“No, but it wasn’t slow,” Bobby Lee said. “The BMW’s crumpled up like that car Princess Diana died in.”
“I see,” Duane said.
Duane carefully adjusted his helmet before he got on the bicycle and was about to begin the long ride home when Dr. Carmichael came out of her front door and called out to him. He was already in the street but he circled back and drifted up the sidewalk to her front steps. She said something, but he couldn’t hear it. He had to remove his helmet in order to be able to hear.
“Duane, I’m very sorry to hear about your wife,” she said. “It’s tragic news for you and your family.”
The doctor’s large eyes seemed larger as she looked at him. She didn’t try to touch him, but she was clearly upset.
“This is all just topsy-turvy,” Duane said. “She was the one that was full of life, and I’m the one that’s running on empty. It should have been me that died.”
“Well, but it wasn’t,” the doctor said.
BOOK THREE
The Walker and Marcel Proust
1
IT WAS THREE MONTHS before Duane found the little piece of note-paper that Dr. Carmichael had handed him a minute or two before he learned that his wife had been killed. Amid the flurry of funeral preparations, the wailing of his two daughters, the stunned silence of his grandchildren—at least the older ones—he had absently taken the note out of his shirt pocket, along with his checkbook and a few receipts, and tossed it on the desk in his study. It was not until mid-June, when he was finally getting around to grappling with his income tax, that he opened a letter from his accountant and found the note. He had evidently mailed it with some miscellaneous receipts. The accountant, not knowing what it meant or whether it was important, thoughtfully sent it back to him.
When Duane first looked at the note, written in an unfamiliar handwriting, he was puzzled. He assumed the accountant, being overcautious as accountants were likely to be, had sent him the scrap of paper by mistake. The words on the paper meant nothing to him at all. They read: “Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Kilmartin trans.”
Duane didn’t understand the “trans.” Since Karla’s death he had been confronted with many things, practical and otherwise, which seemed in no way connected to himself or to his life. The puzzling note seemed only to be another such incongruity. He was about to throw it away when the memory came back to him. Dr. Carmichael had been impatient to get him out of her office, but when he asked her for a book he might read to help him combat his sense of futility, she had written the note and handed it to him. Then he had stepped outside, seen Bobby Lee bereft on the sidewalk, and learned that he had lost his wife.
Duane carefully tucked the note with the name of the book on it into his billfold. He had not yet been back to see Dr. Carmichael. Karla’s funeral was held on the Monday when he would have had his next appointment, so he had been forced to cancel that appointment and so far had not found time to make another. He meant to, eventually, but felt no real urgency about trying to cure himself now, if that was what he had been doing when he was seeing the doctor regularly. The one rule he had clung to from that time was the rule about not riding in cars, pickups, or other motorized vehicles. After Karla’s funeral he had walked from the church to the graveyard, a move that scandalized the town to some extent. As he was walking the short half mile between church and graveyard he glanced at his watch and saw that it was exactly three o’clock, the hour at which Dr. Carmichael would have been admitting him had Karla not been killed on the highway. He felt a faint regret—he would rather have been in the quiet peace of Dr. Carmichael’s office than where he was, but that pleasing, sustaining interlude had receded into the realm of the unattainable. Ahead, in the bare, wind-scoured cemetery, the hundred or so people who had come to pay their last respects to Karla Moore were trying to park their pickups or waiting, stiff in their funeral finery, for him to arrive. Barbette and Little Mike had come from Oregon, but they no longer seemed part of the family, a fact that was sadder even than Karla’s death.
Duane arrived, and Karla was buried, while the strong wind tossed the ladies’ hair and blew one or two hats off the heads of those who had been incautious enough to wear them. It was a spring day, but the winter had been dry in the main—the grass in the bare cemetery was only just tinged with green.
Once the last prayer was prayed, the last hymn sung, and the coffin lowered, Duane walked home and began to deal with the maelstrom of detail—practical, legal, familial—that follows upon a human death. At first he stayed at home, in the big house, to reassure the girls and the grandkids. He felt Karla would have wanted him to be there to help the children, although the only children who spent much time with him were Willy, Barbi, and Bubbles. Loni and Sami hadn’t been as close to their grandmother, and the babies, Little Bascom and Baby Paul, soon forgot Karla and made Rag into a surrogate grandmother, a role Rag accepted with good cheer. With Karla gone she considered herself undisputed mistress of the household, a claim no one raised much of a challenge to. Nellie had been wooed away from the Weather Channel by a country music station in Fort Worth that needed a female DJ with a sexy voice, which Nellie had—she raced up to see her babies on the weekend and then raced back to her turntables and her microphones. Julie, bored with banking, fell in love with a barbecue magnate from Abilene, a man she met at Mayfest, a local frolic held annually on the courthouse lawn. His name was Walt—he was a kind and rather mournful man who aspired to be a chef but found himself stuck in the unwanted but profitable niche of the region’s best barbecue caterer, in constant demand during the warm months at rodeos and family reunions. Walt could seldom resist his own barbecue, and had the belly to show it.
Duane stayed at home because he thought he must, but he could not sleep in his old bedroom, where he had spent so many years with Karla. The bedroom seemed like a cavern where even the air was dead. He kept remembering his last night there with Karla, when he had simply got up at 3 A.M. and walked away. After two nights, raked by memories, he gave up on the bedroom and moved himself onto the big couch in the den, where the big television was. Sometimes Barbi would show up in the middle of the night, dragging her quilt; she had virtually stopped eating since Karla’s death, a thing worrisome to everyone except Duane, who thought the little girl was just upset and would eat when she got better. Usually, at night, when she showed up with her quilt, he could get her to eat a bowl of cereal or a peanut butter sandwich. Willy and Bubbles and Barbi all talked to him about their grandmother, all trying in their different ways to puzzle out the meaning of death and the possibility of there being some kind of life beyond it. Bubbles, who had been the merriest of the grandchildren, was starkly realistic about her grandmother, who, in her view, was now becoming a skeleton in a hole in the ground. Willy, softer than his sister, didn’t quite want to believe that—he thought his grandmother’s spirit might exist and be mainly in the greenhouse, because she had liked to garden so much. Barbi had learned, somewhere, the concept of reincarnation and believed firmly that her grandmother was living already in the body of a great bird. Once Karla had taken Barbi to a lake nearby where there was a flock of pelicans—Barbi was now convinced that Grandmother had become a great white pelican who soared and circled over the house at night, keeping watch on everyone, while living at the lake during the day.
“And she eats frogs,” Barbi assured her grandfather. “Little green slimy frogs. She scoops them in her scooper and gulps them down.”
Duane slept on the couch in the den for three months. Occasionally Willy or Bubbles would come in, crying, wanting to talk about their grandmother. Once in a while Julie, who was working as a booker for Walt’s barbecue business, would stay home for a night or two and come and cuddle with him. Nellie would stay home once in a while too, but when she did she drank too much and went, hungover, back to her job.
Duane asked Rag if she would like to move into the house, so she would be handy in case of emergencies, but Rag declined.
/> “I need my space—I need my Nick at Nite,” Rag said. “They’ve been rerunning Davy Crockett at one in the morning. Fess Parker, remember him?”
“I remember old Fess,” Duane said.
He got Rag a beeper and carefully instructed all the older children in its correct use. He also cautioned them not to bother Rag unless they really needed her, an injunction that was constantly disobeyed. Bubbles would beep her if she couldn’t find a pair of socks that matched.
“I ought to get more money if I’m on twenty-four-hour call,” Rag complained.
“I’ll give you more money,” Duane said.
After three months, when the children were sleeping all night again, and Barbi eating normally, Duane would quietly leave the house about midnight and bicycle out to his cabin; sometimes he would wake up in time to cycle in and help Rag get them through breakfast; but in the cabin he slept deeply and dreamlessly—sometimes he didn’t awake until the bright sunlight poured through the windows. He had a phone put in the cabin, in case of dire emergencies, but preferred to rely on a state-of-the-art pager, on which Rag would leave voice mail messages, in case something urgent came up. The first message went: “These kids are fighting like tigers, how can I reach the SWAT team?”
Duane pedaled in, to find that the kids had made up their differences and were playing video games. Dickie reacted to his mother’s death by working around the clock and then around the clock again. Duane gave him a beeper too, in case there were major problems at one of the rigs, but Dickie lost the beeper the next day and never paged him a single time. Jack had driven grimly away from his mother’s funeral and disappeared. No one had heard from him since that mournful day, but Duane didn’t worry about Jack very much. He might be in Mexico or he might be in China, but Jack would survive.
Time began to do its work. The family began to heal. Things became as normal as they could be, without Karla.
Duane, still walking or pedaling, began to spend more time at his cabin. He had done his best to help his family deal with the death of their parent or grandparent. Now a little time needed to be made for the husband’s grief—his own.
2
A FEW DAYS AFTER KARLA WAS BURIED the spring seemed to die with her. It grew hot; it stayed hot. Two months from the date of her death the temperature hit one hundred and nineteen, the highest temperature recorded in Thalia since records had been kept.
The children wanted to erect a little cross at the curve in the road where Karla had died. Duane encouraged them: he wanted them to keep Karla in their minds and hearts. So he got some boards and helped the children build the cross and paint it. Even Little Bascom and Baby Paul got to swipe at the boards a time or two with the paintbrush, though they had little idea why they were doing it.
Duane and Dickie dug the hole where they set up the cross, just off the road at the fatal curve. Nellie was home from Fort Worth, and Julie—Walt at her side—from Abilene. Bobby Lee was there, and Ruth Popper, and Annette, and even Lester and Jenny. The only family member not present was Jack, from whom not one word had been heard.
Once the cross was planted Duane pedaled out in the late afternoon to renew the flowers; and then did the same by the grave marker in the little cemetery. But the elements exhibited no mercy. The heat climbed day by day. Whatever flowers they put out in the afternoon were burned and dead by ten the next morning. The grass in the cemetery was brown and brittle by the first of June—the skies, day after day, were utterly empty of clouds. The road to the cabin was a hot powder—even pedaling along it on his bicycle threw up a high cloud of dust.
“Well, you’re missing a great heat wave,” Duane said once or twice, to Karla’s ghost. “It’s ruined the wheat farmers already, and it will ruin the cattlemen if it don’t rain in July.”
Every day, without fail, Duane walked in the middle of the afternoon to the cemetery and sat in the narrow shade of a little cedar tree not far from Karla’s grave.
Even though he sat in the one spot of shade in the cemetery, the sweat poured from him as the sun slanted downward in the west. At four it was hot—at five it was hotter still. The heat at its zenith was so powerful it wiped out thought. Duane came with two quarts of water each day and drank them both before he left the cemetery.
He came at the hottest hour because Karla loved such heat. No day was too hot for her. She would lie by the pool for hours, shaded only by an umbrella, reading or listening to music. Duane considered it a small tribute to Karla that he came at the hottest hour—an act of remembrance and respect. When they had been young and poor and had made love in such heat in their hot little room the bedclothes would be as wet afterward as if they had been dipped in a river. Those were the heats of youth, long past but not so long past but that Duane remembered them.
Several times, without the children, he had pedaled the fifteen miles to the curve where the accident had occurred and studied the scene of the two deaths. The curve, badly banked on a narrow farm-to-market road, was known to be treacherous. Twenty years before, two teenagers had been killed on it, rolling their car at almost exactly the same spot. Then, a few years later, a cowboy hurrying home from work had turned both a pickup and a horse trailer over on that curve, killing the best cutting horse in that part of the country, and himself to boot. The deceptive thing about the curve was that the long road beyond it was visible from each direction—drivers sped into the curve thinking it was gentle when actually it was sharp. Both he and Karla had driven around it many times, cutting through the farmlands in order to get over to the road that would take them to Dallas, which was where Karla was going when she was killed.
Duane often sat for an hour by the curve, just thinking. Hay trucks and milk trucks and pickups passed him—but no one stopped. The drivers, many of whom knew him, respected his grief and let him alone.
Death on the highway was as much a part of the culture of that country as rodeos or fistfights. When their children were at the reckless age, all parents lived in terror of the death call, and, for too many of them, it came.
What held Duane’s attention, as he sat on his bike well off the pavement and watched people pull into the curve and pull out of it, was the precision that went with fatal timing. The milk truck that killed Karla had been traveling west at a high rate of speed, heading for some nearby dairy, and Karla had been traveling east, just as fast, headed for Dallas and a day of shopping with her friend Babe, who was already there. The two vehicles, speeding in opposite directions, arrived at the sharpest angle of the curve at exactly the same moment. If Karla had hit the curve even a second earlier, or the truck even a second later, the badly banked angle would have been passed or not arrived at, and both drivers would still be alive.
But no: they met head-on, each making, simultaneously, a momentary misjudgment about the angle of the curve, and that was all it took. Karla might have been trying to slip a tape into the tape deck; she may have looked down to set her coffee cup in its holder. The trucker, at the same moment, might have looked out the window, sneezed, yawned. The two small errors came at precisely the same moment and in a blink two lives ended. The driver of the truck was thrown through the passenger window and killed; the truck jackknifed and split open, flushing thousands of gallons of milk into the ditch. Two weeks later the roadside grass was still pale and milky for some fifty yards. The mangled BMW had to be cut away from Karla, although by then she was dead—killed instantly, as Bobby Lee had said.
Duane looked at the wreckage of the milk truck, looked at the smashed, twisted BMW, and knew that death had come so quickly that his wife had not felt anything. He knew it, and yet his mind kept reaching for her last thoughts. In his first hours of guilt at having deserted her in the last weeks of her life he wondered if there could have been a suicidal element in the accident—but then he thought of Karla’s attachment to her children and grandchildren and knew that was wrong. Besides, several people had seen Karla on the morning of her death and all had reported her to be in high spirits. She had helpe
d Rag get the kids off to school and then had gone to Mildred-Jean’s to get her hair fixed.
“Oh no, we were laughing and cutting up—I mean, why not? She was going off to Neiman’s to shop all day,” Mildred-Jean informed him when he asked how his wife had seemed.
“Mom was fine,” Julie said—she had been home that morning and had helped her mother choose the outfit she wore.
“Grandma didn’t even spank me,” Sami volunteered, one day when they were putting flowers by her grave.
Then Sami burst into tears. All the children cried a lot when he brought them to their grandmother’s grave, or to the cross by the spot where she had been killed. The only one who didn’t cry was Barbi, whose response to the tragedy was more considered.
“I’m going to learn ESP so I can talk to her,” Barbi said. “I know she’s living in a bird. When I learn ESP I’ll signal to the bird and when it hears me it will come down and peck on my window. And then I’ll go outside and talk to Grandma. Could you get me a book on ESP, Pa-Pa? I want to learn it quick.”
Duane pedaled to Wichita Falls, got Barbi the book, and read most of it to her. Very soon afterward Barbi began to talk to birds, and was unshakable in her conviction that she was talking to her grandmother.
“She moves from bird to bird,” she informed the household. “Right now she’s in a roadrunner and she kills bugs and lizards. But sometimes she’s in a crow.”
“Bull,” Willy said. He was deeply grieved by the loss of his grandmother—she had often taken him fishing when no one else had time. He wanted Barbi to shut up about her and just let her be dead, because when they talked about her he began to cry and felt like a sissy all day.
Rag and Bubbles shared that view. Bubbles liked the thought that her grandmother might have wings, but she wanted them to be clean, white angel wings, the color of white sheets just after they were washed. She didn’t want to think of her grandmother having dirty old bird’s wings—bird’s wings, as everyone knew, were filled with lice. Twice she and Barbi had wild fights because Barbi insisted that her grandmother was in an ugly old crow.
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