“That used to be a fine hat,” said Stepford.
At last Lamar settled down. He turned back to the front, breathing heavily. His anger had mottled his face red; his lungs wheezed and ached in his chest. He said to O’Dell, 'Pull over. Anywhere's fine, this big field.”
O’Dell slowed the old Wagoneer down, let it slew off the gravel shoulder a bit, then eased it across the drainage ditch and into a field. He let the smooth V-eight perk for a few moments, then, satisfied, he turned the key and let it go silent.
The road, a narrow black ribbon, cut across the wide flatness of cotton and peanut fields. No cars were anywhere in sight. The sky was huge, piled with clouds like castles.
Some scrub oaks lay a quarter mile to one side.
“Okay, folks,” he said.
“Time to get out.”
“Don't do this, Lamar,” said Mr. Stepford.
“You are scum but you can't do this to us. You have come to admire my wife's cooking and my fine collection of guns, which served you well in the fracas.”
“I have to do what I have to do, old man. You too, Richard. You got to come, too.”
“Oh, God, Lamar,” said Richard.
“Stop your sniveling, Richard,” said Mrs. Stepford.
“Lamar, do what you will but shut this boy up. He ^giving me a headache. But can I pee first? I've been he^ ^tin very tight.”
“Yes, ma'am. O’Dell will watch, because nothing at all to him. The rest of you, V ^ lady some privacy.” / ca'^ They did as he commanded, w because off. It wasn't fair. He had tried. He had wanted so hard to do what was expected of him.
“Lamar, please.”
“Shut up, Richard. You all set, Mrs. Stepford? Thank you ma'am. This way.”
He walked them into the field. It was near twilight. The sun was setting in an orange smear. It looked like a Constable sun to Richard.
Utter serenity lay across the land. It was the exact opposite of the pathetic fallacy: Nature was being ironic, damn her exquisiteness. They wandered across the field. Richard felt as if he were an ant on a pool table. The horizon around them was remorselessly flat. They came, after a time, to a fold in the land and stepped down into a gang of scrub oak trees abutting a messy little creek. It was utterly private.
“Okay,” said Lamar.
“This will do. Have y'all made your peace with God?”
“You piece of shit, Lamar,” said Stepford.
“Don't make it hard on yourself, old man. It don't have to hurt a damned bit. Don't run or nothing; there's only pain in it.”
“Hold me, Bill,” said the old woman.
“You are a goddamned beautiful woman, Mary,” said Bill Stepford to his wife. He was crying a little.
“You gave me fifty great years and you never complained a bit. Mary, I wasn't a decent husband. I had an affair. I had many affairs. The sharecropper's daughter, Maggie? Minnie Purvis, in town. Al Jefferson's niece, the secretary. Mary, I am so very sorry.”
“It's all right. I knew about them.”
She turned to Lamar.
“This man flew fifty missions over Germany in the war. He was wounded twice and won the Distinguished Flying Cross, though he says it's nothing. He came back and built a farm up from fallow ground and was the Grange president for twelve years. He raised four sons and two daughters and gave work to over a hundred itinerant laborers and their families. He paid for their medical while they was here and for three of their children to go to college and he never asked for nothing. He is a good man.
You have no right to end his life in this field.”
“He is a good man,” said Lamar, 'and I don't have no right at all, except that I have the gun and that gives me the right- He turned to Richard.
“Here,” he said, handing him the trooper's silver revolver.
“This belonged to that dead cop. That old boy was mean as cat shit right up to the end. Maybe some of that grit will rub off on you.
Shoot them. Both. In the head. Or I will kill you.” Then he raised the long-slide automatic, thumbing off the safety, and leveled the muzzle at Richard.
Richard swallowed.
“He don't have the guts,” said Stepford.
“Well, you just give him the chance,” said Lamar.
“Go on, Richard. Show me you are a man. Do some men's work.”
Richard turned. The old people were on their knees. Mr. Stepford held Mrs. Stepford, who had begun to cry. Richard felt queasy as hell. Here was the naked thing its own self. Put the muzzle to the head and pull the trigger. Be over in a second. But he didn't have the guts. It was too horrible.
Would their heads blow up? Would it squirt? Would it be gory?
Wouldn't there be blood everywhere? He turned and faced Lamar's gun and saw his own death in Lamar's blank eyes.
“Oh, shit,” he said. He remembered the classic Yale experiment where most typical Americans routinely pumped up the juice and tortured some poor fool, because somebody told them to. Well, this was different.
His life was on the line.
He turned and pressed the gun against Mrs. Stepford's neck and, closing his eyes, pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened except a click. He pulled it again.
“It's broken,” he said.
“Richard, you are so dumb,” said Lamar.
“Get your ass back to the car.”
Richard scampered back.
“See,” he said, 'he do have the guts to do it. He just too dumb to know the gun weren't loaded. Sorry to put you folks out. Had to test the boy. He ain't much, but I don't guess you'll be signing up, Mr. Stepford, so I'll have to make do.”
“Lamar, you like to scared Mary to death.”
“Couldn't be helped. Got to do what I got to do. That simple. You get in my way on a job, old man, I'll shoot you dead. But you have sand, that I admit. You took all I had to hand out and I respect that.
Believe it or not, you'd last on the yard, and that poor boy would die if I hadn't saved him.
Now you all stay here tonight. It won't get cold. Come morning, you amble over to the road. We'll be long gone by then. You'll be back home tomorrow.”
“Lamar,” said Mary Stepford, 'you are a bad man and they will kill you, far sooner than you plan on. But maybe it'll be fast, on account of what mercy you showed today.”
“Thank you,” said Lamar.
“That may be the nicest thing anybody said to me. Sorry we had to steal from you and take your guns. But I have to do what I have to do.”
“Goodbye, Lamar,” said Mary.
Lamar turned and walked back to the car.
Bill watched him go.
“Mary, you are such a fool. That man is pure white scum. He'll be dead before sunrise tomorrow or the day after and a lot of folks will go with him. Can't believe the softness in your heart for such a scoundrel.”
“Well, Bill Stepford,” she said, 'he's everything you say, and worse, but he's one thing you never were, as I have known and lived with for many a year. He's true to his own.”
They drove south, then west, in the setting sun, through farmland and small, dull towns. Finally Richard said, 'Thank you, Lamar.”
“Thank you, Richard. O’Dell, Richard proved he was a man. He can pull the trigger.”
“Dell poppy-poppy,” said O’Dell with a smile.
