He handed the gun to Odell and brought his shotgun to bear. The range was about twenty-five feet.
“You shoulda worn your vest, Sarge,” said Lamar merrily.
Bud crumpled against the buckshot and heard no noise: He was in the center of an explosion. Red everywhere, the smell of dirt and smoke in his nose, the sense of heat and the thousand things that tore into him. He felt his soul depart his body.
CHAPTER
7
They traveled in silence for the longest time, Odell behind the wheel, beaming with bliss, a wary Lamar next to him, and Richard and the rigid Stepfords in the back seat. At one point, Mrs. Stepford whispered something to her husband.
“Excuse me,” he said, “Missus has to go weewee.”
Lamar said, “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I have to ask you to squeeze it in a mite longer. We have to make some tracks.”
“What the hell difference does it make?” said Mr. Stepford. “You’re going to kill us same as you done them law enforcement boys.”
“Just cooperate, okay, old man? I got to concentrate on where I’m going.”
They drove onward, over country roads, right at the speed limit but never breaking any laws. They heard no sirens, and the radio announced no discoveries of police bodies. They saw no helicopters.
“Okay,” said Lamar, looking at a map, “you want to go on straighty-straight. No turnee. Y’all keep your eyes open for Cox City, where we’re going to go left on 21 to Bray. He can’t read the signs but he can drive straight and turn when I tell him.”
“Where are we going, Lamar?” asked Richard.
“Richard, I ain’t ready to talk to you yet. Got to figure this out yet and what I’m going to do with you. You just be quiet.”
“Did I do anything wrong?”
But Lamar just glared ahead. Finally, past Empire City, Lamar took off his hat. It was a wide, white Stetson, once Mr. Stepford’s finest Sunday-go-to-meeting hat. He made a show of examining the small pinfeather in the band, but it was clear he had made a decision. He pirouetted around in the seat to face the three in the back.
“Now Richard,” he finally said with a good deal of weariness, “I want to know—where the hell were you during the fight?”
“Ah,” said Richard, “ah, I went through the kitchen after Odell. I was going to circle around from the other direction, see. Only it was over before I got there.”
“Weren’t not,” said Mr. Stepford. “I could hear him. He was lying on the goddamned kitchen floor. He was crying.”
“I believe you’d make a better outlaw than this poor Richard boy here, don’t you, Mr. Stepford?”
“Believe I would, Lamar, though I don’t run with no trash like you boys.”
“Well, anyway,” said Lamar, “Richard, what the hell am I going to do with you? You got to do more than just art.”
“Lamar, you know this isn’t my cup of tea.”
“It sure ain’t. But if I can’t trust you to back me up in a scrape, what the hell good are you? We are in Scrape City from here on out.”
“Lamar, I don’t even know how to shoot the g—”
Lamar’s arm flashed back, and he slapped Richard hard with the hat across the face. It didn’t hurt so much as shock Richard, who looked at Lamar with utter dismay. This merely made Lamar more angry, and he commenced to beat heavily on Richard with the hat, slapping it at him. Richard cowered, covering himself with his arms.
“That used to be a fine hat,” said Stepford.
At last Lamar settled down. He turned back to the front, breathing heavily. His anger had mottled his face red; his lungs wheezed and ached in his chest. He said to Odell, “Pull over. Anywhere’s fine, this big field.”
Odell slowed the old Wagoneer down, let it slew off the gravel shoulder a bit, then eased it across the drainage ditch and into a field. He let the smooth V-eight perk for a few moments, then, satisfied, he turned the key and let it go silent.
The road, a narrow black ribbon, cut across the wide flatness of cotton and peanut fields. No cars were anywhere in sight. The sky was huge, piled with clouds like castles. Some scrub oaks lay a quarter mile to one side.
“Okay, folks,” he said. “Time to get out.”
“Don’t do this, Lamar,” said Mr. Stepford. “You are scum but you can’t do this to us. You have come to admire my wife’s cooking and my fine collection of guns, which served you well in the fracas.”
“I have to do what I have to do, old man. You too, Richard. You got to come, too.”
“Oh, God, Lamar,” said Richard.
“Stop your sniveling, Richard,” said Mrs. Stepford. “Lamar, do what you will but shut this boy up. He is giving me a headache. But can I pee first? I’ve been holding it in very tight.”
“Yes, ma’am. Odell will watch, because it don’t mean nothing at all to him. The rest of you, turn round, give the lady some privacy.”
They did as he commanded. Richard saw the trees far off. It wasn’t fair. He had tried. He had wanted so hard to do what was expected of him.
“Lamar, please.”
“Shut up, Richard. You all set, Mrs. Stepford? Thank you ma’am. This way.”
He walked them into the field. It was near twilight. The sun was setting in an orange smear. It looked like a Constable sun to Richard. Utter serenity lay across the land. It was the exact opposite of the pathetic fallacy: Nature was being ironic, damn her exquisiteness. They wandered across the field. Richard felt as if he were an ant on a pool table. The horizon around them was remorselessly flat. They came, after a time, to a fold in the land and stepped down into a gang of scrub oak trees abutting a messy little creek. It was utterly private.
“Okay,” said Lamar. “This will do. Have y’all made your peace with God?”
“You piece of shit, Lamar,” said Stepford.
“Don’t make it hard on yourself, old man. It don’t have to hurt a damned bit. Don’t run or nothing; there’s only pain in it.”
“Hold me, Bill,” said the old woman.
“You are a goddamned beautiful woman, Mary,” said Bill Stepford to his wife. He was crying a little. “You gave me fifty great years and you never complained a bit. Mary, I wasn’t a decent husband. I had an affair. I had many affairs. The sharecropper’s daughter, Maggie? Minnie Purvis, in town. Al Jefferson’s niece, the secretary. Mary, I am so very sorry.”
“It’s all right. I knew about them.”
She turned to Lamar. “This man flew fifty missions over Germany in the war. He was wounded twice and won the Distinguished Flying Cross, though he says it’s nothing. He came back and built a farm up from fallow ground and was the Grange president for twelve years. He raised four sons and two daughters and gave work to over a hundred itinerant laborers and their families. He paid for their medical while they was here and for three of their children to go to college and he never asked for nothing. He is a good man. You have no right to end his life in this field.”
“He is a good man,” said Lamar, “and I don’t have no right at all, except that I have the gun and that gives me the right.”
He turned to Richard.
“Here,” he said, handing him the trooper’s silver revolver. “This belonged to that dead cop. That old boy was mean as cat shit right up to the end. Maybe some of that grit will rub off on you. Shoot them. Both. In the head. Or I will kill you.” Then he raised the long-slide automatic, thumbing off the safety, and leveled the muzzle at Richard.
Richard swallowed.
“He don’t have the guts,” said Stepford.
“Well, you just give him the chance,” said Lamar. “Go on, Richard. Show me you are a man. Do some men’s work.”
Richard turned. The old people were on their knees. Mr. Stepford held Mrs. Stepford, who had begun to cry. Richard felt queasy as hell. Here was the naked thing its own self. Put the muzzle to the head and pull the trigger. Be over in a second. But he didn’t have the guts. It was too horrible. Would their heads blow up? Would it squirt? Would i
t be gory? Wouldn’t there be blood everywhere? He turned and faced Lamar’s gun and saw his own death in Lamar’s blank eyes.
“Oh, shit,” he said. He remembered the classic Yale experiment where most typical Americans routinely pumped up the juice and tortured some poor fool, because somebody told them to. Well, this was different. His life was on the line.
He turned and pressed the gun against Mrs. Stepford’s neck and, closing his eyes, pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened except a click. He pulled it again.
“It’s broken,” he said.
“Richard, you are so dumb,” said Lamar. “Get your ass back to the car.”
Richard scampered back.
“See,” he said, “he do have the guts to do it. He just too dumb to know the gun weren’t loaded. Sorry to put you folks out. Had to test the boy. He ain’t much, but I don’t guess you’ll be signing up, Mr. Stepford, so I’ll have to make do.”
“Lamar, you like to scared Mary to death.”
“Couldn’t be helped. Got to do what I got to do. That simple. You get in my way on a job, old man, I’ll shoot you dead. But you have sand, that I admit. You took all I had to hand out and I respect that. Believe it or not, you’d last on the yard, and that poor boy would die if I hadn’t saved him. Now you all stay here tonight. It won’t get cold. Come morning, you amble over to the road. We’ll be long gone by then. You’ll be back home tomorrow.”
“Lamar,” said Mary Stepford, “you are a bad man and they will kill you, far sooner than you plan on. But maybe it’ll be fast, on account of what mercy you showed today.”
“Thank you,” said Lamar. “That may be the nicest thing anybody said to me. Sorry we had to steal from you and take your guns. But I have to do what I have to do.”
“Goodbye, Lamar,” said Mary.
Lamar turned and walked back to the car.
Bill watched him go.
“Mary, you are such a fool. That man is pure white scum. He’ll be dead before sunrise tomorrow or the day after and a lot of folks will go with him. Can’t believe the softness in your heart for such a scoundrel.”
“Well, Bill Stepford,” she said, “he’s everything you say, and worse, but he’s one thing you never were, as I have known and lived with for many a year. He’s true to his own.”
They drove south, then west, in the setting sun, through farmland and small, dull towns. Finally Richard said, “Thank you, Lamar.”
“Thank you, Richard. Odell, Richard proved he was a man. He can pull the trigger.”
“Dell poppy-poppy,” said Odell with a smile.
“That means Odell is happy, Richard. You have made that poor soul happy. You are part of the family.”
“Thank you, Lamar.”
“Now, we got to find us a place to hunker up and work out our next move.”
“Lamar?”
“I hope you like to camp, Richard. Me and Odell spent more than a few nights under the cold stars. It ain’t a problem. Can’t check into a hotel and don’t want to go running with the biker gangs, because Johnny Cop has them so snitched out you can’t spit amongst ’em without hitting a badge or a microphone. I don’t feel like kicking down no doors, at least not for a bit, too much to worry about. We’ll try and lay about a time in the backlands.”
Richard only had one gift. It wasn’t much, but he had been hording it for this moment, when he at last felt he’d passed a test.
“Lamar?”
“What?”
“I think I may have a place to stay,” he said.
CHAPTER
8
He felt his lips first. It was as if they were caked in mud or scab or something. Experimentally, he tried to move them and felt them crack apart, breaking into plates of dry skin. There was no moisture in his mouth.
He heard the drip-drip-drip of something. He could not move. His body was hardly there. He seemed unable to focus or remember anything except orange flashes, flowers, the buzz of insects. Then he remembered Lamar leaning over Ted and the way Ted’s hair puffed from the muzzle blast. He remembered curling. He remembered the shotgun shell tearing into him. He remembered the pain.
Jen!
Jeff!
Russ!
Lost, they were all lost. He felt like his own father, that handsome, rigid man, glossied up in funeral parlor makeup, asleep in his coffin, redder and pinker in death than he’d ever been in life.
But there was light and maybe, now that he concentrated, sound. It was as if he were swimming up from underwater, a long, long way toward the surface. He just barely broke it and the smell of something came to his nose … bourbon.
Lt. C. D. Henderson of the OSBI was looking at him through specs. The lieutenant fell in and out of focus. Now he was an old man, now a pure jangle of blur. Finally he cranked into some kind of stability.
“He’s coming to,” the lieutenant said, as if into a megaphone. The words reverberated in Bud’s skull.
Jen appeared. He tried to reach out of death for her, but he was ensnared in a web. She appeared grief-stricken, her face grave and swollen. He had not seen such feeling on that impassive face in so very long. Jeff swirled into view, intense and troubled. Russ, even Russ who never went anywhere with them anymore: Russ looked drained of anger and distance, and Bud could see the child in him still under the intensity of his stare.
“Oh, Bud, don’t you dare die on me,” Jen said.
He couldn’t talk.
“Dad,” Jeff said. Jeff was crying. “Oh, God, Daddy, you made it, we’re so damned lucky.”
He saw the plasma bag suspended over one bandaged arm and another bag dripping clear fluid over the other. He lay swaddled in bandages. He felt something attacking his penis and squirmed, thinking of rats. Then he remembered from other visits to emergency wards: a catheter. He was so thirsty.
“Jeff,” he said, finally.
Jeff kissed him on the forehead. He wished he could reach out and stroke his son’s arm or something, but he couldn’t move. Now and then a shot of pain would cut at him.
Russ reached over and just touched him on the arm.
Bud nodded and blinked at his oldest son.
“He’s coming out,” a young man in a hospital uniform said, and Bud saw his nameplate, which read Dr. Something or other. When had doctors gotten so young?
He looked back to Jen. He felt a tear forming in his eye. He saw young Jeff, so fair and pure, and Russ with all his complicated brains and hopes and hair, and recalled again the bullet blowing into poor Ted’s skull.
Why did I do so poorly? Caught me without a thought in my head. Came in and took me down. Took us down. Lamar Pye blew us away.
“You’re going to be all right, Sergeant Pewtie,” said the doctor. “The blood loss is the main thing. Another hour and you’d have bled to death. That old guy was tough, I’ll say.”
Bud’s eyes must have radiated confusion, because Jen explained.
“Old Bill Stepford. He hiked thirteen miles through the dark until he came to a farm, and called the police. They got there by midnight. They’d been looking everywhere but had no idea what had happened. You almost bled to death. That was three days ago.”
“T-T-T-Ted?” he managed.
“Don’t you worry ’bout Ted,” said C. D. Henderson. “He ain’t in no pain where he is now.”
He had to know one last thing, even as the effort of asking it seemed to drain him of energy and will.
“Why?”
“Why,” said C.D., “because that damned Lamar is scum, that’s why.”
Bud shook his head imperceptibly.
“Why … am … I … alive?”
“Cause you ain’t a dove, that’s why,” said C.D. “Old man Stepford was a dove hunter come the fall. Only shells Lamar could find was light birdshot. Numbers eight and nine. A surgical team had you on the table over four hours, Bud. Dug close to a thousand pieces of steel shot out of your hide. But not none of them life-threatening and there ain’t going to be no lead po
isoning neither. Lamar popped you with maybe five, six shells from a sawed-off barrel. He must have thought he’d blown your heart and guts out from all that blood. Hah, goddamned good thing you left your goddamned vest off! But anyway he’d sawed that barrel off to a nub and the shot pattern opened up and nothing got inside your chest cavity or to your spine and nervous system or your brain. Tell you what, though. You ain’t goin’ through no metal detector no more, Bud.”
Bud slept until he swam up again to brightness. This time he focused onto the face of Col. W. D. Supenski, superintendent of the Highway Patrol. The colonel was another version of Bud: husky and remote with the public, with one of those pouchy faces that looked like feed sacks left out for a decade on a fence post, he’d been a Marine fighter ace in the Vietnam war all those years back and, in the company of those he trusted—other white men who carried guns and believed in the abstraction of Authority—could be quite a folksy old charmer.
“Well, damn, Bud,” he said, “not even old Lamar Pye could put you out of commission!” The colonel had small, dark eyes that were capable of three expressions: blankness; sick, consuming fury; and genuine delight. It was the latter force that beamed through them today. “Though I must say, I’ve seen turkeys hanging in the barn that looked a sight better.”
Bud offered a feeble smile. No one in his family was in evidence.
“Been talking to Jen, Bud. She’s a fine woman. You are a lucky, lucky man there, Bud.”
Bud nodded.
“Bud, it’s my great pleasure to tell you that the Department of Public Safety and the Oklahoma Highway Patrol has decided to confer on you the highest duty award it is within our power to give, the Medal of Valor.”
Bud swallowed.
“We found six spent cases from your .357, Bud, and your empty speedloader. Severely wounded and under fire from two sides by murderous killers, you were able to draw and engage the enemy and even reload. And maybe it was the fear you put in the Pye boys that made ’em release the Stepfords three hours later. Maybe you saved those lives, too. And if your damned partner hadn’t done the baby-goo on you, you boys might have even brought the Pyes down.”