Shit, he thought. It wasn’t a bad dream. It all happened.
He closed the door and headed to the house, but halfway up, as before, he was intercepted by a man with a shotgun.
“Now, hold on, mister, this ain’t a tourist attraction. You got business you see my lawyer, but otherwise you clear on out.”
Bill Stepford was spry and peppery as a cat, even with half of his face swollen like a blue-green grapefruit. He didn’t exactly point the gun at Bud but just sort of clung tightly to it, as a man who’s gone without water may cling to a canteen even after his rescue. His blue eyes, one round, one flat, both fiery, burned into Bud and a Y of veins stood out on his forehead.
“Mr. Stepford, I ain’t here to sell or buy a damn thing, I came to offer up my thanks.”
“Goddamn yes! Mary, come out! Look what’s showed up! It’s that Bud Pewtie, the man too tough to die. Up and about in six days—my lord, son, you must be made of pure gristle.”
“No, sir, I’m made of skin and bones, just like you, and maybe you saw some of the same kind of blood on the ground.”
“I surely did. Thought you were a goner.”
“I was till you walked halfway across Oklahoma and saved my hash. That’s what I came on by for.”
“Bud, dammit, it wasn’t nothing. I’m an old coot who walks ten miles a day. If I hadn’t gone two miles in the wrong direction to start, I might have gotten there earlier.”
“Don’t think it would have made much difference, sir. I had another few hours of life left any way you cut it, and poor Ted was already in the barn.”
“Bud, you come on in and have some coffee and tell me all about your adventures.”
“Ain’t much,” said Bud, following. “Got a thousand holes in me and maybe a hundred of them little tiny balls no probe could get out. None of ’em went too deep. They just cut the Jesus out of me, that’s all. I’m damned glad you hunt doves and not deer with those deer slugs.”
“Bud, I have a case of Winchester deer slugs under my workbench. Old Lamar just never found them! Don’t that beat the monkey!”
They headed inside, laughing like old pals.
Mary Stepford, looking pale and leathery, rose from the sofa to greet them. “Well, Mr. Pewtie, I swear, I never thought you’d be coming by for coffee.”
“I didn’t either, ma’am. I thought my coffee-drinking days were over.”
“Well, you are a sight for these sore eyes,” the old woman said, and pulled him close and gave him a down-home hug.
“I came by to thank you-all. A letter or a call didn’t seem right, after what you did. You were the heroes.”
“A bad boy like Lamar don’t leave you no choice, Bud. You got to be at your best or you’re finished.”
“You’ll get him, Bud.”
“Ma’am, I have to confess, the last thing I want to do is run into the Pyes again. Scared me then, scare me now. Maybe if I’d had a second, just a second, to get my bearings. But it happened so fast.”
“That’s scum for you,” said Bill. “They know the advantage of surprise—works for ’em every damn time, just as it did against me.”
They had a nice little visit, and Bud kept it light, because the old woman seemed a little shaky, though old Bill Stepford was billowing brimstone and hellfire most of the time. He didn’t really want to take them back through it. What was the point, really?
When it came time for Bud to leave and the old man walked him back to his truck, only then did the conversation meander back to the three convicts. Stepford ran salty profiles of each one by Bud.
When Bud heard how useless Richard was, he wondered why Lamar hadn’t dumped him.
“Maybe it’s the lions,” Stepford said.
Bud had read all the police reports; he’d talked to colleagues just that morning to get the latest. But this was new.
“Lions?” he said.
“Yes sir. He drew pictures of lions for Lamar. Don’t ask me why. Silliest damn things.”
“You wouldn’t, say, have them pictures?”
“Sure do, Bud. Care for a look?”
“Yes sir,” said Bud.
He was thinking, Lions?
CHAPTER
9
No one ever said Lamar was afraid of work. On the first day on the farm, he rose early and drove the Stepfords’ Wagoneer into the barn, into an empty stall. He removed the battery. Then, with a pitchfork, he climbed to the hayloft and laid into the pile up there and threw it to the floor of the barn. Then he forked the hay around the vehicle until it could not be seen. No one would ever stumble on it, and no one could look at the huge pile of hay filling one of the empty stalls and suspect that a stolen car was hidden under it.
The next morning, he chopped wood. Around ten, Odell came out and joined him, and they split all of her logs into firewood in a heroic fourteen-hour stint. The next day, they decided to clear land where she said she wanted eventually to plant a garden, out beyond the barn. Although it had been merely the most banal passing suggestion, for nearly a week Lamar and Odell dug the prairie thatch out and fought their way down to red dirt, which they then leveled and raked and graded, digging at least a hundred large rocks and a thousand small ones out of the earth. Then they cut down a dozen of the scrub oaks and some dead mesquite, reduced the wood to kindling, and dug out the stumps, maybe the hardest of their labors, for the trees had been joined to the earth stubbornly, like the partnership in an ancient marriage, and it took enormous investments of sweat and will to break them apart. The sun was bright and harsh, and the wind snapped across the dry prairie. Far off, the scuts of the Wichitas stood out, the only feature on the otherwise featureless horizon.
“Look at them,” said Ruta Beth. “Lord, how they work. They work like my daddy worked.”
“They’re basically elemental men of the earth,” Richard said grandly, though this insight was lost on Ruta Beth.
She simply looked at him through guared little slits of eyes, nothing showing on her grim face, and said, “Richard, sometimes you say the craziest things.”
A major disappointment: He had not impressed Ruta Beth at all. She took one look at poor, pitiful Richard and abandoned him before the relationship had even begun; it was Lamar, beaming with testosterone and sweat, who drew her like a beacon.
Ruta Beth Tull was twenty-eight years old and sinewy as a wild dog. She usually wore Sears jeans, a thin, cheap wool sweater over a faded blouse, heavy farm boots, and a black hairband, which pulled her dark cascades of hair into a rope behind her head. She had chalky skin and mean little eyes, with which she constantly scanned the world for threat or aggression, never relaxing, never giving, always on alert. Her fingernails were chewed to grimy nubs, and she was always hugging herself in a slightly unseemly way. But her grimness hid a romantic streak once directed at Richard and in a second’s passing redirected toward Lamar.
When she had seen Richard’s picture in the paper during his trial for criminal assault against his mother, she had cut it out. She wrote him a letter that went out in the next batch of correspondence, among other missives—to President Clinton, the governor, Meryl Streep, Hillary Clinton, Robin Quivers of The Howard Stern Show, Nancy Reagan, Ronald Reagan, Barbara Bush, two of Charle Manson’s female followers she’d seen in a TV interview, and Reba McEntire—on a variety of noteworthy subjects. She had never before gotten an answer, except the routine “Thank you so very much” from the Clintons, which she didn’t count as a real answer. But in the case of Richard, her answer showed up three months later, at eleven P.M., spattered with blood, along with Lamar Pye, and his damaged cousin.
The document that initiated this unlikely course of events was the strangest, looniest letter Richard had ever read; it even shocked him a bit.
“Dere Mr. Peed,” it began,
though you cannot know me, at the same time we are One. I believe in another life, in many other lives, we must have been boy and girl friends. We must have offended the Gods with the purity of our passion
and so they cursed us and sent us too wondering through time, always close enough to know the other’s presence, the other’s sorrow, but never close enough too touch, too hold, too kiss, too have secshual untercoarse.
As did you, I lost my beloved parents in a tragedy. It wasn’t easy, but now I have made peace with the sorrowful passing of Mother and Daddy. They frequently talk to me from heaven, which is a very nice place. It’s like a Howard Johnson’s, where someone come to change the sheets every day. It has a very nice salad bar.
Mr. Peed, I miss you, though I have never seen eyes on you. I have stared at your picture so hard in the Daily Oklahoman I have almost wiped it off the page. Mr. Peed, I believe we could have a wonderful life together if only we could meet. Thank you for your attention.
Yours fondly,
Miss Ruta B. Tull
Route 54
Odette, Oklahoma.
When he showed it to Lamar, Lamar read the first paragraph, silently moving his lips across each word, and said, “Richard, I can’t make hide nor hair out of it. Is she crazy?”
“I think so, Lamar. Crazy as hell. But … she likes me. She lives in the country. Her parents are dead. I’m thinking maybe it would be a place to put up.”
“Hmmmm,” said Lamar. “Well, suck my cock, why the hell not? Better’n shittin’ in a wheat field, where we’ll catch cold and our noses run with snot.”
They found the farm lurking behind a solitary mailbox inscribed with the name TULL on Route 54. It was in a desolate sector of Kiowa county, about thirty miles west of Lawton, halfway to Altus. It felt like the true West, all right, prairie for grazing mostly, some fields heroically turned for wheat, but generally the feeling of wide-openness in every direction except due east, where the mountains lay. The highways transected Kiowa like lines in a geometry problem, and off of the asphalt now and then a ribbon of red dirt would run, disappearing in subtle folds of the terrain. The farm lay at the end of a mile of such narrow red dirt road and when you stood in its front yard, your back turned to the two-story clapboard house, rotting and dim, and facing outward, you felt as if you were among the last men on earth. Just flat grass, distant mountains, and the snapping wind as far as the eyes could see.
Ruta Beth asked no questions. She took one look at the trio and knew who they were and why they were there. It was the message from God she had been expecting these long, lonely years. It never occurred to her to be frightened. She smiled at Richard and nodded knowingly to the astonished Lamar but went first to Odell.
“You poor thing,” she said, “you look famished. You come on in. I don’t have much but what I’ve got I’m willing to share.”
“Odell likes cereal, ma’am,” said Lamar. “It’s his favorite thing.”
“What do he like?”
“Er, he likes that Honey Nut Cheerios a lot. He likes your sugary ones. He don’t like the ‘healthy’ ones, you know, with the nuts and all.”
“I have Corn Flakes.”
“Ah, he’ll eat ’em. But he ain’t crazy about ’em.”
“I like cereals, too. I have some others.”
“Cap’n Crunch?”
“No, Mr. Pye. I don’t have no Cap’n Crunch. How about Special K?”
“Ain’t that just like Wheaties? Odell don’t like Wheaties. He did, long as there was sugar on it, till they put that Michael Jordan on the box. Where we come from, we hate the niggers. I know we’re supposed to love the niggers these days, but you try and love our niggers up at McAlester and they just laugh and cut your throat. Killed me a big nigger, that’s what started this whole goddamned ball rolling.”
“I do have some Frosted Mini-Wheats.”
“Frosted Mini-Wheats! Odell, you hear that? Frosted Mini-Wheats! This gal has Frosted Mini-Wheats!”
“Weeny-eets! Weeny-eets!” Odell began to chant, his vague features united in a rapturous passion.
“You come along then, Odell,” she said, and took the big man inside.
Lamar turned to Richard.
“Your gal’s pretty goddamned sweet, if you ask me. You better make her happy or I’ll crack your skull.”
That’s when Richard knew he was lost.
Lamar was thinking about painting the house. It was a mottled gray, peeling and sad. He wanted it to be cheery, blinding white, the white of happy white folks on a rich farm, with lots of kids. He had a brief rare little brush with fantasy: all of them there, Ruta Beth and Richard and Odell and Lamar, all of them happy in that house. But even as he drew some warmth from it, he knew it would never happen. Goddamn Johnny Cop had seen to that. If Johnny Cop hadn’t a-shot his daddy, lo those many years ago, he’d never be in this mess, with all these worries, all these things to think about. And now he was getting hot again.
Still, he could paint the house. That would be his next project. He could scrape the old dead paint off, take a week or so, then sand down to new wood, another week. Take maybe two weeks to give the place another coat. Odell could do some of the work, although Odell’s tiny mind had never had much in the way of skill. Odell could dig or hoe or plow all day long, seven days a week, but he couldn’t do anything that involved thinking. He just didn’t understand.
“Odell, now, think we gonna knock off for the day,” Lamar said. It was six-thirty P.M. of the third day of the second week. They’d finished reroofing the barn, and they’d restrung about a mile of fence between Ruta Beth’s and the McGillavery’s property, because the McGillavery’s cows kept breaking into Ruta’s far field and that meant the McGillavery boys would come looking for them, and that would be trouble.
He and Odell walked back to the house.
“Odell, go wash,” he said. “Wash-wash, for dinner.”
“Din,” Odell said and went merrily off.
He knew he’d find Ruta Beth out back, working at her wheel. It amazed him what she could do. Just the lump of clay, the pumping of her foot, the spinning of the wheel, and some kind of miraculous thing occurred. Goddamn! He loved to watch it.
And there she was, hunched over the spinning wheel, her hands actually sunk into the blurred muck, her face intense and furious. The muck seemed to be spinning itself into something thin and graceful today, like a candleholder that he remembered his mama had before his mama died.
“Amazin’ what you can do,” he said.
She almost never blinked; she had this funny way of just looking at something until she’d sucked it dry. It amazed him that she wasn’t afraid of him, a mankiller like him, with F U C K Y O U! tattooed on his knuckles, who made the quality nervous if he were in the same goddamned county.
“Mr. Pye,” she said, “it ain’t nothing, really. You could do it.”
“Me, nah. I’d mess it up. But go on. Love to watch you.”
She worked intently for another few minutes. Then she said, “What will you do? Them cops won’t never stop looking. You have to move on.”
“I know. I hate to go. Ain’t ever seen Odell so happy. It’s where he should be. Can’t hurt nobody, can’t get in no trouble, no liquor, no niggers or hacks trying to take from him. He could be happy here.”
“You love him. Everybody says you are the meanest man there is, but you love him.”
“He’s all I got. We go way back.”
“It’s so beautiful. But they will get you. Stories like yours never have happy endings.”
“This here place is my happy ending.”
“I swear, I don’t see no bad in you.”
“But bad is what I am. I guess I was borned to it, on account of what happened to my daddy. I never once looked back. Only thing I’s ever any good at.”
“You could have been a farmer.”
“Then somebody come and try and walk on you. You can’t let that happen. So you stop ’em, and next thing, you’re on the run. That’s how it started. Goddamned Uncle Jack kept Odell in the barn. Kept him chained. Beat him. His own son. Beat that boy. He got thirty dollars a month from the county to keep that boy on account of his being so sick in t
he brain and he didn’t spend a goddamned penny of it on Odell. Only reason he took me in is because the state paid him twenty-two dollars a month on me, so as to get me out of their reform school. He was brother to my daddy Jim, who was killed dead by state troopers over in Arkansas, and when my mama Edna Sue died and they put me in their reform school and I give them so goddamn much trouble, ’cause people was always trying to back you down, and I just got it in my fool head nobody was going to back me down, anyway, they sent me to my uncle and his wife Camilla, and I was just shit to him, shit that brought in a Social Services check.
“One day he beat Odell so goddamned bad I thought the boy would die. Because Odell had shat up his pants. They had so much trouble teaching Odell about the bathroom. Anyway, I reckoned to stop it. Caught Uncle Jack along the Perkinsville Road, drunk as usual on Odell’s money. Ain’t done nothing in my life that made me feel so good as when I put the blade into that mean old bastard. And it’s been like that ever since, me watching out for Odell, him for me, we was all we had in the goddamned world. And it wasn’t so bad, we’d made our place, until goddamned Junior Jefferson pulled his stunt.”
It was as complete an accounting of his life as he’d ever given to anybody.
“You’ve had such a hard time.”
“The House is full of men with hard lives. We’re just like them, that’s all.”
“It’s a sad story. Mr. Pye, I honestly believe if you’d have caught a break somewhere along the line, you could have been a great man.”
“I don’t know why you’d say such a thing. I’m just a piece of scum.”
“But what would you do if you could do anything?”
Lamar thought. The question had never been put to him before.
“I’d like to invent a ray,” he said. “You know, like a beam of light. And everything you shine it on, you make it … fair. You shine it and there’s a lot of money and nobody’s sick or angry or nothing, you just make people happy. That’s what I’d do. A happy ray. I’d shine it in all the prisons and all the shithole, jerkwater towns. I’d shine it on Odell and he could talk and his mouth would be mended up. I’d even shine it on the niggers, yes, goddammit, I would, and they would change their evil ways.”