Free Duane's Depressed by Larry McMurtry Page B

the big tanks beneath the two pumps. He moved slowly, and, even from a distance, looked puffy, old, discouraged.
    Duane turned away, slipping across the dark parking lot. He had intended to get a half pound of bacon to take to his cabin, but the rapidly rising level of Karla’s gloom had made him anxious to get out of the house as quickly as possible, and he didn’t want to go in the Kwik-Sack and buy bacon from Sonny Crawford. He decided just to make do with coffee, which he had plenty of. When he stopped once more to look back, Sonny was squinting at the long measuring stick, trying to read the gas level. Probably one of the reasons he had to squint was because he only had one eye. Duane himself had put the other eye out in a brief, intense fight over a girl, Jacy Farrow. The fight had occurred when they were eighteen. For much of his life Sonny had worn an eye patch; but in the last few years he had ceased to bother.
    Now the cause of that long-ago fight, Jacy Farrow, a minor actress who was the town’s nearest approach to a celebrity, was five years dead, lost somewhere in the snows of the North Slope. She had gone north of the Arctic Circle to film a beer commercial,fallen in love with a young bush pilot, and flew off with him one morning hoping to spot a polar bear. Though it was a clear morning when they left, neither Jacy nor the pilot was ever seen again. Two years later a pipeline crew found the plane in a snowdrift. The cockpit was empty, except for a small bag containing Jacy’s cosmetics. No trace of the lovers was ever found.
    The loss haunted Karla for years—she and Jacy had once been good friends.
    “Either she froze or a bear ate her,” Karla said. “I know it was one or the other.”
    Duane made no comment, but Karla continued to brood about Jacy’s life and death.
    “First her child gets killed and then she goes off and gets eaten by a bear,” she remarked from time to time. “It wasn’t such a fun life, was it?”
    Once on the dirt road that led out to his cabin, Duane walked a little faster. He wanted to be out of town, beyond the reach of the ghosts that lived in his memory. He didn’t want to think about Jacy, or about Sonny Crawford as he had once been. He wanted to hang on to the new, uplifting feeling of possibility that he had felt when he first stepped out of his house: the feeling that he had a new life to live, a life of walking, of unburdened solitude, or a different way of looking at the world.
    He had just turned the corner past the last house when he and a deer startled each other. The deer, confused, jumped out of the ditch and ran right past him, so close that he could have touched it. He heard it crashing through the dry weeds as it fled. If he hurried he could be at his cabin by first light. The coyotes would be yipping, the quail would be whistling, and nobody would be able to call him on the telephone.

11
    K ARLA WAITED PATIENTLY for the hour of seven to roll around, that being the earliest hour that she could feel it would be polite to rally her troops—that is, her girlfriends. However sympathetic her girlfriends might be, they weren’t likely to appreciate being awakened from their beauty sleep before 7 A.M. —at least not for any crisis short of a fatality.
    Duane wasn’t dead, he was just depressed, so Karla waited, idling away her time by looking through her files of old health magazines. She was hoping to glean some clues about male depression, but almost all the articles in her health magazines were about women, not men. She did find one short piece from years back that claimed men went through menopause too, although, of course, since they didn’t have periods, it was different for them than for women. How different, the article didn’t say. Nonetheless the concept of male menopause provided at least a clue as to what might have gone wrong with Duane.
    At 7 A.M. on the dot she called her flamboyant redheaded friend Candy Morris, a new arrival to the Thalia