Dirty White Boys (42 page)

Bud walked back into a dark little room and found C.D. sitting under a pyramid of cigarette smoke, his bourbon bottle, and a paper cup before him. He was watching a soap opera through squinty eyes, his face all knit up, a cigarette dangling from his lips. On a shelf to the left stood a brass army of pistol marksmanship awards.

“Howdy, there,” said Bud.

“Bud, goddamn,” the old man leaped up, “nice of you to drop by.”

“Well, damn, just wanted to know how you’s doing?”

“Oh, it’s okay. Gits a little draggy toward the end of day, that’s all.”

“You need anything?”

“No sir, not a thing. I ain’t quite as drunk as I was last time I saw you. Need a drink yourself, son?”

“No, lieutenant. I just wanted to drop by to say so long.”

“Well, you’re the only one of ’em man enough to do that. Close to fifty years, and nobody even come by. How ’bout a sandwich? Bud, you want a sandwich?
Honey!
Can you git Bud a sandwich?”

“No, it’s all right, Lieutenant, I already ate.”

“Sure, Bud. Say, that was good work on Odell. Pity you couldn’t have gotten Lamar, too.”

“I was one bullet shy, goddamn his luck.”

“Now, Bud,” Henderson said, “I’ll be the only one of ’em who tells you the flat-out truth. You shouldn’t have fired so much without aiming. Been in seven gunfights, won ’em all, only twice was I even hit. You got to aim, Bud. You can’t spray and pray. That’s what old Jelly Bryce taught me and no man was better with a gun than he was.”

“You’re right, Lieutenant. I just couldn’t think fast enough.”

“Another thing Jelly Bryce taught me, a man comes at you again, soaking up lead like that, you got to stay cool and break his pelvis with a big bore bullet. Break his pelvis, down he goes. Hit him three inches inside the hip. Puts him down every damn time. Under them circumstances, even a head shot is iffy; hell, you can blow out the top half of a man’s brain and his heart, and he can still go for fifteen seconds on instinct.”

“I’ll remember that.”

He took a drink from his glass. The soap opera whined onward. Bud could smell the liquor and the smoke. All of a sudden, he just wanted to get the hell out.

“Listen, Lieutenant, I do have to poke along. I just wanted to say I’s sorry how it ended for you and I didn’t

want no hard feelings. Some are saying I found Lamar and you didn’t, but we both know that’s not how it was.”

“No, Bud, that is how it was. You
did
find Lamar and I did not. Bud, you going to bring those boys over? I’d surely like to meet those boys of yours. They sound like a damned fine set of boys.”

“Sure, Lieutenant.”

“Let’s set a date, Bud. I’ll get my calendar out. Maybe we could take ’em fishing. Let’s pick a weekend in July, we could go on up to the Wichitas, or no, no, out to Lake Texoma. Used to own a nice piece of land there. I know where the damn fish are hiding, that I can tell you!”

“Lieutenant,” Bud said, “I’ll have to check with them. Jeff’s got Legion Ball and I don’t know when exactly Russ has to go East. I’ll have to call you back on that.”

“Sure, Bud. Now, you
positive
you don’t want no drink?”

“Lieutenant, I have to go.”

“Okay, Bud.”

“Anyways, I’m sorry—”

“Well, I’s sorry too, Bud. I wanted that Lamar and by God if I’d gotten another break or so, you can bet I’d have nailed him.”

“Yes sir.”

“Yes sir,” said the old man, less to Bud than to himself, “yes sir, I’d have nailed him. Just couldn’t get that last damned break.”

When Bud finally got back to his truck, the full force of the day’s heat lay upon him. He checked his watch: Dammit, he’d spent close to half an hour with the pitiful old goat, when he’d only meant to spend ten minutes. He shook his head at what had become of the mighty Lieutenant Henderson. He still felt a little woozy from the smoke and the
dark claustrophobia of the place, or maybe it was the force of his sexual anticipation. Anyway, he got in and drove to Holly’s, feeling he’d earned it.

It took him twenty extra minutes to find the place, and he’d have to come up with an excuse to account for the time, he knew. But by the time he got there, he wasn’t thinking about such things. He thought he’d burst.

He pulled up, nodded at a black kid on a yellow plastic trike on the sidewalk, and bounded to the porch.

“Well, damn my soul,” she said. “The hero himself.”

Bud looked around theatrically. “Oh yeah? There’s a hero here? Always wanted to meet one of them boys, shake his hand.”

“Git you in here, Bud Pewtie, this very instant. You can tell me how much you like my house and how sorry you are I had to move in by myself … 
later.”

She pulled him in and began to grope with him, immediately coming upon his guns.

“Oh, my, well sir, maybe we ought not to do a thing, so as you don’t have to readjust all your equipment.”

“I’d gladly dump ’em in the trash, darlin’, for a few minutes with you.”

“Well I
hope
it’s longer than a few minutes.”

And it was. Bud was in fine form today, released of all his inhibitions, driven forward by the peculiar intensity of his wants. His pains vanished; his legs were young again, his lungs full of stamina. The games started in the living room on a sofa, moved up the stairs, though pausing there for several minutes owing to the possibilities of the steep upward rake of the steps, then continued in her upstairs bedroom, where things got immensely tangled and complicated until at last the moment itself arrived, exploded, and then departed.

“Whooee, wasn’t that a time?” Bud said.

“You should do more of this man-killing, Bud. It does wonders for you.”

“Wasn’t I the boy, though?” he said.

“You certainly were.”

He laid around in her bed for another half an hour and then the mood came across him again. Squealing delightedly, she accommodated him; she was smooth and slippery as an eel.

And when that one was done, he said, “Well, I think we broke in the new house right nice.”

“Would say so. Want to see it?”

Bud knew he shouldn’t. Too much time, he was late already; but she was so proud of the damn thing.

“Sure,” he said.

They dressed, and she lugged him around, room to room. Bud tried hard to keep his enthusiasm up, but he knew he was doing a poor job. And, there really wasn’t much to see: her trailer furniture, spread throughout a six-room house, looked sparse. And for some reason, the house looked grayer and dirtier than he had remembered it looking. Could he live here? It wasn’t nearly as nice as his wonderful and comfortable old place.

“It’s a great little place, honey,” he said.

“You’ll help me paint it?”

Bud
hated
painting.

“Of course.”

“Oh, Bud, we’ll be so
happy
here. I know we will.”

“Yes ma’am, I know we will. Now, uh, I’ve—”

“I know, Bud. And you don’t want to do any
talking
at all. Okay, Bud. Will I see you tomorrow?”

“Of course you will,” he said. “By god, of course you will.”

*  *  *

Bud drove home, thinking of lies, or rather expansions on the truth.
Old C.D., now I
had
to go see him. It ain’t right what they done to him and what they’re saying about him. And you know how that man can talk
(she didn’t, of course).
He just jaws onward and onward and you can’t slow him down any. And he’s so bitter I didn’t want to insult him any further. Plus, he had to hear the story of my famous shootout. And of course he had a lot of comments and constructive criticism. The time just flew away on me
.

He actually mouthed the words out loud, so they’d feel familiar in his mind. You didn’t want to be making stuff up in an escapade like this, because you could just as easy as pie come up with something that invalidated something you’d said before; pick a nice, simple, believable story, near to the truth as you can make it (not very, in this case, but believable) and stick to it. He had a laugh here, remembering an old story about a football quarterback who was out helling around and his wife caught him sneaking in around seven in the morning, and he had a dandy all set up. He told her he’d come back at about ten the night before, but since she was already asleep he didn’t want to wake her so, since it was such a nice night out, he’d decided to sleep in the hammock out there in the front yard, and that’s where he’d been. She said, “That’s very nice, but I took the hammock down two weeks ago.” So the fellow said, “Well, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.”

Bud pulled in the driveway, and immediately one of the OSBI youngsters got out and came up to him.

“Sergeant Pewtie?”

“Yes?” he said, suddenly alerted by the youngster’s gravity. Oh Christ: What was wrong?

“Sergeant, your wife has been looking all over hell and gone for you.”

“What’s wrong?” he said.

“It’s your son.”

“My son?”

Bud watched him in horror, thinking his whole life might be about to change: Lamar, his son, vengeance, it all came together in a single, horrifying moment.

“Your youngest boy, Jeff.”

Oh, God
, thought Bud.

“He just been arrested by the city police. Assault. He attacked two boys in school. Hurt ’em bad, too.”

T
he 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 sonsofbitches 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 of Odell’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. Yessir. 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 inkstains. 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.