Dirty White Boys (8 page)

As they turned away to sleep for tomorrow, C.D. pretended to go back to the data, the OSBI file on Lamar.

But he reached into his coat pocket and slipped out the I. W. Harper bottle. The lid was loose; with deft fingers he removed it. He hunched, seemed to shift in his old man’s dry-boned way, and managed to draw a large, fiery swig from the bottle. It tasted like charcoal, gun smoke, and old plums. It knocked him where he wanted to be, which was into a state of blur.

Bud rolled over, trying to get to sleep. On this job it was six on the damn block, peeking into cars, then twelve on the road for what was called “aggressive patrolling,” and then six off, and his six off was three gone and goddamned if old C.D. wasn’t holding court with a bunch of Bureau boys a couple of bunks on down the goddamned way. There were dog teams outside, yowling, just in case. An OSBI helicopter made a buzz overhead every once in a while. The communications center, in one corner, crackled and yammered. Men were cleaning guns that hadn’t yet been fired. Sleep was a hard bargain tonight.

Yet Bud wasn’t an unhappy man. He and Ted alternated on the driving, and after close to twenty-five years of driving himself, Bud hated it when someone drove him. And was it his imagination, or was Ted’s ambivalence about his life somehow expressing itself in his driving? Made Bud pretty itchy to sit there while the boy diddled with the accelerator. You go trooper, you got to
love
to drive a car, because that’s 98 percent of the duty day: you’ll see death in all the ways it can come to drivers and you’ll give chase and maybe kill, but it all turned on the powerful automobile. You had to love that bitch on wheels or get another line of work.

But in three hours it would be his day to drive again. A certain secret part of him responded to the pleasures of the
wheel, and he hoped they wouldn’t nab those goddamned boys until after he had his eighteen.

But that was only a surface thing. Truth was, Bud felt another deeper pleasure, though he could put no name on it. For now, in the temporary suspension of normalcy that the statewide manhunt brought, he felt something singing and vibrant. It was freedom, or the illusion of freedom, from It.

That’s how he thought of it: It. It was It, that was all It was.

It, being the thing, the mess, the situation. It, meaning Jen and the boys and the placid pleasures of duty versus the sweetness of renewal as experienced in young Holly, and all the pleasures it promised, all the places to go, all the ways to be.

Bud was no romantic. His idea of reading was the new
Guns & Ammo
or
Car and Driver
, and his idea of fun was to go to a high school baseball game and watch Jeff play or to zero in the .270 for deer season. He went to the movies once a year, which was one time too much. He didn’t watch TV since they took Johnny off for that other goof, and it still pissed him that they went and did such a goddamned fool thing. Mainly, he just did his duty as he saw it, hard and fair, and expected otherwise to be left alone.

Then It happened and all craziness broke out. Three months ago he’d been cruising 44 near to shift’s end and had pulled off at a favorite place, a diner called Mary’s in the little town of Cement, where the coffee was hot and black and the hash browns crispy, the way he liked them.

He was sitting at the counter, taking his twenty, when he heard his name.

“Bud? Sergeant Bud Pewtie?”

He turned, and there she was. He remembered now. When he’d been partnered up with Ted during Ted’s six-month provisional, he’d met Holly off and on, and when
Ted got his First Class stripe, he and Jen had the younger couple over to dinner to celebrate with a barbecue. But then as Ted changed, he’d drifted away, and he hardly ever talked to Bud anymore.

“Holly, how are you? Damn, what brings you up here?”

The part of Bud that he no longer thought he had reacted first. It wasn’t that Holly was just pretty; some other secret thing under her surface just teased him in a strange way. Her youth, her boyish body, those freckles, that bright smile, but most of all it was something behind her eyes, something secretly merry and conspiratorial. She was a plotter, all right.

“Well, Bud, truth is, I came looking for you.”

“Well, sit yourself down and I’ll buy you a cup of coffee. You ever hear of such a thing called a telephone? Real easy to operate. You just drop a dime in and push some buttons and, like magic, you’re talking to the man you want.”

“Well, Bud, thanks for the tip, but it ain’t so easy. I wanted it private.”

“You got it. But this isn’t some sad song I heard on the radio a hundred times and still can’t say Jack Jump about? That damn fool Ted’s found a new girl, or some such. I know I look like Ann Landers but I don’t have her wisdom. My idea would be: I’ll loan you the gun and you go shoot him. I don’t think Ann would ever tell you that.”

She giggled at old Bud.

“Oh, Bud, you love to flirt and make all the girls laugh, don’t you? I’ll bet you were a pistol back in high school.”

Not so; he’d been a fullback, big and awkward and a little smarter than people thought when they considered his bulk, but no showboat with the girls. He’d married the first pretty one that was nice to him.

“Sure I was.”

“Well, anyway,” she said, “you’re not far wrong. But I
don’t think it’s a girl. It’s just a thing. He’s just not there anymore. I was wondering if something’s going on in the patrol or on the road I should know about.”

It was true. Ted had drifted off. He went his own way, put in his hours and disappeared. He was no longer a part of the elaborate Smokey culture—the gym, the shooting range, the optional SWAT exercises, the speed pursuit course—and when you took yourself out of that, you sort of guaranteed you’d stay at First Class for a long time.

“Oh, he’s probably working some things out.”

“That’s what he says, when he says anything.”

“It can be a hard life.”

“But Bud Pewtie didn’t let it turn him sour.”

“Well, old Bud Pewtie, he went through his dog days, too. Holly, give him some room. Maybe he ain’t made to be a policeman. That’s okay. No shame in that. There’s other things that he can do and make you and himself proud, I swear it. It’s a hard life and more than once I’ve regretted the path I chose.”

“Well, you’re so John Wayne I find that hard to believe, but I love the way you tried to make me feel good.”

She laughed and it suddenly occurred to Bud how easy it would be for him to like her. He wished sometimes he’d stopped it there and just frozen that moment in his heart forever: her laughter, his pleasure in it, her blinding beauty, his sense of having done the right thing.

But a couple of weeks later, having thought pretty much of nothing except her, he’d just up and called her one day and made up some pretext about Ted’s problems and one damn thing led on to another; it became It.

“Bud?”

It was Ted, in the next bunk.

“Yes, Ted?”

“Bud, I can’t sleep. I’m gonna go sit in the car.”

“Ted, you need your sleep.”

“But I can’t.”

“Ted, you have to be sharp. Is something bothering you?”

“I’ll tell you about it sometime, Bud. You’ll know what I should do.”

Bud watched Ted go on out. He tried to feel something for Ted. Shouldn’t he feel awful, partnered up with the man whose wife he was sleeping with? But he didn’t. Ted had made his own bed with his strange ways. Bud couldn’t believe a bad thing about Holly, and some of the things she’d told him made him sick. Ted watched dirty movies on the VCR alone late at night. Ted didn’t seem to even think about touching her anymore. Ted just didn’t care; he was letting it drift apart.

Ted, partner, you made a dumb mistake. I wish I were man enough to help you out, but I got too much involved.

They were on the swing between I-44 at Chickasha and Anadarko, where the Pye boys hailed from, and where they just might head (though Bud thought not; whatever Lamar was, he wasn’t that dumb) when Ted finally broke his silence.

“Bud, I got a thing or two on my mind.”

“Well, that’s no place for a thing or two. Spit ’em out.”

The young trooper’s face seemed to knit up in pain as he struggled for the words. But then finally he relaxed a bit and just said it.

“Ah, Bud … something’s been eating me alive for months now. I even went to a psychiatrist, through that employees’ assistance program the Department of Public Safety runs. But you’re the first real person I breathed a word to.”

“Well, then you’d best get it out. Just flat say it, and we’ll pick up the pieces and see what we got.”

“It’s this: I don’t think I got the guts for this line of work. The pure guts.”

So that was it. The moment hung in the car. On either side, the countryside, like a green river, flowed by, rolling yet mountainless, the wheat fields and pastures and alfalfa fields all green in the sunlight. Soon Anadarko would come up, an ugly, desolate little town, with its customary bright strip of cheesy fast-food mills, a mile off the dead center of town.

“It’s a scary job, Ted. Every one of us feels it when we strap on the gun. You run into a crazy, a hopped-up Tulsa gangbanger, a bad Okabilly with an attitude, you could stop a slug. I feel it, too, specially in these crazy days, where every goddamned body has a gun.”

“No, Bud, you’re just talking about duty anxiety. That’s what the shrink said. But it’s something deeper.”

“Well, okay, Ted, if you say so. But I think everybody in our profession feels the horsecollar.”

“About a year ago, I had a bad ten-seventy. I got good radar on a Nova about twenty miles below Oklahoma City. Pulled him over. It was around three in the goddamned morning. Not a soul about. Couldn’t even see any lights on the horizon. I did a run through Dispatch and found there was no paper on the driver. Still, I don’t know why, I was scared. A trooper in Maryland got one in the head just that way a few years back.”

“I remember, Ted. I went to his funeral.”

“Anyway, I approached the car.… It was four blacks. You know, in the X caps, the workout suits, and, man, that car just reeked of grass. They’d been having a
high
old time, I like to got buzzed just standing there. So I ask for the license and the guy hands it over. And I feel these eight
eyes on me. And I look. And they’re just staring at me, the reefer smoke just pouring out of that car, and I’m all alone and I’m thinking
 … I’m dead
. I’m sure they were hauling a load. And they were just
staring
at me, waiting for me to make a move, daring me to make a move. And then I saw the first gun. An AR-15, like mine, only with the shorty barrel. It came up on the off-driver’s side. One of ’em gets out. He’s got a fucking
Uzi!
I see the guy in the back seat fiddling with something I couldn’t even ID! Some weird thing with ventilation holes in the barrel shroud, a red-dot scope, a goddamned banana magazine. And here I am with a Smith and six cartridges. Goddamn, Bud, my dad fought in Vietnam and his dad fought in Korea and World War II and on down the line us Pepper boys have stood up and been counted. And all of a sudden it came over me so hard I thought I’d faint: I don’t have it.”

“Ted—”

“So anyway, I just handed the license back. Apologized for stopping. And watched them go away. They laughed. I could hear them laugh as they pulled away. I went back to the cruiser and I just cried. I sat there and I cried.”

Ted just sat there, face slack, eyes dull. Burnt out, used up. He’d let the thing eat him alive.

“Well, Ted, you’re a fine young officer,” Bud finally said. “I think it would be a shame to let a thing like that worry on you too much. Sometime you got to back down. Those boys had you cold. What was the point of getting killed for nothing? They’ve probably killed each other by now anyway. Why not just pass it as done, and swear to do your best from here on out. That’s all.”

“Bud, haven’t you ever made a mistake? Don’t you ever feel guilty? No, I don’t suppose you do. You just are naturally the kind of man who goes through life without screwing up. God, I wish I could be like you. Sometimes I think
Holly wishes I could be like you. Bud this and Bud that. That girl has a thing for you, Bud. And for a while I hated you on account of it.”

“Ted, I—”

“No, Bud, it’s not your damned fault. Well, anyway, that’s it. You got it. I don’t.”

“Well, Ted, the truth is, I have never done a courageous thing in my life. I don’t have no idea how I’d be if there’s lead flying about and I hope never to find out. And there’s all sorts of things about me you don’t know,” Bud said.

“All units, all units,” came the squawk over the statewide intercity net on the Motorola.

Both men suddenly started to listen.

“OSBI has just confirmed the location of the van thought to have been stolen by the inmate escapees Pye and Peed. It was found in the parking lot of a Hostess bakery and distributorship in Ada, where it had apparently sat for over thirty-six hours, unnoticed.”

“Goddamn,” said Bud.

“Body in the back identified as Willard Jones, twenty-four, of Ada. We think we’re looking for victim’s car, a blue eighty-seven Dodge Dart, plates Lima-X-ray-Papa five-niner-seven,” Dispatch said.

“Goddamn,” said Bud, “that old Lamar’s a smart one. Only place nobody’d notice a Hostess van is in the Hostess parking lot. He’s outside the ring now. And nobody knows where the hell he’s heading.”

A quiver passed through Bud.

Lamar was smart and he was bad. It was the worst news.

“Goddamn,” said Ted, “glad you made me wear this damned vest.”

R
ichard 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.