Duane's Depressed by Larry McMurtry Page A

couldn’t even dance, indicated that her judgment was a little bit off, in some respects.
    Karla dialed the phone again, and this time got Babe Collins, an old friend and a person who had spent much of her life in Thalia, as Karla had. Babe was twice widowed; she had a tendency to marry men who drove too fast while they were drinking too much—but the fact that Babe had kept on trucking so determinedly that she had just managed to snare a third husband, Randy Harcanville, meant that she knew at least a little bit about the temperaments of men from the north-central-western part of Texas. Randy Harcanville wasn’t much to look at, but was a fine dancer nevertheless.
    Babe, too, had heard about Duane’s deviant behavior, butfelt that it didn’t do to rush to judgment where Duane and Karla were concerned. The death of their marriage had been predicted many times, by various and sundry; many of the predictors were now dead and buried but Duane and Karla were still married. Maybe they had just had a particularly bad fight. Duane might have just wanted to walk around for a while, licking his wounds, like an old dog might do.
    “Duane’s sensitive, honey,” she offered, when Karla called. “Maybe you hurt his feelings and didn’t realize you had hurt his feelings.”
    “I’ve hurt his feelings a million times and he’s never done nothing like this,” Karla pointed out. “Usually when we have a fight he gets in his pickup and goes to a bar and drinks beer.”
    “There aren’t many good bars around here,” Babe said. “Maybe he just got tired of doing the same old thing.”
    “But, Babe, we didn’t have a fight,” Karla said. “Things were going along real smooth, and now look.”
    Though Babe was polite, it was soon clear to Karla that her friend didn’t take this walking crisis very seriously, which might actually be a sensible reaction. Of course, people would gossip about it at the post office, but that didn’t mean it was really all that important. People as hard up for excitement as the people in Thalia were would gossip about anything. The wild extravagance of Joe Don’s new Temple of Luxor house had been the main subject of local gossip for months. Maybe Duane was just doing everybody a favor by giving them something fresh to turn their attention to.
    Nonetheless, when she hung up the phone—feeling slightly ridiculous—and let Babe go back to her new life with Randy Harcanville, Karla experienced a momentary spasm of pure hopelessness that she knew herself was way out of proportion to anything Duane had actually done. Probably part of the hopelessness was the knowledge that she wasn’t going to pick up much sympathy by complaining about Duane to her friends. Everyone in Thalia, men and women alike, knew she had the best husband in town. People who saw him walking down the street wouldn’t necessarily assume that Duane had gone crazy; quite a few of them might assume that she had been so mean tohim that he couldn’t take it anymore and just walked out the door and left.
    The main part of her spasm of hopelessness, though, had nothing to do with public opinion, which was bound to be fickle at best. The core of her disturbance was the suspicion that some fundamental change had just occurred in her husband—a change that left her out. It was not totally unheard of in Thalia for couples to exercise together. Couples, fat or skinny, could sometimes be seen jogging around the track, or, if the weather was pretty, walking along the street. She herself owned walking shoes. She wouldn’t have minded taking a stroll with Duane, if he had asked her—but he hadn’t.
    About that time she heard a yell from Baby Paul, and Little Bascom straggled in, dragging a blanket and a stuffed squirrel. Though Baby Paul kept yelling there was no sign that anyone was responding to him, so Karla hurried in and plucked him out of his crib. Rag was in the kitchen making Little Bascom Cream of Wheat when Karla returned with