When the Light Goes Page 3

  Duane, Earlene, Ruth and various others who had to work with Bobby thought they might be seeing the beginnings of Alzheimer’s, but no one had so far mentioned that prospect to Bobby Lee himself.

  “Why is Odessa the worst town in Texas for a girl to be from?” Ruth reinquired.

  “It’s because of the natural gas smell,” Bobby Lee told her. “It comes right up through the cracks in the sidewalk. Odessa girls grow up smelling it and it makes them real snarly.”

  “Where’s Earlene?” Duane asked. Being in his old office was beginning to depress him, and might have depressed him more if Earlene had been there—nonetheless he felt he ought to inquire.

  “Hospital, gallbladder,” Ruth said. “She won’t be back until next week.”

  “If your wife has really taken up with Darren Connor why are you so calm?” Duane asked. “Why don’t you just go shoot the son-of-a-bitch? It’d be a service to the county and the state.”

  “I’m not a very good shot,” Bobby Lee admitted. “Remember that time I tried to shoot a bug and shot my toe off instead?”

  Ruth began to cackle. “I remember,” she said. “You came walking in with that bloody foot and Earlene fainted and fell into the water cooler. As I recall she had to have quite a few stitches.”

  Then she stopped and looked at Duane.

  “That was the day you parked your pickup and upset the whole town, particularly Karla,” she said.

  Duane vaguely remembered the shot-off little toe—by no means the most self-destructive thing he had known Bobby Lee to do. It had occurred on the day he parked his pickup and became a walker. But he didn’t want to discuss any of that with Ruth and Bobby Lee. He didn’t want to discuss anything with either of them. In fact he had begun to regret that he had even come to town. A day or two of reflection on his hill was what he needed. After all, he had been all the way to Egypt and back.

  “Where is Anne?” he asked.

  “Oklahoma City,” Bobby Lee said. “She and Dickie went up to some kind of conference. An oil and gas conference, or something.”

  “I’ve been to one or two of those,” Duane said. “They always have a big one about this time of year.”

  “I bet you’re glad that you retired,” Bobby Lee ventured. “Now you won’t have go running around to conferences.”

  “He’s not glad that he retired,” Ruth countered. “Being retired just means being left out—especially to a big shot like Duane. Going to conferences in Big D or Oklahoma City or somewhere sure beats riding around on a bicycle in this heat, if you ask me.”

  “He didn’t ask you,” Bobby Lee pointed out, but it was a light, almost automatic dissent. Whatever Ruth said, Bobby Lee contradicted—and vice versa. It was exactly the kind of argument he had expected to hear when he walked into the office yesterday. Having Anne Cameron talk about her nipples—even though it startled him—was a lot more interesting.

  “What are you thinking, Duane?” Ruth asked. “I know you’re thinking something.”

  “I was thinking something,” Duane said. “I was thinking we’ve all been in this town too long.”

  The remark seemed to startle both Ruth and Bobby Lee.

  Before they could think of a comment, Duane went out the door.

  7

  SINCE IT WAS so close by, Duane decided to take a look at the garden plot behind his house. He and Karla had always gardened—people whose people had been through the Depression always gardened, a tradition he and Karla enjoyed carrying on. When she was killed Duane put much effort into creating what he called the Karla Laverne Moore Memorial Garden. The produce grown was free to anyone who wanted to take it. For one growing season Duane had, by common consent, the best garden ever grown in Thalia. People drove from as far as one hundred miles away to marvel at the Karla Laverne Moore Memorial Garden. They took home a little kale, or a few tomatoes, corn, snap peas, onions, or whatever took their fancy. They were very respectful—no one abused the privilege they had been offered. Poor people on the low side of the poverty line came fairly often. The poor folks were nervous about coming so often—but Duane told them not to be. The garden was so large and various that even if they came every day what they took would hardly make a dent in the abundance.

  In the second year, though, Duane’s impulse had flagged. He didn’t plant as much as he had planted in the first year—and he hadn’t tended it as well. He was slow to respond to an increase in grasshoppers. The garden was still a fine garden, but it wasn’t the extraordinary garden it had been the first year.

  Now of course it was August. The garden was burned to a crisp—it was time to plow it under and hope that when planting time rolled around he would find fresh inspiration and be able to produce a really exceptional garden again.

  With the garden on his mind he had zipped past his house without giving it much of a glance, though he did notice that the lawn needed mowing. A local boy was supposed to see to the lawn—evidently he needed prodding. As he drove past the large empty garage on the south side of the house he noticed to his surprise that the garage wasn’t entirely empty: a chocolate brown Mercedes coupé was parked in it. His daughter Julie drove a chocolate brown Mercedes coupé—perhaps she was home, though nobody at the office had mentioned having seen her, which probably meant that Julie had decided to bypass Ruth and Bobby Lee on her visit.

  The big garage had once held eight cars. With only one parked in it, the place had a lonely look.

  He and Julie had always been close: in his memory of parenthood, girls had been easy, boys hard. While crossing the Atlantic on the freighter, it occurred to him that his children had sort of skipped a stage—the stage of maturity that most people experienced between age twenty and age forty. They had passed from adolescence straight into middle age. The mere fact that all his children were now in their forties was a shocking thing in itself. In the young adult years all four of them had occupied themselves with drugs and dubious lovers—usually both at the same time. And yet, somehow, the girls had righted themselves and made what, so far, appeared to be stable marriages to nice, wealthy, ambitious men. Dickie had taken over the oil company successfully, and Jack, the lone rambler, was in the Alaskan Arctic, doing what nobody knew.

  Duane glanced once more at the Mercedes and pedaled away; but, at the first intersection, he swung the bike around in a big curve and went back—what was he thinking of, to ride off from his own daughter without even giving her a hug? The thought crossed his mind that Julie might be there with a lover, and might not want to see anybody from Thalia. But he was not anybody: he was her father. If a lover was involved, so be it.

  The back door was unlocked, so Duane eased inside.

  “Honey?” he said. Then he saw Julie, in a bathing suit, playing solitaire at the kitchen table. Her hair was wet, but she jumped up at once, and gave him a warm smile and a big hug.

  “I quit smoking, Daddy,” she said, while they were hugging. “That one big victory to report. How were the pyramids?”

  “They’re amazing,” Duane said. “You and Goober and the kids ought to go see them for yourselves.”

  “I should have gone sooner—it’s too late now,” Julie said.

  Duane was surprised. Julie was forty-three or thereabouts: why would it be too late for a trip to the pyramids?

  “I don’t understand—is somebody sick?” he asked.

  Julie shook her head and turned back to her card game.

  “We’re healthy as horses,” she said. “The reason it’s too late for the pyramids is that I’m going into a convent. I’m going to be a nun.”

  Duane was so startled that he flinched.

  “Honey, did I hear you right?” he asked. “You’re going to be a nun?”

  “You heard correctly,” Julie said. The firm set of her jaw reminded him of her mother.

  “Want some sun tea?” she asked. “I just made some.”

  “I’ll take a glass—do you mind if I sit down?”

  “Daddy, sit down—it’s you
r house,” Julie reminded him.

  Duane sat down and drank his tea.

  8

  WHEN HONOR CARMICHAEL, Duane’s psychiatrist, finally returned from her vacation in Maine, Julie’s decision to become a nun was the first thing he mentioned in his first session. He had supposed he would talk about his trip to Egypt, and maybe a little about Anne Cameron, the young woman with the bold nipples, who had come to work for Moore Drilling as a geological analyst. But, before he knew it, the session was almost over and he had mainly talked about his daughter’s determination to enter a convent in Kentucky, a long way, in his opinion, from where her children were being raised.

  Honor Carmichael said almost nothing in the session. When he expressed his worry about the effect of Julie’s decision on her two teenage children, Willy and Bubbles, she made no response. If anything, Honor seemed depressed herself. She usually smiled; this time she didn’t.

  “Lots of women enter convents, Duane,” Honor said, when the session had only a minute or two to run. “It gets men out of their lives, which is often a benefit.”

  “I guess,” he said.

  “It’s a benefit,” she insisted. “Do you remember what you were seeking the day you parked your pickup and walked out to your cabin for the first time?

  “Gosh,” he said. “I don’t really know what I was seeking. I just remember that it felt good to be by myself.”

  “Did it feel peaceful?”

  “Real peaceful.”

  “Then maybe peace is what you were seeking then and what your daughter’s seeking now.”

  “Could we go back to four sessions a week, at least for a while?” he asked.

  “No, we can’t, Duane!” Honor said, with something like anger in her voice.

  Honor stood up—she didn’t smile.

  “Sorry,” Duane said. “Sorry.”

  Then he let himself out the door.

  9

  ONCE IN A WHILE Ruth Popper liked to make Duane dinner—always round steak, cream gravy, pinto beans, fried okra, and corn on the cob when it was in season. Once or twice a year she would even invite Bobby Lee to these dinners. With the three of them there much gossip was exchanged and conversation rarely flagged.

  Slowly, over the last year or two, Duane had begun to actually cook the dinners himself, since Ruth was blind enough to be a little uncertain around the stove. The round steak might be as raw as if it had just been sliced off the animal, and the gravy might be little more than warmed-over milk. Ruth sliced the okra, which gave her the comfortable illusion that she had actually prepared the meal.

  “I’ve been greedy all my life,” she remarked, on this occasion. The sun had set—the three of them ate off a small table on Ruth’s screened-in porch.

  “We know that, why bring it up?” Bobby Lee asked.

  “I’m trying to explain to Duane why his daughter wants to be a nun,” Ruth snapped. “She’s tired of material things. She’s been living in North Dallas over a year, and she’s probably out shopping nine days out of ten. All day, year in and year out, buying things she doesn’t need and that nobody needs. Why not be a nun and sing hymns instead.”

  “Nuns don’t sing hymns, Ruth,” Bobby Lee said. “They mainly just chant them dumb old chants.”

  “Julie told me she never enjoyed sex,” Duane said, as he was ladling out the gravy. He was mildly annoyed with the other two for rattling on. He wanted them to appreciate the gravity of the situation.

  “And that’s not all,” he said. “As soon as she’s trained she wants to be sent to El Salvador or somewhere in Central America.”

  “Whoa, that’s not good—the death squads down there like nothing better than to shoot a few nuns,” Bobby Lee said.

  “That’s why I’m worried,” Duane said.

  “How’d the sex part come up?” Bobby Lee asked. “I remember when Julie was bouncing her little butt off so many pickup seats that you and Karla thought she might be kind of a nympho.”

  “I’m not surprised she doesn’t like sex,” Ruth said. “I always suspected that about her.”

  Duane almost dropped the bowl of gravy.

  “You always suspected it?” he asked.

  “Don’t take that tone with me—I do know a few things,” Ruth said. “And pass the gravy.”

  “If you suspected it I wish you’d mentioned it,” Duane said. “We did think maybe she liked sex too much.”

  “No, I liked sex too much—it was my downfall,” Ruth said.

  Bobby Lee dropped his steak knife.

  “I’m not going to be able to digest my food if we don’t stop talking about sex,” he said. “I happen to like sex, but what good’s it ever going to do me?”

  “I doubt that either of you men ever really liked sex—I mean just pure messy old fucking,” Ruth said.

  “Ruth, you said the F-word,” Bobby Lee said. “I come over here to eat a Christian meal and now a ninety-five-year-old woman’s throwing around the F-word. Maybe the Holy Rollers are right after all. Maybe the world is coming to an end.”

  There was a little pond behind Ruth’s house, from which the first chirpings of frogs were beginning to be heard. As they watched a great blue heron settled majestically at the edge of the pond.

  “That heron comes by most nights,” Ruth said. “Otherwise that pond would be solid frogs.”

  Duane applied himself to the round steak and gravy, plus two tomatoes, some cucumber slices, and crisp-fried okra. He felt deeply frustrated. Julie said her sister, Nellie, was willing to board Willy and Bubbles. Nellie had four kids of her own, so there’d be lots of cousin-support. But, for Duane, nothing was as he had thought it to be. When Julie told him she had never really liked sex, she told it as matter-of-factly as if she were saying she had never really liked spinach.

  Julie was a beautiful woman. Most of the young men in and around Thalia had been in love with her at one time, a fact Duane reminded her of.

  “I know,” Julie said. “I suppose I encouraged them, the fools. I fucked a zillion of them but the most I ever felt was fond.”

  Then she informed him that her large husband, Goober Flynn, was gay.

  “He’s a nice man, really,” Julie said. “And he’s very supportive of my being a nun.”

  All this Duane wanted to tell Ruth and Bobby Lee, and yet, before he could get his revelations out, Ruth, who always managed to be the center of attention, began to shock both her guests with revelations of her own.

  “Everybody thought I was just the mousy little coach’s wife,” she said. “They thought a little affair with Sonny Crawford was the best I could do—Sonny, by the way, was the worst lover I ever had. He was a really terrible fuck.”

  “I don’t want to know none of this,” Bobby Lee said. “I always had the hots for Julie myself, but I knew it was out of the question. Now I find out she wouldn’t have liked it even if I had managed to get her.”

  “Shut up, I’m talking,” Ruth said. “My second lover was Lester, you know.”

  “Lester Marlow?” Duane and Bobby Lee said, in chorus. Lester was the local banker, or had been. Everybody pitied his loyal wife, Jenny, because Lester himself was such an awkward clown. During the boom of the 1970s there had been an embezzlement scandal. Lester had narrowly escaped time in the pen. He had been forced to resign from the bank and puttered around going to garage sales and selling his finds at the big flea market in Fort Worth.

  “It was when Lester was desperate that we started doing it on that cot in my garage,” Ruth said. “There was something about how desperate he was that made it work. But Jennie caught us and we had to stop—Lester couldn’t afford to have Jennie divorce him. That’s when I snagged the Methodist preacher. There’s nothing like screwing a preacher, if you ask me. It just felt absolutely dirty and hot, you know?”

  “Well, lucky you, Ruth,” Bobby Lee said, with some bitterness. “Sounds like you have had the best sex life of any of us.”

  “I had a decent sex life,” Duane said—he regretted
the words before they were well out of his mouth.

  “Duane, there’s no such thing as a decent sex life,” Ruth said. “The whole point of fucking is that it’s not decent.”

  “If I hear you say the F-word one more time I’ll scream,” Bobby Lee said.

  “These are modern times, you know,” Ruth said. “Old ladies can say the F-word if they want to.”

  “I’m glad Karla’s dead,” Duane said. “If she’d known one of her own daughters didn’t like sex it would just about have ruined her life.”

  He and Bobby Lee did the dishes, while Ruth rocked in her rocking chair and listened to the chorus of frogs. Ruth couldn’t see well enough to get her plates really clean. Sometimes Duane would take a plate out of Ruth’s cabinet and find various foodstuffs stuck to it.

  There was a sound from the porch.

  “I hope she didn’t fall,” Duane said.

  When the two of them went back to the porch to say good night they saw Ruth Popper sprawled dead on the floor, her head almost touching the screen of the porch.

  “Oh my God!” Bobby Lee said. “The F-word one minute and the next minute dead.”

  The local clinic was two blocks away and Duane called it, but he knew Bobby Lee was right. Between one breath and another, more or less, Ruth Popper had departed.

  Duane felt a certain relief—he wasn’t quite sure why.

  10

  RUTH HAD REQUESTED only a graveside service, which was held on a day when the wind was so hot it almost raised blisters on the skin. Only about a dozen people were there. Anne Cameron, wearing a simple black dress, stood a little apart from the group. The simple black dress made her look a lot better dressed than anyone else at the funeral, or anyone else in Thalia, for that matter.

  Bobby Lee, whom Duane had never seen in a tie before, had on a bright yellow one.

  “I figure Ruth wouldn’t have wanted me to dress gloomy,” Bobby Lee said.

  “You’re safe then—you didn’t dress gloomy,” Duane said.