Bud found Jen sitting high in the bleachers.
“Hi,” he muttered.
“Where were you? The colonel called and then they called from the hospital and everything.”
“Ah, you know. Got to jawing with that farmer and next thing you knew I was all out of time.”
Her stony, isolated silence was rebuke enough; he knew from the sullen set of her body and the sealed-off look on her face that she was angry and hurt.
“Please don't get so mad. I was late. I'm here. Now how's Jeff? Is he in?”
“No, he's on the bench. He never starts. Bud, you should know that.
Not this year.”
Bud looked and saw his youngest son, appearing small and wan, sitting in the theatrically bright bath of lights, at the end of the bench.
Jeff was an outfielder, who could run down any ball and would even thrust himself brutally against a wall to make a catch if he had to; but his batting was something of a family tragedy. It had just all but disappeared.
He'd hit .432 his freshman year and been a star; and now, as a sophomore, had moved up to varsity. But then the slump had begun; it just sucked the life out of the boy, and the harder he tried, the worse he did. He was stuck on the JV team and couldn't even get into the lineup.
Bud checked the scoreboard: It was seven to two, the Altus Cardinals leading the hapless Cougars, top of the fourth. It seemed that Jeff didn't move; it was as if he were enchanted, in a bubble; the game flowed around him, players ran or swaggered by, yelling and hooting, but Jeff was frozen in some far-off place, as if in another world, lost in concentration.
“How do you feel?” she said.
“It's not bad,” he said.
“You know, at the end of the drug cycle the pain is bad and at the beginning it's okay. It just slides back and forth.”
“I'm sorry I snapped at you. Bud. I just got so scared when they told me you'd been hit. Finally after all these years. And I expect you to be moody. After what you been through, it's a marvel you can even face the world.”
A Cougar got on second and another walked. The few fans, mostly dads and moms, began a desultory clapping.
But the boy on second was thrown out trying to steal, and the next boy hit into a double play.
“Jeff could hit this guy,” Bud said bitterly, 'I know he could.”
“You're so angry, Bud,” said Jen.
“I can't say I blame you, what you went through, seeing poor Ted, your own near miss. It's so horrible. But I can't stand to see you eaten up like this. Can't the department get someone for you to talk to?”
“Stop it,” he said brusquely.
“I don't need to talk to nobody. I just need to get back to work. The whole thing will feel better when we get this creep locked up. That's all.”
Now a Cougar dropped a fly, and then another one threw to the wrong base. In a second, the score had jumped to nine to two. But Bud was secretly pleased. It meant that Jeff's chances at hitting were better.
And, indeed, in the eighth, with two down and nobody on, Jeff was sent to the plate. Bud watched the younster unlimber from the bench, stretch and twist, try to shake off the cramps in his neck. Then he placed the batting helmet on his head and went to the batter's box.
Bud tracked him as he went, his face set in the taut mask of a warrior, his eyes squinting as if to crush every last mote of concentration onto his immediate problem. He entered the box, took three almost ritualized hip pivots, dragging the bat through the zone as if to arrange himself like a machine for the proper setting by which to engage the ball.
In the bright fake light, he looked so lean and strong, so poised, so perfect. Bud realized his heart must have been yammering and his knees shaking, but from the distance Jeff could have been a Cal Ripken or a George Brett, a natural hitter.
Oh please let him get a hit, he requested of the universe.
Some mercy for my son. Let him do well, or not so bad. Do not let him fail. I've failed enough for both of us; please show him mercy.
The pitcher, a tall and whippy black kid, wound and delivered, and Jeff took a called strike. The ball popped sharply into the catcher's glove, dust rising from the impact like a gunshot. Bud thought again: The bullet hits, Ted's hair flies, and Ted is gone. He shook his own head, as if to clear the troubling thoughts from alighting anywhere, and dialed back into reality to check as Jeff took what was apparently the second of two balls.
“This should be his pitch,” he said to Jen.
The pitcher fired and Jeff, overeager, swung wretchedly.
He looked like a crippled stork, and the ball ticked weakly off into foul territory to the third-base side.
“Damn,” Bud said.
“He should have parked that one in the wheat.”
He thought: Oh, Christ, I would give my life for my son to do well.
On the fifth pitch. Bud thought the pitcher uncoiled with a particularly venomous spasm, almost snakelike in the strike of his arm, and the ball swept toward Jeff in high theatrical light just as Jeff himself seemed to unscrew from the hips up, shoulders following hips, arms following shoulders, bat following arms. The whole thing was liquid somehow, punctuated by the sharpest crack Bud had ever heard, much louder and more decisive than the shots Lamar had launched at him.
The ball rose, the noise of the desultory crowd rose. Bud himself rose, screaming 'Yes, yes, YES!” and the ball sailed outward.
Go you bastard, GO! Bud willed it, oh please.
He saw the left fielder crouching at the fence, and as the ball descended, the boy leaped and it seemed he had it zeroed. But felt despair rise like a black tide into his heart, but the leap wasn't high enough by three feet and the ball bounded away in the darkness.
“Oh, God,” Bud said, grabbing Jen's arm, 'he hit a home run! Jeff, Jeff, WAY TO GO!” He was crying, literally, as his son trundled sheepishly around the bases to be greeted, at home by some of his fellow players.
“God,” he said to Jen, 'I'm so damned happy.”
“Bud,” she said, 'my God, you're bleeding.”
CHAPTER 11
O’Dell sat with the AR-15 in his lap and a red wig on his head. He had tits. He was wearing lipstick and a blue fur trimmed coat from the year 1958, the year that Ruta Beth's daddy had bought it for Ruta Beth's mother at Dillon's Department Store in Oklahoma City. He didn't look much like a woman. He looked like a gigantic transvestite with an assault rifle, if you looked close.
But who would look close?
He sat benignly in the back seat of Ruta Beth's little Toyota twelve miles beyond the Red River on the outskirts of Wichita Falls, Texas, just off Interstate 44 on its long pull from Oklahoma City. Sitting next to him was Richard, also with tits (tennis balls taped inside the dress), also with a wig (black), and a red hat with feathers curling down as well, all of it having at one time belonged to Beulah Tun.
Ruta Beth had done the makeup, though Richard thought she'd gone a bit overboard on the rouge. In the mirror, he'd looked like some kind of corpse. If O’Dell didn't seem to mind, Richard certainly did, but of course he would say nothing.
In jeans and sunglasses, his ponytail tucked out of sight under the brim of Bill Stepford's Stetson, Lamar sat, chewing on a long stalk of wheat. Next to his right leg, 'also out of sight, was the cut-down Browning A-5 12- gauge, though it was not loaded with birdshot but double-ought buck shells. He had the long-slide .45 in the waistband in the small of his back. And next to him, in the driver's seat, with Bud's Mossberg, sat Ruta Beth herself, also in a cowboy hat.
“That's it,” said Lamar.
