Texasville Read Free Page A

racquetball at the Wichita Falls country club. Roughnecks and farmers, finding themselves suddenly rich, floundered painfully over the county’s gravelly roads in their expensive running shoes.
    In the case of Jimbo Jackson, briefly the richest person in the county, a devotion to exercise had tragic results: a truckful of his own roughnecks, on their way to set pipe on one of his own wells, ran over him. Two or three trucks were ahead of them, carrying pipe to other wells, and Jimbo, flopping along patiently in the choking dust, not far from his newly completed mansion, accidentally veered into the middle of the road. The roughnecks thought they had hit a yearling—Jimbo was not small—but when they got out to look, discovered they had killed their boss.
    The local paper, in a mournful editorial, advised joggers to keep to the bar ditches—a stance that infuriated Karla.
    “The bar ditches are full of chiggers and rattlesnakes,” she said. “What does he think this is, the Cots wolds?”
    Duane wondered if it could be Cotswold, Kansas, she was referring to. During the virtually sleepless year when he had driven a cattle truck, Karla had sometimes come with him on his runs. He was just back from Korea; they were just married. It seemed to him he had passed through a town called Cotswold, though it might have been in Nebraska or even Iowa. But it didn’t seem to him that the bar ditches in Kansas could be that much better to jog in than the bar ditches in Texas.
    “Duane, it’s in England,” Karla said. “Don’t you remember? We read about it in that airlines magazine the time we took the kids to Disneyland.”
    Duane didn’t enjoy being reminded of the time they took the kids to Disneyland. Jack had almost succeeded in drowning Julie on the log ride. Dickie, who hated to spend money on anything except drugs, got caught shoplifting. He tried to steal his girlfriend a stuffed gorilla from one of the gift shops. Nellie disappeared completely, having decided to run off to Guaymas with a young Mexican she met on one of the rides. They stopped in Indio so Nellie could call her boyfriend in Thalia and tell him she was breaking off their engagement. The boyfriend managed to reach Karla and Duane, and the runaways were stopped at the Arizona line.
    Nine months later, having married and divorced the boy she had meant to break up with, Nellie had Little Mike, their first grandchild. He did not look Hispanic, or bear any resemblance to the husband she had had so briefly.
    “They say travel’s broadening,” Karla remarked, on the flight home from Disneyland.
    Duane looked up just in time to see Jack slip two ice cubes from his Coke down the neck of a little old woman who had been brought on board in a wheelchair and dumped in the seat in front of him.
    “Whoever said that never traveled with our kids,” Duane said as the old lady began to writhe in her seat. “I’m telling you right now I’ll commit suicide before I’ll go anywhere with them again.”
    He glanced at Julie to see what evil she might be contemplating.Julie wore dark glasses with huge purple frames. She had a teen magazine spread over her lap and her hand under the magazine. Duane decided to his horror that she was playing with her crotch.
    “What did you say, Duane?” Karla asked. “I was reading and didn’t hear.”
    “I said I’d commit suicide before I’d go anywhere else with these kids,” he said.
    “Duane, don’t brag,” Karla said. “You know you’re too big a sissy even to go to the hospital and get a shot.”
    She noticed the little old lady, who was writhing more desperately as the ice cubes worked their way down her back.
    “I hope that old lady isn’t going into convulsions,” she said.
    Duane had been trying to decide where his duty lay. Should he try to help the old lady get the ice cubes out, which would practically mean undressing her? Should he grab Jack and break his neck? Should he demand that his son apologize? Jack