Dirty White Boys (16 page)

He and Odell walked back to the house.

“Odell, go wash,” he said. “Wash-wash, for dinner.”

“Din,” Odell said and went merrily off.

He knew he’d find Ruta Beth out back, working at her wheel. It amazed him what she could do. Just the lump of clay, the pumping of her foot, the spinning of the wheel, and some kind of miraculous thing occurred. Goddamn! He loved to watch it.

And there she was, hunched over the spinning wheel, her hands actually sunk into the blurred muck, her face intense and furious. The muck seemed to be spinning itself into something thin and graceful today, like a candleholder that he remembered his mama had before his mama died.

“Amazin’ what you can do,” he said.

She almost never blinked; she had this funny way of just looking at something until she’d sucked it dry. It amazed him that she wasn’t afraid of him, a mankiller like him, with
F U C K Y O U
! tattooed on his knuckles, who made the quality nervous if he were in the same goddamned county.

“Mr. Pye,” she said, “it ain’t nothing, really. You could do it.”

“Me, nah. I’d mess it up. But go on. Love to watch you.”

She worked intently for another few minutes. Then she said, “What will you do? Them cops won’t never stop looking. You have to move on.”

“I know. I hate to go. Ain’t ever seen Odell so happy. It’s where he should be. Can’t hurt nobody, can’t get in no trouble, no liquor, no niggers or hacks trying to take from him. He could be happy here.”

“You love him. Everybody says you are the meanest man there is, but you love him.”

“He’s all I got. We go way back.”

“It’s so beautiful. But they will get you. Stories like yours never have happy endings.”

“This here place is my happy ending.”

“I swear, I don’t see no bad in you.”

“But bad is what I am. I guess I was borned to it, on account of what happened to my daddy. I never once looked back. Only thing I’s ever any good at.”

“You could have been a farmer.”

“Then somebody come and try and walk on you. You can’t let that happen. So you stop ’em, and next thing, you’re on the run. That’s how it started. Goddamned Uncle Jack kept Odell in the barn. Kept him chained. Beat him. His own son. Beat that boy. He got thirty dollars a month from the county to keep that boy on account of his being so sick in the brain and he didn’t spend a goddamned penny of it on Odell. Only reason he took me in is because the state paid him twenty-two dollars a month on me, so as to get me out of their reform school. He was brother to my daddy Jim, who was killed dead by state troopers over in Arkansas, and when my mama Edna Sue died and they put me in their reform school and I give them so goddamn much trouble, ’cause people was always trying to back you down, and I just got it in my fool head nobody was going to back me down, anyway, they sent me to my uncle and his wife Camilla, and I was just shit to him, shit that brought in a Social Services check.

“One day he beat Odell so goddamned bad I thought the boy would die. Because Odell had shat up his pants. They had so much trouble teaching Odell about the bathroom. Anyway, I reckoned to stop it. Caught Uncle Jack along the Perkinsville Road, drunk as usual on Odell’s money. Ain’t done nothing in my life that made me feel so good as when I put the blade into that mean old bastard. And it’s been like
that ever since, me watching out for Odell, him for me, we was all we had in the goddamned world. And it wasn’t so bad, we’d made our place, until goddamned Junior Jefferson pulled his stunt.”

It was as complete an accounting of his life as he’d ever given to anybody.

“You’ve had such a hard time.”

“The House is full of men with hard lives. We’re just like them, that’s all.”

“It’s a sad story. Mr. Pye, I honestly believe if you’d have caught a break somewhere along the line, you could have been a
great
man.”

“I don’t know why you’d say such a thing. I’m just a piece of scum.”

“But what would you do if you could do anything?”

Lamar thought. The question had never been put to him before.

“I’d like to invent a ray,” he said. “You know, like a beam of light. And everything you shine it on, you make it
 … fair
. You shine it and there’s a lot of money and nobody’s sick or angry or nothing, you just make people
happy
. That’s what I’d do. A happy ray. I’d shine it in all the prisons and all the shithole, jerkwater towns. I’d shine it on Odell and he could talk and his mouth would be mended up. I’d even shine it on the niggers, yes, goddammit, I would, and they would change their evil ways.”

She beheld him gravely.

“That is the sweetest thing I ever did hear.”

“Well, it won’t never happen,” said Lamar.

“You’re like that ray. You give people hope. You watch. They’ll believe in you like in Jesus or Mr. Elvis Presley. They know you stand for freedom.”

She touched his knee.

“I thought you loved that Richard. He showed me that letter.”

“I guess I did. Don’t know why I thought so much of poor Richard. He ain’t but a ninny. I doubt he has hair on his privates. What is it you want? I’ll give you everything you want.”

“No woman ever said that to me. So sometimes I’d take it.”

“I want you to have it. I so bad want to give it to you. I’ll be your true first, Mr. Pye,” she said shyly, “and you’ll be my first, too.”

Richard could tell he’d fucked her. It had really only been a matter of time. A woman as nuts as Ruta Beth would almost certainly end up fucking a crazy fuck like Lamar.

Anyway, when they came in from the barn, loosey goosey and giggly, they both smelled of cunt. It was, to Richard, a low, rank odor. His mother smelled like that sometimes, after one of her “friends” had visited, when he was a little boy and he’d been made to play in the garden.

But now Lamar was happy as a goddamned head of household who’s just made the mortgage. Even Odell picked it up. He looked up from his cereal bowl and smiled brightly, flecks of Frosted Mini-Wheats clinging to his lips and yellow teeth. He was happy.

It’s like a family, my God, thought Richard. It was some terrible parody of happiness: Lamar the daddy and Ruta Beth the mommy and Odell and Richard the two boys. It was the normal life he’d never had.

It was such a good time, the little family in the kitchen of the farmhouse, laughing. Some demented Norman Rockwell could have painted the picture and put it on the cover of
The Saturday Evening Post
, Richard thought, Lamar with his ponytail and tattooed knuckles and scrawny Ruta Beth
with her chalky Addams Family skin and her inbred farm face; and Odell, eternal boy-man, with a tunnel for a mouth and a mop of reddish hair and two tiny eyes. And, of course, him, too, Richard, who’d blinded his mother one day in a fit of rage because the parafascist right-wing
Daily Oklahoman
had refused to review his exhibit, “Richard Peed: Artist in Transition,” at the Merton Gallery on Dwight Street.

They even did errands, like any family. It turned out that Ruta Beth had no paper anywhere in her house, no writing implements, nothing. She didn’t even have any magazines, newspapers, or books. So of course she had to go out and get tablets of paper and pencils for Richard to continue his lions with, as that was his most important contribution. And she also had to drive all the way to Murf’s Guns in Duncan to buy double-ought buckshot for the shotguns, when they learned from the TV that goddamned salty old state cop had somehow managed to survive because he’d been hit with birdshot.

But Lamar wasn’t mad, he was so mellow in his new life.

“Goddamn, was he a tough old boy!” he hooted. “He was a right tough old buzzard but birdshot didn’t get him done! Won’t he have something to tell his grandkids!”

The heavier shells were important for another reason.

“Only one last thing to figure,” said Lamar. “That’s the place where we going to do our next job.”

Richard, smiling, wasn’t sure what Lamar meant by job.

“You know. To rob. We’re robbers, Richard. Don’t you get that? It’s our work. And the way I work, them shotgun shells going to come in handy!”

H
e pulled into the Elgin diner. Erect and brave in sunglasses, she sat in a window booth. She looked pale even through the distorted reflection of the interstate on the surface of the glass. She was not dressed in black but in a neat little sleeveless polka-dot dress. The freckles on her arms matched the pattern of the dress. And when she saw him, her face lit up. She waved her hand tentatively. He waved back.

Oh, lord, he thought, here it is.

He got out of the truck, reached back and tucked the Commander, which had slipped a bit, back behind his kidney. He’d taken a Percodan half an hour early, after leaving the Stepfords, so the pain had gone down somewhat. Still, he was moving like an old man, a step at a time, as if the air itself sat on his body with a special kind of violence. He was nearly fifty; he felt a hundred and fifty. A geezer, full of melancholy and black thoughts. His legs ached, his body seemed cut from old stone as he climbed the steps.

He entered and her smile lit the place. Goddamn, how the young woman could smile. Was it all young women or just this one? He began to feel a little woozy. As he approached,
she rose and took his hand and gave him a quick kiss.

“Well now Bud, who painted you the color of dead roses? Oh, my poor, poor baby.”

“Well, you know how to perk a fellow up, don’t you? I’ve felt better, that’s for sure.”

“Are you in pain?”

“Oh, nothing I can’t handle with only the slightest help from a million milligrams of heroin every twenty minutes or so.”

“You’ll joke when the devil comes ’round with his bill, Bud.”

“Take my women, take my money, take my life, but don’t take my sense of humor, Mister.”

“When that colonel came to tell me about Ted, it took him an
hour
before he got around to you. That was the worst, Bud, my Bud. I had to sit there playing the grieving widow just crazy to know about you, Bud. Oh, Bud, happiest day of my life they told me you were going to make it. I had to keep crying when all’s I wanted was to laugh because they said you were going to make it.”

“Holly, damn, you look good.”

“Oh, Bud. Oh, Bud.”

“Holly, I’m so very sorry about Ted. No man deserves to die like that. He wasn’t a bad boy. I just fouled up. I wish to hell I could do it over.”

“Well, you never can, can you?”

“How are you holding up?”

“Bud, I’m fine, now that the funeral is over and poor Ted’s mother and dad have gone home. I don’t have to play the sobbing wife no more.”

“You know, the patrol can arrange for a doctor, or somebody to help you. You know, someone to talk to you.”

“Bud, you’re the only person I want to talk to.”

“And the insurance. What it is, it ain’t a fortune, but it’s damn comforting. There’s no horrible financial thing crushing down on you.”

“It’s fine, Bud. It’ll get me through more than a few years, and they said they’d try and help me get a job.”

“Great.”

“Bud, you’re not facing this, are you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Bud, I don’t want to talk about me. I want to talk about
us.”

Bud looked out through the goddamned window to green Oklahoma. A hundred yards away he could see the interstate and the cars flashing down it. Where he’d made a living for so long.

“Bud, we can have everything now. I’m sorry Ted got killed but it wasn’t your fault and it wasn’t my fault, it was Lamar Pye’s fault. Now we can be together. It’s one less difficulty. It’s time, Bud. You know it as well as I know it.”

“Holly, I—” Then he ran out of gas.

“Don’t you want to be with me?”

“Lord, yes.”

“Then, Bud, why not? Why can’t you just do it.”

“Holly, you should know he loved you very much. What happened to him, he just lost his nerve and it was eating him up. He thought less of himself, not you. He deserves a little time before we up and move in and start sleeping together for the whole world to see.”

“You never cared too much what the world thought.”

“Yeah, maybe. And there’s the other thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Lamar.”

“Lamar?” Holly said. “Oh, yeah.
Lamar
. Now what the hell you think that means?”

“It don’t feel right with him still out there.”

“Bud.”

“Holly, I said I’d take care of you for my partner. That was the last thing he asked before Lamar come over with the gun. And I will. I swear to you, I will. But I got to take care of my partner first.”

“Ted’s dead, Bud, there’s no care to be taken. And nothing with Lamar Pye is going to bring him back.”

“Well,” Bud said, without much more to offer.

“Is that it, Bud? Lamar? You’re going to go up against Lamar? The whole goddamned state of Oklahoma can’t find Lamar and you’re going to find him?”

As usual, he didn’t know what he meant.

“I don’t know. What I mean is, nothing feels right with Lamar on the loose. Wouldn’t necessarily have to be me gets him. Frankly, the last thing I want is to run into Lamar. It ain’t
personal.”

“The hell it ain’t.”

“Holly, I just …”

“So you aren’t going to touch me?”

“Did I say that?”

“Seems like what you meant.”

“I swear to you, at that moment when Lamar meant to finish me, what was in my heart was the thought I’d never been with you fair, in the open, the two of us, at a restaurant, a barbecue, you know, a damn couple. Last thing on my mind as I went under.”

Was it true? It felt true about now. But he wasn’t sure. He really didn’t remember.

“Damn, Bud, you kill me.”

“Well, that’s my job.”

“You know that place two exits back. The Do Si Do Motel?”

“Yes.”

“Got us a room, Bud. Wanted to celebrate being alive.”

Bud looked at his watch. He was due at the hospital by three and it was already near two. But what the hell. It was only a hospital.

Their differences—was it a woman-man thing or a Bud-Holly thing?—had to do with being naked. She didn’t mind it. She sort of liked it, in fact, and could be so damned casual about it. Bud hated it; just that feeling of vulnerability, of being wide open to assault, of being a fat man whose nakedness revealed his idiocy. So it was that after they had made love, he had to pull the sheets up around his loins. In secret and terrible fact, he yearned always when they were done to dress instantly; but he also knew that the moments afterward were the most hallowed to her, were in some sense the point of the exercise, where her oneness with him was at its most intense, and so he could never deny her them.