Dirty White Boys

CHAPTER 21

It was the fucking neck.

The key to the lion lay in its neck. Somehow, in the density of muscle and bone, in the knots of hair, in the fucking shortness of the structure, there lay the secret to that amazing regality, that kingly magnificence.

Yet Richard could not free it, not, that is, with a pencil or a crayon or any conventional drawing implement.

Lord how he had tried. Like popcorn puffs, his crumpled-up failures lay scattered about him in the upstairs room of Ruta Beth's farmhouse.

He felt a killing headache.

He could not get it: his beasts all had a strange tightness to them. He drew them in his sleep, he drew them in the air with an empty hand, he drew them in his mind, he drew them on paper, and he had never quite brought it off.

In fact, if he thought about it, his best lion had been done in the liquid medium of peanut butter. It was the image he'd crafted on the mock cake: something in the wet fluency of the material and the ease of its manipulation and the lack of pressure or expectation had freed him to really achieve the pure essence of lion hood And his first dumb drawing in the Mac and maybe a doodle here and there, on a place mat in the margins of a book or magazine, those, too, had had the freedom he needed.

You think too much, he thought. What had Conrad said?

“Thinking is the great enemy of perfection.” Boy had he gotten that one right!

Richard stood, yawned, trying to shake the tension from his back and neck and the weariness from his wrist. Lamar and O’Dell were out in the fields on some absurd agricultural project, Ruta Beth was behind the barn working at her fucking wheel. He was alone.

Of course it would help if Lamar had told him the point of the lion.

Did he want a formal portrait? What was his thing about the lion, where would it go, what would it become?

If he knew that, then maybe it would be better or easier. But Lamar wasn't saying; he was too sly. It was as if in some preliterate, instinctual way, Lamar knew it was wisest not to disclose this information. He wanted Richard to struggle and build the lion out of that struggle, rather than providing for him a neat little dedicated, purpose-built image. He was a tyrannical patron!

So: the lion.

What is the essence of the beast?

He was a hunter. He hunted. He roamed the savannah, took down the helpless, and stole their meat. He hunted to live.

But no—he also killed to live. The hunting wasn't the point, the hunting was only the rationale. Something in the lion loved to close in, enjoy the fear and the pain of the quarry, and experience that sublime moment when its spastic struggle ceased and its eyes went blank, and, bathed in the black torrents of its own blood, it passed into limp death. What a Godlike moment, what a sense of cosmic power, how thrilling!

Richard tried to find that impulse in himself. No such luck.

Knock-knock, who’s there? Only us lambs. He shivered, disgusted. Such a thing did not exist for him. That's why it was hopeless.

He stood and restlessness stirred in his limbs. He suddenly ached for freedom. He needed to move. He began to roam through the upper story; not much, three bedrooms and a bathroom that Ruta Beth kept immaculate, especially with, as she put it, "three big, strong boys in the house.”

The toilet seat was down.

He wandered into the room Ruta Beth and Lamar shared.

Again, it was farm- and convict-neat, the sign of people used to living to very high standards of imposed discipline.

Yet you could look at it for a hundred years and never divine from its clues that a Lamar Pye, killer and robber and butt fucker had taken up occupancy.

It titillated him a bit to be in Lamar's private space. The blood rushed to his head. He knew how the Angel Lucifer must have felt when he wandered into God's bedroom before his exile. For just a second he tried to imagine what it would be like to be Lamar, the Lion: to look upon all living things as prey, and to know with blood-boiling confidence that you had the magic power to drive them to the earth and rip their bloody hearts from them, to taste the hot blood and feel the weakening of their quivers as they slid into death.

He had to laugh. Yeah, right. The feeling was hopelessly counterfeit.

It didn't belong to him. Who are you trying to kid, he wondered.

Then Richard noticed something: It was an envelope, manila, on the closet shelf hidden behind shoeboxes. It struck him as odd, for nowhere else in Ruta Beth's strange little house was there a hidden treasure.

Feeling just a little daring, Richard snatched the envelope, saw that it was stamped "Kiowa County Prosecutor's Office, March 15, 1983.”

Now what the-He opened the flap and reached inside.

There were two of them, green with age, in frozen copper postures of the hunt. Bud pulled to the side of the road and looked up at the building and saw what it was: the Harry J. Phillips Fine Arts Society.

Bud paused for a second, as an intriguing thought whispered through his mind. He glanced at his watch. Had some time. He decided, what the hell.

He got out, reached behind the seat, and removed his briefcase. Setting his Stetson right, he climbed the low concrete steps, pausing for a second to look at one of the lions close up. All the power and glory of its musculature stood capured in the art; the piece was an homage to the power of the lion, and even Bud felt a little thrill at looking at it.

He went inside, where it was dark and had the feeling of a cathedral, hushed and almost religious. A uniformed guard watched him come.

“Closing time is five p.M.” sir,” the guard said.

Bud flashed his badge.

“Looking for the head man. Who’d that be and how'd I find him?”

“Dr. Dickstein. He's the curator. Admin offices, down on the left.”

“Thanks.”

Bud walked down the corridor. He looked at the paintings.

They made him feel insignificant. A few made no sense at all; others seemed like photographs of explosions.

Now and then one would throw up an image so arresting it stopped him in his boots. But in time, he made it to the office of the curator and stepped inside to find a young man in shirtsleeves and wire glasses sitting at a computer terminal.

He was one of those wiry boys, with great coils of hair, like electrified springs. He looked a little like Russ, Bud couldn't help thinking.

“Ah, excuse me.”

“Can I help you?”

Bud pulled his badge.

“Sergeant Bud Pewtie, Oklahoma Highway Patrol. I'm looking for Dr. Dickstein. He in there?”

“Er, no. I'm Dr. Dickstein. Dave Dickstein. Sergeant, what can I do for you?”

God, they were growing them young these days! Bud immediately felt he'd screwed up, not getting that the guy who ran such a place could be so young.

“Sir, I was hoping you could give us some help.”

“Well—” said the young man, some ambivalence leaking into his tone.

“You may have heard, we had three convicts break out of Mcalester State Penitentiary a couple of months ago. Now they've set to armed robbery and they killed four policemen and two citizens a few weeks back.”

“The TV's full of it.”

“Sir, it seems that one of them was an artist. He studied art back East in Baltimore.”

“Yes. I still don't—”

“Well, I have some of his drawings here. It turns out he likes to draw lions. Lions.”

The young man looked Bud over intently.

“Sir, I'm no art expert,” said Bud, "and the truth is I couldn't tell one joker artist from another. I can't even remember which one sawed off his ear. But I thought I might find an expert and have him look at the drawings. Maybe he'd see something I wouldn't. Maybe there's a meaning in them I just can't grasp. And somehow, maybe, I don't know, it would lead me another step of the way.”

“Well,” said Dr. Dickstein, "I did my Ph . on Renaissance nudes.

That doesn't have much to do with lions. But I'd be happy to look at them. Did you see our lions, by the way. Sergeant?”

“Yes, sir, I did. That's what brought me in here.”

“Replicas of the lions outside the Chicago Art Institute.

The lion has been a theme in romantic art for a thousand years. It usually represents male sexuality, particularly in the Romantic tradition.”

“These boys ain't so romantic.”

“No, I don't suppose they are,” Dr. Dickstein said.

Richard slid out the photograph. He stared at it with some incomprehension; its details were exact and knowable but they had been arranged into a pattern that made no sense at all. He saw a bedroom slipper, a bedroom, a bed, two sleeping forms, a nice nightdress, a bathrobe.

Then he realized that the room in the photograph was the room he was at that moment in. And that the bed was the bed that still lay between the two windows, which Ruta Beth and Lamar now so placidly shared. In fact, the photographer had been standing almost exactly where Richard now stood, except that he had been perhaps three or four feet closer to the foot of the bed than Richard now was.

Involuntarily, Richard took the steps over the hardwood floor until he stood in the exact spot. He looked at the bed, which was ever so neatly made, so tidy, with a white bedspread with little rows of red roses on it. He looked at the wall above the bed, white and blank and formless.

He looked back in the picture. It was the same, except that the two people in the bed weren't sleeping, they were dead. Someone had fired something heavy—even Richard knew enough to suspect a shotgun—into them as they slept.

The shells had destroyed their faces and skulls, and the inside of their heads, like fractured melons, lay open for all the world to see.

Jackson Pollock at his most amphetamine crazed had contaminated the wall: flung spray, spatter, gobbets of flesh, patches of skin, a whole death catalog of the contents of the human head displayed on that far wall, which was now so tidily cleaned up and repainted.

Richard felt woozy. Ruta Bern's parents, obviously; the tragedy she had so glumly and vaguely referred to in her letter was a murder.

Someone had broken in and blown Mother and Daddy away. Ruta Beth had probably discovered them like this; that explained her weirdness, her craziness, her strange devotion to a man like Lamar who, whatever else, "could protect her.

But… she stayed in the same house?

She slept in the same bed?

Richard shivered.

He looked back at the picture. Blood, blood everywhere, a carnivore's feast of blood, the triumph of the lion over its prey.

Something in him seemed to twitch or stir. He noticed that—good heavens!—he was getting an erection.

Quickly, he put the photograph back in the envelope and the envelope back where he had found it. He returned to his desk. The blood sang in his ears.

The lion. The lion.

His pencil flew across the page.

Bud opened his briefcase and spread the three drawings out on Dr. Dickstein's desk: the crude tracing he'd found among Lamar's prison effects, the drawing from the Stepfords, and the doodles on the place mat at the Denny's crime scene.

“He studied at a place called the Baltimore Institute. Is that good?”

“The Maryland Institute. It's a fine school,” said Dick stein.

“You know, this is very unusual. If you study the lives of artists, indeed you find violent and maladjusted men. But almost always their rage is directed at the self.

The ear, you know, Van Gogh, that sort of thing. It's rare that they express their hostility to the world at large. I suppose they're too narcissistic.”

“We ain't sure how much he's in command. He was celled with a tough lifer con, an armed robber by profession.

Very powerful criminal personality. We think Richard just got sucked up in it. Lamar has a way of getting people to do what he wants. He's the real monster.”

The young art doctor stared at the three drawings for a bit.

“This one isn't in his hand?”

“No. It was in an impression I found in a magazine that was in Lamar's possession in the pen.”

“It's traced. The line is heavy, crude, and dead.”

“I believe that's right. Never saw the original. It was etched in a Penthouse. The light caught it right and I brought it out myself.”

“Yes. But clearly the original drawing is Richard's.”

“Yes sir.”

“Yes. I see commonality. And this, this one, it's the one he worked on the hardest.”

“Yes sir. At the Stepfords'. They told me Lamar ordered Richard upstairs, to draw while looking out.”

“So it was an assignment?”

“Yes sir.”

“It represents… Lamar's view of himself?”

“Yes sir.”

“Very roman—look. Sergeant, you don't have to call me sir. Dave would be fine. Everybody around here calls me Dave.”

“Dave it is, then.”

“Good. Anyway… it represents Lamar's view of himself. Men who think they're lions see themselves as powerful, kingly, sexually provocative, very romantic in their own eyes. Incredible un self-cons ious vanity. Typical criminal personality, I'd bet.”

“Sounds pretty familiar.”

“Yes, I thought it might. And… it doesn't quite work. I think you see in the second lion something studied, perhaps too 'cute.” The first one is much cruder, but it's much better. Richard is trying to do too much in Number Two. He has conflicting impulses. It's very Renaissance, actually, very Italian. He's trying to please his patron, the powerful lord who doesn't know much about art except what he likes, and yet his own subversive interests keep breaking through. His talent is betraying him. He knows that the subject matter is beneath him. He sees through it, so he really can't force himself above the level of the commercial hack. He despises the material. It's so coarse: Viking—primordial warrior stuff, the killer elite at play in the fields of the Lord. Hmmm. What is it Arendt says about the banality of evil? This is it in spades, and Richard knows that. He doesn't like drawing it but of course he hasn't the guts to say no. What would happen if he said no?”

“You don't want to know.”

“I'll trust you on that one.”

“Is he any good? As an artist?”

“Well… there's something here, I don't know. He has technical skills, yes. And he doesn't want to do it, but he is doing it and that tension makes it somehow interesting.”

“How about the third one?”

“Ah—lots of vigor, dash, panache. Done offhanded.

With his left brain. Something else was on his mind.”

“He did it just before the robbery. They had him as lookout. If he'd have done his job right, maybe all them people wouldn't have died.”

“You don't like him, do you. Sergeant?”

Bud thought a moment.

“No, not really. He had choices. Lamar and O’Dell, they never had no choices. They were born to be trash. They learned at the toe end of somebody's boot. Richard could have done anything. What happened to him didn't have to happen. He was smart enough for it not to have happened.

That's what I despise about him. He's not even a good goddamned criminal. Lamar's a great criminal. Lamar's a pro. This poor pup, he's just what the convicts call a fuck boy "I can see how prison would be somewhat hard on him,” said Dr. Dickstein.

“And that's it?”

“Well—yes.”

“Thanks then. You've been some help.”

The museum director's eyes knitted up then, and he seemed to really throw himself at the three drawings.

At last he said, "You know—I don't know, there's one other thing.”

“Yes sir?”

“It probably doesn't mean a thing.”

“Maybe not. But tell me anyway.”

“What I see here is a process of—” he paused, groping for a word.

“What I see is a process of purification, somehow.

He's honing, reducing it, concentrating it, trying to simplify it. He's trying to reduce it to pure essence of lion for Lamar.”

Bud looked carefully at the drawings. From Number Two to Number Three it was true: same lion, same posture, but somehow simple, less fretwork to it, the lines bolder, the suggestion more powerful.

“Why?” he asked.

“Well, he's getting close to cartoon almost, one could say. Or emblem.

He's reducing it to emblem or trademark. I don't know. But there's definitely a lot of work, a lot of practice, a lot of method gone into it. Now, he's nervous before the crime, he's not thinking, it's just come welling up. And he gets this one, which is by far the best.

Whatever he's reducing it to, he's almost there. Lamar will see that.”

Bud looked at the drawing. He was trying to figure out what it could be. Was Lamar going to put a trademark on his” crimes?

“I don't know,” said the doctor.

“It looks like something I once saw, but… Is there a visual tradition in criminal culture? Possibly it has to do with graffiti or hex signs or some such, some unique signature, some proclamation of deviance that says to the world, "I am the bad man'?”

He paused.

It looked like something to Bud, too.

Then he remembered the mottling of blue stains on Lamar's arms as Lamar bent to put a bullet into poor Ted and the f u c k and the y o u I Lamar wore on his knuckles.

It appeared to Bud perfectly formed and beautiful.

“It's a tattoo,” Bud said, astounded at his own insight.

“Richard is designing a tattoo for Lamar!”