“The regular hospital,” Bobby Lee said. “They’re thinking of cutting both his feet off.
“They’re black as oil,” he added. “Sonny don’t move around much and I guess his circulation just finally gave out.”
“You mean he’s got gangrene?” Duane asked.
“Well, his feet are black as oil, they say,” Bobby Lee said. “It might be gangrene. Whatever it means, his dancing days are over.”
“They were over anyway—I haven’t seen Sonny at a dance in twenty years,” Duane said.
The news sobered him—the thought of Sonny sitting there, year after year in his little convenience store, hardly moving, hardly walking, until his feet began to rot, was not a pleasant thing to contemplate.
“You ought to go see him, Duane,” Bobby Lee said. “You and him was best friends once. If they cut off both his feet he’s going to be pretty depressed.”
Bobby Lee left and Duane washed the dishes. He liked everything in the cabin to be clean and in its ordered place. It was so peaceful not being in the big house, with Rag ranting and the children bickering and the TV blaring, that he had looked forward to a day of doing not much other than sitting in his lawn chair and looking off the hill. It was mainly when he was alone that he could think about Karla almost in a tranquil way, letting incidents from their life together sort of rise out of his memory and sink back into it. It was utterly still, not a breath of breeze even on his hilltop; the temperature was rapidly climbing toward one hundred. The distant horizon, which had been clear and sharp at sunrise, was already hazy from heat. He had the Thoreau book with him and looked through it idly now and then, but could not really get up enough momentum to read it straight through. There was one sentence he liked so much that he had underlined it and stuck a little piece of paper in the book to mark the place. “I went into the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life,” the sentence read, “and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
Duane read that sentence over and over again, forty or fifty times; it was that sentence that explained exactly what he himself was trying to do—explained it so clearly that he didn’t really want to read the rest of Walden. He had parked his pickup, left his family, and settled in the cabin to attempt to learn about life and not feel that he was just plodding through it. He knew most of his acquaintances would consider such an ambition puzzling and unnecessary. He had had a long marriage, four children, and nine grandchildren. How could he possibly think he hadn’t really lived?
It was a question Duane couldn’t easily answer himself. All he knew was that in his fifties he had begun to lose his sense of purpose and had merely gone on for several years, going through the motions, until finally he couldn’t do that anymore—so he had stopped and was attempting to start a life that—detail by detail—meant something. He wanted to feel that at least some of what he did was worthwhile, in and of itself—even if it was nothing more than cleaning the trash out from under one bridge. Indeed, he felt that the smaller and more local the attempt, the better chance he had of accomplishing an action that had value. He didn’t know enough to change anything large. Whatever he worked on had to be small, and within the sphere of his competence.
Already, it seemed to him, he had let his confusion and depression deflect him from even that modest goal. He had begun seeing the doctor, which had turned out to be unexpectedly tiring. Then, just as it promised to become less tiring, Karla smacked into the milk truck and three months had been sucked into the attempt to keep his family’s head above water. Ruth Popper had done him a very good turn when she reminded him that his children were grown and should be expected to be the hands-on parents of their own offspring. His wife was dead—giving up his new life, or at least his attempt to make a life that had some purpose, would not bring her back. He was not going to forget Karla, not ever, but being a widower was not a profession. He didn’t intend to marry—didn’t want to—but, as he thought about it, he became more and more sympathetic to the town’s hope that he would marry. In gossiping about his next wife the townspeople were just saying, in effect, what he had threatened to strangle Rag for saying: that life goes on. Though it seemed disloyal to think that his life would eventually go on completely out of relation to Karla, or her memory, the likelihood was that it would. When he had been young his mother had sung him a song, popular in that day, called “Time Changes Everything.” As he sat in his lawn chair, letting the heat soak into him, he realized as never before what a powerful truth that was.
It might even be that the gossipy townspeople were right. Time, which changed everything, might even change him so much that he would want to marry again.
It just wouldn’t happen soon—that much he knew.
That evening he didn’t go into town. He walked around the hill until the afterglow faded and it was too late to check on the grandkids. Checking on the grandkids every few hours, was, after all, the habit he was trying to break. He ate no supper and didn’t miss it. The concept of fasting one day a week had begun to appeal to him. Frequently he ate out of habit, rather than hunger—it seemed to him that it was time to eliminate that habit. The day he had bought Barbi her book on ESP he had also bought himself a small book on woodworking, which he studied for half an hour, just before he turned his light off. He hadn’t yet used many of the tools he had bought at Jody Carmichael’s, the first time he had gone there. He didn’t want to buy a bunch of specialized woodworking tools and then never do anything with them. He meant to buy just three or four tools and actually try to use them to work a piece of wood, shaping it into something of his own devising.
That night, to his extreme surprise, Duane had a wet dream. He was kissing a woman. At first he only felt sensation—he could not identify the woman. But then, very clearly, he saw that the woman he was touching and kissing was Honor Carmichael. He saw her large eyes, and smelt her breath. When he woke his sheets were so sticky with semen that he had to get up, clean himself, and change them. For the rest of the night he was wakeful. It had been many months, perhaps even a year, since he had felt any sexual stirring at all, and yet suddenly, unbidden, a dream came in which he was making love to his doctor.
When he dozed off again, as light was breaking, Karla came into a dream.
“Duane, I told you so,” his dead wife said, before she dissolved into the clear morning light.
5
WHEN DUANE LEFT HIS CABIN the little thermometer by his window read one hundred and two, and yet it was only eight-fifteen in the morning. He had turned his radio on for a few minutes—speculation from the weathermen was that the temperature might reach one hundred and twenty by the middle of the afternoon. Far away, in Phoenix, the Sky Harbor airport had had to close because the temperature had risen so high that planes could not get enough lift to ascend.
He got on his bicycle and pedaled slowly toward Wichita Falls, intending to visit Sonny Crawford in the hospital. It had been many years since he and Sonny had been able to talk companionably, or really be friends, as they had once been; but he had known Sonny all his life and had shared many early pleasures and early miseries with him. Duane had even been the cause of Sonny losing the sight in his left eye, in a sudden violent fight over the affections, such as they had been, of Jacy Farrow.
Duane felt he ought at least to visit Sonny. There was a time when Sonny had been a kind of honorary uncle to his own children—Julie and Jack in particular had doted on him once, and Sonny had been a good honorary uncle, easing them through many rough spots in their relationships with their parents. The least he could do now was check in on Sonny. The thought of a man so depressed that he couldn’t even move around enough to sustain circulation in his feet was a grim thought.
As he rode along the country road, keeping in what shade he could find, moments of his wet dream began to replay themselves in his mind. The images that came to him were momentary, but they all involved Honor Carm
ichael: her breasts, her mouth, her legs. The images annoyed him. He didn’t want to be having sexual thoughts about his doctor. It seemed particularly disloyal, somehow, both to Dr. Carmichael and to Karla. If he had to have sexy dreams, why couldn’t they be of Karla, the wife he had just lost? Once or twice, bored, he had even tried to build a fantasy about Karla—but it didn’t work. When he thought of Karla she was always fully dressed, ready for shopping, not sex. He was unable to retrieve a sexual image of his wife of forty years, with whom he thought he had had a pretty good sex life, even if it had tailed off quite a bit in the last few years; yet he could produce exciting sexual images of his doctor, whom he scarcely knew and in fact had quit seeing. It was troubling, not because there was anything much wrong about having a sexual fantasy about an attractive woman, but because it made him feel silly. He was on his way to see a very sick old friend. Why wouldn’t his mind let the sex alone?
When he passed in sight of the Corners he decided on the spur of the moment to stop in and chat with Jody for a few minutes—he had had no breakfast and felt like a bottle of Gatorade might improve his pace.
Three depressed roughnecks, all from one of his own crews, were sitting on the tailgate of a pickup, eating microwaved burritos when Duane rode up.
“Morning, boys,” he said. “Enjoying your breakfast?”
All three stopped eating and stared at him. Seeing him in biking garb seemed to render them speechless; or perhaps they were just too tired to talk. One, a boy named Gene, had a big piece of burrito sticking out of his mouth but seemed too weary even to chew it.
“Mr. Moore, Dickie’s killing us. Make him stop,” one man said. “Ever since you put him in charge it’s just been work, work, work.”
“Shit, I wish he’d just go back to being a dope addict,” Gene said, removing the wad of half-chewed burrito from his mouth in order to say it.
“My girlfriend’s about to quit me because I don’t never get no time off,” the third man said. “It’s got to be a serious situation.”
“When are you going to take over again?” Gene asked. “It might save our lives.”
“I’m not going to take over again,” Duane said, and went inside.
Jody Carmichael was in shadow behind his counter, illuminated only by the green light of his computer screen.
“Excuse me just a minute,” he said. “The horses are at the gate and the Queen’s got a filly running.”
“Which queen?” Duane asked.
“Queen Elizabeth, the only queen that’s got any horses that are worth a shit,” Jody said. He clicked on his keyboard a few more times and then swiveled around to face Duane.
“That’s terrible about your wife,” he said. “I always liked Karla.”
“Yes, most everybody did,” Duane said.
“The minute you start paving these goddamn little dirt roads that don’t need to be paved you start losing valuable members of the population,” Jody said. “People don’t smash into milk trucks on these dirt roads.”
Duane didn’t answer. He was momentarily stunned by the spiffed-up condition of Jody’s store. Instead of being a dark, untidy mess in which double-A batteries might be shelved behind the Fritos, the store was now brightly lit, clean as a pin, and arranged in such a way that the potato chips, not the double-A batteries, were next to the Fritos. The general store was now as neat and clean as the hardware store had been.
“It looks as if your daughter’s been here,” he said.
“Yes, there’s been a revolution since you’ve been here,” Jody said. “You lost an old wife and my daughter cleaned my store, and neither you nor me expected such a thing to happen.”
“Don’t all this orderliness scare people?” Duane asked.
“Scares the roughnecks,” Jody said. “It even scares me a little. I’m apt to see my own reflection on a can and think an old madman’s snuck in on me. When did you adopt the bicycle as your mode of transportation?”
“When I started having appointments with your daughter,” Duane said. “Eighteen miles is just a little too far to walk.”
“Oh, have you been visiting Honor?” Jody asked. “That’s good. No wonder you look in good health.”
“I saw her for a while,” Duane said. “Didn’t she tell you?”
“Nope, she’s a psychiatrist,” Jody said, a little testily. “She don’t go around mentioning who’s crazy and who ain’t.”
“No, I guess that wouldn’t really be the right thing,” Duane said.
Still, he felt a little disappointed. For some reason he had assumed that Dr. Carmichael would have at least mentioned to her father that he had become a patient. It struck him that he wanted her to be more interested in him than she actually was. If that weren’t true, probably there would have been no wet dream.
Even though he felt vaguely disappointed, Duane could not but be struck by the improvement Honor Carmichael had made in her father’s working environment. The Corners had been a dark, dirty hole—now it was bright, clean, cheerful, and well ordered. Honor had obviously given some thought to how things should go, to how the toiletries and snacks and groceries should relate on the shelves to the lightbulbs, fishing lures, and bug spray.
Jody saw Duane admiring the smart arrangement, and smiled.
“Honor’s got that organized mind,” he said. “I guess that’s why she’s a good psychiatrist. She can figure out what kinds of things ought to sit next to one another on a shelf.”
“She sure can—you’re lucky,” Duane said.
“Yes,” Jody said simply. “I’m lucky. Having a daughter like Honor frees up my mind so I can pay attention to my betting. There’s this new Albanian soccer team they’re trying to get going. I never thought I’d live to see an Albanian soccer team. Old King Zog must be dancing on his grave.”
“Who’s King Zog?” Duane asked.
Jody gave him a startled look.
“He was the King of Albania until the Commies took over,” Jody said.
Jody’s response made Duane feel like an uneducated hick. Not only had he never heard of King Zog, he had never really even heard of Albania. All he could remember about Albania was that a bunch of Albanians had tried to escape to Italy somewhere on a boat, and—he thought he remembered—had been turned back. They had been sort of like the Vietnamese boat people, only they weren’t Oriental.
“I didn’t know you kept up with all the royalty, Jody,” he said.
“Oh, just the Queen, really,” Jody said. “The Queen’s got a couple of nice fillies and some two-year-olds that look like they might be picking up speed.”
Duane bought a bottle of Gatorade and some peanuts to nibble on his way to visit Sonny Crawford.
“Your daughter’s really done a good job here,” he said. “You already had the neatest hardware store in this part of the country, but now you’ve got the neatest grocery store to go with it.”
“That’s not the end of it, either,” Jody said. “Any day now she claims she’s going to paint the outside.”
“If I was her I’d wait till fall to start in on that job,” Duane said. “This heat will dry her brushes before she could even get the paint on the board.”
“No, it won’t, because she’ll be out here at first light and paint for an hour and leave,” Jody said. “Then she’ll be out the next morning and paint for an hour and leave. Once she starts a job, Honor don’t let up.”
Duane wanted to ask Jody to tell her hello for him, but, at the last minute, he didn’t make the request. If Dr. Carmichael hadn’t even mentioned to her father that he had become her patient, then asking Jody to tell her hello was probably quite inappropriate. He realized, as he pedaled away, that he didn’t know much more about the rules of psychiatry than he did about the kings of Albania. Perhaps, in Honor Carmichael’s view, he was still her patient, in which case it would probably be much more appropriate for him to make a new appointment and go tell her hello himself.
6
“YOU DON’T WANT TO LOOK AT M
Y FEET, or smell them either,” Sonny said, when Duane came into his hospital room. “Your best bet is to sit right under the air conditioner.”
“That’s the best bet in this heat anyway,” Duane told him.
Sonny looked out the window at the baking hospital lawn.
“I guess it is hot, isn’t it?” he said. His eyes didn’t really fix on Duane—they didn’t really fix on anything. They reminded Duane of the eyes of old dogs. Wherever Sonny Crawford was looking was a place no one normal could hope to see.
“It’s so hot airplanes can’t take off,” Duane said. “They had to close down Phoenix.”
Sonny smiled his vague, impersonal smile.
“That’s okay, I wasn’t going to Phoenix anyway,” Sonny said. “The seasons don’t really mean much to me anymore. I don’t mind if it’s hot and I don’t mind if it’s cold.”
To Duane’s eye, Sonny looked awful. He hadn’t shaved for three or four days, and his graying hair was messed. When Duane reached to shake his hand Sonny had no grip at all. Duane might as well have been shaking his elbow, or his knee. He might just as well be shaking the hand of a man who had died. He felt awkward even being in the room with Sonny, and was sorry he had come. All the two of them shared was a town and a past. They had lived their lives in the same place, but any interest they had had in knowing each other had evaporated over time.
“The whole town misses Karla but I guess you probably miss her most,” Sonny said. He had been at the funeral, his necktie poorly knotted. Duane remembered seeing him talking to the girls.
“I do miss her,” Duane said.
“I hadn’t really talked to Karla in years,” Sonny admitted, looking out again at the burning lawn. “It was my fault. Karla was always into self-improvement—she kept trying to get me to jog, or eat right, or look for a girlfriend, but I didn’t. I guess she just got pissed off and gave up on me—can’t blame her.”
“That was her way,” Duane said.
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