Duane's Depressed (10 page)

Of course, he had grown up poor—the struggle to make a living had taken his youth. But he hadn’t been poor in a long time—in debt, yes, but not poor. He could have afforded, anytime in the last thirty-five years, to go see the pyramids, or the Siberian oil fields, or the lands of sand. His own secretary, Ruth Popper, who certainly wasn’t wealthy, had taken wing when she was about seventy—Ruth and a younger sister had gone to Egypt, Scotland, China; he, who wrote her paycheck each week, had never seen any of those places. It was only lately that he had begun to feel negligent in some vague way. He had just gone along, like everyone else, doing what he was supposed to do—but no more than he was supposed to do. Without realizing it, he
had been wasting time—years and years of time, time that would never be his again. He had failed to take advantage of the diversity of opportunity that had been, all along, available to him.

“So now what?” he asked, out loud. Shorty looked up at him expectantly.

But it had merely been a question put to himself. He was sixty-two. People were living a lot longer than they had once lived. One old man and three old women of his acquaintance were still walking spryly around the streets of Thalia, all of them in their early nineties. If he could hang on to enough vigor to be walking around on his own when he was in his nineties, then he still had thirty years—and thirty years gave him time enough to do at least some of the things he had never done. He was in good health and needn’t feel, yet, that he had totally cheated himself where his unsatisfied curiosity was concerned. In thirty years a person could do a lot, learn a lot, see a lot. There was no need to panic—not even much need to rush. He meant to take a slow, relaxed approach to his new life. Mainly, to begin with, he wanted to walk around for a while.

Though he had only left his home to walk to the cabin a few hours earlier, it already seemed that he had been gone a long time, and it seemed, also, that he had traveled a good deal farther than six miles. In a way he felt he had crossed a border, entered a new country in which the laws and customs were different from the laws and customs he had lived under all his life. Nothing about his new life was defined very clearly—not yet—but that didn’t bother him, really. His new life, after all, was still less than twenty-four hours old. It had been almost noon of the day before when he had parked his pickup in the cluttered carport and set out on foot to find peace.

It seemed to Duane, sitting in his lawn chair, warm under his poncho, watching the sun rise higher in the clear winter sky, that he had been lucky to find the contentment he felt at that moment so soon and so easily. It was only a six-mile walk from his old life to his new. He had a stove and a small refrigerator in the cabin. He could provision himself for a while with no more provisions than would fit in a backpack. The first thing he had done when he arrived that morning was disconnect the small
radio. He did that immediately, before he even brewed coffee, because he knew it would be just like Karla to call the radio station and concoct some kind of emergency, a sick child or something, so that the radio station would page him.

But he didn’t want to be paged: didn’t want to be answerable. He had been answerable long enough. Now what he wanted was to sit and think, walk and think, lie in bed and think; and not to be in any hurry as he was thinking. He had done what was expected of him all his life, but he didn’t feel that he had to do the expected any longer. He wanted to establish his own priorities and then act on them. Should he go to Egypt first? Or learn to make biscuits first? He had always had the notion that it would be interesting to follow some great river from its source to the sea. Maybe that was what he should do first, take a long trip on a long river.

One thing he knew already was that he wanted to pare down, rid himself of things he didn’t need, such as his pickup. What he was doing at the moment, sitting in a lawn chair, watching the sunrise, was simple and basic. The first thing he wanted to do was eliminate what was unnecessary and excessive. The cabin he sat by was already as simple as it needed to be. There was a stove, a small fireplace, a refrigerator, a single bed, a card table, two chairs, a nail to hang a coat on, two fishing rods, an almanac, a twenty-two, an axe for cutting firewood, and some overshoes. The radio was the only thing in the cabin that he really didn’t need, and he had already unplugged the radio.

Duane knew already that simplicity was a big part of what he was seeking now, in his life. For as far back as he could remember he had spent his days wading through clutter, fighting for air in a way. His home, his office, his pickup each contained an overabundance of clutter. Just stepping into his office and seeing the piles of bills, envelopes, mail, circulars, catalogues, contracts overwhelmed him. At the cabin he had exactly what he needed: a dog, a chair, coffee, a warm poncho, and no more. He even had a small bathroom, a luxury put in at Karla’s insistence—the cabin at first had had no bathroom.

“No bathroom?” she said. “Ye gods! What if I’m paying you one of my rare visits and need to go?”

Duane shrugged. “There’s six sections of land here,” he said. “You could probably go find a place to go somewhere on it.”

“Yes, and get snakebit, ye gods!” she said.

Rather than argue about it for years he had put in the commode and the shower. But he would not allow Karla to hang curtains.

“Duane, what if somebody was to drive by and see you?” she asked.

“The only way they can drive by and see me is if they drive off this hill,” he pointed out. “And if they drive off this hill it won’t matter if they did see me, because they’ll be dead.”

Karla raged about the cabin for about a year and then gave up. The only improvements Duane had added since then was to drive two more nails in the wall, to hang coats and slickers from.

Now, so far as he was concerned, the cabin was perfect. There were windows on all four sides, to let in the light and allow him to see what the weather was doing. The windows also made it easy for him to keep an eye on the flats below. Road hunters had to be watched—they didn’t always honor the season and would sometimes pick off an unwary deer if they thought they were unobserved. From now on he meant to keep a stern watch on them.

The sun rose higher, the morning wore on; Duane finished one cup of coffee and then a second—except for the few moments it took him to pour the second cup of coffee, he didn’t leave his chair. Well to the northwest a dark layer of cloud was forming; it might be that colder weather was hurrying down the plains. It occurred to him that he probably ought to chop a little firewood that afternoon; there was a mesquite thicket a couple of hundred yards to the south that would provide him all he needed. It was too bad he had forgotten the bacon, though. With a half pound of bacon and a can or two of beans he would be set up fine, if it should happen to get sleety or wet.

After a lengthy nap Shorty got restless and decided to investigate the rocks just off the edge of the hill, where a family of ground squirrels burrowed. Shorty considered the ground squirrels intruders, and the ground squirrels considered Shorty a
bothersome pest. One of the squirrels would sit on top of a boulder and scold Shorty roundly, chattering in indignation.

“Live and let live, Shorty,” Duane said. “Those squirrels got here first.”

Gradually, as the morning wore on and the dark clouds to the northwest edged closer, a thought with equally stormy implications began to edge into Duane’s mind. When he walked off that morning at three-fifteen he had assumed he would take a long walk, perhaps spend most of the day at his cabin, and then walk back in and eat dinner with his family. That would be his new pattern: alone, exploring the country during the day, and a meal with his family at night. He made himself a can of tomato soup for lunch, and, while he was eating it, realized that he didn’t want to go back and have dinner with his family. He didn’t want to go back and spend the night in his home in Thalia. He didn’t want to go to his office and see what checks or bills might have come in the morning’s mail. The change he felt in himself was more profound than he had first supposed it to be. His larder was undersupplied—it consisted of three more cans of soup, a can of English peas, and some coffee. He was going to have to walk in and buy food and some toiletries at some point. He kept a toothbrush at the cabin but no razor. The stormy thought that came to him was simple enough: he didn’t want to live at the big house with his family anymore. He wanted to live in his cabin, alone except for Shorty. The process of change that began when he had locked his pickup and put the keys in the old chipped coffee cup was more serious than he had supposed. He hadn’t been just walking for amusement: he had been walking away from his life.

When the conviction struck him that he wasn’t going back, he felt again the feeling of relief that had come to him that morning when he first stepped out of his house. He had walked away from his life—and it seemed to him that he had waited until the last possible minute to do it, too. He didn’t know why he felt that way, but he
did
feel that way. Any later, even a few weeks, and he might not have been able to do it. He might have stayed trapped in the same strong fishnet of routine and habit that had bored him for at least the last twenty years, if not longer. As he felt himself
flooded with relief for the second time that day it seemed to Duane that his legs had simply taken independent action. While he had been sitting calmly at the dinner table, explaining to his grandchildren that walking was just healthy exercise, his legs and feet had been preparing for revolutionary action, and now they had taken it. Karla, in her shock that he would leave the house on foot at three-fifteen in the morning, had been right, her instincts sound. It wasn’t just a momentary restlessness that had carried him out the door and out of town. Without exactly knowing it he had reached a point in his life where he had to live differently if he was to live at all, and his feet and legs, somehow recognizing that fact before he had been able to face it consciously, had hurried him away and saved him.

Although geographically he had only gone six miles—in fact he could look out of the south window of the cabin and see not only the town of Thalia but the very roof of the house where he had slept last night—he knew that in emotional terms he might already be in Egypt or India. It had never before struck him so forcibly that distance was not really a matter of miles. His family, most of them probably just about to begin their normal day of television and fights and trips to Wichita Falls, had no idea yet that he had ceased to live among them. Only Karla knew it, and even Karla just suspected it. She couldn’t know it for sure, because he himself had just come to realize it within the last few minutes. Walking away was exactly what he had intended to do, but the intention had been so well submerged inside him, deep in his feelings, that he hadn’t realized it was there until, in the quiet of the cabin, it had suddenly surfaced, and surfaced powerfully, like a whale rising.

Then the sun vanished—the clouds from the northwest had just arrived. The little cabin was not well insulated. In a few minutes Duane felt the temperature begin to drop. He put on his coat and picked up the axe.

“Come on, Shorty, let’s go cut some firewood,” he said. “You and me had better get to work.”

Shorty, excited to be going somewhere with Duane, his favorite person, briskly led the way to the thicket of mesquite, on the slope of the hill to the south.

13

“W
E AIN’T AS WELL EQUIPPED AS
I
THOUGHT
, Shorty,” Duane said, an hour later. Despite the plummeting temperature he had worked up a good sweat cutting the abundant mesquite limbs into fireplace-size chunks. He had a respectable pile of nice burnable mesquite, but the cabin was two hundred yards away and he had no way to transport the firewood to the cabin except in his arms.

“We need a good wheelbarrow, or maybe a wagon,” he said to the dog, who was watching a hawk circle low over the hill, hoping to surprise a quail or a small rabbit or even a good-sized rat—there were plenty of rats living under the vast archipelagos of prickly pear which dotted the plain to the south. Shorty knew he couldn’t get the hawk but kept an eye on it anyway.

“Maybe I could fix up a travois—make you a sled dog,” Duane said, but, for the moment, Duane filled his arms with as much mesquite as he could carry and walked to the cabin. He came back and got three more loads before he had a pile of firewood that satisfied him. With a wheelbarrow or a small wagon he could have moved as much in one trip. It was mildly aggravating to realize how many basic tools it took just to enable one man to live a simple life.

Then he went back six more times to the woodpile he had created at the edge of the thicket. He decided his reflection about tools had been incorrect. It had been based on the
premise that there was some kind of hurry, and that convenience, not simplicity, was the basic, prime good in life. He was so used to that way of thinking, had proceeded on that premise for so long, that he had to twist himself around mentally in order to see that it didn’t have to be that way. A huge abundance of firewood was only a short walk away. In an hour or less, each day, he could carry more than he could possibly burn. In a week of steady work, even without a wagon or a wheelbarrow, he could have firewood stacked almost to the roof of his cabin. There was no reason to hurry about it, or to spend money on tools, when the one tool he really needed—his axe—he already had. The one thing he needed to get, next time he was home, was a file, so he could sharpen the axe.

“An axe don’t stay sharp forever,” he said to the dog, who decided he was being told to get those ground squirrels. Shorty went flashing off. He was so happy that Duane hadn’t put him in the pickup and taken him back to Juan, Jesus, and Rafael that he couldn’t refrain from frisking as he went about his duties—or what he supposed to be his duties.

The hawk that had been hunting near the mesquite thicket had been joined by its mate. Just as Duane was stacking his last armload of firewood the two hawks sailed by him and dipped off the edge of the hill. He looked down on their backs as they rode the wind and scanned the valley below.