Dirty White Boys (13 page)

“He is a good man,” said Lamar, “and I don’t have no right at all, except that I have the gun and that gives me the right.”

He turned to Richard.

“Here,” he said, handing him the trooper’s silver revolver. “This belonged to that dead cop. That old boy was mean as cat shit right up to the end. Maybe some of that grit will rub off on you. Shoot them. Both. In the head. Or I will kill you.” Then he raised the long-slide automatic, thumbing off the safety, and leveled the muzzle at Richard.

Richard swallowed.

“He don’t have the guts,” said Stepford.

“Well, you just give him the chance,” said Lamar. “Go on, Richard. Show me you are a man. Do some men’s work.”

Richard turned. The old people were on their knees. Mr. Stepford held Mrs. Stepford, who had begun to cry. Richard felt queasy as hell. Here was the naked thing its own self. Put the muzzle to the head and pull the trigger. Be over in a second. But he
didn’t
have the guts. It was too horrible. Would their heads blow up? Would it squirt? Would it be gory? Wouldn’t there be blood everywhere? He turned and faced Lamar’s gun and saw his own death in Lamar’s blank eyes.

“Oh, shit,” he said. He remembered the classic Yale experiment where most typical Americans routinely pumped up the juice and tortured some poor fool, because
somebody told them to. Well, this was different. His life was on the line.

He turned and pressed the gun against Mrs. Stepford’s neck and, closing his eyes, pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened except a click. He pulled it again.

“It’s broken,” he said.

“Richard, you are so dumb,” said Lamar. “Get your ass back to the car.”

Richard scampered back.

“See,” he said, “he do have the guts to do it. He just too dumb to know the gun weren’t loaded. Sorry to put you folks out. Had to test the boy. He ain’t much, but I don’t guess you’ll be signing up, Mr. Stepford, so I’ll have to make do.”

“Lamar, you like to scared Mary to death.”

“Couldn’t be helped. Got to do what I got to do. That simple. You get in my way on a job, old man, I’ll shoot you dead. But you have sand, that I admit. You took all I had to hand out and I respect that. Believe it or not, you’d last on the yard, and that poor boy would die if I hadn’t saved him. Now you all stay here tonight. It won’t get cold. Come morning, you amble over to the road. We’ll be long gone by then. You’ll be back home tomorrow.”

“Lamar,” said Mary Stepford, “you are a bad man and they will kill you, far sooner than you plan on. But maybe it’ll be fast, on account of what mercy you showed today.”

“Thank you,” said Lamar. “That may be the nicest thing anybody said to me. Sorry we had to steal from you and take your guns. But I have to do what I have to do.”

“Goodbye, Lamar,” said Mary.

Lamar turned and walked back to the car.

Bill watched him go.

“Mary, you are such a fool. That man is pure white scum. He’ll be dead before sunrise tomorrow or the day
after and a lot of folks will go with him. Can’t believe the softness in your heart for such a scoundrel.”

“Well, Bill Stepford,” she said, “he’s everything you say, and worse, but he’s one thing you never were, as I have known and lived with for many a year. He’s true to his own.”

They drove south, then west, in the setting sun, through farmland and small, dull towns. Finally Richard said, “Thank you, Lamar.”

“Thank you, Richard. Odell, Richard proved he was a man. He can pull the trigger.”

“Dell poppy-poppy,” said Odell with a smile.

“That means Odell is happy, Richard. You have made that poor soul happy. You are part of the family.”

“Thank you, Lamar.”

“Now, we got to find us a place to hunker up and work out our next move.”

“Lamar?”

“I hope you like to camp, Richard. Me and Odell spent more than a few nights under the cold stars. It ain’t a problem. Can’t check into a hotel and don’t want to go running with the biker gangs, because Johnny Cop has them so snitched out you can’t spit amongst ’em without hitting a badge or a microphone. I don’t feel like kicking down no doors, at least not for a bit, too much to worry about. We’ll try and lay about a time in the backlands.”

Richard only had one gift. It wasn’t much, but he had been hording it for this moment, when he at last felt he’d passed a test.

“Lamar?”

“What?”

“I think I may have a place to stay,” he said.

H
e felt his lips first. It was as if they were caked in mud or scab or something. Experimentally, he tried to move them and felt them crack apart, breaking into plates of dry skin. There was no moisture in his mouth.

He heard the drip-drip-drip of something. He could not move. His body was hardly there. He seemed unable to focus or remember anything except orange flashes, flowers, the buzz of insects. Then he remembered Lamar leaning over Ted and the way Ted’s hair puffed from the muzzle blast. He remembered curling. He remembered the shotgun shell tearing into him. He remembered the pain.

Jen!

Jeff!

Russ!

Lost, they were all lost. He felt like his own father, that handsome, rigid man, glossied up in funeral parlor makeup, asleep in his coffin, redder and pinker in death than he’d ever been in life.

But there was light and maybe, now that he concentrated, sound. It was as if he were swimming up from underwater, a long, long way toward the surface. He just barely broke it
and the smell of something came to his nose … bourbon.

Lt. C. D. Henderson of the OSBI was looking at him through specs. The lieutenant fell in and out of focus. Now he was an old man, now a pure jangle of blur. Finally he cranked into some kind of stability.

“He’s coming to,” the lieutenant said, as if into a megaphone. The words reverberated in Bud’s skull.

Jen appeared. He tried to reach out of death for her, but he was ensnared in a web. She appeared grief-stricken, her face grave and swollen. He had not seen such feeling on that impassive face in so very long. Jeff swirled into view, intense and troubled. Russ, even Russ who never went anywhere with them anymore: Russ looked drained of anger and distance, and Bud could see the child in him still under the intensity of his stare.

“Oh, Bud, don’t you dare die on me,” Jen said.

He couldn’t talk.

“Dad,” Jeff said. Jeff was crying. “Oh, God, Daddy, you made it, we’re so damned lucky.”

He saw the plasma bag suspended over one bandaged arm and another bag dripping clear fluid over the other. He lay swaddled in bandages. He felt something attacking his penis and squirmed, thinking of rats. Then he remembered from other visits to emergency wards: a catheter. He was so thirsty.

“Jeff,” he said, finally.

Jeff kissed him on the forehead. He wished he could reach out and stroke his son’s arm or something, but he couldn’t move. Now and then a shot of pain would cut at him.

Russ reached over and just touched him on the arm.

Bud nodded and blinked at his oldest son.

“He’s coming out,” a young man in a hospital uniform
said, and Bud saw his nameplate, which read Dr. Something or other. When had doctors gotten so young?

He looked back to Jen. He felt a tear forming in his eye. He saw young Jeff, so fair and pure, and Russ with all his complicated brains and hopes and hair, and recalled again the bullet blowing into poor Ted’s skull.

Why did I do so poorly? Caught me without a thought in my head. Came in and took me down. Took us down. Lamar Pye blew us away
.

“You’re going to be all right, Sergeant Pewtie,” said the doctor. “The blood loss is the main thing. Another hour and you’d have bled to death. That old guy was tough, I’ll say.”

Bud’s eyes must have radiated confusion, because Jen explained.

“Old Bill Stepford. He hiked thirteen miles through the dark until he came to a farm, and called the police. They got there by midnight. They’d been looking everywhere but had no idea what had happened. You almost bled to death. That was three days ago.”

“T-T-T-Ted?” he managed.

“Don’t you worry ’bout Ted,” said C. D. Henderson. “He ain’t in no pain where he is now.”

He had to know one last thing, even as the effort of asking it seemed to drain him of energy and will.

“Why?”

“Why,” said C.D., “because that damned Lamar is scum, that’s why.”

Bud shook his head imperceptibly.

“Why … am … I … alive?”

“Cause you ain’t a dove, that’s why,” said C.D. “Old man Stepford was a dove hunter come the fall. Only shells Lamar could find was light birdshot. Numbers eight and nine. A surgical team had you on the table over four hours,
Bud. Dug close to a thousand pieces of steel shot out of your hide. But not none of them life-threatening and there ain’t going to be no lead poisoning neither. Lamar popped you with maybe five, six shells from a sawed-off barrel. He must have thought he’d blown your heart and guts out from all that blood. Hah, goddamned good thing you left your goddamned vest off! But anyway he’d sawed that barrel off to a nub and the shot pattern opened up and nothing got inside your chest cavity or to your spine and nervous system or your brain. Tell you what, though. You ain’t goin’ through no metal detector no more, Bud.”

Bud slept until he swam up again to brightness. This time he focused onto the face of Col. W. D. Supenski, superintendent of the Highway Patrol. The colonel was another version of Bud: husky and remote with the public, with one of those pouchy faces that looked like feed sacks left out for a decade on a fence post, he’d been a Marine fighter ace in the Vietnam war all those years back and, in the company of those he trusted—other white men who carried guns and believed in the abstraction of Authority—could be quite a folksy old charmer.

“Well, damn, Bud,” he said, “not even old Lamar Pye could put you out of commission!” The colonel had small, dark eyes that were capable of three expressions: blankness; sick, consuming fury; and genuine delight. It was the latter force that beamed through them today. “Though I must say, I’ve seen turkeys hanging in the barn that looked a sight better.”

Bud offered a feeble smile. No one in his family was in evidence.

“Been talking to Jen, Bud. She’s a fine woman. You are a lucky, lucky man there, Bud.”

Bud nodded.

“Bud, it’s my great pleasure to tell you that the Department of Public Safety and the Oklahoma Highway Patrol has decided to confer on you the highest duty award it is within our power to give, the Medal of Valor.”

Bud swallowed.

“We found six spent cases from your .357, Bud, and your empty speedloader. Severely wounded and under fire from two sides by murderous killers, you were able to draw and engage the enemy and even reload. And maybe it was the fear you put in the Pye boys that made ’em release the Stepfords three hours later. Maybe you saved those lives, too. And if your damned partner hadn’t done the baby-goo on you, you boys might have even brought the Pyes down.”

“Sir,” Bud said, “Ted tried his damnedest.”

“I’m sure he did, Bud. But the fact is, you returned fire and he didn’t. We found him on his belly with his hands over his head and his legs drawn up like a little baby. He just lay there and they came and shot him. He didn’t fire a bullet! Bud, the truth is, we get paid to stand up to boys like that. That’s what the people want. Now, Ted’s going to get a posthumous award. The Oklahoma Highway Patrol Star of Bravery. His name goes on the big plaque at Department of Public Safety in Oklahoma City. And a funeral! Bud, we’re going to have troopers from all over America coming in. Because our community hangs together in times like these.”

“He should get the best medal,” Bud said. “Not that medals mean a damned thing.”

“Bud, it don’t mean much now and I know how you feel. I lost more than a few wingmen. But in years to come, that medal will mean more and more, especially to your boys. I know. I been there.”

“Yes sir,” said Bud. “Now what about the Pyes? Did we pick them up yet?”

“Fact is, the damned Pye boys have dropped off the earth. Don’t know where they are. We got OSBI and FBI and troopers and sheriffs and MPs all over the state digging for ’em. Even the goddamned media is cooperating, though it’s a first. We’ll get ’em.”

Bud nodded, but he didn’t agree. Lamar might be savage and crazed, but he wasn’t dumb. He had that inmate cunning, always had an angle to play.

“Now Bud, you just rest. Take your time in recovering, and I’ve already talked to Jen. You just let yourself mend. You don’t never have to go back in a cruiser again. If you want that lieutenancy that you turned down so many times, it’s yours. You could get paid for the job you already do, which is running a troop, if Captain James is telling the truth. Bud, you’d get a captaincy eventually, and your own troop. Or, we could bring you up to headquarters to run the firearms training section. You’d like that, wouldn’t you Bud? Be a fine cap on a fine career!”

Bud smiled meekly, knowing he didn’t have to say a thing.

The next time he came awake, it was the pain that awakened him. The drugs had worn off. How he stung! He felt like a horde of bees had worked him over. Every little twist and jiggle and the bees got back to work. This wasn’t going to be no piece of cake.

He was desperately thirsty. Jen poured him a glass of water, and he drank it greedily. He had the sense it was another day or so later, and that it was night.

“How’s Holly?” he finally said.

“Oh, that girl’s taking it fine. Sometimes it doesn’t hit them for a bit. She’ll have some rough days ahead. I was over there last night. Donna James and Sally McGinley and a few of the others had brought hot dishes. It was very nice.
She seemed all right, I suppose. She was very happy for all the support and everyone agreed it was best she hadn’t had kids yet. She’ll remarry, there’ll be plenty of time for that. They’re going to give Ted a medal, one of the highest. The funeral will be something very special.”

“How was she … toward you?”

“Toward me? Why, Bud, whatever do you mean?”

“I got her husband killed, that’s what I mean. I like to have shot that boy myself from the way I handled things.”