“The day they break it off—will I see you?”
“Well, I'll sure try,” he said, feeling vaguely trapped.
“I don't know if it's possible. I already missed one of my son's games and I want to get to the next one, in case he gets to play.”
“Okay,” she said in a tone that suggested it wasn't.
“I do miss you.”
“I know you do.”
“Talk to you soon.”
He hung up, feeling sour as hell. Hadn't he just promised her that on the first day off, he'd see her? Great. He'd be exhausted, and what would the situation be with Ted, wouldn't he be off the same day? It was a mess. Sometimes Bud didn't know what the hell he'd do.
So after indulging the sourness for a few seconds, he headed back into the diner and slid in next to Ted.
“How is she?” Ted asked.
“Fine. Just fine. You call Holly?”
“Oh, Holly's okay, I suppose,” Ted said.
“Well, I reckon we should shove, huh?”
Bud shot a look at his watch. Ten-fifteen, yeah, they were due back on the road, just in case. He didn't like to be out of radio contact that long. Didn't realize he'd been on the phone for close to ten minutes. He took a last sip of coffee —lukewarm—and stood to peel some money off for the food. Not strictly necessary, but Bud knew that if you started eating for free—it was so easy—people soon stopped respecting you. He left a single for the girl, also irked that Ted never bothered to pitch in, at least with a tip.
“Oh, Bud,” said Ted.
“One thing. This girl here, she wanted to ask you something.”
Bud turned to the woman, a middle-aged waitress, with the name Ruth on the nameplate of her uniform; she was vaguely familiar from previous stops, but he'd never struck up a relationship with her as he had with a few of the girls in other towns.
“Yes, Ruth?”
“Well, Sergeant, it's old Bill Stepford. He's stopped off for coffee each morning for the past ten years, every morning, nine o’clock sharp.
He didn't show this morning. It sort of bothered me.”
“I told her it was something for the Murray County sheriffs office,”
Ted said.
“Well, they're all out playing hero,” Ruth said.
“Sam Nicks hasn't set foot in this place since the jailbreak up at Mcalester.”
“Did you think about calling this farmer?” Bud asked.
“Yes sir, I did. The line was busy. Called four times and the line was busy.”
“Maybe he's talking to somebody.”
“Well, maybe he is. But I know Mr. Stepford and he is not the talking type.”
“What about his wife?” Ted asked.
“Well, she's a mighty nice woman but she's not the sort to spend half an hour on the line either.”
“Sounds like the phone is off the hook,” said Bud.
“Bill Stepford hasn't missed coffee here in ten years. He came the last time we had heavy snow; drove his Wagoneer through the drifts. He likes our coffee.”
Bud considered.
“Where is it?”
“Seven miles down the road. Then left, on County Road Six Seventy-nine. A mile, you'll see the mailbox. I'm afraid maybe he fell or something, can't get to the phone. People shouldn't live so isolated like that.”
“Well,” said Bud, 'I'll call Dispatch and see if anything's going on they need us for. If not, maybe we'll take a spin by.”
Lamar let Richard shower and sleep first, because Richard had driven while Lamar and O’Dell slept. So Richard sank into dreamless oblivion, a mercy. But when Lamar shook him awake at nine, he was still in the Stepfords' upstairs bedroom, still an escaped convict, still in the company of murderers.
Richard pulled on a pair of Bill Stepford's jeans and a blue workshirt and then settled in to do two things at once, under Lamar's instructions. He was to sit in the upstairs bedroom and keep watch, just in case. And he was to draw lions.
“Ah, now, Lamar? With everything that's going on?”
“Yes sir. I want it done, I want it perfect, so that when the time comes, we can move to the next step.”
What next step?
Anyway, he now sat doodling, the original much-studied sketch before him. It was beginning to fade into gibberish, just a random blotch of lines. He wondered what Lamar saw in it to begin with. He knew it was insufferably banal: a lion, a woman, some sort of crazed Aryan fantasy, something out of the Hyperborean age. It matched exactly La mar's arrested stage of development, but it had nothing to do with art; it was, rather, something out of that great unwashed fantasy life of the lumpen proletariat that expressed itself on the sides of vans or in comic books or boorish, bloody, boring movies. It was so coarse, untainted by subtlety or distinction.
Yet it had saved his life, he knew: It had in some way tamed Lamar's rage and redirected it, made Lamar see there was more to life than predation. And the drawing itself: There was something wildly savage and free in it that Lamar himself had responded to but which Richard had since been unable to capture, whether he stuck with lions or moved on to tigers and eagles. When he thought about it, it went away; you just couldn't do something like that offhandedly.
It was a left-brain, right-brain thing. Lamar had understood and let Richard have a little bit of room on the issue. But now he was pressing him for results.
Fortunately, the farmer had a large selection of paper and pencils available. Working with a No. 2, Richard sat at the window, looking out dreamily, and tried to imagine some savage savannah where man and cat were the same creature, but woman was still woman. And on this plain, the strongest ruled, by tooth and claw and without mercy. And of these creatures, the most powerful and cunning was Lamar, Lamar the Lion, who wasn't merely a killer but also a shrewd and cunning king.
Richard's pencil tip flew across the page; he felt deeper into the concept of lion than ever before, as if he'd somehow entered the red zone, the mindset of the jungle, where you looked at other life-forms and one question entered your mind: What does it taste like?
He stopped. Hmmm, not bad.
Dreamily, he looked out the window. He tried to imagine a plain dotted with zebra and giraffe and cape buffalo and little wily antelopes, and the ever-present hyenas.
And he almost saw it, too, though the illusion proved difficult to sustain when he noticed a black-and-white Oklahoma Highway Patrol cruiser rolling down the road toward the house.
Even though Bud was driving, he was still in his surly mood.
“Ted, you really ought to call Holly.”
“Nah” was all Ted could say.
“She'll be worried,” he said.
“The truth is. Bud,” said Ted, 'we just don't have much to talk about these days. I let her down, too. I can see in her eyes, I don't mean a thing to her. Goddamn, how I love her and there she is, and I can't reach her.”
Bud swallowed uncomfortably. Something seemed to come up into his throat. Ted was truly miserable, stewing in his own pain.
“Now you and Jen, you have a perfect marriage. You're a team. She's a part of your career. She's happy with what you got. She never puts any pressure on you.”
“Well, Ted, you know that appearances can be deceiving.”
“Not yours. Bud.”
“Ted… look, we're going to have to have a talk.”
“A talk?”
