When the Light Goes Read online

  BY LARRY MCMURTRY

  When the Light Goes

  Telegraph Days

  Oh What a Slaughter

  The Colonel and Little Missie

  Loop Group

  Folly and Glory

  By Sorrow’s River

  The Wandering Hill

  Sin Killer

  Sacagawea’s Nickname: Essays on the American West

  Paradise

  Boone’s Lick

  Roads

  Still Wild: A Collection of Western Stories

  Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen

  Duane’s Depressed

  Crazy Horse

  Comanche Moon

  Dead Man’s Walk

  The Late Child

  Streets of Laredo

  The Evening Star

  Buffalo Girls

  Some Can Whistle

  Anything for Billy

  Film Flam: Essays on Hollywood

  Texasville

  Lonesome Dove

  The Desert Rose

  Cadillac Jack

  Somebody’s Darling

  Terms of Endearment

  All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers Moving On

  The Last Picture Show

  In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas

  Leaving Cheyenne

  Horseman, Pass By

  BY LARRY MCMURTRY AND DIANA OSSANA

  Pretty Boy Floyd

  Zeke and Ned

  LARRY MCMURTRY

  When the Light Goes

  A NOVEL

  SIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2007 by Larry McMurtry

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  First Simon & Schuster trade paperback March 2008

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  Designed by Karolina Harris

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  McMurtry, Larry.

  When the light goes : a novel / Larry McMurtry.

  p. cm.

  Sequel to: Duane’s depressed.

  1. Older men—Fiction. 2. Thalia (Tex. : Imaginary place)—Fiction. 3. City and town life—Fiction.

  4. Texas—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3563.A319W47 2007

  813′.54—dc22 2006050821

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-3426-6

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-3426-1

  eISBN: 978-1-4391-2650-9

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-3427-3 (pbk)

  ISBN-10: 1-4165-3427-X (pbk)

  For James

  For Curtis

  For Gail

  To conquer isolation is the aim of most villages . . .

  SMALL - TOWN MAYOR, FRENCH,

  QUOTED BY JANET FLANNER IN PARIS JOURNAL II

  1

  “WOW, LOOK AT THOSE TWO!” the young woman exclaimed—by “those two” she seemed to be referring to her own stiffening nipples, plainly visible beneath a pale shirt that showed her small breasts as clearly as if she had been naked.

  “Hard as little pickles,” she said pleasantly, standing up to shake Duane’s hand.

  “I’m Annie,” she added. “Annie Cameron—and you’re Mr. Moore—or I certainly do hope you’re Mr. Moore.”

  Annie Cameron looked alert and smart, wore no makeup, and had her dark hair pulled back in a ponytail.

  Duane had just returned from Egypt. He had only that moment stepped into the Thalia office of his small oil company, and he had never seen the young woman with the hard-as-little-pickles nipples before. A dark green Lexus was parked outside the office—a car he had also never seen before.

  “See any good belly dancing while you were in Cairo?” Annie asked—probably she realized that Duane was momentarily at a loss for words.

  “I didn’t get around to the belly dancing,” he admitted, wondering how this smart-looking, rangy young woman with the delightful smile had found her way to his old office in Thalia. It had been his only office until he had more or less retreated—both from the oil business and from family life as he had lived it for forty years—to a cabin on a nearby hill. His elder son, Dickie Moore, now ran the drilling company from a larger and more modern office in Wichita Falls, where the company’s masses of equipment—trucks, pickups, pulling machines, drill bits, cables, extra pipe and the like could be housed until needed.

  Very little active work got done in the Thalia office, which made the sudden, vivid presence of Anne Cameron even more of a mystery.

  Anne Cameron looked Duane directly in the eye for a moment, and then slipped back into her seat behind a new, expensive-looking computer.

  “Just let me finish this one graph,” she said. “I’m checking some wells Moore Drilling dug in Young County in the early Seventies.” She clicked rapidly for a minute or two and then Duane heard the low hum of the printer.

  “I find I can’t be very social until I’m at a good stopping place in whatever analysis I’m doing,” she said. “I’m just too much of a perfectionist—my mother says my perfectionism is why I’m single.”

  “She may have a point,” Duane said.

  He felt at something of a loss. Yesterday he had arrived in Brooklyn, on a freighter from Alexandria, Egypt. The freighter was called the Tappan Zee. This morning he had flown to Dallas, and then on to Wichita Falls, where, two weeks earlier, he had left his bicycle chained to a sapling in the airport parking lot. On the long bumpy flight to Dallas he had begun to worry about the bicycle, an expensive machine made exactly to his specifications. Yet he had left it vulnerable to anyone with a chain-cutter, and there were plenty of those in the oil patch. They could easily have snipped the chain and taken the bike. His relief, when he saw that his bike was still there, was great. He unchained the bike and rode it through August heat the twenty-two miles to Thalia. Thanks mainly to the fact that his bicycle hadn’t been stolen, he was in a fairly upbeat mood. Two of his own trucks passed him as he was pedaling, but neither driver gave him so much as a toot of the horn. They were all well used to seeing the boss on his bicycle—besides, in practical terms, he was no longer their boss: Dickie was their boss.

  Duane badly needed a shave and a shower but felt he might as well stop by the office for a minute, to let everyone know that he was back. He expected to find his small Thalia crew at one another’s throats—that was their usual condition. Earlene, the much fired, much rehired secretary, would be there, misfiling things. Ruth Popper, edging into her mid-nineties now, would be rocking in her corner, doing crosswords that she was too blind to really see. And Bobby Lee, who had worked for Duane since they were teenagers, would be on the outs with Earlene or Ruth or both.

  Instead, when he stepped into the office, he found Anne Cameron and her stiff nipples. Besides the nipples there was also the expensive new computer in an office that had been all but abandoned by the young powers-that-be at Moore Drilling.

  Suddenly Anne stopped clicking at he
r keyboard and looked at Duane with doubt in her expression.

  “Is it because of my titties that you’re looking that way, Mr. Moore?” she asked. “I hope you’re not thinking I’m flirty. Sometimes I let myself daydream about Ruel, which is why my little pickles poked up. Ruel was my sexiest boyfriend ever.

  “In fact he was my only sexy boyfriend. Most of the time I dated computer geeks.”

  Duane could think of no reply.

  “I always mean to dress conservatively, but then I don’t,” she added. “It’s my California heritage, I guess. I don’t have big boobs, so why wear a bra? What do you think?”

  Duane thought that Anne Cameron, nipples or no, was a huge improvement on what he had expected to find when he pedaled up to his office.

  He didn’t say it, though.

  “I’ve been to Egypt,” he reminded her. “I didn’t get around to the belly dancing but I did see the pyramids. Now I’m home and I think I need a nap.”

  Anne Cameron looked relieved, if not entirely convinced.

  “Dickie said you’d be mighty surprised when you saw me,” she said.

  Duane felt tired.

  Annie was clicking rapidly when he went out the door.

  2

  DUANE’S BIG HOUSE on the edge of Thalia—it was the spacious ranch-style home where he and Karla, his wonderful wife of forty years, had raised their four children and most of their nine grandchildren—was only a few blocks from the office where Anne Cameron was busy on the computer. What exactly she was doing on the new, pricey computer Duane could not say.

  His wife, Karla, had been killed two years before, in a head-on collision with a milk truck on the curve of a narrow Texas farm-to-market road. She had been on her way to Dallas for a day of shopping—had she survived she would have undoubtedly brought home lots of expensive clothes to stuff in closets already tightly stuffed with expensive clothes.

  Duane was on the back steps of his house, attempting to dig his house keys out of the small backpack, which contained his passport, a change of clothes, two changes of underwear, and a small paperback guide to Cairo and its environs, when he realized that he didn’t really want to go into his house, where, at the moment, no one lived at all. He wanted a shave and a shower but he didn’t want to perform either activity in this big, darkened, silent house.

  Ruth Popper, technically still his employee but, untechnically, probably his oldest and closest friend in the town of Thalia, lived only a few blocks away—indeed, in strict truth, everyone in Thalia lived only a few blocks away. It was not a particularly spread-out town. Though Ruth had felt free to criticize Duane’s behavior virtually every day for fifty years, he nonetheless felt sure she would allow him the shower and the shave. Then, refreshed, he could bicycle out to his cabin, six miles from town, and watch the long August sunset from the edge of his hill.

  Though now nearly blind, Ruth had lived in her small house so long that she could move about it unerringly, or almost. A year before she had stumbled over a footstool that wasn’t where it was supposed to be, breaking her left arm in two places but sparing her hips at least.

  As usual Ruth blamed Bobby Lee for this setback.

  “Bobby Lee was the last person to sit on that footstool, so it’s no wonder he left it where it would trip me,” she pointed out. Ruth and Bobby were bitter, lifelong rivals for Duane’s attention—each would automatically blame the other for any error made in the operation of the drilling company—and, over the decades, thousands of errors had been made by the various employees of Moore Drilling.

  “Ten a day, at least, for forty-one years, if somebody would like to put a calculator on it!” Duane said once.

  Nobody wanted to put a calculator on it.

  When Duane rang her doorbell Ruth began a slow and cautious approach to her front door.

  “Hold your horses! Hold your horses!” she said, several times.

  “I only rang once,” Duane pointed out, when Ruth finally opened the door. “I did hold my horses.”

  “Yes, but you’re impatient by nature,” Ruth told him. “I guess I know that much about you.

  “Were the pyramids worth it?” she asked, when he stepped inside. Ruth had gone to Egypt with her sister Billie—the sisters had also gone to Russia and China and various other places—and had strongly encouraged Duane to start with the pyramids if he ever set out to see the world.

  “The pyramids were worth it,” Duane assured her. “They were the most worth it of anything I’ve ever seen in my life—or am ever likely to see. May I use your shower?”

  “They don’t give away water in this town,” Ruth reminded him, sharply. “What’s wrong with your shower?”

  “It’s in my house,” Duane reminded her. “Going to Egypt was easy, but going into my house is hard.”

  “Oh, help yourself, Duane,” Ruth said. “You could use a shave too while you’re at it.”

  “How do you know I need a shave?” Duane asked. “You can’t see well enough to see my stubble.”

  “It’s the way you sound, Duane,” Ruth assured him. “You sound all growly when you need a shave.”

  Duane, never one to waste water, shaved quickly and then took a steaming hot shower and emerged refreshed. He had had his change of clothes laundered on the big ship; he felt perked up and ready for a brisk ride out to his cabin.

  “Why can’t you go into your own house, Duane?” Ruth asked, as he was at the door.

  “It’s the pictures on the icebox door,” he said. “Mine and Karla’s whole life together is on that door. The kids. The grandkids. Nellie being crowned homecoming queen. Little Bascom showing off his first tooth. Karla . . .”

  He had to stop for a bit, at the thought of his late wife.

  “Karla and me, getting drunk in Colorado,” he said. “Karla and me when we were young and happy.”

  “And middle-aged and happy?” Ruth asked.

  “Middle-aged and struggling, but hell! At least we were still married.”

  “It’s a refrigerator door, Duane—stop calling it an icebox, it dates you,” Ruth said. It was an attempt to get Duane’s mind off Karla, about whom, she knew, he felt a lot of guilt. After all, if he hadn’t parked his pickup and started walking everywhere, and then had gone so far as to move out to his cabin, Karla might not have been speeding eastbound just as the milk truck came speeding westbound, into the same curve.

  Duane caught himself just in time. He backed away from the subject of Karla and their happiness or unhappiness, as traced by the many family pictures stuck on the icebox door.

  “By the way, Ruth,” he asked, “who’s this Anne Cameron who seems to be running the Thalia office now?”

  “She’s not running the office,” Ruth said. “She’s a geological analyst—she went to MIT and Caltech too. Unless I miss my guess she’s also your next wife.”

  “That girl? No way,” Duane said. “She’s younger than my daughters—way younger.”

  “So what?” Ruth came back. “Most men at your age marry women who are younger than their daughters. It’s perfectly normal.”

  “Even if it is, what if I don’t want a next wife?” Duane asked, a little too loudly.

  “No, you’d rather take showers at my house than face the fact, which is that Karla is dead and your children are grown up and gone. Your grandkids are gone too, and they’re also nearly grown up. You’re a family man with an empty nest. What you need to do is start a new family with a smart young geological analyst with a couple of good degrees.

  “And you don’t need to bark at me, either,” Ruth reminded him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He often barked at Ruth and then apologized for his rudeness. She had, after all, been one of his most maddening employees for over forty years.

  “It’s all right, honey,” Ruth said. Sometimes she called Duane honey and sometimes he called her honey, in acknowledgment of the fact that they had meant a lot to one another for a long time—for most of their lives, in fact.

 
“I bet you’re just jet-lagged,” Ruth ventured. “When my sister and I flew home from Russia I was jet-lagged for a whole month. Nobody could put up with me.”

  “I’m not jet-lagged—I came home on a ship, remember?” Duane said. “But I still don’t want to go into my house and I have no idea why you think I should marry this young woman named Anne. I just met her half an hour ago.”

  Ruth Popper didn’t reply. For a woman in her nineties she was remarkably unlined, a fact that she attributed to her lifelong passion for crossword puzzles.

  “There’s nothing more relaxing than a good crossword,” she often said. “A good crossword takes your mind off serious stuff, like death, for example. It’s thinking bad thoughts that gives a woman lines.”

  “Duane, are you still being counseled by Jody Carmichael’s daughter?” she asked.

  “Yes—I hope I am,” Duane said.

  “Then can’t you ask her to explain why you won’t go into your own house even long enough to take a shower?” Ruth asked.

  “She hasn’t explained it because I haven’t admitted it to her,” Duane said. “Anyway, I know why I don’t like to go into my own house—it’s because I miss all the people who used to live there—the kids and the grandkids and even Rag.”

  Rag, now dead, had been the family cook. She had never been easy to get along with but she was the family cook.

  “A person who would miss Rag is a person who is barely hanging on to his sanity,” Ruth told him. “You go along now, Duane. I want to watch my shows.”

  3

  DUANE STOPPED for a few minutes at the Kwik-Sack, where he bought a dozen eggs, a pound of bacon, some coffee, a small bottle of Cutty Sark, and three packages of small crumbly doughnuts with powdered sugar on them. As he pedaled slowly out of Thalia, on the dirt road that led to his cabin, he began to regret not having mentioned to his psychiatrist, Honor Carmichael, that he had developed an aversion to his house in Thalia. It would be at least two weeks before he could mention it to Honor because she and her lover Angie Cohen were vacationing in Maine for the month of August. Angie Cohen’s family owned an island off the Maine coast. Honor’s eccentric father, Jody Carmichael, who ran a crossroads convenience store at a dusty intersection in the oil patch some eight miles from Duane’s cabin, informed him that owning an island off the coast of Maine meant that not only were Angie’s family very rich, but had been rich for a long time.