Dirty White Boys

CHAPTER 26

The papers, in all their accounts of the famous gunfight at Jimmy Ky's, gave no personal details about this Bud Pewtie. Oklahoma highway patrol sergeant, forty-eight, that was all. His name was in no phone book either, but that was common: Cops seldom had listed phone numbers.

“How are we going to find him, Daddy?” Ruta Beth asked.

“Oh,” said Lamar, "there're ways. He's left a trail. A sly old dog like me, hell, I'll sniff him out.”

Lamar stared at the photo in the paper, and Bud Pewtie stared back. It was a grave, authoritarian face, the face of a manhunter. Lamar had seen it on a few cops in his time, but fewer and fewer of late, as the cops had gotten younger and somehow sweeter. But Pewtie had the gray eyes and flat mouth of a hero type, an ass-kicker, a shooter. And goddamn, he'd done some shooting. Lamar looked at the bandage swaddling his left hand. Two fingers, just gone, as if by surgery.

Luck or talent? Lamar knew it was probably luck, but it left him a little uneasy. No man should be that lucky.

“He's a scary man,” said Richard.

“Richard, when you hold a gun to a man's kid, he ain't scary no more.

And when you blow that child's brains all over the sidewalk, let me tell you, he's going to bawl like a baby. Oh, then he'll know the true cost of mixing up with Lamar Pye. By God, he'll know.”

Lamar thought: He's probably a family man. Looks like the father of a whole tribe, lots of those square tough-guy sons-of-bitches was like that—they were trained that the world was theirs for the taking and their job was to fill it with kids. He thought of Pewtie as the head of a tribe, and saw him living on an estate, though of course he knew how little cops made. But the image was good; it stoked the cold rage Lamar knew he had to taste and hold to do the deeds that he had in mind, that would teach the world how dangerous it is to take something from Lamar Pye.

“Now,” he said, "says here he's forty-eight years old.

Wouldn't a stud like this one have kids? Wouldn't those kids be roughly in high school, figuring he got married in his late twenties, when he got out of the goddamned Marine Corps and got his training done?”

He looked around at Ruta Beth and Richard. No doubt about it, though Ruta Beth was as decent a girl as ever lived, she was not bright. She had some ofo’Dell's dullness in the face, as she grappled with the idea.

Richard, on the other hand, was too goddamned smart.

That was his whole goddamned trouble. He could figure everything out and do nothing. Richard was about the most worthless man he'd ever seen; a bad thief, gutless, a goddamned Mary Jane. He should have let the niggers make him their bitch before they killed him. But no. Not Lamar.

Takes a boy under his wing and all these months later is still stuck with him.

Richard got it first, of course, but when he said it, Ruta Beth got it, and her little dark eyes lit up with something like a baby's glee.

“Sports! His kids would do sports! You know they would!”

“Yes indeed, Richard, I think you got it. We go to the library, look through old newspapers, your high school sports page. Goddamn, I'll guarantee you, this one'd have a fullback or a pitcher or some other goddamned thing. We'll find his name in the paper and we'll know what school he goes to. Yes sir. That gives us the place old Bud Pewtie lives in. We can hunt for that truck, which we all got a good look at when it was parked here, even though you two geniuses didn't recognize it in the parking lot.”

“It was dark, Lamar,” said Richard.

“

“It was dark, Lamar,”

“ repeated Lamar.

“Or maybe we send the boy something—say, a basket of fruit, because he done pitched a no-hitter. Then we ID him when he comes out and follow him. Anyway you cut it, goddamn we'll have us the whole goddamn Pewtie clan, you betcha.”

“Suppose he's guarded?”

“Well, then we wait a bit, and we catch us a Pewtie when the guard is down. Say a kid. Or maybe the mama. Then we call old Bud, and we say, you either come on out to play with us, or we going to start sending you fingers and ears.

Oh, he'll come. Goddamn I know, he'll come.”

It fell to Richard and Ruta Beth to enter Lawton's small branch library at Thirty-eighth and Cherry and take up the bound copies of the months of April, May, and June (not yet finished) for the Lawton Constitution.

Richard paged through the grim newsprint, his fingers darkening with ink stains. Every now and then a headline would reach out and snag his eye. grange slates bake sale, for example, or safety record set at whiz plastics or recital set for tuesday—not news stories per se, but little announcements about this or that thing occurring somewhere in or about the greater Lawton area. They were like bulletins from another life: Richard had been raised to hold lower middle class society in utter contempt, but right then, it seemed the nicest thing he could ever imagine was to work accident-free in the Whiz Plastics plant his whole life, and go to the Grange bake sale on Saturday and his daughter's recital on Tuesday.

Never. Was gone. Couldn't happen. That life was sealed off. He was "special,” he had been trained from an early age, smarter and more talented, and see what it had got him?

Why am I so damned smart? he wondered, pityingly.

Why do I have to see through so much? Why couldn't I be banal, like everyone else?

“What the hell are you crying about?” Ruta Beth said.

“You want us arrested for being weird? They do that in small towns, you know.”

“No, it's just that it's so commonplace, the contents of a newspaper.

There's nothing meaningful in it. It's so ordinary”

“Goddamn, Richard, you are the goddamnedest weirdest man I ever did see. Don't see what Lamar sees in you. Go on, look for the goddamned name.”

Richard pushed his way onward, his eyes roaming through the sports section, pulsing through dreary tales of dreary games played all across the city and surrounding counties. Why did boys love games so? It was a complete mystery to him. Take baseball, for example point? After all, if you hit the ball or not in the long run, what was achieved?

self-defining systems, full of TWO PEWTIE HITS TAKE LAWTON HIGH P, He'd almost missed it. But there it was, the name Pewtie, big as life.

There couldn't be two of them.

“Sophomore Jeff Pewtie continued his hitting rampage,” the breathless copy read, "with a single in the first and a bases-loaded double in the fifth. Since being promoted to Lawton varsity in mid-May, the 15-year-old sophomore has hit an amazing .457.”

Richard rushed through the pages in search of this young Hercules' labors and found them nearly every week. When Jeff didn't deliver mighty clouts, his superb outfielding astonished the fans. Finally, yes, a picture: the boy being clapped on the back after delivering a game-winning hit, this just from last week! He looked carefully. The face was young and square and handsome, on a compact, muscular body, brimming with health and confidence. He looked hard into the bone structure and tried to match it with the sergeant's photo from the papers earlier that week, after the shooting. After a bit, he came to see it: It was the shape of the nose and the distribution of flesh between the eyes, the subtle architecture of a face or, rather, of a genetic pattern reiterated, though in a slight variant mutation, father to son.

“That's him,” he said.

“

“Bout time,” said Ruta Beth.

“That's the kid.”

Richard looked at the boy; a shiver came across him.

What a perfect gladiator, how confident of his place in the world and expectant of the future. And what woe awaited him.

In the parking lot, they showed Lamar a page they'd ripped from the newspaper, with Jeff's picture.

“You were right, Lamar. You were dead right. Now all's we have to do is go to the school like you said, and do what you said, and in a day or so, we'll—”

“Richard, goddamn, sometimes I don't think you got a brain in that head of yours. Not a one. How careful you look at this?”

Richard hung his head in shame.

“Not very,” he said.

“Didn't think so, Richard. Tell me, Richard, you ever looked at a sports page in your life? Or you only look at books with pictures of naked women in ’em?”

“I-I-I don't like games,” Richard said sullenly, punching out his lower lip.

“Well, on most sports pages; they got what they call a schedule. Yes, indeedy, and all you need to do is lookiesee and there it is.”

“There what is?”

“The schedule. Of the games. Don't you think this old hero cop Bud Pewtie going to want to see his kid play ball?

I mean, really, don't you think?”

“He would. Daddy,” said Ruta Beth.

“You damned betcha,” said Lamar.

“And according to this here schedule… there's a goddamn game tonight."” He looked at the two of them.

“Better git your mitts, boys and girls. We's going to a ball game.”