Bud ad read all the police reports; he'd talked to colleagues just that morning to get the latest. But this was new.
“Lions?” he said.
“Yes sir. He drew pictures of lions for Lamar. Don't ask me why.
Silliest damn things.”
“You wouldn't, say, have them pictures?”
“Sure do, Bud. Care for a look?”
“Yes sir,” said Bud.
He was thinking, Lions?
CHAPTER 9
No one ever said Lamar was afraid of work. On the first day on the farm, he rose early and drove the Stepfords' Wagoneer into the barn, into an empty stall. He removed the battery. Then, with a pitchfork, he climbed to the hay loft and laid into the pile up there and threw it to the floor of the barn. Then he forked the hay around the vehicle until it could not be seen. No one would ever stumble on it, and no one could look at the huge pile of hay filling one of the empty stalls and suspect that a stolen car was hidden under it.
The next morning, he chopped wood. Around ten, O’Dell came out and joined him, and they split all other logs into firewood in a heroic fourteen-hour stint. The next day, they decided to clear land where she said she wanted eventually to plant a garden, out beyond the barn.
Although it had been merely the most banal passing suggestion, for nearly a week Lamar and O’Dell dug the prairie thatch out and fought their way down to red dirt, which they then leveled and raked and graded, digging at least a hundred large rocks and a thousand small ones out of the earth. Then they cut down a dozen of the scrub oaks and some dead mesquite, reduced the wood to kindling, and dug out the stumps, maybe the hardest of their labors, for the trees had been joined to the earth stubbornly, like the partnership in an ancient marriage, and it took enormous investments of sweat and will to break them apart. The sun was bright and harsh, and the wind snapped across the dry prairie. Far off, the scuts of the Wichitas stood out, the only feature on the otherwise featureless horizon.
“Look at them,” said Ruta Beth.
“Lord, how they work.
They work like my daddy worked.”
“They're basically elemental men of the earth,” Richard said grandly, though this insight was lost on Ruta Beth.
She simply looked at him through guared little slits of eyes, nothing showing on her grim face, and said, 'Richard, sometimes you say the craziest things.”
A major disappointment: He had not impressed Ruta Beth at all. She took one look at poor, pitiful Richard and abandoned him before the relationship had even begun; it was Lamar, beaming with testosterone and sweat, who drew her like a beacon.
Ruta Beth Tun was twenty-eight years old and sinewy as a wild dog. She usually wore Sears jeans, a thin, cheap wool sweater over a faded blouse, heavy farm boots, and a black hair band which pulled her dark cascades of hair into a rope behind her head. She had chalky skin and mean little eyes, with which she constantly scanned the world for threat or aggression, never relaxing, never giving, always on alert.
Her fingernails were chewed to grimy nubs, and she was always hugging herself in a slightly unseemly way. But her grimness hid a romantic streak once directed at Richard and in a second's passing redirected toward Lamar.
When she had seen Richard's picture in the paper during his trial for criminal assault against his mother, she had cut it out. She wrote him a letter that went out in the next batch of correspondence, among other missives—to President Clinton, the governor, Meryl Streep, Hillary Clinton, Robin Quivers of The Howard Stern Show, Nancy Reagan, Ronald Reagan, Barbara Bush, two ofcharle Manson's female followers she'd seen in a TV interview, and Reba Mcentire—on a variety of noteworthy subjects. She had never before gotten an answer, except the routine 'Thank you so very much” from the Clintons, which she didn't count as a real answer. But in the case of Richard, her answer showed up three months later, at eleven p .” spattered with blood, along with Lamar Pye, and his damaged cousin.
The document that initiated this unlikely course of events was the strangest, looniest letter Richard had ever read; it even shocked him a bit.
“Dere Mr. Peed,” it began, though you cannot know me, at the same time we are One. I believe in another life, in many other lives, we must have been boy and girl friends. We must have offended the Gods with the purity of our passion and so they cursed us and sent us too wondering through time, always close enough to know the other's presence, the other's sorrow, but never close enough too touch, too hold, too kiss, too have secshual untercoarse.
As did you, I lost my beloved parents in a tragedy. It wasn't easy, but now I have made peace with the sorrowful passing of Mother and Daddy. They frequently talk to me from heaven, which is a very nice place. It's like a Howard Johnson's, where someone come to change the sheets every day. It has a very nice salad bar.
Mr. Peed, I miss you, though I have never seen eyes on you. I have stared at your picture so hard in the Daily Oklahoman I have almost wiped it off the page.
Mr. Peed, I believe we could have a wonderful life together if only we could meet. Thank you for your attention.
Yours fondly, Miss. Ruta B. Tun Route 54 Odette, Oklahoma.
When he showed it to Lamar, Lamar read the first paragraph, silently moving his lips across each word, and said, 'Richard, I can't make hide nor hair out of it. Is she crazy?”
“I think so, Lamar. Crazy as hell. But… she likes me. She lives in the country. Her parents are dead. I'm thinking maybe it would be a place to put up.”
“Hmmmm,” said Lamar.
“Well, suck my cock, why the hell not? Better'n shittin' in a wheat field, where we'll catch cold and our noses run with snot.”
They found the farm lurking behind a solitary mailbox inscribed with the name tun on Route 54. It was in a desolate sector of Kiowa county, about thirty miles west of Lawton, halfway to Altus. It felt like the true West, all right, prairie for grazing mostly, some fields heroically turned for wheat, but generally the feeling of wide-openness in every direction except due east, where the mountains lay. The highways transected Kiowa like lines in a geometry problem, and off of the asphalt now and then a ribbon of red dirt would run, disappearing in subtle folds of the terrain. The farm lay at the end of a mile of such narrow red dirt road and when you stood in its front yard, your back turned to the two-story clapboard house, rotting and dim, and facing outward, you felt as if you were among the last men on earth.
Just flat grass, distant mountains, and the snapping wind as far as the eyes could see.
Ruta Beth asked no questions. She took one look at the trio and knew who they were and why they were there. It was the message from God she had been expecting these long, lonely years. It never occurred to her to be frightened.
She smiled at Richard and nodded knowingly to the astonished Lamar but went first to O’Dell.
“You poor thing,” she said, 'you look famished. You come on in. I don't have much but what I've got I'm willing to share.”
“O’Dell likes cereal, ma'am,” said Lamar.
“It's his favorite thing.”
“What do he like?”
“Er, he likes that Honey Nut Cheerios a lot. He likes your sugary ones. He don't like the 'healthy' ones, you know, with the nuts and all.”
“I have Corn Flakes.”
“Ah, he'll eat ’em. But he ain't crazy about ’em.”
