Dirty White Boys

CHAPTER 8

He felt his lips first. It was as if they were caked in mud or scab or something. Experimentally, he tried to move them and felt them crack apart, breaking into plates of dry skin. There was no moisture in his mouth.

He heard the drip-drip-drip of something. He could not move. His body was hardly there. He seemed unable to focus or remember anything except orange flashes, flowers, the buzz of insects. Then he remembered Lamar leaning over Ted and the way Ted's hair puffed from the muzzle blast. He remembered curling. He remembered the shotgun shell tearing into him. He remembered the pain.

Jen!

Jeff!

Russ!

Lost, they were all lost. He felt like his own father, that handsome, rigid man, glossied up in funeral parlor makeup, asleep in his coffin, redder and pinker in death than he'd ever been in life.

But there was light and maybe, now that he concentrated, sound. It was as if he were swimming up from underwater, a long, long way toward the surface. He just barely broke it and the smell of something came to his nose… bourbon.

It C. D. Henderson of the OSBI was looking at him through specs. The lieutenant fell in and out of focus. Now he was an old man, now a pure jangle of blur. Finally he cranked into some kind of stability.

“He's coming to,” the lieutenant said, as if into a megaphone.

The words reverberated in Bud's skull.

Jen appeared. He tried to reach out of death for her, but he was ensnared in a web. She appeared grief-stricken, her face -grave and swollen. He had not seen such feeling on that impassive face in so very long. Jeff swirled into view, intense and troubled. Russ, even Russ who never went anywhere with them anymore: Russ looked drained of anger and distance, and Bud could see the child in him still under the intensity of his stare.

“Oh, Bud, don't you dare die on me,” Jen said.

He couldn't talk.

“Dad,” Jeff said. Jeff was crying.

“Oh, God, Daddy, you made it, we're so damned lucky.”

He saw the plasma bag suspended over one bandaged arm and another bag dripping clear fluid over the other. He lay swaddled in bandages. He felt something attacking his penis and squirmed, thinking of rats. Then he remembered from other visits to emergency wards: a catheter. He was so thirsty.

“Jeff,” he said, finally.

Jeff kissed him on the forehead. He wished he could reach out and stroke his son's arm or something, but he couldn't move. Now and then a shot of pain would cut at him.

Russ reached over and just touched him on the arm.

Bud nodded and blinked at his oldest son.

“He's coming out,” a young man in a hospital uniform said, and Bud saw his nameplate, which read Dr. Something or other. When had doctors gotten so young?

He looked back to Jen. He felt a tear forming in his eye.

He saw young Jeff, so fair and pure, and Russ with all his complicated brains and hopes and hair, and recalled again the bullet blowing into poor Ted's skull.

Why did I do so poorly? Caught me without a thought in my head. Came in and took me down. Took us down. Lamar Pye blew us away.

“You're going to be all right. Sergeant Pewtie,” said the doctor.

“The blood loss is the main thing. Another hour and you'd have bled to death. That old guy was tough, I'll say.”

Bud's eyes must have radiated confusion, because Jen explained.

“Old Bill Stepford. He hiked thirteen miles through the dark until he came to a farm, and called the police. They got there by midnight.

They'd been looking everywhere but had no idea what had happened. You almost bled to death.

That was three days ago.”

“T-T-T-Ted?” he managed.

“Don't you worry 'bout Ted,” said C. D. Henderson.

“He ain't in no pain where he is now.”

He had to know one last thing, even as the effort of asking it seemed to drain him of energy and will.

“Why?”

“Why,” said CD.”

“because that damned Lamar is scum, that's why.”

Bud shook his head imperceptibly.

“Why… am… I… alive?”

“Cause you ain't a dove, that's why,” said C.D.

“Old man Stepford was a dove hunter come the fall. Only shells Lamar could find was light birdshot. Numbers eight and nine. A surgical team had you on the table over four hours, Bud. Dug close to a thousand pieces of steel shot out of your hide. But not none of them life-threatening and there ain't going to be no lead poisoning neither.

Lamar popped you with maybe five, six shells from a sawed-off barrel.

He must have thought he'd blown your heart and guts out from all that blood. Hah, goddamned good thing you left your goddamned vest off! But anyway he'd sawed that barrel off to a nub and the shot pattern opened up and nothing got inside your chest cavity or to your spine and nervous system or your brain. Tell you what, though. You ain't goin' through no metal detector no more, Bud.”

Bud slept until he swam up again to brightness. This time he focused onto the face of Col. W. D. Supenski, superintendent of the Highway Patrol. The colonel was another version of Bud: husky and remote with the public, with one of those pouchy faces that looked like feed sacks left out for a decade on a fence post, he'd been a Marine fighter ace in the Vietnam war all those years back and, in the company of those he trusted—other white men who carried guns and believed in the abstraction of Authority—could be quite a folksy old charmer.

“Well, damn. Bud,” he said, "not even old Lamar Pye could put you out of commission!” The colonel had small, dark eyes that were capable of three expressions: blankness; sick, consuming fury; and genuine delight. It was the latter force that beamed through them today.

“Though I must say, I've seen turkeys hanging in the barn that looked a sight better.”

Bud offered a feeble smile. No one in his family was in evidence.

“Been talking to Jen, Bud. She's a fine woman. You are a lucky, lucky man there, Bud.”

Bud nodded.

“Bud, it's my great pleasure to tell you that the Department of Public Safety and the Oklahoma Highway Patrol has decided to confer on you the highest duty award it is within our power to give, the Medal of Valor.”

Bud swallowed.

“We found six spent cases from your .357, Bud, and your empty speed loader Severely wounded and under fire from two sides by murderous killers, you were able to draw and engage the enemy and even reload. And maybe it was the fear you put in the Pye boys that made ’em release the Stepfords three hours later. Maybe you saved those lives, too. And if your damned partner hadn't done the baby-goo on you, you boys might have even brought the Pyes down.”

“Sir,” Bud said, "Ted tried his damnedest.”

“I'm sure he did. Bud. But the fact is, you returned fire and he didn't. We found him on his belly with his hands over his head and his legs drawn up like a little baby. He just lay there and they came and shot him. He didn't fire a bullet! Bud, the truth is, we get paid to stand up to boys like that. That's what the people want. Now, Ted's going to get a posthumous award. The Oklahoma Highway Patrol Star of Bravery. His name goes on the big plaque at Department of Public Safety in Oklahoma City. And a funeral! Bud, we're going to have troopers from all over America coming in. Because our community hangs together in times like these.”

“He should get the best medal,” Bud said.

“Not that medals mean a damned thing.”

“Bud, it don't mean much now and I know how you feel.

I lost more than a few wingmen. But in years to come, that medal will mean more and more, especially to your boys. I know. I been there.”

“Yes sir,” said Bud.

“Now what about the Pyes? Did we pick them up yet?”

“Fact is, the damned Pye boys have dropped off the earth. Don't know where they are. We got OSBI and FBI and troopers and sheriffs and MPs all over the state digging for ’em. Even the goddamned media is cooperating, though it's a first. We'll get ’em.”

Bud nodded, but he didn't agree. Lamar might be savage and crazed, but he wasn't dumb. He had that inmate cunning, always had an angle to play.

“Now Bud, you just rest. Take your time in recovering, and I've already talked to Jen. You just let yourself mend.

You don't never have to go back in a cruiser again. If you want that lieutenancy that you turned down so many times, it's yours. You could get paid for the job you already do, which is running a troop, if Captain James is telling the truth. Bud, you'd get a captaincy eventually, and your own troop. Or, we could bring you up to headquarters to run the firearms training section. You'd like that, wouldn't you Bud? Be a fine cap on a fine career!”

Bud smiled meekly, knowing he didn't have to say a thing.

The next time he came awake, it was the pain that awakened him. The drugs had worn off. How he stung! He felt like a horde of bees had worked him over. Every little twist and jiggle and the bees got back to work. This wasn't going to be no piece of cake.

He was desperately thirsty. Jen poured him a glass of water, and he drank it greedily. He had the sense it was another day or so later, and that it was night.

“How's Holly?” he finally said.

“Oh, that girl's taking it fine. Sometimes it doesn't hit them for a bit. She'll have some rough days ahead. I was over there last night.

Donna James and Sally Mcginley and a few of the others had brought hot dishes. It was very nice.

She seemed all right, I suppose. She was very happy for all the support and everyone agreed it was best she hadn't had kids yet. She'll remarry, there'll be plenty of time for that.

They're going to give Ted a medal, one of the highest. The funeral will be something very special.”

“How was she… toward you?”

“Toward me? Why, Bud, whatever do you mean?”

“I got her husband killed, that's what I mean. I like to have shot that boy myself from the way I handled things.”

“You stop that. Bud. No one has said such a thing, or even thought it, I would know. You-all ran into pure black evil, that's all there is to it.”

But Bud didn't think so. What percentage of his awareness had he lost in his little snit about almost getting caught? It came back to him; that's what he'd been thinking about on the drive from the road to the farmhouse. Had he missed something? Car tracks, signs of disturbance, any of the little things, the signals a policeman has to be aware of, that might keep him alive? Had he gone out back, where they must have stashed Willard Jones's stolen car? No, not Bud. Goddamn Bud was just sawing away on some other bullshit, about getting himself caught with his pants down.

Open the door, and let in Mr. Lamar Pye, thank you very much. And Lamar did what Lamar would do, because that was Lamar: you only had to look at those glaring eyes or read the Jacket about the long list of felonies and killings to know what Lamar was about.

A black vapor seemed to blow through his mind.

“I want to go to the funeral,” he finally said.

“I have to do something for Ted.”

“Bud, they say—”

“I WANT TO GO!” he yelled in a violent husband's voice that meant he wanted no discussion.

“It's tomorrow,” Jen said.

“Go get a doctor, goddammit, Jen, do it!”

“Bud!”

“I have to go to that thing. It's the last and only chance I'll have to do right by him. That's all there is to it.”

It was sunny, a fabulous day in April, and the oaks looked full and majestic against the flat and dusty plains of the Lawton Veteran's Cemetery. The breeze rattled the leaves—so much shimmering green, all of it stirred by the persistent wind, that Oklahoma wind that seemed to wash over everything—amid the gray stones that stood over men who’d died because a bitch called duty had said so. Far off to the northwest stood Mount Scott, hardly a mountain but still the commanding elevation in the Wichitas: It was an ancient, dry old hill, bleak and stony.

Bud was so sunk into himself now he could hardly focus.

The beauty of the place and the death of the place; he responded to it in an especially bitter way. Maybe it was the drugs. They had to keep him stoked to the gills or the pain would begin to build. But Bud was the sort of man, as Jen would tell you, who, when he sets his mind on a thing, that thing comes to pass. So Bud sat in the wheelchair as Jen pushed him along. He wore his dress hat, his dress uniform, and Ray-Bans because his eyes were hollow and blood rimmed seven small bandages were visible on his face and neck; under his shirt a single huge wrapping protected his hundreds of wounds, and on his legs still more of the smaller patches. He could walk if he had to, a slow step at a time, but for now this was all right.

What he felt more than anything was fatigue. Not pain, not anger, not regret: a ton of liquid lethargy. The air weighed too heavily upon his body. He wanted to sleep but he couldn't sleep. He had no words for anybody. The glasses, sealing his eyes off, helped, but he had the enormous urge to just lie down and go to sleep. Nothing seemed worth two cents anywhere in the world.

But he knew he had to be here somehow.

Jen and Jeff pushed him across the flatness. Up ahead, they could see a little draw where the last ceremony was beginning. Troopers from all fifty states and police representatives from nearly as many cities around the country had arrived. When these things happened it was amazing how many cops wanted to be part of it, to come by and say, there, brother, it's all right. It could just as easily have been me.

You did your best.

“Bud, you all right?” Jen asked.

He'd snapped at her twice as they were getting him dressed. He knew he was behaving badly in front of his son.

“Yes, I am fine,” he said.

“I'm ready to go dancing, goddammit.”

“Dad,” said Jeff.

“I'm sorry, Jen,” he said.

“Ain't fit to sleep with the dogs today.”

That goddamned Lamar Pye running around free as a bird and poor Ted is going into the ground. Wasn't right.

Wasn't no kind of right.

Now the anger seethed through him. He could live with the pain, but the anger was something else entirely. Could he live with that? He didn't know.

Up ahead, he could see TV vans parked and handsome people in the artificial brightness of the camera lights standing apart from the milling crowd of law enforcement types.

That irked him, too. He'd been watching the TV news.

Seemed like Lamar and O’Dell Pye had become famous and poor old Ted was second-string. There had been long interviews with "miracle survivors”

Bill and Mary Stepford and a hundred shots of the most famous oak tree in Oklahoma, the one behind which he and Ted had cowered while Lamar and O’Dell had fired and advanced on them. There was footage of shotgun shells and pistol cases littering the ground, a night shot of the caravan of vehicles at the farm, the blue-and-red eggbeaters filling the darkness with their urgency, the medevac chopper rising to haul bloody Bud Pewtie to Comanche Memorial Shocktrauma, even a shot of poor shot-up Bud on the trundle being wheeled in from the roof to the emergency room. He looked dead as hell, face white, partially covered by a bloody sheet, one shoe off and one shoe on.

“Jen pushed him through the crowd, which magically melted and stilled.

Now and then a low "Howdy, Bud” rose, and Bud nodded to acknowledge. As the last of the crowd parted, Jen slid him into the front row where the big shots sat. Colonel Supenski in his dress blues, a man from the Governor's Mansion standing in for a governor who couldn't make it, two old people who had to be Ted's grieving parents, Captain James, and at the end of the row, Holly.

If he had been seeing her for the first time, he'd have fallen in love with her all over again. She looked still and grave and almost numb; but her skin had blossomed somehow, as if it were dewy with moisture; she seemed as pale as a white rose, her eyes focused on nothing as she just sat there in a kind of solemn haze.

Told you I'd see you on the day we got off it, he thought.

Another one of my damned lies.

She felt him looking at her, and she smiled.

The smile blew him away.

He loved her smile. One of the best parts of their intimacy was the way they laughed so hard at each other's strange jokes. They shared some kind of wavelength or something.

Holly rose and came over and smiled bravely at Jen and knelt down and touched his hand.

“How are you, old trooper?” she said.

“Holly, I tried so hard. Just couldn't save him. They got us cold.”

“It's okay, Bud.”

She rose and gave Jen a hug and then hugged Jeff before returning to her seat.

Bud had been through too many before. The details were all familiar, and only the tiniest, most meaningless deviations set this one apart from the others. A trooper honor guard consisting of one man each from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and Missouri walked the casket from the hearse to the bier and set it down, and only one man was out of step by the end of the trek instead of the usual two.

The casket was heavy, but they always were: just dead weight, after all. The elaborate business of the flag folding proceeded awkwardly because the team was newly united; but eventually they got it crushed into the tricorn shape, only stars showing, and the team leader presented it to Holly with a little salute.

Twenty yards off, the seven-man firing team fired three volleys, for a total of twenty-one; the volleys were ragged as they always were, and, in the vast space, the gunfire thin.

The worst moment was always taps. It didn't matter if the bugler played it well or poorly, in tune or out; there was something in the mournful ache of the music, and how it spoke of men dying before their time for something they only vaguely understood and being only vaguely appreciated by the people on whose behalf they died, that made it hurt so much. Bud bit back a tear, feeling the blackness in him rise and rise yet again. He saw the puff of hair as the slug went in and Lamar unbending from the task with the blank eyes of a carpenter or a stonemason.

No words were said, beside an invocation by the minister.

And then it was over, that fast. Holly was swept up and embraced and borne out. The troopers and cops began to file to their cars.

“Okay, Bud?” Jen wanted to know.

“Or do you want to stay a bit.”

“No, let's get out of here.”

Four days later. Bud was released from the hospital. At home, he lay there feeling slightly liberated. But in a bit the -black vapor settled over him again, almost like a blanket that he could pull tight.

Someone had warned him of this:

post-stress syndrome, a bitch to get through, feelings of worthlessness and failure and bone-grinding fatigue. All right, so: I got it but good.

He chased Jen out and she slept in the living room. She never saw him cry; nobody had ever seen him cry and goddamned if he would start now with that shit. But he had a night when he cried and another night when he locked himself in the toilet and threw up bad. The doctor dropped by twice a day, and there was a long session with Colonel Supenski, a highway patrol shooting investigation team, and homicide investigators from the Murray County Sheriff's Department and the county prosecutor's office. Bud told it all to them, except his surliness over the near slip of being caught by Jen; they went over it doggedly, who was where when the shots came, this and that, like a slow-mo replay in a football game. Would Bud testify before a grand jury in order to get a true bill against Lamar? Bet your ass he would!

He tried not to think of Holly, but at night that came over him, too: the flash of the gun, the softness of her skin, the ugly powder burn melted into Ted's skull, the tautness of her nipples, the grin on Lamar's face as he pivoted with the shotgun, the smoothness inside her thighs. One became the other: flash and explode, orange ness pain, ecstasy, all of it crammed together. He yearned to call her. But he couldn't.

On the fourth day, it was at last time to rise. He got himself up and slung on blue jeans, a starched white shirt with a point collar, a good pair of Tony Lama boots, brown with a black shaft. He threw a bolo tie, with a horse's head on the clasp, around the shirt neck, tightened it up. He slid a Colt Commander with a Shooting Star magazine crammed with eight hollow tips into his waistband over his kidney, then pulled on a sports coat.

He lumbered down the steps, at first feeling woozy. But then he got the hang of it.

“Jen, I'll be out a bit. Then I'll stop at the hospital. Back before dark.”

She came from the kitchen and intercepted him at the front door. Her face was gray and remote and, as always, somewhat impassive, except for the glare in her eyes.

“You can hardly walk. Just what do you think you're doing. Mister?”

“I feel I have to say something to that farmer.”

“Write him a letter or give him a call. That's why they invented the telephone.”

“Without this old boy's gumption, I'm in the ground and you're the one they're bringing the hot dishes to.”

“Send him a card. Bud, you still have steel in you. Suppose something breaks free and you start bleeding again.

You could bleed to death.”

“If I was meant to bleed to death, I'd have done it with a thousand steel balls in me, not in my truck driving out to the country.”

“Do you have a gun?”

“The Commander.”

“Good. I don't want you out in the world without some protection.”

“Didn't do much good the last time,” he said, "but the theory sounds promising.”

Bud went to his truck, a blue Ford F250, climbed in, and stuck the key into the column switch, then paused. Christ, would there always be somebody pulling on him? Would it ever end?

Looking carefully left and right, he eased out the clutch and backed into the highway, then threw a bit of gravel as -he accelerated. In seconds he came to a larger road and slipped into traffic behind a huge cattle carrier.

Bud worked his way through the gears in the heavy-duty four-speed, tugging the stick firmly, his feet light on the accelerator and clutch pedal. He loved the goddamned truck, he truly did.

But Bud didn't drive straight out to the Stepfords'. With no conscious thought at all, he stopped at a convenience store and went to the pay phone. He dropped the quarter and dialed the number. It was just like the last time, in front of the diner, just that simple.

In time she answered.

“Howdy,” he said.

“Thank God you called,” Holly whispered.

“Oh, Bud, I can't talk now. The minister is here. He thinks he's helping.

Oh, lord, seeing you would help.”

“I been home and couldn't call, you know. I've got something to do anyway. Can you meet me in Elgin, that diner, Ralph's, I think it is, say about two this afternoon?”

“I'll be there.”

Bud hung up and returned to the truck. The drive to the Stepfords' passed without incident. On the way he drove by the diner where the waitress had mentioned Bill Stepford's absence: Why hadn't that set bells ringing?

Reason was, a policeman will knock on a thousand doors in a career, maybe a hundred thousand. Maybe a thousand policemen knocking on a hundred thousand doors over a twenty-year span will produce one Lamar Pye, waiting in the window with a semiauto shotgun, ready to blow them to hell and gone. The numbers say: Go ahead, knock on the door. Lamar was just the road accident that happens to other people and makes life interesting.

Bud now came to the mailbox and the road into the farm.

He turned, headed down it. The same line of oak trees, the same just-turned wheat fields, the same eventual arrival at the house itself, a white clapboard structure with new rooms added every decade or so; the porch, the barn, the feeding pens, the mud, the hay. It all looked the same, except now the yard was much crisscrossed with tire tracks from the multitude of emergency and police vehicles.

And the tree. Bud looked at what for two or three days had been the most famous tree in Oklahoma and North Texas, where he and Ted had sought cover and from which he had fled to the cruiser to call for backup, not making it.

Bud parked where he'd parked before, the obvious place.

It was now as it was then: still, green, just a farm. He had a bad moment where he didn't want to get out. Am I ruined now? he wondered.

No real fear for twenty-five years, but then I've never been hit in twenty-five years. Now, has this thing ruined me? Am I afraid to make the stop or knock on the door? His breath came in little spurts.

He opened the truck door, hearing the buzz of cicada as he had that day. He smelled alfalfa and animal shit, as on any farm. He stood for a moment, looking around. It could have been that day, same bright weather and warmth, same time. But then his knee began to hurt because there was a tiny ball of steel under the kneecap that the surgeons hadn't had time to get out. Maybe they'd go back and get it, maybe Bud could live with it. And as he thought about that one, in a hundred other places, his body began to sing. The Percodan was wearing off; he checked his watch, it was an hour till the next dosage.

Shit, he thought. It wasn't a bad dream. It all happened.

He closed the door and headed to the house, but halfway up, as before, he was intercepted by a man with a shotgun.

“Now, hold on, mister, this ain't a tourist attraction. You got business you see my lawyer, but otherwise you clear on out.”

Bill Stepford was spry and peppery as a cat, even with half of his face swollen like a blue-green grapefruit. He didn't exactly point the gun at Bud but just sort of clung tightly to it, as a man who’s gone without water may cling to a canteen even after his rescue. His blue eyes, one round, one flat, both fiery, burned into Bud and a Y of veins stood out on his forehead.

“Mr. Stepford, I ain't here to sell or buy a damn thing, I came to offer up my thanks.”

“Goddamn yes! Mary, come out! Look what's showed up! It's that Bud Pewtie, the man too tough to die. Up and about in six days—my lord, son, you must be made of pure gristle.”

“No, sir, I'm made of skin and bones, just like you, and maybe you saw some of the same kind of blood on the ground.”

“I surely did. Thought you were a goner.”

“I was till you walked halfway across Oklahoma and saved my hash.

That's what I came on by for.”

“Bud, dammit, it wasn't nothing. I'm an old coot who walks ten miles a day. If I hadn't gone two miles in the wrong direction to start, I might have gotten there earlier.”

“Don't think it would have made much difference, sir. I had another few hours of life left any way you cut it, and poor Ted was already in the barn.”

“Bud, you come on in and have some coffee and tell me all about your adventures.”

“Ain't much,” said Bud, following.

“Got a thousand holes in me and maybe a hundred of them little tiny balls no probe could get out. None of ’em went too deep. They just cut the Jesus out of me, that's all. I'm damned glad you hunt doves and not deer with those deer slugs.”

“Bud, I have a case of Winchester deer slugs under my workbench. Old Lamar just never found them! Don't that beat the monkey!”

They headed inside, laughing like old pals.

Mary Stepford, looking pale and leathery, rose from the sofa to greet them.

“Well, Mr. Pewtie, I swear, I never thought you'd be coming by for coffee.”

“I didn't either, ma'am. I thought my coffee-drinking days were over.”

“Well, you are a sight for these sore eyes,” the old woman said, and pulled him close and gave him a down home hug.

“I came by to thank you-all. A letter or a call didn't seem right, after what you did. You were the heroes.”

“A bad boy like Lamar don't leave you no choice, Bud.

You got to be at your best or you're finished.”

“You'll get him. Bud.”

“Ma'am, I have to confess, the last thing I want to do is run into the Pyes again. Scared me then, scare me now.

Maybe if I'd had a second, just a second, to get my bearings.

But it happened so fast.”

“That's scum for you,” said Bill.

“They know the advantage of surprise—works for ’em every damn time, just as it did against me.”

They had a nice little visit, and Bud kept it light, because the old woman seemed a little shaky, though old Bill Stepford was billowing brimstone and hellfire most of the time. He didn't really want to take them back through it.

What was the point, really?

When it came time for Bud to leave and the old man walked him back to his truck, only then did the conversation meander back to the three convicts. Stepford ran salty profiles of each one by Bud.

When Bud heard how useless Richard was, he wondered why Lamar hadn't dumped him.

- "Maybe it's the lions,” Stepford said.

Bud ad read all the police reports; he'd talked to colleagues just that morning to get the latest. But this was new.

“Lions?” he said.

“Yes sir. He drew pictures of lions for Lamar. Don't ask me why.

Silliest damn things.”

“You wouldn't, say, have them pictures?”

“Sure do, Bud. Care for a look?”

“Yes sir,” said Bud.

He was thinking, Lions?