Texasville

Sometimes, driving into town, Duane Moore found it hard to tell whether he was going forward or backward.

The pickup was going forward, of course. He was not yet so crazy as to drive into town in reverse. And yet, internally, he ran mostly in reverse. He spent hours replaying old conversations in his head or reliving past events. If they had been important conversations or crucial events, the habit might have been understandable, but they weren't. Having such conversations once was enough; yet his brain would sometimes play them back three or four times, as if it were a cassette player that kept rewinding and replaying unimportant tapes.

Just inside the city limits, he passed his own pipe yard with the four towering rigs sitting in it, representing doom. They were all deep rigs and had cost nearly $3,000,000 apiece. One of them had occasionally been used to drill a well, but the three others had never been out of the pipe yard where they were built. Looking on the bright side--as everyone constantly advised him to do--he could tell himself how lucky he was that there weren't ten rigs sitting there accumulating rust along with interest he couldn't pay.

Lester Marlow, the president of the local bank--and recently indicted on 73 counts of bank fraud--had encouraged him to build ten rigs. That had been at the height of the boom, when every headline spoke of the energy crisis. It had been hard to get drills into the ground fast enough to meet the demand for West Texas crude. Duane's four small rigs operated around the clock, month after month, but they could only drill shallow wells. There was plenty of money to be made from shallow wells, and Duane was making as much of it as anyone in the area, but every banker he brushed elbows with assured him that deep oil was the wave of the future. Marlow breezily offered to lend him $30,000,000 to build deep rigs with.

After much brooding, Duane decided to build four. Before they were even completed, the wave of the future knocked him right off the surfboard, along with plenty of other surfers. The energy crisis somehow changed into an oil glut. The four new rigs were dead in the water or, at least, dead in the pipe yard; but the money it had taken to build them was very much alive, hungrily consuming interest payments of more than $100,000 a month.

Lester Marlow's trial for bank fraud was coming up in three months. He was planning to plead ignorance. Everyone in town agreed that he was ignorant but cheerfully assumed that he was headed for prison.

Bobby Lee, Duane's number-one tool pusher, who hated Lester for having once repossessed a pickup, argued strongly for the death penalty. Never having worn a white collar, he took a tough line on white-collar crime.

"I'd like to see Lester walk the last mile," Bobby Lee said whenever the subject came up.

"Why, he couldn't walk no mile," Eddie Belt said. "Too fat. I doubt he'd make it three hundred feet."

Eddie, who also worked for Duane, was the local realist.

•

The Dairy Queen was filled with the usual hard-bitten but dejected crowd--nouveau riche only a few months earlier, now nouveau bankrupt.

"I see you brought your land shark," Eddie Belt said when Duane took his seat at the oilmen's table. Eddie was referring to Duane's dog, Shorty, who could be seen through the big plate-glass window, his head flattened against the windshield.

It was a remark Duane heard several times a week. Bobby Lee, whose wit was often indebted to Saturday Night Live, had once referred to Shorty as a land shark, and the name had caught on. Shorty was hated throughout the oil patch for his habit of unannounced attacks. He would lie motionless in the pickup seat for hours, looking like a dog that had had a sunstroke; but if some roughneck or old friend of Duane's so much as leaned an elbow against the pickup, Shorty would strike, instantly and unerringly. He preferred to nip heels but would make do with elbows, as most of the people who worked for Duane had learned to their sorrow.

"Good morning," Duane said. He had no interest in defending Shorty or in talking about him at all. The thought that most of the people he knew could think of nothing to talk about except the bad habits of his dog often depressed him.

Junior Nolan was looking particularly low. Junior was fair-skinned and his forehead had sunburned a fiery red. He wore a cowboy hat when he was in the Dairy Queen but often forgot to put it on when he was outside. It could usually be found on the seat of his pickup.

Junior had made so much money in the oil business that he had been able to buy a ranch and realize his lifelong dream, which was to be a cowboy. Unfortunately, he had to run his ranch almost alone, since most of the cowboys in the area had long since given up and gone to work for oil companies. Junior made do with one ranch hand, an elderly chain smoker named Mitch Mott, who was sitting beside his boss, chain-smoking, when Duane sat down.

"Mitch, I thought you quit smoking," Duane said.

"I did," Mitch said, lighting a cigarette off the one he was just finishing. "I quit for part of last week. But then I got down in the dumps, and the first thing I knew, I was smoking again."

Junior Nolan was well on his way to losing his oil company and his ranch, too. He was 6'5", one of the tallest men in the county. Karla, Duane's wife, had often expressed an interest in him; but so far, little seemed to have come of her interest.

Janine Wells, Duane's girlfriend, was sitting a table or two away, having coffee with her girlfriends from the courthouse. Janine, a petite blonde, had got herself elected county tax collector.

Duane was glad that he and Janine had agreed to ignore each other in public. Or he guessed he was glad: Sometimes he thought he would have done better to strike a deal allowing him to ignore her in private. Their last tryst or two had been uneventful from Janine's point of view, though Duane had taken two much-needed naps.

The only cheerful person at the table was Luthie Sawyer. Luthie owned a small drilling company and was going broke, like everyone else, but he talked so constantly and kept in such perpetual motion that he may not have noticed that detail. Luthie was an eternal optimist and also an imaginative one. He was always coming up with novel solutions to problems that left everyone else totally stumped.

"I think I've got the answer to this oil glut," Luthie announced, stirring his coffee so rapidly he made a little whirlpool in his cup.

"Good," Duane said. "What's the answer?"

"Let's bomb OPEC," Luthie said. He was a small, vigorous man, deeply suntanned.

"Well," Duane said noncommittally.

Bobby Lee and Eddie Belt looked thoughtful.

"Napalm it or use H-bombs?" Bobby Lee asked.

Luthie evidently hadn't got that far in his planning.

"I don't know if you could buy an H-bomb," he said.

"Why couldn't you buy one?" Eddie Belt asked. "It's still a free country, ain't it?"

"I don't think you'd need nuc-lar weapons," Luthie said. "I think regular bombs would do it."

"If this means getting drafted, I pass," Bobby Lee said.

"No army in the world would take you," Eddie Belt said. He and Bobby Lee were longtime rivals.

"Don't you remember Ross Perot?" Luthie said. "They stuck some of his engineers in jail and he just hired himself some mercs and got 'em out."

"What's a merc?" Mitch Mott wanted to know.

"You know, mercenaries," Luthie said.

The hated name of H. Ross Perot, the billionaire computer baron and educational reformer, rang like a bell in the dining room of the Dairy Queen.

Thanks to the state's new no-pass, no-play law, students failing even one course could not participate in extracurricular activities during the six weeks following the failure. H. Ross Perot had done all he could to lobby the bill through, and it was ruefully admitted that he could do a lot.

What it meant for the Thalia Thistles was that many of the young men now sweating through calisthenics would fail off the team at the end of the first testing period, making it doubtful that the high school could even field a complete team.

Rage, like a wall of flame, had swept the state in the wake of no pass, no play. The fear haunting every parent's mind was that if the young ones were denied the right to play sports, twirl batons, lead cheers or blow horns in the band, they would quit school immediately and sit around the house forever, watching TV.

"I'd rather just go bomb Ross Perot's offices," Bobby Lee said. His position on no pass, no play was not in doubt.

Duane, a closet advocate of the new law, kept his thoughts to himself. Occasionally, he daydreamed about how nice it would be if his children got educations. He imagined Dickie becoming a lawyer instead of a criminal; Jack and Julie being (continued on page 94)Texasville(continued from page 84) the first Texas twins to graduate from Harvard. In public, he confined himself to an occasional ambiguous murmur.

"How come Perot ain't going broke like everybody else up here?" Eddie Belt asked. "You think he's a Communist?"

"He's not in the oil business," Duane pointed out.

"I don't like no son of a bitch that's that much richer than me," Bobby Lee said.

"It might not cost but a few hundred thousand to bomb OPEC," Luthie said, returning to his plan.

"I don't think OPEC is a place," Duane said.

Luthie looked hurt. He had always been thin-skinned. Bombing OPEC had seemed like a simple solution to everyone's problems. All the papers made it clear that OPEC was responsible for the oil glut. But Duane's remark shook his confidence.

"I thought it was over there by Kuwait somewhere," Luthie said.

"Mexico don't belong, but Venezuela does," Duane pointed out.

"Oh, shit, don't bomb Mexico; it'd just spread them germs," Eddie Belt said. He had been to Mexico twice and had caught inconvenient diseases both times.

"I don't want none of them germs coming around me," he said as his memories grew more vivid.

After that, conversation lagged. It was as if the various patrons of the Dairy Queen had been overtaken for a moment by events too sobering for words. The only sound was the sound of Janine popping her bubble gum--a sound that made Duane feel tense, for some reason. Janine had never given up bubble gum, though it contrasted sharply with the polished, sophisticated image she felt was required of her as an elected official. Duane knew she was watching him. She watched him constantly but without finding out much. Janine could not be said to be a very advanced student of male behavior.

"Do you think women want it more than men?" Junior Nolan asked suddenly, staring at a salt shaker.

The table was collectively stunned. Only Duane smiled. Everyone else stirred his coffee thoughtfully, embarrassed that Junior had seen fit to ask such a question.

"Want what more?" Bobby Lee asked, though he knew perfectly well what "it" meant.

"Uh, sexual intercourse," Junior said sadly.

The coffee in several cups was again thoughtfully stirred. Duane had already finished his and chose to sit back and hear how the company responded to Junior's surprising question.

Just at that moment, Sonny Crawford walked in, a copy of The Wall Street Journal tucked under his arm.

"Good morning," he said politely. Sonny was, by general agreement, the most polite man in town.

"Junior wants to know if women need more sex than men," Duane said.

"I didn't say need it, exactly," Junior said, blushing into his sunburn.

"Don't look at me; I'm a bachelor," Sonny said.

"We need the bachelor perspective," Duane said. "Mitch is a bachelor, too. What do you think about it, Mitch?"

"Duane, I wouldn't know," Mitch said. "I've mostly done without, except during rodeos."

Duane glanced over at the ladies from the courthouse, avoiding Janine's steely-blue eyes. He had an urge to invite them to join in the conversation, if it ever became a conversation.

He wondered what had prompted Junior to ask such a question. His wife, Suzie Nolan, was a lovely woman, quiet and seemingly demure. She had lived in Thalia all her life, graduating in the same class as Duane and Sonny.

Junior Nolan had not taken his eyes off the salt shaker since asking his unexpected question--a question that had given his tablemates a bad surprise. The specter of female need had been raised, and the response of most people at the table was to look discreetly away.

Junior himself abruptly decided not to wait for opinions, since none had been forthcoming in almost a minute.

"Mitch, we better hit it," he said. "It ain't getting any cooler outside." He got up and headed for the door, carrying his hat in his hand. Duane saw him toss it into his pickup.

"How come Junior only wears a hat inside?" Eddie Belt asked.

"He's always been a little eccentric," Sonny said.

Mitch Mott got up and ambled out, trying to walk bowlegged. He affected the walk of a lifelong cowboy, but for most of his life he had been a short-order cook who rodeoed a little on the side. Junior had gone up to the Panhandle to buy some calves, had met Mitch at a small rodeo, mistaken him for a cowboy and hired him on the spot.

Since he had lived in Thalia for a mere ten years, Mitch was not deeply versed in its lore, which only a lifetime's residence could make intelligible--and sometimes not then.

Duane had spent a lifetime there and still found much of what went on to be incomprehensible, but he didn't care. He was beginning to find the thought of Suzie Nolan interesting. After all, as he knew better than most, what looked demure from one angle might not look so demure from another. Janine sat just behind him, looking like the woman who invented Sunday school while, in fact, possessing the heart of a slaver.

"Maybe Junior should call up Dr. Ruth," Sonny suggested.

One reason Sonny's little Kwik-Sack did such a booming business at night was that he took the night shift himself and kept the radio tuned to Dr. Ruth Westheimer's popular call-in show, Sexually Speaking. He kept the radio turned up loud so that all the customers could hear it, even if they were back in the far corner by the detergents. Roughnecks and truck drivers, stepping in to buy cigarettes or beer, would fall under the spell of Dr. Ruth's brisk Central European voice; often they lingered for 15 or 20 minutes, piling up items they didn't need, while Dr. Ruth discussed the pros and cons of anal intercourse or offered helpful tips on how not to drip too much spit into one's partner's mouth while tongue kissing.

"Hell, let's get the women in on this," Duane said, feeling in an impish mood for the first time in months. "They're the ones who know the answer."

Sonny smiled when he said it. Sonny could smile without looking one bit less sad, a fact that had bothered Duane during all the years of their friendship.

Elsewhere around the table, the suggestion met with something akin to panic. Bobby Lee nearly swallowed the toothpick he had been masticating for the past ten minutes.

"I don't think we ought to ask them," he said. "They're women."

"Well, wasn't Junior asking about women?" Duane said.

Eddie Belt, who rarely agreed with Bobby Lee about anything, agreed with him this time. "If Junior wants to know, let Junior ask them," he said. "I ain't gonna ask one of them nothing."

He started to shut up but then remembered the many injustices he had suffered at the hands of women.

"I wouldn't ask one of 'em for a Dr Pepper if I was dying of thirst," he said. "I wouldn't ask them to connect the hose if my house was burning down. If both my legs was broke and one offered me a wheelchair, I wouldn't take it."

"What's he raving about?" Janine said. She and her friends, Charlene Diggs and Lavelle Bates, were on their way out, but Eddie's outburst had been delivered in such a loud voice that they all stopped. Janine had the bold urge to chat with Duane a minute and felt that Eddie Belt, whom she couldn't stand, had provided her with a sufficient excuse.

"I wasn't raving about nothing, and if I was, it was none of your business," Eddie said. His memories had raised him to such a pitch of outrage that he forgot for a moment that he was talking to his boss's girlfriend.

"That's not very polite," Janine said crisply. "I just asked."

"You girls sit down," Duane said, jumping to his feet. He was not willing to be cheated of his first impish mood in months. Who knew when he would see another?

He secured chairs so quickly that the women were nonplused.

"Duane, we just got up," Charlene said. "We got jobs to do. We ain't allowed to sit back down."

"Yeah, you ought to been doing the jobs all this time instead of sitting there telling lies," Eddie said. Once he got up a headful of outrage, it took it a while to drain.

"What'd he do, take an ugly pill this morning?" Janine asked.

Some months earlier, she and Eddie had been engaged for three months. Over the years, Janine had indulged in a number of engagements, complete with rings and the selection of wallpaper. She had been responsible for some of the very episodes Eddie was remembering with such ire, but she had undergone two years of very helpful therapy with a psychologist in Wichita Falls. The therapist had taught her how unproductive it was to dwell on past mistakes.

Since Duane had pulled up chairs, the ladies from the courthouse all sat down. All of them had worked there since graduating from high school. It occurred to Charlene and Lavelle that it was a fine opportunity to see how Duane and Janine behaved toward each other in public. At the very least, it would provide meat for analysis.

Luthie Sawyer nodded to the ladies, got up and left, a hurt look on his face. The fact that his plan to bomb OPEC had bombed in Thalia was clearly a letdown.

"We hurt that old boy's feelings," Duane said. "He had a scheme cooked up to keep us from all going broke."

"Oh, you ain't going broke; you just like to feel sorry for yourselves," Janine said.

She knew that a person in good mental health didn't dwell on the bad things that might happen. Her view was that the oil business was just in a lull between booms. By the time she and Duane got married, he would be richer than ever.

"What was you men talking about that's so important we have to neglect our jobs to hear about it?" she asked.

Bobby Lee had recovered from his moment of panic. He was one of the few men in town who had not been engaged to Janine. He felt she was nowhere near smart enough to get Duane away from Karla--therefore, he had little to fear from her.

"We was talking about sex," he said.

"We knew that; we ain't dumb," Charlene said.

"Junior Nolan was wondering whether women want more sex than men," Duane said. "When I was growing up, the boys all wanted it and the girls didn't. Now it's the other way around. I wonder why."

Charlene laughed. She had been married three times, but all three husbands had died after only modest use.

"We've got prettier and you all have gotten uglier," she said.

It was certainly true that Charlene had gotten prettier. She had been overweight and sloppy as a teenager but had turned into a good-looking woman.

"Men are all wimps, anyway," Lavelle Bates said. She was a tall, rawboned brunette who had recently become the first employee of the Thalia courthouse to go to a Club Med on her vacation. It gave her a slight aura of mystery, and even a slight aura had proved enough to intimidate suitors.

"If any woman wants much, she's out of luck around here," she said, looking pointedly at Bobby Lee, who had been flirting with her for the past several years in his languid fashion.

Janine tried to look thoughtfully aloof. It was the first time since the affair began that she had sat in public with Duane unless they were out of town. She found that she liked being in public with him. It was good for her self-esteem, the thing she had had to work on most assiduously with her therapist. The men she had been engaged to thought she had far too much self-esteem, while her therapist thought she had much too little.

"I think they should need it equal, the males and the females, don't you, Duane?" she asked.

Being able to sit in public with him raised her self-esteem to the highest pitch in her memory.

"There ain't a man alive that can think up as much dirt as a woman," Eddie Belt said.

"He must have taken two ugly pills this morning," Janine said. "Ugly as he is, he isn't usually this ugly."

Janine had a sense that she was finally getting the situation to swing her way. The sense was so strong that she casually put an arm across Duane's shoulder, a move not lost on anyone in the Dairy Queen. Even the cook was watching from behind a stack of taco shells.

"All I know is, men are scaredy-cats," Lavelle said.

"I figure the average man tells at least a million lies a year," Charlene observed.

"You women won't stick to the point," Duane said. "All we're trying to find out is whether you girls want it more than us boys."

"In the first place, you ain't boys," Lavelle said. "You look half dead to me."

"That's what being middle-aged means," Sonny said. "You're on the downhill slope."

"I ain't, and besides, I've got my brakes on," Bobby Lee said. He was five years younger than Sonny and Duane and objected to being lumped with them. He didn't care for the downhill-slope concept, either.

"What's it say about it in The Wall Street Journal?" Duane asked.

Sonny liked to buy penny stocks. He generally spent an hour or two each morning at the D.Q. picking through the Journal. He wasn't rich, by any means, but he owned the laundromat, the Kwik-Sack, the video parlor, four or five buildings and a recently installed car wash.

"It doesn't say a word about the problem," he said.

"I can't believe we have to pay taxes to the county so these women can sit here and talk about stuff like this," Eddie Belt said.

"Stuff like what?" Karla asked, materializing suddenly at Eddie's elbow.

Although everyone else at the table was frozen with horror, Duane could hardly keep from laughing out loud. He alone had seen Karla's BMW whip past the drive-in window a minute earlier. Karla was impatient with the drive-in window, as well as with other forms of service at the D.Q.

What she usually did was park behind the building, come in the back door, gossip a minute with the cook, sniff the nacho dip to see if it met with her approval and pour herself some fresh coffee before anyone in the dining room even knew she was around. If there was no one there with whom she felt like gossiping, she could cut back out the rear exit and be on her way to wherever her mood took her.

Duane had decided to give Janine lots of rope and see if Karla could hang her. He knew it wasn't a charitable thing to do, but then, he was not always in the mood to be charitable toward Janine. Without bothering to ascertain whether he planned to divorce Karla and marry her, Janine had told him not to plan any custody fights, because she had no intention of living with his kids.

If there were such a thing as a personality glut, Karla had it. She often wore a T-shirt that said, Life's too short to dance with ugly men, a motto that dated from the day she had first learned of the concept of open marriage. She had read it in Cosmo, (continued on page 154)Texasville(continued from page 96) the source of many of her concepts.

Janine withdrew her arm from Duane's shoulder as smoothly as possible, well aware that if Karla had happened to walk in with a chain saw, the arm would be lying on the floor already.

"Hi, Janine," Karla said. "Haven't seen you in a long time."

"I hardly ever leave the courthouse," Janine said. "The only people who see me are people with overdue taxes."

Karla seemed happy as a lark, though she hadn't taken off her sunglasses.

"Why are you looking so red in the face, Eddie Belt?" she asked. "Were you talking about sex? I've noticed the mere mention of sex turns you red in the face."

"You don't have to call me by my whole name," Eddie pointed out. "You've known me all my life."

Eddie had a hard time concealing the fact that he was deathly afraid of Karla--more afraid of her than he would have been of a cobra. You could run from a cobra, but where could you run from Karla if you happened to work for her husband?

"Now, don't pick on Eddie," Duane said. "We've just been discussing whether women like sex more than men, or what. We didn't reach a decision yet."

"In fact, we haven't got very far in the discussion," Sonny said. It worried him that Duane would sit there practically egging on his wife and his girlfriend.

"Bobby Lee's just a Peeping Tom, so he shouldn't get a vote," Karla said.

"I ain't, I'm married," Bobby Lee protested.

Pretending her finger was a piece of chalk, Karla marked a few scores in the air. "Sonny's a bachelor, Eddie Belt's scared of women and Duane says himself he's past his prime. I don't know if it's fair to judge the whole male sex by this ugly little bunch," she said.

"Yes, it's fair," Lavelle said. "I lived in Olney twenty years, and men ain't no better down there."

"I ain't scared of women and you ain't no Gina Bardot yourself," Eddie Belt snapped, wishing he'd never stopped at the Dairy Queen in the first place.

"Brigitte Bardot," Sonny corrected.

Janine could hardly believe Duane would sit there and let his own wife insult him so bluntly. Ordinarily, she would have thought it meant he suffered from low self-esteem, but Duane was tricky and couldn't really be understood in terms of self-esteem.

"I may get a second wind any day now," he said, grinning.

"Duane, you used up all your winds years ago," Karla said.

"I wish I could just sit here all day, but some of us have to work," Janine said, standing up. Charlene and Lavelle were reluctant to leave until they had heard what Karla had to say to Duane out of earshot of Janine, but they didn't have much choice. Fortunately, the cook was still watching from behind the taco shells, and they knew they could get a full report from her.

"If you ever figure out who wants it most, let us know," Charlene said. "I've often wondered."

Karla took Eddie Belt's dozer cap off and ruffled his hair to show him there were no hard feelings.

"I know you're not really scared of women," she said. "You're just scared of me, and that shows you got good sense."

"If I had good sense, I wouldn't be here," Eddie said, though now that the horrible trio from the courthouse was gone, his mood was improving.

"You oughta do like Duane, get you a girlfriend who chews bubble gum," Karla said, still the picture of good cheer.

Duane laughed.

"I don't know what you think you've got to laugh about, Duane," Karla said, smiling at him.

"I was just laughing at nothing," he said. "It's either that or cry about everything, and I wasn't in a crying mood."

Karla put an arm around Sonny, her old friend. From time to time, in years past, she had tried to penetrate his detachment at least enough to get him to flirt with her, but she had finally come to accept the fact that his detachment was impenetrable. Since then, he had been a stable source of advice, though rarely a source of fun.

"It don't say much for your character that you'd let him sit here with that slut and not do a thing to save our marriage," she said.

"Your marriage isn't in any danger, and it never has been," Sonny said.

"Wrong," Karla said. "You'd be surprised how often it's been in danger."

"Karla's chased off all the women except herself," Duane said. "I guess it's time to go to work."

"As soon as you leave, I'm gonna pump Sonny like he was an oil well," Karla said.

She made a pumping gesture with her right hand.

"I'll pump until I get you to have total recall of everything Duane said to his girlfriend while I wasn't here," she said.

"That won't take long," Sonny said. "They barely spoke."

"Do you think morals have declined?" Karla asked. "Ten years ago, a married man like Duane wouldn't have dared sit in this Dairy Queen with his girlfriend."

"Ten years ago, this Dairy Queen wasn't here," Duane observed.

"There's never been a dollar's worth of morals in this whole county," Eddie Belt volunteered. He was perking up a lot. The decline of local morals was one of his favorite topics.

Duane got up and stepped over to the window. Shorty, ever loyal, still had his head pressed against the windshield, though the sun was blazing down. Duane waved at him. Shorty, overjoyed, jumped straight up, bonking himself against the roof of the cab. Then he went into a frenzy, trying to scramble onto the dashboard to be closer to Duane. In his frenzy, he knocked pliers, receipts and everything else Duane kept on the dashboard onto the floor boards. Duane laughed. It always cheered him a little to see Shorty leap up like a fish and bonk himself on the roof.

"Laughing at animals is a sign of bad morals, too," Karla said. "Shorty can't help it that he's the stupidest creature on earth."

"What do you expect when a place is nearly a hundred years old?" Sonny said. "Decadence sets in."

"Who's going to the centennial meeting tonight?" Duane asked, since Sonny had mentioned the county's age, a topic on everyone's mind.

Only Sonny raised a hand. As mayor of the town, he spent most of his evenings going to one meeting or another. The week before, in the city council, there had been a hot debate over street names, a flourish the town had done without so far. Some wanted to name streets after pioneers, others after trees. The tree faction won by three votes.

Everyone else stonily ignored Duane's question.

"What happened to the pioneer spirit?" Duane asked.

"Who cares what happened to it?" Eddie Belt said. "I ain't growing no beard, either."

It had been decided to require all adult males in the county to grow beards for the centennial. Many neighboring counties had had their centennials already and had had a beard requirement. For this one, those refusing to comply faced the danger of being ducked in a water tank situated on the courthouse lawn for that purpose.

"You'll get ducked if you don't grow a beard," Duane warned.

"You're not a dictator, Duane," Karla said. "You can't make people grow beards just because you're chairman of that stupid committee."

"I hate beards," Bobby Lee said. "The whiskers kind of stick into you when you try to sleep at night."

"The people of this county don't deserve a centennial," Duane said. "They're too uncooperative."

"Who asked for the damn thing, anyway?" Eddie Belt asked. "I wasn't here a hundred years ago and nobody else was, either. What do we care about how the thing got started up?"

"You're supposed to care about your history," Karla said.

"I'd rather forget mine," Bobby Lee said.

"Wouldn't we all," said Karla.

"'Hell, let's get the women in on this,' Duane said. 'They're the ones who know the answer.'"

" 'I don't know if it's fair to judge the whole male sex by this ugly little bunch,' she said."