She beheld him gravely.
“That is the sweetest thing I ever did hear.”
“Well, it won’t never happen,” said Lamar.
“You’re like that ray. You give people hope. You watch. They’ll believe in you like in Jesus or Mr. Elvis Presley. They know you stand for freedom.”
She touched his knee.
“I thought you loved that Richard. He showed me that letter.”
“I guess I did. Don’t know why I thought so much of poor Richard. He ain’t but a ninny. I doubt he has hair on his privates. What is it you want? I’ll give you everything you want.”
“No woman ever said that to me. So sometimes I’d take it.”
“I want you to have it. I so bad want to give it to you. I’ll be your true first, Mr. Pye,” she said shyly, “and you’ll be my first, too.”
Richard could tell he’d fucked her. It had really only been a matter of time. A woman as nuts as Ruta Beth would almost certainly end up fucking a crazy fuck like Lamar.
Anyway, when they came in from the barn, loosey goosey and giggly, they both smelled of cunt. It was, to Richard, a low, rank odor. His mother smelled like that sometimes, after one of her “friends” had visited, when he was a little boy and he’d been made to play in the garden.
But now Lamar was happy as a goddamned head of household who’s just made the mortgage. Even Odell picked it up. He looked up from his cereal bowl and smiled brightly, flecks of Frosted Mini-Wheats clinging to his lips and yellow teeth. He was happy.
It’s like a family, my God, thought Richard. It was some terrible parody of happiness: Lamar the daddy and Ruta Beth the mommy and Odell and Richard the two boys. It was the normal life he’d never had.
It was such a good time, the little family in the kitchen of the farmhouse, laughing. Some demented Norman Rockwell could have painted the picture and put it on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post, Richard thought, Lamar with his ponytail and tattooed knuckles and scrawny Ruta Beth with her chalky Addams Family skin and her inbred farm face; and Odell, eternal boy-man, with a tunnel for a mouth and a mop of reddish hair and two tiny eyes. And, of course, him, too, Richard, who’d blinded his mother one day in a fit of rage because the parafascist right-wing Daily Oklahoman had refused to review his exhibit, “Richard Peed: Artist in Transition,” at the Merton Gallery on Dwight Street.
They even did errands, like any family. It turned out that Ruta Beth had no paper anywhere in her house, no writing implements, nothing. She didn’t even have any magazines, newspapers, or books. So of course she had to go out and get tablets of paper and pencils for Richard to continue his lions with, as that was his most important contribution. And she also had to drive all the way to Murf’s Guns in Duncan to buy double-ought buckshot for the shotguns, when they learned from the TV that goddamned salty old state cop had somehow managed to survive because he’d been hit with birdshot.
But Lamar wasn’t mad, he was so mellow in his new life.
“Goddamn, was he a tough old boy!” he hooted. “He was a right tough old buzzard but birdshot didn’t get him done! Won’t he have something to tell his grandkids!”
The heavier shells were important for another reason.
“Only one last thing to figure,” said Lamar. “That’s the place where we going to do our next job.”
Richard, smiling, wasn’t sure what Lamar meant by job.
“You know. To rob. We’re robbers, Richard. Don’t you get that? It’s our work. And the way I work, them shotgun shells going to come in handy!”
CHAPTER
10
He pulled into the Elgin diner. Erect and brave in sunglasses, she sat in a window booth. She looked pale even through the distorted reflection of the interstate on the surface of the glass. She was not dressed in black but in a neat little sleeveless polka-dot dress. The freckles on her arms matched the pattern of the dress. And when she saw him, her face lit up. She waved her hand tentatively. He waved back.
Oh, lord, he thought, here it is.
He got out of the truck, reached back and tucked the Commander, which had slipped a bit, back behind his kidney. He’d taken a Percodan half an hour early, after leaving the Stepfords, so the pain had gone down somewhat. Still, he was moving like an old man, a step at a time, as if the air itself sat on his body with a special kind of violence. He was nearly fifty; he felt a hundred and fifty. A geezer, full of melancholy and black thoughts. His legs ached, his body seemed cut from old stone as he climbed the steps.
He entered and her smile lit the place. Goddamn, how the young woman could smile. Was it all young women or just this one? He began to feel a little woozy. As he approached, she rose and took his hand and gave him a quick kiss.
“Well now Bud, who painted you the color of dead roses? Oh, my poor, poor baby.”
“Well, you know how to perk a fellow up, don’t you? I’ve felt better, that’s for sure.”
“Are you in pain?”
“Oh, nothing I can’t handle with only the slightest help from a million milligrams of heroin every twenty minutes or so.”
“You’ll joke when the devil comes ’round with his bill, Bud.”
“Take my women, take my money, take my life, but don’t take my sense of humor, Mister.”
“When that colonel came to tell me about Ted, it took him an hour before he got around to you. That was the worst, Bud, my Bud. I had to sit there playing the grieving widow just crazy to know about you, Bud. Oh, Bud, happiest day of my life they told me you were going to make it. I had to keep crying when all’s I wanted was to laugh because they said you were going to make it.”
“Holly, damn, you look good.”
“Oh, Bud. Oh, Bud.”
“Holly, I’m so very sorry about Ted. No man deserves to die like that. He wasn’t a bad boy. I just fouled up. I wish to hell I could do it over.”
“Well, you never can, can you?”
“How are you holding up?”
“Bud, I’m fine, now that the funeral is over and poor Ted’s mother and dad have gone home. I don’t have to play the sobbing wife no more.”
“You know, the patrol can arrange for a doctor, or somebody to help you. You know, someone to talk to you.”
“Bud, you’re the only person I want to talk to.”
“And the insurance. What it is, it ain’t a fortune, but it’s damn comforting. There’s no horrible financial thing crushing down on you.”
“It’s fine, Bud. It’ll get me through more than a few years, and they said they’d try and help me get a job.”
“Great.”
“Bud, you’re not facing this, are you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Bud, I don’t want to talk about me. I want to talk about us.”
Bud looked out through the goddamned window to green Oklahoma. A hundred yards away he could see the interstate and the cars flashing down it. Where he’d made a living for so long.
“Bud, we can have everything now. I’m sorry Ted got killed but it wasn’t your fault and it wasn’t my fault, it was Lamar Pye’s fault. Now we can be together. It’s one less difficulty. It’s time, Bud. You know it as well as I know it.”
“Holly, I—” Then he ran out of gas.
“Don’t you want to be with me?”
“Lord, yes.”
“Then, Bud, why not? Why can’t you just do it.”
“Holly, you should know he loved you very much. What happened to him, he just lost his nerve and it was eating him up. He thought less of himself, not you. He deserves a little time before we up and move in and start sleeping together for the whole world to see.”
“You never cared too much what the world thought.”
“Yeah, maybe. And there’s the other thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Lamar.”
“Lamar?” Holly said. “Oh, yeah. Lamar. Now what the hell you think that means?”
“It don’t feel right with him still out there.”
“Bud.”
“Holly, I said I’d take care of you for my partner. That was the last thing he asked before Lamar come over with the gun. And I will. I swear to you, I will. But I got to take care of my partner first.”
“Ted’s dead, Bud, there’s no care to be taken. And nothing with Lamar Pye is going to bring him back.”
“Well,” Bud said, without much more to offer.
“Is that it, Bud? Lamar? You’re going to go up against Lamar? The whole goddamned state of Oklahoma can’t find Lamar and you’re going to find him?”
As usual, he didn’t know what he meant.
“I don’t know. What I mean is, nothing feels right with Lamar on the loose. Wouldn’t necessarily have to be me gets him. Frankly, the last thing I want is to run into Lamar. It ain’t personal.”
“The hell it ain’t.”
“Holly, I just …”
“So you aren’t going to touch me?”
“Did I say that?”
“Seems like what you meant.”
“I swear to you, at that moment when Lamar meant to finish me, what was in my heart was the thought I’d never been with you fair, in the open, the two of us, at a restaurant, a barbecue, you know, a damn couple. Last thing on my mind as I went under.”
Was it true? It felt true about now. But he wasn’t sure. He really didn’t remember.
“Damn, Bud, you kill me.”
“Well, that’s my job.”
“You know that place two exits back. The Do Si Do Motel?”
“Yes.”
“Got us a room, Bud. Wanted to celebrate being alive.”
Bud looked at his watch. He was due at the hospital by three and it was already near two. But what the hell. It was only a hospital.
Their differences—was it a woman-man thing or a Bud-Holly thing?—had to do with being naked. She didn’t mind it. She sort of liked it, in fact, and could be so damned casual about it. Bud hated it; just that feeling of vulnerability, of being wide open to assault, of being a fat man whose nakedness revealed his idiocy. So it was that after they had made love, he had to pull the sheets up around his loins. In secret and terrible fact, he yearned always when they were done to dress instantly; but he also knew that the moments afterward were the most hallowed to her, were in some sense the point of the exercise, where her oneness with him was at its most intense, and so he could never deny her them.
“Goddamn, Bud,” she said. “Lamar may have filled you with lead, but he sure didn’t take your manhood. You had plenty left for me.”
Why did she think him that good a lover? In the beginning he’d been a mighty engine, able to climb the mountain two or three times in a single afternoon. It was the incredible joy of freedom, of a new, other life. But the beginning was long past, and it seemed to him at least that his mighty engine only just got up the hill these days. But he figured that what she saw was what she wanted to see: that buck from the first weeks. He knew he’d never be that again, or at any rate, not with her. It saddened him, but he never quite had the guts to put it into words.
“You sure he didn’t shoot you with love potion instead of lead?”
He laughed. She could be so damned girlish. Her breasts showed: they were little things but beautiful; he loved their weight, their heft, their round perfection and pink tips and the way they jiggled ever so slightly when she laughed.
“It was steel he shot me with,” he said. “Steel shot. Another lucky break. The infection rate on steel is much lower than lead. But that ain’t luck at all, compared to having you.”
“You didn’t start bleeding.”
“No.”
The bandages held; no telltale red spots marked the opening of the tiny wounds.
“It must have felt like being hugged by a stamp collection,” he said.
“Oh, Bud, you are so funny! First time I saw you, I thought, oh my, it’s John Wayne himself, but then you got me to laughing and I saw how much better you were than John Wayne. Or anybody.”
Her absurdly high vision of him! How could he say no to a woman who thought so highly of him? He came the closest to being the man she thought he was and believed him to be when he was with her; and no other place in his life.
“I wish I could stay here forever,” he said suddenly.
“No, Bud,” she said. “It ain’t good enough. We deserve a house and maybe our own kids. Or to travel. A real life. We were meant for it. We were supposed to meet, I believe that in my heart.”
“I believe you’re right,” he said, exactly what he didn’t want to say. It amazed him: Somehow he always did the exact opposite of what he set out to do. He was turned inside out. But not by her. She was just Holly, as usual. He was turned inside out by It, the thing, the two of them.
“Well, sweetie, ought to be heading back. I’m late.”
“You go. Bud, just promise me. This Lamar thing? You’re not going to let it grow into some huge obsession. Some mission, where you got to get your revenge? It ain’t worth it. It would just get you killed.”
“It ain’t anything like that. I just want to be part of the team that brings him down, that’s all. A part of his end, the way I was a part of his beginning.”
The doctor was angry because Bud was so late, and he seemed to wish he could find something seriously wrong with Bud and throw him back in a hospital room out of sheer meanness. But Bud’s wounds resolutely refused to break and bleed; it was as if he had sealed himself up again.
“Your colonel called. He said he’d tried to reach you at home. I don’t think he was happy.”
“Well, I didn’t get in any trouble today, so he shouldn’t be too angry.”
“What you did, Sergeant, was you got laid.”
Bud looked at him in surprise.
“Sir, I—”
“No, I know it, I can tell it. Physiological signs. I don’t know what you’ve got going, Sergeant, but I wouldn’t press it.”
“You ain’t going to—”
“No, it’s your business. Just don’t try and go too far too fast. You could get hurt again. And this time permanently. Now take your Percodan.”
And when he got home, there was only more trouble. It was Jeff’s game night, and Bud had promised he’d go. He was late and Jen had gone on without him. He gobbled a sandwich and almost called Holly, since he was alone in the house and she was back now, too. But he thought the better of it and instead raced across town to the Lawton Cougars field, where the JV team was playing its home Thursday night game under the lights.
Bud found Jen sitting high in the bleachers.
“Hi,” he muttered.
“Where were you? The colonel called and then they called from the hospital and everything.”
“Ah, you know. Got to jawing with that farmer and next thing you knew I was all out of time.”
Her stony, isolated silence was rebuke enough; he knew from the sullen set of her body and the sealed-off look on her face that she was angry and hurt.
“Please don’t get so mad. I was late. I’m here. Now how’s Jeff? Is he in?”
“No, he’s on the bench. He never starts, Bud, you should know that. Not this year.”
Bud looked and saw his youngest son, appearing small and wan, sitting in the theatrically bright bath of lights, at the end of the bench. Jeff was an outfielder, who could run down any ball and would even thrust himself brutally against a wall to make a catch if he had to; but his batting was something of a family tragedy. It had just all but disappeared. He’d hit .432 his freshman year and been a star; and now, as a sophomore, had moved up to varsity. But then the slump had begun; it just sucked the life out of the boy, and the harder he tried, the worse he did. He was stuck on the JV team and couldn’t even get into the lineup.
Bud checked the scoreboard: It was seven to two, the Altus Cardinals leading the hapless Cougars, top of the fourth. It seemed that Jeff didn’t move; it was as if he were enchanted, in a bubble; the game flowed around him, players ran or swaggered by, y
elling and hooting, but Jeff was frozen in some far-off place, as if in another world, lost in concentration.
“How do you feel?” she said.
“It’s not bad,” he said. “You know, at the end of the drug cycle the pain is bad and at the beginning it’s okay. It just slides back and forth.”
“I’m sorry I snapped at you, Bud. I just got so scared when they told me you’d been hit. Finally after all these years. And I expect you to be moody. After what you been through, it’s a marvel you can even face the world.”
A Cougar got on second and another walked. The few fans, mostly dads and moms, began a desultory clapping. But the boy on second was thrown out trying to steal, and the next boy hit into a double play.
“Jeff could hit this guy,” Bud said bitterly, “I know he could.”
“You’re so angry, Bud,” said Jen. “I can’t say I blame you, what you went through, seeing poor Ted, your own near miss. It’s so horrible. But I can’t stand to see you eaten up like this. Can’t the department get someone for you to talk to?”
“Stop it,” he said brusquely. “I don’t need to talk to nobody. I just need to get back to work. The whole thing will feel better when we get this creep locked up. That’s all.”
Now a Cougar dropped a fly, and then another one threw to the wrong base. In a second, the score had jumped to nine to two. But Bud was secretly pleased. It meant that Jeff’s chances at hitting were better.
And, indeed, in the eighth, with two down and nobody on, Jeff was sent to the plate. Bud watched the younster unlimber from the bench, stretch and twist, try to shake off the cramps in his neck. Then he placed the batting helmet on his head and went to the batter’s box.
Bud tracked him as he went, his face set in the taut mask of a warrior, his eyes squinting as if to crush every last mote of concentration onto his immediate problem. He entered the box, took three almost ritualized hip pivots, dragging the bat through the zone as if to arrange himself like a machine for the proper setting by which to engage the ball.