CHAPTER
12
Nothing panics you like your own blood, but by the time he’d gotten to the hospital, Bud had figured out that he probably wasn’t going to die that night. And he didn’t: Stitches underneath his arm had popped when he leaped to celebrate Jeff’s home run, but the loss was minimum, though the young emergency room doctor wouldn’t release him and so he spent another night in the hospital despite his considerable moanings and groanings about it.
“He complains like that all the time,” Jen told them. “It’s his idea of fun.”
But the next morning, Colonel Supenski himself showed up, with lion eyes and not a lot of old-boy fellowship.
“Bud, you are ragging on me something fierce.”
“Yessir,” said Bud, glumly.
“Now, I want you to consider doctor’s orders my orders. You can’t go roaming about doing God knows what. It’s not a vacation. You’re still on duty and your duty is to recover, and return to active duty.”
“Yessir,” said Bud.
“Bud, I can see in your eyes, something’s eating at you. I know how being shot can make a man call into value a lot of the things he holds dear. I want you to—”
Bud fixed the colonel with a glare.
“What are you saying, Colonel?”
“There’s talk, Bud.”
“Talk? Talk about what?”
“Bud, as I understand it, somebody’s wife saw you and Ted’s widow at a diner in Elgin. It didn’t seem right.”
“Whose business is it?”
“It shouldn’t be nobody’s business, Bud. But that isn’t the point. What should and what is are different as night and day. The truth is, if you wear the badge and walk the walk, you have to live a life that not only is free of taint, but looks free of taint. It isn’t pretty, and it sure isn’t fair, but it’s what it is and that’s the fact, and I know you know same as I do. Now all’s I want from you is recovery time. Do you understand?”
Bud took a deep breath. Never in his long career had he ever argued with authority. It wasn’t his way. If you enforce rules, you live by rules, that was that. But this time, for whatever reason, maybe just his prickly orneriness or some deeper sense that the universe was now ever so slightly unhinged, he said, “What’s going on between Mrs. Pepper and myself is just nobody’s damned business but hers and mine and maybe my wife’s. That’s all there is to it.”
The colonel looked at him hard.
“Bud, a dee-vorce, a scandal, it could cost you so much. Believe me, I know. I went through one in the Marine Corps fourteen years ago and it took me forever to get back on my feet. I never ever got the love back of my middle daughter and I will die regretting that. All for a younger woman I thought I loved who is now married to a general. So I know, Bud. I’ve been there. Plus, Bud, I got the patrol to think over. You up and marry the widow of the man you were partnered with who got killed when you were along … might git some folks talking. Next thing you know, you got those news boys looking for dirt. It’s a hard thing.”
“Yes sir,” said Bud. “I hear you. But what I should tell you is Ted’s dying words. He asked me to look after Holly.”
“Okay, Bud, I believe you. Now you just get better and ever damn body going to be fine.”
They let Bud go that afternoon, but before he drove home, he called Holly.
“Hi.”
“Oh, Bud, tell me, it wasn’t nothing?”
“No, just some stitches broke, some minor local bleeding, that’s all.”
“Oh, that’s great. And they’re going to let you out?”
“I am out.”
“Oh, Bud, can I meet you?”
“Holly, that’s just it. People are beginning to talk. The colonel said something.”
There was a long silence on the line.
“Holly, the last thing either you or I need is some huge mess over who’s with who.”
“So what are you saying, Bud?”
“Well, I don’t know.”
Bud thought about how simple it all became without Holly. It was as if all the weight that had accrued on his neck and shoulders over the last few months suddenly took flight and vanished. He saw the future before him as a kind of sentimentalized postcard, golden and pure. Yet even as he could not bear the thought of hurting Jen, neither could he bear the thought of hurting Holly.
“Bud, do you want it to be over?”
“No, Holly, of course not. I couldn’t live without you,” he said.
“Bud, I couldn’t live without your bad jokes.”
“We just have to be careful for a time is all. This settles down, we get it all straightened out.”
“When will I see you?”
“Well, I got a grand day planned for us tomorrow. I want to go through Lamar’s prison stuff. Everyone else has, why shouldn’t I? Anyway, that’s a long drive up to McAlester. I could meet you, say, in Duncan, at eleven, we could drive on up, get lunch, I’d go into the house for an hour or two and then we’d come on back and have dinner on the way.”
“Oh, Bud, don’t that sound like the prom itself!”
Bud drove on home then, and got there just as Jeff had returned from practice. Jen was back late and, behind, seemed to be manufacturing some despair over the dinner that she felt she had to prepare. The issue was: chicken or fish. Neither sounded like much to Bud.
“Goddamn,” he said, “we got some celebrating to do. This boy hit a home run, I just got out of the hospital, and you worked too late to put in one more minute here. Let’s go out to dinner. I need meat, red meat, freshly killed. The Meers Store. Any objections?”
“Dad, it’s so expensive for hamburgers.”
“Whatever. Let’s go. We can put it on the card.”
“Bud, we haven’t paid that yet.”
“Well, it ain’t overdue so it won’t bounce. Come on, Jen, let’s give this boy a thrill, like the one he gave us last night.”
“Dad,” Jeff said in a voice dense with mock despair over his father’s shameless corniness.
“Now come on, people, time’s a-wasting. Maybe even Russ would join us, if he ain’t snooty these days.”
“I have a paper due tomorrow,” Russ called down from upstairs.
Honors history. Russ looked like a goddamn beatnik, but he got straight As and was a good boy, even if he rarely spoke one word in a language his father understood.
“We shouldn’t leave Russ,” said Jen.
Bud bounded up the stairs, the ache in his legs vanished in his explosion of enthusiasm. It was suddenly overwhelmingly important that Russ be there, that they all be together.
His oldest son’s room was a strange jungle to him; the junk-addict rock star in the poster, all the narrow little paperback books without pictures on the covers by people Bud had never heard of—Camus, Sartre, Nietzsche, Mailer, Dostoyevsky, names like that—magazines with words rather than pictures on their covers, too, a whole universe that just puzzled Bud, who’d had to drop out of Oklahoma State his freshman year when his father had died of cirrhosis in an Air Force hospital, and had gone into the Air Force himself for four years the next week.
“Now, what’s this about a paper? It can’t wait?”
“Dad, if I screw up this thing, Foster won’t give me a rec to Princeton, like he said he would.”
“Your brother did so well.”
“I know. That’s terrific, I’m really happy for him. But, this paper.”
“Sure, I understand,” said Bud, who of course didn’t. Russ was a thin boy, more bone and muscle than flesh, who wore his hair troublingly long. Bud tried never to look at his left earlobe, where something glittered; and he didn’t approve of the way the boy dressed almost purely in black except for a battered leather coat of the sort the pilots had worn when Bud was an air policeman those many years ago.
Russ had just charted his own course through life. He loved his folks and never gave them a lick of trouble, but he wanted a wider, more passionate world. Read all the time,
was trying to read himself out of Oklahoma.
“It’s okay, Dad,” said Jeff, who had come up the stairs after Bud. “He’s a brain, he’s got to study.”
He didn’t say it angrily; he and Russ never competed directly, and ran in completely different circles in high school. It was all right, it was cool.
But Bud felt a flash of anger: he loved it so when his boys were together and he could hover over them as he had when they were children, perhaps most fascinated at his own sense of kingship than out of any sense of giving them something, too. It was a selfish thing, Jen had told him: The boys had to be who they were, not his little servants, there to reflect his glory. He didn’t quite agree, but everywhere he saw the signs: authority breaking down, both on the road and in the home. It was a losing battle, no sense at all of even fighting it. The day of the father as master was ending, closing out. He knew that and could get through it, he told himself. But he missed that sense of lordship that used to come with paying the mortgage.
“Okay, no problem, we’ll bring you something.”
“Thanks, Dad,” said Russ.
They left shortly, and drove through the dark. Nobody said much on the way over. There wasn’t much traffic as they took Cache Road through the built-up strip abutting Fort Sill and then got to plain flat highway west of Lawton. Twenty miles out of town they turned and drove up through the Wichita National Wildlife refuge, where buffaloes could actually be seen. The mountains rose around them like humps of stone. The Meers Store was an old mining-company store whose quaintness some clever people had preserved; now it served huge hamburgers made from authentic longhorn beef, said to be low on cholesterol, high on flavor. It was one of those down-homey joints, known for good beef, cold beer, and flirty waitresses. Full of junky posters and deer that nobody in living memory had killed. It didn’t take long to find a table, and in just a bit more time, Bud was draining a Budweiser and waiting for a big hamburger, his favorite.
“Jeff, you should be so proud. I thought I’d bust a gut when you hit that ball. I did bust a gut.”
Jeff gave a strange, self-conscious shrug.
“You did so well, Jeff,” said Jen. “We’re so proud.”
“Well, one lucky swing doesn’t make a season.”
“No, but it just might start you off on a path to success. I feel you have the talent to be a major league player, if that’s what you want bad enough,”
“Probably not, dad.”
“He should still plan to go to college, Bud,” said Jen.
“Sure, sure, I ain’t saying he shouldn’t. But he should also be damned proud. What pitch you hit?”
“Dad, I don’t even remember. I just decided I’d swing. Truth is, I’d pretty much given up. Didn’t think I could hit him. The ball was just smoke. That guy was good. He’s pitched a couple of no-hitters this year. He’s only a sophomore. They say he’ll go pro before he graduates. But he threw it where I could hit it. God, it felt so good.”
“Well, sir, it looked good, too.”
Bud sat back. He ordered another beer when the girl brought the food. Delicious, as anticipated.
It was dark in the place, and as he ate, he could see people, but not their faces. They could have been anyone, he thought, and thought of all the hundreds of times he’d come across grotesque things on the road, where out of nowhere scum hit innocent people and took their money and sometimes their lives. The people just couldn’t do a thing about it, except hope for mercy, that’s how sudden and ugly it could come.
His family sat in the light; who was in the dark? Who waited?
Was it a Lamar Pye, death just waiting to happen? And who would protect them? He, Bud? He was sworn to be off with his young woman, having the kind of adventure he’d never had when he was a young man and was so lucky to get to now.
But who would save them from the Lamars?
He looked at them. Jen was telling Jeff about a new jacket she thought he ought to get for his college interviews. Jeff was saying that Russ didn’t get a jacket but didn’t need one, he was such a brain. They were intent on their conversation, and Bud wanted to hug them both and hold them from the darkness.
He met her at eleven and they set off for McAlester. Why? Everybody—FBI, OSBI, U.S. marshals, Department of Corrections police, Pittsburg county sheriff’s department, Oklahoma City homicide—had gone through the squalid collection of convicts’ possessions, such as they were. These were the very best professional investigators in the state; what could Bud find that they couldn’t?
Bud knew the answer: nothing. Anyway, he wasn’t really even an investigator, having spent most of his career on the road, where things happened fast and furious and you handled a hundred decisions and situations a day, but no penetrations into mystery or playing a dozen varying accounts off against each other or cultivating a network of informants. But still Bud somehow wanted to know Lamar in a way that reading his jacket could not provide. He wanted to touch the things that Lamar had touched and cherished, and see what Lamar felt about life.
“I don’t know how you can put your hands on those things. What do you expect to get out of it?” Holly asked, just as Jen had that morning. Jen had said it was a sick obsession; Holly, however grudgingly, accepted it.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Don’t the Indians believe if a man holds a thing dear some of his soul rubs off on it? But Lamar don’t have a soul. Maybe his evil rubbed off on his stuff. I want to see what’s left in it.”
“Bud, that’s crazy.”
“Well, maybe it is. But I’m going to go nuts if I just sit around that house and take Percodans. It’ll be a nice trip.”
They took Oklahoma 7 east from Duncan toward the small penitentiary city 125 miles away. It was a bright summer’s day, and on either side of the highway, the farmland spilled away, the neat fields broken up by stands of trees or low hills, all of them decorated with the rhythmic pumping of the oil wells, which somehow looked like giant insects at their feeding, up, pause, and then greedily down again. Now and then, they’d blow by some hopeful rural town, usually with pennants flapping and gas station signs climbing heroically into the sky and a small civilization of fast-food joints.
Bud loved it: highway America. Always different, always the same. He loved the snap of the wheat in the wind and the small tidy places and the neatly furrowed fields and the high blue sky and the green everywhere. It had given him such a thrill to roll down that ribbon of concrete in his unit, aerials whipping, lord of it all, and all who looked on him knew that he was the man that counted.
He looked over at Holly. She was such a pretty young thing. He didn’t believe he’d ever seen a person in whom the features were so perfectly formed. Why did she like him so?
She looked over and smiled. She had nearly perfect teeth.
“What are you thinking, Bud?”
“I’m wondering how come of all the men in the world you picked me. You could have had any of them.”
“Well, I could not have, and you know it. I picked you because you were the kindest and the strongest and the bravest and the best. Who wouldn’t pick such a man?”
He shook his head. The absurdity of the praise almost irritated him; he remembered the fear, the sense of worthlessness he’d felt when Lamar brought the shotgun to bear for the last moment, just before pulling the trigger. Whatever his virtues, they were valueless that day.
The cloud that passed through his mind must have shown in his eyes.
“Bud,” she said, “can’t you let it go? The thing with Lamar, Ted’s death, that horrible thing. It’s over. The others will get him, sooner or later.”
“It’s forgotten. Okay? I swear it.”
“Oh, Bud,” she said with a sigh, “you are such a wonderful liar.”
That seemed to let the tension escape, and they drove the rest of the way in a buoyant mood; he flirted and she laughed. They listened to the radio. There was an oldies station in Oklahoma City that they picked up, KOMA, and Bud knew more of the songs
than Holly did. They made jokes about the troopers parked by the roadside or occasionally cruising down the other side of the highway strip. It was light and pleasant.
In under two hours they came to the small city of McAlester, and from the highway they could see the city’s only remaining industry—its prison. From Oklahoma I as they headed in, it looked somehow magical, like a Moorish city or a Camelot: the high, white, fortresslike walls shining in the sun. It looked so cheerful, so promising, but it was such a fantasy. No cheer in that place, and goddamned little promise.
“Here we go,” said Bud, turning off Route I for the two-mile spin up West Street, until it delivered them into the prison itself. Was it his imagination, or did he feel a sense of dread and evil as they approached, as if the air, somehow, had gotten heavy?
McAlester State Penitentiary was everything you thought of when you heard the word “prison.” The walls were huge and blank and festooned with cruel razor wire, and up close the fraudulence of the whitewash revealed itself, because you could see the ancient bricks mortared into place in the millions and you knew that under the bright paint they were dingy, as though soaked in woe.
“So much bad comes out of a place like that, it makes you wonder,” said Bud, as he turned off West Street onto Prison Boulevard, in the shadow of the vast south wall itself. “The convicts call ’em gladiator schools. It’s where a young kid with a wild streak learns how to be a burglar, a buttfucker, a cop killer, and how never to feel nothing about what he’s done. You don’t want to know what goes on inside a place like that. You can’t begin to imagine it. But I’ll tell you this: Nothing good ever came out of an American prison. I’d drench ’em in napalm and turn every last boy inside into ashes and black bones, and start over.”
“The newspapers would scream,” Holly pointed out.
“They would until they watched the crime rate fall.”
Bud pulled into a slot marked LAW ENFORCEMENT just shy of the admin building that crouched under the walls and turned his truck engine off. Lamar and Odell and Richard: They’d come this way. He remembered from the newspapers that first day after the escape: the arrows pointing to a second-floor grated window in the admin section of Cellblock A out back, where that poor boy had parked his truck and they had climbed into it and waited for him to come to his death. Then they’d driven out the gates, turned left, turned left again, and come down this merry little street with the cheery visitor’s center, the warden’s big house like a mansion, even a tacky little museum, before turning down West Street and heading out into the world.