Dirty White Boys (26 page)

A few hours back, a Department of Texas Safety four-by-four with two squint-eyed Rangers had come lurching down the riverbank, punching its way over fallen logs, skimming into the low tide where necessary, its spotlight playing in the brush for signs of the robbers. But it had passed by, at one point only fifteen feet from them, and gone on down the line. It would be back.

Then, about an hour later, there were lights on the Oklahoma side, as presumably a duplicate of the same mission unfolded over there. But the trucks weren’t the problem. The problem was the helicopters.

They came in fast. They came low, and their noise seemed to explode from nowhere as they roared along the river about a hundred feet up, two, three times an hour. These hunters really wanted to kill something. Once, Richard had caught a glimpse of the observer hanging out of the cabin door, a squat man with huge binoculars, a cowboy hat, some kind of mouth microphone and the meanest-looking, fanciest black plastic rifle Richard had ever seen. It looked like a ray gun. He was a boy who meant business; he wanted to drop a bad man before the night was over.

“Can’t we wait on the bank?” Richard now moaned through his chattering teeth. “Won’t be another helicopter by for an hour.”

“You’re the biggest fool I ever met, Richard,” said Ruta Beth. “Didn’t Daddy tell you ’bout infer-red? With that infer-red stuff, they can see you in the dark by the heat of your body. That’s what they’re doing—hunting you by your heat. Them boys get a reading on heat from three bodies hiding in the grass, goddamn if they won’t have a whole company of Rangers here in ’bout a minute.”

How did Lamar know so much? Lamar knew everything.

But Lamar was dead.

“He’d have been here by now if he was going to make it,” Richard said. “We are going to freeze to death and that will be that.”

“Daddy is too goddamned smart for any Johnny Cop.” She was even beginning to talk like him. “Now Richard, please shut up or Odell will have to discipline you.”

“Yes, Ruta Beth,” Richard said.

“Wi-chud,” came Odell’s glottal spasm.

“Odell, I heard, no bonky, please!”

But Odell didn’t want to hurt Richard. Instead he gathered him up and hugged him. It was the strangest thing; Odell’s arms just drew Richard in, and his great body seemed to absorb Richard. There was nothing sexual in it at all, for the sex part of Odell’s brain lay happily dormant; but it was all tenderness.

Odell’s love bloomed like a hothouse flower: Richard felt the heat radiating from the big body, and in the embrace, the purity of survival.
Odell! What a strange boy! What planet do you come from?

The warmth saved Richard. It reached out and plucked him from the frozen loneliness of his exile and gave him a life. He yearned to lose himself in it. He knew now he could get through anything.

The hours passed. Six more times the helicopter roared by. At last the dawn began to nudge its way across the sky.

“Ruta Beth?”

“Yes?”

“What do we do if he doesn’t show?”

“Nothing. Wait some more.”

“But they’ll catch us.”

Ruta Beth had no response. It was true. The car they had arrived in was deposited under a camouflaged tarpaulin in some trees but a mile or so away, at the end of a farm road near an abandoned farmhouse. In daylight, its shabby fraudulence would be uncovered swiftly enough. Spotted by the chopper, it would draw hundreds of cops within minutes; they’d fan out with bloodhounds, find the trail, follow the little party to the river’s edge, and find it cowering there.

Across the river, Ruta Beth’s Toyota had been artfully hidden. It, too, would be discovered in daylight. The only real chance was to get across the river in darkness, pull away in the Toyota, which as yet had no criminal charges against it, and head by back roads to Ruta Beth’s farm.

In the slow progress of light, Richard at last saw Ruta Beth’s stony face. She was a true believer in the cult of Lamar, but even now he could see that her hope was vanishing.

“He’ll be here,” she said. “Know he will.”

Waiting for Lamar. It was like some existential play written by a perverted Frenchman high on keef and boy-love. But instead of snappy patter and ironic reflections on fate, the three principals merely huddled in the water, wrinkled as prunes, waiting for the sun to rise and betray them.

At least, thought Richard, it would be over soon.

A fish bit him. He started at the impulse of pain fighting through his numbness, but the fish bit him again. Not bit him—goosed him, almost comically, squeezing his balls playfully.

“Odell?”

But Odell’s passive face indicated no measurable mental activity.

What the—

“Goddamn,” said Richard. “He has come.”

Lamar broke the water like a seal, shivered in great animal fury, and snorted merrily, “Hah! Shoulda seen you jump, boy!”

At that moment, Richard loved him.

“Lamar! Lamar!” spouted Ruta Beth.

“Mar! Mar! MARRRRRR!” aped Odell.

“Now folks, hold it down! It ain’t party time yet. I got to git you out of here.”

“Where you been, Daddy?”

“In some damn john’s garage. I managed to git me out by cop car, dumped that, cut crosstown and ended up hunkered down in this garage, waiting for the lights to go down so’s I could jump-start the car and come a-calling on y’all. You got the money?”

“You bet we do, Lamar,” said Ruta Beth. “Come, give me a hug and a kiss, honey.”

“Believe I will,” said Lamar, and as Odell watched happily, the two swarmed toward each other in the grayness for a big sloppy kiss.

Only Richard thought to wonder: How many did he kill to get out?

But, disengaging himself from Ruta Beth, Lamar announced, “Now, it’s time to move. Where’s that goddamned canvas sack, honey?”

“Up on the bank, Daddy. You want me to git it?”

“I do.”

He turned to Richard. “You look cold as a corpse, boy. You chattering?”

“I-i-t’s so
cold
, Lamar,” Richard said.

“Hell, in three hours Ruta Beth’ll have you eating biscuits by the fire.”

Ruta Beth pulled the big canvas sack close to Lamar.

“Great, babe,” he said, and reached in to pull out a coil
of thin, waxy rope. Richard could just barely make it out in the gray light.

“You swim, Richard?”

“Yes,” said Richard.

“Good. Now I want you to swim across and slip-knot this to a tree good and strong so that these folks can pull themselves across.”

“I-I—” gulped Richard.

He looked. The torrent of the Red was strong, swollen with rain; it thundered along and in the gray light was beginning to show the source of its name; it looked like a river of blood, rushing out of a sucking chest wound, pausing only here and there to generate eddies of bubbles where the current curled on itself and lashed downward. Now and then a stick or piece of vegetation would come shooting along. It was the river of death, that’s all. Out there, Richard would surrender, his limbs pummeled by the long night’s cold; he would be sucked down, then shipped downstream, a bloated, leaky corpse.

“Haw!” barked Lamar. “Had you there, son!
I’ll
swim the goddamned river. You help me git the rope set around a branch here, so it don’t get away. Then you go across hand by hand. You got that? Ruta Beth, you follow. Odell?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

“Wop,” said Odell.

With that, Lamar and Odell unleashed the rope and got it secured around the stout trunk of a green willow that grew crookedly out of the bank. Lamar tied some strange superknot that only a bosun’s mate or an Eagle Scout would know.

“Okay, Odell, you hang on to these bad boys,” and he pulled two handguns from under the water. Odell took them eagerly.

“Wish me luck,” said Lamar. “Wish to hell I hadn’t
a-skipped all them swimming lessons back at the country club.”

He threw himself into the water like a child at the beach and in several long strokes was gone. It was almost five minutes before they saw him scuttle out at the other end, slither up the bank, and secure the other end of the rope to another limb. He gave the signal.

“Okay, boys,” said Ruta Beth, “Daddy’s calling. Odell, can you go first?”

“Go,” said Odell.

Odell began to pull himself across the river, hand over hand along the rope that ran just under the water’s now pinkish surface. With his great strength he went quickly, even though he carried the money sack.

“Now you, Richard.”

“No, Ruta Beth. You go.”

“Suit yourself, but don’t mess around, Richard. The law gonna come soon and we can’t wait. And if they git you, no matter how much you fear Lamar, you will betray him. We both know that.”

She fixed him with a burning glare. Her small country face, so severe in the gray light, had the aspect of a Botticelli nude’s, so reduced was it to planes and angles. It was as if she were putting the evil eye on him, some furious hex thing, so that he could not escape his fate. Then off she went, and being light and farm-strong, pulled herself along without apparent effort, until he lost her in the rush of the water.

Now it was Richard’s turn. Tentatively he pulled himself out. The current was so much stronger than he anticipated. When the river deepened so that he could no longer stand, it scared him. He almost froze on the spot. But then he got his nerve back up and launched himself farther. With each pull on the rope, his anxiety increased. The rope was deeper, his
face was farther in the water, it was so cold, the current was so strong. At one point the rope seemed to sink a good two feet beneath the surface and it was all he could do to keep his head above the water, sucking in half a lungful of air now and then. From his vantage point he could see nothing—no land, no sky, only the glinting surface of the water, as if the universe had become nothing but water. The idea of it terrorized him.

Yet he pulled on. Then he opened his mouth too early and caught a swallow that rocketed down him. The cough racked up through him, seizing his body, but still he clung to the rope.
Just a little farther
, he thought. He managed to get two more pulls on the rope in before surfacing for air.
I must be nearly there
, he thought.

But he made the mistake of turning to look at the far shore, which he assumed must be but a few feet away; he could barely see it. He wasn’t even halfway.

The depression of it hit him like a sledgehammer.

Give it up
, he said.
Give it up
.

But he fought on, blindly. It was a long, groping night walk; the world resolved itself into the roar of the water and the exhaustion in his arms. He ached to surrender. At one point, he did, and ordered his hands to release him. But they would not. He found it in himself to go another few pulls and then another. A good, sweet lungful of air got him over his worst despair. Onward, he pulled.

It was going to take forever. But at the next sighting, he was astounded at how close the shore was. And with a mighty pull, he got himself into the shallow waters. He saw them in the brush a few feet back from the river’s edge. His feet touched. He let go of the damned rope. He stood to raise himself and wave.

And then the current had him.

*  *  *

“Richard,” said Lamar, almost conversationally. Richard was so close, he was coming out of the water, then he just seemed to sit down and the water scooted him along. His face had a silly half-smile, as if he couldn’t believe what was happening, as if this were some damned joke.

“Richard,” said Lamar, irritated. “Git your ass out of—”

But he was gone. The water had him, and as Lamar watched, the silly look melted into one of sheer terror and weakness. Richard panicked, began to flap, lost control, and was out of sight in seconds.

“Wi-chud,” said Odell.

“That boy’s gone,” said Ruta Beth. “Water took him.”

Lamar just watched. He felt something like disappointment. Then he was angry. Goddamned stupid Richard, come all this way, and—

“Shit,” he said.

“Lamar, it’s over. Let it be,” said Ruta Beth. “Let it be.”

Richard sank. The world turned dark and liquid. There was no light down here. Weakly he kicked and waved against his fate, but there was no mercy at all, anywhere. He fought for air, but the water beat its way into his lungs. He gobbled for air, but there was only water. He closed his eyes in the gray light.

He thought of his mother.

Mother
, he wanted to cry.

His mother was a beautiful woman. She drove his father away with all her “friends.” They were a rich, aristocratic crowd from Tulsa, third-generation oil money long removed from the smell and sweat of the fields, and his father preferred the old boy network of kick-ass riggers and up-from-penury scalawags like himself, who’d made their fortunes
on guts and nerve. All these puffy people, all of his mother’s friends with their Eastern pretensions, they finally drove the poor man away, though Richard didn’t think there’d ever been a divorce.

Richard’s mother told him he could be an artist. She took him to art lessons so early and surrounded him with artistic people. He went to Europe when he was six, nine, eleven, and fourteen. It wasn’t her fault he turned out so disappointingly. She had done everything she could.

Somehow, things were always set against Richard. She would arrange for “introductions” to various prominent men in the East when they traveled there, but the men were always disappointed in him. He had a gift but not a great one, that was clear, and he was so much less interesting than Mother, he was a wretched conversationalist, he didn’t have her buoyant charm, her vividness, her confidence. And she told him that, not in subtle ways, but baldly and to his face.

“Richard, you could do so much better if you weren’t so meek. You will not inherit the earth that way, I promise you. You have to learn to project. People don’t find your self-doubts attractive at all. Reach out, open up.”

But the more she pushed him, the more he sealed up. It was as if he was blossoming inward, becoming more retarded and pitiful and self-conscious and crippled with terror. He was afraid of everything!