Duane's Depressed Read Online Free PDF

he was holding the driver’s door open with one hand and dangling a bloody foot out the door.
    “Oh my God, what has that stupid little idjit done now?” Earlene said, whereupon she fainted, falling face forward onto her electric typewriter, which immediately emitted a wild keening sound.
    “It’s all right, it was just my little toe,” Bobby Lee said, when Karla came running out. “I guess Duane didn’t beat you too bad, you don’t have no black eyes, or else if you do you’re using real good makeup.”
    “I never said he beat me,” Karla said. “Now Earlene’s fainted right on her typewriter—I bet she’s ruined that whole contract.”
    “Well, big deal, I ruined my whole foot,” Bobby Lee said.“And a foot’s more important than a contract. There’s a hose hooked to that faucet there by the corner of the office—if you’ll just turn it on and hand it to me I’ll sluice off some of this blood and we’ll be on our way.”
    “On our way where?” Karla asked. “I never said we were going anywhere.”
    One of the reasons Bobby Lee was so hard to communicate with was that he never removed his sunglasses, no matter how light or how dark it was. Once long ago a woman he was madly in love with called him a cross-eyed runt. Despite the fact that, in the years since the insult had been delivered, hundreds of people had assured him that he wasn’t cross-eyed—a fact he could see for himself, in the privacy of his own bathroom, every morning when he shaved—Bobby Lee had refused to take any chances. He kept his dark glasses on at all times, in case crosseyedness struck unexpectedly.
    “Oh, come on, Karla,” he said. “Everybody knows Duane has left you. The CB’s been cracklin’ all mornin’, about him walking off. Ten or twelve people have offered him rides, but he won’t get in no car. You two must have had the fight of a lifetime, for him to take it into his head to walk six miles.”
    “Nope, no fight. I haven’t even seen him since breakfast,” Karla said. “He just parked his pickup and walked off.”
    “Well, that’s not what they’re saying on the CB,” Bobby Lee assured her. “Are you going to bring me that hose, or not? I don’t want to get blood on my pickup.”
    Karla brought him the hose, but declined to watch him wash his mangled toe.
    “What were you aiming at that you hit your little toe?” she asked.
    “A bug,” Bobby Lee said. “I was so fucking bored I tried to shoot a bug and hit my toe.”
    “I guess I better go wet a washrag and see if I can bring Earlene back to life,” Karla said.
    “If it don’t work I guess I could always give her mouth-to-mouth,” Bobby Lee said. He found Earlene appealing—who cared if she was a little chubby?
    “I guess you would, you lech,” Karla said. “I expect I can reviveher without any help from a man so stupid he would try to shoot a bug.”
    But reviving Earlene proved more difficult than she had expected. Even when Earlene regained a measure of consciousness she was far from out of the woods.
    “I’m all right, I’m all right, I just need a little air. Everybody stand back,” Earlene said. Her voice was wobbly but not as wobbly as her legs. When she attempted to walk across the room and get what she referred to euphemistically as her “nerve medicine”—it was actually Paxil, a fact Karla had determined long ago by sneaking a look in Earlene’s purse one day when she was in the bathroom—she began to list heavily to the left. Before anyone could grab her and set her back on course she flopped into the watercooler, knocking it over. The water bottle, which had just been refilled that morning, went rolling across the floor, gurgling as it went, and gushing nice fresh springwater freely onto the rug.
    Ruth Popper, who had been deep in a nap and unaware of any commotion, woke up from her nap with the conviction that her feet were wet, which they were, the rolling bottle of water having come to rest against her