Dirty White Boys (46 page)

Ruta Beth had the other shotgun.

Richard took out his revolver.

“Not yet, you coon-brain. Not till you get in the house. You ready?”

“Yes sir.”

“You, Baby Girl?”

“Yes Daddy.”

“Then it’s butcher day.”

*  *  *

“We can’t keep going over the same thing again and again. We’re like cats in a damn bag. It ain’t going to change.”

“So that’s it? You’re just going to leave?”

“Holly, I—”

“I can’t believe you can just leave.”

“I can’t stay here forever. It ain’t going to change.”

“Oh, Bud.”

He rose, picked up his hat, and walked to the door.

He opened the door.

Then he turned.

She was still on the sofa. She looked like he’d beaten her. Her face was swollen and wet.

“God, Holly,” he said. “I am so sorry. You deserve so much. You deserve so much more than I could ever give you.”

She just sat there.

He tried to think of something more to say, some magic sentence that would make it all better. Of course there wasn’t one. So in the end, he merely turned and walked out.

If she’d have cried out, what would he have done? A part of him badly wanted to go back. A part of him didn’t know what the hell he was doing. He only knew he had to get out of there, or he’d never leave. So he walked as if in a tunnel to the truck.

Lamar was seventy-five feet away when the door of the house suddenly opened. He saw Bud, big as life, looking like John Wayne in the doorway of a hundred westerns, face grim, broad Stetson low over his eyes.

But Bud didn’t see him. Instead he walked in a straight line to the truck.

It was too far to shoot. He could run at Bud, but Bud would see or hear him. Again, he fought his thirst for action,
and melted back, sinking into the ground behind a hedge, with his hand driving the girl and Richard back.

They watched as Bud climbed into the truck. He was too far away to attack, and they couldn’t get back to the car in time to follow him.

Bud started the truck and drove off.

“Where’s he going?” whispered Richard.

“Shut up,” said Lamar.

“What do we do, Daddy? What do we do?”

Lamar thought for a second and thought the same thing:
What do we do?

Then he grinned.

“I know,” he said.

Holly sat there. The sense of loss was on her like a heavy wool blanket. The whole thing played out before her eyes and the words
so close, so close
kept echoing in her mind.

But she could never get him to see it: how perfect they were, how they’d be more together than they ever would be apart.

Then someone knocked on the door, filling her heart with hope.

She rose and ran, thinking,
Bud, Bud, Bud
, and opened the door.

But it wasn’t Bud. It was Lamar.

B
ud drove aimlessly through downtown Lawton in the dark, not really seeing anything except the blurred lights. He followed no particular path and at various times found himself nearing the airport, the Great Plains Coliseum, and Gate Number Three. Even Fort Sill Boulevard seemed desolate. Downtown, those amber lights caught everything in a particularly harsh brown glow, so that no true color stood out.

Bud felt exactly the opposite of how he expected. He thought he’d feel liberated at last, shorn of his secret life, ready and willing to embrace with all seriousness of high purpose his old life, which had been miraculously restored to him. But no. He just felt draggy, slow, morose, grouchy. He wanted to get in a fight. Impulses toward extreme anger flicked through him. A part of him wanted to lash out, maybe at Jen, maybe at Jeff, maybe at Russ, really at himself. It wasn’t depression so much as plain old regret; images from all the sweet times with Holly kept playing on a movie screen in his head.

So little to show. She’d given him so much and she got so little.

Well, Holly, let that be a lesson to you that will stand you in good stead sometime in the future: no married men. Not worth it. All’s you get is promises and sex up front, and pain and abandonment at the back end
.

At last he turned down his own street and pulled into his own driveway. Jen’s station wagon was there in the carport.

He got out, walked in. The house seemed especially small and cheesy. Wasn’t much of a house. No room in it big as a motel room. The furniture, except what Jen had been given by her mother, was cheap, bought on time, in ruins before being paid off. The linoleum in the kitchen was dingy; the walls needed repainting; his shop was a mess; the lawn needed cutting.

For some reason it seemed to stink of a thousand meals tonight, of backed-up toilets and spilled beer and TV dinners and pizza kept in the refrigerator too long. God. How had all this happened? How did he end up in a house he didn’t love with—

“Well,” she said. “About time.”

“All right, Jen,” he said.

“So where is he?”

“He’s with his friends. I got him out in time to play and drove him over. That coach said officially his suspension didn’t start till
tomorrow
so the old geezer let him play. Git himself in a lot of trouble, you ask me. Anyway, Jeff did fine, a double and a single, made a nice running catch late in the game.”

“It went into extra innings?”

“No, no, it didn’t.”

“He’s with his friends. Bud, where
were
you?”

“Oh, I had some business.”

“What
business? Bud, what’s going on?” Her face was grave and her eyes locked onto him. He could not meet their power.

“Ah—”

It hung in the air.

Finally he said, “Look, I understand I haven’t been the best of husbands lately, Jen. I just had my head somewhere else. Okay. I’ve told you some lies, I’ve done some things I shouldn’t have done. But, Jen, I want to tell you now, flat out, straight to your face, that’s all over now. Now I am going to be father to my boys and husband to my wife. I want us to have our old life back, the one we loved for all those years.”

“Bud?”

“What?”

“Bud, I won’t ask you for details.”

“I’m glad.”

“I’ve heard things and I don’t want to know if they’re true or not. I just want you to tell me whatever it was, it’s all over now. You have a good life, Bud, fine, strong, brave sons. No man could have better sons.”

“I know that.”

“I know I’m not so young as I once was. I can’t help that. Like you I got old, and like you I got fat. I just got fatter.”

“It’s not that.”

“Oh, who knows what it is, Bud. I do know that I can forgive you maybe once. But, Bud, don’t you ever do anything like this again. If you want to be with her, just go and be with her. But no more of this running around.”

“I will make it up. I’ll make it so you won’t notice there was a bad time. It was all good times, you, me, the boys.”

“Okay, Bud. Then I don’t want to hear of it again. We close the book and we lock it and I don’t want to hear about it again. Is that clear?”

“I understand.”

“Good. Now I think we should go to bed. I think you
should show me that you love me still. In the physical way, I mean. It’s been nearly a year, are you aware?”

“I didn’t know.”

“It’s been a long, long time, Bud, and I have needs, too, though you don’t like to face it.”

“Well, then let’s go.”

They headed upstairs.

The phone pulled Bud from a blank and dreamless sleep, and he awoke in the dark of his bedroom, his wife breathing heavily beside him. All through the house it was quiet.

Groggily, he picked it up.

“Pewtie.”

“Well, howdy there, Bud” came a voice from far, far away. It swam at Bud from lost memories, out of a pool of still green water. He fought to recall it but its identity lingered beyond his consciousness.

“Who is this?”

“Oh, you know who it is, Bud. It’s your old goddamned buddy Lamar Pye.”

Bud’s head cleared, fast.

“Pye. What the hell are you—”

“Missing anything?”

“What?”

“Missing anything?”

Bud thought:
My boys
.

“Lamar, so help me Christ—”

“Sure must be lonely in that bed tonight.”

Bud looked: He could see Jen stirring under her blankets.

“I don’t—”

“I hope you didn’t call nobody yet, there, Bud.”

“I—”

“She’s damned pretty, your old lady. A bit young for a old goat like you. Bet she gits you to working hard.”

“Lamar, what the—”

“Here, say something to your baby. Bring her over, sweetie.”

A faraway voice said, “Git over here, you bitch,” and in the next second, another voice came on the line.

“Oh, Bud, oh God, they came in and got me, oh, Bud, I am
so
scared, Bud they’ve all got guns and he hit me, he hit me—” and then Holly was taken away.

“Who is it, Bud?” said Jen groggily.

“You hear that, trooper? We got your wife. Yes sir, got your goddamned wife. You take my baby cousin, and shoot him full of holes, I’m going to take your lady, for my pleasures. Let me tell you how it’s going to be, okay? You call anyone, you tell anyone, you mention this to anyone, by God, I will kill her and you know I will. First though I’ll fuck her in every hole she got. Every one.”

“I swear—”

“Now, Bud, if you want this pretty gal back, you’d best come and do what I tell you. I want you to go to a pay phone. You got about a hour. It’s at 124 and Shoulder Junction, outside of Geronimo. Exxon station. I’m going to bounce you from pay phone to pay phone before I bring you in, just to make goddamned sure you don’t have no SWAT boys with you. Got that?”

“Lamar—”

“You miss that goddamned call and I’ll cut her throat and cut her nose off, Bud, and then come git you and the rest of your family at my leisure.”

“Don’t hurt her, goddamn it,” Bud barked.

“Oh, and Bud?” Lamar asked in a voice rich in charm. “You want her back? Tell you what. Bring some guns.”

He hung up.

Bud jumped out of bed, fought to clear his head. But, really, there was no decision to make, not one he could face
anyway. If he called headquarters, he could play the game and sooner or later close with Lamar with a SWAT team, choppers, snipers, the works; the professionals would handle it as well as they could, but it wouldn’t matter. One look at other boys at his private party with Bud and Lamar would cut her up without so much as a by-your-leave and take his goddamned chances with the lawmen. He didn’t give a damn; he didn’t fear his own death, he only wanted Bud’s.

Bud pulled on jeans, boots, and a black shirt. He grabbed a sports coat, only to cover the guns he’d be wearing.

“Bud, what is going on?”

“I have to go.”

“Bud, you—”

He faced his wife.

“I’m sorry. I have to go one last time. If you love me, you let me go. You trust me, you let me go.”

Then he raced downstairs, opened the gun safe. There they were. He pulled on his shoulder rig and the high hip holster and then busily threaded rounds into the magazines, all of them, jamming them up with hollowtips. If his thumbs hurt, he didn’t notice; it just seemed to take so goddamned long. He holstered the Beretta and the .45; the .380 went behind his belt on his belly. Then he looked for a rifle, knowing only a fool fights with a pistol if he has the choice, but came up short until he remembered that .30-30 lever gun outside, still under the seat in his truck. He closed the safe.

A shape loomed in the dark.

“Dad?”

It was Jeff.

“Jeff, I’ve got to go, fast.”

“Dad, what’s—”

“Never you mind.”

“Dad—”

“Jeff, I love you. No matter what you hear or what they tell you or what happens, I love you. I love your mother and your brother more than anything. Now I have something to handle and I have to handle it. You stay here and take care of your mother. It’ll be fine, I swear to you.”

“Dad—”

“Jeff, I have to go!”

“Dad … I love you.”

Bud grabbed his youngest son and gave him a bone-squeezing hug. He felt the boy’s ribs and beating heart under that sheathing of muscle.

“Go on, now,” he said, and dashed out.

Bud got to the truck, worried now, absurdly, that he was low on gas. But he had gas. He gunned it, whirled out of the quiet neighborhood for Geronimo forty-five miles away. He had about fifty minutes.

But suddenly a thought came to him. Goddamnedest thing. From where he didn’t know, but an idea just flashed into his head. He saw a gas station phone booth and stopped and ran to dial 411.

“You have a number for a C. D. Henderson, out on Thirty-eighth?”

It took a few seconds.

“That number isn’t listed, sir.”

“Goddammit, this is a police emergency, I’m Oklahoma highway patrol sergeant Russell B. Pewtie, ID number R-twenty-four, and I want that number. Give it to me or give me your supervisor.”

Soon enough Bud had the number and called.

The phone seemed to ring and ring.

Then a groggy woman’s voice answered, the old woman, and Bud asked for the lieutenant.

“Carl,” he heard her say, “it’s some old boy for you.”

Henderson’s raspy voice came on.

“’Lo?” he said.

“Lieutenant, it’s Bud Pewtie.”

“Bud, my God!”

“You still have your keys, don’t you? You can still get into that goddamned office?”

“I could break in if I had to. Now what—”

“Listen to me, you drunken old goat. You get your ass over there. You say you’re a detective? Well, this here’s the night you’re going to prove it.”

“What are you talking about? What’s going on?”

“You never mind what’s going on. I got something for you. The mystery person in Lamar’s gang. Wore the mask all the time. Here’s why. It’s a goddamned girl. A
young
girl. Heard him call her ‘sweetie.’ Heard her say, ‘Get over here, bitch.’ That’s all. But … a
young
girl. Young, in her twenties, maybe. Now that’s another dot for you to connect. That’s your goddamned third point. You find me a category that ain’t a category that’s got a Toyota that’s also got a young girl. You got to find me that girl and that goddamed location. Now get cracking, you old buzzard, and don’t you let me down.”