Chapter 2

Duane's Depressed
by Larry McMurtry

(Page 2 of 4)

Before leaving to go chase down her husband, Karla put in a call to Mildred-Jean Ennis at the beauty parlor — Mildred-Jean was the person to check with about sudden fatalities in the community, the reason being that her beauty parlor was right across the street from where they parked the local ambulance. Karla was so upset by the thought of Duane walking around in a norther that she felt a panic attack coming on — calling Mildred-Jean might be a way to keep herself on an even keel until she found out what lay behind her husband's strange behavior. When it came to local disturbances Mildred-Jean was at least as reliable as the Weather Channel was about the weather. It didn't take ambulance-level emergencies to prompt her interest, either. She was a solid source of information about adulteries, and even mild flirtations seldom escaped her notice.

"My antennae are always out; that's what antennae are for," Mildred-Jean liked to say; besides that she was a psychic, who sometimes gave card readings when she wasn't styling hair. Mildred-Jean hailed from Enid, Oklahoma, a garden spot by comparison with Thalia, in her opinion, but, unfortunately, she had ended up in Texas when her passionate romance with a crop duster named Woody suddenly lost altitude and deposited her on a dusty corner by Highway 79.

"Well, I just thought somebody might have died this morning," Karla said. "Most people seem to die in the morning rather than the afternoon — I don't know why that is."

"Nope, nobody died — not that there ain't two or three ignorant sons-of-bitches around here who deserve to have their asses killed." She was thinking particularly of Woody, who lived a few blocks away with a redhead he had formed an unseemly relationship with.

"Well, I just wondered. Bye," Karla said, and hung up. She didn't want to give Mildred-Jean an opportunity to start in about Woody — hearing about other men's treachery was not likely to help quell her panic attack, not while her husband, a male himself, was wandering the streets.

"Maybe aliens came down in a spaceship and took possession of Pa-Pa's mind," Willy offered, helpfully. He was resting his fingers again.

"It could be aliens but I bet it's oil," Karla said. She raced into her bedroom and shot the TV by her bed all the way up the cable to the Financial Channel, convinced that the Saudis had opened the floodgates at last, producing a tidal wave of oil that would drop the price of West Texas crude to around two dollars a barrel, ruining everybody in Texas, or at least everybody in Thalia. Anxiety about the Saudi tidal wave had been a constant in the oil patch for years; nobody knew when it would come but everyone agreed that once it did come, ruin would be complete: no more platinum AmEx cards, no more frequent-flier miles, no more fun trips to Las Vegas or Bossier City.

Apparently, though, the tidal wave still hadn't come. The commentators on the Financial Channel evinced no sign of panic.

If it's not death and it's not oil I guess he wants a divorce, Karla thought. No sooner had the notion entered her head than the last few barricades separating reason from panic were swept aside. He wanted a divorce: she knew it, should have known it immediately. There wasn't anything wrong with Duane: he just wanted a divorce and was too chicken to come in the house and spit it out.

Julie was in the kitchen making herself and Bubbles bacon sandwiches when Karla wandered in, looking for her car keys. Now that she knew what the truth was she was in no special hurry to go chase her husband down.

"Bacon sandwiches, I love 'em," Bubbles said. "I wish they'd kill every pig in the world so there'd always be plenty of bacon sandwiches."

Bubbles, eight, had frizzy blonde hair and a blue-eyed gaze that melted the hardest hearts.

"I don't think the world needs to lose a whole species of animal just so you can stuff yourself with grease, Miss Bubbles," Karla said.

Bubbles regarded her grandmother coolly. They did not always see eye to eye.

"You shut up that talk or I'll never hug your wrinkled old neck again," Bubbles said, although without rancor. She was dipping a table knife into a big jar of Miracle Whip and licking the Miracle Whip off the knife blade.

"Thanks a lot. Who bought you that stupid purple dinosaur you sleep with?" Karla said, as she stood in the door. She glanced at Julie, hoping her daughter would offer Bubbles a word or two of correction, but Julie was gazing absently out the window, wondering what she was going to do for fun until Darren Connor got out of jail.

"If she's this rude at eight, what's she going to be like at fifteen?" Karla asked. "You need to be thinking about things like that, Julie, instead of just wasting your life on violent criminals."

"Bacon and Miracle Whip and Barney are the three best things in the whole world," Bubbles said airily, waving the knife around as if it were a wand.

Julie was wishing her mother would leave, so she could pop an upper — handling her kids in the morning was really tiring work.

Once in her little white BMW, Karla found that her panic attack was subsiding a little. Duane's sudden desire for a divorce was annoying, but it probably wasn't the end of the world. She whirled out of her driveway in a cloud of dust, as usual, but then sat with the driver's-side window down, smelling the dust and feeling the cut of the norther, wondering why he suddenly wanted a divorce. He hadn't been especially restless lately — Karla was even reasonably sure he didn't have a girlfriend. One of her many spies would have immediately alerted her to any romantic development. He must already be in his office; there was no sign of him on the road. She had known Duane for much of her life and had been married to him just over forty years. They had never in their lives been strangers to each other, she and Duane; but, once she thought about it a few more minutes, sitting in her car with the motor idling, she realized that the part about them not being strangers wasn't quite true. Living with Duane had become sort of like living with a stranger: a pleasant stranger, to be sure, and an attractive stranger, but not a person she could truthfully say she knew very much about. They still lived in the same house, ate at the same table, talked about the same kids, worried about the same crises, even slept in the same bed, but what did they know of each other now, really? Not much, it seemed to Karla, a thought that aroused only a faint sadness in her. Somehow forty years of constant intimacy had betrayed them finally, in some sly way. The very fact of being together so long had imperceptibly swirled them farther and farther apart. If such a realization had come to her sooner, she might have been the one to act, the one to ask for a divorce.

Coming out of a panic attack was not much different from awakening from a nightmare. Once you woke up and realized you were really lost or dead, then the things of the earth slowly settled back into place. By the time Karla had made the short drive to Duane's office she had begun to feel a little like a fool. Duane might not even want a divorce. He might just have been low on gas and walked back to the office to get something he had forgotten. He might have sneaked off on foot so as not to stir up the grandkids, who were pretty demanding where their Pa-Pa was concerned. Reassured, Karla gave her hair a lick or two with a comb before going into the office.

Ruth Popper, the old secretary whom Duane refused to push into retirement, sat in a chair in one corner of the office, peering through a big magnifying glass at a book of crossword puzzles. Ruth had a dictionary balanced on one knee and a pencil between her teeth. The big magnifying glass was attached to the chair Ruth sat in. The whole office staff and even a few of the roughnecks had chipped in to buy Ruth the big magnifying glass, but it soon became apparent that they had wasted their philanthropy.

"Hell, she couldn't see a crossword puzzle if she was looking at it through the Mount Palomar telescope," Bobby Lee said, putting the matter caustically. A year or two back, testicular cancer had forced Bobby Lee to surrender one ball, a circumstance that had rendered him notably testy. Bobby Lee, the drilling company, and to a degree everyone in Thalia were almost as anxious about the other testicle as they were about the coming tidal wave of Saudi oil. If the cancer should come back and force him to surrender the other ball, the general view was that Bobby Lee would get two or three young women pregnant just prior to the operation and then buy an assault rifle and shoot down everybody he had ever quarreled with, which was, in essence, the whole population of Thalia.

"If he sees he's gonna lose that other ball I expect him to fuck up a storm and then get seven or eight guns and take us all out," Rusty Aitken told Duane. Rusty was the local drug dealer, though officially he just ran a body shop on the west edge of town. Karla didn't like Rusty Aitken, largely because her own children had done their best to make him a rich man, and had largely succeeded.

Bobby Lee was right about Ruth and the magnifying glass, though. All she could see when she held the crossword puzzle book under the glass was an occasional wavy line.

"It's all right," Duane invariably said, when some busybody pointed out that he was employing a blind woman who sat in a corner all day pretending to do crossword puzzles. "Moving the magnifying glass back and forth gives her a little something to do." A young secretary named Earlene did all the actual secretarying. Earlene and Ruth did not have a harmonious relationship, mainly because Ruth would sneak over during Earlene's lunch break and hide whatever lease orders Earlene had been working on when she left for lunch.

"I'm just testing her," Ruth said, when Duane chided her about this habit. "A good secretary ought to be able to find anything in this office in three minutes, hidden or not."

"Even if you hid it in your car?" Duane asked — though almost blind, Ruth still drove herself to work, making use of a tortuous network of back alleys and avoiding all contact with what she called the "big roads." The worst she had done so far was knock down a row of garbage cans.

"Well, if it's in my car I guess it's stuff I need to work on myself, in the peace of my home," Ruth informed him. She did not enjoy having her methods questioned — she never had.

"Where's Duane?" Karla asked, peeking into the office.

Earlene was typing and Ruth was swiveling her magnifying glass back and forth. She had just caught a glimpse of the word "Mississippi" an excellent word, and she wanted to count the letters and see if she could fit it into her puzzle anyplace. Karla's sudden entry caused her dictionary to fall off her knee.

"Ain't here; he just stuck his head in the door and said he was going to the cabin," Earlene said, without lifting her eyes from the lease contract she was typing.

The cabin was just a frame shack Duane had built a few years ago, when all their kids and grandkids were temporarily living at home. Nellie, Dickie, and Julie were all in the process of quarrelsome divorces, and Jack — Julie's twin — was serving a twelve-month probation for possession of a controlled substance, in this case four thousand methamphetamine tablets. All the grandchildren liked living in their grandparents' big house, though Nellie's two oldest, Barbette and Little Mike, preferred living in a commune in Oregon, where they had been for the last three years. The children themselves hated living at home and were constantly at one another's throats. Karla, who was auditing a few courses at Midwestern University at the time, audited one in art history and came home one day eager to explain a few new concepts to Duane.

Copyright © 1999 by Larry McMurtry

About the Author

Larry McMurtry is the author of twenty-eight novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove. His other works include two collections of essays, three memoirs, and more than thirty screenplays, including the coauthorship of Brokeback Mountain, for which he received the Academy Award. He lives in Archer City, Texas.