With more amusement than alarm, she watched Duane point the pistol into the water.
“Duane, I don’t think you ought to try and shoot your dick off,” she said.
“Why not?” he asked. “It don’t work half the time anyway.”
“Well, I wouldn’t be the one to know about that,” Karla said. “But it’s a small target and if you miss you’ll just ruin our new hot tub.”
She laughed loudly at her own wit. Shorty, excited by the laughter, began to roll around on the redwood deck. He attempted to bite his own tail and came close to nipping it a time or two.
“Don’t sulk, Duane,” Karla said. “You left yourself wide open for that one.”
She stood up and kicked Shorty lightly in the ribs. Shorty was too excited by the pursuit of his own tail to take any notice.
“I guess I’ll go in and see if I can talk Nellie into acting like a parent for a few minutes,” Karla said.
Duane took the gun out of the water. In the far corner of the vast yard the new white satellite dish was tilted skyward, its antenna pointed toward a spot somewhere over the equator. The dish was the most expensive one available in Dallas. Before they had even got it aligned properly Karla had gone to Dallas and returned with a Betamax, a VHS and four thousand dollars’ worth of movies she had purchased from a video store. So far they had only watched two of them: Coal Miner’s Daughter, which Karla and Nellie watched once or twice a week, and a sex movie called Hot Channels.
Duane pointed out to her that it was possible to rent movies. They could even be rented from Sonny Crawford’s small convenience store, in Thalia.
“I know that, Duane,” Karla said. “Just because I’m horny don’t mean I’m dumb. The ones I want to see are always checked out, though.”
However, on her next visit to Dallas she considerately bought only eight hundred dollars’ worth of movies.
Duane had been in the hot tub nearly half an hour and was beginning to feel a little bleached. He climbed out and dried himself and his pistol. He felt weary—very weary. Sometimes he would wake up in the night needing to relieve himself and would feel so tired by the time he stumbled into the bathroom that he would have to sit on the pot and nap for a few minutes before going back to bed. Getting rich had been tiring, but nothing like as tiring as going broke.
The minute Duane climbed out, Shorty stopped rolling around on the deck and raced across the yard to park himself expectantly beside Duane’s pickup. He knew it was almost time for Duane to go to town, and he was ready to roll.
CHAPTER 2
ON THE WAY TO TOWN DUANE GOT ON THE CB AND tried to check in with Ruth Popper, his outspoken secretary, who was actually no more outspoken than Karla, his wife, or Janine Wells, his girlfriend, or Minerva, his maid.
While he was becoming rich, the women in his life had become outspoken. He had stopped being rich, but they had not stopped being outspoken. Any one of them would argue with a skillet, or with whatever was being cooked in the skillet, or with whoever came by—Duane himself, usually—to eat what was being cooked.
He didn’t really want to talk to Ruth, but there was always the faint chance that oil prices had risen during the night, in which case somebody with a little credit left might want an oil well drilled.
The CB crackled, but Ruth didn’t answer. Shorty watched the CB alertly. At first he had barked his characteristic piercing bark every time it crackled, but after Duane had whacked him with his work gloves several hundred times Shorty got the message and stopped barking at it, though he continued to watch it alertly in case whatever was in it popped out and attacked Duane.
Just as the pickup swung onto the highway leading into Thalia, Ruth Popper jogged off the pavement and began to run up the dirt road. Ruth was a passionate jogger. She passed so close to the pickup that Duane could have leaned out and hit her in the head with a hammer—though only if he’d been quick. Despite her age, Ruth was speedy. She wore earphones and had a Walkman, a speedometer, and various other gadgets attached to her belt as she ran. She also carried an orange weight in each hand.
She showed no sign of being aware that she had just passed within a yard of her boss and his dog. Feeling slightly foolish, Duane hung up the CB and watched her recede in the rearview mirror, her feet throwing up neat identical puffs of dust from the powdery road.
Ruth Popper was the only person left in Thalia who had preserved a belief in exercise, now that the oil boom was over. It had taken the greatest bonanza in local memory to popularize exercise among people who had worked too hard all their lives to give it the least thought, but once it caught on it caught on big.
Duane himself started jogging four miles a day, and devoted an evening or two a week to racquetball at the Wichita Falls country club. Roughnecks and farmers, finding themselves suddenly rich, floundered painfully over the county’s gravelly roads in their expensive running shoes.
In the case of Jimbo Jackson, briefly the richest person in the county, a devotion to exercise had tragic results: a truckful of his own roughnecks, on their way to set pipe on one of his own wells, ran over him. Two or three trucks were ahead of them, carrying pipe to other wells, and Jimbo, flopping along patiently in the choking dust, not far from his newly completed mansion, accidentally veered into the middle of the road. The roughnecks thought they had hit a yearling—Jimbo was not small—but when they got out to look, discovered they had killed their boss.
The local paper, in a mournful editorial, advised joggers to keep to the bar ditches—a stance that infuriated Karla.
“The bar ditches are full of chiggers and rattlesnakes,” she said. “What does he think this is, the Cots wolds?”
Duane wondered if it could be Cotswold, Kansas, she was referring to. During the virtually sleepless year when he had driven a cattle truck, Karla had sometimes come with him on his runs. He was just back from Korea; they were just married. It seemed to him he had passed through a town called Cotswold, though it might have been in Nebraska or even Iowa. But it didn’t seem to him that the bar ditches in Kansas could be that much better to jog in than the bar ditches in Texas.
“Duane, it’s in England,” Karla said. “Don’t you remember? We read about it in that airlines magazine the time we took the kids to Disneyland.”
Duane didn’t enjoy being reminded of the time they took the kids to Disneyland. Jack had almost succeeded in drowning Julie on the log ride. Dickie, who hated to spend money on anything except drugs, got caught shoplifting. He tried to steal his girlfriend a stuffed gorilla from one of the gift shops. Nellie disappeared completely, having decided to run off to Guaymas with a young Mexican she met on one of the rides. They stopped in Indio so Nellie could call her boyfriend in Thalia and tell him she was breaking off their engagement. The boyfriend managed to reach Karla and Duane, and the runaways were stopped at the Arizona line.
Nine months later, having married and divorced the boy she had meant to break up with, Nellie had Little Mike, their first grandchild. He did not look Hispanic, or bear any resemblance to the husband she had had so briefly.
“They say travel’s broadening,” Karla remarked, on the flight home from Disneyland.
Duane looked up just in time to see Jack slip two ice cubes from his Coke down the neck of a little old woman who had been brought on board in a wheelchair and dumped in the seat in front of him.
“Whoever said that never traveled with our kids,” Duane said as the old lady began to writhe in her seat. “I’m telling you right now I’ll commit suicide before I’ll go anywhere with them again.”
He glanced at Julie to see what evil she might be contemplating. Julie wore dark glasses with huge purple frames. She had a teen magazine spread over her lap and her hand under the magazine. Duane decided to his horror that she was playing with her crotch.
“What did you say, Duane?” Karla asked. “I was reading and didn’t hear.”
“I said I’d commit suicide before I’d go anywhere else with these kids,” he said.
>
“Duane, don’t brag,” Karla said. “You know you’re too big a sissy even to go to the hospital and get a shot.”
She noticed the little old lady, who was writhing more desperately as the ice cubes worked their way down her back.
“I hope that old lady isn’t going into convulsions,” she said.
Duane had been trying to decide where his duty lay. Should he try to help the old lady get the ice cubes out, which would practically mean undressing her? Should he grab Jack and break his neck? Should he demand that his son apologize? Jack was an ingenious liar and accepted no punishment meekly. The more blatant his crimes, the more brilliant he became in his own defense. Duane began to get a headache. He felt like strangling his son. He wondered if the stewardesses realized that his beautiful little daughter was playing with her crotch. Dallas-Fort Worth seemed very far away.
“Duane, don’t sulk, it was a real nice trip in some ways,” Karla said.
CHAPTER 3
DUANE WAS WELL AWARE THAT HIS IGNORANCE OF the world, and his unwillingness to go and see much of it, were shortcomings that particularly enraged Karla, though why they enraged her he had no idea, since she was every bit as ignorant of the world beyond Texas. He had been to California three times, and she had only been once. He had been to Las Vegas twice and had asked her to go both times. Both invitations had led to fits—the fit being one of Karla’s favorite forms of self-expression.
“No, thanks, the only reason you’re going is to get laid, and I’m not giving you a chance to accuse me of standing in the way of that,” she said.
Duane knew perfectly well she wasn’t standing in the way of it. Karla was a firm believer in sexual freedom, especially for her.
“I just thought you might like to see one of those shows,” he said.
“If I wanta see tits all I have to do is take my bra off,” Karla said.
She didn’t really even have to do that, since her daughter Nellie’s fine young bosom was frequently on view around the house. For almost a year dinner had been eaten to the sound of Little Mike slurping at his mother. Nellie was too lazy to wean him, despite repeated entreaties from Karla, who had not cared for breast-feeding and didn’t enjoy watching it take place.
Bobby Lee, Duane’s number one tool pusher, was the only one who got much of a thrill out of watching Nellie nurse Little Mike or Barbette, the baby girl. With oil at twenty-one dollars a barrel and sinking, there wasn’t too much drilling to do. Bobby Lee had plenty of leisure to devote to watching Nellie nurse her kids. His desire was obvious, but so far Nellie had refused him—and being refused by Nellie was virtually a unique distinction.
Bobby Lee had worked for Duane for over twenty years and made it plain that he hoped to marry into the family someday, although he was already married.
“I don’t know why you’d want to, except that you never have been in your right mind,” Duane said.
He had no serious objections, though. Bobby Lee would make at least as good a son-in-law as the first three Nellie had presented them with.
Karla, however, had plenty of objections, which she aired whenever she could get Bobby Lee alone. Unbeknownst to Duane, she and Bobby Lee had had a messy one-night stand several years back. Duane had been off deer hunting. It left Karla unaffected but caused Bobby Lee to fall madly in love.
The fact that she was completely uninterested in him as a boyfriend didn’t mean—as Karla repeatedly pointed out—that she wanted him sleeping with her daughter, or daughters. Bobby Lee was a small man with mournful brown eyes. If Nellie wasn’t around, the mournful eyes would frequently linger on Julie, who was just coming into bud.
“It does look like, with all the horny women there are in this country, you could find someone not related to me, if you’d just look,” Karla told him.
“What horny women?” Bobby Lee asked. He liked to project an image of asceticism, although he could be found every night at Aunt Jimmie’s Lounge, and Aunt Jimmie’s was not exactly a monastery.
When Barbette was born, two months previously, Karla decided she was going to have to take the weaning of Little Mike into her own hands. In his two years he had shown no interest in restraint, and if he felt his food source threatened there was no telling what he might do to his baby sister.
Karla started kidnapping him every day. She drove him around in her new BMW, plugged in via Walkman to the loudest music she could find in the hope of drowning out his screams. Little Mike threw several bottles out the window, but he eventually broke.
Duane had a deep fondness for the tiny, helpless Barbette. She fulfilled his old longing for a quiet, gentle child. He would sit with her for hours on the deck of the hot tub, shading her with a cowboy hat. Sometimes he dreamed that he and Barbette were living somewhere else—where was never quite clear, though it might have been San Marcos, where he and Karla had once contemplated moving.
His urge to protect Barbette was very strong, and his biggest worry was the twins, who pitched her around like a ball. One day they left her on a kitchen cabinet and went outside to swim. By a miracle of timing Duane came in from work just in time to keep her from rolling off. The shock flooded him with so much adrenaline that he began to tremble; it produced a rage that frightened even the twins, who put on tennis shoes and immediately ran off. They planned to hitchhike to Disneyland and get jobs as concessionaires.
Nellie and Karla, returning from a quick shopping trip to Wichita Falls, accidently intercepted the twins just before they reached the highway. They were in their bathing suits. Both claimed that Duane had threatened to kill them.
“Oh, I doubt he would have,” Karla said, not absolutely convinced. Duane did love that baby girl.
The twins were convinced, though. They didn’t want to go back home. Jack crawled through a barbed-wire fence and ran off into a pasture. Julie calmed herself by appropriating her big sister’s Walkman and listening to a little Barbara Mandrell. Little Mike, sensing an opportunity to regain a lost paradise, clawed his way under Nellie’s blouse and fastened himself blissfully to a nipple.
“Let’s go back to town and get the sheriff,” Nellie said.
“Don’t let that child nurse,” Karla said. “What about his baby sister? She might want something to eat when we get home.”
“I don’t want to go home,” Nellie said. Little Mike was draining her so fast she felt dizzy.
“Nellie, we have to go home,” Karla said. “We live there.”
Meanwhile, Jack had disappeared into the pasture.
“I want to stay with Billie Anne,” Nellie declared. Billie Anne was Dickie’s girlfriend. She worked in a savings-and-loan and had an apartment in the small community of Lakeside City.
Little Mike, not wasting a second, switched to the other breast.
Karla began to blow the horn, thinking it might make Jack come back. Instead, it caused Julie to open the door and slip out. Karla and Nellie were both too agitated to notice her departure. When they got home and discovered she wasn’t in the car, they were dumbfounded. She had been right in the car, listening to Barbara Mandrell, except now they were home and she wasn’t.
Nellie refused to get out until Karla determined whether Duane was still planning to murder his family.
“Don’t kill the motor,” she said. “I might be leaving quick.”
Duane was out by the pool, giving Barbette a bottle. His rage has passed, leaving him only mildly irritated.
“I guess you’d all go off and leave this baby to starve,” he said.
Karla quickly regained the initiative.
“Duane, the twins have run completely off because of you, and Nellie won’t even come in the house,” she said. “You’ll have to go out to the car and promise not to murder her.”
“Have I ever murdered anybody?” he asked. Giving Barbette her bottle gave him a lot of satisfaction.
“No, but you’re not usually under this much stress,” Karla said. “You could try calling that stress hot line in Fort Worth when you fe
el sort of pent up.”
“That stress hot line is for broke farmers,” he said. “It ain’t for destitute oil millionaires.”
It occurred to him, looking at the scrubby oil-stained acres below the bluff, that in a sense he did live on an oil farm, one that was about farmed out.
“Duane, it’s for anybody that’s feeling terrible, like people do when they go berserk,” Karla said. “They ain’t gonna ask if you’re a farmer—they’ll just give you helpful advice, like don’t murder your children or anything.”
“That baby could have been brain-damaged for life falling off the cabinet,” Duane pointed out. “Where’s Minerva? I thought we were paying her to watch this baby.”
“I have no idea where Minerva could have got to,” Karla said. Minerva had worked for them for more than a decade without becoming any more predictable.
“If she comes back I’m going to offer to trade jobs with her,” Duane said. “She can run the oil company and I’ll watch the baby.”
Karla got a blue Magic Marker and wrote the number of the stress hot line on a piece of note paper. Then she stuck the paper onto the cabinet, right by the phone. Duane watched her with a disquieting look of amusement on his face. Karla remembered reading in Cosmo that people who were about to go berserk often seemed perfectly normal up until the moment when they started blasting away with a gun.
That very morning she and Duane had seen a TV report about a Midland oilman who had carbon-monoxided himself in the garage of his new mansion. He had thoughtfully turned off his brand-new security system so that if one of his kids happened to glance at a TV monitor they wouldn’t see him turning black, or whatever you did if you monoxided yourself.
“Duane, Nellie’s just sitting out there wasting gas,” Karla said. “You’re going to have to do something about the twins, too.”
Duane walked Barbette until she went to sleep, and laid her gently in her baby bed. Then he went outside and whistled at Shorty, who was in the pickup in a flash, so excited at getting to take an unexpected trip that he barked his piercing bark a few times.