meanest-looking, fanciest black plastic rifle Richard had ever seen. It looked like a ray gun. He was a boy who meant business; he wanted to drop a bad man before the night was over.
“Can't we wait on the bank?” Richard now moaned through his chattering teeth.
“Won't be another helicopter by for an hour.”
“You're the biggest fool I ever met, Richard,” said Ruta Beth.
“Didn't Daddy tell you 'bout infer-red? With that infer-red stuff, they can see you in the dark by the heat of your body. That's what they're doing—hunting you by your heat. Them boys get a reading on heat from three bodies hiding in the grass, goddamn if they won't have a whole company of Rangers here in 'bout a minute.”
How did Lamar know so much? Lamar knew everything.
But Lamar was dead.
“He'd have been here by now if he was going to make it,” Richard said.
“We are going to freeze to death and that will be that.”
“Daddy is too goddamned smart for any Johnny Cop.”
She was even beginning to talk like him.
“Now Richard, please shut up or O’Dell will have to discipline you.”
“Yes, Ruta Beth,” Richard said.
“Wi-chud,” came O’Dell's glottal spasm.
“O’Dell, I heard, no bon ky please!”
But O’Dell didn't want to hurt Richard. Instead he gathered him up and hugged him. It was the strangest thing; O’Dell's arms just drew Richard in, and his great body seemed to absorb Richard. There was nothing sexual in it at all, for the sex part of O’Dell's brain lay happily dormant;
but it was all tenderness.
Wi-chud ma key ma key good. Wi-chud no cold. Wi-chud, like, ma key warm.
O’Dell's love bloomed like a hothouse flower: Richard felt the heat radiating from the big body, and in the embrace, the purity of survival. O’Dell! What a strange boy! What planet do you come from?
The warmth saved Richard. It reached out and plucked him from the frozen loneliness of his exile and gave him a life. He yearned to lose himself in it. He knew now he could get through anything.
The hours passed. Six more times the helicopter roared by. At last the dawn began to nudge its way across the sky.
“Ruta Beth?”
“Yes?”
“What do we do if he doesn't show?”
“Nothing. Wait some more.”
“But they'll catch us.”
Ruta Beth had no response. It was true. The car they had arrived in was deposited under a camouflaged tarpaulin in some trees but a mile or so away, at the end of a farm road near an abandoned farmhouse. In daylight, its shabby fraudulence would be uncovered swiftly enough.
Spotted by the chopper, it would draw hundreds of cops within minutes; they'd fan out with bloodhounds, find the trail, follow the little party to the river's edge, and find it cowering there.
Across the river, Ruta Bern's Toyota had been artfully hidden. It, too, would be discovered in daylight. The only real chance was to get across the river in darkness, pull away in the Toyota, which as yet had no criminal charges against it, and head by back roads to Ruta Bern's farm.
In the slow progress of light, Richard at last saw Ruta Beth's stony face. She was a true believer in the cult of Lamar, but even now he could see that her hope was vanishing.
“He'll be here,” she said.
“Know he will.”
Waiting for Lamar. It was like some existential play written by a perverted Frenchman high on keef and boy- love.
But instead of snappy patter and ironic reflections on fate, the three principals merely huddled in the water, wrinkled as prunes, waiting for the sun to rise and betray them.
At least, thought Richard, it would be over soon.
A fish bit him. He started at the impulse of pain fighting through his numbness, but the fish bit him again. Not bit him—goosed him, almost comically, squeezing his balls playfully.
“O’Dell?”
But O’Dell's passive face indicated no measurable mental activity.
What the-'Goddamn,” said Richard.
“He has come.”
Lamar broke the water like a seal, shivered in great animal fury, and snorted merrily, 'Hah! Shoulda seen you jump, boy!”
At that moment, Richard loved him.
“Lamar! Lamar!” shouted Ruta Beth.
“Mar! Mar! MARRRRRR!” aped O’Dell.
“Now folks, hold it down! It ain't party time yet. I got to git you out of here.”
“Where you been. Daddy?”
“In some damn John's garage. I managed to git me out by cop car, dumped that, cut cross town and ended up hunkered down in this garage, waiting for the lights to go down so’s I could jump-start the car and come a- calling on y'all.
You got the money?”
“You bet we do, Lamar,” said Ruta Beth.
“Come, give me a hug and a kiss, honey.”
“Believe I will,” said Lamar, and as O’Dell watched happily, the two swarmed toward each other in the grayness for a big sloppy kiss.
Only Richard thought to wonder: How many did he kill to get out?
But, disengaging himself from Ruta Beth, Lamar announced, 'Now, it's time to move. Where's that goddamned canvas sack, honey?”
“Up on the bank. Daddy. You want me to git it?”
“I do.”
He turned to Richard.
“You look cold as a corpse, boy.
You chattering?”
“I-i-t's so cold, Lamar,” Richard said.
“Hell, in three hours Ruta Beth'll have you eating biscuits by the fire.”
Ruta Beth pulled the big canvas sack close to Lamar.
“Great, babe,” he said, and reached in to pull out a coil of thin, waxy rope. Richard could just barely make it out in the gray light.
“You swim, Richard?”
“Yes,” said Richard.
“Good. Now I want you to swim across and slipknot this to a tree good and strong so that these folks can pull themselves across.”
“I-I—” gulped Richard.
He looked. The torrent of the Red was strong, swollen with rain; it thundered along and in the gray light was beginning to show the source of its name; it looked like a river of blood, rushing out of a sucking chest wound, pausing only here and there to generate eddies of bubbles where the current curled on itself and lashed downward. Now and then a stick or piece of vegetation would come shooting along. It was the river of death, that's all. Out there, Richard would surrender, his limbs pummeled by the long night's cold; he would be sucked down, then shipped downstream, a bloated, leaky corpse.
“Haw!” barked Lamar.
“Had you there, son! I'll swim the goddamned river. You help me git the rope set around a branch here, so it don't get away. Then you go across hand by hand. You got that? Ruta Bern, you follow. O’Dell?”
