The grief was something else. Lamar had not known grief in his violent thirty-eight years; his father died on the highway before he himself had even been born, so he never knew to miss him. Then there was his mother, a wan and sickly woman, without much in the way of personality, who passed him around to aunts and cousins and whatnot; he was in reform school when she died a drunkard’s death in a ditch, with a bad man. He felt nothing, not even a stab of loneliness. When Odell’s mama, Camilla, died when he and Odell were on a straight eighteen month slide for aggravated assault—plea-bargained down from second degree murder—he felt a twinge. She’d been the best woman he’d ever known, kind and gentle, and she had so loved her Baby Odell, though not quite enough to stop her husband from chaining him up in the barn and beating him with a razor strop. Lamar had stopped that himself. But that was more a single moment’s passing, like a cold breeze through his insides. Here it came, there it went, it was gone forever.
But now Odell. He didn’t think it would ever stop hurting. He thought of it as weight. It took the form of a fat black cat that crawled upon his chest, suffocating him. He got the idea that if he ever lay down and went to sleep, that cat would kill him. He imagined it having mousy breath and a white blaze between yellow saucer eyes that never blinked but only looked on him with utter stillness and without interest. But it wanted him dead. It would creep up during the night, warm and cuddly, and just plant itself on his chest, acquiring weight as the night passed until he clawed for air, but by that goddamned time the cat weighed a ton and its purrs had the quality of a file’s gritty grasp, squashing him down into the feathers until he was no more.
“Goddamn cat” was all Lamar would say as to why he no longer slept but instead roamed the farm at night, striding grimly about on the rolling, open prairie, amid the craggy mesquite trees that seemed to be trying to claw the moon from the sky in black rage. Sometimes he ventured as far afield as across the highway into some farmer’s grazing lands, where he walked madly between the cattle, who soon grew accustomed to his prescence.
As he walked he tried to reconstruct Odell in his mind, as if in doing so, he could keep that boy out of the cold and lonely grave. There had been something solid about Odell: He expected so little, he was almost unstoppable in most kinds of battle, he knew no fear or remorse; he simply lived each moment, then forgot it forever. Lamar had taken care of him for years. He understood his cousin’s strange language full of twisted words and broken sentences; he understood the subtleties of Odell’s face, which most people regarded as utterly impassive and blank. Not Lamar; he could read Odell’s mood from the set of his mouth, the raggedness of his breathing through that incomplete septum, and the essential sweetness of his character.
For at heart, in some way, though he had done terrible things at Lamar’s dark bidding, Odell had retained his innocence. He simply had done what Lamar said and taken no pleasure from it. He had had no need to dominate or kill or steal; he had only needed to be paid a little attention and be fed, and that had lasted him to the end of his days. But Lamar had dragged him along, made him a pale instrument of his own criminal will, and had now gotten him killed.
No, no, he told himself. You can’t believe that. You’da gone on for years, you and Odell, you thinking, Odell happily following, if it weren’t for that goddamned Bud Pewtie.
The thought of Pewtie recalled the gun flashes in the dark, and that made him think of Odell hit on the floor, his baby voice keening in pain and hurt, his mouth shot away so that his tiny store of words had been reduced to an animal howl.
“WAHRRRR!”
And then when the lights came on, he saw the blood all over Odell and the way his jaw was smashed and hanging, sections of bone blown out, and a torrent of blood squirting out of it. That must have been the very first shot, the jaw shot, the lucky jaw shot that changed the whole nature of the fight.
That Bud Pewtie seemed to have the Pye number all right! Something about him made him special to the Pyes. Lamar remembered turning with the shotgun after the .45 had run dry at the Stepford place and pumping one last shell into Pewtie. It was like his back exploded! Blood from a butchered pig, a big, fly-catching puddle of it! And the bastard wasn’t even badly hurt! Flesh wounds from bird-shot! Pretty goddamned suspicious.
And the second time. A second time Bud Pewtie, big as life and dumb as an elephant, came walking onto Ruta Beth’s farm and was just ten feet away and all Lamar had to do was jump across that space and bury the hatchet in the lawman’s brain! It would have been so easy! They could have stashed him, taken his truck, and driven to new digs in New Mexico or Texas or California or somesuch. But no—played it safe, and got poor Odell blown away.
What haunted him most, as it haunted Bud, was Odell’s insane lumber across the tattoo shop while Pewtie shot pieces off him. He must have hit him two dozen times as Lamar just stared, his own hand blown to shit so that he could think of nothing; you could just see the bullets tearing through Odell, blowing off pieces of bone and flesh like he was nothing. Still, something in Odell drove him onward while Pewtie put them into him. Odell, goddamn was he a lot of man! He may have been a baby to the world, but to Lamar he was a man, because he had truly given up his life for Lamar’s, a sacrifice that was all but unimaginable to Lamar. He’d never seen anything like it in all his years of prison. It just wasn’t done. When a man’s time came, it came, that was all.
So Lamar roamed the fields at night, thinking these things over, working himself deeper and deeper into a titanic rage. One night it rained and the lightning flashed all around, but Lamar didn’t care. He went up on a ridge and stood in the pouring rain, his shirt off, the lightning bolts detonating like artillery shells all around him. When they went off, their illumination brought the world into sharp, instantaneous relief; he could see the farmhouse and the highway far away, and the abutments against the horizon that were the Wichitas; but the flashes were like gun flashes and the thunderclaps like the sounds of guns.
“He should see a doctor,” said Richard. “He’ll get a fever and die. Or he’ll go insane out there in all that rain and lightning, and do something crazy and take us with him.”
“You shut up now, Richard,” said Ruta Beth, blinking as a particularly vivid flash filled the dark kitchen with sudden shadows. “Daddy’s in pain. He’s in real pain. He needs time to get a grip.”
“He needs a doctor. You don’t get two fingers shot off and not see a doctor.”
“What little you know, Richard. I heard that back in fifty-four, my daddy’s brother Cy lost a whole hand to a threshing machine and there wasn’t no doctor in these here parts. So they just wrapped him up tighter’n a drum, and few days go by and he’s up and spry as a weed. It’s only goddamned city folks need a doctor ever time their nose git a little runny.”
“How long did Cy live?”
“Well, he died the next year of a fever, but that don’t have nothing to do with it.”
“Ruta Beth, I—”
The door blew open; rain whistled in and at that moment, as if in a cheap movie, a lightning flash illuminated the ravaged features of Lamar, his hair a mottled and wild mess, his eyes crazed, his muscles tensed and hard against the sting of the rain, with just the faintest outline of lion on his chest.
“Richard,” he commanded. “I want you to git your art stuff. I want you to draw me a picture. Boy, draw me a picture as if your life depended on it. I got to see that picture or I’m going to die, Richard.”
Richard leaped up.
“Yes, Lamar. Tell me what it is. I can draw it. I’ll draw like I drew before. You just tell me and I’ll do it.”
“Richard, I want to see Baby Odell happy in heaven. He’s sitting at the Lord’s right hand. He’s playing with a cat, a little kitty. He’s got a halo. Then on the Lord’s other hand, there’s Jesus, and he’s just as pleased as punch because his new buddy Odell done joined him up.”
“Y-yes,” said Richard, thinking it seemed a little ambitious for his modest talent
s.
“Yeah, but that’s only in heaven. That’s going on up top. Down here on earth, Richard, down here on earth, that goddamned Bud Pewtie, he’s being burned. You know what I mean? He’s on fire. His flesh is burning in the everlasting fires of hell. He’s screaming for mercy, but they ain’t none. No mercy for him. Do you get that?”
“Yes, I do, Lamar. And you? You’re in the picture?”
“Hell yes, boy,” said Lamar. “I’m the one with the match.”
Richard drew as if he were the one on fire. He knew it was an absurdity, but in some way it satisfied him to reach out and at last help Lamar, if only in this crazy way.
He tried to remember the Sistine Chapel, for it had that crazed scope to it—heaven and earth, reward and punishment, the duality of existences, a classical Renaissance theme. He of course was no Michelangelo, but he doubted if Lamar knew who Michelangelo was, so he doubted his plagiarism would get him in much trouble. That’s how he envisioned it—an insane white-trash Sistine Chapel, full of pure rage and the criminal’s need to dominate and hurt, and at the same time full of a kind of innocence. It would be a lunatic masterpiece, a crackpot pièce de résistance, of the sort that is rare but does in fact exist—the works of Céline, for example; or Mahler, a horrible man; or Sam Peckinpah, that deranged maker of nihilistic cowboy movies whom some actually believed to be a very great artist.
It was as if he had been liberated. His fingers flew and discovered new and interesting ideas as they plunged ahead, each new line leading to yet another line in a mad scramble, a helter-skelter, a kind of artistic release. Whatever Lamar had done for him or to him, he had now at last released Richard’s inhibitions; no thought of what was “proper” attended his brain, no reluctance, no phony patina of “sophistication”; he let the work flow from his id—or from Lamar’s.
Heaven was a mountaintop, purple and swarming with clouds. Our Lord was a benevolent biker king, a Daddy Cool aslouch on the throne of his Harley, his powerful features radiating justice and serenity; at his left foot was his only son, Jesus as Road Captain, his leathers glistening, his narrow, ascetic face made more prominent by a ponytail that hung down from a bandanna. He had a tattoo that said JESUS LOVES and he, too, radiated benevolence and forgiveness. And Baby Odell. It was with special affection that Richard evoked the Baby; he cured his harelip and gave his eyes focus and wit; he gave him not the slobby body of an overgrown farmboy but the sleek muscles of a weightlifter. His mouth was no longer small and overshadowed by the dark fissure above it, but firm and eloquent, just as he now had cheekbones and spine and the one thing that poor Odell never in life acquired, for it requires some kind of primitive self-awareness: dignity. It was about halfway through that he realized he was reinventing Odell as Al Capp’s Li’l Abner, but that was okay: there was something barefoot and down-home to both Abner and Odell that made it appropriate.
It was nearly midnight when he finished the rough sketching for the first half of the drawing; but now, in a fever, he could not stop. He was consumed with fire, as high as he’d ever, ever been before in his life.
Oh, Mother, he thought, if you could see me now.
For Bud Pewtie, he tried to imagine a pain so everlasting and consuming it would be almost beyond comprehension. How does one get the total squalor of torture, of ultimate and total degradation, into a mere representation? He tried to think of atrocity—the blown-away old people in this very house; but more, scenes from Auschwitz, the endless litter of scrawny corpses; or the famous photograph of the searing flame of napalm in Vietnam, out of which with such utter delicacy the little girl had run, leaving her mother and baby brother cooking behind; the Zapruder film frame in which Kennedy’s skull explodes, a fragment launching into midair and trailing a plasma gossamer; a picture of the rent, headless corpse of a third-trimester abortion that an antichoice zealot had once sent him.
Yet none of this stuff really worked; it didn’t get him where he needed to be.
What is the worst, he thought, the worst thing you know or have ever heard of? The screwball in Silence of the Lambs with his “woman suit”? The German officer who forces Sophie to choose which child shall live and which shall die? The cries of the Scottsboro boys as they were dragged to their trees, knowing they were innocent?
No, he thought, the worst thing you ever heard of was the boy who blinded his mother. He didn’t have the guts to kill her. He wasn’t strong enough, though he hated her almost as much as he loved her. He tried to remember the mechanics of his strokes with his stiff arms, his sudden explosiveness, the sound of the blade cutting into the skin and into the sockets. He remembered her wailing. God, how she wailed for mercy. But she was so weak. She had dominated him for so long, but she was so weak! The power he’d felt, the obscene sense of gratification after all those years.
“There, Mother, there! Now you know how it feels!”
That’s what he’d said to her.
Now, trapping that sickness and storing it like a fossil fuel, he began once again to draw.
Lamar sat like Rodin’s Thinker, watching the sun come up. It crept over the rim of the plains out beyond the highway, foreshadowing another hot, clear Oklahoma day. This early, it was still farmer’s sun, appreciated wordlessly only by men who rose before it to get a good part of their immense day’s labor finished before it got truly hot. it was swollen and bloodshot, and almost orange, but still cool. Lamar regarded it dully. It was as if he’d spent his rage and collapsed, finally, after so many long, sleepless days and nights battling fever and pain and that goddamned big cat that was still stalking him. His face was slack, his eyes dull. He was shirtless, the half-lion looking almost abstract, like a scribble, on the planes of his chest. His hair fanned wetly over his broad back. He breathed through his mouth, drawing the air over a dry, dead tongue. Nothing moved on his body; he looked as passive as a piece of stone, though the veins on his muscular right arm were distended and now and then a rogue impulse caused one of his remaining fingers to twitch.
He’d been sitting there since three o’clock, when he’d returned from another of his long night walks.
Richard approached gingerly. He felt as if he were a small boy in the presence of greatness.
He stood, waiting to be recognized.
After a long time, Lamar finally looked over.
Richard saw two glistening tracks running down his cheeks, which connected with no knowledge of Lamar that he’d ever had, until at last he recognized that tears had left their mark. Lamar was weeping silently.
“Lamar, are you all right?”
“Oh, I’m hurting something mighty, Richard,” Lamar said. “I’m hurting so fierce I doubt if I’m a-going to make it.”
“Please, Lamar. What would we do without you? You can’t talk like that. You’ve got to make it. It always seems darkest just before the dawn.”
“Goddamn Richard, that poor boy, he never’d done a thing wrong if I hadn’t a-steered him to it. It’s me should be lying on that slab, not him. And I promised him I’d take him to his mama’s grave and I never done that. And now he ain’t even going to git no funeral. They going to dump him in some goddamned pauper’s grave and that’s the end of it. It’s so sad. It kills me how sad it is.”
“Lamar, I finished the drawing. I’ll put the colors in tomorrow if you like it.”
He held it out to Lamar, who took it and examined it closely in silence for some time. Then Richard heard a shuffle, a choke, a sob, as Lamar broke down completely.
Richard stood there feeling as if he’d violated some immense privacy of Lamar’s. To see a man so bold and strong and fearless weeping hysterically—it befuddled Richard. It was like seeing his own father crying, when all the signals always said that fathers don’t cry. His never did. Mothers cry. But his never did, either.
But then Lamar looked over and said, “Richard, goddamn, what you done here, that’s wonderful. The Baby in heaven, Bud Pewtie in hell. Goddamn, Richard, you are a great artist. Just looking at that lets
me imagine it in some way I couldn’t before. I do know that he’s up there, a-waitin’ on me. Goddamn, Richard, boy, it’s like you done lifted a huge weight off my shoulders.”
“Why thank you, Lamar,” said Richard, stunned at the response.
Then Lamar looked at the bottom part, the hell part.
“Now what’s this?” he said, his features darkening. “I thought I told you he was supposed to burn, like in hell.”
“Lamar, Lamar, I thought hard about it, and I came up with something different. Something so … strange it would make you famous. Famous forever. It’s so horrible.”
Lamar’s features knitted as he tried to penetrate the image. Gradually, they lightened.
“His face,” he said. “You got me doing something to his face.”
“Yes,” Richard admitted shyly.
“I don’t get it, Richard.”
“What is a man, Lamar? A man is many things, and you can take them from him, but the one thing, if you take it, you take everything.”
“Everything?”
“Yes. Everything. Not his life, not his family, not his balls, but—his face.”
“I’m cutting his face off?”
“Everything. Eyes, nose, tongue, lips, teeth. You’ve taken his face. You’ve left him without a face. Consider it! It’s so … extreme.”
Lamar looked at Richard and a strange light came into his eyes. And then Richard saw that it was respect.
Lamar suddenly embraced Richard, held him tightly.
“Richard, I think you done helped me find the power. You and the Lord, Richard, you both done helped me find the power.”
“You can go on?”
“Go on? Hell, boy, we gonna git us a Bud Pewtie. And his goddamned family. And this time, we’ll leave a ruckus in the chicken coop they talk about in Oklahoma for a hundred years! You mess with the Pyes, they’ll say, and the Pyes will have their day! And we’ll leave him for all to find—without a face!”