CHAPTER 14
On Saturday, Bud went to the new Lawton public library just down from the new police station and looked at art books and books on Africa.
Lions. What the hell was this thing about lions?
Was it just lions? Or was it another theme—the lion in art? Of the latter, there wasn't much. He only came across one painter who could be called a lion artist, a Frenchman named Rousseau who painted the goofiest things Bud had ever seen. The stuff was called primitive. The most famous showed a lion licking a sleeping black man under a spooky moon. Bud gazed on the picture, trying to figure it out. It actually kind of shook him: it was like looking into someone else's dreams—it had that clear, serene quality to it, almost childish. It seemed somehow smug that its meanings were sealed off to normal folk like himself. It gave him the goddamn willies.
The other famous lion painting, also by Rousseau, actually wasn't primarily about lions at all; instead it was about a woman on a chaise lounge in the jungle. She had the same spooky calmness. In one corner of the picture, a lion and a tiger, almost lovers, gazed from the dense green trees. It also had that childish quality, but there was nothing in it that seemed to have to do with Lamar Pye or Richard Peed, because they were so peaceable and in a way, so unnatural.
To Lamar, nature was savage; this kind of wussy lion would strike Lamar as a kind of sacrilege somehow.
But then Bud noted a small drawing in an art history book jammed with paintings of important men and battles.
Was it a lion? It was a cat, but could it be a lion? He looked close at the caption, more foreign gibberish with one recognizable key word: 'Lion tour ne vers la gauche, la tete levee, 1854it read. The artist was another French guy, a Eugene Delacroix.
This Eugene appeared to know a bit more about lions than his poor countryman Rousseau. There was nothing phony or movie-like about it and this lion couldn't have come out of any dream. It was a big beast, somehow shivering in the delight of its own existence, its head corkscrewed slightly to the left so that you couldn't see the famous lion profile or much of the familiar mane. The beast seemed to be stretching itself on some plain somewhere. But Eugene must have feared lions and known what they could do, in a way the dreamer Rousseau never could: Eugene somehow got its throbbing power, the bunched muscles under the skin, the sense of sheer grace and coiled energy stored in it, its animal purity. But the eyes, especially, seemed to have some secret meaning: They were jet-black arrowheads set in the narrow skull, animal eyes, devoid of mercy or curiosity, merely intent on feeding whatever instincts happened to play across the lion brain. Odd how much emotion a few lines inked on a piece of paper one hundred odd-years ago could stir.
Bud shivered himself, though not with delight. He felt the power of the predator, the instinctive killer. Maybe this is what Richard was trying to bring out.
But that was all he came up with, and so he put the art books aside, and turned to the lion as animal, gazing for hours at lion photography from a variety of texts. This got him even less. Lions, for all their vaunted majesty, were just big cats. In their slouchy poses, their silkiness, their slope-bellied laziness, he saw a cat one of the boys had once had, a yellow tabby thing hung with the name Mischief, who’d laid around the house all day watching the human beings with total disinterest, seeming as harmless as a slightly animated pillow. But every once in awhile, he'd bring in a tiny lung or heart or something, as an offering, as if to a god. As if he. Bud, master of the house, were the god. Whatever, it worked; the cat lived with them in perfect harmony for eleven years before finally dying comfortably of old age.
Bud had always liked its split personality: that it could be the complete tabby by day, then slip out at night and revert to savagery, rending some small creature down to its organs.
But this got Bud nowhere except into a blinding headache.
He called Holly and had a brief but entirely pleasant chat, as he told her all about the lions of the Lawton library, and she laughed at the image of the big old boy who looked like John Wayne looking at books on lions and how the mamas must have thought he was crazy or something.
She said he was damned lucky they didn't call the police.
Then he said, 'Uh, I was thinking, I might drop by tomorrow”
“You was, was you?” she said, in flirty fake astonishment.
“Well, whatever gave you that idea?”
“Oh, a little fellow.”
“Well, if you come, you best bring him along.”
“About noon?”
“Yes sir,” she said.
When he got home, everybody seemed happy. He even felt happy, though he had to gobble a Percodan to keep from hurting. It seemed that all was at peace in the strange realm he called his empire; he didn't have to mollify any of his far-flung, rebellious provinces. He had a few beers, a light supper, and went to bed before either of the two boys got home from dates or parties or whatever. He dreamed of lions.
On Sunday, Bud rose and, feeling he hadn't been paying enough attention to Jen and feeling also guilty over what he had planned for noon, went to the nine a.M. service with her and Jeff. Russ, of course, the intellectual, had stopped going to church in the eighth grade.
So Russ slept, because he'd been out late the night before on some fool thing. At least he hadn't come back with another earring. Bud put his anger aside or in the little place where he stored it, and drove across town with Jen and Jeff in Jen's station wagon.
Jen had taken to going to the Methodist Church though, like Bud, she'd been christened a Baptist. Her father, a prosperous farmer up near Tulsa, had always referred, sneeringly, to Methodists as Baptists who forgot where they came from, and although Jen stuck with her father on pretty near everything, she'd decided to give Methodism a shot, and it stuck. The Methodists had a preacher named Webb Fellowes whom she liked a great deal because he always gave a damned entertaining sermon:'f or a younger man, he seemed to be quite wise and respectful, and he was funny.
Today he told an amusing story about a rich Texas oil man who annually gave 15 percent to the church and quite a sight more when the parishioners decided to build a new building. Afterward, this Texan was asked if he belonged to the church.
“Hell no,” he said, 'the church belongs to me!” Bud saw what Webb Fellowes was getting at: It wasn't a thing about how much you gave in dollars, but how much you gave in your heart.
If that's the case, he thought, I ain't much of a Christian, especially because as soon as the service is over and Jen and Jeff and I go to get some breakfast, I'm going to go break a commandment.
After the service, they walked down the line that got them to the minister, and he was well up on things.
“Hear you hit a dinger, son,” he called out heartily, clapping Jeff on the arm.
''Yes sir, I did,” said Jeff.
“That ball's still climbing,” said Jen.
“No ma'am, it just barely made it over the center fielder's mitt,” Jeff said, 'But it was a home run nevertheless.”
“Well, Mrs. Pewtie, you've got every right to be proud.”
“And every right to be thankful,” she said, and took Bud's arm and brought him a little closer.
“How're you doing, Sergeant?” asked Webb Fellowes.
“Well,” said Bud, 'they tell me I won't be going through any metal detectors without setting off every alarm between here and Kansas City, but I feel pretty good.”
The minister laughed.
“The Lord looks after those who know He's there,” he said.
Bud smiled enthusiastically at the young minister and at the absurdity of the statement. What a crock, he thought as he pumped Fellowes' strong hand, the Lord don't look after nothing. He just sets the goddamned Lamar Pyes of the world loose, and hell comes for a meal nearly every place that boy hangs his hat.
