Read Online Duane's Depressed by Larry McMurtry - Free Book Online

look at and no moon to light the patio or the yard, accidents could happen. Once when Duane left the glass door open a little, a granddaddy rattlesnake, almost eight feet long, sidled into the house and made itself comfortable on the bed. Karla noticed it just as she was about to throw back the covers: she let out a shriek that could have been heard in Wichita Falls. The sight of a huge rattlesnake—the largest anyone had seen around Thalia in more than twenty-five years—on her very own bed so unnerved Karla that she slept on the couch in the living room for the next two months. The snake had been killed, stuffed, and given to the county museum, where it was on permanent display, but even so Karla was a long time freeing herself of the conviction that the big snake or one of its kinfolk was under her bed or in her walk-in closet. The incident scared her so badly that she had every object taken out of every closet in the house, to be sure no snakes were lurking among them. The house contained seventeen large closets; the objects they disgorged while Karla was hunting for snakes made a pile the like of which had not been seen by anyone in Thalia, ever.
    “They didn’t even have this much stuff in Babylon,Grandma,” Barbi said. She had only been four at the time, but, even then, she had a good vocabulary.
    “Where’d you hear about Babylon, honey? You don’t even go to Sunday school,” Karla asked. The answer, of course, was the Discovery Channel.
    “I don’t know about Babylon but this is too much stuff,” Duane observed. “No wonder I’ve already been bankrupt twice.”
    “Duane, it just kind of filtered in—you know, like sand does when there’s a sandstorm,” Karla said.
    After contemplating the great pile for a few days, Karla decided there might be something to be said for the simple life after all. Rather than try to fit the thousands of objects back in the seventeen closets, she and the girls indulged in an orgy of weeding, carried a whole pickup load of designer clothes to an orphanage in Waco, and got rid of much of the rest in a gigantic garage sale which drew patrons from as far away as Odessa.
    “That old snake had a good effect after all,” Duane observed. “Now I can go in my own closet and look for some clean underwear without suffocating.”
    “Duane, don’t even mention that snake, I might get a migraine,” Karla said.
    That night, though, it was far too cold for there to be any rattlesnakes about. The sky was inky, the stars like white diamonds. Though the norther had mostly blown itself out, it still sighed and whistled a bit; the wind chimes Annette had hung up behind the trailer house tinkled in the distance.
    Duane, in his bathrobe, blew in his hands a few times and considered the various places he could walk on the morrow. He knew every road in the county, from his years in the pickup, but there were plenty of them he had yet to traverse on foot. The decision to walk for a while, made on the spur of the moment, had already changed his perspective and improved his attitude. Instead of going to bed with the dull sense that he would just have to get up in the morning and do the same things he had done more or less every day for sixty years, he had a new experience to look forward to.
    “Duane, get in here; it’s too cold for you to be standing outthere,” Karla said, sticking her head out the glass door for a moment.
    Duane obeyed, yawning. He felt invigorated, rather than sleepy, but he yawned anyway, hoping Karla would just let him go to bed with no more discussion of the walking. He didn’t expect it to work, but he gave it a try, anyway.
    Sure enough, it didn’t work.
    “Duane, if you’re that depressed maybe you should just get counseling,” Karla said.
    He didn’t respond.
    “Lots of normal people go into counseling now—it’s not a stigma, like it used to be,” she said.
    “If it’s not a stigma, why don’t you get it, instead of liposuction?” Duane suggested,