Free Duane's Depressed by Larry McMurtry

Karla was sitting at the kitchen counter with a cup of coffee and a stack of health magazines. She felt disoriented, on the whole. It was three-fifteen in the morning and her husband was about to go walking away.
    “Suppose one of the grandkids needed a blood transfusion real quick,” she said. “What good would you be if you were walking around somewhere out on the road?”
    “Not much good,” he admitted. “I doubt that’s going to happen, but if it does, call nine-one-one. That’s what it’s for.”
    “Duane, I’m really upset; you’re just not in your right mind anymore,” Karla said. “You’re clinically depressed, only you’re too stubborn to admit it.”
    “We can talk about it later,” he said, not looking at his wife. He had an overpowering desire to be out of the house, beyond questions, speculations, marriage, business, all of it.
    He pulled on his gloves and left, leaving Karla sitting unhappily with her pile of magazines.

10
    O NCE OUTSIDE HIS HOUSE , Duane immediately felt a huge swelling of relief. He had a feeling he had never had before in his life: that the whole world was there before him and that he was free to walk through it. He might walk through Egypt, if he felt like it, or India, or China. If he had to use airplanes or boats in order to cross the great waters that lay in his way it would only be until he was back on land. From then on he would trust to his two feet again, walking everywhere, in no hurry, free. All that he had been too busy to see or do in his life so far he could now investigate, without haste, at his own pace, on foot. It was a wonderful feeling—he stood by his garage for a few moments, savoring it. There sat the pickup that had been his prison; but it was his prison no longer.
    Happily, he set off through the town. Though he felt as if the whole world were spread before him, his actual location was a small town on the West Texas plain, the town where he had lived his whole life. He had never before, even in boyhood, really wandered around it much at night. Walking through it would be, in a sense, to discover it afresh. The wind had died completely—it was no longer very cold. Duane soon warmed up sufficiently that he felt he could do without his gloves, which he stuffed in his hip pocket.
    Although most of the houses in town were dark, a few had lights in their kitchens, or bedrooms, or dens. From some theonly light was the glow of a television set, faintly lighting a window. Evidently he and Karla were not the only people awake with things on their minds at three in the morning.
    A dog barked at him, here and there—to the south a coyote yipped. From the north-south highway that ran through town there was the drone of a truck—from the sound of the motor Duane thought he recognized it as one of his own.
    When he turned north he passed the small house where Lester Marlow, once the local banker, now lived in gloomy penance. Five years back Lester had lost track of the fact that, while he might be president of the bank, he didn’t own the money in it. He began to embezzle; then, in an effort to conceal what he had done from the watchful auditors, he had decided to blow up the bank. He constructed a bomb in his garage, put it in the trunk of his car, and was on the way to the bank with it when the bomb went off, blowing up, not the bank, but a brand-new Cadillac and, to some extent, Lester. The blast in effect scalped him; it also blew him through the windshield and cut off one of his ears. The blast, which occurred only a block from the bank, created such confusion in downtown Thalia that no one noticed Lester had lost an ear. Lester had always been considered funny looking; he had been in the hospital nearly three hours before a nurse noticed that he only had one ear. A hasty search of the bomb site failed to turn it up. The loss of the ear didn’t seem to bother Lester much but he was bothered by the loss of his hair. Much of his time since he had been