“Ted—”
“So anyway, I just handed the license back. Apologized for stopping. And watched them go away. They laughed. I could hear them laugh as they pulled away. I went back to the cruiser and I just cried. I sat there and I cried.”
Ted just sat there, face slack, eyes dull. Burnt out, used up. He’d let the thing eat him alive.
“Well, Ted, you’re a fine young officer,” Bud finally said. “I think it would be a shame to let a thing like that worry on you too much. Sometime you got to back down. Those boys had you cold. What was the point of getting killed for nothing? They’ve probably killed each other by now anyway. Why not just pass it as done, and swear to do your best from here on out. That’s all.”
“Bud, haven’t you ever made a mistake? Don’t you ever feel guilty? No, I don’t suppose you do. You just are naturally the kind of man who goes through life without screwing up. God, I wish I could be like you. Sometimes I think Holly wishes I could be like you. Bud this and Bud that. That girl has a thing for you, Bud. And for a while I hated you on account of it.”
“Ted, I—”
“No, Bud, it’s not your damned fault. Well, anyway, that’s it. You got it. I don’t.”
“Well, Ted, the truth is, I have never done a courageous thing in my life. I don’t have no idea how I’d be if there’s lead flying about and I hope never to find out. And there’s all sorts of things about me you don’t know,” Bud said.
“All units, all units,” came the squawk over the statewide intercity net on the Motorola.
Both men suddenly started to listen.
“OSBI has just confirmed the location of the van thought to have been stolen by the inmate escapees Pye and Peed. It was found in the parking lot of a Hostess bakery and distributorship in Ada, where it had apparently sat for over thirty-six hours, unnoticed.”
“Goddamn,” said Bud.
“Body in the back identified as Willard Jones, twenty-four, of Ada. We think we’re looking for victim’s car, a blue eighty-seven Dodge Dart, plates Lima-X-ray-Papa five-niner-seven,” Dispatch said.
“Goddamn,” said Bud, “that old Lamar’s a smart one. Only place nobody’d notice a Hostess van is in the Hostess parking lot. He’s outside the ring now. And nobody knows where the hell he’s heading.”
A quiver passed through Bud.
Lamar was smart and he was bad. It was the worst news.
“Goddamn,” said Ted, “glad you made me wear this damned vest.”
CHAPTER
5
Richard knew he was smart. He read at three. He was in gifted and special classes all the way through school, with grades way off the charts and an IQ that always opened eyes. And his talent: eerie, vivid, almost supernatural. A special, precious kind of boy, who impressed all exposed to him, all the way through.
But Lamar was smart.
Put Richard on the street and he’s dead. Put Richard in jail and he’s dead. Put him in Russia, in ancient Rome, on Mars, in the Marine Corps, all those places—he’s dead. Not Lamar. Lamar ends up running most of them, or in their prisons, running them. Lamar just knows. Always, always figuring. Show him a problem and he breaks it down fast and right, though not the way a normal man might: He breaks it down so there’s more for him and less for you. That’s his one moral law, and having accepted it, he has no qualms or doubts. He works this law passionately and with straightforward conviction. What is Yeats’s line? “The worst are full of passionate intensity”? That’s it. That’s Lamar. A sly genius at disorder, a prince of chaos.
These thoughts rocketed through Richard’s oh-so-busy brain as he drove the little trio in Willard Johnson’s four-year-old Dart west of Ada toward Ratliff City, toward Mr. Bill Stepford, Sr.,’s place, where Mr. Stepford, Sr., and family had some guns that they would take, by any means possible. Richard tried not to think of that part. These poor people were condemned: Hurricane Lamar would hit them, abetted by Cyclone Odell, and wipe them out. They were the dead, sitting there in their little farmhouse even now, watching the television, finishing up the peach cobbler, wondering about the upcoming Grange meeting, deer season, and the possibility of Oklahoma ever getting some sort of major professional sports franchise. They had fought in wars and paid taxes and said their prayers for sixty-odd years and loved each other and the land that supported them, and they were dead. The existential majesty of it overwhelmed Richard.
Both Lamar and Odell were asleep in the back. He could hear them breathing, the even-odd-even-odd rhapsody of their snores, broken now and again by a belch or the rippling percussion of a smelly fart (Odell farted all the time and then smiled and said, “Odell makey stinky.”) Their presence held not only terror but squalor and banality as well: They were so crude, bald, itchy, raw, unvarnished, brutes of the id. Richard looked out the window at the silent alfalfa fields of Oklahoma, the long and dreadful wait in the van at last over. He fought down a sob and studied a patch of sky, riddled with stars.
Richard thought: I could do it. I could slew the car off the road, throw the door open, and run, run away, flee. The police would find me eventually. I could explain. Just like the other thing: It’s not my fault. Really. I was made to do it, I had no choice.
But he knew this was complete illusion. He could no more get away from Lamar than he could face him down and kill him. Lamar was everything. Lamar would run him down and break his neck with those strong hands, watching him with those superficially charming but ultimately empathyless eyes; then, as he was dying of asphyxiation, his spine having punctured his lungs, Lamar would fuck him in the ass, laughing; that would be how Richard left this world.
He wouldn’t do it, of course. It made him nervous to even consider such a thing. If Lamar could see what he was thinking, Lamar would kill him for thinking it. Lamar was an absolute god: he demanded obedience as sternly as the figure in the Old Testament.
He looked out the window again.
“Be easy, wouldn’t it, Richard?” Lamar asked softly from behind him. It startled Richard; he jumped.
“You scare so quick, Richard,” Lamar laughed in a whisper. “But it would be easy, wouldn’t it?”
“What, Lamar?”
“You know. Dump us. Take off. Go on, admit it. You thought of it.”
“It’s not my nature to be bold.”
“No, it ain’t. I could see that from the start. But I will change that. Richard, I swear to you, you stick with me, I may not make you rich or even free, but by God, you will be a man. Do you read me?”
“Yes sir,” said Richard.
“Don’t you ‘sir’ me, boy. I ain’t no goddamned officer. I’m your friend, Richard, do you believe me? Your only friend.”
“Yes, Lamar.”
“You don’t like the killing, do you?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Son, what that means, you raised in a different place than Lamar and Odell. Where Lamar come from, you hadda fight like shit every damn day or someone take it all from you. I do not enjoy it. I am not a low-down, trashy man. But a man has to do what he has to do to look after his people. Do you understand?”
“I do.”
“That’s good. That’s very good.”
No, it was very bad, because in the glare of their headlights a solitary mailbox stood against the glinting black tarmac before it and the fields of wheat country, now fallow in summer, behind it. It said simply STEPFORD.
“Party time,” said Lamar.
It fell to Richard. Lamar explained patiently.
“This old farm lady, she take a look at me and she’s on the phone to the county sheriff. I got something about me scares people. You, Richard, you got no tattoos and a girly body, you couldn’t hurt a flea. So you knock on the door and get us in and when I come in, you make sure that old man don’t make it to no gun.”
They parked halfway down the farm road. Richard could see the house, its windows glowing, standing in the middle of a barnyard, the barn towering nearby. It looked like a Christmas card. H
e yearned for moral destitution, some sign of country decadence, so that there’d be some sense that these people deserved what Lamar had in mind for them; but no. It was too pretty, a banal quaintness, possibly too studied. A farm from a Potemkin village.
Odell split off back; he’d come in the rear when Lamar came in the front. It was about ten o’clock. Why were the old people up so late?
“Y-you won’t hurt them if you don’t have to?” Richard asked.
“’Course not,” said Lamar. “I ain’t low-down. Only, see, we do need these guns. Suppose Johnny Cop pulls down on us. Go back to the pen? Let the niggers do us up? You too, up so fine? Even Odell? No sir, can’t let that happen.”
“Okay. Just so I have your assurance.”
“You can count on me,” said Lamar.
Richard watched as he melted into the darkness. He stood alone, breathing hard, in the brisk night, hearing the wind beat through the trees and now and then the squawk and rip of small things in the dark, fighting or dying. There was no moon; the stars rolled like wheat fields, torrents of them, high above, remote pinwheels of ancient fire. Richard wanted to weep but he could only obey: he counted in his head and when he reached the number three hundred, off he went.
As he approached the house he could see the old man sitting in his study, under some mounted game animals; a glass gun case stood against the wall; there was no old lady anywhere in sight, but he saw the blue glow of a television from an upstairs room.
He prayed there weren’t grandkids or something in the house, or visiting relatives.
He knocked on the door. Maybe they’d be smart. Nobody just opened the door to strangers in the night these days. Maybe they’d be smart and call the sheriff, or get a gun and drive the interlopers away. He knocked again, praying for inaction.
The door opened wide.
“Why hello,” the woman said.
“Er, hello. I’m, I’m an art teacher in Oklahoma City. My car broke down on the road. I was wondering if you could call the Triple A. I don’t have to come in.”
“And wait out there in the cold? Why, I wouldn’t hear of it. That’s the silliest thing I ever heard say. You come on in out of the chill and we’ll get the tow truck on its way. Do you like coffee?”
Lamar slid in like a shadow of a cat and seemed to envelope her, muffling her cry. He had the shank hard against her throat, and Richard fixated on the way its blade pressed against her white, loose skin. She made a weeping sound, and in her desperation her eyes settled on Richard; they were widening in terror and begging, please, for mercy. Richard shuddered and looked away.
Two loud crashes boomed through the house, and Odell, for some bizarre reason without his shirt and with his hair wet and slicked back, broke in from the rear, an ax in his hand. He paused to howl at the ceiling or the sky beyond the roof, and Richard watched in abject fascination as the cry arose from him and his body shivered in rapture. All his demons were free and dancing in the room. He raced for the study where the old man looked up at him in utter befuddlement, then cowered from the blow he seemed about to receive from the immense half-naked man with the ax.
“The guns, Richard,” ordered Lamar.
Richard ran to the gun case. Its glass stopped him. Inside, the gleaming treasures lay in repose. He could see green and yellow boxes of cartridges stacked neatly in the corner. He tried the handle, but the thing was locked. It baffled him, and then the bafflement departed as the glass seemed to explode out at him. Odell had just blasted it with the ax.
“Wook oub,” said Odell, raising the ax in another mighty effort. Richard fell back as the ax smashed the door off the frame, and Odell greedily pulled a long-barreled gun from the rack and a box from the shelf, and began inserting red tubes into the weapon. With an oily klak he cycled it and turned.
“Dwan mub,” he commanded, but the old man hadn’t. He sat there shaking, literally stunned into shock from the way the universe had conspired in an instant to deconstruct his life.
Lamar had dumped the old woman, and came over to examine what lay before him.
“Goddamn,” he said almost immediately. “Shotguns! Shotguns! You don’t got no pistols? What the fuck is the matter with you, you old piece of shit!”
Angrily, he kicked the case. Then, grasping his fury, he took a shotgun off the rack and threaded shells into it. He pumped it, pointed it upwards, and fired.
The noise was terrific.
Richard had never been near a gun going off before in his life. The pain of it assaulted his ears. So loud! A satisfying rain of plaster cascaded down on Lamar, who smiled at this tiny victory over the world. Odell was dancing merrily around the room. Now and then he would smash something and holler. The two old people found each other at the couch, the woman weeping in the old buzzard’s arms.
At last, Lamar went over to them.
“I thought you hunted, old fuck. You! I’m talking to you. You want me to gut the heart out of that old bitch? You talk to me, motherfucker.”
The old man glared up at him.
“I gave up hunting deer last year. Sold all my centerfires. I—”
“You what?”
“I killed over one hundred deer, two elk, three bears, and a moose. It was enough.”
“You fucking pussy, I want CENTERFIRE! I want OOOMPH! I want AUTOMATIC! I want a goddamn BE-RETTA! I want COLT! I want MAGNUM! You dicksucking old puss, I wouldn’t even fuck your scrawny ass, I’d give it to Richard. Richard, if he don’t tell where the pistols are, fuck his ass. You hear me: Fuck him good up the ass and fuck his old lady up the ass.”
“Tell him, Bill,” said the woman.
“I can’t,” said the old man.
“Tell him, Bill,” said the woman.
“He’ll just take them and go out and kill people in the world. He’s going to kill us anyway. We’re dead already. It don’t matter none.” He turned to Lamar. “You know, back in 1944, a lot of blond young men tried to kill me, in airplanes called Messerschmitts. But I bombed their factories and killed their wives and children and destroyed their filth. You’re them, you prison scum. Go ahead, fuck my ass and fuck my old wife’s ass. You can hurt me but you can’t scare me.”
Lamar, for the first time in his life, seemed a little unsure.
“Richard, you hear that? A goddamn hero. Odell?”
“It’s the Pyes,” the old man told his wife. “On the news, the escapees. Just the worst trash. A sane society would have executed them both years back. Well, to hell with you, Lamar Pye and this simpleton and your little homosexual pal.”
“I’m not a homosexual,” said Richard.
The old man spit on Richard.
Richard looked at the glob on his shirt. Then he looked at the old man. He was one of those scrawny old types, mostly leather and sinew, with furiously burning blue eyes. He looked like the sort of man who rose at four A.M. every morning and gave hell in buckets to any and all that had displeased him over his long life. He probably had a million dollars in the bank and believed he could take it to heaven with him. His children probably all secretly hated him, just as Richard had secretly hated his father. But like Richard, this man’s children would never dare express their contempt directly.
“You goin’ to let him do that?” said Lamar.
Why did he have to do that? thought Richard.
“You can’t let a man do that. An old man with two shotguns on him, who thinks he’s a hero. You got to break him down, boy.”
“He’s afraid,” said the old man. “I can smell it on him. His underpants are brown and smelly. It happened in the Eighth Air Force all the time. Men like him, they never made their twenty-five missions. Your underpants—a mess, right?”
Richard swallowed. Yes, as a matter of fact, they were. He wasn’t sure when it had happened but now he knew that it had. He swallowed again, wondering who he’d explain this to, then kicked the old man in the leg.
“Way to go, Richard. You show him. You be a goddamned man, Richard,” shouted Lamar.
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Everyone always talks, Lamar knew. That’s the rule. But the old man had more grit than you find on the average yard, and Richard didn’t have the stuff to get it out of him, even though he kicked him a batch of times as he lay curled on the floor in front of his weeping wife.
“Okay, Richard,” Lamar finally said, not because he felt a pang of mercy for the square john but because Richard was truly disgusting him, his face all knit up like a girl’s as he pranced his prissy way around him, kicking without a lot of force.
Richard looked at him, face twisted in emotion. Not rage, exactly; just some kind of terrible excitement. Shit, Lamar thought he looked like someone had stuck a pickle up his ass.
“Odell,” Lamar commanded.
Odell turned the old man over on his back and twisted his arm backward and up like a corkscrew until the old man screamed. Meanwhile Lamar went looking for liquor. Could these people be Christian teetotalers? He had heard of such a thing but found it hard to imagine. The screams behind him were irritating.
He wandered into the pantry. Didn’t quality usually keep booze in a pantry? Lamar looked around. He had never been in a house like this before. He wondered what it would be like living in a house like this. Pictures of a bunch of kids on the walls. He looked closely: it was like they were from Mars or something. All these kids and these pretty women and handsome boys who had to be the old man’s daughters or sons or something. He wondered what it would be like to fuck a woman who looked like that? They didn’t look like the Penthouse bitches, with the perfect round tits and the creamy skin. It looked fake, even if most evenings it got you off. These gals looked real, somehow, and sweet and tender. He imagined the fear in their eyes if he decided to fuck them. Lamar hadn’t had true pussy in almost a decade. He’d almost forgotten what it would be like. Even now, he was a little unsure if he’d taste it before they finally got him.