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.”
CHAPTER 5
Richard 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.
These thoughts rocketed through Richard's oh-so-busy brain as he drove the little trio in Willard Johnson's four-year-old Dart west of Ada toward Ratliff City, toward Mr. Bill Stepford, Sr's place, where Mr. Stepford, Sr.” and family had some guns that they would take, by any means possible. Richard tried not to think of that part. These poor people were condemned: Hurricane Lamar would hit them, abetted by Cyclone O’Dell, and wipe them out. They were the dead, sitting there in their little farmhouse even now, watching the television, finishing up the peach cobbler, wondering about the upcoming Grange meeting, deer season, and the possibility of Oklahoma ever getting some sort of major professional sports franchise.
They had fought in wars and paid taxes and said their prayers for sixty-odd years and loved each other and the land that supported them, and they were dead. The existential majesty of it overwhelmed Richard.
Both Lamar and O’Dell were asleep in the back. He could hear them breathing, the even-odd-even-odd rhapsody of their snores, broken now and again by a belch or the rippling percussion of a smelly fart (O’Dell farted all the time and then smiled and said, 'O’Dell ma key stinky.') Their presence held not only terror but squalor and banality as well: They were so crude, bald, itchy, raw, unvarnished, brutes of the id.
Richard looked out the window at the silent alfalfa fields of Oklahoma, the long and dreadful wait in the van at last over. He fought down a sob and studied a patch of sky, riddled with stars.
Richard thought: I could do it. I could slew the car off the road, throw the door open, and run, run away, flee. The police would find me eventually. I could explain. Just like the other thing: It's not my fault. Really. I was made to do it, I had no choice.
But he knew this was complete illusion. He could no more get away from Lamar than he could face him down and kill him. Lamar was everything.
Lamar would run him down and break his neck with those strong hands, watching him with those superficially charming but ultimately em-pathyless eyes; then, as he was dying of asphyxiation, his spine having punctured his lungs, Lamar would fuck him in the ass, laughing; that would be how Richard left this world.
He wouldn't do it, of course. It made him nervous to even consider such a thing. If Lamar could see what he was thinking, Lamar would kill him for thinking it. Lamar was an absolute god: he demanded obedience as sternly as the figure in the Old Testament.
He looked out the window again.
“Be easy, wouldn't it, Richard?” Lamar asked softly from behind him.
It startled Richard; he jumped.
“You scare so quick, Richard,” Lamar laughed in a whisper.
“But it would be easy, wouldn't it?”
“What, Lamar?”
“You know. Dump us. Take off. Go on, admit it. You thought of it.”
“It's not my nature to be bold.”
“No, it ain't. I could see that from the start. But I will change that. Richard, I swear to you, you stick with me, I may not make you rich or even free, but by God, you will be a man. Do you read me?”
“Yes sir,” said Richard.
“Don't youSir' me, boy. I ain't no goddamned officer.
I'm your friend, Richard, do you believe me? Your only friend.”
“Yes, Lamar.”
“You don't like the killing, do you?”
“No, I don't.”
“Son, what that means, you raised in a different place than Lamar and O’Dell. Where Lamar come from, you hadda fight like shit every damn day or someone take it all from you. I do not enjoy it. I am not a low-down, trashy man. But a man has to do what he has to do to look after his people.
Do you understand?”
“I do.”
“That's good. That's very good.”
No, it was very bad, because in the glare of their headlights a solitary mailbox stood against the glinting black
