When the Light Goes

by Larry McMurtry

  “Department stores—big department stores—and old department stores,” Jody said, before turning back to his computer. Jody’s passion was for computer gambling, at the moment mainly involving South American soccer teams.

  Duane had spent all of his sixty-four years of life in the Texas oil patch, where being super-rich usually meant that someone in the family had found a lot of oil. The wildcatter H. L. Hunt, for example, had found a lot of oil, so much oil that at one time it would have seemed almost impossible for any of his children to go broke; and yet a few of his sons achieved the near-impossible: they had gone broke, or at least came close enough to being broke that their decline made the news.

  Duane kept up with financial affairs well enough to know that other kinds of businesses now made people super-rich. Bill Gates of Microsoft was now worth more than any oilman, unless you counted the Saudis. Duane was surprised to learn that an old-fashioned business such as a department store could make Angie Cohen’s family rich enough to buy an island, but maybe, as Jody had suggested, they started early. Jody Carmichael might not have had a haircut in six or seven years, but he was a man who usually knew what he was talking about. Duane had now been to Egypt, but he had never been to New England and was happy enough to take Jody’s word for how things worked up there.

  As he pedaled over the low shaley hill to his cabin Duane began to experience a buildup of anxiety. He even hyperventilated a little, out of the sudden fear that his aversion to his house in Thalia might have spread to his cabin—the simple structure that Karla had called his “hut.”

  Though she had been forced to accept the reality of the hut on the hill, she had never for a moment softened toward it or admitted that Duane might derive some benefit from being in it and being alone. To Karla’s way of thinking, Duane belonged in only one place, their big house, where she, and sometimes their children, and sometimes their grandchildren, lived. In Karla’s view a resistance to the normal circumstances and duties of domestic life had somehow afflicted Duane—it was a virus of some sort, an anti-domestic virus that had attacked Duane and driven him out to his accursed hut.

  As Duane approached his cabin he wondered where in the world he would find to live if he no longer felt at peace in his cabin. But even before he went into the cabin and unpacked his few groceries his rising anxiety began to ebb. The sun was not quite down—there was promise of a long summer afterglow. Only one or two stars were visible yet, but soon there would be many. Once it grew really dark the Milky Way with its millions of stars would be right over his head.

  The cabin was dusty, though not as dusty as Cairo. He had happened to hit Egypt on a windy week. Dust obscured the Nile, though not the pyramids. Once or twice, walking in sandstorms near the American University, it seemed to Duane that he might as well be on the campus of Texas Tech, in Lubbock, on a day when everyone was being peppered with West Texas sand.

  Still, sand or no sand, he had managed to make his way to Giza, where, a lone tourist amid countless tour groups, he looked at the Great Pyramid and felt absolute awe for the first time in his life. In their one and only family outing Duane and Karla and the four kids had gone to the Grand Canyon, and Duane had been impressed, even though both Julie and Nellie had managed to get food poisoning in Flagstaff, making it far from an ideal trip. But the Grand Canyon was a work of nature while the pyramids were the works of man—certainly the most stupendous works of man that Duane had ever seen.

  The cabin, to his great relief, still felt like his proper home. A small rattlesnake, about a foot long, with only a button for his tail so far, was crawling around near the stove. Duane grabbed a broom and eased the little rattler out the door.

  “I’d let you stay but one of us might get careless,” he said, apologetically. He didn’t mind snakes, but sometimes snakes minded people.

  The little rattler, making good speed, slithered under some rocks near the edge of the hill.

  By then the sun was down and the western sky ablaze with molten afterglow. It had been mainly the fine bright Texas skies that Duane had missed in Egypt—a country that he felt sure had fine skies of its own.

  Once, at dawn, he had even seen the Nile under a fine sky, but then the wind came up and Cairo soon looked Lubbock-like again.

  4

  DUANE RARELY SLEPT long or deeply anymore. Earlier in life, when he was likely to have done a certain amount of hard physical labor, he was sometimes able to sleep deeply, but, even then, he rarely slept long. Five hours’ sleep seemed to be plenty. The one time that pattern changed was in the first weeks of his therapy with Honor Carmichael—Duane discovered that talking about himself four hours a week was more tiring than any work he had done in his life. Once, after therapy, he had barely been able to bicycle back to his motel. After another session—he was then mostly living in the bridal suite of a dingy, low-grade Seymour Highway motel—he had stretched out on the water bed and slept almost around the clock, something he had never done in his entire adult life.

  At his cabin, on warm nights, if he was unable to sleep, Duane usually found that he liked being outside rather than inside, and he had provided himself with a cheap but comfortable lawn chair for that purpose.

  On the night of his return, once he saw that sleep wasn’t going to come, he went outside and settled into his lawn chair. To the north he could see the not-very-distant lights of Wichita Falls. There were cattle on the property—Dickie and his sisters were affluent enough to dabble in the cattle business—but the cattle, wherever they were, were quiet, and likewise the coyotes, though he knew he would hear from the latter when dawn began to redden the eastern sky.

  The only sounds he heard were the chug-chugs of two oil rigs, behind him and over the ridge a mile or two to the west. Very likely they were his own rigs, running all night, as usual. The fact that the only sounds disturbing the deep peace of the summer night came from his own rigs made him feel slightly annoyed—how nice it would be if he could just sit on his hill and enjoy the silence. But he had been an oilman all his life and knew that the oil business was a 24/7 boom-and-bust business: no driller in his right mind would shut down an active rig because the sound of the motors irritated Duane Moore. Most good drillers had long since forgotten what real silence felt like—it was just not an important factor in their lives.

  In a little while the distant, monotonous chuggings of the unseen but not-too-distant rigs began to make him drowsy. The lawn chair was really a pool-or-patio chair, meaning that it could be made to lie flat. Duane lay back, drowsy, the brilliance of the Milky Way directly over his head, and went to sleep, only to awaken, after not too long, to a hazy dream of nipples. He heard a female voice say what Anne Cameron had said to him about her own nipples only that afternoon: hard as little pickles. But the nipples Duane was dreaming about were not like pickles at all: they were more like ripe raspberries, engorged with juice. The woman in his dream had smallish breasts—Anne’s had also been small—and yet Duane could not put a face to the breasts. Then he seemed to catch a glimpse of pink labia, with a tuft of brownish pubic hair about the inviting slit.

  Still in darkness, he awoke with an erection, hard enough to be a little painful. He loosened his pants, but, even as he freed the erection, it began to subside. He wanted to see more of the woman with the pink cunt and raspberry nipples, but the dream swiftly left him. Just at the end of it he seemed to see Honor Carmichael’s face for a moment, but not her breasts and not her cunt.

  The dream and the erection were both surprises. Duane had not had sex since Karla’s death, two years before—he could remember only one or two erections or wet dreams during that time, although nocturnal erections had been a commonplace event throughout much of his adulthood.

  But now there he was, on his hill, in the dark half hour before first light, with a subsided erection that had followed upon a dream of raspberry nipples.

  Soon the coyotes began to yip. The eastern horizon reddened. Duane went inside, made himself some coffee, and ate a whole pa
ckage of the crumbly little doughnuts with powdered sugar on them.

  The sexy dream made Duane realize that maybe he had something new to think about: his need for a woman. Ruth Popper, irritating as she could be, was not necessarily wrong in her thinking. Karla was dead; she would not be back. He knew that he was in love with Honor Carmichael—he had even told her so—but Honor had politely shrugged him off. She had a lover, one that she was evidently quite content with.

  Despite that fact, Duane knew that he was not likely to be entirely out of love with Honor for quite some time. He was free, though he didn’t want to be; he would just have to see how long his attachment to Honor Carmichael lasted. He couldn’t just switch his affections because a lively young woman with perky nipples and good degrees had suddenly turned up in his office in Thalia.

  How exactly that had come about was something he wanted to find out. He kept up with oil industry developments well enough to know that the drilling and production histories of practically every oil well in the world would soon be brought online, making it possible for companies such as his to decide which wells might be worth revisiting, and which weren’t. He and Dickie had more than once talked about hiring someone with geological smarts and computer savvy to take a look at the histories of the nearly two thousand wells the company had drilled over four decades. Apparently, while he was in Egypt, Dickie had acted on the notion, and had somehow persuaded a young woman upscale enough to drive a Lexus to come to Texas to work for them.

  He wondered, briefly, if Dickie and Anne were lovers, and decided it was unlikely. Dickie had often been unfaithful to his somewhat spacey wife, Annette; he was always flushing short-term girlfriends out of rodeo arenas or honky-tonks—but what was certain was that none of them had degrees from MIT or Caltech. Most of the women, like Dickie himself, had no degrees at all. A California girl who didn’t wear a bra and had degrees from two first-rate schools would not seem to be Dickie’s cup of tea.

  On the other hand, people will fool you. It had been one of Karla’s favorite maxims.

  “People will fool you, Duane . . . they just will,” she had told him many times over the long course of their marriage.

  Duane himself had proved Karla’s point in spades by parking his pickup one day, after which he insisted on walking or biking everywhere he went, a decision that infuriated Karla more than anything he had done during their forty-year marriage.

  “You said it yourself, honey—people will fool you,” Duane told her, cheerfully.

  “Duane, I didn’t happen to want you to fool me,” Karla said, before bursting into tears.

  5

  IT WAS ONLY about fifteen miles along dirt roads from Duane’s cabin on the hill to the new offices of Moore Drilling on the Seymour Highway in Wichita Falls. If he got up and started Duane knew he could easily bike in before the heat got too bad. Though he had an office of his own, within the general office, he didn’t stay in his office much, there being, really, nothing for him to do. Everyone deferred to him, including Dickie, and the secretaries were always plying him with not-very-good coffee, which didn’t change the fact that he had nothing to do.

  When, two years before, he had abruptly turned the company over to Dickie, he only half expected the transfer to work. Dickie was only a month out of rehab and had a long history of soon relapsing back into cocaine addiction. Usually he stayed clean three or four months and then started using again—he would get worse for a while and then voluntarily put himself back in rehab. He had spent nearly ten years repeating that pattern, and no one seriously expected him to break it—not Duane, not Karla, not Dickie’s wife, Annette, nor any of their three children, Loni, Barbi and Sami.

  But this time Dickie fooled them. He did break the pattern. Dickie had never lacked for energy, or ability either; he had just never bothered to apply himself to the oil business. Then he switched focus and did apply himself vigorously to the oil business, to the dismay of many of the employees, who discovered that they were now expected to work a great deal harder than they had been accustomed to working. Some quit—but Moore Drilling paid top dollar, and most of the old hands soon sheepishly drifted back.

  All this was good: son had succeeded father and done well with the company. Now Dickie was looking hard at the potential of natural gas. Big fields were being opened in the Texas Panhandle and across the line in western Oklahoma. Dickie had talked to Duane about it a couple of times, since it would involve borrowing some money to invest in new equipment. Dickie, who had lived his life in blue jeans, was soon wearing ties and having lunch with bankers.

  Duane considered pedaling over to the office just to check his mail; he got as far as filling his water bottle and going out to his bike; but, before he could straddle his bike, the feeling of aversion he had felt while standing on the back steps of his big house in Thalia rose up in him, stopping him cold. He stood by his bicycle, looking off the hill. The day was getting hotter by the minute—if he didn’t go soon he would lose the morning coolness. What was the matter with him? It wouldn’t have killed him to go into his house for ten minutes, long enough to shave and shower; and it wouldn’t kill him to pedal over to Wichita Falls and let the folks in the office know he was back. Everyone in the office would be glad to see him, if only mildly. He was, in the secretaries’ eyes, a nice old geezer who never made them snap to and do all the things they were supposed to do.

  So what was wrong now? He was home, he was rested, he had seen the pyramids, it felt good to be back to his cabin: why this sudden reluctance to enter either his home or his office?

  He told himself that he was being silly. He started to straddle his bike, again—then, again, he stopped. He stood by the bike for several minutes, in a state of acute indecision. The August heat was rising rapidly by then. He needed to go, if he was going—if he wasn’t going he needed to give up and do something else. But what?

  He remembered that Thalia was only six miles away. His visit with Anne Cameron had been very brief; he had asked her nothing. He had not even asked why the wells he had drilled in Young County in the 1970s were of particular interest to her—it was a legitimate professional question that might have broken the ice between them. But he had merely allowed himself to be surprised by her Lexus and her nipples. He made an excuse and left.

  He found himself wondering if Anne would be wearing a see-through shirt again today. He had not actually seen a woman’s nipples in a long time; he had really stopped thinking about sexual things until Anne Cameron surprised him. Perhaps some natural period of mourning for Karla had passed—he had no need to feel guilty about sexual thoughts, or even sexual actions, anymore.

  A moment later he straddled his expensive bicycle and was pedaling at a brisk pace along the dirt road toward Thalia.

  6

  NO LEXUS was parked at the office when Duane came pedaling up. Ruth Popper’s ancient Buick was there, and Bobby Lee’s battered Toyota pickup—of course it was still early by Thalia standards. Duane didn’t even know where Anne Cameron lived—probably she had taken an apartment in Wichita Falls, which would be the sensible thing to do.

  “She’s not here,” Ruth Popper informed him, the minute he stepped in the door. “She won’t be here today—you just wasted a trip to town.”

  “What is she babbling about?” Duane asked Bobby Lee—though he knew exactly what Ruth was implying.

  “She’s talking about the new girl with the pointy tits,” Bobby Lee said. “Your bride to be, according to some people, at least.”

  “I don’t have a bride to be,” Duane said. “You’re the one with the fresh bride—didn’t you just marry a girl named Jessica?”

  “Don’t mention Jessica or he’ll start bawling,” Ruth said. “It’s a tragic story and I don’t need to hear it for the twentieth time.”

  “Can’t you just do your crosswords and let us alone?” Bobby Lee asked. He was chewing on a matchstick and did not seem to be close to tears. In fact he seemed to be in a fairly good humor, though, as Duane
knew from long experience, that could change in the blink of an eye. Since the loss of his left testicle due to cancer some years earlier, Bobby Lee had been, to say the least, emotionally volatile; his prosthetic replacement for the lost ball had not turned out to be every woman’s cup of tea.

  “Jessica has taken up with Darren Connor, remember him?” Bobby Lee asked.

  “I do, how come he’s out of jail?” Duane inquired. A few years earlier his daughter Julie had been involved with Darren Connor, who, fortunately, had been jailed in Oklahoma for having robbed a filling station and beaten the proprietor nearly to death with a tire iron.

  “If it’s just Darren you have nothing to worry about,” Duane said. “Darren will violate his parole any day now and you’ll have your wife back.

  “If you want her back, that is.”

  “I guess I’ll figure that out if she shows up.”

  “Where was Jessica from—I don’t believe I ever heard you say,” Duane asked.

  “Odessa, the worst town in Texas for a girl to be from,” Bobby Lee said.

  “Why’s that?” Ruth asked. Sometime earlier the staff had bought Ruth a big magnifying glass that came with a little stand so Ruth could adjust it and see her crosswords more clearly. Though proud of the glass, Ruth seldom used it, preferring to peer dimly at her crosswords. That way she could write in whatever word took her fancy.

  “Why’s what?” Bobby Lee asked—lately his ability to concentrate had been fitful. Often he forgot his own questions before anyone could even attempt to answer them.