Duane’s Depressed
In The Last Picture Show Duane was obsessed with Jacy, the prettiest girl in town. Now 62 years old (on “the lip of old age”), he’s still living in Thalia and owns an oil-drilling company. He’s been married to Karla for more than forty years, and they have four grown children and nine grandchildren. As chapter 3 begins, Duane has decided to park his pickup and start walking everywhere, much to the alarm of just about everybody. In the middle of a norther, he is heading for the shack a few miles out of town that he built for times when he needed some solitude.
Duane was walking briskly along the dirt road toward his cabin, the collar of his Levi’s jacket turned up against the norther. He was well aware that the fact that he was walking would attract attention, so he chose an obscure route out of town—a route along which there would be little attention to attract.
Even so, by the time he reached the city limits, a dozen passing motorists had stopped to ask if his pickup was broken down. All twelve offered him a ride.
“No thanks,” Duane said, twelve times. “I’m just out for a walk.”
“Out for a what?” Johnny Ringo asked—Johnny was a wheat farmer who owned a fine patch of cropland in the Onion Creek bottoms.
“A walk, Johnny,” Duane repeated.
Johnny Ringo was a tough old bird who took little interest in the doings of his fellowman. Of the twelve people who stopped to offer Duane a ride, he was the least disturbed by the notion of pedestrianism.
“Well, a walk’s something I never tried,” he said. And then he drove off.
Duane knew that it would take a while to accustom the citizens of the county to the notion that he was tired of driving pickups and just wanted to walk around for a few years. By his reckoning there were fewer committed pedestrians in the county than there were followers of Islam. Pedestrians, by his count, numbered one—himself—whereas two lonely and diminutive Muslims had somehow washed up in the nearby town of Megargel, where they worked in a feed store. Anyone who cared to visit Megargel could see them struggling with huge sacks of grain, their turbans covered with the dust of oats and wheat.
Duane walked on into the dun countryside, obligingly stopping every half mile or so to explain to a passing cowboy, or pickup full of roughnecks, that no, his pickup hadn’t broken down, he was just walking out to his cabin, enjoying the February breeze. Although annoyed to have to explain himself to every single car that passed, he was not surprised and took care to preserve his amiability. The county had slowly come to accept C-SPAN and computers—in a few months they could probably be brought to accept
a walker, too. Then his walks would get easier, more pure. A day would finally come when none of the roughnecks or the hunters would stop at the sight of him walking—not unless he waved them down. He could walk in peace, think, be alone.
Even now, on what was essentially the first solitary walk of his life, there were pleasant stretches when the road ahead was empty, free of pickups and trucks coming and going from the oil fields or the ranches. There was just the cold blue winter sky, and the whip of the wind, so strong when it gusted that the weeds by the fences rattled against the barbed wire. He could walk along, keeping a lookout for deer, or coveys of quail, or wild turkeys or wild pigs, all of which he and his son Dickie occasionally liked to hunt.
He had passed through much of his life paying only the most casual attention to the natural world, noting only whether it was cold or wet or hot, an obstruction to his business or otherwise. He had not delved much into nature’s particularities, knew the names of only a few trees, a few birds, some insects, and the common animals. The thought of his own ignorance made him feel a little guilty. He knew scarcely a thing about botany, could identify only a few of the plants he was passing as he walked. He thought he might purchase a book about weeds and flowers, and maybe a book about birds; he could at least educate himself to the point where he recognized the plants he was passing, as he walked here and there.
Rounding a bend in the road, at about the halfway point between his cabin and the town, he happened to notice a coyote, standing only twenty yards away in the pasture. The coyote, unalarmed, was watching him intently, its head cocked to one side.
“No, my pickup ain’t broke down,” Duane said. “I’m just out for a walk, if you don’t mind.”
He walked a little farther and then glanced back. The coyote was still standing there, looking at him.
IN HIS NEW BOOK, MCMURTRY REVISITS HIS SMALL-TOWN ROOTS IN NORTH TEXAS.
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