Duane's Depressed

  Praise for Duane’s Depressed

  “Duane’s Depressed abounds with wonderfully funny characters, all lovingly graced with the lighthearted compassion that is McMurtry’s trademark. . . . Beneath all the humor, however, McMurtry has fashioned a poignant meditation on mortality.”

  —Judith Wynn, Boston Herald

  “The best thing McMurtry’s written since Lonesome Dove.”

  —Alan Dumas, Rocky Mountain News

  “Ultimately one of his most moving [books] . . . In the end, it achieves something like wisdom.”

  —Kevin Bicknell, The Atlanta Journal-

  Constitution

  “Duane’s Depressed is a rumination on aging, grief, love, the purpose of life, and the redemptive power of art. That might sound like heavy going, but Mr. McMurtry’s touch is always light and humorous, even when dispensing sharp insights into the crisis of middle age.”

  —Bob Hughes, The Wall Street Journal

  “Duane’s Depressed has some moments that shed such light on the relationships between men and women that it soothes your soul to read how someone so closely understands the mismatched matches we are. . . . McMurtry talks the talk. His dialogue is Thalia, Texas. And it has meaning and depth and makes his characters people you’re glad to know.”

  —Catherine W. Downing, The Anniston Star

  “The reader is moved by the inconclusive journey of a man who knows that he must change his life but doesn’t know why or how.”

  —The New Yorker

  “The kind of book for which the adjective bittersweet might have been invented. It’s also the best contemporary novel McMurtry has written in years.”

  —Nancy Pate, The Orlando Sentinel

  “Engaging [and] affecting.”

  —Ben Greenman, Time Out

  “Duane’s Depressed may be McMurtry’s strongest writing effort since Terms of Endearment and among the most thoughtful and evocative novels he has produced since The Last Picture Show. . . . Fresh and crisp as a cold north wind, the novel sweeps away standard expectations so many readers have come to have of McMurtry. It offers instead a cogent, thoughtful, sometimes profound examination of the human condition and the human spirit.”

  —Clay Reynolds, Houston Chronicle

  “A celebration of life and the basic instinct to survive. It is a master working at peak form.”

  —Curt Schleier, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  “Duane may be depressed, but readers won’t be. . . . McMurtry . . . is the sort of double-jointed writer who can stretch toward tragedy and comedy.”

  —Ron Charles, The Christian Science Monitor

  “A charming yet bittersweet novel that cuts right to the quick of the human condition . . . [McMurtry has] a writing style that alternately evokes chuckles and probing introspection. . . . It’s with a profound sense of satisfaction that one closes the last page on this trilogy, tinged only by a bit of sadness that the page has indeed been closed.”

  —Dale Jones, Cedar Rapids Gazette

  “A funny, bittersweet, quintessential McMurtry novel—with sharply drawn characters, a lyrical love of McMurtry’s native Texas plains, and wildly funny moments of comic flair . . . moving and mirthful.”

  —Polly Paddock Gossett, The Hartford Courant

  “As welcome as a letter from home, a sad and funny one. . . . McMurtry is a dust bowl Salinger, making his characters our friends, their crises our own, in bare and beautiful prose.”

  —People

  “Marvelous . . . gentle and bittersweet.”

  —Adam Woog, The Seattle Times

  “Alternately funny, bittersweet, and sad, a mix of emotions that McMurtry has all but patented. . . .”

  —William Porter, The Denver Post

  BY LARRY MCMURTRY

  Sin Killer

  Sacajawea’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

  Duane’s Depressed

  a novel

  Larry McMurtry

  SIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS

  Rockefeller Center

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  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 © 1999 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 Paperbacks Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  This Simon & Schuster trade paperback edition 2007

  SIMON AND SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-800-456-6798 or [email protected]

  Designed by Edith Fowler

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover as follows:

  McMurtry, Larry.

  Duane’s depressed : a novel / Larry McMurtry.

  p. cm.

  Sequel to: Texasville.

  I. Title.

  PS3563.A319D8 1999 98-45712 CIP

  813’.54—dc21

  ISBN-13: 978-0-684-85497-7

  ISBN-10: 0-684-85497-X

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-3015-5 (Pbk)

  ISBN-10: 0-7432-3015-9 (Pbk)

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4391-2777-3

  For Karen Kennerly

  BOOK ONE

  The Walker and His Family

  1

  TWO YEARS INTO HIS SIXTIES, Duane Moore—a man who had driven pickups for as long as he had been licensed to drive—parked his pickup in his own carport one day and began to walk wherever he went.

  The carport was a spacious affair, built to house six cars in the days when cars still had some size; now that cars had been miniaturized—as had horses—the carport could accommodate ten vehicles and might have accommodated as many as a dozen if the vehicles had been parked with some care; but care, defined as a capacity for attention to such things as order and propriety, was not something that most members of Duane’s large family had proven to be capable of or interested in—not so far, at least. In the Moore carport cars tended to stack up behind one another, so that the person who had parked in front could rarely get his or her car out without a bitter quarrel, sometimes involving fisticuffs, with the person or persons whose car or cars were parked behind theirs.

  In fa
ct—and it was a fact that had vexed Duane for years—the spacious carport mainly housed a collection of junk: welding tools, old golf clubs, fishing equipment, baby carriages whose tires had been flat for several years, couches and chairs that had stalled, somehow, on their way to the upholsterer, and towering pyramids of objects acquired by Karla or one of the girls at garage sales, department stores, swap meets, or discount malls—objects that had evidently fallen in their purchasers’ esteem before they could even get into the house—though the house too contained comparable pyramids of objects that had made it through the doors but not much farther.

  Contemplation of his own misused carport was one of the reasons Duane parked his pickup one day and began to walk, but it was not the only reason, or necessarily the most important. He had spent almost fifty years of his life in the cab of a pickup, racing through the vast oil patch that extended over much of West Texas, hurrying from one oil-soaked lease to another; but now he was sixty-two and the oil game had lost its thrill, the chase its flavor. He didn’t want to be in the cab of a pickup anymore, because being in the cab of a pickup suddenly made him wonder what had happened to his life. It occurred to him one day—not in a flash, but through a process of seepage, a kind of gas leak into his consciousness—that most of his memories, from first courtship to the lip of old age, involved the cabs of pickups. His long marriage to Karla, their four children, their nine grandchildren, his booms and his busts, his friendships and his few love affairs had somehow all happened in the few brief periods when he hadn’t been in the cab of a pickup, somewhere in the Texas oil patch.

  So, one day in February, with a blue norther cutting through the pastures of dead mesquite like a saw, Duane parked his pickup in the southernmost parking spot in the carport and hid the keys in a chipped coffee cup on the top shelf in the kitchen cabinet. Nobody used that coffee cup anymore—it had sat untouched on the top shelf for years. All Duane hoped was that the keys could be hidden in it for a year or two—that way none of the grandkids could steal his pickup until they grew adept enough to hot-wire it, which ought to be a while.

  Then, pleased with his decision and even rather enjoying the crisp cut of the norther, Duane took the first walk of his new life, a short one of some three-quarters of a mile along a dirt road to his office. His departure was observed only by Willy, the grandson Julie had presented them with only a few days prior to her seventeenth birthday; now Willy was nine. The prospect of great-grandchildren was never far from Duane’s thoughts—or Karla’s either. Willy sat in front of the living room TV, playing a video game called Extreme Rampage—he was merely resting his fingers for a moment when he saw his grandfather walk off down the dusty road. The sight struck Willy as being slightly odd, but he loved Extreme Rampage too much to allow anything to distract him from it for long. He forgot all about his grandfather until his grandmother came into the living room a few minutes later, looking puzzled.

  “Willy, have you seen Pa-Pa?” she asked. “I thought sure I heard his pickup drive up, and his gloves are in the kitchen, but I can’t find him anywhere.”

  “Pa-Pa walked off,” Willy said, his fingers dancing expertly on the buttons of the video game.

  “What?” Karla asked, supposing she had heard wrong.

  “Pa-Pa walked off down that road—that road right out there,” Willy insisted. He didn’t point—matters on the screen were critical—indeed, domination of the world was at stake. He couldn’t spare a hand.

  “Willy, I’ve told you not to lie to me,” Karla said. “Just because your little sister lies to me constantly don’t mean you have to start.”

  “It wasn’t a lie!” Willy protested indignantly. Unfortunately the brief shift in his attention proved fatal: the Ninja Master kicked him off the cliff.

  “Oh no!” Willy said. “I was winning and now I’m dead.”

  His grandmother was unmoved.

  “I’m gonna talk to your mother about you, young man,” she said. “I think you spend too much time playing those dumb video games. They’re screwing up your cognition or something. Pa-Pa’s never walked anywhere in his life, much less on a day when there’s a norther.”

  Willy saw no point in arguing with his grandmother. Grownups who were that old could never be convinced of anything anyway—indeed, all grown-ups had a tendency to deny the plainest facts. One of the few things he and his sister, Bubbles, agreed on was that grown-ups were weird.

  Just as his grandmother was about to leave the room the phone rang and she picked it up.

  “Maybe it’s Pa-Pa—he might be on the cell phone,” she said, but instead it was Julie, mother of Willy and Bubbles. Julie was just returning from visiting her boyfriend, Darren, who was in jail in Lawton, Oklahoma, awaiting trial on a charge of armed robbery and aggravated assault, a charge Julie was convinced was unjust. Julie was making the call from the edge of her parents’ driveway; she was not about to rush into the house without making a few inquiries, not after what she had just seen.

  “Did you and Daddy just have a big fight?” Julie asked. “If you did I’m going back to Wichita Falls and spend the night in a motel.”

  Karla was too surprised to answer right away. She had just put in a peaceful morning watching the international table tennis championships on cable—it was amazing how fast a little Ping-Pong ball could travel if someone from China whopped it.

  “It’s bad enough seeing Darren in custody just because he hit some old fart with a wrench,” Julie said. “I shouldn’t have to come home and be a witness to parental violence.”

  “Julie, Darren was robbing the old man he hit with the wrench,” Karla reminded her. “Darren’s a criminal. That’s why he’s in custody.”

  “I don’t want to talk about that—I want to talk about you and Daddy,” Julie insisted. She was close enough to the house to be able to see into the kitchen, but was not close enough to be able to tell whether there was blood on the walls.

  “Honey, your father and I haven’t been violent in years, and then it was just me throwing things,” Karla told her. “Bubbles is watching Barney and Willy is right here playing video games.”

  “Then why is Daddy walking down the road?” Julie asked.

  Karla threw Willy a quick, slightly guilty glance, but Willy was in space, trying to keep aliens from destroying planet Earth.

  “Duane’s walking down the road?” she said. “Are you sure it’s him—a lot of men look alike from the back.”

  “I guess I know my own daddy; he’s been my daddy my whole life,” Julie said.

  “I told you Pa-Pa was walking down the road,” Willy said, without taking his eyes from the TV screen. “You should apologize for calling me a liar.”

  “I do apologize for calling you a liar,” Karla said. “I just hope I don’t have to call your mother something worse. There’s all kinds of dope available in those Oklahoma jails. I don’t think your mother’s lying but she could be hallucinating.”

  “Momma, all I took was a little speed so I wouldn’t fall asleep driving and leave my children without a mother,” Julie said. “I’m not hallucinating! My daddy is walking down the road! Get it?”

  “Then oil prices must have really tanked, or else some-body’s died,” Karla said, suddenly convinced. “There’d be no other reason why Duane would get out of his pickup and go walking down a road.”

  “Momma, I wish you’d just ask him,” Julie said. “He hasn’t gone very far.”

  “Oh, I mean to ask him,” Karla said. “What does he think he’s doing, scaring us this way?”

  2

  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 ev
en 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.