“I'm not a homosexual,” said Richard.
The old man spit on Richard.
Richard looked at the glob on his shirt. Then he looked at the old man. He was one of those scrawny old types, mostly leather and sinew, with furiously burning blue eyes. He looked like the sort of man who rose at four a . every morning and gave hell in buckets to any' and all that had displeased him over his long life. He probably had a million dollars in the bank and believed he could take it to heaven with him. His children probably all secretly hated him, just as Richard had secretly hated his father. But like Richard, this man's children would never dare express their contempt directly.
“You goin' to let him do that?” said Lamar.
Why did he have to do that? thought Richard.
“You can't let a man do that. An old man with two shotguns on him, who thinks he's a hero. You got to break him down, boy.”
“He's afraid,” said the old man.
“I can smell it on him.
His underpants are brown and smelly. It happened in the Eighth Air Force all the time. Men like him/ they never made their twenty-five missions. Your underpants—a mess, right?”
Richard swallowed. Yes, as a matter of fact, they were.
He wasn't sure when it had happened but now he knew that it had. He swallowed again, wondering who he'd explain this to, then kicked the old man in the leg.
“Way to go, Richard. You show him. You be a goddamned man, Richard,” shouted Lamar.
Everyone always talks, Lamar knew. That's the rule. But the old man had more grit than you find on the average yard, and Richard didn't have the stuff to get it out of him, even though he kicked him a batch of times as he lay curled on the floor in front of his weeping wife.
“Okay, Richard,” Lamar finally said, not because he felt a pang of mercy for the square John but because Richard was truly disgusting him, his face all knit up like a girl's as he pranced his prissy way around him, kicking without a lot of force.
Richard looked at him, face twisted in emotion. Not rage, exactly; just some kind of terrible excitement. Shit, Lamar thought he looked like someone had stuck a pickle up his ass.
“O’Dell” Lamar commanded.
O’Dell turned the old man over on his back and twisted his arm backward and up like a corkscrew until the old man screamed. Meanwhile Lamar went looking for liquor.
Could these people be Christian teetotalers? He had heard of such a thing but found it hard to imagine. The screams behind him were irritating.
He wandered into the pantry. Didn't quality usually keep booze in a pantry? Lamar looked around. He had never been in a house like this before. He wondered what it would be like living in a house like this.
Pictures of a bunch of kids on the walls. He looked closely: it was like they were from Mars or something. All these kids and these pretty women and handsome boys who had to be the old man's daughters or sons or something. He wondered what it would be like to fuck a woman who looked like that? They didn't look like the Penthouse bitches, with the perfect round tits and the creamy skin. It looked fake, even if most evenings it got you off. These gals looked real, somehow, and sweet and tender. He imagined the fear in their eyes if he decided to fuck them. Lamar hadn't had true pussy in almost a decade. He'd almost forgotten what it would be like. Even now, he was a little unsure if he'd taste it before they finally got him.
There it was: brown bottles in a row, in a locked cabinet.
He yanked the door open and a little piece of lock broke off. Some lock. Jack Daniel's Old No. 7, Tennessee drinking whiskey. Couldn't do better than that. He unscrewed the cap, took a swallow. Goddamn.
Like wet smoke. Burns all the way down, your eyes tighten like fists and little tears come to them. Only way the world would ever get tears out of Lamar Pye. He took another quick swallow, then put back the bottle. Best not to let O’Dell know. Sober, O’Dell could be hard enough to handle. Drunk he could be death, and impossible. If Billy Cop came a-knocking, it wouldn't do any good to let O’Dell be drunk, because Lord knew that goddamned Richard boy would be no good in a fight with the law.
He wandered into the room with the television. The news was on. Some trashy-looking woman with an armful of babies was blubbering while two or three pretty girl reporters stood around and watched her melt down.
She was blubbering about her poor husband Willard and what a good man he was. Lamar realized that was the wife of his Willard in the truck.
Goddamn. Willard, he thought. You sure married yourself an ugly woman. But he sort of wished he'd fucked her, ugly or not. He wanted to fuck something, that was for sure.
Maybe he'd fuck the old man later.
Next his own picture came on, and somebody was talking about him, saying the authorities considered the escapees to be 'armed and extremely dangerous.” Wasn't that a mouthful?
The picture was the lineup shot from nine years ago when he had been picked up by OK City homicide after he and O’Dell had tapped Nicky Pusateri for the Pagans.
Damnedest thing. You just could never tell. Shot that little prick square in the back of the head. Seen him go down, seen the blood squirt like tomato. Shot him again in the back and wrapped him in canvas and drove him twenty miles out and dumped him. And he was alive after all that?
He was, yes, and the dicks had come for Lamar, finding him stoned on amphetamines and living with a woman named Sally Two-Shoes, an Indian gal and sometime hooker who once in awhile would work a convenience store job with him and, though nobody ever found out about it, had killed her own father by drowning him in the toilet when he was drunk.
He'd been making her blow him from the time she was ten on until she finally killed him, age fourteen. Anyway, they'd dragged Lamar into downtown OK City, some fancy building, and taken his pictures; he remembered one of the dicks smelled of garlic. Lamar looked at the picture again in the second before it vanished;
he was wearing a golf shirt, the only one he'd ever had, with a little alligator on the pocket. Made him look like a pussy. Why'd he ever bought that shirt? His nose was squashed and his eyes dull and unfocused because he'd been sliding off the uppers; his lower lip hung open because his face was so relaxed on the drug downslope. His hair was long, though pulled tight behind him. He looked stupid.
It had been his last instant of freedom.
Then some anchorwoman came on. She was pretty, like the farmer's daughters and the girl reporters with Willard's wife, maybe prettier.
He wondered how it would be to fuck her, too. She was talking in a low, urgent voice about how dangerous these men were and how they should be avoided at all costs until the authorities finally caught up to them.
She talked about the terrible obscenity tattooed on Lamar's knuckles, and she talked about how three men were already dead. Her face got all long and somber.
It somewhat tickled Lamar, the edge of breathy fear in her voice. He liked that a lot. He knew he scared square people. They looked into his eyes and they just saw pain and horror. That is, if they looked into his eyes, and they seldom did, or seldom had, even back in the world. You tattoo a f u c k and a y o u I on your knuckles, tends to chill the straights out.
“Lamar?”
It was Richard.
“Yeah?”
“We got ’em. It was a vault. The old lady gave us the combination.”
“What happened to the old man?”
“He isn't breathing too well.”
“He should have made it easy on his self Saved us the trouble. See what it got him? Oh well, fuck him if he can't take a joke.”
They walked on downstairs, then into the basement. A shelf holding jelly jars set in the wall folded out on hinges to reveal an open Tredlock gun vault that stood about four feet tall and whose shelves appeared to display all the handguns known to man.
“Fifty-six, thirty-three, oh-eight,” said Richard proudly.
