Dirty White Boys (21 page)

“Yes, it is, Odell, and now we’re going to repaint it,” said Lamar, as he climbed from the dusty vehicle. “Richard, you’re a painter, ain’t you? Time to pull your weight, son. Let’s get this sucker repainted.”

But Richard looked like somebody had just squeezed all the air out of him. He was the color of dead petunias.

“What’s wrong, boy?”

“Odell hit me! Twice!”

“I don’t see no blood. If he
really
hit you, you’d be bleeding.”

“But he
hurt
me.”

“Odell, no bonky Richard. Richard nicey nice. Odell, go me sorry.”

Odell’s face lit in contrition. Genuine pain seemed to briefly shine from his eyes.

“Dell baddy bad,” he said.

“See, he apologizes, Richard. Okay? Does that take care of it?”

“Ah,” said Richard, “I suppose.”

“Lamar, the baby has been upset at your absence,” said Ruta Beth. “I wonder if we could control him if you weren’t here.”

“Don’t you fret that, hon,” said Lamar. “Now come on. We got work to do.”

But Richard wondered. For just a second there, it looked as if Odell was going to lose it. His dull eyes inflated in fear and rage, and it was as if his whole chest swelled. He had grabbed Richard and slapped him hard atop the head twice. Richard had felt like a rag doll. The fear/hate of losing Lamar had turned Odell briefly psychopathic and frightening.

It scared the shit out of Richard. In one of his “moods,” Odell could hurt anyone. He shuddered at the thought: Odell, alone in the world, without Lamar.

“Come on, boy, get to work,” commanded Lamar.

They spent the afternoon with cans of spray paint and Richard tried to lose himself in the work. He was surprised how much he enjoyed the simple task: It was freedom from lions, it was freedom from fear, it was freedom from Odell’s whimsy or the utter domination of Lamar. After a frenzy of taping over the trim, he sprayed the bright orange paint on the car in smooth, circular motions, almost as if it were an airbrush, amazed at how quickly the car picked up its new color and how good he was at it. He was much better than Lamar, a lot better than Ruta Beth, and completely better than Odell, who simply could not get the concept of smoothness and just hammered a spot onto a single sector of the car so clumsily that even Lamar saw the hopelessness of it and gave him another job. And pretty soon they had it: a nice orange car.

The next day, Friday, Lamar said to him, “Okay, Richard, you come with me today. We goin’ pick up our second car.”

“A second car?”

“Yes sir. It will surprise you how a dumb Okabilly like me got this sucker planned out, Richard. We actually going
to use three cars. Yep. You got to plan it right if you want to stay ahead of Johnny Cop. Them boys got their computers and their helicopters and their what-all. Gittin’ harder and harder to do an honest day’s stealing. But I think I got em buffaloed on this one, yes I do. Hey, boy, you’re a-running with the big dogs now. Ain’t it a toot?”

“Yes sir,” said Richard.

As they were pulling out of the farmyard in Ruta Beth’s Toyota, she came out and gave Lamar a little peck on the cheek.

“You be careful, hon.”

“I will. And you take good care of Odell. You watch him. He can wander off.”

“Don’t you worry about Odell. Me ’n’ him going to have a good time. I’m going to work and he’s going to spin the wheel for me.”

“Good. He feels useful then.”

“Richard, you mind Daddy. He knows what he’s doing.”

“Yes ma’am,” said Richard.

“Don’t be late, honey.”

“We won’t be.”

“You want the roast beef tonight?”

“That’d be super,” Lamar said.

They pulled out. Lamar was happy.

“Damn,” he said. “She’s the best goddamn girl a man could find. I’m a lucky man, Richard. Yes I am.”

They drove the mile down the red dirt road, turned left on 54, then, a few miles down, west on 62, toward Altus. The highway was flat across a flat land under a high western sky and a blaze of sun unfiltered by the thin clouds. The mountains jutted from the plains and the wind snapped across the earth. Now and then a tractor would slow traffic down or they’d meander through some one-horse town, a
brick bank and hardware store, a strip mall with an auto parts place and a Laundromat, the inevitable 7-Eleven.

“See,” said Lamar amiably, “trouble with those goddamned Seven-’Levens is that ever goddamned hour the manager sets a certain amount of the cash in the timelock vault. Through a little chute up top. So at any given time you can’t get but what the store’s taken in in the past hour. Ain’t hardly worth the goddamn trouble.”

He knew so much!

He knew how stores were organized, what kind of vaults they had, how police patrol shifts worked, how city and state cops differed in their investigative approaches, how to operate any kind of gun or machine, how to get into or out of anything, how to rewire or deactivate electronic security devices. It was as if he had burrowed into the very structure of the universe and knew all of its useful secrets.

“Now, Richard, I do want to talk to you ’bout Sunday.”

Sunday! Richard didn’t want to think about Sunday. He had just willed it out of his mind.

“You tell me what your job is.”

“I’m your tail gunner.”

“That’s it. Now, what’s a tail gunner do?”

“He pretends to be a victim of the robbery. He doesn’t pull a gun or anything. He’s just with the squares, his hands up, everything. But he’s watching in case there’s some hero or undercover cop.”

“You never know about undercover cops.”

“Or some cowboy. Lots of cowboys in Texas.”

“Now, Richard, what are you looking for?”

“Man with a gun.”

“And what might the signs be?”

“Ah—” Richard struggled to remember. “He’ll have a coat on, no matter how hot it is. And he’ll be very conscious of the coat. He’ll always be adjusting it, you know,
pulling it tight to keep it from falling open. You really think we may run into a man with a gun? Remember when that crazy guy went into Luby’s? There were a hundred people in there and not one of them had a gun.”

“We may not be so lucky. You going to see a bulge?”

“A bulge. Maybe a—”

“No, Richard, goddamn, don’t you remember nothing? These new holsters are real slick in holding the piece in tight to the body. In the old days, you could always see a bulge. It’s all changed now with this here ballistic nylon, plus all the cops wearing flat autos instead of rounded wheelguns. You probably be up against a boy with a Beretta or a Glock or a SIG. Rangers carry SIGs, Texas highway patrol, Berettas. You got to read his body. Got that?”

“Yes, sir,” said Richard disconsolately, feeling very much like a teenage boy who had disappointed his father.

“And what else?”

“Ah—what else?”

“What else.”

“I don’t know—”

“You dumbhead. It may be a bitch! Yeah, used to be damn few women working police and fewer by God of them packing guns. Now you got a goddamn one-in-five chance it’ll be a woman. Now if there’s an undercover or plainclothes or off-duty cop in there, you got one chance in five it’s a woman. Could be a woman with kids, woman at a table with her daddy or her old man, could be a nigger woman, a Mex, anything. You read the goddamned body, look for the way they carry their hands, the way they don’t swing about fast because it might cause the coat to fluff up, you got that?”

“Yes sir.”

“And if you see it and she goes for it when the job is coming down, Richard, what’s your assignment?”

“I have to shoot.”

“Yes sir, like I told you; gun out front, you look at the sights, you LOOK AT THE SIGHTS, and you fire fast, three times. You put her down, Richard, or she gonna put us down. You think you can’t do it? Think on this: I get hit, Odell may go hog wild with that AR. He could make that goddamned Luby’s thing look like Sunday school. You want that on your conscience?”

“No sir.”

“No sir. Quick in, quick out, nobody gets hurt, we go home rich.”

They were in downtown Altus now, driving through the dusty streets. It was a low old town, with no buildings over three stories, lots of closed-up storefronts, a general store, a courthouse and city hall that looked as if plush times had passed by many a year ago, the usual statue of Will Rogers, who never met a man he didn’t like, a few benches. But Lamar didn’t go for it.

“Too open. Pull ’round the other side of town, we’ll find something with a bit more privacy.”

They cut through what passed for the Altus suburbs, little houses swaddled under wilted trees, and soon enough hit the commercial strip, U.S. 283 running north.

“Yeah, this is more like it. Pull in there.”

Richard pulled into a strip mall crowded with cars. Food Lion was the big draw; there was also a yogurt shop, a county library, a Rexall, a movie complex with five tiny ratty little theaters, and a sporting goods store.

“Ooo, movies, ain’t that a treat. Pull in here, Richard.”

“We’re going to the movies?”

“No, Richard, we are not going to the movies. Richard, sometimes I wish I’d left you in that goddamn cell for the niggers. They’da been more happy, I’da been more happy, and hell, boy, maybe
you’da
been more happy.”

They sat in silence. In awhile a car pulled in, and a father and son got out and went up to the box office. The father bought two tickets and they went in.

“Now ain’t that a gift. See, Richard, he’ll be in there two hours. When he comes out, it’ll take him at least a half an hour to figure out that he didn’t forget where he parked his car, but that somebody stole it. It’ll take the cops, even in a hick burg like this, another fifteen, twenty minutes to come on by to write the goddamned report. By that time, we’ll have that sucker wearing a different color and new plates.”

Slowly, Richard drove over to the car, but Lamar said, “We got some time, you just cruise a bit. We got a last thing to talk about.”

Oh, Christ
, thought Richard.

“You got one other job.”

“What is it, Lamar?”

“Now, say something goes wrong. I catch some shit. I don’t make it out. Or I get hit bad and die in the car, bleed to death maybe. The law is closing in, it’s all gone down, it’s turned to yellow cat shit.”

“Lamar!”

“It could happen. This is risky business, sometimes the craziest things fuck you up. You listening? You can see it in your
mag-i-nation?”

All too easily. Richard felt like crying.

“I saved your ass from the niggers, I got you out, I got you this new life. Richard, if they catch you, you can tell them you was forced in all of this. Richard, you might even be a hero in all this, you could tell them all the bad things we done. The Stepfords will say you didn’t do nothing, that goddamn lucky-ass John Wayne-looking Smokey sergeant will say you didn’t shoot nobody. Hell, they’ll make a movie with what’s his fucking name, Richard Gere, that the
one, he’s playing you. But you owe me one thing, Richard.”

“Yes, Lamar.”

“You still got that Smokey’s gun? You ain’t lost it or nothing?”

“No, Lamar. I have it. It’s back at Ruta Beth’s under the mattress I sleep on.” He hated it. It was a big silver thing, hard and slightly greasy. He was supposed to dry-fire it a hundred times a night to develop strength in his hands, but he could never pull the trigger more than twenty-five times before it hurt too much.

“Oh, you don’t have it now? Great, Richard. Well, never mind. If it goes to the skunks on us, Richard, and old Lamar’s been turned to meat by some state cop with a shotgun full of Number Four, you wait till Odell’s head is turned, then you put that gun muzzle behind his ear and you pull the trigger. That’s the sweetest thing could happen to Odell if I’m not here.”

“I-I—I thought you
loved
Odell.”

“I do. Too much to want to have to think about what would happen to him if I weren’t there to watch out for the boy. Who would care for him? Who would explain things to him? There ain’t no mercy in this world for a big old baby who’s listened to his evil cousin, done harm and can’t talk for himself. Who would brush his teeth? Who would make sure he eats? Sometimes, he don’t even know enough to eat at all. He’s the sorriest soul on earth, truth is. They’d make him into some kind of geek show if I’m dead and they catch him, then they send him to some hole without me to figure out what’s going on and to make the way for him. Couldn’t have that, Richard. No way. So you got to do what I tell you.”

“Yes, Lamar.”

“I knew I could trust you, Richard. Okay, drop me here.”

Richard pulled over and Lamar slipped out, took a quick look-see in each direction, then smooth and unruffled as could be, just bent to the car door and slipped a long, flat piece of metal down the window shaft. With a few swift diddles—backward, while looking around with the softest and most relaxed expression on his face—he popped the lock and jumped behind the wheel. In a second, he had it started. He backed out, pulled by Richard with a smile, and headed off on his way.

O
n Saturday, Bud went to the new Lawton public library just down from the new police station and looked at art books and books on Africa. Lions. What the hell was this thing about lions?

Was it just lions? Or was it another theme—the lion in art? Of the latter, there wasn’t much. He only came across one painter who could be called a lion artist, a Frenchman named Rousseau who painted the goofiest things Bud had ever seen. The stuff was called primitive. The most famous showed a lion licking a sleeping black man under a spooky moon. Bud gazed on the picture, trying to figure it out. It actually kind of shook him: it was like looking into someone else’s dreams—it had that clear, serene quality to it, almost childish. It seemed somehow smug that its meanings were sealed off to normal folk like himself. It gave him the goddamn willies.

The other famous lion painting, also by Rousseau, actually wasn’t primarily about lions at all; instead it was about a woman on a chaise lounge in the jungle. She had the same spooky calmness. In one corner of the picture, a lion and a tiger, almost lovers, gazed from the dense green trees. It
also had that childish quality, but there was nothing in it that seemed to have to do with Lamar Pye or Richard Peed, because they were so peaceable and in a way, so unnatural. To Lamar, nature was savage; this kind of wussy lion would strike Lamar as a kind of sacrilege somehow.