Dirty White Boys (6 page)

He then narrated some colorful details of the escape, including a description of the van they purportedly made their getaway in, an eighty-nine Ford Econoline with
HOSTESS PRODUCTS
emblazoned on it, and the license number and a description of the poor missing driver, a Willard Jones.

“What you see before you now is the rap sheet on the three inmates. Lamar’s the baddest bad news. He’s a goddamned professional inmate and criminal. Been breaking the law since he was ten years old. His daddy, matter of fact, was killed in a shootout with an Arkansas state trooper back in fifty-five, when Lamar was just a lump in his mama’s belly. Raised in reform school. B and E, assault, assault with a deadly weapon, armed robbery, distribution of narcotics, he just put his hands in everything, working out of Tulsa and Oklahoma City. He shot a convenience store clerk dead in 1974. Just shot him, point blank. That’s Lamar. Anyway, it was goddamn plea-bargained down to murder two, and he was paroled in 1980. Then he and his cousin, poor dumb old Odell, they commenced to rob
banks, fast-food restaurants, hell, they even robbed a yogurt shop in Tulsa mall. They’re both shooters. We also believe Lamar pulled the trigger on a couple of snitches who were ratting out the Noble Pagans motorcycle club, on contract from the Pagans. Here’s something you won’t see on no bulletin: they say this boy’s hung like an ox. They say he makes Johnny Dillinger look like a sprout in that department. So if you have a suspect, you can always check his pecker, and if you need two rulers to measure, I’d say you got your man!”

There was tide of laughter in the room.

“Now Odell’s like Lamar’s body servant. Dumb as a stump and can’t hardly talk. Retarded, probably. Anyway, in 1985, Lamar and Odell decided to rip off a Noble Pagan road captain who was dealing and they took him out beyond Anadarko and shot him in the head. Well, he didn’t die soon as they thought, and he named them first, which is how come the boys ended up in the Mac.”

Bud looked at the pictures of the two men and saw what he’d seen so many times before—the look of billytown trash, hard-burning eyes smoldering with either some obscure grudge against the world or utter stupidity. Minds that worked different from most minds, that’s what they were like, as if in some way they were hardwired different. Killers, manipulators, ruthless, savage—and yet, goddamn them, always brave. So much sheer aggression. So used to violence, so comfortable with it.

Odell’s eyes were like coal lumps; not a goddamned thing in them; he just stared out from the photograph, his strange-shaped head seeming to come from a different planet, a black smear where his upper lip should have been.

Lamar was different: his face was wider and more open and held some charm to it. In a certain hard way, he was a handsome man; but the eyes had such a glare to them, such
a fuck-not-with-me attitude. There was something tragic in them, too; the hard cons, the real pros, always had a glimmer of talent. They could have been something else, something better.

“My guess is, here’s how we’ll catch him,” said Henderson. “Sooner or later he’ll run to his own kind—outlaw biker scum, punks, hardcases. Hell, he’s been affiliated with half the gangs in Oklahoma; he’s done time with all the hardcore convicts and professional criminals in the state. He’ll go to them and somebody’ll rat him out, you just watch.”

“What about this other boy?” a voice called.

“Peed is hard to figure,” said C. D. Henderson. “He ain’t your inmate material, or so it would seem. No priors. Some kind of art genius, went to that high school for the gifted they run in Tulsa—his daddy was a oil executive—and he went out East to some kind of art place. A painter, they say. Anyway, back he comes when his mama gets sick and he spends ten years nursing her. Meanwhile, he’s teaching art at Oklahoma City Junior College, but mainly he’s painting.”

Bud looked at this Richard Peed. Under the puffy, pillow head of hair, he beheld a face remarkable in its softness. No harsh lines attended Richard Peed at all; he seemed raw material, unformed, callow, a child-man. His face was dough, waiting for experience to stamp an imprint upon it. The eyes were fuzzy and slightly weak, and even in the picture, peering over the new rack of inmate’s numbers and bled of all nuance by the harshness of the flashbulb, he radiated fear; he was a rabbit. The joint would kill him.

“What’d this he-man do?” a deputy sheriff asked. “Rob a goddamned lemonade stand?”

But Bud could see the only mark against him was an assault with intent to kill, three to five. That almost never
got a fellow time in a hard joint like the Mac. Any first-year law student could get a body with no priors out in two months.

“Well, because he was white and rich, they had to make a big show of going hard on him. But the deal was, he’d do his three months at the Mac, and then be transferred to the Federal playground at El Reno. What he did, though, was plumb right crazy sick,” said Lt. Henderson. “He had this art show and he thought all the reviewers were going to say how great he was, only nobody came. His poor mama was giving him a hard time. So he stabbed her.”

If C. D. Henderson meant to shock his audience, he failed. All the men there had encountered more grotesque atrocities in the billytowns and black townships of Oklahoma, but Henderson wasn’t quite done yet.

“Stabbed her, that is, in the eyes. Put his own mother’s goddamned eyes out. Blinded her.”

A
nother rabbit was learning about the wolves.

It was nearly eight, getting on to darkness. Bud Pewtie would not receive his phone call for a good six hours yet. But in a van heading at just five miles under the speed limit west down State Route I toward Ada, the lesson progressed.

This rabbit’s name was Willard. It said so on a little oval on his pocket. W
ILLARD
, in script.

Lamar thought:
Whatever happens, I ain’t never going to have to wear no shirt with my goddamned name in a little oval so all the square johns can say, Oh, hello, Lamar, check the oil, Lamar, put that thing over there, Lamar, I take sugar in my coffee, Lamar
.

Willard had already pissed in his pants. He couldn’t stop weeping. But that’s what rabbits did. That’s why they were rabbits.

“Now, Willard,” said Lamar, “tell me again about your plant.”

“Mister, please don’t hurt me, Christ, it’s just a goddamned plant.”

“How many trucks?”

“Jesus, mister, I don’t know, I never counted.”

“Now listen careful, Willard. I don’t want to have to hurt you. Just tell me. How many trucks? Answer my questions or I’ll have Odell hurt you like he done before.”

Odell had already broken four of Willard’s fingers. He sat now, his big arm necklaced around Willard’s scrawny, shivering neck, eating Twinkies. He’d eaten about fifty of them.

“Dink-ies,” he’d say occasionally.

“Richard,” called Lamar, “you just keep going straight on toward Ada. Don’t do nothing stupid. You’re right at the speed limit, son, I can feel it.”

Richard, driving the van, tried to appear nonchalant, but the rabbit’s terror was like the smell of decaying flesh in the air, and it made him sick.

“Yes, Lamar,” called Richard. They rolled through jerkwater towns where Richard had always wondered how people made a living, across rolling green fields strewn with barrellike rolls of hay, across a landscape that could have been a portrait of Farmland, USA. He tried not to listen to what was going on behind him, but only concentrate on the speed limit, on staying right at sixty.

“Maybe twenty-five trucks,” Willard was saying, his voice wobbly and occasionally falsetto with fear. “We got accounts all over South Oklahoma. We do all the grocery store deliveries, we got vending machine accounts in VFWs in every town over five thousand, we do cop stations—cops eat a lot of HoHo Cakes—we do gas stations, every place a man might eat a Twinkie or a HoHo Cake, that’s where we are.”

“Dink-ies,” said Odell.

“Please, please, I got a wife and two kids. Sir, I never hurt nobody and never did no wrong.”

“Never you mind, Willard. You just work with me and I’ll see if I can’t cut you a little slack with Odell, okay?”

“Yes sir,” sobbed Willard.

“Twenty-five trucks? Now, when you pull in, they all park together or what? Is it fenced? You checked in? Does anybody pay any attention to you? You go into an operations shack, or what?”

“Y’all park together, sir,” said Willard, concentrating very hard. “There ain’t no fence or nothing. Nobody checks you in. The drivers go into the office with what stock they got left, and unload. Then they check out.”

“If you didn’t check out, would anybody notice? Would it be a big thing? Who would know?”

“Oh, Christ. You’re going to hurt me.”

“I am not going to hurt you, ’less you make me hurt you. I want this shit, Willard. Willard, help me, goddammit. We can work together on this goddamned thing, can’t we?”

“I guess round about eight, maybe they’d begin to wonder what-all the hell I been up to. Maybe if I don’t git back by ten, that’s when they call the cops. But drivers and vendor service guys, you know, they always go off, do the goddamndest things.”

“But not you, Willard. You do good work.”

“Yes sir.”

“Now, Willard. You got any money?”

“Sir, I only got ’bout ten dollars on me, cash. And I got lots of quarters. Maybe five hundred dollars in quarters and loose change.”

“Ah,” said Lamar, calculating. “What about a bank-card? You got a bankcard, Willard?”

“No sir. I only make fourteen thousand dollars a year. I don’t have enough money for no bankcard.”

“Do you have any money at your house?”

“Please, sir, don’t go to my house. I got two little girls. Oh, Jesus, why is this happening?”

It was as if Willard’s need to know
why
finally exasperated Lamar beyond endurance. He felt no man had the right to ask such elemental questions of him.

“Here’s why, Willard. You see what it says here?”

He held out his big right fist, the one that said
F U C K
.

Willard nodded.

“Yes, you do.”

And he held out his big left fist.

Y O U
! it said.

The fear radiated from Willard’s eyes like heat. Lamar liked that in a man.

“Do you get it, Willard? Do it make sense now?”

Desperately, Willard nodded.

“Yes.
Now
it makes sense. Odell, break his goddamned thumb.”

Willard screamed while Odell broke his thumb. He screamed so loud it irritated Lamar, who crawled forward, below eye level, to talk to Richard.

“How you holding up, Richard?”

“Do you have to hurt him so?” Richard asked.

“Hurt him? Hell, you ain’t seen a thing, Richard, in your short life if you think that’s hurting.” Lamar gave a little chuckle at the stupidity of Richard’s observation.

“Anyway,” he continued after a pause, “I think you’ll be wanting to hit the turnoff up ahead, into Ada, I do believe. Then we look for Davis Street and when we head down, you give me a call.”

“Lamar … where are we going?”

“Don’t you worry, son, I got it all figured out. Now, what was that about the wrists, boy? Remember, the other night you was telling me about the wrists.”

Willard was still screaming; he sobbed and heaved and begged, but Odell kept him captured with a single immense hand while eating Twinkies with the other.

The wrist? The wrist? Now what the flick?

Then he had it: art.
Art!

“Oh, yeah Well, I think actually, ah, you see, what makes a painting or a drawing so fluid, actually, so lifelike, is the flexibility of the wrist and the exquisite relationship of the articulate muscles of the wrist and hand to the vision and the imagination. That’s why a free-painted line is always called a living line.”

“Goddamn,” said Lamar, rapturous with delight. “Yessir, you sure can talk. You can talk and you can draw! You are a goddamned interesting young man, ain’t he, Odell?”

“Awoooooah,” said Odell Pye, his broad, crippled mouth knitting up into a smile, his lips crusted with flecks of weightless white custard filling, Willard weeping in his grasp.

“Well, now, Richard, boy, you be thinking on your next drawing. I think I want to go back to lions. I liked the eagles and I liked the tigers, but damn, there’s something
about that old king of the jungle that just tickles me where I itch the worst!”

Richard watched as a black-and-white Highway Patrol car flew by across the way. He checked his watch. Clearly they hadn’t been discovered yet.

Lamar had one more item on his agenda. He crawled back into the rear of the van. He reached over and lifted the rabbit’s head, so that the man’s face looked into his. What he saw was what he expected to see: no surprises at all. Fear. The eyes were stone bright, like the rabbit had been high on crank, but the drug that made him so mad was just the fear. You could now do anything to Willard the Rabbit. You could fuck him, fuck his daughters, kill his wife, set his house a-fire, and he’d just look at you like that, baby lips aquiver. He wasn’t no man, goddammit. He was a rabbit. Even a nigger will fight you, you push him hard enough or corner him. But not a rabbit. Rabbit just look you over while you decide which part of him to bite on. He may even help you make that decision. And he will sell you anything, anything at all.

“Now, Willard, listen here, I need some more help.”

“W-what?” said Willard.

“Guns. I need some guns. Man like me, man with enemies, got to have a gun, you know. Not to hurt, to protect. Now, Willard, you got any guns?”