“Hi, honey, I’m your neighbor,” she informed him. “You don’t have to just watch sex on TV, you could be doing it for real.”
“Oh, no thanks,” Duane said. “I’m just in town to see my doctor.”
“Shoot, for forty dollars I bet I could make you feel so good you wouldn’t need to see a doctor—you could start cutting down on those doctor bills,” the girl said.
“It’s just a checkup,” Duane said, feeling awkward.
“Well, I’m Gay-lee, three doors down,” she said. “Just remember me if you get an urge or an itch. Oh hi, puppy, I didn’t see you.”
Shorty, who had been nosing around in the parking lot, slunk in while the young whore was standing in the doorway.
When she left, Duane decided he not only needed ice, he needed whiskey. There was a liquor store a hundred yards or so down the highway; he shut Shorty in the room and started for it. A few doors north of his room a rough-looking young man sat in a battered Buick with the doors open. He had lots of hair, some of which was stuffed under a dirty dozer cap.
“Howdy, cowboy,” he said. “Want to take a ride over the moon?”
“What?” Duane asked.
“Got meth, got coke, got speedballs,” the young man said. “Man, I got a drugstore—you name it.”
“Good-bye is what I’ll name it,” Duane said.
When he was coming back Duane saw Marcie Meeks, out on the far edge of the parking lot with a lawn edger, clipping a weed here and there. The west side of the parking lot was a wild tangle of tall weeds, short brush, sunflower stalks, and the like—not the sort of foliage you could eliminate with a lawn edger. Duane was still annoyed by his interrogation. He thought about going over to the old woman and pointing out that she had a drug dealer and a prostitute in her motel—and he had only met two guests. But he didn’t do it. The old woman looked too forlorn, wandering through the weeds with her inadequate tool.
Duane took a shower—fortunately the hot water was only tepid, because he had no cold water to cut it with. Then he lay on the sagging bed and sipped bourbon out of a little plastic cup. He made another unsuccessful effort to tune the TV to any channel but the sex channel; when that didn’t work he merely lay on the bed.
Finally the hour of his appointment drew near. Duane wanted to give himself at least an hour to walk to the doctor’s office—he didn’t want to be late. He was a little fuzzy from the whiskey but expected to walk off the fuzziness on the way to town. He tried to imagine what he might say to the psychiatrist, and also tried to imagine what sort of questions she might ask him, but both efforts were futile. He had no idea what he was going to say, or what Jody’s daughter, Honor Carmichael, might ask. He felt as if he were setting off on a big adventure—an adventure of a sort he had not planned, and didn’t know if he was really ready for.
“I’m leaving you here for your own protection,” he said to Shorty. “I doubt they allow dogs in psychiatrists’ offices.”
When he left the motel the whore and the drug dealer were lounging around the latter’s old Buick. Business, for both of them, was slow. Gay-lee waved at Duane, but he didn’t wave back.
4
HONOR CARMICHAEL’S OFFICES were in a large, nicely kept white stucco house, on a pleasant street with lots of trees in the yards. There were flower beds all round the white stucco house. It had only taken Duane thirty minutes to walk there from the Stingaree Courts—he felt that he had walked from one world to another. The contrast was so sharp as to be confusing. Which world did he belong in? Or did he belong in either?
He went on into the white stucco house and announced himself twenty minutes early. Usually doctors had you fill out forms, when you saw them for the first time. Duane expected to have to put down his whole medical history, but in this case a nice young woman merely got his address and phone numbers, plus his insurance information, and asked him what medications he was on; then she told him to have a seat. There were heaps of magazines on the tables. Duane picked up an issue of the Smithsonian and was reading an article on bats when the receptionist called his name.
At first he thought the receptionist just wanted more information—it couldn’t be time for his appointment, already. It seemed to him he had scarcely sat down. Anxiety rose in him like liquid in a straw, but the smiling young woman didn’t notice or care. She led him down a short hall to a room where a tall, grave woman waited. The room had lots of plants in it. There was no desk—just several comfortable chairs and a long couch. The woman, Honor Carmichael, was older than he had expected. Her hair was graying at the temples.
“Hello, Mr. Moore,” she said, offering her hand. “I’m Dr. Carmichael.”
“Hello. I know your father,” Duane said. He felt absolutely tongue-tied. Honor Carmichael had a nice tan. Either she had just been someplace where it was sunny, or she worked in her yard a lot.
She didn’t respond to his mention of her father. Duane didn’t know what to do next. Was he supposed to lie on the couch, or just sit in one of the chairs? Where was she going to sit? It was all different from how he had thought it would be—he could not even remember what he had thought it would be. Honor Carmichael was comfortably but simply dressed. She didn’t have on a white coat or seem like any of the doctors he had ever met before—still, he felt completely intimidated by her. She had a long face, like her father’s, only hers was more attractive.
“As you can see there’s a couch and there’s some chairs,” she said.
Duane had a vague memory of having been told that people were expected to lie on couches when they saw psychiatrists—the couch in the room was clearly meant for stretching out, not sitting. He felt completely awkward, out of his depth.
“Well, where would you like me?” he managed to ask.
“Where you think you’d be most comfortable—most relaxed,” she said.
Duane took a chair, a reclining chair with a comfortable leather seat. He had once owned a Cadillac with a seat as comfortable as the chair, and had always regretted trading the car off, mainly because he liked the seat.
When he sat, Honor Carmichael sat too—or Dr. Carmichael, rather. He had to remind himself that he had come to see her because she was a doctor—not because she was Jody Carmichael’s daughter.
There was a long silence. Dr. Carmichael seemed perfectly relaxed, perfectly content to wait until he began to talk about what was on his mind; but, at the moment, his mind was blank. He had no idea where to start.
“I guess I don’t really know how this is supposed to work,” he said finally. “I’ve never been to a psychiatrist before.”
“Why do you think you need to see one now?” she said. “Let’s start with that.”
“Well, people think I’m depressed,” Duane said. “My wife thinks it, and other people too.”
“Do you think you’re depressed, Mr. Moore?” she asked. He noticed she had very large eyes, and long fingers as well as a long face. She wore a ring with a green stone in it.
“I guess everybody’s depressed, sometime,” Duane said. “I doubt I’m that much more depressed than the next man. But people keep mentioning it so I thought I better ask an expert.”
“What have you done to convince all these people that you’re depressed?” she asked.
“It’s mainly the walking and the fact that I’m living by myself now, in a little cabin,” he said.
“What do you mean, the walking?”
“I parked my pickup nearly three weeks ago,” he said. “Since then I’ve walked everywhere I go. I moved to a little cabin on some property I own—and since then I’ve done a lot of sitting and a lot of walking.
“I walked here today,” he added, after a pause.
“Walked here from how far?” she asked.
“I judge it to be about eighteen miles,” Duane said. “I started early—about three-thirty.”
The doctor looked him over—if she was surprised by what she had been told she didn’t show it.
“You don’t look win
ded,” she said. “That’s a fair distance to walk—you must be in pretty good physical health.”
“I think I’m in good health,” Duane said. “Some things make me madder than they used to—that’s the main difference I notice.”
“What sort of things make you madder?”
“People littering the landscape,” he said. “They just throw their junk off bridges, into the creek beds. Most of these little creeks don’t have much water in them. The stuff don’t float away. It just sits there. Sights like junk in the creeks upset me.”
“What do you do about it?” she asked. “How do you manifest your anger?”
“I mainly just clean it up, if I can,” he said. “But it makes me angry, and it didn’t used to.”
Dr. Carmichael didn’t change expression.
“What about your parents? Either of them alive?”
“No, both dead,” Duane said.
He went on to explain that his father had been killed in a rig explosion when he was five. His mother had taken in laundry for a living; his grandmother on his mother’s side had lived with them until she died—their house was so small and cramped that, as soon as he was able to work and support himself, he had moved out and taken a room in a boardinghouse. His mother, never happy, broken by his father’s death, had faded out when she was only fifty-seven. Duane was in the process of explaining that his father had been good to him—he could still remember the smell of his father’s work shirts when he would come and sit by him after work; they smelled of starch and cigarettes and sweat—when the doctor stood up and smiled at him.
“I’m sorry, the hour’s up,” she said.
Duane was shocked. For a moment he couldn’t believe it. It seemed to him that he had only just begun to talk a few minutes before. But when he looked at his watch he saw, to his amazement, that the doctor was right. Somehow, before he had given more than the briefest account of his life, the hour had passed.
It disturbed him—he felt it was wrong to have to cut himself off so abruptly. He liked the doctor and would have preferred to stay in the nice chair whose seat reminded him of his old Cadillac, talking for a long, long time.
“See Natalie . . . we’ll fit you in on Monday, if that’s convenient,” Dr. Carmichael said.
Duane stood up—he suddenly felt desperate for information, for some word of counsel or analysis from the doctor.
“That time really passed quick,” he said, feeling very awkward. “Do you think I’m depressed?”
Dr. Carmichael made no attempt to answer the question.
“Natalie will schedule you for Monday,” she said. “I’ll see you next week, Mr. Moore.”
5
WHEN DUANE STEPPED OUT OF HONOR CARMICHAEL’S OFFICE he still had a sharp sense of having been interrupted. He had just begun to talk about his life to his doctor—it was confusing to have to break off the story so soon; confusing and disturbing. Though he couldn’t remember much of what he said to the doctor, the fact that he was finally saying it—indeed, gushing it out—was such a powerful relief that the interruption, for the first few minutes, was nearly intolerable. He couldn’t remember the doctor asking more than one or two questions. He had mainly just sat and talked about his parents. It seemed to him he had told the doctor more about his parents in a few minutes than he had told Karla in the forty years of their marriage.
In the anteroom he felt confused. The doctor had told him to see the receptionist, but the receptionist wasn’t there. No one was there. He didn’t know whether to leave or to wait. Before he could decide the young woman—Natalie—popped back in.
“Sorry, I was just checking the doctor’s schedule,” she said. “We can see you again at three on Monday, if that’s convenient.”
“That’s fine,” he said.
“How would you like to pay?” she asked. “It’s one hundred and ninety dollars.”
The office seemed so much like a home that Duane had forgotten that it was a kind of hospital—he was a patient, not a guest. He still had the cash from his poker winnings, so he counted out the money, took the little card with his appointment noted on it, and went out into the March sunlight. In his head he was still talking to Dr. Carmichael, and he continued to talk to her until he had walked a couple of miles.
Then the one-way interior conversation stopped and a feeling of bleakness and loneliness took its place. He was no longer on Dr. Carmichael’s pleasant street, either in his head or otherwise. The borders of the road were weedy and strewn with trash, and a constant stream of pickups and oil trucks passed him as he trudged back out the Seymour highway, toward the Stingaree Courts.
About a mile from the Courts he passed a tavern called the Silver Slipper, an establishment every bit as run down as the motel. The sign that spelled out the name had several bulbs burned out. Two or three pickups and a familiar-looking Buick were parked in front of the tavern.
Duane felt shaky, and his legs were leaden. Walking all the way back to the cabin was out of the question—even making it back to the motel was going to be a struggle. It was a weekend—he had meant to go home and look off his hill for two days—but somehow his short conversation with Dr. Carmichael had sapped his strength. He decided to go in the tavern, have a drink, and give his legs a rest.
Sure enough, when he went into the Silver Slipper he spotted the young drug dealer with the long hair, sitting with Gay-lee at a booth near the back of the bar. A couple of roughnecks were slamming a tiny puck around on the miniature hockey game.
The bartender, a large, fleshy man, had a white dishcloth draped over one shoulder. Duane sat on a bar stool. It had rarely felt so good just to sit and take a weight off his legs. The bartender, a man about his age, looked vaguely familiar.
“You don’t look very peppy, hoss,” the bartender said. “Is it allergies, or did you just lose someone near and dear?”
Duane didn’t know what the man was talking about, but when he put a hand to his face he discovered that his cheeks were wet. Either he had been crying or his eyes were watering from some irritant he hadn’t noticed.
“I guess it’s the damn ragweed,” he said. “Could I have a bourbon on the rocks?”
The bartender squirted a jigger into a shot glass and poured the whiskey over ice.
“You’re Duane Moore,” the man said. “You don’t remember me, but I remember you.”
Duane looked closely, but still couldn’t place the man.
“I played right guard for Iowa Park once upon a time,” the bartender said. “You were in the backfield for Thalia. We collided on the line in nineteen fifty-four. I stopped you from scoring a touchdown but broke my collarbone in the process. I’m Bub Tucker.”
He held out his hand and Duane shook it.
“Well, you did look familiar, but the damn ragweed’s screwed up my vision, I guess,” he said.
Though the man was friendly, Duane wished he had picked a different bar to drink in, just any bar where not a soul knew him. The only person in the world he wanted to talk to was Dr. Carmichael, and he especially didn’t want to have to relive a high school football game with a man whose collarbone he had broken long ago.
“That collarbone never healed right,” Bub Tucker revealed. “Lucky thing.”
“Why lucky?” Duane asked.
“Kept me out of the service,” Bub said. “Accident prone as I am generally, I’d have got killed in Korea or somewhere if they’d let me in the service.”
“That’s one way to look at it,” Duane said.
Bub Tucker, once he had reminded Duane of their one moment of contact, seemed no more inclined to reminisce than Duane was. He drifted off to polish glasses, chewing on a toothpick, only drifting back, silently, to refill Duane’s glass when Duane nodded at him and held it up.
Duane drank four whiskeys, spreading them over an hour and a half. There was a basketball game on the TV above the bar, but Duane only rarely looked up at it. He sipped his bourbon and crunched the ice in his glass, gradually growing c
almer and less shaky as the whiskey took effect. The last time he could remember feeling so shaky was when Karla almost bled to death from an undiagnosed ectopic pregnancy.
That had been a truly scary thing. His wife had been within an hour of death. And yet, walking along the Seymour highway, he had felt just as shaky, though all he had done in this case was talk to a nice doctor for an hour.
“Good to see you, Duane—you ought to get some allergy pills for the ragweed,” Bub Tucker said, when Duane put a bill on the bar and got up to leave. “Come back to see us sometime.”
“I expect I will—sorry about that collarbone,” Duane said.
Bub Tucker smiled and polished another glass.
“Hey, that’s just football,” he said.
6
BACK AT THE STINGAREE COURTS, Duane stayed awake only long enough to drink one more whiskey and to allow Shorty to run around the parking lot for twenty minutes, lifting his leg against fence posts and dead weeds.
Then he took his shirt off, fell back on the sagging mattress, and didn’t wake again until the middle of the next morning, when the dog began to whine to go out.
Duane, who rarely slept more than five hours a night, saw that he had just slept nearly fifteen hours—and he still felt that he could sleep some more. He had intended to go to the cabin for the weekend, but quickly abandoned that plan. The eighteen-mile walk that had seemed easy only the day before now became as hard to imagine as climbing Mount Everest. He didn’t understand what had happened to him. Somehow a brief talk with a nice doctor had weakened him to the point where he couldn’t walk home—or, really, walk anywhere. Normally he would have hated the thought of spending the whole weekend at the Stingaree Courts, with no cold water and a TV that showed only sex, but his lethargy was so profound that he didn’t care. Perhaps it meant that he was depressed, though he could not remember that Dr. Carmichael had used that word at all. At the moment he felt weak, tired, and utterly without appetite or ambition. He didn’t want to do anything—the one prospect that meant something was the prospect of seeing the doctor again at three on Monday.
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