“Honey, you done great. See, he caught us in a mistake. We should have stories prepared. Last thing you ever want to do is try and be making stuff up as you go along. Trip up too easy. No ma’am, got to have your story straight up front, got to have it worked out and tested, that’s how you do that kind of work. Goddamn, Ruta Beth, I must say, you got to be some kind of natural at that kind of work.”
“Have you figured it out? Why he was here?”
Lamar thought a little harder, and then he had it.
“Tires,” he said. “That was soft dust this side of the Red. Sure enough we left tracks in it. They must have got a good tire print and the F-fucking-B-I done ’em the models of cars them tires could fit. So they’re just wading through the DMV listings, hoping to turn up the right car with the right tires and the right fucking boys. They’re so goddamn worried, they even got old Bud Pewtie, his hide so full of buckshot still he can’t hardly walk, out doing shitbird work.”
He was laughing now. He saw the joke in it.
Ruta Beth stared at him in horror.
“But Lamar,” she said. “They was right. I got them tires two years ago when they was marked down because the tire place said Goodyear had discontinued the line and they just wanted to reduce inventory.”
“Not them tires, no ma’am. Night of the party, I went out, remember? Goddamn, I got to thinking about the ways we could slip up and only one I hadn’t covered was the goddamn tires. I swapped ’em with Bridgestones I lifted off a Hyundai Excel. Hah! Old Bud Pewtie thinks he’s so goddamn smart. He ain’t as smart as no Lamar Pye.”
CHAPTER
20
On the final day, Bud tried to make it last longer. He dawdled, he examined each car with microscopic attention, he wouldn’t disengage from conversations, he just let it drift. But still it ended. He pulled down the driveway of a farm all the way over near Healdton in Jefferson County. The sun was a huge pink balloon sinking through wavering atmospheric phenomenon, and the twilight was still and windless. He looked each way as he pulled onto the road, and saw the black band of the highway stretching in a straight shot toward a blank horizon.
Okay, that’s it.
“Dispatch, six-oh-five, do you copy?”
“Six-oh-five, over. What’s your situation?”
“Ten-twenty-four on the O’Brian location.”
“Nothing to report, Bud?”
“No, Dispatch. Nada, zilch, negative. Anybody get anything?”
“That’s a big negative, six-oh-five. Lots of disappointment at this end. Best git yourself home now, Bud.”
“Thanks, Dispatch. Ten-four and out.”
Bud clicked the radio off. In two weeks he’d gotten to know Dispatch a little, a retired Tillman deputy sheriff, another good old boy like himself, steady and salty. In a sense he wanted to please Dispatch as much as himself or Lt. C. D. Henderson or Colonel Supenski. But it wasn’t to be. The joint task force, in two weeks, had called on close to four thousand addresses in the Southern Oklahoma region, and located close to four thousand Toyota Tercels, Hyundai Excels, and Nissan Sentras in the proper model years. Of these, over eight hundred had worn the Goodyear tires; each owner had been investigated and either cleared or interviewed at length. Some fourteen were put under surveillance, which had itself yielded nothing. Meanwhile, joint Highway Patrol-OSBI raiding teams had entered the domiciles of close to two hundred former or currently wanted felons who owned the proper car. Again, nothing, although the lieutenant himself said they’d served warrants on and apprehended over twenty-eight fugitives from justice in the process.
Bud himself had been to over 230 domiciles in the past two weeks, working twelve, fourteen, and sometimes sixteen hours a day, roaming the back country roads of the southernmost five counties. Some nights he hadn’t even come home but had checked into truck-stop motels for a few hours’ ragged sleep, and one night he’d just climbed into a sleeping bag and slept under the shelter of the open tailgate. Oddly, it had been his best sleep.
He tried to think it all over as he headed back to Lawton, to turn in the radio and see what the hell to do next, if there was a next. Goddamn Lamar, smart as a whip. All them brains spent on defeating the law, and completely unyoked to any moral compass. He could have been a doctor, a goddamned lawyer, with brains like that. But he spent all that time just figuring out one thing: how to get away with it. He wasn’t your “criminal genius,” like the movies had it, sleek and cosmopolitan with a taste for fine wine, and maybe his IQ wasn’t the kind that tests could measure. But he was a smart boy.
Tiredly, he turned on the AM radio to KTOK, the Oklahoma City all-news station, and listened to the numb recitation of the world and the region’s events, from what the president had done on down to what happened in the Oklahoma City council that day.
And soon enough, he got the bad news.
“In Lawton, highway patrol and OSBI authorities today called off a statewide dragnet for the car they believed was used by escaped convict Lamar Pye and his gang in the May 16 robbery and shooting spree in Wichita Falls, Texas, which left four law enforcement officers and two civilians dead.”
We’ll just have to wait for you to strike again, Lamar, Bud thought. And this time, I know you’ll make a goddamned splash and a half
“In a related development, Lawton school officials revealed today that a Lamar Pye ‘cult’ appears to be growing and gaining strength in Lawton high schools, elevating the escaped convict and armed robber into a folk hero. At Lawton West last night, vandals defaced the school gym with ‘Long Live Lamar’ and ‘Go Lamar’ graffiti. Superintendent Will C. Long said—” The superintendent’s voice came on the air: “It’s a symptom of the moral limbo in which all too many of our children are raised that some of them would consider a Lamar Pye a hero.”
Shit!
That really got to Bud!
It was like these goddamned kids today. They thought it was funny or cool when somebody stood over a poor policeman and blew his brains out or caught him coming out of the men’s room with his hands wet and blew him away with a blast of double-ought.
The news put Bud in a black funk, a near rage. It made him wish he was a drinking man still, and he felt like pulling over to the next bar he found and chasing his anger away.
Instead, he drove on as the darkness increased, changing to a C-W station, whose jangly rhythms soothed him some. And then he knew he had to call Holly again. It just came like that and he didn’t bother to fight it at all.
He found a pay phone by a convenience store the other side of Oil City. He had to call collect because he didn’t have enough change.
“Well, howdy, stranger,” she said. “I thought you’d dropped off the earth.”
“Been looking at three-year-old Toyotas, just like a real detective. How are you?”
“Bud, I’m okay. How’re you?”
“Honey, I’m outta Toyotas, that’s how I am, and I’m missing you something kind of bad.”
“A likely story.”
“Only the truth.”
“You ain’t had sex in awhile. That’s what it is.”
“No ma’am, that ain’t what it is. I miss Holly. She’s a peach. Now I don’t think I’m gonna be doing a thing tomorrow. You and me were going to look at places.”
“Oh, Bud. I thought you’d forgot.”
“No ma’am. Be over ’round ten.”
“Bud, I was looking through the want ads. I found a house to rent. I want you to see it so bad.”
“Ten o’clock?”
“Oh, Bud, I love you so much!”
Now why did I go do that, he said to himself when he hung up. Back in It all over again.
* * *
Bud woke the next morning to a dilemma: since he was only going house hunting with Holly, did he need his three guns? The answer seemed clear but wasn’t. It might seem to be “No.” But if he didn’t put the guns on, then Jen would surely know he wasn’t headed off on police business. Still, the prospect of walking into st
rangers’ houses with a smile on his face and three automatic pistols on him wasn’t pleasing either.
That’s how it was. In this business you were always thinking, figuring angles, trying to work your way two or three jumps ahead. You always had your lies prepared up front because you didn’t want to improvise under pressure, where you’d surely start contradicting yourself and anyone with half a brain could unravel your tale. It was like living in enemy territory all the time.
Goddamn, turning me into Lamar Pye, he thought as, after his shower, he put himself into the rigmarole of slipping into the holsters, loading the guns and magazines, every last thing, including the little Beretta .380, which felt as if, over the days, it was going to wear a hole in his belly.
“I may give up on this goddamned .380,” he called to Jen as he slipped the gun into an open button and down behind his belt at just the right angle so that it didn’t give him too much difficulty.
But she didn’t answer. Grim again.
“Okay,” he called, “I’m going.”
She came around the corner and fixed him with a glare.
“Anyways, where you off to? I thought they called the search off.”
“Well, they did,” he said—sliding into his lie, not looking quite at her. That was what a good liar could do: look you straight in the eyes and sell you the Tallahatchie Bridge. Not Bud; he sort of let his vision dawdle into the middle distance—“but I got some paperwork to do, and I don’t want that damned lieutenant thinking any the less of me. I can’t do a thing to impress him. I’ll just mosey down to the Annex, check some things, diddle around, be back by mid-afternoon.”
“I don’t see why you have to go today. You’ve been gone for the best part of two weeks.”
“I have a job to do,” he said. “Let me do my job, all right?”
She reacted as if she’d been slapped, which in a way she had, as well as lied to straight up. With a bitter expression, she retreated, and then said, “Russ hears today. If the news is good, you should be here for him and we should take him out to celebrate.”
“Would he go out with us, though? He just sits up there reading.”
“We have to try.”
“Should I go up and say good luck to him?”
“He’s sleeping. Jeff’s gone but Russell doesn’t have classes until ten today.”
“Okay. I’m sorry I yelled at you. This thing has me down.”
“It certainly does,” Jen said, numbly.
“I’ll see you.”
He gave her a brief kiss, and went out and climbed into his truck.
He drove, by a roundabout way, to Holly’s.
He parked and went in. It was just that simple. One woman, and then the other, without so much as a how-do-you-do.
“Oh, don’t you look like a stud, Bud. Bet I know what you want!”
“Holly, I got all these goddamned guns on me. Getting out of ’em is harder than getting out of my boots.”
“Well, I guess you’d rather play with them than me, Bud,” she teased, but he answered in earnest.
“I just put on this shoulder holster. It’s a pain to get out of and back on adjusted just right.”
“Okay, Bud. Have it your way. You may never get another chance.”
But she was dressed herself and only teasing him. She looked so damned cute today he could hardly stop himself from wanting her. Who wouldn’t want such an attractive young woman with all that spunk and that way she had of poking fun at everything? When he was with her, every other damned thing seemed to go away. It just felt so normal.
They stopped for coffee at an out-of-the-way place and then drove on to the first of her addresses, a small place in a nicely kept neighborhood on Sixteenth Street, a block or so down from Lee Boulevard near the south side of town. The lady who owned it was waiting for them, a wispy, white-haired old bat. She took up with Holly right away, all but ignoring Bud, as though she sensed his true irrelevance to what lay before them and started gossiping with Holly like a daughter.
Bud awkwardly put his big hand with his wedding ring on it behind him, in a back pocket that pulled his jacket back, and walked up the walk behind the two ladies, feeling left out but also so strange. He now had to face it, the part of It that had left him acutely uncomfortable all these late weeks. It was this “house-hunting” thing. Why had he agreed to it, except out of stupidity and sloth? It felt like such a violation. Actually going into another home, looking at it and imagining a life in it, while a few miles away a wife and sons went about their business, completely unaware of the betrayal that was being planned coldly against them by their sworn protector.
Bud shook his head. He climbed the porch, looked at the blooming dark void that lay before him, into which the ladies had disappeared, then swallowed and followed.
A young family had lived here, he saw in an instant. The place stank of young kids—the way they piss, the way they smear their food on everything, their warmth, their noise, their considerable odors. It was now empty, but on the cheap carpeting were the stains of baby food and spilled milk and weewee. Here and there on the walls was a smear of pudding or a dried stalk of broccoli.
“See what a nice sunroom,” the lady was saying. “The Holloways said they used it as a family room.”
Bud looked at the small, windowed-in back porch, which smelled of mildew.
“Who lived here?” he asked suddenly.
“Sergeant Holloway and his family. He was transferred to Germany and Rose and the boys went with him, though I don’t think she was too happy about it.”
“Be good for kids to see a foreign country, though,” Bud said. “Mine never did.”
But he was thinking: another sergeant’s home. Some goddamned fool for duty, giving his whatever to some bigger outfit, doing well enough but not truly well.
He looked around, sensing the other sergeant.
“Was he an artilleryman, ma’am?” he asked, wanting just one more detail somehow.
“No, I believe he was a military policeman, though with an artillery battalion. The whole battalion deployed to Germany.”
Bud nodded, looked around. Another cop!
He listened as the two women clambered up the steps. When they were gone to the upstairs, he poked a head in the kitchen. It was small, colored yellow, with flowers on the wallpaper, and all the appliances looked scratchy and sticky. The linoleum was worn where the kitchen table had been, and a bulletin board was literally riddled with hundreds of puncture marks where various family documents must have been hung. He had one in his kitchen, too.
He sat there, imagining the shouts of children, maybe the bustling of the woman in the kitchen, trying to make a good meal without a lot to work with. And where would the sergeant be? Yes, in the living room, plunked down on the sofa, watching the goddamned football game. How many times had such a drama played out in his own house? And now and then Jen would come out and yell, “You boys be quiet, your daddy’s watching the football game” or “Your daddy’s trying to sleep.” Had she hated him for it? Had she resented it? You saw things like that all the time: the woman just finally saying to hell with it and sinking a butcher knife in the husband’s chest, or getting out the deer rifle and nailing a .30-30 through him, or soaking him in hot grease. Had Jen ever wanted to do that?
He thought of Jen as she’d been when he’d met her, all those years ago. The prettiest woman he’d ever seen, and when she’d returned a few of his shy smiles, he’d hardly known what to do. She’d stood by her man, too. She waited for him his first two long years in the air force and married him then, spending the first two years of marriage in a tiny apartment on his sergeant’s salary outside the Pope AFB in North Carolina, where he’d finished up as an air policeman. She’d gone with him when he went back to school, and when he decided to join the troopers instead of staying the course, feeling too old among all those kids, she’d said fine, and made do with a trainee’s salary, and then a Trooper First Class’s salary, the long years at a corporal??
?s salary when, even though he’d passed the sergeant’s exam, others with seniority or connections got the job. She’d had the kids and done the crap work, and gradually took over everything he didn’t like doing, like the checkbook, the taxes, the PTA meetings. She always managed a part-time job. She never made a big point over how much more money her daddy had than he was able to make, and if she was disappointed in the life that Bud had built for them all those years rolling up and down Oklahoma’s highways, she never let it show. She’d worked like hell out of commitment to a man and some idea of a family. Was it her fault she’d put on weight and the years had drained her face of joy and her conversation of everything except a sullen, sometimes bitter, irony?
Suddenly an overwhelming melancholy came over Bud. He couldn’t take it anymore: the teeming, swarming sense of family in the old house. The sense of a sergeant, his wife, the children, no money, and the struggle to hold it all together in some way. He turned and went out to the front porch, where a beat-up sofa sat, like a throne from which to view the neighborhood. He put himself down on the arm and took in great draughts of air. That helped somewhat. For a second there, he’d felt like he was going to puke. He wondered if he wasn’t coming down with something, and ran a hand across his brow only to have it come away damp.
All your systems breaking down, you old fool, he told himself.
He had a sudden urge to just bolt. Just get the hell out of there. To hell with Holly and this nonsense about the house. Nothing would make him feel sweeter than to put some distance between himself and Holly and the damned old biddy and run on back to Jen. If he confessed, got it off his chest, maybe he could get his marriage and his family back. Do it. Do it now!
But he didn’t do that either. He sat there for a time, looking up and down the quiet street: trees, small homes, a few kids out and about.
“Bud? Bud, honey? Could you come up here?”
Bud turned and went upstairs, where three small bedrooms and a john lay off the short hall.