“No woman ever said that to me. So sometimes I'd take it.”
“I want you to have it. I so bad want to give it to you. I'll be your true first, Mr. Pye,” she said shyly, 'and you'll be my first, too.”
Richard could tell he'd fucked her. It had really only been a matter of time. A woman as nuts as Ruta Beth would almost certainly end up fucking a crazy fuck like Lamar.
Anyway, when they came in from the barn, loosey goosey and giggly, they both smelled of cunt. It was, to Richard, a low, rank odor. His mother smelled like that sometimes, after one other 'friends” had visited, when he was a little boy and he'd been made to play in the garden.
But now Lamar was happy as a goddamned head of household who’s just made the mortgage. Even O’Dell picked it up. He looked up from his cereal bowl and smiled brightly, flecks of Frosted Mini-Wheats clinging to his lips and yellow teeth. He was happy.
It's like a family, my God, thought Richard. It was some terrible parody of happiness: Lamar the daddy and Ruta Beth the mommy and O’Dell and Richard the two boys. It was the normal life he'd never had.
It was such a good time, the little family in the kitchen of the farmhouse, laughing. Some demented Norman Rockwell could have painted the picture and put it on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post, Richard thought, Lamar with his ponytail and tattooed knuckles and scrawny Ruta Beth with her chalky Addams Family skin and her inbred farm face; and O’Dell, eternal boy-man, with a tunnel for a mouth and a mop of reddish hair and two tiny eyes. And, of course, him, too, Richard, who’d blinded his mother one day in a fit of rage because the para fascist right-wing Daily Oklahoman had refused to review his exhibit, 'Richard Peed: Artist in Transition,” at the Merton Gallery on Dwight Street.
They even did errands, like any family. It turned out that Ruta Beth had no paper anywhere in her house, no writing implements, nothing. She didn't even have any magazines, newspapers, or books. So of course she had to go out and get tablets of paper and pencils for Richard to continue his lions with, as that was his most important contribution.
And she also had to drive all the way to Murfs Guns in Duncan to buy double-ought buckshot for the shotguns, when they learned from the TV that goddamned salty old state cop had somehow managed to survive because he'd been hit with birdshot.
But Lamar wasn't mad, he was so mellow in his new life.
“Goddamn, was he a tough old boy!” he hooted.
“He was a right tough old buzzard but birdshot didn't get him done!
Won't he have something to tell his grandkids!”
The heavier shells were important for another reason.
“Only one last thing to figure,” said Lamar.
“That's the place where we going to do our next job.”
Richard, smiling, wasn't sure what Lamar meant by job.
“You know. To rob. We're robbers, Richard. Don't you get that? It's our work. And the way I work, them shotgun shells going to come in handy!”
CHAPTER 10
She pulled into the Elgin diner. Erect and brave in sunglasses, she sat in a window booth. She looked pale even through the distorted reflection of the interstate on the surface of the glass. She was not dressed in black but in a neat little sleeveless polka-dot dress. The freckles on her arms matched the pattern of the dress. And when she saw him, her face lit up. She waved her hand tentatively. He waved back.
He got out of the truck, reached back and tucked the Commander, which had slipped a bit, back behind his kidney.
He'd taken a Percodan half an hour early, after leaving the Stepfords, so the pain had gone down somewhat. Still, he was moving like an old man, a step at a time, as if the air itself sat on his body with a special kind of violence. He was nearly fifty; he felt a hundred and fifty. A geezer, full of melancholy and black thoughts. His legs ached, his body seemed cut from old stone as he climbed the steps.
He entered and her smile lit the place. Goddamn, how the young woman could smile. Was it all young women or just this one? He began to feel a little woozy. As he approached, she rose and took his hand and gave him a quick kiss.
“Well now Bud, who painted you the color of dead roses? Oh, my poor, poor baby.”
“Well, you know how to perk a fellow up, don't you?
I've felt better, that's for sure.”
“Are you in pain?”
“Oh, nothing I can't handle with only the slightest help from a million milligrams of heroin every twenty minutes or so.”
“You'll joke when the devil comes 'round with his bill, Bud.”
“Take my women, take my money, take my life, but don't take my sense of humor. Mister.”
“When that colonel came to tell me about Ted, it took him an hour before he got around to you. That was the worst. Bud, my Bud. I had to sit there playing the grieving widow just crazy to know about you, Bud. Oh, Bud, happiest day of my life they told me you were going to make it. I had to keep crying when all's I wanted was to laugh because they said you were going to make it.”
“Holly, damn, you look good.”
“Oh, Bud. Oh, Bud.”
“Holly, I'm so very sorry about Ted. No man deserves to die like that.
He wasn't a bad boy. I just fouled up. I wish to hell I could do it over.”
“Well, you never can, can you?”
“How are you holding up?”
“Bud, I'm fine, now that the funeral is over and poor Ted's mother and dad have gone home. I don't have to play the sobbing wife no more.”
“You know, the patrol can arrange for a doctor, or somebody to help you. You know, someone to talk to you.”
“Bud, you're the only person I want to talk to.”
“And the insurance. What it is, it ain't a fortune, but it's damn comforting. There's no horrible financial thing crushing down on you.”
“It's fine. Bud. It'll get me through more than a few years, and they said they'd try and help me get a job.”
“Great.”
“Bud, you're not facing this, are you?”
“I don't know.”
“Bud, I don't want to talk about me. I want to talk about us.”
Bud looked out through the goddamned window to green Oklahoma. A hundred yards away he could see the interstate and the cars flashing down it. Where he'd made a living for so long.
“Bud, we can have everything now. I'm sorry Ted got killed but it wasn't your fault and it wasn't my fault, it was Lamar Pye's fault. Now we can be together. It's one less difficulty. It's time, Bud. You know it as well as I know it.”
“Holly, I—” Then he ran out of gas.
“Don't you want to be with me?”
“Lord, yes.”
“Then, Bud, why not? Why can't you just do it.”
“Holly, you should know he loved you very much. What happened to him, he just lost his nerve and it was eating him up. He thought less of himself, not you. He deserves a little time before we up and move in and start sleeping together for the whole world to see.”
