“She’ll be worried,” he said.
“The truth is, Bud,” said Ted, “we just don’t have much to talk about these days. I let her down, too. I can see in her eyes, I don’t mean a thing to her. Goddamn, how I love her and there she is, and I can’t reach her.”
Bud swallowed uncomfortably. Something seemed to come up into his throat. Ted was truly miserable, stewing in his own pain.
“Now you and Jen, you have a perfect marriage. You’re a team. She’s a part of your career. She’s happy with what you got. She never puts any pressure on you.”
“Well, Ted, you know that appearances can be deceiving.”
“Not yours, Bud.”
“Ted … look, we’re going to have to have a talk.”
“A talk?”
“About some things you think I am that I am not. And about some other stuff as well.”
“What?”
But they had arrived in the barnyard of the Stepford farm. The house was white clapboard, an assemblage of structures added as the farm prospered. The lawn was neat, and someone had planted a bright bed of flowers by the sidewalk. A huge oak tree towered over the house.
Bud and Ted climbed out. Bud adjusted his Ray-Bans and removed his Smokey hat from the wire rack behind his seat and pulled it on. He looked about. There was a fallow field, where the spring wheat had already been harvested and the earth turned. Copses of scrub oak showed here and there among the gentle rolls of the land, and far off, a blazing bright green field signaled the presence of alfalfa. There was a blue-stem pasture off to the right, and a few cattle grazed amid the barrels of hay.
“Looks okay to me,” said Ted. “The goddamned phone is probably off the hook.”
“Hello?” cried Bud. And then again.
There was no answer.
“Let’s go up and knock and see what happens.”
Richard ran downstairs. He knew he shouldn’t scream but he wanted to. The panic billowed through him brightly. He wanted to crap again. His stomach ached as he raced thumpingly along.
“Lamar,” he sobbed, “Lamar, Lamar, oh Lamar.”
He plunged down the steps.
In the darkness of the basement, Odell was over by the workbench, sawing with a hacksaw. Richard looked and saw three long metal poles on the floor and three wooden boots or something.
Lamar looked over at him.
“Lamar,” he gasped, “cops. State police.”
Lamar just looked at him blankly. Then he said, “How many? A goddamned team? SWAT, what? Or just a one car?”
“I only saw one,” said Richard. “Halfway up the driveway. Be here in a minute.”
Lamar nodded. He turned and looked at the Stepfords, who sat groggily on an old couch.
“You make a sound and you’re dead. I mean that, sir, and I ain’t a-fucking with you.” His voice was level but intense.
Odell, meanwhile, had risen from his position and was busy threading ammunition into the shotguns that Richard now saw had been sawed off so that they were short and handy.
Lamar took one, threw some sort of lever with an oily clang.
“We’re going upstairs. You tie these people up and I mean tight. Then you come up. You hear shooting, you come a-running, do you get that? And bring your gun.”
“Hootin’,” said Odell happily.
“Yes, Lamar,” said Richard.
“Okay, Odell,” said Lamar. “We goin’ fry us some Smokey.”
Lamar stuffed a dozen bright red-and-blue shells into his pockets and Odell followed. They raced up the steps.
Lamar watched them. A guy with some miles on him, and a kid. Standing in the sun, just looking the place over. The older one called out “Hello” and adjusted his duty belt. Then he got his Smokey hat out and set to fiddling with it. He wanted it just right, just set perfect on his head. Show-offy cocksucker. The kid looked somewhat grumpy, maybe tired. He wanted to get it over with.
Lamar knew they were cherry. He could smell it on them. They had no idea what they were walking into; if they had, they’d have had their pieces out and they’d be behind cover. He watched as they exchanged a few dry words, then made up their minds to come up to the house.
He could tell also that the young one had a vest on by the unnatural smoothness of the way the cotton of his shirt clung to the Kevlar; the older one, though barrel-chested and big, was apparently without body armor, for there was more give in the material as he moved.
“Odell, you go out the back, around the side of the house on the left. You ain’t gonna fire until I do. You wanna do the old guy first, same as me. He may have been in a scrape or two and maybe has been shot at. He probably won’t panic so bad as the other. But main thing is, they can’t reach the goddamn cruiser, because then they’ll call it in, and in two minutes they got the goddamned backup in. We gotta take ’em out clean, you got that, sweetie?”
“Kwean,” said Odell.
“You shoot for the head on the boy. Aim high, try and hit him in the face. The old boy, you can gutshoot him. He ain’t wearing no vest.”
Odell darted out the back, shotgun in hand.
Lamar moved up to the left of the window. They were too far for a shotgun. If this goddamned old farmer had had an assault rifle, he could have taken them both out with one fast semiauto string. He had four shells in his cut-down Browning auto, a pocketful of spares, and his goddamned long-slide .45, but he hated to shoot it out with a handgun. Too many ifs or maybes with a handgun.
The excitement in him was incredible. But so was the giddiness. He almost giggled. Bliss boomed through him. He tried to chill himself out, but goddamn, this was going to be fun!
When to fire? Fire when they knock on the door? Fire through the goddamned wood, blow ’em back? But maybe the buckshot didn’t have enough power to get through the wood and would spend itself getting through it. No, best to let ’em get within ten feet and then pull down. Knock ’em down with the shotgun, then close and finish them off with the .45.
Oooooooeeeeeeee! Bar-b-cued Smokey!
They walked up toward the house. A large dragonfly flashed in the sun. Bud saw the flowers and the love of flowers the owners had put into them. Jen was like that, too. It seemed strange they hadn’t come out to greet the policemen, as farm people were among the last in America to still show respect to the badge.
He had turned to Ted to remark on the stillness of it when Ted exploded.
Ted didn’t actually explode; he was simply standing stricken in a sudden cloud of red mist and his throat had gone to pulsing colors and his eyes had widened with horror.
To Bud it seemed as if they had stepped through a glass door into another world and were suddenly ensnared in a medium of molasses or oil, something thick that dampened all sound and made their motions utterly painful and slow. There was no noise at all. Or if there was, Bud didn’t hear it a bit. He felt the stings as though being attacked by a swarm of bees and had a sense that a leg had died on him.
And then the world flashed orange and he had no sense of anything, as if he’d been somehow snatched from time itself, and then he returned to earth a second later, surprised to find himself down on the ground. He had no memory of falling. Blood was everywhere. He looked at poor Ted, who was bleeding even more profusely at the throat and screaming soundlessly. A starburst had fractured the left lens of Ted’s Ray-Bans; blood ran in a snaky little line down from the obscured eye. It all seemed to be happening so slowly, and he could make no sense of it at all, though the air seemed full of dust and insects, and then he realized they were taking shotgun fire from the left window and that he had been hit bad.
Boomy! Boomy! Boomy!
Gun go boomy-jerky, shell outta poppy, gun go boomy-jerky! again.
Ha! Ha!
Makey smoke, makey fire.
Bad ‘uns fall down go hurt. Red on them. Look it, red!
Boomy makey red.
Mar go ‘‘Loady-shooty, loady-shooty’’ loud. Dell makey gun go boomy again.
P
ut in shell thing. Gun go klack! then gun go boomy!
Odell laughed.
Funny, so funny.
“I’M HIT, OH GOD!” screamed Ted, blowing through the soundlessness. Now there was noise everywhere, Bud’s ears were ringing in pain and it was so loud he hurt. He had a coppery taste in his throat, as if he’d just had a penny sandwich. His lungs creaked and the rasp of Ted’s breathing sounded louder than a buzz saw.
Bud didn’t remember drawing the Smith, but he just had it there in his hand out of some miracle or something and he was pumping off rounds at the broken window, just squeezing and squeezing, and then another rake of pain ripped across his chest—Vest! Vest! he mourned—and he went down flat. The gun was lost. Then he had it again and brought it up and fired but came up with nothing but the sounds of hammer striking empty primer. He opened the gun and six shells fell out. He stared at it dumbly.
Speedloader. Speedloader!
Clumsily he grabbed at a speedloader from the pouch but his fingers were thick and greasy with blood. It fell from them and rolled in the dust, picking up grit where it was smeared with red.
“I’M HIT, OH GOD I’M HIT!” wailed Ted.
Cover, Bud was thinking, cover. The car was too far.
He rose and half-yanked Ted to the tree ten feet away. A large man ran at him and Bud lifted the Smith to fire and the man ducked. Bud couldn’t figure out why the gun didn’t fire. He looked. Oh yes. He hadn’t reloaded. The speed-loader lay in the dust. He thought he had another in the pouch.
Reload, reload, he told himself, pulling the second speedloader out. He dropped it, too. Then he remembered Ted’s gun and tried to get it out, but the security holster wouldn’t permit the piece to be withdrawn. Ted shivered desperately beneath him. Blood pulsed out of a hole under his ear, and his whole face was spotted with blood. His legs were also bleeding.
“I can’t see,” he said. “Oh, Christ, Bud, I can’t see.”
“Be cool, be cool,” Bud said, trying to make sense of it. He picked up his dropped speedloader and somehow got the tips of the six cartridges it held inserted in the chambers. He twisted the knob and the shells dropped into the gun. He slammed the cylinder shut and looked around for targets, but he could see nothing.
The car, he thought. Get to the radio, get backup, do it, do it now!
“Ted, I gotta run to the car.”
“DON’T LEAVE ME, PLEASE, DON’T LEAVE ME!”
Richard tied the last knot too tight and felt the old man shiver in the cruelty of it. But he didn’t care. He had other things to do. He looked at the two of them, trussed like pigs. Under other circumstances, a tragic scene. But not now.
He raced up the stairs to the kitchen. His thought now: Get out of here.
He would run to the barn and into the fields beyond. He simply would disappear while the shooting was going on. They would find him later. He would convince them: he had nothing to do with it.
But he was halfway through the kitchen when the first blast came, even louder than the one Lamar had fired last night. It was like being inside a kettledrum.
He dropped instantly, his face on the floor.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
It would not stop. The noise level just rose and rose and rose. He had no idea guns were so loud! He lay there on the floor and began to cry.
Please don’t let me be hurt.
He tried to free himself from Ted and looked for targets. But smoke and dust hung in the air, illuminated by the sun. He blinked. Nothing made a lot of sense. Shotguns, two shotguns, that much he knew.
He thought he saw movement at a corner of the house and fired two-handed this time, fast, two shots, and when he rose to run to the car, a blast took his legs out from under him and blew him down. The gun skittered away. He couldn’t see the gun. He tried to crawl.
“DON’T LEAVE ME, PLEASE,” Ted yelled, grabbing at his ankle.
He craweled a bit further, until he looked up at Lamar Pye, standing over him.
“Well, howdy, Dad,” said Lamar.
“Oh, Christ,” said Bud.
“Yes sir, I was you, I’d make my peace too, Mr. Smokey.”
“Fuck you,” said Bud.
“Oh, ain’t you a bull stud, though? Odell, come see what we have done bagged. Coupla Smokies.” He turned back to Bud. “Liked that speed reload you done under fire. Right nice. Give this to you—you’re a professional. You just got outsmarted. Odell, get that other boy’s gun from him.”
Odell Pye, amazingly big, his red hair tossed every which way, his face blotchy with pimples and freckles, walked over to where Ted cowered bleeding. He kicked him hard in the back. In pain, Ted spasmed outward, and Odell reached down and yanked his gun from him.
“Gun,” said Odell, proudly, lifting Ted’s Smith.
“That it is, Odell, that it is.”
Lamar turned to Bud.
“Now, Dad, case you don’t know it, your bacon is fried. I got no beef agin most cops, just other stiffs doing their jobs. But you Smokies shot and killed my old man many years ago. I wasn’t even borned yet.”
“Fuck you, Pye, and the horse you came in on. We’ll get you, you watch.”
“You watch, Trooper. I’m gonna cut a path across this state nobody won’t never forget. A hunnert years from now, daddies’ll scare their young kids to sleep with tales of mean old Lamar Pye, the he-lion of Oklahoma. Odell, put a shell into that cruiser’s radio, and then check it for weapons.”
Odell went to the car. Bud heard the report as he fired a shotgun shell into the radio. Then, a second later, he heard the trunk open.
“Eeene gun, eene gun,” sang Odell, and Bud saw that he had shaken the case off Ted’s AR-15.
Shit, he thought.
Then he thought, Can I make it to my backup? He had the Smith .38 around his ankle.
When Lamar turned, Bud lunged. He got to the gun, but he couldn’t get the thumbsnap off clean because there was so much blood on his hand and his thumb kept slipping. Time he got it off, Lamar had leaned a big boot on his ankle, pinning it, and had reached down and removed the gun.
“Big boy like you, little lady thang like this? You ought to be ashamed.”
He tossed the gun away.
“DON’T KILL ME! PLEASE DON’T KILL ME!” shouted Ted.
“Ted, shut up,” yelled Bud.
“I don’t think he can hear you,” said Lamar. “I think he done lost his mind.”
“He’s just a kid. Let him be. He hasn’t even been on long enough to make corporal. He’s got a wife. He’ll have kids sometime. Don’t hurt him. Kill me. I’m an old man, I’ve had my kids.”
Lamar’s eyes widened in mock amazement.
“Tell you what,” he said, “how ’bout if I kill both you and then you can argue in heaven over which one I should have killed.” He thought his own joke was pretty funny. But then he turned to Odell.
“Odell, you go get that goddamned Richard and the old people. We are going to get out of here now, case anybody heard the ruckus. You get ’em loaded up.”
“Yoppa, Mar,” said Odell.
Lamar knelt down by Bud.
“You in much pain? I could do you now, save you some hurtin’.”
“Fuck off, Pye.”
“Sand. Smokey got sand. I like that in a man. Now I would say, though, your partner is sorta lacking in the ball department. He’s whining like a baby. I hate babies.”
“He’s a kid, you prick.”
“Still, gotta learn not to whine. Nobody likes a baby. How you onto us, anyhow?”
“It’s on the net. There’ll be sixty cruisers here in a minute.”
“You goin’ to face the Lord with a lie on your lips? Bible say that’s a ticket to hell, friend. You’d best use this time to make your peace with God.”
“Pye. Don’t hurt the boy any more. And the old people. Let them go. You got me, you got your Smokey sergeant, that’s enough game for one day.”
“Say, you are a bull stud,” said Lamar, “but I’m g
oing to kill you anyway.”
Bud tried not to shiver but he could not stop. He tried to make it stop hurting but it would not stop hurting. He looked. So much blood. He must have been hit a hundred times. He never guessed he had so much blood in him. It hurt to breathe, it hurt to think.
Lamar had gone somewhere. He was alone. He thought of Jen. Oh Christ, he’d been such a bad husband. All the things he’d never said or did. And at the end, all that time with Holly. Why? Why wasn’t I a good man? I only wanted to be good and it all came to this. And he thought of his youngest son, Jeff. Oh, Jeff, I wanted to be there for you so bad. I wanted to help you, show you things, and if you needed a little extra help, I wanted to give it to you. I never would have left you. He missed his children.
“Bud,” came a sob.
He rolled over through oceans of pain. He didn’t know it could hurt so.
“Ted, just be calm.”
“Bud, they’re going to shoot us dead.”
“They’re just trying to scare us. They gotta get out of here fast and they know it. If they do us, our people will hunt them down and kill them and they know that. It’s all bluff.”
“No, it ain’t. Bud, you’ll make it. I won’t. I’m dying no matter what. Bud, please. I miss Holly. I love her, oh Christ, I love her so. I’m sorry I wasn’t the man—”
“Stop it, Ted.”
“Bud, you take care of her. Promise me, please. You take care of her. You help her. Like you tried to help me.”
“I—”
“PLEASE! OH GOD, I’m scared. PLEASE before I die.”
“Ted, I—”
But Lamar was back. A car pulled up, a Jeep Wagoneer. Bud saw the two grim old people sitting ramrod stiff in the back. They were next. A twerpy-looking white boy was driving—that goddamned Richard Peed. Lamar and Odell walked over.
Lamar said, “You made your peace with the Lord yet, Trooper?”
“Eat shit,” said Bud.
Lamar walked over to Ted. Ted had folded into a fetal position half on his belly and his side, and was weeping softly. Lamar bent over him with the .45 and shot him in the back of the head. His hair jumped a little as the bullet tore into it. Then he turned to Bud. But the .45 was empty, and its slide had locked back.