“That means O’Dell is happy, Richard. You have made that poor soul happy. You are part of the family.”
“Thank you, Lamar.”
“Now, we got to find us a place to hunker up and work out our next move.”
“Lamar?”
“I hope you like to camp, Richard. Me and O’Dell spent more than a few nights under the cold stars. It ain't a problem.
Can't check into a hotel and don't want to go running with the biker gangs, because Johnny Cop has them so snitched out you can't spit amongst ’em without hitting a badge or a microphone. I don't feel like kicking down no doors, at least not for a bit, too much to worry about.
We'll try and lay about a time in the back lands Richard only had one gift. It wasn't much, but he had been hording it for this moment, when he at last felt he'd passed a test.
“Lamar?”
“What?”
“I think I may have a place to stay,” he said.
CHAPTER 8
He felt his lips first. It was as if they were caked in mud or scab or something. Experimentally, he tried to move them and felt them crack apart, breaking into plates of dry skin. There was no moisture in his mouth.
He heard the drip-drip-drip of something. He could not move. His body was hardly there. He seemed unable to focus or remember anything except orange flashes, flowers, the buzz of insects. Then he remembered Lamar leaning over Ted and the way Ted's hair puffed from the muzzle blast. He remembered curling. He remembered the shotgun shell tearing into him. He remembered the pain.
Jen!
Jeff!
Russ!
Lost, they were all lost. He felt like his own father, that handsome, rigid man, glossied up in funeral parlor makeup, asleep in his coffin, redder and pinker in death than he'd ever been in life.
But there was light and maybe, now that he concentrated, sound. It was as if he were swimming up from underwater, a long, long way toward the surface. He just barely broke it and the smell of something came to his nose… bourbon.
It C. D. Henderson of the OSBI was looking at him through specs. The lieutenant fell in and out of focus. Now he was an old man, now a pure jangle of blur. Finally he cranked into some kind of stability.
“He's coming to,” the lieutenant said, as if into a megaphone.
The words reverberated in Bud's skull.
Jen appeared. He tried to reach out of death for her, but he was ensnared in a web. She appeared grief- stricken, her face -grave and swollen. He had not seen such feeling on that impassive face in so very long. Jeff swirled into view, intense and troubled. Russ, even Russ who never went anywhere with them anymore: Russ looked drained of anger and distance, and Bud could see the child in him still under the intensity of his stare.
“Oh, Bud, don't you dare die on me,” Jen said.
He couldn't talk.
“Dad,” Jeff said. Jeff was crying.
“Oh, God, Daddy, you made it, we're so damned lucky.”
He saw the plasma bag suspended over one bandaged arm and another bag dripping clear fluid over the other. He lay swaddled in bandages. He felt something attacking his penis and squirmed, thinking of rats. Then he remembered from other visits to emergency wards: a catheter. He was so thirsty.
“Jeff,” he said, finally.
Jeff kissed him on the forehead. He wished he could reach out and stroke his son's arm or something, but he couldn't move. Now and then a shot of pain would cut at him.
Russ reached over and just touched him on the arm.
Bud nodded and blinked at his oldest son.
“He's coming out,” a young man in a hospital uniform said, and Bud saw his nameplate, which read Dr. Something or other. When had doctors gotten so young?
He looked back to Jen. He felt a tear forming in his eye.
He saw young Jeff, so fair and pure, and Russ with all his complicated brains and hopes and hair, and recalled again the bullet blowing into poor Ted's skull.
Why did I do so poorly? Caught me without a thought in my head. Came in and took me down. Took us down. Lamar Pye blew us away.
“You're going to be all right. Sergeant Pewtie,” said the doctor.
“The blood loss is the main thing. Another hour and you'd have bled to death. That old guy was tough, I'll say.”
Bud's eyes must have radiated confusion, because Jen explained.
“Old Bill Stepford. He hiked thirteen miles through the dark until he came to a farm, and called the police. They got there by midnight.
They'd been looking everywhere but had no idea what had happened. You almost bled to death.
That was three days ago.”
“T-T-T-Ted?” he managed.
“Don't you worry 'bout Ted,” said C. D. Henderson.
“He ain't in no pain where he is now.”
He had to know one last thing, even as the effort of asking it seemed to drain him of energy and will.
“Why?”
“Why,” said CD.”
“because that damned Lamar is scum, that's why.”
Bud shook his head imperceptibly.
“Why… am… I… alive?”
“Cause you ain't a dove, that's why,” said C.D.
“Old man Stepford was a dove hunter come the fall. Only shells Lamar could find was light birdshot. Numbers eight and nine. A surgical team had you on the table over four hours, Bud. Dug close to a thousand pieces of steel shot out of your hide. But not none of them life-threatening and there ain't going to be no lead poisoning neither.
Lamar popped you with maybe five, six shells from a sawed-off barrel.
He must have thought he'd blown your heart and guts out from all that blood. Hah, goddamned good thing you left your goddamned vest off! But anyway he'd sawed that barrel off to a nub and the shot pattern opened up and nothing got inside your chest cavity or to your spine and nervous system or your brain. Tell you what, though. You ain't goin' through no metal detector no more, Bud.”
Bud slept until he swam up again to brightness. This time he focused onto the face of Col. W. D. Supenski, superintendent of the Highway Patrol. The colonel was another version of Bud: husky and remote with the public, with one of those pouchy faces that looked like feed sacks left out for a decade on a fence post, he'd been a Marine fighter ace in the Vietnam war all those years back and, in the company of those he trusted—other white men who carried guns and believed in the abstraction of Authority—could be quite a folksy old charmer.
“Well, damn. Bud,” he said, 'not even old Lamar Pye could put you out of commission!” The colonel had small, dark eyes that were capable of three expressions: blankness; sick, consuming fury; and genuine delight. It was the latter force that beamed through them today.
“Though I must say, I've seen turkeys hanging in the barn that looked a sight better.”
Bud offered a feeble smile. No one in his family was in evidence.
“Been talking to Jen, Bud. She's a fine woman. You are a lucky, lucky man there, Bud.”
