Dunlup Crashes In

Royce Dunlup was lying in bed with a cold can of beer balanced on his stomach. The phone by the bed began to ring and he reached over and picked the receiver up without disturbing the can of beer. He has a big stomach and it was no real trick to balance a can of beer on it, but in this instance the can was sitting precisely over his navel and keeping it there while talking on the phone was at least a little bit of a trick.

Since leaving Rosie and taking up, more or less formally, with his girlfriend Shirley Sawyer, Royce had learned a lot of new tricks. For one thing, he had learned to have sex lying flat on his back, something he had never done in all his conservative years with Rosie. Nobody had ever tried to teach Royce anything like that before, and at first he made a nervous pupil, but Shirl soon broke him in. While she was in the process of breaking him in, she talked to him about something called fantasy, a concept she had picked up in her one year of junior college in Winklebury, Arizona. Fantasy, as Shirley explained it, meant thinking about things you really (continued on page 144) Dunlup Crashes In (continued from page 119) couldn't do, and her own favorite fantasy involved having sex with a fountain. In particular, Shirley wanted to have it with Houston's new Mecom fountain, a splendid gusher of water in front of the equally splendid Warwick hotel. At night, the Mecom fountain was lit up with orange lights, and Shirley insisted that she couldn't think of anything better than seating herself right on top of a great spurt of orange water, right there in front of the Warwick.

That wasn't possible, of course, so Shirley had to make do with the next best, which was seating herself every night or two on what she primly referred to as Royce's "old thing." About all that was required of Royce at such times was to keep still while Shirley jiggled around and made little spurting sounds, in imitation of the fountain she imagined herself to be sitting on. Royce's only worry was that someday Shirley might lose her balance and fall backward, in which case his old thing was bound to suffer; but so far it hadn't happened and Royce had never been one to look too far ahead.

His own favorite fantasy was simpler; it involved setting the beer can on his navel. What Royce liked to pretend was that the beer can had a little hole in its bottom and his navel a secret hole in its top, so that when he put the can of beer over his navel, a nice stream of cold beer squirted right down into his stomach with no effort on his part at all. That way, the two pleasantest things in life, sex and beer drinking, could be accomplished without so much as lifting a hand.

Shirley evidently liked sitting on his old thing so much that she was willing to support him to keep it handy, so Royce had become a man of substantial leisure. His memory had never been very keen, and in three weeks he managed to forget Rosie and his seven children almost completely. Now and then, longings for his darling, Little Buster, would come over him, but before they got too strong, Shirley would come home and set a cold beer on his navel and the longings would subside. Shirley lived in a three-room house on Harrisburg, right next door to a used-tire center, and Royce spent much of his day staring happily out the window at a mountain of some 20,000 worn-out tires. For activity, he could walk two blocks down Harrisburg to a 7-Eleven and buy some more beer or, if he were especially energetic, walk another block and spend an afternoon happily playing shuffleboard at a bar called the Tired Out Lounge, the principal hangout of his old friend Mitch McDonald.

Mitch was a retired roustabout who had had a hand pinched off in an oil-field accident years before. It had been he, in fact, who had introduced Royce to Shirley. She had been Mitch's girlfriend for years, but they had had a falling out that started (Shirley later told Royce) because Mitch's old thing acquired the bad habit of falling out of Shirley just at the wrong time. Despite this, Mitch and Shirley had decided to stay friends, and in a moment of lethargy, Mitch had handed his friend Shirley over to his friend Royce. He himself regarded Royce as far too crude for Shirley, and he was very upset when they happened to hit it off. It was his own doing, however, and he managed to keep quiet about how wrong it all was, except to Hubbard, Jr., the nervous little manager of the Tired Out Lounge. Mitch frequently pointed out to Hubbard, Jr., that Royce and Shirley couldn't last, and Hubbard, Jr., a very neat man who had the bad luck to own a bar that was only three blocks from a used-tire center, always agreed, as he did with everybody, no matter what they said.

Still, on the surface, Royce and Mitch stayed buddies, and it was no great surprise to Royce that it was Mitch who called him on the phone.

"What's up, good buddy?" Mitch asked when Royce said hello.

"Restin'," Royce said. "Havin' a few beers."

"You're gonna need something stronger than that when you hear what I got to say," Mitch said. "I'm over here at the J-Bar Korral."

"Aw, yeah?" Royce said, not much interested.

"It's this here East Tex hoedown," Mitch went on. "They have it ever Friday night, unescorted ladies free. The pussy that walks around loose over here ain't to be believed."

"Aw, yeah?" Royce repeated.

"Anyhow, guess who just come in?" Mitch said.

"John F. Kennedy," Royce guessed, feeling humorous. "Or is it old L.B.J.?"

"Nope," Mitch said. "Guess again."

Royce racked his brain. He could think of nobody they both knew who might be likely to turn up at the East Tex hoedown--in fact, in his relaxed state, he could not even think of anybody they both knew.

"Too tired to guess," Royce said.

"All right, I'll give you a hint," Mitch said. "Her name starts with an R."

Mitch expected that crucial initial to burst like a bombshell in Royce's consciousness, but once again, he had miscalculated.

"Don't know nobody whose name starts with an R," Royce said. "Nobody 'cept me, an' I ain't hardly even got out of bed today."

"Rosie, you dumb shit," Mitch said, exasperated by his friend's obtuseness. "Rosie, Rosie, Rosie."

"Rosie who?" Royce said automatically, all thought of his wife still far from his mind.

"Rosie Dunlup!" Mitch yelled. "Your wife, Rosie, ever hear of her?"

"Oh, Rosie," Royce said. "Ask her how Little Buster's doin', will you?"

Then the bombshell finally burst. Royce sat up abruptly, spilling the can of beer off his navel. He didn't notice it until the cold liquid began to leak underneath him--then, since when he sat up his stomach hid the can, he thought the sudden shock must have caused him to wet the bed.

"Rosie?" he said. "You don't mean Rosie?"

"Rosie," Mitch said quietly, savoring the moment.

"Go tell her I said to go home," Royce said. "What's she think she's doin' over there at a dance with all them sluts? She oughtn't to be out by herself," he added.

"She ain't out by herself," Mitch added. It was another moment to savor.

Royce stuck his finger in the puddle he was sitting in and then smelled the finger. It smelled like beer, rather than piss, so at least he was rid of one anxiety. Dim memories of his married life began to stir in him, but only vaguely, and when Mitch dropped his second bombshell, the room of Royce's memory went black.

"Whut?" he asked.

Mitch adopted a flat, informative tone and informed Royce that Rosie had arrived with two short men, one of whom wore a mustache. The other was a well-known oilman who drove a white Lincoln.

There was silence on the line while Royce absorbed the information. "Fuck a turkey," he said finally, running his fingers through his hair.

"Yeah, don't that beat all?" Mitch said. "I guess what they say is true: While the cat's away, the mouse will play."

"Why, what does she mean, goin' off an' leavin' the kids?" Royce said. A sense of indignation was rising in him. "She's a married woman," he added forcefully.

"She sure ain't actin' like one tonight," Mitch said. "Her an' that Cajun's dancin' up a storm."

"Don't tell me no more, you're just makin' it hard for me to think," Royce said. He was trying to keep in mind a paramount fact: Rosie was his wife and she was in the process of betraying him.

"You comin' over?" Mitch asked.

In his agitation, Royce hung up the phone before he answered. "You god-damn right I'm coming over," he said, to no one. Problems lay in his way, however. One of his shoes was lost. Shirley had a scroungy little mongrel named Barstow, after her home town, and Barstow was always dragging Royce's shoes off into corners, so he could nibble at the shoestrings. Royce found one shoe in the kitchen, but the other one was completely lost. While he was looking for it, though, he found a bottle of Scotch he had forgotten they had, a good deal of which he gulped down while he was looking for the shoe. The shoe refused to turn up and Royce, tormented by the thought of what his wife was getting away with, grew more and more frantic. He turned the bed upside down, thinking it might be under there--then he turned the couch upside down--then he stepped outside to kick the shit out of Barstow, who had vanished as neatly as the shoe.

As the minutes ticked by, Royce's desperation increased, and his fury with it. Finally, he decided the shoe was nonessential; he could do what he had to do with one shoe on. He rushed out into the street and jumped into his delivery truck, but unfortunately, thanks to a month of inactivity, the truck's battery was dead. Royce felt like turning the truck over, as he had the bed and the couch, but sanity prevailed. After trying vainly to flag down a couple of passing cars, he hobbled rapidly up to the Tired Out Lounge. Everybody got a good laugh at the sight of him with one shoe on and one shoe off, but Royce scarcely heard the uproar.

"Shirley's damn turd-hound stole it," he said, to silence speculation. "Got an emergency. I need somebody to come help me jump-start my truck."

Nothing wins friends in a bar like someone else's emergency, and in no time Royce was getting a jump start from a 1958 Mercury, his shoe problem forgotten. Five or six experts from the used-tire center stood around, idly kicking at the tires of Royce's truck while the jump-starting took place. Several of them tried not too subtly to find out what the emergency was; after all, they had left their drinking to participate in it and had done so with the expectation--always a reasonable one on Har-risburg--of gunshots, screaming women and flowing blood. A used potato-chip truck with a run-down battery was a poor substitute, and they let Royce know it.

"What the fuck, Dunlup?" one said. "Your old lady's house ain't even on fire."

Royce was not about to admit the humiliating truth: that his wife was out honky-tonking with other men. He silenced all queries by slamming his hood down and roaring away, although the hood popped up again before he had gone a block, mainly because, in his haste, he had neglected to remove the battery cables and had slammed it down on them.

The men who had helped him watched him go with a certain rancor. "The son of a bitch is too ignorant even to put on both shoes," one of them said. They were hoping maybe he'd have a car wreck before he got out of sight, but he didn't and they were left to straggle back to the bar without even a story to tell.

"Dumb bastard," another tire whanger said. "I wouldn't help him next time if a snappin' turtle had aholt of his cock."

• • •

Over at the J-Bar Korral, meanwhile, a colorful evening was in progress. A group called the Tyler Troubadours was flailing away at a medley of Hank Snow favorites and the customers had divided themselves roughly into three equivalent groups: those who had come to drink, those who had come to dance and those who hoped to accomplish a little of both. Brylcreem and Vitalis gleamed on the heads of those men who bothered to take their Stetsons off, and the women's hair was mostly upward coifed, as if God had dressed it Himself by standing over them with a comb in one omnipotent hand and a powerful vacuum cleaner in the other.

Everybody was happy and nearly everybody was drunk. One of the few exceptions to both categories was Ver-non, who sat at a table, smiling uncomfortably. He was not sober on purpose, but then, neither was he unhappy on purpose. Both states appeared to belong to him, which was just as well, since as near as he could tell, nobody else wanted them.

Certainly, Rosie didn't. She had immediately flung herself into dancing, figuring that was the easiest way to keep her mind off the fact that she was out on a date with F. V. d'Arch. It was very clear to her that it was a date, since at the last minute she had let him pay for her ticket; beyond that, her imagination refused to take her. She had more or less forgotten why she had been so determined to drag poor Vernon along, but she was glad that she had, anyway, just in case problems arose with F. V.

Fortunately, though, F. V. had shown himself to be a model of comportment. He had flung himself into dancing just as eagerly as Rosie had, mostly to keep his mind off the fact that he couldn't think of anything to say to Rosie. For years, the two staples of their conversation had been Bossier City, Louisiana, and Packard engines, and neither seemed quite the right thing to talk about on their first date.

Also, looming in both their minds was the specter of Royce Dunlup. Despite the fact that he had not been heard from in weeks and might be in Canada, or even California, both Rosie and F. V. secretly assumed that somehow he would find them out and turn up at the dance. They also secretly assumed that by their being there together, they were guilty--probably in the eyes of God and certainly in the eyes of Royce--of something close to adultery, although they had as yet to exchange even a handshake. Both were sweaty before they had danced a step, from guilt and nervousness, and the dancing proved to be an enormous relief. At first, F. V. danced with great Cajun suavity, from the hips down, never moving his upper body at all, which struck Rosie as slightly absurd. She was used to lots of rocking and dipping and hugging when she danced, and while she didn't especially want F. V. to try any hugging, she did expect him at least to turn his head once in a while. Right away, she poked him in the ribs, to make her point.

"Loosen up there, F. V.," she said. "We ain't standin' in no boat, you know. You're gonna be a dead loss when they play one of them jitterbugs if you can't twist no better'n that."

Fortunately, a little practice and five or six beers and the fact that there was no sign of Royce did wonders for F. V.'s confidence, and Rosie had no more cause for complaint. F. V. had her on the floor for every dance and they were cut in on only twice, both times by the same massive drunk, who couldn't seem to get over the fact that Rosie was as short as she was. "Ma'am, you're plumb tiny," he said, several times.

"That's right, be careful you don't fall on me. I'd just be a smear on the floor if you was to," Rosie said, charitable in her happiness at finding out she could go about in the world and dance with various men without any lightning bolts' striking her dead.

In her happiness, and because the inside of the J-Bar Korral was roughly the temperature of a bread oven, she began to drink beer rapidly during the intermissions. F. V. drank beer rapidly, too, and Vernon bought beer as rapidly as they drank it. The top of their table was a puddle from all the moisture that had dripped off the bottles, and Vernon amused himself while they danced by soaking up the puddle with napkins.

"F. V., we ort to of been doing this years ago," Rosie said, during one intermission. She was feeling more and more generous toward F. V.--the fact that he had gotten up the nerve to mumble "Wanta go?" that morning was the beginning of her liberation.

"We ort, we ort," F. V. said. "Wanta come next week?"

"Oh, well," Rosie said, fanning herself with a napkin.

"They have these dances ever week," F. V. said. He paused. "Ever week on the dot," he added, in case Rosie doubted it.

"That's sweet," Rosie said vaguely, looking around the room in such a way as to leave in question as much as possible. It was rather vulgar of F. V. to rush her so, she felt, and the thought of having to commit herself to something a whole week away was scary.

"It's the same band all the time," F. V. persisted.

"Vernon, you ort to try a dance or two," Rosie said, hoping to slip quietly off the spot she was on.

"I was raised Church of Christ," Vernon explained. "They ain't partial to dancing."

Vernon was not going to be of any help, Rosie saw. He was merely waiting politely for the evening to be over. Meanwhile, F. V.'s dark Cajun eyes were shining and he was waiting to find out if he had a date for next week.

"Well, if Little Buster ain't been kidnaped, or the sky don't fall..." Rosie said, and she let her sentence trail off.

That was enough for F. V. Anything less crushing than blank refusal had always been enough for F. V. He leaned back and drank beer, while Vernon ate pretzels.

Vernon felt as if the road of his life had just suddenly forked, giving him no time to turn. He had left the old, straight road of his life, probably forever, on the impulse of an instant, yet it did not surprise him very much that the fork had so quickly led him into the sand. He did not expect to get back on the old road, and to him the sweat and the roar of the J-Bar was just part of the sand. He watched and ate his pretzels rather disconnectedly, mild in his dullness, not thinking of much.

None of them knew that outside, in the far reaches of the J-Bar parking lot, a baby-blue delivery truck was revving up. Royce Dunlup had arrived and was preparing his vengeance.

He had not, however, parked his truck. On the way over, he had had the feeling that a few beers might clear his head, so he had stopped at an all-night grocery and bought two six-packs of Pearl. To his annoyance, everyone in the store had laughed at him because he had on only one shoe--it was beginning to seem to Royce that he must be the first person in the history of the world to have a shoe carried off by a girlfriend's dog. The cashier at the grocery store, no more than a pimply kid, had felt obliged to crack a joke about it.

"What happened, Hoss?" he asked. "Did you forget to put the other one on or forget to take this one off?"

Royce had taken his six-packs and limped to his truck, followed by the rude jeers of several onlookers. The incident set him to brooding. People seemed to assume that he was some kind of nut, a kind who liked to wear only one shoe. If he went limping into a big dance like the East Tex hoedown wearing only one shoe, hundreds of people would probably laugh at him--his whole position would be automatically undermined. For all he knew, Rosie could have him committed to an insane asylum if he showed up at a dance with only one shoe on.

It was a thorny problem, and Royce sat in his truck at the far end of the J-Bar parking lot and drank his way rapidly through a six-pack of beer. It occurred to him that if he waited patiently enough, some drunk was sure to stagger out and collapse somewhere in the parking lot, in which case it would be no trouble to steal a shoe--the only risky part about such a plan was that Rosie and her escorts might leave before he could find a collapsed drunk. In light of the seriousness of it all, the matter of the missing shoe was a terrible irritation, and Royce made up his mind to strangle Barstow the next time he came home, Shirley or no Shirley. He drank the second six-pack even more rapidly than the first--drinking helped keep him in a decisive mood. The J-Bar was only a cheap, prefabricated dance hall, and Royce could hear the music plainly through the open doors. The thought that his own wife of 27 years was in there dancing with a low-class Cajun put him in a stomping mood, but, unfortunately, he had nothing but a sock on his better stomping foot.

Then, just as he was finishing his 12th beer, a solution to the whole problem accidentally presented itself. Royce had about decided to wait in the truck and try to run over Rosie and F. V. when they came out. He killed his motor and prepared to lie in wait, and just as he did, the solution appeared in the form of two men and a woman, all of whom seemed to be very happy. When they stepped out of the door of the J-Bar, they had their arms around one another and were singing about crawfish pie; but by the time they had managed to stagger the length of the building, the party mood had soured. One of the men was large and the other small, and the first sign of animosity Royce noticed came when the big man picked up the little man by his belt and abruptly flung him at the rear wall of the J-Bar Korral.

"Keep your fuckin' slop-bucket mouth shut around my fiancée, you little turd, you," the big man said, just about the time the little man's head hit the wall of the J-Bar Korral. Royce couldn't tell if the little man heard the command or not--instead of answering, he began to writhe around on the asphalt, groaning out indistinct words.

The woman paused briefly to look down at the small writhing man. "Dar-rell, you never need to done that," she said calmly. "I've heard die word titty before, anyway. I got two of 'em, even if they ain't the biggest ones in the world."

The big man evidently didn't think her comment deserved an answer, because he grabbed her arm and stuffed her into a blue Pontiac without further ado. The two of them sat in the Pontiac for a while, watching the little man writhe; then, somewhat to Royce's surprise, the big man started the car and drove away, without bothering to run over the little man. The little man finally managed to get one foot under himself--the other foot evidently wouldn't go under him, because he hopped on one leg right past Royce's potato-chip truck and on into the darkness of the parking lot.

Royce scarcely gave him a glance. He had just had an inspiration. When the little man struck the building, it seemed to Royce that the building crunched. He distinctly heard a crunching sound--obviously, the building was flimsy; it was probably made of plywood and tar paper. There was no reason for him to wait half the night so as to run over Rosie and F. V. in the parking lot. A building that would crunch under the impact of a small dirty-mouthed man wouldn't stand a chance against a six-year-old potato-chip truck in excellent condition. He could drive right through the wall and run over Rosie and F. V. while they were actually dancing together.

Without further contemplation, Royce acted. He drove his truck up parallel to the rear wall and leaned out and punched the wall a time or two with his fist. It felt like plywood and tar paper to him, and that was all he needed. He chose as his point of entry a spot right in the center of the rear wall, backed up so as to give himself about a 20-yard run at it, revved his engine for all it was worth and, with blood in his eye, drove straight into the wall.

The J-Bar Korral was a big place, and at first only those customers who happened to be drinking or dancing at the south end of the building noticed that a potato-chip truck was in the process of forcing its way into the dance. The first impact splintered the wall and made a hole big enough for the nose of the truck, but it was not big enough for all the truck and Royce was forced to back up and take another run at it. A couple from Conroe were celebrating their first wedding anniversary at a table only a few yards from where the nose of the truck broke through, and the young couple and their friends, while mildly surprised to see the wall cave in and the nose of a truck appear, took a very mature attitude toward the whole thing.

"Look at that," the husband said. "Some sorry son of a bitch missed his turn an' hit the wall."

Everybody turned and watched, curious to see whether the truck was going to break on through. "I hope it ain't a nigger," the young wife said. "I'd hate to see a nigger while we're celebratin', wouldn't you, Goose?" Goose was her pet name for her husband--he didn't like her to use it in company, but the sight of the truck caused her to forget that temporarily. Her first name was Beth-Morris and that's what everybody called her, including her husband's best friend, Big Tony, who happened to be sitting right next to her at the table, helping her celebrate her first anniversary.

No sooner had she uttered the forbidden nickname than Big Tony gave her a best-friendly hug and began to make goose talk right in her little white ear. "Shit, your husband's already too drunk to cut the mustard; let's you an' me sneak out to the car and play a little goosy-gander," Big Tony said.

Before Beth-Morris could take a firm stance, Royce and his truck burst right into the J-Bar Korral. Annoyed at being stopped the first time, Royce had backed halfway across the parking lot for his second run. Beth-Morris looked up just in time to see a potato-chip truck bearing right down on their table. She screamed like a banshee, spoiling everyone's anniversary mood. Big Tony instantly had all thought of goosy-gander driven from his mind--he had just time to fling his beer at Royce's windshield before the edge of the front bumper hit his chair and knocked him under the table.

For a brief moment, there was a lull. The people at the south end of the dance hall stared at Royce and his truck, unwilling to believe what they were seeing. Royce turned on his windshield wipers to get Big Tony's beer off his windshield, at which point people began to scream and push back their chairs. Royce knew he had no time to lose: Rosie and F. V. might escape him in the confusion. He let out his clutth and roared right out onto the dance floor, scattering tables like matchsticks.

Of the people Royce sought, F. V. was the first to see him. He and Rosie were dancing near the bandstand. They had both heard the first screams, but screams were not uncommon at a big dance, and they didn't immediately stop dancing. At the sound of gunfire they would have stopped dancing, but screams ordinarily just meant a fist fight, and fistfights were not worth stopping for.

Thus, it was a severe shock to F. V. to complete what he thought was a nicely executed step and look up to see Royce Dunlup's potato-chip truck driving straight toward the bandstand. If shocks really froze blood, his circulatory system would have achieved a state of immediate deepfreeze. As it was, except for a couple of involuntary jerks, he managed to control himself rather well.

"Don't look now," he said to Rosie. "Royce is here. Don't look now."

Rosie felt instantly weak. It was not a surprise, though; the only thing surprising was that she seemed to hear the sound of a truck. It was bound to be her imagination, however, and F. V.'s tone had more or less convinced her that her life depended on keeping her head down, so she did. She assumed Royce was stalking through the dancers, probably with a gun in his hand; since she had nowhere else to put it, she reposed her trust in F. V. Perhaps he could steer them out the door, so they could make a run for it.

But F. V. had stopped dancing and stood stock-still, and the sound of a truck got louder; then the sound of screams got far too loud to be the result of a fistfight and the musicians suddenly lost the beat. "My Gawd," the vocalist said, and Rosie looked up just in time to see her husband driving past in his familiar baby-blue delivery truck.

For a moment, Rosie felt deeply happy. There was Royce in his delivery truck, driving with both hands on the wheel, just like he always did. Probably all that had happened had been a dream. Probably she was not at a dance but home in bed; the dream would be over any minute and she would be back in the life she had always lived.

A happy relief swelled in her as she stood there, expecting to wake up. Then, instead of her waking up, Royce's truck hit the bandstand, flinging musicians left and right. The drummer's drums all fell on top of him and the vocalist was knocked completely off the platform, into the crowd. To make matters worse, Royce backed the truck up and went at the bandstand again. The drummer, who had just managed to get to his feet, was once again knocked sprawling into his drums. The second crash did something bad to the electrical system--it spluttered and flashed a very white light, and the electric guitar, which was lying off by itself in a corner, suddenly emitted a horrible scream, frightening everyone in the place so badly that all the women screamed, too. All the musicians who could move picked themselves up and fled--except one, the bull-fiddle player, a tall, gangly fellow from Port Arthur who preferred death to cowardice. He leaped over the fallen drummer and smashed at the potato-chip truck with his bull fiddle. "Son-of-a-bitch bastard!" he yelled, raising the fiddle on high.

Royce was mildly surprised at the stance the bull-fiddle player took, but he was far from daunted. He backed up a few feet and went at the bandstand a third time. The gallant from Port Arthur got in one tremendous swing before being flung backward into the drums and the drummer. The fight was not gone from him, though: He rose to his knees and flung a cymbal at die truck, cracking Royce's windshield.

"Security, security, where's the goddamn security?" the vocalist yelled from the midst of the crowd.

As to that, no one knew, least of all the two owners of the J-Bar, Bobby and John Dave, who had run out of their office to watch the destruction of their place of business. They were both middle-aged businessmen, long accustomed to dealing with rowdiness, but the spectacle that confronted them was more than they had bargained for.

"How'd that get in here, John Dave?" Bobby asked, astonished. "We never ordered no potato chips."

Before John Dave could answer, Royce was off again. He was largely satisfied with the destruction of the bandstand and whirled the truck around to face the crowd. He began a fast trip around the dance hall, honking as loudly as he could in order to scatter the many bunches of people. It worked, too: The people scattered, hopping around like grasshoppers over the many fallen chairs. In order to block the exit, Royce then began to use his truck like a bulldozer, pushing chairs and tables into the one door and then smashing them into a kind of mountain of nails and splinters.

Vernon, ever a cool head in an emergency, had rushed to Rosie's side as soon as he figured out what was happening, and the two of them were concentrating on trying to keep F. V. from panicking, which might give their position away. The fact that they were all short gave them some advantage, though it didn't seem so to F. V. "Good as dead, good as dead," he kept saying.

"Damn the luck," he added mournfully.

"It ain't luck, it's justice," Rosie said grimly. She was not especially calm, but she was a long way from panic--she had not lived with Royce 27 years without learning how to take care of herself when he was mad.

Vernon watched the little blue truck chug around the room, smashing what few tables it hadn't already smashed. The three of them had taken refuge behind the huge man who had danced with Rosie; fortunately, he was with his equally huge wife. The two of them seemed to be enjoying the spectacle enormously.

"That's a pretty little blue truck," the huge lady said. "Why' nt we get one of them to haul the kids in?"

At that very moment, the pretty little blue truck veered their way. "Here's what you do, you two run for the ladies' room," Vernon said. "Run, run!"

Rosie and F. V. broke for it and the moment they did, Royce spotted them. He braked, in order to get an angle on where they were going, and while he was slowed down, six drunks rushed out of the crowd and grabbed his rear bumper. The huge man decided to get in on the sport and ran right over Vernon, who had just moved in front of him to try to get into the truck. Royce jerked the truck into reverse and flung off all but two of the drunks; then he shot forward again and the last two let go. As the truck went by, the huge man threw a table at it, but the table only hit one of the drunks.

F. V. outran Rosie to the ladies' room, only to remember, at the last second, that he wasn't a lady. He stopped and Rosie ran into him.

"Ooops! Where's the men's room?" he asked.

Rosie looked around and saw that the crowd had parted and that Royce was bearing down on them. There was no time for commentary--she shoved F. V. through the swinging door and squeezed in behind him, about two seconds before the truck hit the wall.

The part of the J-Bar where the rest rooms were had once been the projection area when the J-Bar had been a drive-in theater, rather than a dance hall. It had cinder-block walls. Royce had expected to plow right through, into the ladies' john, but instead he was stopped cold. He even bumped his head on his own windshield.

His confusion at finding a wall he couldn't drive through was nothing, however, to the confusion inside the rest room. Most of the women who had been using it were blissfully ignorant of what was going on out on the dance floor. They had heard some screaming, but they had just assumed it was a bigger-than-usual fight and more or less resolved to stay where they were until it was over. Several were in the process of combing their hair upward, one or two were re-gluing false eyelashes and one, a large redhead named Gretchen, who had just finished getting laid out in the parking lot, had one leg propped up over a lavatory and was douching.

"Lord knows the trouble it saves." she remarked, to general agreement, and the conversation, such as it was, was largely concerned with the question of unwanted pregnancies. A woman who was sitting in one of the toilets was regaling everyone with a story about unwanted triplets when, with no warning at all, a small male Cajun popped through the door and right into their midst. The appearance of F. V. was so startling that no one noticed the small, frightened-looking redhead who was right on his heels; but the shock that followed when the truck hit the wall was nothing anyone could miss. Gretchen fell down beside the lavatory, and a blonde named Darlene opened her mouth to scream and dropped a false eyelash into it. F. V., off balance to begin with, had the bad fortune to fall right on top of Gretchen.

"It's a monster; get him away." Gretchen screamed--she assumed she was about to be raped and rolled onto her belly and kept screaming. A couple of women rolled out from under the doors of the toilet stalls. They assumed a tornado had struck, but when they saw F. V., they began to scream for the police. Rosie had her ear to the door and could hear die wheels of the truck spinning on the slick dance floor. When she looked around, she saw that F. V. was in real trouble. Five or six women had leaped onto him to keep him from raping Gretchen, and a particularly tough-looking young brunette was trying to strangle him with a tubular syringe.

"Naw, naw," Rosie said. "He ain't out to hurt nobody, he just run in here to hide. My husband tried to run over him in a truck."

"He dove at me," Gretchen said.

"You mean there's a truck loose in this dance?" the young brunette said. "That's the dumbest thing I ever heard of."

She hurried over and peeked out the door. "Aw," she said, "it's just a little truck. I thought you meant a cattle truck or something like that. Anyway, it's driving off."

Gretchen was still looking at F. V. with burning eyes--the news that a truck was loose in the dance hall seemed to mean nothing to her at all. "I still think he's an ole sex fiend," she said, looking at F. V. "A man that waits till he's right between my legs to fall down may fool you, honey, but he ain't fooling me."

F. V. decided Royce was the lesser of two evils--he ran out the door, with Rosie close behind him. On the dance floor, a scene of pandemonium reigned. Royce had a headache from bumping his windshield and had decided to go back to his original plan, which had been to run over the two sinners in the parking lot. To make that work, he had to get back to the parking lot, and it wasn't proving easy. The patrons of the f-Bar had had time to size up the situation and a number of the drunkest and most belligerent began to throw things at the truck--beer bottles, particularly. The outraged vocalist had managed to locate the two security policemen, both of whom had been taking lengthy craps when the trouble started. The two policemen rushed onto the dance floor with guns drawn, only to discover that the criminal was in retreat.

Royce ignored the rain of beer bottles and plowed on across the dance floor, honking from time to time. The two policemen, plus Bobby and John Dave and the vocalist, began to chase the truck. Neither of the policemen was the sort to enjoy having a crap interrupted, though, and they weren't running their best. When a small man jumped out at them and yelled "Stop!" they stopped.

"Don't stop," the vocalist yelled, very annoyed.

Rosie joined Vernon. "It's all right, it's all right," she assured the policemen. "It's my husband. He's crazed with jealousy, that's all."

"I knowed it, Billy," one of the policemen said. "Just another goddamn family fight. We could have stayed where we was."

"Family fight my Lord in heaven," John Dave said. "Lookit this dance hall! Hurricane Carla never done us this much damage."

"No problem, no problem," Vernon said quickly, pulling out his money clip. He peeled off several hundred dollars. "The man's my employee and I'll make good your damages," he assured them.

At that moment, there was the sound of a car wreck. Despite the bottles and an occasional chair, Royce had managed to drive more or less calmly down the length of the dance floor and out the hole he had made coming in. It was just alter he got out that the wreck occurred. The large man in the blue Pontiac had thought it all over and decided to come back and throw the little man against the wall again, and he was driving along slowly, looking for him, when Royce drove through his hole. Darrell, the large man, was not expecting anyone to drive out of the wall of the dance hall and was caught cold. The impact threw Royce out the door of his truck and onto the asphalt of the parking lot.

The next thing Royce knew, he was looking up at a lot of people he didn't know, all of whom were looking down at him. The surprising thing was that there was one person in the crowd he did know; namely, his wife, Rosie. The events of the evening, particularly the unexpected car wreck, had confused Royce a good deal and he had for the moment completely forgotten why it was he had come to the J-Bar Korral in the first place.

"Royce, just keep still now," Rosie said. "Your ankle's broken."

"Aw," Royce said, looking at it curiously. It was the ankle belonging to the toot on which he had no shoe, and the sight of his sock, which wasn't even particularly clean, made him feel deeply embarrassed. "I never meant to come with just one shoe on, Rosie," he said, doing his best to meet his wife's eye. "The reason is Shirley's damn old dog carried the other one off."

"That's all right, Royce," Rosie said. She saw that Royce had forgotten her little indiscretion, for the moment; he just looked tired, drunk and befuddled, as he often did on Friday night, and squatting down beside him in the parking lot, with hundreds of excited people around, was, indeed, a little bit like waking up from a bad dream, since the man before her was so much like the same old Royce instead of the strange new hostile Royce she had been imagining for several weeks.

Royce, however, felt a little desperate. It seemed very important to him that Rosie understand that he had not deliberately set out to embarrass her. Long ago his own mother, a stickler for cleanliness, had assured him that if he didn't change his underwear at least twice a week, he was sure to be killed in a car wreck someday wearing dirty underwear, a fact that would lead inevitably to the disgrace of his whole family. A dirty sock and one shoe was maybe not so bad as dirty underwear, but Royce still felt that his mother's prophecy had finally been fulfilled, and he needed to do what he could to assure Rosie it hadn't really been his fault.

"Lookt everwhere for it," he said morosely, hoping Rosie would understand.

Rosie was plain touched. "That's all right, Royce, quit worryin' about that shoe," she said. "Your ankle's broke an' you wouldn't be able to wear it, anyhow. We got to get you to a hospital."

Then, to Royce's great surprise, Rosie put her arm around him. "Little Buster askt about you, hon," she said softly.

"Aw, Little Buster," Royce said, before relief, embarrassment, fatigue and beer overwhelmed him. Soon, though, he was completely overwhelmed. He put his head on his wife's familiar slate-hard breastbone and began to sob.

In that, he was not alone for long. Many of the women and even a few of the men who had gathered around forgot that they had come out to tear Royce limb from limb. At the sight of such a fine and fitting reunion, the urge for vengeance died out in the crowd's collective breast--a number of women began to sob, too, wishing they could have some kind of reunion. Darrell, the owner of the ill-fated Pontiac, decided to forgive Royce instead of stomping him and went off with his fiancée to continue the argument they were having over whether titty was an OK word. Bobby and John Dave shook their heads and accepted ten of Vernon's $100 bills, as collateral against whatever the damages might be. They realized that, once again, the East Tex hoedown had been a big success. The two policemen went back to their bowel movements, Vernon started an unsuccessful search for F. V. and Mitch McDonald, Royce's best buddy, immediately went to a phone booth to call Shirley and tell her Royce had gone back to his wife. He made it clear that he had nothing but forgiveness in his heart and hinted rather broadly that his own, very own old thing was aching to have Shirley come and sit on it again--to which Shirley, who was filling beer pitchers with her free hand at the time, said, "Sit on it yourself, you little tattletale, I got better things to do, if you don't mind."

Rosie knelt by her husband, gratefully receiving the warm sentiments of the crowd. Many a woman leaned down to tell her how happy she was that she and her husband had got it all straightened out. Royce had cried himself to sleep against her breast. Soon an ambulance with a siren and a revolving red light screamed up and took Royce and Rosie away, and then two big white wreckers came and got the Pontiac and the potato-chip truck. Some of the crowd straggled back through the hole in the wall to talk things over; others drifted off home; and many stayed where they were--all of them happy to have witnessed, for once, such passion and compassion. Then, when all was peaceful, a spongy raft of clouds blew in from the Gulf, hiding the high wet Houston moon, and the clouds began to drop a soft, lulling midnight drizzle onto the parking lot, the cars and the happy, placidly milling crowd.