“How come you started walking everywhere?” Sonny asked.
“I don’t know, really. I guess it just came to seem like a better use of my time than riding in pickups. I’ve ridden millions of miles in pickups and yet I’ve never really seen the world—I’ve just seen the pickups.”
There was, after that, a long silence. Duane felt he had done his duty, by coming to see Sonny, but couldn’t tell that Sonny much cared.
“It’s strange, isn’t it?” Sonny said. He had noted Duane’s unease.
“What, that your feet have gone bad?” Duane asked.
“No, that’s not strange, that’s just what happens if you sit on your ass all night and don’t exercise. If I’d just listened to your wife my feet would probably be fine. What’s strange is us—you and I have known one another all our lives and don’t have a thing to say to one another.”
“That may not be so strange,” Duane said. “There may just not be that much to talk about if two people live their whole lives in Thalia.”
“Well, there’s life, and there’s high school football, and there’s Jacy Farrow,” Sonny said. “I guess that only takes you so far.”
“I think Ruth means to come and see you, if she can get someone to drive her,” Duane said. “She asked about you yesterday.”
“Old Ruth,” Sonny said. “She might come to visit me but she can’t come to see me because she can’t see. She’s another one who tried to get me into self-improvement. Remember when Ruth used to jog?”
“Yep, during the boom,” Duane said. “That was when everybody was into jogging. Then the bust happened and everybody went back to real life.”
“I had an affair with Ruth, remember?” Sonny said. “Her husband was that fat-ass coach. He asked me to take Ruth to the doctor one day and we started sleeping together.”
Duane did remember. At the time he had been going with Jacy, the prettiest girl in town, and had thought it rather odd that his friend was shacking up with an old lady—Ruth would have been in her mid-thirties, at the time. Not only that, he thought it was dangerous. Everyone in town knew about the affair—how the coach failed to notice it was a mystery to everyone; but the consensus was that he would catch them in the act someday and kill them both with his deer rifle.
“When you come right down to it, I guess Ruth Popper was my only real girlfriend,” Sonny said. “I married Jacy but her parents caught us and had the marriage annulled before I even slept with her. I guess Ruth was it for me, so far as romance was concerned.”
“You could have done worse,” Duane said. “Lots of people have.”
Sonny looked startled. His face was puffy and he seldom changed expression but he did shift his eyes and look at Duane when Duane told him he could have done worse.
“You know, that’s true,” Sonny said. “Ruth is a nice woman. I should have run that fat coach off and married her. I knew Ruth cared about me and I knew Jacy didn’t—but Jacy was prettier. I never really got over Jacy. You got over her and married Karla and had four kids, but look at me. All I married was a Kwik-Sack.”
Duane was beginning to feel low and sad, which is how he always felt when he was with Sonny Crawford for more than a few minutes—Sonny just had the ability to shift the weight of his lifelong gloom onto whomever he was with. Now it was happening again, and the reason it was happening was because what Sonny was saying was true, and also sad. If Duane considered that he was bad off for having wasted so much time riding in pickups, how much sadder was Sonny’s case? The aging man in the bed with the ruined feet had been blocked all his life from mature happiness because he couldn’t get over his failure to win one girl, Jacy Farrow, who, in the years when Sonny had such a terrible crush on her, had just been a pretty, selfish, small-town rich girl. Jacy had grown beyond some of those faults, it was true—in her middle years, when she had returned to Thalia after a very modest career in movies, Duane had grown to like her a lot. But the Jacy who had transfixed Sonny and somehow arrested his growth had had nothing to offer but her looks. Of course the pull of beauty in a small town where there was little of it was no slight pull. He himself had been as in love with Jacy as Sonny had been—and more successfully—and had needed three or four years to get over her himself, after she was sent away to school and went on to have her small success in Hollywood and Europe.
Then Karla showed up and he moved on—only, for Sonny, there was no Karla. Dickie or one of the kids told him that Sonny was still cutting pictures of Jacy out of magazines when Dickie was in high school, twenty years or more after Jacy had left Thalia.
Yet Sonny was not dumb. Even now, despite his puffy face and his black feet, he gave the impression of being an intelligent man, intelligent enough to notice that Duane’s spirits were sinking.
“Sometimes I think it’s Jacy’s fault that my feet are rotting,” Sonny said, with a little smile. “She bewitched me and I stayed bewitched.”
“It don’t do to dwell in the past,” Duane said.
The remark sounded stupid, but he had to say something and could come up with nothing better. All he wanted was to be out of the building, on his bike, off in the country feeling the comforting heat. Sonny’s room was chill, so chill that Duane had goose bumps on his arms. He wondered if they kept the room so cold in order to drive visitors out sooner, or because most of the building was filled with people who were dying. Keeping them chilled down probably made the undertaker’s job easier.
“I guess that’s been my problem,” Sonny said. “I’ve always dwelled in the past. I’m just one of those country boys who never got out of high school—not really. My happiest times were when you and me and Jacy ran around together. You know, when Sam the Lion was alive. That was back before the picture show closed, remember?”
“Oh, I remember,” Duane said. “I had to work my ass off, in those days. Sometimes I would have to roughneck forty-eight hours, straight through. I worked for Jacy’s daddy, mostly. That’s why they never wanted me going with her. I was just oil field trash, to them.”
As he was leaving, Sonny stuck one of his black feet out from under the sheets and looked at it.
“So long, toes,” Sonny said. “I’ll be rid of you tomorrow.”
Duane was so glad to be out of the hospital that all he did, for a time, was stand and soak up the heat. Being with Sonny made him feel suffocated, smothered by the past that meant so much to Sonny and so little to himself.
Later, buying a milk shake at the Burger King, Duane took a dollar bill out of his pocket and happened to notice the little slip of paper with the name of the book on it—the note Honor Carmichael had made for him the last time he had seen her. He wished he had thought to make an appointment with her, but he hadn’t. In view of the dream he had had about her, he didn’t even know if he should make an appointment. Falling in love with his doctor, if that was what he was doing, didn’t make any sense. For all he knew she was married, or had a boyfriend. The last thing he needed was to get hung up on a woman he couldn’t have.
On his way out of town he pedaled over to a bookstore in one of the larger malls and handed the slip of paper to a clerk, a skinny young woman in a green blouse.
“Oh, Proust,” she said, as if it were an everyday name. “We don’t get many calls for Proust. I don’t think we have this in stock but we could order it for you, if you like.”
“Why don’t you do that?” Duane said, writing down his name and address.
“Wow, Proust,” the girl said. “I’ve been meaning to read him myself, but it just looks so long.”
“Do you know what it’s about?” Duane asked.
“Wow, France, I think—or Paris or something,” the girl said. “We’ll call you when it comes in.”
“Thanks,” Duane said. He wondered, as he pedaled home, why his doctor thought he ought to read about France.
7
FOR THE NEXT YEAR AND A HALF Duane devoted himself to the task he had chosen to undertake, which was to pare his life down to essentials. He
bicycled less, walked more. Much of his time he spent alone, in or near his cabin. He bought a few simple woodworking tools and built a shed onto the east side of his cabin, in which to do his woodworking. He had a small assortment of woods and lumber delivered to him, which he kept covered with a tarp. With some difficulty—involving many failed efforts—he learned to make boxes. He made a box for each of his children, and then one for each of his grandchildren.
He did not enclose his shed, but worked in the heat and the cold, desisting only when winter rain slanted in and wet his workbench. He tried carving animals out of knotty mesquite, but found that he could not get the proportions of the animals right—his best creations were boxes. He gave a box to Rag, one to Ruth Popper, one to Bobby Lee, and one to Lester and Jenny Marlow. Even so his stock of boxes increased faster than he could give them away.
The books that he had ordered—the ones the salesclerk thought were about France—came in less than a week: three fat silver-and-black paperbacks. Duane took them home and put them on a shelf next to the coffee can, but he didn’t try to read them. Twice he pedaled over to the Corners in the predawn hours because Jody Carmichael had said his daughter intended to paint the store. Jody had been right. Honor Carmichael was there, in shorts, with her long hair tied up in a bun; but she was not there alone. A short, dumpy woman was helping her. Duane pulled his bicycle into the ditch and watched the two women through a screen of brush. He didn’t want to be seen. Though he knew it was weird that he was peeping at his doctor, he couldn’t resist. When he came back a second morning he saw the same scene: Honor Carmichael was painting, with the help of a short woman who wore a kind of pushed-down hat.
On a third morning he rode halfway to the Corners and then turned and went back home. Spying on his doctor as she tried to make her father’s store presentable just seemed too weird—if Dr. Carmichael should happen to catch sight of him he knew he would feel dreadfully embarrassed.
What he ought to do was simply call the doctor and start a new sequence of appointments. The doctor had said his therapy might take years—that meant that, for a price, he could have her company four times a week indefinitely. But he didn’t call to make an appointment and he didn’t ride back to the Corners, either.
When he did go back, months later, he marveled at the transformation. Both the store and the hardware shed had been painted white, with green trim. The debris had been cleaned up and a low fence built around the yard. Flowers had been planted all around the house, and the mud hole where customers had once parked was blacktopped. The store that had for so long been a mess and an eyesore was now one of the more attractive places of business in the whole county.
Meanwhile, in Thalia, the big house where Duane and Karla had lived much of their lives slowly emptied of children and grandchildren. Dickie decided he could run the oil company more efficiently if he lived in Wichita Falls, so he and Annette and Loni and Barbi and Sami moved into a house in the western suburbs. There was increased oil and gas activity in southern Oklahoma and Dickie wanted to be closer to the action.
In the fall after his mother’s death Jack returned from wherever he had been, only to leave again immediately. Duane came home to the cabin one day to find a note on the table which read:
Hi, Dad.
Sorry I missed you, I’m moving to Montana.
Jack
After that the family heard of him mainly through Rag. Sometimes Jack would call her in the middle of the night—the two of them would talk for hours about the state of the world. In January Duane got a postcard informing him that Jack was going to college in Bozeman. By the next summer he had a job as a sheep detective, catching sheep rustlers up on the Wyoming-Montana border, employed, so Rag claimed, by a rich woman who owned half a million acres in that part of the world.
“Why would a rich woman hire Jack?” Duane asked Rag one day. “Why would a rich woman bother with sheep? It sounds fishy to me.”
“Okay, doubt my word,” Rag said. “If you don’t believe me I guess you could hike up there in a year or two and check it out. Of course, by the time you get there Jack may be back in the Amazon. People who travel at a snail’s pace can’t expect to know everything.”
Nellie, the most popular country DJ in the whole of the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, fell in love with the rich man who owned the station she worked at, plus eighty-two others and various cable enterprises. His name was Zenas Church; he was a widower with five children and a Learjet which he piloted himself, whizzing around to his eighty-three radio stations. Nellie was soon spending weekends in Nashville and New York, where she attended lavish parties. She had a nanny whose exclusive responsibility was Little Bascom and Baby Paul; the nanny’s main job was keeping the little tykes from being trampled underfoot by Zenas Church’s five boys, all of whom were large and clumsy.
Julie moved into north Dallas, or south Plano, where Jeanette, her best girlfriend, lived. The two of them ranged as far north as Tulsa and as far south as Padre Island in pursuit of parties, at one of which Julie met Goober Flynn, a flamboyant native of Texarkana who liked to wear Western shirts with pearl buttons and two-thousand-dollar cowboy boots but in fact had graduated from the Wharton School of Business and had been one of the first Texans to buy stock in Microsoft. Goober Flynn and Zenas Church were soon in competition to see who could get richer. Goober put Julie to work in one of his several craft malls, where the years she had spent with her mother, shopping wildly and at random, stood her in good stead. Soon she was traveling to New England, Kentucky, the Pacific Northwest, and even as far afield as Afghanistan, seeking out native craftsmen. Goober insisted that she finish her education, which she did at a junior college in Garland. Duane rode down on his bike to see her graduate; the trip took him two days each way. Goober Flynn, a man of some polish, did not seem to regard Duane’s determination to avoid motorized transport as being in any way unusual. He thought it might be a good way for stressed-out executives to unwind, and even suggested that Duane go up to the Wharton School of Business and give a seminar in how to get around without motor transportation.
Willy and Bubbles were soon enrolled in a private school in Highland Park, where they were required to wear uniforms—even, in Willy’s case, a tie.
Back home in Thalia, Rag ruled forlornly over a big empty house. The only sign that a large family had once lived there was the pile of junk that still filled much of the carport.
“Couldn’t you just have a garage sale and get rid of it?” Duane asked. “It’s been there for years. There could be snakes living in it.”
Rag received the suggestion with indifference.
“Better yet, you ought to sell this whole place, Duane,” she said. “Nobody wants to live here anymore. I’m getting to be a drunkard just from sitting here by myself.”
“You could get a pet,” Duane suggested.
“A pet ain’t as good as human company,” Rag insisted. It was true that she was drinking a lot. She and Bobby Lee had formed the habit of playing video games with each other—sometimes their games raged deep into the night. Though Bobby Lee had eventually broken down and acquired a prosthetic testicle, it hadn’t made him any less shy with women.
“I think I could have sex,” Bobby Lee said often. “But the thing is, I can’t get up my nerve to try.”
Then he joined a health club and became an exercise addict, lifting weights, climbing StairMasters, rowing on rowing machines, playing racquetball with all comers.
“I can’t figure out why you exercise so much,” Duane said one day. Bobby Lee came to the cabin to visit with him at least twice a week.
“You work hard all day,” he added. “Then you go to a damn health club and work harder. What’s the point?”
Bobby Lee pondered the question for a long time, before answering. The hair at his temples had turned white; otherwise he was almost bald.
“I guess it’s because all those machines are so clean,” he said, finally. “We’ve got machines at the rig but they’re o
ily and greasy or muddy and yucky. But those machines at the health club are spotless. I mean, spotless. They clean those suckers every day.”
“I don’t care how clean they are, they’re still just machines,” Duane said. “Dickie pays you to work with the dirty machines and then you turn around and give your hard-earned money to a damn health club just so you can get all sweaty and smelly working with a clean machine. I don’t guess I get it.”
“There’s not much to get,” Bobby Lee said, a little sadly. He was prone to low spells, during which, without warning, his spirits would plummet to serious depths.
“I guess I go to health clubs for the same reason people go to art museums,” he added.
“Art museums?” Duane asked.
“Sure,” Bobby said. “People go to art museums to see pretty pictures and I go to health clubs to see those pretty machines. You know, they’re even so clean they gleam.”
“Now I’ve heard everything,” Duane said.
8
IN THE SPRING AFTER KARLA’S DEATH Duane raised a splendid garden behind the big house. Discouraged by the tragedy and the overpowering heat wave that followed it, he let the previous year’s hasty garden burn up. Blister bugs got into the greenhouse and ruined the tomatoes; the drought and the heat took care of everything that had been planted outside. Even the peaches on their four nice peach trees shriveled up before they ripened—the birds got most of them. Duane, trying to hold the family together, discovered that he lacked the energy to hold the family together and garden too. Now and then in the late afternoon he would go out and make a stab at weeding the garden, but about the only things he took from it that summer were a few good onions and a bucket or two of unblemished peaches.
The problem of the garden nagged at his conscience all summer. He remembered that Dr. Carmichael had been particularly interested in his attitudes toward the garden—they had been probing those very attitudes not long before Karla got killed and he left therapy. With Karla alive he hadn’t fretted about the garden too much, because it was her responsibility as much as his; and Karla was, if anything, the better gardener. Once she was killed the whole responsibility became his, and the fact that he immediately failed at it and let the garden burn up was one of the things that troubled him most from day to day. The children had no interest in helping him, and somehow it didn’t feel right just to hire a gardener. It was his garden, and Karla’s. Hiring a gardener would have destroyed the whole point; though, when he thought about it, he couldn’t easily say why. If hiring a gardener for a few weeks would save the garden, why not do it?
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