You can't go roaming about doing God knows what. It's not a vacation.
You're still on duty and your duty is to recover, and return to active duty.”
“Yes sir,” said Bud.
“Bud, I can see in your eyes, something's eating at you.
I know how being shot can make a man call into value a lot of the things he holds dear. I want you to—” Bud fixed the colonel with a glare.
“What are you saying. Colonel?”
“There's talk. Bud.”
“Talk? Talk about what?”
“Bud, as I understand it, somebody's wife saw you and Ted's widow at a diner in Elgin. It didn't seem right.”
“Whose business is it?”
“It shouldn't be nobody's business. Bud. But that isn't the' point What should and what is are different as night and day. The truth is, if you wear the badge and walk the walk, you have to live a life that not only is free of taint, but looks free of taint. It isn't pretty, and it sure isn't fair, but it's what it is and that's the fact, and I know you know same as I do. Now all's I want from you is recovery time. Do you understand?”
Bud took a deep breath. Never in his long career had he ever argued with authority. It wasn't his way. If you enforce rules, you live by rules, that was that. But this time, for whatever reason, maybe just his prickly orneriness or some deeper sense that the universe was now ever so slightly unhinged, he said, 'What's going on between Mrs. Pepper and myself is just nobody's damned business but hers and mine and maybe my wife's. That's all there is to it.”
The colonel looked at him hard.
“Bud, a dee-vorce, a scandal, it could cost you so much.
Believe me, I know. I went through one in the Marine Corps fourteen years ago and it took me forever to get back on my feet. I never ever got the love back of my middle daughter and I will die regretting that.
All for a younger woman I thought I loved who is now married to a general.
So I know. Bud. I've been there. Plus, Bud, I got the patrol to think over. You up and marry the widow of the man you were partnered with who got killed when you were along might git some folks talking. Next thing you know, you got those news boys looking for dirt. It's a hard thing.”
“Yes sir,” said Bud.
“I hear you. But what I should tell you is Ted's dying words. He asked me to look after Holly.”
“Okay, Bud, I believe you. Now you just get better and ever damn body going to be fine.”
They let Bud go that afternoon, but before he drove home, he called Holly.
“Hi.”
“Oh, Bud, tell me, it wasn't nothing?”
“No, just some stitches broke, some minor local bleeding, that's all.”
“Oh, that's great. And they're going to let you out?”
“I am out.”
“Oh, Bud, can I meet you?”
“Holly, that's just it. People are beginning to talk. The colonel said something.”
There was a long silence on the line.
“Holly, the last thing either you or I need is some huge mess over who’s with who.”
“So what are you saying. Bud?”
“Well, I don't know.”
Bud thought about how simple it all became without Holly. It was as if all the weight that had accrued on his neck and shoulders over the last few months suddenly took flight and vanished. He saw the future before him as a kind of sentimentalized postcard, golden and pure. Yet even as he could not bear the thought of hurting Jen, neither could he bear the thought of hurting Holly.
“Bud, do you want it to be over?”
“No, Holly, of course not. I couldn't live without you,” he said.
“Bud, I couldn't live without your bad jokes.”
“We just have to be careful for a time is all. This settles down, we get it all straightened out.”
“When will I see you?”
“Well, I got a grand day planned for us tomorrow. I want to go through Lamar's prison stuff. Everyone else has, why shouldn't I? Anyway, that's a long drive up to Mcalester. I could meet you, say, in Duncan, at eleven, we could drive on up, get lunch, I'd go into the house for an hour or two and then we'd come on back and have dinner on the way.”
“Oh, Bud, don't that sound like the prom itself!”
Bud drove on home then, and got there just as Jeff had returned from practice. Jen was back late and, behind, seemed to be manufacturing some despair over the dinner that she felt she had to prepare. The issue was: chicken or fish. Neither sounded like much to Bud.
“Goddamn,” he said, 'we got some celebrating to do.
This boy hit a home run, I just got out of the hospital, and you worked too late to put in one more minute here. Let's go out to dinner. I need meat, red meat, freshly killed. The Meers Store. Any objections?”
“Dad, it's so expensive for hamburgers.”
“Whatever. Let's go. We can put it on the card.”
“Bud, we haven't paid that yet.”
“Well, it ain't overdue so it won't bounce. Come on, Jen, let's give this boy a thrill, like the one he gave us last night.”
“Dad,” Jeff said in a voice dense with mock despair over his father's shameless corniness.
“Now come on, people, time's a-wasting. Maybe even Russ would join us, if he ain't snooty these days.”
“I have a paper due tomorrow,” Russ called down from upstairs.
Honors history. Russ looked like a goddamn beatnik, but he got straight As and was a good boy, even if he rarely spoke one word in a language his father understood.
“We shouldn't leave Russ,” said Jen.
Bud bounded up the stairs, the ache in his legs vanished in his explosion of enthusiasm. It was suddenly overwhelmingly important that Russ be there, that they all be together.
His oldest son's room was a strange jungle to him; the junk-addict rock star in the poster, all the narrow little paperback books without pictures on the covers by people Bud had never heard of—Camus, Sartre, Nietzsche, Mailer, Dostoyevsky, names like that—magazines with words rather than pictures on their covers, too, a whole universe that just puzzled Bud, who’d had to drop out of Oklahoma State his freshman year when his father had died of cirrhosis in an Air Force hospital, and had gone into the Air Force himself for four years the next week.
“Now, what's this about a paper? It can't wait?”
“Dad, if I screw up this thing, Foster won't give me a recto Princeton, like he said he would.”
“Your brother did so well.”
“I know. That's terrific, I'm really happy for him. But, this paper.”
“Sure, I understand,” said Bud, who of course didn't.
Russ was a thin boy, more bone and muscle than flesh, who wore his hair troublingly long. Bud tried never to look at his left earlobe, where something glittered; and he didn't approve of the way the boy dressed almost purely in black except for a battered leather coat of the sort the pilots had worn when Bud was an air policeman those many years ago.
Russ had just charted his own course through life. He loved his folks and never gave them a lick of trouble, but he wanted a wider, more passionate world. Read all the time, was trying to read himself out of Oklahoma.
“It's okay. Dad,” said Jeff, who had come up the stairs after Bud.
“He's a brain, he's got to study.”
He didn't say it angrily; he and Russ never competed directly, and ran in completely different circles in high school. It was all right, it was cool.
But Bud felt a flash of anger: he loved it so when his boys were together and he could hover over them as he had when they were children, perhaps most fascinated at his own sense of kingship than out of any sense of giving
