Duane's Depressed by Larry McMurtry Page B

the baby.
    “You look like you’ve been crying already today,” Rag said amiably. It was clear to her that things were not quite right in the Moore household—they rarely had been in the ten years that she had worked there. Of course, with kids as wild as Dickie, Nellie, Julie, and Jack, quiet times and peace and harmony were not really to be expected. Still, it was a little unusual for Karla to look so upset at breakfast time.
    “He walked off at three-fifteen this morning—what if we never see him again?” Karla asked, plopping Baby Paul into his high chair, taking care to position it far enough from the table that he couldn’t tip it over as he had the evening before.
    “Oh my lord, so the man went for a walk in the early A.M. ,” Rag said. “It’s not a hanging offense, is it?”
    Nonetheless, something of Karla’s disquiet communicated itself to her. When a man left the house on foot at three-fifteen in the morning, it was a sign of something. But what?
    In her distraction she forgot what she was about for a minute or two and scorched the Cream of Wheat.
    “Oh my lord, now look... I don’t do that once a year,” Rag said.

12
    D UANE HAD NOT HURRIED HIS WALK . In Thalia there had been a few scattered streetlights, but along the dirt road it was very dark. An oil rig strung with lights, seven or eight miles away, provided the only challenge to the starlight, and that a faint one. Besides the startled deer there was a surprising amount of game along the road. The country was thick with small feral pigs—twice he saw families of them snuffling in the underbrush. Crossing a river bottom he thought he heard some wild turkeys flush, but he couldn’t see them. A family of coons waddled ahead of him for a while, and, just before he reached the cabin, with only the faintest light beginning to show in the east, he heard the beat of wings and looked up to see some Canada geese, rising from a small lake nearby.
    When he walked across the narrow gravel road that ran along the edge of the hill to his little cabin he thought he saw something move in front of the cabin door. His first thought was that a coon was trying to break in, to forage in what few foodstuffs he kept in the cabin, leaving the kind of mess that coons leave.
    A second later, though, he realized that the animal sniffing around his cabin wasn’t a coon, it was a low-slung little dog. It was Shorty, a Queensland blue heeler, the sixth in a ragged and uncertain line of descent from the first Shorty—the first blue heeler that Duane had owned. Shorty, who had been Duane’sconstant companion for nearly ten years, not only had offspring all over Thalia; he had offspring all over the oil patch as well.
    Shorty the Sixth, as he was sometimes called, had been a very winning puppy, and they had kept him at home until he began to exhibit the same tendencies that Duane’s blue heelers always exhibited, that is, a tendency to herd children in the same way they would have herded cattle or sheep: they nipped their heels. Shorty the Sixth had shown himself particularly eager to nip Little Bascom’s heels—in his view Little Bascom was essentially an erratic, two-legged sheep. After Shorty the Sixth’s nips had broken the skin of Little Bascom’s heels the third time, Karla insisted on dispatching him to the camp of some wetbacks who lived north of town, sustaining themselves by fixing fence for a number of ranchers in the area. The wetbacks had no children for Shorty to attempt to herd; besides, they were lonely men, and grateful for the company of a little blue dog.
    The only problem with the arrangement was the same problem that had prevailed with the other five blue heelers, and that was that no man, whether wetback or Anglo, could compare in their eyes with Duane. Even though the descent from the original Shorty was ragged and irregular, an intense loyalty to Duane, and Duane alone, somehow got passed down the generations. Shorty the Sixth was perfectly