drunk.”
“Arthur’s young and he’s reliable,” Karla said. “I should go snatch that child baldheaded for calling him a wimp.”
“She’s got a right to freedom of speech,” Duane said.
Shorty was standing just outside the glass doors that led to the deck and the hot tub. He often stood there for hours, staring longingly into the bedroom. It was a sand-stormy day—pellets of West Texas grit occasionally peppered the glass.
“I can’t stand the way that dog stands there with his tongue hanging out,” Karla said. She left the room.
Duane continued to look at the wet, stunned people wandering dejectedly along a beach on the other side of the world. One hundred and twenty thousand of them had been washed away forever, which should have brought his own troubles into perspective, only it didn’t. He felt just as depressed as ever. His huge debt depressed him, his unruly children depressed him, his smug girlfriend depressed him, and the huge house that he didn’t like and would probably never manage to pay for depressed him most of all. He even hated the bed he was lying on—it was so vast that he often had to crawl twenty feet just to answer the phone.
The survivors of the tidal wave actually seemed to inhabit a more beautiful world than he did. The sea that had swallowed their loved ones was a vivid blue. The palm trees that had been spared were a lush green. The large new Sony TV transmitted all the colors perfectly—the scene of devastation actually looked like a South Seas paradise, whereas out his window all he saw was grayness, grit, and Shorty with his tongue out.
The sand the survivors walked around on was brilliantly white and far more beautiful than the sand that peppered his glass doors. West Texas sand looked and felt like ground rocks. Duane had felt it often and hated it. He often thought it would be nice to live in a place where the wind wasn’t strong enough to blow little rocks around.
His imagination refused to accord the Asian tragedy anything like the gravity it deserved. Despite himself, he imagined a freak tidal wave, in the form of a waterspout, arching over four hundred and fifty miles of Texas and striking the Thalia courthouse dead center, washing away the courthouse and everyone in it. He knew it was an unworthy thought, since many innocents would die; on the other hand, it was an appealing solution to the problem of Janine—a problem he would have to face up to pretty soon.
As he drove past Los Dolores, its brown adobe walls somber even in the bright sunlight, Duane’s mind chose to replay the afternoon he had watched the tidal-wave coverage. When he was depressed, his memory proved particularly uncooperative. Instead of replaying scenes of happiness and mirth—of which there had been many in his life—it only replayed other depressions. Though he had been happy for most of his life, and seriously depressed only for a year or two, it was an effort for him to remember much of what had happened during his forty-six happy years. His mental processes seemed to be the opposite of Minerva’s, with whom he had discussed the problem several times.
“Shoot, I just remember the good,” Minerva said. “I forget the bad right off.”
At the time she was convinced she was getting spinal meningitis, though so far she had none of the symptoms.
“I guess you’re more of an optimist than me,” Duane said.
“No, I’m crazier,” Minerva replied. “You’re too sane, Duane. There’s not a saner man in this county, and right there’s your problem.”
CHAPTER 15
L OOKING AT LOS DOLORES, DUANE WONDERED what Jacy felt. It occurred to him that he could just stop and ring the doorbell, as Karla had. Perhaps Jacy was inside, depressed, hoping someone would ring the doorbell.
She might be lying on a bed as vast as his own, watching TV coverage of some disaster and sinking ever deeper into her own depression. She might enjoy talking over old times, even though the old times just
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