Dirty White Boys

CHAPTER 5

Richard knew he was smart. He read at three. He was in gifted and special classes all the way through school, with grades way off the charts and an IQ that always opened eyes. And his talent: eerie, vivid, almost supernatural. A special, precious kind of boy, who impressed all exposed to him, all the way through.

But Lamar was smart.

Put Richard on the street and he's dead. Put Richard in jail and he's dead. Put him in Russia, in ancient Rome, on Mars, in the Marine Corps, all those places he's dead.

Not Lamar. Lamar ends up running most of them, or in their prisons, running them. Lamar just knows. Always, always figuring. Show him a problem and he breaks it down fast and right, though not the way a normal man might: He breaks it down so there's more for him and less for you.

That's his one moral law, and having accepted it, he has no qualms or doubts. He works this law passionately and with straightforward conviction. What is Yeats's line?

“The worst are full of passionate intensity"? That's it. That's Lamar. A sly genius at disorder, a prince of chaos.

These thoughts rocketed through Richard's oh-so-busy brain as he drove the little trio in Willard Johnson's four-year-old Dart west of Ada toward Ratliff City, toward Mr. Bill Stepford, Sr's place, where Mr. Stepford, Sr.” and family had some guns that they would take, by any means possible. Richard tried not to think of that part. These poor people were condemned: Hurricane Lamar would hit them, abetted by Cyclone O’Dell, and wipe them out. They were the dead, sitting there in their little farmhouse even now, watching the television, finishing up the peach cobbler, wondering about the upcoming Grange meeting, deer season, and the possibility of Oklahoma ever getting some sort of major professional sports franchise.

They had fought in wars and paid taxes and said their prayers for sixty-odd years and loved each other and the land that supported them, and they were dead. The existential majesty of it overwhelmed Richard.

Both Lamar and O’Dell were asleep in the back. He could hear them breathing, the even-odd-even-odd rhapsody of their snores, broken now and again by a belch or the rippling percussion of a smelly fart (O’Dell farted all the time and then smiled and said, "O’Dell ma key stinky.") Their presence held not only terror but squalor and banality as well: They were so crude, bald, itchy, raw, unvarnished, brutes of the id.

Richard looked out the window at the silent alfalfa fields of Oklahoma, the long and dreadful wait in the van at last over. He fought down a sob and studied a patch of sky, riddled with stars.

Richard thought: I could do it. I could slew the car off the road, throw the door open, and run, run away, flee. The police would find me eventually. I could explain. Just like the other thing: It's not my fault. Really. I was made to do it, I had no choice.

But he knew this was complete illusion. He could no more get away from Lamar than he could face him down and kill him. Lamar was everything.

Lamar would run him down and break his neck with those strong hands, watching him with those superficially charming but ultimately em-pathyless eyes; then, as he was dying of asphyxiation, his spine having punctured his lungs, Lamar would fuck him in the ass, laughing; that would be how Richard left this world.

He wouldn't do it, of course. It made him nervous to even consider such a thing. If Lamar could see what he was thinking, Lamar would kill him for thinking it. Lamar was an absolute god: he demanded obedience as sternly as the figure in the Old Testament.

He looked out the window again.

“Be easy, wouldn't it, Richard?” Lamar asked softly from behind him.

It startled Richard; he jumped.

“You scare so quick, Richard,” Lamar laughed in a whisper.

“But it would be easy, wouldn't it?”

“What, Lamar?”

“You know. Dump us. Take off. Go on, admit it. You thought of it.”

“It's not my nature to be bold.”

“No, it ain't. I could see that from the start. But I will change that. Richard, I swear to you, you stick with me, I may not make you rich or even free, but by God, you will be a man. Do you read me?”

“Yes sir,” said Richard.

“Don't youSir' me, boy. I ain't no goddamned officer.

I'm your friend, Richard, do you believe me? Your only friend.”

“Yes, Lamar.”

“You don't like the killing, do you?”

“No, I don't.”

“Son, what that means, you raised in a different place than Lamar and O’Dell. Where Lamar come from, you hadda fight like shit every damn day or someone take it all from you. I do not enjoy it. I am not a low-down, trashy man. But a man has to do what he has to do to look after his people.

Do you understand?”

“I do.”

“That's good. That's very good.”

No, it was very bad, because in the glare of their headlights a solitary mailbox stood against the glinting black tarmac before it and the fields of wheat country, now fallow in summer, behind it. It said simply stepford

“Party time,” said Lamar.

It fell to Richard. Lamar explained patiently.

“This old farm lady, she take a look at me and she's on the phone to the county sheriff. I got something about me scares people. You, Richard, you got no tattoos and a girly body, you couldn't hurt a flea.

So you knock on the door and get us in and when I come in, you make sure that old man don't make it to no gun.”

They parked halfway down the farm road. Richard could see the house, its windows glowing, standing in the middle of a barnyard, the barn towering nearby. It looked like a Christmas card. He yearned for moral destitution, some sign of country decadence, so that there'd be some sense that these people deserved what Lamar had in mind for them; but no. It was too pretty, a banal quaintness, possibly too studied. A farm from a Potemkin village.

O’Dell split off back; he'd come in the rear when Lamar came in the front. It was about ten o’clock. Why were the old people up so late?

“Y-you won't hurt them if you don't have to?” Richard asked.

'"Course not,” said Lamar.

“I ain't low-down. Only, see, we do need these guns. Suppose Johnny Cop pulls down on us. Go back to the pen? Let the niggers do us up?

You too, up so fine? Even O’Dell? No sir, can't let that happen.”

“Okay. Just so I have your assurance.”

“You can count on me,” said Lamar.

Richard watched as he melted into the darkness. He stood alone, breathing hard, in the brisk night, hearing the wind beat through the trees and now and then the squawk and rip of small things in the dark, fighting or dying. There was no moon; the stars rolled like wheat fields, torrents of them, high above, remote pinwheels of ancient fire.

Richard wanted to weep but he could only obey: he counted in his head and when he reached the number three hundred, off he went.

As he approached the house he could see the old man sitting in his study, under some mounted game animals; a glass gun case stood against the wall; there was no old lady anywhere in sight, but he saw the blue glow of a television from an upstairs room.

He prayed there weren't grandkids or something in the house, or visiting relatives.

He knocked on the door. Maybe they'd be smart. Nobody just opened the door to strangers in the night these days. Maybe they'd be smart and call the sheriff, or get a gun and drive the interlopers away. He knocked again, praying for inaction.

The door opened wide.

“Why hello,” the woman said.

“Er, hello. I'm, I'm an art teacher in Oklahoma City. My car broke down on the road. I was wondering if you could call the Triple A. I don't have to come in.”

“And wait out there in the cold? Why, I wouldn't hear of it. That's the silliest thing I ever heard say. You come on in out of the chill and we'll get the tow truck on its way. Do you like coffee?”

Lamar slid in like a shadow of a cat and seemed to envelope her, muffling her cry. He had the shank hard against her throat, and Richard fixated on the way its blade pressed against her white, loose skin. She made a weeping sound, and in her desperation her eyes settled on Richard; they were widening in terror and begging, please, for mercy.

Richard shuddered and looked away.

Two loud crashes boomed through the house, and O’Dell, for some bizarre reason without his shirt and with his hair wet and slicked back, broke in from the rear, an ax in his hand. He paused to howl at the ceiling or the sky beyond the roof, and Richard watched in abject fascination as the cry arose from him and his body shivered in rapture. All his demons were free and dancing in the room. He raced for the study where the old man looked up at him in utter befuddlement, then cowered from the blow he seemed about to receive from the immense half-naked man with the ax.

“The guns, Richard,” ordered Lamar.

Richard ran to the gun case. Its glass stopped him. Inside, the gleaming treasures lay in repose. He could see green and yellow boxes of cartridges stacked neatly in the corner. He tried the handle, but the thing was locked. It baffled him, and then the bafflement departed as the glass seemed to explode out at him. O’Dell had just blasted it with the ax.

“Wook oub,” said O’Dell, raising the ax in another mighty effort.

Richard fell back as the ax smashed the door off the frame, and O’Dell greedily pulled a long-barreled gun from the rack and a box from the shelf, and began inserting red tubes into the weapon. With an oily klak he cycled it and turned.

“Dwan mub,” he commanded, but the old man hadn't.

He sat there shaking, literally stunned into shock from the way the universe had conspired in an instant to deconstruct his life.

Lamar had dumped the old woman, and came over to examine what lay before him.

“Goddamn,” he said almost immediately.

“Shotguns!

Shotguns! You don't got no pistols? What the fuck is the matter with you, you old piece of shit!”

Angrily, he kicked the case. Then, grasping his fury, he took a shotgun off the rack and threaded shells into it. He pumped it, pointed it upwards, and fired.

The noise was terrific.

Richard had never been near a gun going off before in his life. The pain of it assaulted his ears. So loud! A satisfying rain of plaster cascaded down on Lamar, who smiled at this tiny victory over the world.

O’Dell was dancing merrily around the room. Now and then he would smash something and holler. The two old people found each other at the couch, the woman weeping in the old buzzard's arms.

At last, Lamar went over to them.

“I thought you hunted, old fuck. You! I'm talking to you.

You want me to gut the heart out of that old bitch? You talk to me, motherfucker.”

The old man glared up at him.

“I gave up hunting deer last year. Sold all my center fires

“You what?”

“I killed over one hundred deer, two elk, three bears, and a moose. It was enough.”

“You fucking pussy, I want CENTER FIRE I want OOOMPH! I want AUTOMATIC! I want a goddamn BERETTA! I want COLT! I want MAGNUM! You dick sucking old puss, I wouldn't even fuck your scrawny ass, I'd give it to Richard. Richard, if he don't tell where the pistols are, fuck his ass. You hear me: Fuck him good up the ass and fuck his old lady up the ass.”

“Tell him. Bill,” said the woman.

“I can't,” said the old man.

“Tell him, Bill,” said the woman.

“He'll just take them and go out and kill people in the world. He's going to kill us anyway. We're dead already. It don't matter none.”

He turned to Lamar.

“You know, back in 1944, a lot of blond young men tried to kill me, in airplanes called Messerschmitts. But I bombed their factories and killed their wives and children and destroyed their filth. You're them, you prison scum. Go ahead, fuck my ass and fuck my old wife's ass. You can hurt me but you can't scare me.”

Lamar, for the first time in his life, seemed a little unsure.

“Richard, you hear that? A goddamn hero. O’Dell?”

“It's the Pyes,” the old man told his wife.

“On the news, the escapees. Just the worst trash. A sane society would have executed them both years back. Well, to hell with you, Lamar Pye and this simpleton and your little homosexual pal.”

“I'm not a homosexual,” said Richard.

The old man spit on Richard.

Richard looked at the glob on his shirt. Then he looked at the old man. He was one of those scrawny old types, mostly leather and sinew, with furiously burning blue eyes. He looked like the sort of man who rose at four a . every morning and gave hell in buckets to any' and all that had displeased him over his long life. He probably had a million dollars in the bank and believed he could take it to heaven with him. His children probably all secretly hated him, just as Richard had secretly hated his father. But like Richard, this man's children would never dare express their contempt directly.

“You goin' to let him do that?” said Lamar.

Why did he have to do that? thought Richard.

“You can't let a man do that. An old man with two shotguns on him, who thinks he's a hero. You got to break him down, boy.”

“He's afraid,” said the old man.

“I can smell it on him.

His underpants are brown and smelly. It happened in the Eighth Air Force all the time. Men like him/ they never made their twenty-five missions. Your underpants—a mess, right?”

Richard swallowed. Yes, as a matter of fact, they were.

He wasn't sure when it had happened but now he knew that it had. He swallowed again, wondering who he'd explain this to, then kicked the old man in the leg.

“Way to go, Richard. You show him. You be a goddamned man, Richard,” shouted Lamar.

Everyone always talks, Lamar knew. That's the rule. But the old man had more grit than you find on the average yard, and Richard didn't have the stuff to get it out of him, even though he kicked him a batch of times as he lay curled on the floor in front of his weeping wife.

“Okay, Richard,” Lamar finally said, not because he felt a pang of mercy for the square John but because Richard was truly disgusting him, his face all knit up like a girl's as he pranced his prissy way around him, kicking without a lot of force.

Richard looked at him, face twisted in emotion. Not rage, exactly; just some kind of terrible excitement. Shit, Lamar thought he looked like someone had stuck a pickle up his ass.

“O’Dell” Lamar commanded.

O’Dell turned the old man over on his back and twisted his arm backward and up like a corkscrew until the old man screamed. Meanwhile Lamar went looking for liquor.

Could these people be Christian teetotalers? He had heard of such a thing but found it hard to imagine. The screams behind him were irritating.

He wandered into the pantry. Didn't quality usually keep booze in a pantry? Lamar looked around. He had never been in a house like this before. He wondered what it would be like living in a house like this.

Pictures of a bunch of kids on the walls. He looked closely: it was like they were from Mars or something. All these kids and these pretty women and handsome boys who had to be the old man's daughters or sons or something. He wondered what it would be like to fuck a woman who looked like that? They didn't look like the Penthouse bitches, with the perfect round tits and the creamy skin. It looked fake, even if most evenings it got you off. These gals looked real, somehow, and sweet and tender. He imagined the fear in their eyes if he decided to fuck them. Lamar hadn't had true pussy in almost a decade. He'd almost forgotten what it would be like. Even now, he was a little unsure if he'd taste it before they finally got him.

There it was: brown bottles in a row, in a locked cabinet.

He yanked the door open and a little piece of lock broke off. Some lock. Jack Daniel's Old No. 7, Tennessee drinking whiskey. Couldn't do better than that. He unscrewed the cap, took a swallow. Goddamn.

Like wet smoke. Burns all the way down, your eyes tighten like fists and little tears come to them. Only way the world would ever get tears out of Lamar Pye. He took another quick swallow, then put back the bottle. Best not to let O’Dell know. Sober, O’Dell could be hard enough to handle. Drunk he could be death, and impossible. If Billy Cop came a-knocking, it wouldn't do any good to let O’Dell be drunk, because Lord knew that goddamned Richard boy would be no good in a fight with the law.

He wandered into the room with the television. The news was on. Some trashy-looking woman with an armful of babies was blubbering while two or three pretty girl reporters stood around and watched her melt down.

She was blubbering about her poor husband Willard and what a good man he was. Lamar realized that was the wife of his Willard in the truck.

Goddamn. Willard, he thought. You sure married yourself an ugly woman. But he sort of wished he'd fucked her, ugly or not. He wanted to fuck something, that was for sure.

Maybe he'd fuck the old man later.

Next his own picture came on, and somebody was talking about him, saying the authorities considered the escapees to be "armed and extremely dangerous.” Wasn't that a mouthful?

The picture was the lineup shot from nine years ago when he had been picked up by OK City homicide after he and O’Dell had tapped Nicky Pusateri for the Pagans.

Damnedest thing. You just could never tell. Shot that little prick square in the back of the head. Seen him go down, seen the blood squirt like tomato. Shot him again in the back and wrapped him in canvas and drove him twenty miles out and dumped him. And he was alive after all that?

He was, yes, and the dicks had come for Lamar, finding him stoned on amphetamines and living with a woman named Sally Two-Shoes, an Indian gal and sometime hooker who once in awhile would work a convenience store job with him and, though nobody ever found out about it, had killed her own father by drowning him in the toilet when he was drunk.

He'd been making her blow him from the time she was ten on until she finally killed him, age fourteen. Anyway, they'd dragged Lamar into downtown OK City, some fancy building, and taken his pictures; he remembered one of the dicks smelled of garlic. Lamar looked at the picture again in the second before it vanished;

he was wearing a golf shirt, the only one he'd ever had, with a little alligator on the pocket. Made him look like a pussy. Why'd he ever bought that shirt? His nose was squashed and his eyes dull and unfocused because he'd been sliding off the uppers; his lower lip hung open because his face was so relaxed on the drug downslope. His hair was long, though pulled tight behind him. He looked stupid.

It had been his last instant of freedom.

Then some anchorwoman came on. She was pretty, like the farmer's daughters and the girl reporters with Willard's wife, maybe prettier.

He wondered how it would be to fuck her, too. She was talking in a low, urgent voice about how dangerous these men were and how they should be avoided at all costs until the authorities finally caught up to them.

She talked about the terrible obscenity tattooed on Lamar's knuckles, and she talked about how three men were already dead. Her face got all long and somber.

It somewhat tickled Lamar, the edge of breathy fear in her voice. He liked that a lot. He knew he scared square people. They looked into his eyes and they just saw pain and horror. That is, if they looked into his eyes, and they seldom did, or seldom had, even back in the world. You tattoo a f u c k and a y o u I on your knuckles, tends to chill the straights out.

“Lamar?”

It was Richard.

“Yeah?”

“We got ’em. It was a vault. The old lady gave us the combination.”

“What happened to the old man?”

“He isn't breathing too well.”

“He should have made it easy on his self Saved us the trouble. See what it got him? Oh well, fuck him if he can't take a joke.”

They walked on downstairs, then into the basement. A shelf holding jelly jars set in the wall folded out on hinges to reveal an open Tredlock gun vault that stood about four feet tall and whose shelves appeared to display all the handguns known to man.

“Fifty-six, thirty-three, oh-eight,” said Richard proudly.

“I opened it myself.”

Out of deference to Lamar, not even O’Dell had dipped inside. Lamar reached in and touched handguns, many of them.

“Turn on the goddamned light,” he said.

The light came out.

Lamar examined the wares and at last discovered what it was he wanted.

Yes, the man was a pistol shooter all right, and Lamar quickly seized what would be his prize. It was a45 automatic with an extremely long slide and barrel, maybe eight inches. It had fancy sights mounted low to the slide. He looked to see that it was a Colt all right, but someone had added a new inscription under the Colt name that said clark custom guns, new iberia, la.

“A bull's-eye gun?” asked Lamar.

“Go to hell,” said the old man, crumpled on the floor, face swollen.

“I do believe I will, yes sir,” said Lamar, "but it is a bull's-eye gun, ain't it?”

“Bill was state pistol champ, standing bull, rapid fire, three years in a row back in the seventies,” said the woman.

“It'd be a treat to see him shoot one day,” said Lamar, "but that ain't gonna happen.”

Then he reached inside the safe and came out with some thing else: It was a big Colt .357 Magnum revolver with a four-inch barrel called a Python. He handed it to Richard.

“Here,” he said.

“You're a man now.” Then he turned to the old lady.

“I bet you know how to cook real good. How'd you' like to who mp up a real country breakfast? Eggs, bacon, juice, the works. I am hungry as hell and so are my friends, grandma.”

“Don't help him a bit,” said the old man.

“You are going to kill us,” said the old lady.

“Yes ma'am, I probably will have to, not on account of not liking you but because that's the way things is. But could we eat first?”

“I suppose so,” said the old woman.

“You're a fool, Mary,” said the old man.

“Now Bill,” said Lamar, "Mary's just trying to be a good neighbor.”