“But what about you, Daddy?” Jack asked. “I hear you’re batching.”
“Yep, I stay at the cabin a lot,” Duane said. “Your mother’s upset about it. I was walking everywhere until I bought this bicycle. I like the walking, but a bike sure gets you there faster.”
“Good for you,” Jack said. “You should have left that rabble long ago. Let them all get off their lazy butts and get a life.”
“I think your mom thought she had a life,” Duane said. “But then I left. You should go see her once in a while. It might cheer her up.”
Jack adored his mother, though they fought fiercely and held opposite views on a wide range of issues.
“I saw her yesterday and she got in my face because I shaved my head,” Jack said. He lifted the dozer cap briefly, revealing, indeed, a shaved pol.
“Mothers pay a lot of attention to hair,” Duane remarked. “Wives too.”
His own hair had not been cut since he left home and was now definitely longish, by local standards.
“Fuck, if Michael Jordan can do it so can I,” Jack said. “Good to see you, Dad. I gotta hustle now—I got eight more pigs to deliver and these people that want ’em ain’t patient. They’re shipping them to Germany. I wonder if eating too much wild pig is what made the Germans become Nazis.”
In a second he was in his pickup and gone, his last question left unanswered. The truckers evidently meant to wait right where they were until Jack returned with the other load of pigs. One of them was snoring loudly in the cab of the truck—the other walked up into the leafy park carrying a boom box and was soon listening to the wail of lost-love Mexican ballads.
Duane got on his bike and rode twice around the park, trying to decide what to do in the interval of time before his appointment with the doctor. His encounter with his younger son had been altogether too brief. It was always good to see Jack—it made him feel good to think he had fathered at least one healthy son—but they never seemed to have time for a real conversation. Though Jack seemed to approve of his new lifestyle, Duane wasn’t sure he meant it. Perhaps his habit of taking the opposite position from his mother’s had caused him to say what he said. Perhaps deep down—if there was a deep down with Jack—he thought that his father, too, ought to get off his butt and get a life.
21
FEELING AIMLESS, Duane rode his bike north, through a part of town he hadn’t visited much since his youth. Wichita Falls had once boasted a professional baseball team, the Spudders—whether the Spudders had been Class B, C, or D, he could not remember; but as a boy of ten or so he and Sonny Crawford and a few other boys would catch rides to Spudder Park with Sam the Lion, the old man who had run the pool hall in Thalia and had been a friend to many boys. Sam the Lion had died suddenly, while he and Sonny were gone on a whoring trip to Mexico. Shortly afterward, Duane had been drafted, but the Korean War ended before he could be sent overseas. He spent his two years of service in Fort Hood, Texas.
Sam the Lion, and Spudder Park, and the summer nights of his boyhood, when he and Sonny and a few other boys had chased down home run balls in the dark field behind the ballpark, were things Duane seldom thought about, seldom remembered. He rode slowly past the old ballpark, now abandoned and weedy, and then drifted back over to the frontage road that ran north toward Oklahoma, just across the Red River, ten miles away.
Duane pedaled on to Burkburnett, a small town on the south bank of the river. He had once known an old man who made excellent fishing lures in Burkburnett; in his fishing days he had visited the old man often. He made his lures in an old trailer house, working on them through the day and evidently on through the night. Fishermen knew of him—some came from as far away as Idaho or New England to buy his lures, but the old man, whose name was Leroy Green, had a great fondness for the fishermen of his native state and saved his best lures for locals such as Duane. Then Duane had stopped fishing, and had stopped visiting Mr. Green. Curious to know whether the old man was still sitting in his trailer house, meticulously fashioning his wonderful lures, Duane pedaled over to where the trailer house had been.
But nothing of the little tackle shop remained. The house the trailer had been parked behind had been repainted—a child’s bike with training wheels attached to it sat on the front porch. Duane tried to think back to his time as a fisherman, but could not really fix the year when he had paid his last visit to Leroy Green, the old man who had made the best lures in North Texas.
Burkburnett, in 1918 the site of one of the wildest oil booms ever to happen in Texas, was now just a sleepy little town, different from Thalia only because it had the Red River as a northern boundary, and the state of Oklahoma only a mile away.
Duane biked on north and pulled off the road at a little green spot near the long bridge that crossed the river, linking Texas and Oklahoma. He felt a little sad—sorry that he had let the old man, Leroy Green, slip out of his life. Except for his service in the two world wars the old man had lived in North Texas all his life and was as valuable for his stories as for his lures. He told wild tales of the first oil booms, and had known the legendary sheriff Jack Abernathy, who had taken Teddy Roosevelt on a wolf hunt, running down the wolves on horseback and catching them with his bare hands.
Now the old man was gone, and his stories too. Duane left his bicycle and walked down to a little bluff where he could watch the river, its thin reddish channel winding through broad banks of flats of pale sand. As he watched the river the sad feeling grew sharper—it produced as sharp a pain as if one of old man Leroy Green’s lures had hooked him in his gut. In coming to the edge of the old, famous river—the river the cattlemen dreaded because of its quicksands, the river the Indians fought to keep and failed to keep, the river young Texas couples once crossed in order to get married quickly, before their parents could catch them and stop them—he had come to the edge of his country, and it felt as if he had suddenly come to the edge of his life. He had gone as far as he could go with the work he knew, with the people he knew, with the family he had helped create. In those spheres little more could be expected.
Mixed in the sudden pain was the feeling that he had arrived at the far edge of himself. The list of things he had never done was far longer than the list of things that might be considered accomplishments. All that he had done in the way of building things had merely slipped away, into the great stream of human effort, gone as silently as the sand below him slid into the flowing water. What had happened to his life? Why, in sixty-two years, had he made so little of it? He was not educated, he had not traveled, he knew nothing of the great cities of the world, he could speak no language except a crude English; he had never visited a great museum, or seen a great picture, or heard a great symphony orchestra, or read a great book. He was ignorant, except at the most general level, of the works of great men and women who had made something in their time as living beings. Duane felt both a sudden need to hurry and a sense of the hopelessness of hurry. How could he now, a sixty-two-year-old man with no education, hope to encompass more than a tiny fraction of what he had missed by casual misapplication throughout decades of wasted time?
Standing above the Red River, watching it flow out of the northwest and pour on eastward, Duane sensed his death. It might not be a near thing; he might live another twenty years, or even thirty—but it lay directly ahead, the next big event, the one thing he still had to accomplish. He had seen several men killed in accidents and car wrecks, had known many others who died of old age, but had never connected any of those deaths with the distant fact of his own; but now, for no reason, against the immediate fact of his strength and good health, he felt that dying was really the only thing he had left to do. Watching the river flow on toward the far distant sea, he suddenly felt that he knew what the calf-roping dream meant—this dream he had not yet even told his psychiatrist about.
The running calf was life—he had had a fine throw at it and missed. The calf ran on, as indifferent as the river to his effort. He should have caught the cal
f—he had had energy, he was not dumb, he was capable of discipline, he had a healthy will—and yet he had missed and missed and missed. There were no excuses—he had not been forced to live as he had—and there could be no remedy. He just had not seen clearly enough into the arena of life, had not fully appreciated the opportunities it offered, had not tried to rise above his limited upbringing in ways that he could have and should have.
Life—that swift calf—had run right in front of him, and he just hadn’t known how to catch it.
The ache of regret that Duane felt as he stood on the banks of the river was as deep and as sharp as anything he had felt in his life. He sat by the riverside for two hours, feeling the river throb within him. Then he pedaled slowly, wiping tears from his cheeks, back into Wichita Falls, eager for it to be three o’clock. He really wanted to tell his doctor about his dream and what he thought it meant.
22
“NO DOG?” Dr. Carmichael asked, when Duane stepped into her office.
“No dog,” Duane said.
“Well, it’s frustrating,” the doctor said. “Why can’t I meet your dog?”
“He’s not mine anymore,” Duane said, a little impatiently. An hour wasn’t much time. He wanted to tell the doctor about his dream, and about the sad feeling he had had on the banks of the Red River, just now. He thought he might have a grip on something important, and he didn’t really want to waste time talking about Shorty.
“He won’t ride on a bicycle and my life is too spread out now for me to do all my traveling on foot,” he explained. “So I gave him to a girl and a maid at my motel. The maid’s had thirteen children. They’re nice people and the dog likes them so I left him with them. He’s used to change. He lived with some wetbacks before he started following me around.”
“You’re cutting all ties, aren’t you?” the doctor said. “I think we should try the couch today, if that’s all right with you.”
Duane liked the couch—he found he could relax on it. Looking Dr. Carmichael in the face minute after minute might have been what made him so tired, he decided. He liked knowing she was there, but he also liked just looking at the wall and the plants when he talked. That way he didn’t wonder what the doctor was thinking, from minute to minute.
“I’ve been feeling real sad,” he admitted at once. “Can I tell you about this dream I’ve been having?”
Stretched comfortably on the long couch, looking at the wall and at the nice tall plants in the corner of the room, Duane told the doctor about his calf-roping dream. He told her about it in some detail—the more he talked, the more vividly he remembered the dream. The horse was a black gelding, the image of one Karla had had in her barrel-racing days, when they had first been courting. He remembered the feel of the stiff hemp rope, as he made his loop. He remembered watching the calf he had drawn being eased into the chute from which it would be released. He remembered taking the piggin string between his teeth, remembered the calf charging forward when the barrier was dropped. He remembered being so close to the calf for the first few seconds that he could merely have dropped the rope over its head. He remembered how the calf had just run through the loop as if the rope were not a tangible thing. He even remembered the curious variant of the dream in which the calf had become Jacy Farrow.
All this he told the doctor. Then he stopped talking and waited for the doctor to say something, but the doctor was silent. He could sense her behind him, a presence but a silent presence. He looked at his watch and discovered to his horror that he had only two or three minutes left in the hour—and the weekend loomed. He really wanted to tell the doctor about his sadness that morning by the river, and his feelings about dying, and his sense that he had wasted his life. He didn’t understand why an hour in the doctor’s office went so quickly, while the hours outside the office took so long to pass.
“I need to know what you think,” he said, twisting for a moment so that he could see her. But the doctor was almost behind him. When he twisted all he saw was her knees.
“It’s going to be hard going a whole weekend without knowing what you think,” he said, stretching out again.
“Remember what I told you a few sessions ago,” Dr. Carmichael said. “This is going to be a long process. I realize that you feel in a state of crisis right now, but I can’t necessarily relieve you by telling you what I think. What I can tell you is that I am thinking. We have a lot more to talk about before I’ll know what I think.”
She paused—Duane waited. He didn’t know exactly what he was hoping for—maybe just some words that would make him feel a little less troubled.
“When I do know what I think it may be nothing more dramatic than that you’ve suddenly realized you’re getting old—and don’t like it,” the doctor said. “You would like to have back all the possibilities you once had—wouldn’t you?”
“I sure would,” Duane said. “I sure would. I’d do a lot of things different if I could have a few of those possibilities back.”
“Surely you know that you’ve just described a very common problem,” the doctor said. “Everyone who survives to a certain age wakes up one day to realize that they’re old, or about to be. They wonder where the years went, and why they didn’t do more with them. They feel regret. They wish they could have one more chance to ring the bell—realize some ambition, achieve something they might have achieved. No one wants to think it’s all just been futile striving.”
“But mostly that’s what it has been, hasn’t it?” Duane asked. “Futile striving?”
“Yes, unfortunately,” Dr. Carmichael said. “But not just for you, Duane—that’s the human condition. It’s been that way for most of the people who have ever lived on this earth.
“I know that’s no consolation, unless you can be consoled by the knowledge that you’re one with mankind,” she said. “But that’s the state you’re in, and now your time’s up. You’ll just have to hang in there until Monday.”
Duane stood up, but he was reluctant to leave.
“Is there a book I could read about this—I mean about time passing and all?” he asked. “I’ve been wanting to read more. I’ve got all this time on my hands now that I’m not working. If you could just recommend a book that might help me understand it a little better I’d be grateful.”
Dr. Carmichael was standing up. She looked a little impatient—maybe she needed to make a phone call, or just go to the bathroom. But she went to her desk, wrote a few words on a notepad, tore off the note, and handed it to him.
“Try this,” she said. “It’s not short, but it is great and it deals with some of the feelings you’re describing. And if you devote yourself to it and actually read it you won’t have so much time on your hands.”
“Thanks,” Duane said. He glanced at the note, saw a name he didn’t recognize, and stuck the piece of paper in his shirt pocket.
When he walked up to the desk to pay for his session, Natalie, the young receptionist who took his money, seemed confused. She usually had his receipt ready for him. This time she had to make herself write out the receipt, and her hand was shaking. She seemed on the verge of tears.
“Is something wrong?” Duane asked.
“I’m afraid so,” Natalie said, wiping her eyes hastily. “There’s a man to see you. I’m afraid he has bad news.”
Duane looked around, but saw no one in the waiting room.
“He said he preferred to wait for you outside,” the young woman said.
The man waiting outside was Bobby Lee. The moment Duane looked at him he knew there had been a death. Bobby Lee wasn’t wearing his sunglasses. He looked stunned and white and blank.
“Who’s dead?” Duane asked. “Is it Dickie?”
Everyone in his family drove much too fast—always had—but for recklessness on the roads none of them had ever been in a class with Dickie. All through Dickie’s teenage years he and Karla had been half afraid to answer the phone at night, for fear that there would be a voice on it telling them their oldest chi
ld was dead.
“Not Dickie—it’s Karla, she was killed instantly,” Bobby Lee said.
“Killed instantly by what?” Duane asked.
“By a head-on with a truck,” Bobby Lee said. “The truck driver’s dead too. The impact threw him out of the cab and he broke his neck when he landed.”
Duane’s bicycle was leaning against the wall of the doctor’s house. He got it and turned toward the street.
“All right, I’ll be right home,” he said. “I thank you for coming to tell me. I’ll see you at home.”
Bobby Lee was stunned anew. His face showed it.
“Your wife’s dead,” he said. “You mean you’re going to ride a bike all the way to Thalia?”
“Bobby, it’s just twenty miles—that don’t take long on a bike,” Duane said.
“But your kids are crying their eyes out,” Bobby Lee said. “All except Jack—we can’t find Jack.”
“Jack’s hauling pigs,” Duane said. “I know where to leave word for him. You go home now and tell the kids I’ll be there in two hours.”
“But if you’d just ride in the pickup with me you could be there a lot quicker,” Bobby Lee said. His lip was quivering. He seemed about to sob, and probably had been sobbing.
“Besides, it would be company for me,” he added. “I don’t know what I’m going to do without Karla.”
“None of us know what we’re going to do without Karla,” Duane said. “But you go on back and tell the kids I’m on my way. I’d just like to be by myself for a little while, before I get into it all.”
He put his arm around Bobby Lee’s shoulder, and Bobby Lee gulped and a few tears leaked out of his eyes.
“I guess you’re right—she’s gone, so what’s the hurry?” he said.
“Do we know how fast she was going when she hit the truck?” Duane asked.
Duane's Depressed Page 27
