Duane's Depressed (35 page)

The man waiting outside was Bobby Lee. The moment Duane looked at him he knew there had been a death. Bobby Lee wasn’t wearing his sunglasses. He looked stunned and white and blank.

“Who’s dead?” Duane asked. “Is it Dickie?”

Everyone in his family drove much too fast—always had—but for recklessness on the roads none of them had ever been in a class with Dickie. All through Dickie’s teenage years he and Karla had been half afraid to answer the phone at night, for fear that there would be a voice on it telling them their oldest child was dead.

“Not Dickie—it’s Karla, she was killed instantly,” Bobby Lee said.

“Killed instantly by what?” Duane asked.

“By a head-on with a truck,” Bobby Lee said. “The truck driver’s dead too. The impact threw him out of the cab and he broke his neck when he landed.”

Duane’s bicycle was leaning against the wall of the doctor’s house. He got it and turned toward the street.

“All right, I’ll be right home,” he said. “I thank you for coming to tell me. I’ll see you at home.”

Bobby Lee was stunned anew. His face showed it.

“Your wife’s dead,” he said. “You mean you’re going to ride a bike all the way to Thalia?”

“Bobby, it’s just twenty miles—that don’t take long on a bike,” Duane said.

“But your kids are crying their eyes out,” Bobby Lee said. “All except Jack—we can’t find Jack.”

“Jack’s hauling pigs,” Duane said. “I know where to leave word for him. You go home now and tell the kids I’ll be there in two hours.”

“But if you’d just ride in the pickup with me you could be there a lot quicker,” Bobby Lee said. His lip was quivering. He seemed about to sob, and probably had been sobbing.

“Besides, it would be company for me,” he added. “I don’t know what I’m going to do without Karla.”

“None of us know what we’re going to do without Karla,” Duane said. “But you go on back and tell the kids I’m on my way. I’d just like to be by myself for a little while, before I get into it all.”

He put his arm around Bobby Lee’s shoulder, and Bobby Lee gulped and a few tears leaked out of his eyes.

“I guess you’re right—she’s gone, so what’s the hurry?” he said.

“Do we know how fast she was going when she hit the truck?” Duane asked.

“No, but it wasn’t slow,” Bobby Lee said. “The BMW’s crumpled up like that car Princess Diana died in.”

“I see,” Duane said.

Duane carefully adjusted his helmet before he got on the bicycle and was about to begin the long ride home when Dr. Carmichael came out of her front door and called out to him. He was already in the street but he circled back and drifted up the sidewalk to her front steps. She said something, but he couldn’t hear it. He had to remove his helmet in order to be able to hear.

“Duane, I’m very sorry to hear about your wife,” she said. “It’s tragic news for you and your family.”

The doctor’s large eyes seemed larger as she looked at him. She didn’t try to touch him, but she was clearly upset.

“This is all just topsy-turvy,” Duane said. “She was the one that was full of life, and I’m the one that’s running on empty. It should have been me that died.”

“Well, but it wasn’t,” the doctor said.

BOOK THREE
The Walker and Marcel Proust

1

I
T WAS THREE MONTHS
before Duane found the little piece of note-paper that Dr. Carmichael had handed him a minute or two before he learned that his wife had been killed. Amid the flurry of funeral preparations, the wailing of his two daughters, the stunned silence of his grandchildren—at least the older ones—he had absently taken the note out of his shirt pocket, along with his checkbook and a few receipts, and tossed it on the desk in his study. It was not until mid-June, when he was finally getting around to grappling with his income tax, that he opened a letter from his accountant and found the note. He had evidently mailed it with some miscellaneous receipts. The accountant, not knowing what it meant or whether it was important, thoughtfully sent it back to him.

When Duane first looked at the note, written in an unfamiliar handwriting, he was puzzled. He assumed the accountant, being overcautious as accountants were likely to be, had sent him the scrap of paper by mistake. The words on the paper meant nothing to him at all. They read: “Marcel Proust,
Remembrance of Things Past
, Kilmartin trans.”

Duane didn’t understand the “trans.” Since Karla’s death he had been confronted with many things, practical and otherwise, which seemed in no way connected to himself or to his life. The puzzling note seemed only to be another such incongruity. He was about to throw it away when the memory came back to
him. Dr. Carmichael had been impatient to get him out of her office, but when he asked her for a book he might read to help him combat his sense of futility, she had written the note and handed it to him. Then he had stepped outside, seen Bobby Lee bereft on the sidewalk, and learned that he had lost his wife.

Duane carefully tucked the note with the name of the book on it into his billfold. He had not yet been back to see Dr. Carmichael. Karla’s funeral was held on the Monday when he would have had his next appointment, so he had been forced to cancel that appointment and so far had not found time to make another. He meant to, eventually, but felt no real urgency about trying to cure himself now, if that was what he had been doing when he was seeing the doctor regularly. The one rule he had clung to from that time was the rule about not riding in cars, pickups, or other motorized vehicles. After Karla’s funeral he had walked from the church to the graveyard, a move that scandalized the town to some extent. As he was walking the short half mile between church and graveyard he glanced at his watch and saw that it was exactly three o’clock, the hour at which Dr. Carmichael would have been admitting him had Karla not been killed on the highway. He felt a faint regret—he would rather have been in the quiet peace of Dr. Carmichael’s office than where he was, but that pleasing, sustaining interlude had receded into the realm of the unattainable. Ahead, in the bare, wind-scoured cemetery, the hundred or so people who had come to pay their last respects to Karla Moore were trying to park their pickups or waiting, stiff in their funeral finery, for him to arrive. Barbette and Little Mike had come from Oregon, but they no longer seemed part of the family, a fact that was sadder even than Karla’s death.

Duane arrived, and Karla was buried, while the strong wind tossed the ladies’ hair and blew one or two hats off the heads of those who had been incautious enough to wear them. It was a spring day, but the winter had been dry in the main—the grass in the bare cemetery was only just tinged with green.

Once the last prayer was prayed, the last hymn sung, and the coffin lowered, Duane walked home and began to deal with the maelstrom of detail—practical, legal, familial—that follows
upon a human death. At first he stayed at home, in the big house, to reassure the girls and the grandkids. He felt Karla would have wanted him to be there to help the children, although the only children who spent much time with him were Willy, Barbi, and Bubbles. Loni and Sami hadn’t been as close to their grandmother, and the babies, Little Bascom and Baby Paul, soon forgot Karla and made Rag into a surrogate grandmother, a role Rag accepted with good cheer. With Karla gone she considered herself undisputed mistress of the household, a claim no one raised much of a challenge to. Nellie had been wooed away from the Weather Channel by a country music station in Fort Worth that needed a female DJ with a sexy voice, which Nellie had—she raced up to see her babies on the weekend and then raced back to her turntables and her microphones. Julie, bored with banking, fell in love with a barbecue magnate from Abilene, a man she met at Mayfest, a local frolic held annually on the courthouse lawn. His name was Walt—he was a kind and rather mournful man who aspired to be a chef but found himself stuck in the unwanted but profitable niche of the region’s best barbecue caterer, in constant demand during the warm months at rodeos and family reunions. Walt could seldom resist his own barbecue, and had the belly to show it.

Duane stayed at home because he thought he must, but he could not sleep in his old bedroom, where he had spent so many years with Karla. The bedroom seemed like a cavern where even the air was dead. He kept remembering his last night there with Karla, when he had simply got up at 3
A.M.
and walked away. After two nights, raked by memories, he gave up on the bedroom and moved himself onto the big couch in the den, where the big television was. Sometimes Barbi would show up in the middle of the night, dragging her quilt; she had virtually stopped eating since Karla’s death, a thing worrisome to everyone except Duane, who thought the little girl was just upset and would eat when she got better. Usually, at night, when she showed up with her quilt, he could get her to eat a bowl of cereal or a peanut butter sandwich. Willy and Bubbles and Barbi all talked to him about their grandmother, all trying in their different ways to puzzle out the meaning of death and the possibility of there being
some kind of life beyond it. Bubbles, who had been the merriest of the grandchildren, was starkly realistic about her grandmother, who, in her view, was now becoming a skeleton in a hole in the ground. Willy, softer than his sister, didn’t quite want to believe that—he thought his grandmother’s spirit might exist and be mainly in the greenhouse, because she had liked to garden so much. Barbi had learned, somewhere, the concept of reincarnation and believed firmly that her grandmother was living already in the body of a great bird. Once Karla had taken Barbi to a lake nearby where there was a flock of pelicans—Barbi was now convinced that Grandmother had become a great white pelican who soared and circled over the house at night, keeping watch on everyone, while living at the lake during the day.

“And she eats frogs,” Barbi assured her grandfather. “Little green slimy frogs. She scoops them in her scooper and gulps them down.”

Duane slept on the couch in the den for three months. Occasionally Willy or Bubbles would come in, crying, wanting to talk about their grandmother. Once in a while Julie, who was working as a booker for Walt’s barbecue business, would stay home for a night or two and come and cuddle with him. Nellie would stay home once in a while too, but when she did she drank too much and went, hungover, back to her job.

Duane asked Rag if she would like to move into the house, so she would be handy in case of emergencies, but Rag declined.

“I need my space—I need my
Nick at Nite
,” Rag said. “They’ve been rerunning
Davy Crockett
at one in the morning. Fess Parker, remember him?”

“I remember old Fess,” Duane said.

He got Rag a beeper and carefully instructed all the older children in its correct use. He also cautioned them not to bother Rag unless they really needed her, an injunction that was constantly disobeyed. Bubbles would beep her if she couldn’t find a pair of socks that matched.

“I ought to get more money if I’m on twenty-four-hour call,” Rag complained.

“I’ll give you more money,” Duane said.

After three months, when the children were sleeping all
night again, and Barbi eating normally, Duane would quietly leave the house about midnight and bicycle out to his cabin; sometimes he would wake up in time to cycle in and help Rag get them through breakfast; but in the cabin he slept deeply and dreamlessly—sometimes he didn’t awake until the bright sunlight poured through the windows. He had a phone put in the cabin, in case of dire emergencies, but preferred to rely on a state-of-the-art pager, on which Rag would leave voice mail messages, in case something urgent came up. The first message went: “These kids are fighting like tigers, how can I reach the SWAT team?”

Duane pedaled in, to find that the kids had made up their differences and were playing video games. Dickie reacted to his mother’s death by working around the clock and then around the clock again. Duane gave him a beeper too, in case there were major problems at one of the rigs, but Dickie lost the beeper the next day and never paged him a single time. Jack had driven grimly away from his mother’s funeral and disappeared. No one had heard from him since that mournful day, but Duane didn’t worry about Jack very much. He might be in Mexico or he might be in China, but Jack would survive.

Time began to do its work. The family began to heal. Things became as normal as they could be, without Karla.

Duane, still walking or pedaling, began to spend more time at his cabin. He had done his best to help his family deal with the death of their parent or grandparent. Now a little time needed to be made for the husband’s grief—his own.

2

A
FEW DAYS AFTER
K
ARLA WAS BURIED
the spring seemed to die with her. It grew hot; it stayed hot. Two months from the date of her death the temperature hit one hundred and nineteen, the highest temperature recorded in Thalia since records had been kept.

The children wanted to erect a little cross at the curve in the road where Karla had died. Duane encouraged them: he wanted them to keep Karla in their minds and hearts. So he got some boards and helped the children build the cross and paint it. Even Little Bascom and Baby Paul got to swipe at the boards a time or two with the paintbrush, though they had little idea why they were doing it.

Duane and Dickie dug the hole where they set up the cross, just off the road at the fatal curve. Nellie was home from Fort Worth, and Julie—Walt at her side—from Abilene. Bobby Lee was there, and Ruth Popper, and Annette, and even Lester and Jenny. The only family member not present was Jack, from whom not one word had been heard.

Once the cross was planted Duane pedaled out in the late afternoon to renew the flowers; and then did the same by the grave marker in the little cemetery. But the elements exhibited no mercy. The heat climbed day by day. Whatever flowers they put out in the afternoon were burned and dead by ten the next morning. The grass in the cemetery was brown and brittle by the first of June—the skies, day after day, were utterly empty of
clouds. The road to the cabin was a hot powder—even pedaling along it on his bicycle threw up a high cloud of dust.