them something, too. It was a selfish thing, Jen had told him: The boys had to be who they were, not his little servants, there to reflect his glory. He didn't quite agree, but everywhere he saw the signs: authority breaking down, both on the road and in the home. It was a losing battle, no sense at all of even fighting it. The day of the father as master was ending, closing out.
He knew that and could get through it, he told himself. But he missed that sense of lordship that used to come with paying the mortgage.
“Okay, no problem, we'll bring you something.”
“Thanks, Dad,” said Russ.
They left shortly, and drove through the dark. Nobody said much on the way over. There wasn't much traffic as they took Cache Road through the built-up strip abutting Fort Sill and then got to plain flat highway west of Lawton.
Twenty miles out of town they turned and drove up through the Wichita National Wildlife refuge, where buffaloes could actually be seen. The mountains rose around them like humps of stone. The Meers Store was an old mining-company store whose quaintness some clever people had preserved; now it served huge hamburgers made from authentic longhorn beef, said to be low on cholesterol, high on flavor. It was one of those down-homey joints, known for good beef, cold beer, and flirty waitresses. Full of junky posters and deer that nobody in living memory had killed.
It didn't take long to find a table, and in just a bit more time. Bud was draining a Budweiser and waiting for a big hamburger, his favorite.
“Jeff, you should be so proud. I thought I'd bust a gut when you hit that ball. I did bust a gut.”
Jeff gave a strange, self-conscious shrug.
“You did so well, Jeff,” said Jen.
“We're so proud.”
“Well, one lucky swing doesn't make a season.”
“No, but it just might start you off on a path to success. I feel you have the talent to be a major league player, if that's what you want bad enough.”
“Probably not, dad.”
“He should still plan to go to college. Bud,” said Jen.
“Sure, sure, I ain't saying he shouldn't. But he should also be damned proud. What pitch you hit?”
“Dad, I don't even remember. I just decided I'd swing.
Truth is, I'd pretty much given up. Didn't think I could hit him. The ball was just smoke. That guy was good. He's pitched a couple of no-hitters this year. He's only a sophomore.
They say he'll go pro before he graduates. But he threw it where I could hit it. God, it felt so good.”
“Well, sir, it looked good, too.”
Bud sat back. He ordered another beer when the girl brought the food.
Delicious, as anticipated.
It was dark in the place, and as he ate, he could see people, but not their faces. They could have been anyone, he thought, and thought of all the hundreds of times he'd come across grotesque things on the road, where out of nowhere scum hit innocent people and took their money and sometimes their lives. The people just couldn't do a thing about it, except hope for mercy, that's how sudden and ugly it could come.
His family sat in the light; who was in the dark? Who waited?
Was it a Lamar Pye, death just waiting to happen? And who would protect them? He, Bud? He was sworn to be off with his young woman, having the kind of adventure he'd never had when he was a young man and was so lucky to get to now.
But who would save them from the Lamars?
-He looked at them. Jen was telling Jeff about a new jacket she thought he ought to get for his college interviews.
Jeff was saying that Russ didn't get a jacket but didn't need one, he was such a brain. They were intent on their conversation, and Bud wanted to hug them both and hold them from the darkness.
He met her at eleven and they set off for Mcalester.
Why? Everybody—FBI, OSBI, U . marshals. Department of Corrections police, Pittsburg county sheriff's department, Oklahoma City homicide—had gone through the squalid collection of convicts' possessions, such as they were. These were the very best professional investigators in the state; what could Bud find that they couldn't?
Bud knew the answer: nothing. Anyway, he wasn't really even an investigator, having spent most of his career on the road, where things happened fast and furious and you handled a hundred decisions and situations a day, but no penetrations into mystery or playing a dozen varying accounts off against each other or cultivating a network of informants.
But still Bud somehow wanted to know Lamar in a way that reading his jacket could not provide. He wanted to touch the things that Lamar had touched and cherished, and see what Lamar felt about life.
“I don't know how you can put your hands on those things. What do you expect to get out of it?” Holly asked, just as Jen had that morning.
Jen had said it was a sick obsession; Holly, however grudgingly, accepted it.
“I don't know,” he said.
“Don't the Indians believe if a man holds a thing dear some of his soul rubs off on it? But Lamar don't have a soul. Maybe his evil rubbed off on his stuff. I want to see what's left in it.”
“Bud, that's crazy.”
“Well, maybe it is. But I'm going to go nuts if I just sit around that house and take Percodans. It'll be a nice trip.”
They took Oklahoma 7 east from Duncan toward the small penitentiary city 125 miles away. It was a bright summer's day, and on either side of the highway, the farmland spilled away, the neat fields broken up by stands of trees or low hills, all of them decorated with the rhythmic pumping of the oil wells, which somehow looked like giant insects at their feeding, up, pause, and then greedily down again.
Now and then, they'd blow by some hopeful rural town, usually with pennants flapping and gas station signs climbing heroically into the sky and a small civilization of fastfood joints.
Bud loved it: highway America. Always different, always the same. He loved the snap of the wheat in the wind and the small tidy places and the neatly furrowed fields and the high blue sky and the green everywhere. It had given him such a thrill to roll down that ribbon of concrete in his unit, aerials whipping, lord of it all, and all who looked on him knew that he was the man that counted.
He looked over at Holly. She was such a pretty young thing. He didn't believe he'd ever seen a person in whom the features were so perfectly formed. Why did she like him so?
She looked over and smiled. She had nearly perfect teeth.
“What are you thinking. Bud?”
“I'm wondering how come of all the men in the world you picked me. You could have had any of them.”
“Well, I could not have, and you know it. I picked you because you were the kindest and the strongest and the bravest and the best. Who wouldn't pick such a man?”
He shook his head. The absurdity of the praise almost irritated him; he remembered the fear, the sense of worthlessness he'd felt when Lamar brought the shotgun to bear for the last moment, just before pulling the trigger. Whatever his virtues, they were valueless that day.
The cloud that passed through his mind must have shown in his eyes.
“Bud,” she said, 'can't you let it go? The thing with Lamar, Ted's death, that horrible thing. It's over. The others will get him, sooner or later.”
“It's forgotten. Okay? I swear it.”
“Oh, Bud,” she said with a sigh, 'you are such a wonderful liar.”
That seemed to let the tension escape, and they drove the rest of the way in a buoyant mood; he flirted and she laughed. They listened to the radio. There was an oldies station in Oklahoma City that they picked up, KOMA, and Bud knew more of the songs than Holly did. They made jokes about the troopers parked by the roadside or occasionally cruising down the other side of the highway strip.
It was light and pleasant.
