Texasville

by Larry McMurtry

  At such times he wondered what Karla and Jacy found to talk about all day. Certainly they would have long since finished comparing notes about him. He had always thought of his courtship of Jacy as one of the high points of his life, but when he tried to reexamine it, to recall what had made it special, he found he really didn’t have many memories. He had a fairly clear memory of standing with her on the fifty-yard line the night he, as captain of the football team, had crowned her Homecoming Queen. They had kissed, and the band had played the school song. Some of the band members and a few of the football players wept with emotion, but he hadn’t wept, nor had Jacy. They thought it was corny. That had occurred in their junior year, and they had already considered themselves about ten times more sophisticated than the rest of the kids in high school.

  He couldn’t quite remember when he had fallen in love with Jacy, but he must have, because they had gone steady all their senior year, and he had smashed one of Sonny Crawford’s eyes out for daring even to date her during a period the following summer when he had been in Odessa, roughnecking. He remembered crying about her as he was riding the bus out of Thalia to go to boot camp, and he had a hazy memory of trying to call her one night from Korea. She had then been in a sorority house at SMU. The call had been unsuccessful, and he had never been sure whether he just got the wrong sorority house or whether Jacy just hadn’t wanted to talk to him.

  But of the actual romance he could remember nothing, a fact which made him feel slightly guilty and strangely restless. He couldn’t remember their kisses or lovemaking or talk or dates or anything, though he thought he remembered that they had gone to bed together on their senior trip. He had always considered that it was an important romance—after all, it had cost Sonny an eye—and it was troubling not to be able to remember anything about it except a corny moment on a football field that they had both scorned at the time.

  One night when Karla had taken pity on Junior Nolan and was cooking him a steak out on the patio, Duane fished around in a storage room until he found a couple of his high school yearbooks. He took them to the bedroom and looked through them, hoping they would make it all vivid again. There he was in his football uniform, and again in a sports coat he had bought when he was voted Most Handsome Boy.

  And there Jacy was, as Most Beautiful Girl. There were even pictures of them at the homecoming game: one of her riding around the field in a white convertible, and one of him waiting for her on the fifty-yard line, his helmet in one hand and a huge bouquet in the other, and a third one of their kiss. That one was mostly obscured, though, because Jacy had chosen it to write on when she signed his yearbook. “To the sweetest man in the world, I’ll love ya’ forever!!!” she had written.

  The yearbooks failed to meet whatever need had caused him to dig them out, and after browsing in them for about three minutes he dropped them on the bed and lay watching the sports channel. Connors and McEnroe were hitting long slashing forehands at one another, Connors grunting audibly every time he hit the ball. The grunts reminded Duane of Janine, who, despite her efforts to be ladylike in everything, issued a series of similar grunts when she was about to come. Hearing Janine’s grunts always gave him a certain sense of relief, if not of release. The grunts meant it had worked again, at least from Janine’s point of view. He had begun to doubt that anything of that sort was really going to work from his point of view, but the margin of failure was ambiguous and didn’t trouble him much.

  Janine had scarcely spoken to him since the night he had called her from the emergency room. She could be seen any day cheerfully doing her job at the courthouse or playing tennis with Lester, who had calmed noticeably under her ministrations.

  Duane had had two discussions on the subject of Lester and Janine with Jenny Marlow, who took a tolerant—indeed, almost ecstatic—view of their romance.

  “I just hope it lasts until I can divorce him,” she said. “You can’t imagine how hard it is to get a husband out of love with you if one wants to stay in love with you.

  “I don’t know how many times I’ve had to break Lester’s heart in the last five years,” she added. “If hearts were made of pottery his would just be little ground-up pieces of glass by now.”

  While he was watching Connors and McEnroe, Karla walked back into the bedroom. She was fully dressed but dripping wet.

  “I don’t know if it’s gonna work out too well having Junior living here,” she said. “It all started out platonic but I don’t know if Junior’s gonna be able to keep it that way.”

  “What makes you think he can’t?” Duane asked.

  “He just threw me in the swimming pool,” Karla said. “He said he’d always wanted to try and do it underwater. I told him I thought we ought to keep it platonic but he misunderstood me.

  “How could he misunderstand that?” Duane asked, as Karla peeled off her dripping T-shirt.

  “Junior thinks a platonic is one of them little Japanese pickups,” Karla said. “He thought I meant we oughta run away together.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Swimming around,” Karla said. “He’s so drunk he thinks I’m still in the pool.”

  She stepped into the bathroom and emerged a minute later wearing a purple bathrobe.

  “I wonder what Suzie Nolan does all day?” she asked.

  Duane pretended he was concentrating on the tennis match.

  “Duane, are you mad at me?” Karla asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “It looks like Suzie would get curious about why Junior lives out here now,” Karla said.

  “Not everybody’s got curiosity,” Duane said. So far as he could tell, Suzie had no interest in Junior’s whereabouts.

  “Wives usually have curiosity about their husbands, though,” Karla said. “Or even about their ex-husbands.”

  “We could call her and tell her he’s swimming around in our pool, hoping you’ll run away with him in a Japanese pickup,” Duane suggested.

  “I heard it on the grapevine that you’re in love with her,” Karla said.

  “The grapevine’s misinformed you again, honey,” Duane said lightly.

  “Every time you call me honey there’s a lie involved,” Karla said.

  Duane went outside to check on Junior. He didn’t want him to drown, and fortunately Junior hadn’t. He was sitting on the diving board with his coyote call. Despite much practice, he wasn’t expert with the call. All he was producing at the moment was a kind of splutter, so weak that Shorty, who slept a few feet away, hadn’t even raised his head.

  “I called a toad,” Junior said. “See him?”

  In fact there was a fair-sized toad sitting by the pool. While Duane watched, it managed a lethargic hop into the thin grass.

  “There he goes,” Junior said. “Where’s Karla?”

  “She told me she had a headache,” Duane said.

  “I don’t doubt that,” Junior said. “Women all get headaches the minute I fall in love with them.”

  “I wouldn’t take it personally,” Duane said. “Quite a few have headaches around me too.”

  “I’ll never really be in love with anybody but Suzie,” Junior said. “Suzie’s meant the world to me. I keep thinking she’ll call up and tell me to come home, but I guess that’s just wishful thinking.”

  The look on Junior’s face made Duane feel sad. He had visited Suzie that very morning for a passionate twenty minutes. What he had told Karla was true. He wasn’t in love with Suzie. The two of them were just having an interlude of good luck involving a high level of sexual compatibility. There was no reason to suppose it would last. The day might come when Suzie would wake up missing Junior and simply call him home. It was something Duane would like to see happen, even if it meant the end of an exciting interlude.

  Junior crawled off the diving board and fell asleep in a lawn chair.

  Duane went back in to find Karla looking at his yearbook. She had it open to the page with the homecoming photographs and was reading what Jacy had w
ritten across their picture.

  “Well, she didn’t love you forever, did she, Duane?” Karla said.

  “Nope,” he said.

  Karla closed the book. “Duane, are you sad?” she asked.

  “I guess,” he said.

  “Why? You can tell me. I’m your wife,” Karla said.

  Duane felt the beginnings of a headache. He went in the bathroom and splashed cold water on his forehead for a while. Sometimes that stopped headaches. He wet a washrag with cold water and when he lay back down put the washrag across his forehead.

  “It’s a lot better if a husband and wife communicate and tell one another the reasons when they’re happy or sad,” Karla said.

  “Well,” Duane said, and got no farther. He was thinking of Junior. From feeling sorry for him he had begun to envy him. Junior had taken less than a minute to fall asleep in the lawn chair. Perhaps he was already in the midst of a nice dream. He could be dreaming of his years of wealth, when two thirds of the wells he drilled turned out to be producers. Or he might be dreaming of even earlier years, when his passionate young wife had still wanted him. The moment he had fallen asleep the sadness had left his face, to be replaced by a look of peace.

  Duane wished he could gain peace so easily. His own dreams were of bank meetings or of obscure but total breakdowns at one of the rigs. His dreams only left him the more tired.

  “You don’t look too happy yourself,” he said to Karla.

  “No, because I was brought up to believe it’s a wife’s duty to make her husband happy and you’re laying there with a rag on your head looking as sad as a hound dog,” Karla said.

  “I’m not that sad,” Duane said. “I’m just a little miserable.”

  “Is it because I spent sixty thousand on a duplex we can’t afford?” she asked. “I was just thinking it would be nice if the children had a decent place to be married in.”

  “It would be even nicer if the children would stay married a decent length of time,” Duane said.

  “Do you think we raised them wrong?” Karla asked.

  Duane tried to think back over the years when they had been raising Dickie and Nellie, before the twins were born. It seemed to him they had done all the things parents were supposed to do. They had taken the children to Sunday school, made them do chores, spanked them for particularly gross behavior, given them lavish praise when they were good. Obviously their attention had slipped at some point, but he was too tired to try and pick out the point, and so far his headache wasn’t letting up.

  “It makes me nervous when you don’t answer me, Duane,” Karla said.

  “I’ve got a headache,” Duane said. “I can’t think of too many answers when I’ve got a headache.”

  “It makes me feel guilty when you get those headaches,” Karla said. “It’s probably because of me that you’re so stressed.”

  “Blame it on OPEC,” Duane said. “It’s simpler, and we can both go to sleep.”

  Karla got out of bed, put on her gown and came back to bed. She picked up the remote TV control and roved through the channels for a minute before switching it off.

  “Every night there’s less and less on TV,” she said.

  “Karla, stop worrying,” Duane said. “It’s not much of a headache, and it’s not your fault.”

  “I didn’t really mean to spend all that money today,” Karla said. “I guess it would have been better if we’d never got rich. I started spending money and now I can’t stop. Every time I go to Dallas I think I’ll buy one dress and then I buy ten.”

  “It’s not the dresses, it’s the oil rigs,” he said. “A thousand dresses doesn’t cost as much as one of those fuckers.”

  “Jacy’s real curious about you,” Karla said. “I think sometimes she wishes she had just stayed here and married you.”

  Duane didn’t believe for a minute that Jacy wished anything of the kind. His curiosity was piqued, but he could tell from Karla’s wide eyes that one question from him would set loose a manic flow of talk, which might flow for hours. He decided against setting it loose.

  “You never did tell me why you were sad,” Karla reminded him.

  Duane couldn’t remember, if he had ever known. His memory of the evening didn’t want to go back farther than the time he spent splashing cold water on his forehead. The washrag wasn’t cool anymore. He wished he had more cold water, but didn’t feel like getting up to get it.

  “I wasn’t as sad as a hound dog,” he said, hoping to reassure his wife.

  “No, but your face gets kind of long when you’re real depressed,” Karla said.

  She got up, unbidden, went to the kitchen, and returned with a large bowl filled with ice and water. She wet the washrag in the icy water, squeezed it out and returned it to him. It was very cold.

  “Thanks,” Duane said.

  “I guess I’d just like to lead a sensible life,” he added, thinking about the question of his sadness. “Do you think this is a sensible life?”

  Karla had turned on a tiny reading light and was leafing through a Play girl.

  “It may not be too sensible but at least we know the difference between a platonic relationship and a Japanese pickup,” she said.

  CHAPTER 31

  DUANE SOON FOUND IT ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO leave Thalia without Jenny Marlow catching him and demanding to ride wherever he was going. There were four roads out of town and his attempted exits became a game of tic-tac-toe, which Jenny almost always won. She seemed to have nothing to do but lay ambushes.

  If he went north, toward Rising Star, she usually flagged him down at Aunt Jimmie’s Lounge. If he tried to make a break to the south, she headed him off at Sonny’s carwash. If he went west, she caught him at the Dairy Queen. And if he attempted a dash toward Wichita Falls, she would zip out of the alley behind the grocery store and honk until he pulled over.

  It was true that he could have sneaked out along the little paved road that ran behind the cemetery, rejoining one of the major arteries a few miles out, but for years he had been accustomed to merely driving out of town at will, and he always forgot about Jenny until she roared up behind him and began to honk.

  The sound of honking would catapult Shorty into a maddening sequence of loud yips, which only a forceful beating with the work glove would silence. Duane decided travel was hardly worth it.

  It was not that Jenny was seeking romance—apparently romance was the farthest thing from her mind. The thing closest to her mind was her new job as director of the centennial pageant, a job that had fallen to her by default.

  The gentleman from Brooklyn who had been a tentative candidate to direct the pageant had not exactly worked out, a fact that was really no fault of his own. His name was Sally Balducci. Duane had finally persuaded the committee to bring him down for an interview, although the committee was not without qualms.

  “I never heard of a man named Sally,” Jenny said. “I hope he isn’t a transvestite.”

  “Or if he is, I hope he’s good enough to fool G.G.,” Duane said.

  Sally Balducci was definitely not a transvestite. He was a short, fat gentleman with bushy gray curls who arrived wearing a green sports coat and a wide white tie, casually knotted. He got off the commuter plane that had brought him from Dallas groaning and holding his hands over his ears. Apparently the little plane had not been pressurized adequately.

  While waiting for his luggage, Sally Balducci reeled around the little airport, weeping. He muttered in a strange dialect, frightening the few elderly matrons who had flown in with him. Occasionally he groaned loudly and kicked the wall of the airport.

  To Duane’s dismay, the flight seemed to have rendered Sally stone deaf. As he drove into Thalia he kept whacking his head with the heel of his hand in hopes of getting his hearing started again. It didn’t work. He looked with an expression of profound sadness at the few dusty buildings that made up the town.

  Duane took him home and gave him two or three of Karla’s quart-sized vodka tonics, which un
fortunately put him to sleep. Efforts to awaken him were unsuccessful. He slept most of the night in a lawn chair by the pool, just as Junior Nolan had a few nights before Sally’s arrival.

  He missed the committee meeting at which he was supposed to be interviewed, giving G. G. Rawley the opportunity to lecture everyone for fifteen minutes on the unreliability of papists.

  Sally awoke in the wee small hours and watched a sumo wrestling match with Minerva. His deafness did not abate, though Minerva, ever the skeptic, claimed he could hear perfectly well.

  “That man can hear a worm crawl,” she claimed. “He don’t want to hear. If he could, he might have to stay around here all summer putting on that stupid pageant.”

  That was not likely, for the committee had hardened its heart against the man. That afternoon, in a twenty-minute rump session held in Sonny’s laundrymat, the committee voted to make Jenny director of the pageant. Meanwhile Sally sulked in Duane’s pickup, growing hotter and hotter. Out of sympathy Duane drove him to Dallas so he wouldn’t have to ride the commuter plane again. Jenny rode along. She had the script of the pageant with her, but Sally was in such a foul mood that he refused to look at it. The minute they arrived at the airport he headed for the bar.

  On the way home Jenny hauled out the script and began to brood about casting. It was not lost on anyone that the centennial was thundering down on them. Beards were sprouting on male faces all over the county, including Duane’s.

  “Please say you’ll play Adam,” Jenny said. “If you’ll just play Adam it might give me some confidence. It’s one of the best parts.”

  Duane had already agreed to play George Washington. The thought of playing Adam didn’t excite him. “I’ve already grown a beard,” he pointed out. “I don’t think Adam had a beard.”