“Women have a heartless side to them, don’t they?” Duane said.
“This whole town’s heartless,” Lester said. “Nobody’s losing any sleep over the fact that I have to stand trial for trying to protect their interests.”
“It’s about time for my grapefruit juice,” Duane said. He didn’t think he could stand to listen again to Lester’s stories about how hard he had tried to protect people’s interests.
“I wish you’d talk to Jenny,” Lester said. “She respects you, Duane.”
“She’s on the Centennial Committee,” Duane said. “I guess I’ll see her if she comes to the meeting tonight.”
Duane had often sat through softball games that he had no interest in, just to watch Jenny Marlow pitch. She had single-handedly increased the attendance at local softball games by several hundred percent. Even people who considered Jenny too opinionated enjoyed watching her pitch.
As a committeewoman she was, if anything, too fertile with ideas. She was in charge of floats, and thought there ought to be a float of the courthouse. Others took the view that there was no need for a float of the courthouse, since the courthouse itself was there for all to see. Jenny was one of the few Republicans in town, and her sense of patriotism extended all the way down to the county level.
“That courthouse is the oldest building in the downtown area,” she pointed out. “It’s the symbol of the county. It’s what unites us as a people. There has to be a float of it.”
“I didn’t notice that we was even united as a people,” Duane said, but he had no real objection to the courthouse float, since Jenny herself would do all the work. She was a whirlwind of energy and for that reason was rarely left out of any civic undertaking. She ran the concessions at football and basketball games with relentless efficiency.
The fact that Duane voted for the courthouse float irritated Karla, who took it as a sign of weakness. Karla thought floats were boring.
“You just let women trample all over you,” she said.
“Well, I let some women trample all over me,” Duane said.
“That’s right, pretty ones,” Karla said. “I don’t notice you doing many favors for ugly girls.”
CHAPTER 11
IN ORDER TO GET LESTER OFF THE PHONE, DUANE promised to drop by the bank that afternoon. He knew it was in his interest to keep Lester soothed as much as possible.
There was absolutely nothing to do. Two years earlier there would have been fifty people passing through the office every morning—promoters bringing him investors, investors trying to get him to take their money. Now they had vanished, leaving only Ruth.
Duane went out to see what she was doing. As usual, she was writing letters at a furious pace. There was a large stack of letters on her neat desk, each with its envelope stamped and ready beside it.
“Do I need to sign any of these?” Duane asked. He had not dictated any of the letters and had no idea what they concerned.
“If you do I’ll ask you,” Ruth said, giving him a testy look. She didn’t like him interfering with the mail in any way.
Since he rarely saw any of it, the mail Ruth produced worried Duane almost as much as the mail she threw away. She seemed to conduct an elaborate business from his office, but there was no indication that it was his business.
Though she knew the secrets of everyone in town, Ruth herself was a total mystery. Since leaving Sonny, nearly twenty-five years before, she had had no visible love life, but she seemed happy and looked fresher every year.
“Maybe she just has hundreds of friends we don’t know about,” Karla said, when Duane brought up the matter of Ruth’s voluminous correspondence.
“She never leaves town,” Duane said. “Where would she get hundreds of friends?”
“She leaves town,” Karla said. “I see her running up and down these dirt roads all the time.”
Duane knew he should just shut up. Nevertheless, he didn’t shut up. Little Mike was toddling around trying to hit the cat with a pair of pliers somebody had left in the kitchen. The cat, whose name was Leon, easily eluded Little Mike.
“I don’t think Ruth Popper makes hundreds of friends jogging on these roads,” Duane said.
Minerva passed through unexpectedly and swatted Little Mike with the Cable Guide. He was too surprised to cry.
“I don’t know why you think a baby that small needs to play with pliers,” she said.
“Duane don’t trust Ruth,” Karla said, attempting to draw Minerva into the argument.
“Me neither,” Minerva said. She flopped down in a chair and began to scan the Guide, hoping to find some sumo wrestling.
“Why don’t you trust her?” Duane asked.
“Because she lives in a trailer house,” Minerva said. “Anything could go on in a trailer house.”
“But anything could go on anywhere,” Duane said.
Sometimes the arbitrariness with which women took positions made him feel like he might go crazy. Both Minerva and Karla excelled at arbitrary positions.
Little Mike abandoned the pliers and hurried out of the room. He liked to put space between himself and Minerva whenever he could.
Minerva got up, took inventory and discovered they were out of barbecued pork rinds, a necessity of life as far as she was concerned. She ate them by the thousands while watching TV, washing them down with vodka and grapefruit juice.
“If you’re even suspicious of Ruth, I think you ought to get help,” Karla said. “There must be a psychiatrist somewhere that you’d like.”
“You sure didn’t like the one you tried,” he reminded her.
“I liked him,” Karla said. “I just decided I wasn’t crazy enough to spend that kind of money on advice. I can get plenty of advice down at the beauty parlor when I want it.”
“Having nobody to talk to but you and Minerva and Ruth would drive anybody crazy,” Duane said.
When he stepped out of his office, Ruth stopped typing instantly. She insisted on total privacy when she was typing.
“Jenny kicked Lester out,” he said.
“I knew that several hours ago,” Ruth said. “I saw Jenny at the post office. I think it’s a mistake. Jenny’s a little vain, and vanity comes before a fall.”
She stared at him sternly.
“That makes one more footloose woman in this town,” she said. “Suzie Nolan is also footloose now.”
“I intend to give them both a wide berth,” Duane assured her.
“I don’t know why we’re even talking about this,” he added.
“Because the oil business has gone belly up and there’s nothing for you to do except sleep with every woman you can find,” Ruth said.
“Could I have a check?” he said. “I think I ought to give Lester a few thousand.”
Ruth tore a check out of the checkbook but didn’t hand it to him.
“How many thousand?” she asked.
“I haven’t decided,” Duane said.
“Why don’t you go see Jacy?” Ruth said.
Duane was very surprised. Ruth had never so much as mentioned Jacy before.
“I doubt she wants company,” he said.
“She might, though,” Ruth said. “I would, if I’d lost a child.”
“I thought you hated Jacy,” he said.
“I don’t hold grudges for thirty years,” Ruth said. “She was just a girl then. Besides, tragedy changes people. She just sits there alone in that man’s big house, grieving for that child. The thought of it preys on my mind.”
“I doubt she’d even remember me, Ruth,” Duane said.
“You remember her, don’t you?” Ruth said. “Why should her memory be worse than yours?”
“I just meant we aren’t friends anymore,” Duane said, feeling that he was losing an argument he had not expected to be having.
“I think you’d rather pick on footloose wives than go help out a woman you used to love who’s had a tragedy,” Ruth said. “You’re scared you’ll fall in love with her again, a
ren’t you?”
“I wouldn’t know how to fall in love with anybody,” Duane said. “I’m too old for it.”
“You never get too old for it,” Ruth said.
“I haven’t noticed you falling in love lately,” he said. “If it’s such a fine thing, why don’t you do it?”
Ruth just looked at him and smiled. She had long had a little crush on him, and because she was so much older they both were free to enjoy its products.
“I’m too broke to fall in love,” Duane added. “I can’t get the fact that I owe twelve million off my mind long enough to get serious.”
“Ten years from now you might not even remember you had this debt,” Ruth said. “But you’ll always remember Jacy, and you’ll always remember me.”
“Why will I have to remember you?” he asked. “Where will you be?”
“I’ll be in the afterlife,” Ruth said quietly. “I just hope you can find someone competent to keep your books.”
Duane took the blank check and stepped out into the blazing sun. Shorty immediately began to jump up and down in the seat and bark his piercing bark.
CHAPTER 12
DUANE CHICKENED OUT ON HIS DATE WITH LESTER Marlow. He gave the five-thousand-dollar check to the drive-in teller and told her to give it to Lester’s secretary. He could see Lester through the bank’s big plate-glass windows. He was running his fingers through his hair, and he looked very unhappy. Duane sped off before Lester could spot him—otherwise he might have rushed out and jumped in the cab, annoying Shorty.
Shorty hated it when people rode in the cab. He regarded it as a place that belonged exclusively to himself and Duane. When someone got in he would often snarl ominously and keep on snarling even while Duane was beating him vigorously with the work glove. If it proved impossible to silence him, Duane would sometimes stop, get out and fling Shorty in the back of the pickup for the remainder of the trip.
For Shorty, having to ride in the back of the pickup was the worst conceivable humiliation. The minute Duane flung him in the back, he would press his face against the cab and keep it there, no matter how long the ride, hoping Duane would give him a chance to atone for whatever he had done.
Eluding Lester gave Duane a brief sense of freedom. He decided to skip lunch, since if he went to lunch he would just have to have familiar conversations with familiar people. Not having to sit in the bank and talk to Lester about his debt was such a relief that he felt a little lightheaded.
Lacking firm plans, he spent the afternoon driving idly along the dirt roads of the county, as he often did when he wanted to avoid everyone. It had been a dry spring and the pastures were parched. Even traveling slowly, the pickup threw up clouds of dust. Duane remembered Jimbo Jackson, with whom he had umpired many a Little League ball game. It was in just such dust that Jimbo had met his death. What kept bothering Duane was that Jimbo had been jogging at all. It spoke of sad hopes. Probably Jimbo thought that if he could get slim he could also become happy, and even out of debt. It seemed so sad to Duane that sometimes his eyes would fill up when he thought about it.
Duane could drive for hours with his mind totally blank. The blankness was very restful, a welcome change from the familiar contest in which his mind pitted what he owed against what he could pay. Sometimes, if he crossed a creek that actually had water in it, he would stop and fish a little. Occasionally he caught a sluggish catfish, which he usually threw back. He fished for peace, not for fish.
But even on the backroads of the county it was not possible to get very far from people he knew. The road cut through one of Junior Nolan’s pastures, reminding him of Suzie Nolan. In the morning the thought that both she and Jenny Marlow had become, in Ruth’s phrase, footloose, aroused a flicker of interest. But it was now afternoon, and when he tried to fantasize something sexual involving either one of them, his imagination was depressingly chaste. It rendered them topless, but not bottomless. He had seen both women hundreds of times, at picnics, barbecues, ball games. He had seen them water-skiing, danced with them at rodeo dances, sat with them at high school plays. Despite it all, he had a paltry stock of images from which to create fantasies—their bosoms faded from view after only a few seconds and a sexless blankness returned.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Shorty,” Duane said out loud.
Shorty was in the middle of a deep nap and merely flicked an ear when he heard his name.
All of Duane’s small rigs were working. From time to time he liked to drop in on his crews unexpectedly to see how many he could catch loafing on the job.
Bobby Lee’s rig was down in the post oaks near the bottom of the county. When Duane drove up, Bobby Lee and four roughnecks were standing around looking dejected. The very sight of them made Duane wish he hadn’t come. No matter when he went out to one of his rigs, day or night, winter or summer, the crew would be standing around looking dejected.
“If I wanted to see depressed people I could have stayed in the bank,” Duane said. “At least it’s air-conditioned.”
“Broke a bit,” Bobby Lee said hopelessly.
“Unheard of!” Duane said, trying to joke a little. Broken bits were a fact of life in the oil business.
Bobby Lee looked near tears, and the four roughnecks stared at Duane dully. A red ice chest full of beer sat on the tailgate of Bobby Lee’s pickup. The roughnecks were very oily. Duane decided that one advantage to going broke would be that he wouldn’t have to look at so many oily people in the course of a day.
“We were just a hundred feet from being down—why did that sonofabitch have to break?” Bobby Lee said.
Duane wondered if Bobby Lee were still stable. Commonplace setbacks seemed to leave him overwhelmed.
“I wish I’d become an airline pilot,” Bobby Lee said.
“I don’t,” Duane said. “You can’t see twenty feet. With my luck I might end up on a plane you were flying.”
Bobby Lee’s myopia was legend. Though only moderately good-looking, he was far too vain to wear glasses. As a result he had had so many accidents that it was more and more difficult to get a crew to work with him. He could not see wire at all and was constantly driving through barbed-wire gates.
Duane had not killed his motor or stepped out of the pickup. He felt disinclined to do either, but at the same time did not want to drive off and leave his crew mired in depression. As the head of the company it was his duty to do what he could for group morale.
“It’s not the end of the world if a bit breaks,” he said. “Fish it out.”
“They never break on Eddie’s rig,” Bobby Lee said.
One of Bobby Lee’s problems was that he was convinced Eddie Belt had a better life than he did. Eddie Belt was just as firmly convinced that it was the other way around. Duane spent a lot of time trying to persuade them that their lives were almost identical, which was, in fact, the case.
“Eddie’s broken forty-two bits since he came to work for me,” Duane said. “How many have you broken?”
“I don’t believe in statistics,” Bobby Lee said haughtily.
“I can probably have Turkey Clay out here in an hour,” Duane said. Dickie, his son, and Turkey, a sixty-year-old roughneck, constituted his trouble-shooting unit. Turkey had been a hard-working, reliable employee until Dickie introduced him to the pleasures of cocaine. Turkey’s response was euphoric.
“All them years I got by on beer and pussy, they just seem like wasted years,” Turkey said. In his euphoria he ran over almost as many gates as Bobby Lee.
“That old man practically eats cocaine,” Bobby Lee said. “Maybe we’ll try fishing that bit out ourselves. I get nervous working with people who eat drugs.”
Knowing that that was about as upbeat as Bobby Lee was likely to get, Duane hastily drove off.
Eddie Belt’s rig was only ten miles to the north. Long before he reached it he knew something was wrong. The generator they used made a noise like an attacking warplane and it wasn’t making its noise.
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p; The only noise that came from the vicinity of the rig was the noise of gunshots. The shots caused Duane to speed up. Eddie had been known to fire a whole crew of roughnecks if he found them incompetent. There was always the possibility that he had just decided to execute them rather than fire them.
Duane’s first glimpse of the location was not reassuring. Four bodies lay motionless under a mesquite tree. It was only when he skidded to a stop that one of the bodies raised its head. The other roughnecks continued to nap.
The gunfire seemed to be coming from a small stock tank about a quarter of a mile away.
“What’s he shooting at?” Duane asked the one roughneck who seemed to be awake.
“Frogs,” the man replied, before lying back down.
“Why isn’t the generator running?” Duane said. “We’re drilling an oil well, aren’t we?”
The roughneck, a spindly lad of about nineteen, seemed annoyed at having to carry on a protracted conversation at a time when he would rather nap.
“The generator ain’t running because there’s baling wire in it,” he said. He pulled his dozer cap over his eyes to indicate that the conversation was over.
“Baling wire?” Duane said. It sounded like fiction to him.
He got out and walked over to the stock tank. It was a good year for bullfrogs. Fifteen or twenty healthy specimens were lounging in the mud near the water’s edge.
Eddie sat on the bank, reloading the customized deer rifle Duane had given him as a Christmas bonus several years before.
“How come there’s baling wire in the generator?” Duane asked. “We don’t bale our oil, we barrel it.”
“I did not put no baling wire in that generator,” Eddie said.
“Do you always hunt frogs with a deer rifle?” Duane asked.
“It’s the most humane way,” Eddie said. “You shoot just under them.”
He proceeded to shoot just under a large frog.
The bullet produced an explosion of mud, which kicked the frog some ten feet in the air. When it came down it didn’t move.
“Now that frog was not even nicked,” Eddie said. “He’s just knocked out. If I wanted to I could go get him, put him in a sack and take him home with me. I could use him as a breeder and he’d do fine.”