Dirty White Boys (20 page)

“The newspapers would scream,” Holly pointed out.

“They would until they watched the crime rate fall.”

Bud pulled into a slot marked
LAW ENFORCEMENT
just shy of the admin building that crouched under the walls and turned his truck engine off. Lamar and Odell and Richard: They’d come this way. He remembered from the newspapers that first day after the escape: the arrows pointing to a second-floor grated window in the admin section of Cellblock
A out back, where that poor boy had parked his truck and they had climbed into it and waited for him to come to his death. Then they’d driven out the gates, turned left, turned left again, and come down this merry little street with the cheery visitor’s center, the warden’s big house like a mansion, even a tacky little museum, before turning down West Street and heading out into the world.

“Open that glove box,” he said.

She did and saw a small black gun.

“That’s a Beretta 84 .380,” he said. “Thirteen shots. Safety’s on. Anything happens—”

“Bud—”

“I know it’s silly and not a thing will happen. But you know how my mind works. Anyhow, you take that gun and push the safety down with your thumb. Then all you have to do is pull the trigger thirteen times. That should make him
really
mad, so after that, you slug him with it.”

“Bud, you are so strange. Do you really think there’s going to be
another
prison break?”

“No. But like the man says, if you want peace, prepare for war. I’ll be back in an hour, okay?”

“Yes sir, it’s not a problem.”

“You sure?”

“Yes sir. I brought a paperback book along to read.”

“Good.”

They were expecting Bud, but if he anticipated any personal apology for the things that McAlester had unleashed, he got none: only professional courtesy, distant and cool but not rude. He checked his Colt Commander with an assistant warden, who took him into a bleak little office. There in three battered cardboard boxes were all that remained in the Big Mac of Lamar Pye, his cousin Odell, and Richard Peed.

“No letters,” said the assistant warden. “Lamar and Odell haven’t gotten letters in years. Nobody cared about them or even knew about them. Until they broke out, they didn’t exist.”

Bud nodded.

“I don’t know what you’re looking for,” said the assistant warden, “but if you think you’re going to find it there, I think you’ll be disappointed. How long do you want?”

“Oh, an hour or so?”

“That’s fine, Sergeant. Take your time. No rush. No one’s going anywhere.”

Bud sat down and pulled over Odell’s box. It was mostly clothes, neatly laundered blue jeans and plaid shirts, a few prison denims of the sort that were no longer strictly mandatory. The underwear, all clean. No porn. He seemed not to have a sexual bone in his body. A model airplane, poorly assembled. Some kind of World War II ship, with glue smeared all over it. A shank, cut from a shoehorn, wickedly vicious. And, finally, a cigar box, just as a small boy in a fabled boyhood would have, a Huck Finn.

Bud opened the thing: first off, he saw a faded picture of a farm woman, taken, judging from her hair, some time in the sixties. She had that severe, Depression-era look, no meat at all on her sinewy features, narrow eyes that expected no mercy from the world. Her taut mouth held a tension of sorts. She was hunched in a cheap coat, though the sun was shining. The picture was blurry, but in the background he saw white clapboard, a farmhouse perhaps. He turned the picture over, O
DELL’S
M
AMA
C
AMILLA
, A
NADARKO
, O
KLAH
1967 it said, in bold, childish letters, though the writing could not have been Odell’s since the man was hopelessly retarded and illiterate.

Next out came a coloring book. Bud opened it. Sometime
early sixties, badly done, the crayon strokes violent and mixed, paying no attention to the lines. The book was drawn from a Walt Disney cartoon movie called
Sleeping Beauty
, full of thin, beautiful blond people. An act of cruelty, Bud thought, to give such a thing to a hulking, damaged boy like Odell, with the hole in his face and the nothingness in his mind: He could just look and wonder at what he could not have, ever. A woman’s flowery hand had written “Odell’s favorite book” inside the cover, and paging through, Bud finally came upon what must have been Odell’s favorite page. It was a dragon, rearing up ferociously, about to strike a handsome knight with a sword. Alone, it was not touched by a crayon; the image held too much power for young Odell to defile.

That was it. So little for a human life, even an Odell Pye’s. He pulled the next box over, finding it heavy. It had to be Richard’s, because the heaviness soon revealed itself to be books. Richard was a reader:
In the Belly of the Beast, In Cold Blood, The Pound Era, Thus Spake Zarathustra
by somebody whose name Bud could not even figure out how to pronounce. The books looked a little like Russ’s, which somehow irritated him. Paging through them, Bud found lines highlighted in yellow marker. It was all gibberish, mostly about violence.

Crazy stuff. What the hell could it mean?

He guessed Richard was trying to figure out what he was doing in here. Too bad, Richard boy. You made your decision, now you got to take the consequences.

Bud put the little book down and went through a few heavy and glossy paperback books on art, mostly painting, again nothing pornographic. Some art supplies—sheaves of drawing and tracing paper, a small box with pencils, chalk, chunks of charcoal for sketching, but no sketches. No weapons, just shaving gear, all neat, and a toothbrush, the toothpaste neatly rolled up. A comb, a Bic razor, some Colgate shaving cream, soap in a plastic box. It all gave Bud the creeps for some reason, and he soon tired of Richard and his intellectual vanities.

He pulled the last box over,
PYE, L
., it said on the outside. The clothes were neat in a professional convict’s way: jeans, a jean jacket, even a pair of cowboy boots, much polished, much worn. A stack of magazines:
Guns & Ammo, Shooting Times, Gun World
, and a profusion of stroke books. Bud paged through them:
Penthouse
and
Playboy
and a few more obscure ones that seemed to show women in stockings or women bent over, spreading their asses, exposing their tuliplike assholes or leaning back and ramming plastic or rubber dildoes into amazingly prehensile vaginas. Again, Bud felt slimy, as if Lamar were drawing him in, making him party to Lamar’s own inner horror. He set the magazines down, found a well-thumbed copy of
The Picture History of the Third Reich
. He found something called
The Turner Diaries
and another called
The Last Clarion for the White Race
. Aryan brotherhood shit.

At last he came to an album of sorts. He pulled it out. L
AMAR’S
B
OOK
, it said in blocky letters, the same letters he recognized from the back of the picture of Odell’s mama. He opened it up, encountering a crumbling yellow news clipping from the
Arkansas Gazette
of August 1955.

HERO TROOPER SLAYS TWO BEFORE DYING
, the headline read, and Bud made out the murky one-column shot of a man identified as “Trooper Sergeant Swagger.”

Wow
, thought Bud.
They knew how to build a lawman in those days
.

Wonder if I’d have the guts for that action?

Rather than contemplate so melancholy a topic, Bud gave the page a turn. Next was a report card, from the Arkansas State Reformatory Middle School, dated June 1962.

Lamar got a bunch of 3s and 4s in his subjects—As and Bs, that was—but some educator had written:

Of course he wasn’t; of course he did.

The next page, another news clipping, from the Anadarko
Call-Bulletin
of January 1970:

FARMER FOUND SLAIN ON PERKINSVILLE ROAD
.

The story simply related how a farmer named Jackson Pye—the third worthless Pye brother, Bud concluded—had been stabbed to death by a mysterious assailant as he walked home along a country road from a nearby tavern.
There were no witnesses. The report also said he was survived by his son Odell.

Another page:
CONVENIENCE STORE ROBBERIES CONTINUE
.

Another:
LOCAL MAN ARRESTED ON RAPE CHARGES
.

Another:
BAIL DENIED TO VIOLENT OFFENDER PYE
.

Another:
PYE ESCAPES FROM COUNTY LOCK-UP
.

Bud riffled through the pages: the raw verbs of crime headlines yelled up at him from the seventies, and the crimes, mostly robbery and theft, now and then a murder and a sentencing. Lamar had become the compleat career criminal, master of a dozen violent trades, his acts marked by brazenness, violence, and a certain nutty courage. Lamar had balls, no doubt about it.

PYES CONVICTED IN PUSATERI KILLING
read the last one, an account of how Lamar and Odell shot a motorcycle gang snitch in the head and dumped him, how he miraculously survived to identify them before dying.

SENTENCE FIFTEEN YEARS TO LIFE FOR EACH KILLER COUSIN
.

The album was Lamar’s life, what he was proud of, his résumé. What would you do with such a man? How could he possibly be reclaimed? He came from criminal stock, he evinced antisocial behavior from an early age, was unnaturally aggressive, and took to the lifestyle of the professional criminal with extraordinary ease. He was born to be a criminal, that was all.

Bud put the book down. There was nothing at all here, except a warning for any and all who dared mess with Lamar Pye without backup and lots of firepower. Put him in your sights and blow him away, that’s all.

He glanced at his watch.

He’d been at it three hours! Jesus Christ! And Holly was still waiting outside.

He reached for the pile of slick magazines to reinsert in the box, but by their very slickness, they fell to the floor,
skidding and opening. Bud cursed and bent to retrieve them and then noticed something strange. Across the rolling mountainous breasts of the Penthouse Pet of August 1991, there was inscribed some sort of figure. It wasn’t a drawing, but the impression of a drawing that had been done on a paper laid across it.

Bud picked it up, tried to find some angle of light that would reveal its secret. That didn’t work; the image kept collapsing as the light changed. It occurred to him to do a tracing. He remembered that Richard had some light paper in the art supplies in his box and he quickly got it out. He laid the paper across Miss August, only slightly obscuring the thrust of her tits, the pronglike tightness of her nipples; with a piece of charcoal, he delicately rubbed the paper, just enough pressure to leave the charcoal everywhere except in the grooves, where it sank under pressure.

When he was done, he looked at what he had brought out: It was the image of a lion.