobby asked. “I have to work tonight. That cream of chicken soup may not stick to my ribs very long.”
“I plan to acquire some groceries tomorrow,” Duane said. “I didn’t get time to go shopping today.”
“Karla said you was so lonesome you’d probably appreciate any company you could get, but that was wrong,” Bobby said. “You ain’t even lonesome, are you?”
“Nope,” Duane said.
“Why not? You got to admit this is a lonesome old hill.”
“I think it’s a nice hill,” Duane said. “If it was higher it would be too high, and if it was lower it wouldn’t be a hill, it would just be a ridge. It makes a fine place to retire.”
“Oh, are you retired now?” Bobby Lee asked. “If you are, you should have told them at the office. They’re under the impression that you’re still running a business.”
“I’ll tell them tomorrow,” Duane assured him. “I had to chop my wood today.”
Bobby Lee was quiet for a while, thinking. He extracted a cigarette from a pack, looked at it, and then stuck it behind his ear.
“I get the feeling your retirement home is a smoke-free environment,” he said.
“No, you can smoke,” Duane said. “One of the benefits of retirement is that you get to stop making rules for other people. Other people can go to hell anyway they want to.”
“Hell is not having but one ball and wondering if you’re going to get cancer in the good one,” Bobby Lee said.
“I thought we weren’t going to talk about this anymore,” Duane said.
“I was sent out here by Karla—she instructed me to snoop. I guess you know that,” Bobby Lee said.
“You don’t work for Karla,” Duane reminded him. “You’re not her employee. You don’t have to do her dirty work, you know?”
“I don’t guess I really know what’s happening,” Bobby Lee said. “I thought I was your employee, but now you say you’re retired. Who’s going to run the oil company if that’s the case?”
“Dickie and you,” Duane said. “He’ll be out of rehab next week. A little more responsibility might be good for him. It might encourage him to let the drugs alone.”
“Maybe,” Bobby Lee said.
After that they sat in silence for a long time.
“What do you want me to tell Karla?” Bobby asked.
“Tell her I’m fine,” Duane said.
There was another silence.
“You’re fine—that’s it?” Bobby inquired.
“You’re sitting there looking at me. Don’t I look healthy to you?” Duane asked.
“Yes, but you could be seething underneath,” Bobby Lee said.
“I’m not seething underneath. I was just enjoying a quiet evening in my cabin when you showed up.
“I’m fine,” he added.
“It may be true but she’s not gonna want to hear that,” Bobby Lee said. “She thinks you’re racked with guilt for deserting your family.”
“My family’s six miles away,” Duane reminded him. “If something bad happens somebody can run out and get me.”
“Bad . . . what do you mean, bad?”
“Oh, like a murder, or maybe a car wreck,” Duane said.
Bobby Lee stood up, took the cigarette from behind his ear, tapped it on his wrist, and put it back behind his ear.
“I don’t know, I just feel kind of fraught up about all this,” he said.
“Why?”
“I guess because nobody expected you just to suddenly leave home,” Bobby Lee said. “It ain’t really like you.”
“Well, I didn’t plan it,” Duane said. “It just occurred. And it is like me. It’s like the new me.”
“Oh, the retired you?” Bobby asked.
“The me that’s at peace,” Duane said.
“At peace?” Bobby Lee asked.
Duane nodded. Shorty had gone to sleep.
“Then I guess that means you were at war, only none of us knew it,” Bobby Lee said.
“Something like that. One way to explain it is that I got tired of pickups, and all that goes with them.”
“All that goes with them—you mean like family life and stuff?”
Again, Duane nodded.
“You ought to appreciate that yourself,” he said. “You’ve never liked family life, particularly. You spend most of your life in a pickup, drinking beer and smoking.”
“And listening to the radio,” Bobby Lee reminded him.
“I just meant you’re not Mr. Average Dad,” Duane said.
“I know it. I never learned not to marry them cruel women,” Bobby Lee said. “I’ve had to lead a life of driving around, just to escape them.”
“All women are high maintenance,” Duane said. “When you get right down to it that’s the bottom line.”
Bobby Lee considered the remark in silence for a moment.
“Fuckin’ A,” he said, just before he went out the door.
15
KARLA WAS IN THE DEN watching Comedy Central when Nellie came in, dragging two suitcases and several large bags full of tropical dood
ads. She had just been in Cancun with a new boyfriend, Tommy, but the romance had not quite survived the long unromantic flight back to DFW. Tommy had not felt like defending her right to drag the large bags onto the airplane, the result being that Nellie had been forced to check them—then, wouldn’t you know, her bags had been the very last to come off the plane, which meant that she was at the very end of the Customs line. The Customs agents had become unreasonably suspicious, perhaps because she and Tommy were the last ones in line. By the time they finally got through Customs Nellie was so fed up with Tommy that she brusquely informed him that she never wanted to see him again, an action which necessitated taking a taxi home all the way from Dallas, a distance of one hundred and twenty miles.
Nellie was surprised to see her mother up at such an hour, but glad too—she had spent her last cent in Cancun and couldn’t pay the taxi driver.
“Mom, do you have two hundred dollars? I had to take a taxi home,” Nellie said. “It was a black man that drove me—he was real nice.”
“I guess I’d die of surprise if one of my kids showed up not needing money,” Karla said. She riffled through three or four purses and a jacket or two and finally found enough twenties to pay the bill.
“You want to come in and have coffee?” she asked the black man, waiting patiently in her driveway. “It’s two hours back to Dallas. Or I could just pour you some in a paper cup if you’re in a hurry.”
The driver gratefully accepted the coffee and drove off.
“You look like you got a nice tan, honey—how’d it go with Tommy?” she asked, giving her daughter a quick once-over.
“That boring little shitheel, I can’t remember why I even went with him,” Nellie said. “How come you’re up so late, Mom?”
Something didn’t feel quite right in the house. Nellie thought it might be jet lag on her part, but actually she felt pretty peppy. She just had a feeling that something was a little off.
“I’m grown, can’t I stay up late if I want to?” Karla asked. “Anyway, you have to stay up late if you want to see the best comedy acts—they don’t put ’em on while normal people are awake.”
“That’s true, but it don’t explain why you look like you’ve been crying,” Nellie said.
Like her mother, she preferred to cut right to the chase.
“Well, now that you mention it, your father left me,” Karla said—why hide the truth from your own child?
“Oh no, another midlife crisis,” Nellie said. “When he comes back let’s try to get him on Paxil. It sure helped me right after I came out of rehab.”
Karla opened her cabinet and studied the various whiskeys available to her, deciding on tequila, in honor of her daughter’s safe return from a land where it was so popular.
“Your daddy’s too old for a midlife crisis—at least, he is unless he’s planning to live to be one hundred and twenty-four,” she said. “He’s sixty-two. People have midlife crises when they’re in their forties.”
She poured herself a nice slug of tequila and held the bottle up for Nellie to see.
“Want a little of the hair of the dog that’s been biting you for the last few days?” she asked. Nellie was the only child she had who would drink with her. Dickie and the twins preferred drugs.
“Maybe just a dribble,” Nellie said. “Just enough to remind me of Mexico. It’s a drag coming back to a place where there ain’t no beach.”
She thought about the feeling she had, the feeling that something wasn’t right in the house.
“Is there another woman involved . . . is that why Daddy left?” she asked.
Karla shook her head but Nellie remained skeptical.
“Just because you don’t know who it is yet doesn’t mean there isn’t one,” she said.
“Well, I don’t think so,” Karla said. “He left yesterday morning, on foot.”
“On foot—why?” Nellie asked. “You didn’t throw his car keys in the septic tank again, did you?”
She remembered the septic tank incident vividly because her mother, once she calmed down, had tried to bribe Fug, her boyfriend of the moment, to dive into the septic tank and hunt for the keys. But Fug was too chicken, and those particular keys were never found.
“I didn’t throw his keys in the septic tank—we didn’t even have a fight,” Karla said. “I thought we were getting along fine.”
Before Karla could elaborate Nellie suddenly remembered that she was a mother. She sprang up and ran down the hall to take a quick look at Little Bascom and Baby Paul, both sleeping like the angels they were. Then she peeked in the master bedroom, just to be sure her father wasn’t there—and he wasn’t.
“He’s gone all right,” she said, when she got back to the kitchen. “Start from the beginning and tell me all about it.”
Karla was glad to have her daughter home. Nellie was usually sympathetic when it came to troubles with men—she had had plenty of them herself.
“I don’t know what the beginning was,” Karla admitted. “Day before yesterday he showed up about noon, parked his pickup, and just walked off. He didn’t say a word to anybody.”
“Where’d he walk to?” Nellie asked. “If he left he had to go somewhere.”
“Out to the cabin,” Karla said. “Walked back in, had a nice meal with the grandkids, told them he was mainly walking for his health, and left again at three-fifteen the next morning. He told the kids he wanted to stay in good health so he could live to see them grown up and married . . .”
She had to pause briefly in her narrative, choked up at the thought of her own grandkids being grown up and married. Even dark little Barbi might grow up and marry, someday; then she would have no kids living at home, unless, of course, there were divorces at the grandkids’ level.
“He didn’t seem mad or anything, when he left,” she went on. “The only crazy thing he said was that he’d like to burn his pickup.”
“Mom, it could be senility,” Nellie said. “I’ve heard that senile people hide things and burn letters and stuff.”
“Letters, sure, I’d burn letters if my boyfriends had ever written me any,” Karla said. “But I never heard of anyone wanting to burn their pickup—how’s he supposed to run an oil business without a pickup?”
Nellie had to admit that was a puzzler. Pickups were the first facts of life, where they lived. She was beginning to feel a little anxious. What if her father really had gone for good? Pretty soon all the grandkids would be whining because they missed their Pa-Pa. The very thought made her wish she was back on the clean white beach of Cancun, wearing the string bikini that had brought her so many admiring looks and made Tommy afraid to leave her side for more than about twenty seconds at a time.
“So, is he at the cabin?” she asked.
“Yep—Bobby Lee had supper with him,” Karla said. “All they had was soup and crackers.”
“Mom, that’s okay, there’s nothing crazy about having a light meal once in a while,” Nellie said.
“No, but Bobby Lee said he was just real distant,” Karla said.
“Oh well, who wants to talk to that little shrimp anyway?” Nellie asked. “All he wants to talk about is how good he can do it even though he’s only got one ball.”
“How would he know? He hasn’t had a girlfriend since he had the operation,” Karla said. “I’d feel sorry for him if he wasn’t so whiny. He shot his little toe off yesterday—that’s one more thing that happened while you were gone.”
“Maybe they could page Daddy on the radio and let him know I’m home,” Nellie said. “If he knew I was here he might come back. I’ve always been his favorite—you said that yourself.”
“Won’t work. Bobby says he’s unplugged the radio; he’s real cut off,” Karla told her. “Anyway he knows when you were due back—we marked it right there on the calendar.”
The calendar hung on the wall right beside the microwave. Nellie went over to look, and sure enough, her return date had been recorded in her own neat hand, in contrast to the r
est of the calendar, which was just a mass of scribbles, most of them scribbled by Rag. The scribbles mainly seemed to involve dental appointments for the grandchildren, but they were constantly missing their appointments because nobody but Rag could read Rag’s handwriting, and she sometimes couldn’t read it herself.
“What does Rag think about Daddy leaving?” Nellie inquired.
“Oh, it suits her fine—it’s one less mouth to cook for,” Karla said. “I’m the only one here in despair. Julie and Annette stay stoned all day—you know how they are. I can’t expect much support from them.”
“I know, they’re dopeheads,” Nellie said. She suddenly felt very, very sleepy—the fatigue accumulated in a week’s round-the-clock partying in Mexico had begun to wash over her, like a great warm wave.
“But I’m home now,” she added. “It’ll be all right, Mom. Daddy will get tired of the cabin and walk back in a couple of days.
“You need to not overdramatize,” she said. Then she gave her mother a good long hug and a kiss and went to bed.
16
WHEN NELLIE WENT TO BED Karla rolled up in a blanket and channel-surfed until she struck the Weather Channel—it was by far her favorite channel for late-night viewing. After a certain hour she grew tired of weird comedians and brassy talk show hosts: she just wanted some nice soothing weather. The pleasant thing about the Weather Channel was you really didn’t have to watch it or even listen to it—you could just sort of absorb it, like the weather itself. Karla often let it play all night, while she lay on the couch, flipped through magazines, or dozed; the Weather Channel allowed her to inhabit a comfortable country between sleep and wakefulness. She got to hear the sound of human voices without having to engage with a human personality. Also—although she knew this wasn’t a Christian trait—the worse the weather was in some remote part of the world, the cozier it felt to lie in her blankets and drowse. If the weather was really bad elsewhere, with whole towns sliding into the surf in California, or floods causing people to have to sit on the roofs of their houses in Missouri, or to rescue their half-drowned pets in Arkansas, then the better it felt to be dozing on a nice dry couch in Thalia.
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