“Mar be here,” Rutie-girl.
Wi-chud. Where Mar?
Rutie-girl, where Mar?
Wi-chud go The no know,” nicey Dell.
Dell go boo-hoo. No Mar. Dell go boo-hoo. Dell want Mar. Dell red.
Red inside. Red Red Red Red.
WHERE MAR! DELL WANT MAR!
Wi-chud, you tellum or Dell go BON KY on head, Wichud.
Wi-chud, crybaby girly, 'No No Dell, No Hurty.”
GO BON KY Wi-chud. GO BON KY Then… Mar!
Mar new car!
Car whitey!
Dell be so happy-happy.
“New car, new car,” Dell.
“Yes, it is, O’Dell, and now we're going to repaint it,” said Lamar, as he climbed from the dusty vehicle.
“Richard, you're a painter, ain't you? Time to pull your weight, son.
Let's get this sucker repainted.”
But Richard looked like somebody had just squeezed all the air out of him. He was the color of dead petunias.
“What's wrong, boy?”
“O’Dell hit me! Twice!”
“I don't see no blood. If he really hit you, you'd be bleeding.”
“But he hurt me.”
“O’Dell, no bon ky Richard. Richard nicey nice. O’Dell, go me sorry.”
O’Dell's face lit in contrition. Genuine pain seemed to briefly shine from his eyes.
“Dell baddy bad,” he said.
“See, he apologizes, Richard. Okay? Does that take care of it?”
“Ah,” said Richard, 'I suppose.”
“Lamar, the baby has been upset at your absence,” said Ruta Beth.
“I wonder if we could control him if you weren't here.”
“Don't you fret that, hon,” said Lamar.
“Now come on.
We got work to do.”
But Richard wondered. For just a second there, it looked as if O’Dell was going to lose it. His dull eyes inflated in fear and rage, and it was as if his whole chest swelled. He had grabbed Richard and slapped him hard atop the head twice.
Richard had felt like a rag doll. The fear/ hate of losing Lamar had turned O’Dell briefly psychopathic and frightening.
It scared the shit out of Richard. In one of his 'moods,” O’Dell could hurt anyone. He shuddered at the thought:
O’Dell, alone in the world, without Lamar.
“Come on, boy, get to work,” commanded Lamar.
They spent the afternoon with cans of spray paint and Richard tried to lose himself in the work. He was surprised how much he enjoyed the simple task: It was freedom from lions, it was freedom from fear, it was freedom from O’Dell's whimsy or the utter domination of Lamar. After a frenzy of taping over the trim, he sprayed the bright orange paint on the car in smooth, circular motions, almost as if it were an airbrush, amazed at how quickly the car picked up its new color and how good he was at it. He was much better than Lamar, a lot better than Ruta Beth, and completely better than O’Dell, who simply could not get the concept of smoothness and just hammered a spot onto a single sector of the car so clumsily that even Lamar saw the hopelessness of it and gave him another job. And pretty soon they had it: a nice orange car.
The next day, Friday, Lamar said to him, 'Okay, Richard, you come with me today. We goin' pick up our second car.”
“A second car?”
“Yes sir. It will surprise you how a dumb Okabilly like me got this sucker planned out, Richard. We actually going to use three cars.
Yep. You got to plan it right if you want to stay ahead of Johnny Cop.
Them boys got their computers and their helicopters and their what-all.
Gittin' harder and harder to do an honest day's stealing. But I think I got em buffaloed on this one, yes I do. Hey, boy, you're a-running with the big dogs now. Ain't it a toot?”
“Yes sir,” said Richard.
As they were pulling out of the farmyard in Ruta Beth's Toyota, she came out and gave Lamar a little peck on the cheek.
“You be careful, hon.”
“I will. And you take good care of O’Dell. You watch him. He can wander off.”
“Don't you worry about O’Dell. Me 'n' him are going to have a good time.
I'm going to work and he's going to spin the wheel for me.”
“Good. He feels useful then.”
“Richard, you mind Daddy. He knows what he's doing.”
“Yes ma'am,” said Richard.
“Don't be late, honey.”
“We won't be.”
“You want the roast beef tonight?”
“That'd be super,” Lamar said.
They pulled out. Lamar was happy.
“Damn,” he said.
“She's the best goddamn girl a man could find. I'm a lucky man, Richard. Yes I am.”
They drove the mile down the red dirt road, turned left on 54, then, a few miles down, west on 62, toward Altus.
The highway was flat across a flat land under a high western sky and a blaze of sun unfiltered by the thin clouds. The mountains jutted from the plains and the wind snapped across the earth. Now and then a tractor would slow traffic down or they'd meander through some one-horse town, a brick bank and hardware store, a strip mall with an auto parts place and a Laundromat, the inevitable 7Eleven.
“See,” said Lamar amiably, 'trouble with those goddamned Seven-'Levens is that ever goddamned hour the manager sets a certain amount of the cash in the time lock vault. Through a little chute up top. So at any given time you can't get but what the store's taken in in the past hour.
Ain't hardly worth the goddamn trouble.”
He knew so much!
He knew how stores were organized, what kind of vaults they had, how police patrol shifts worked, how city and state cqps differed in their investigative approaches, how to operate any kind of gun or machine, how to get into or out of anything, how to rewire or deactivate electronic security devices. It was as if he had burrowed into the very structure of the universe and knew all of its useful secrets.
“Now, Richard, I do want to talk to you 'bout Sunday.”
Sunday! Richard didn't want to think about Sunday. He had just willed it out of his mind.
“You tell me what your job is.”
“I'm your tail gunner.”
“That's it. Now, what's a tail gunner do?”
“He pretends to be a victim of the robbery. He doesn't pull a gun or anything. He's just with the squares, his hands up, everything. But he's watching in case there's some hero or undercover cop.”
“You never know about undercover cops.”
