Dirty White Boys (41 page)

It was nearly midnight when he finished the rough
sketching for the first half of the drawing; but now, in a fever, he could not stop. He was consumed with fire, as high as he’d ever, ever been before in his life.

Oh, Mother
, he thought,
if you could see me now
.

For Bud Pewtie, he tried to imagine a pain so everlasting and consuming it would be almost beyond comprehension. How does one get the total squalor of torture, of ultimate and total degradation, into a mere representation? He tried to think of atrocity—the blown-away old people in this very house; but more, scenes from Auschwitz, the endless litter of scrawny corpses; or the famous photograph of the searing flame of napalm in Vietnam, out of which with such utter delicacy the little girl had run, leaving her mother and baby brother cooking behind; the Zapruder film frame in which Kennedy’s skull explodes, a fragment launching into midair and trailing a plasma gossamer; a picture of the rent, headless corpse of a third-trimester abortion that an antichoice zealot had once sent him.

Yet none of this stuff really worked; it didn’t get him where he needed to be.

What is the worst, he thought, the worst thing you know or have ever heard of? The screwball in
Silence of the Lambs
with his “woman suit”? The German officer who forces Sophie to choose which child shall live and which shall die? The cries of the Scottsboro boys as they were dragged to their trees, knowing they were innocent?

No, he thought, the worst thing you ever heard of was the boy who blinded his mother. He didn’t have the guts to kill her. He wasn’t strong enough, though he hated her almost as much as he loved her. He tried to remember the mechanics of his strokes with his stiff arms, his sudden explosiveness, the sound of the blade cutting into the skin and into the sockets. He remembered her wailing. God, how she wailed for mercy. But she was so weak. She had dominated
him for so long, but she was so weak! The power he’d felt, the obscene sense of gratification after all those years.

“There, Mother, there! Now you know how it feels!”

That’s what he’d said to her.

Now, trapping that sickness and storing it like a fossil fuel, he began once again to draw.

Lamar sat like Rodin’s
Thinker
, watching the sun come up. It crept over the rim of the plains out beyond the highway, foreshadowing another hot, clear Oklahoma day. This early, it was still farmer’s sun, appreciated wordlessly only by men who rose before it to get a good part of their immense day’s labor finished before it got truly hot. it was swollen and bloodshot, and almost orange, but still cool. Lamar regarded it dully. It was as if he’d spent his rage and collapsed, finally, after so many long, sleepless days and nights battling fever and pain and that goddamned big cat that was still stalking him. His face was slack, his eyes dull. He was shirtless, the half-lion looking almost abstract, like a scribble, on the planes of his chest. His hair fanned wetly over his broad back. He breathed through his mouth, drawing the air over a dry, dead tongue. Nothing moved on his body; he looked as passive as a piece of stone, though the veins on his muscular right arm were distended and now and then a rogue impulse caused one of his remaining fingers to twitch.

He’d been sitting there since three o’clock, when he’d returned from another of his long night walks.

Richard approached gingerly. He felt as if he were a small boy in the presence of greatness.

He stood, waiting to be recognized.

After a long time, Lamar finally looked over.

Richard saw two glistening tracks running down his cheeks, which connected with no knowledge of Lamar that
he’d ever had, until at last he recognized that tears had left their mark. Lamar was weeping silently.

“Lamar, are you all right?”

“Oh, I’m hurting something mighty, Richard,” Lamar said. “I’m hurting so fierce I doubt if I’m a-going to make it.”

“Please, Lamar. What would we do without you? You can’t talk like that. You’ve got to make it. It always seems darkest just before the dawn.”

“Goddamn Richard, that poor boy, he never’d done a thing wrong if I hadn’t a-steered him to it. It’s me should be lying on that slab, not him. And I promised him I’d take him to his mama’s grave and I never done that. And now he ain’t even going to git no funeral. They going to dump him in some goddamned pauper’s grave and that’s the end of it. It’s so sad. It kills me how sad it is.”

“Lamar, I finished the drawing. I’ll put the colors in tomorrow if you like it.”

He held it out to Lamar, who took it and examined it closely in silence for some time. Then Richard heard a shuffle, a choke, a sob, as Lamar broke down completely.

Richard stood there feeling as if he’d violated some immense privacy of Lamar’s. To see a man so bold and strong and fearless weeping hysterically—it befuddled Richard. It was like seeing his own father crying, when all the signals always said that fathers don’t cry. His never did. Mothers cry. But his never did, either.

But then Lamar looked over and said, “Richard, goddamn, what you done here, that’s
wonderful
. The Baby in heaven, Bud Pewtie in hell. Goddamn, Richard, you are a great artist. Just looking at that lets me imagine it in some way I couldn’t before. I do know that he’s up there, a-waitin’ on me. Goddamn, Richard, boy, it’s like you done lifted a huge weight off my shoulders.”

“Why thank you, Lamar,” said Richard, stunned at the response.

Then Lamar looked at the bottom part, the hell part.

“Now what’s this?” he said, his features darkening. “I thought I told you he was supposed to burn, like in hell.”

“Lamar, Lamar, I thought hard about it, and I came up with something different. Something so … strange it would make you famous. Famous forever. It’s so horrible.”

Lamar’s features knitted as he tried to penetrate the image. Gradually, they lightened.

“His face,” he said. “You got me doing something to his face.”

“Yes,” Richard admitted shyly.

“I don’t get it, Richard.”

“What is a man, Lamar? A man is many things, and you can take them from him, but the one thing, if you take it, you take
everything.”

“Everything?”

“Yes. Everything. Not his life, not his family, not his balls, but—his face.”

“I’m cutting his face off?”

“Everything. Eyes, nose, tongue, lips, teeth. You’ve taken his face. You’ve left him without a face. Consider it! It’s so … extreme.”

Lamar looked at Richard and a strange light came into his eyes. And then Richard saw that it was respect.

Lamar suddenly embraced Richard, held him tightly.

“Richard, I think you done helped me find the power. You and the Lord, Richard, you both done helped me find the power.”

“You can go on?”

“Go on? Hell, boy, we gonna git us a Bud Pewtie. And his goddamned family. And this time, we’ll leave a ruckus
in the chicken coop they talk about in Oklahoma for a hundred years! You mess with the Pyes, they’ll say, and the Pyes will have their day! And we’ll leave him for all to find—without a face!”

T
hey began to come in the night. He could not deny them. He wasn’t sure if they were dreams or fantasies, but they always came between the hours of four and six while he was in a semiwakeful state, involving visions and positions as yet untried: smoky memories, these visions, all of Holly. He’d roll over and see Jen sleeping, and wonder,
Why, oh why aren’t you enough for me?

But the fact was: She wasn’t enough, or at least now that he’d had the other, younger woman so often and knew how she tasted (salty) and how she smelled (musky) and the consistency of her hair (tight) and all the secret parts of her that he could touch to make her squeal and moan.

Maybe it was just the closeness of the brush with death; whatever, now he needed flesh to confirm that he was unmistakably alive. He wanted Holly’s flesh. He did not, goddamn his soul to hell and goddamn his allegiances to hell, want his wife’s flesh.

“I have to go,” he said to Jen in the morning.

She just looked up at him. She was a handsome woman, near his own age, with a square, beautiful face, now completely unimpressed and beyond surprise. Her eyes just bore
into him. He sensed her remoteness and her passage into a zone beyond disappointment, as if to suggest there were few words left.

“My guns,” he said. “I called that OSBI lieutenant, Henderson. They’re out of the state ballistics lab now, they all been tested. He says I can sign for ’em. Sure would feel better with my own guns, and not somebody else’s.” He’d been given a department Smith .357 for self-defense, just in case, but somehow it lacked the proprietary intimacy of the ones he’d put so many holes in targets and Odell with.

“So you’re going to go fetch them?” Jen said suspiciously.

“Yes, thought I might. Then I thought I’d stop at the range and run a box through each and see how it felt. Then I’ll be right back.”

“You haven’t been ‘right back’ in four months, but I suppose if you have to go, you have to go.”

Bud tried a smile. It didn’t work. He knew he shouldn’t appear too anxious, but whenever he “acted,” he knew his movements seemed awkward and forced.

However, today he knew he had to have Holly and damn the consequences, and so after dawdling over another cup of coffee and reading a sports section whose scores he already knew by heart, he at last got up, threw on his hat, slid the generic Smith into a belt holster and a jacket over that, though it was hot, and set out.

He blinked. The Percodan knocked out the sharp jabs but couldn’t reach deep enough into his nervous system to shut down the more general throbbing in his limbs and joints that made him aware of every movement; once again, he felt ancient. He no longer wore the eyepatch, but some moisture came and he blinked it back as he slid behind the Ford’s wheel. As he climbed in, he fired something off in his leg wound, where the pellet had sunk so deep, and a
momentary flare of pain blossomed inside. He shook it off and pulled the door shut.

It was bright now, June, and flecks of pollen hung in the air. Spring was a memory; full Oklahoma summer bore down, its weight crushing all movement from the air. He took an unair-conditioned breath, and it felt like sucking down steam. Then he turned the engine, backed out, and with a nod, passed the day-shift bodyguards.

He drove to the City Hall Annex. C.D. was not there to be found, but instead there was a younger OSBI detective, and some boys holding court in the task-force big room.

The boys wanted to meet Bud: two Texas Rangers still hoping to get a try at Lamar, two undercover state policemen from the headquarters unit, and two or three OSBI investigators, the names and hands all thrown at Bud in a hurry.

“Hell of a job you did there, Pewtie. Goddamn, that’s the kind of shooting this here country needs more of by a damn sight”—that was the gist of the comments, offered in several variants.

“Well,” said Bud modestly, “I was damned lucky.”

The social palaver done, Bud went into the office where once C.D. had drunkenly held court, and the new boss opened a drawer and pulled his guns out one after another.

“One Colt Commander, .45 ACP, serial number FC34509, one Beretta 92F 9-mm, serial number D12097Z, and one Beretta 84 .380, serial number E259751Y. There, Sergeant Pewtie, just sign and they’re yours. Got your Beretta shoulder holster and the Colt Galco, but I don’t know what happened to the .380 holster. How the hell you carry that?”

“In my belly. Behind my belt buckle. No holster at all. Hurt like hell, but I was damn glad it was there when I needed it.”

He looked at them: his three guns, all functional black combat pistols, without a grace note or a gleam to them. Just tools. A wave of sweetness came over him, so powerful it almost made him want to faint. No man whose life hasn’t been saved by a gun can begin to imagine what a man whose life has feels when he confronts the instruments of his survival.

Bud headed out, but then he stopped, feeling he had a thing or two still to do.

“Where would I find C.D.?”

“Well, Sarge, he’s got a place way south of town, out Thirty-eighth Street, south of MacMahon Park.” He gave an address.

“I ought to drop on by,” Bud said, learning that he felt it exactly as it popped out.

“The old boy’d probably appreciate that, assuming you get him early enough, before he’s given himself up to the bottle.”

Bud looked at his watch. Did he have time for this? Why was he doing it? If he got in and got out quick, it shouldn’t matter. But time, as always, was the problem. It might help him cover; he went to see the lieutenant, they got to talking, the hours passed,
that’s
why he was late.

It was a dingy
little
suburban tract house in an unappealing development, smaller even than Holly’s place, way south of the airport, and now and then a big jet would roar overhead, its landing gear threatening to knock down aerials and chimneys. There were no trees in the neighborhood.

He waited just a second to determine if he really wanted to do this or not. It had the sense of a fool’s errand. But there was something in the way it was shaking out he didn’t like—that he, Bud Pewtie, had “found” Lamar, where the
old man had not. It wasn’t really a fair interpretation. He finally went up and knocked on the door.

The woman who answered was another bitter prune, without a lick of softness anywhere to her drawn features or her immense fatigue.

“I’m Pewtie,” Bud said. “Is C.D. available?”

She just fixed him with a wordless glare, and then finally said, “You the lawyer about the settlement?”

“No ma’am. I’m a highway patrol officer that worked his last case.”

“That damn Johnny Lawyer said he’d be here
yesterday
. We need the money. Damn fool C.D. lost all his two years back on a goddamn re-sort investment down at Lake Texoma.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Bud said.

“Well, you go on back then. But he’s in a black mood, as usual.”

“Has he been—”

“Of course. You can’t take that man’s bottle from him, but he don’t get bad until around four.”