You think too much, he thought. What had Conrad said?
“Thinking is the great enemy of perfection.” Boy had he gotten that one right!
Richard stood, yawned, trying to shake the tension from his back and neck and the weariness from his wrist. Lamar and O’Dell were out in the fields on some absurd agricultural project, Ruta Beth was behind the barn working at her fucking wheel. He was alone.
Of course it would help if Lamar had told him the point of the lion.
Did he want a formal portrait? What was his thing about the lion, where would it go, what would it become?
If he knew that, then maybe it would be better or easier. But Lamar wasn't saying; he was too sly. It was as if in some preliterate, instinctual way, Lamar knew it was wisest not to disclose this information. He wanted Richard to struggle and build the lion out of that struggle, rather than providing for him a neat little dedicated, purpose-built image. He was a tyrannical patron!
So: the lion.
What is the essence of the beast?
He was a hunter. He hunted. He roamed the savannah, took down the helpless, and stole their meat. He hunted to live.
But no—he also killed to live. The hunting wasn't the point, the hunting was only the rationale. Something in the lion loved to close in, enjoy the fear and the pain of the quarry, and experience that sublime moment when its spastic struggle ceased and its eyes went blank, and, bathed in the black torrents of its own blood, it passed into limp death. What a Godlike moment, what a sense of cosmic power, how thrilling!
Richard tried to find that impulse in himself. No such luck.
Knock-knock, who’s there? Only us lambs. He shivered, disgusted. Such a thing did not exist for him. That's why it was hopeless.
He stood and restlessness stirred in his limbs. He suddenly ached for freedom. He needed to move. He began to roam through the upper story; not much, three bedrooms and a bathroom that Ruta Beth kept immaculate, especially with, as she put it, 'three big, strong boys in the house.”
The toilet seat was down.
He wandered into the room Ruta Beth and Lamar shared.
Again, it was farm- and convict-neat, the sign of people used to living to very high standards of imposed discipline.
Yet you could look at it for a hundred years and never divine from its clues that a Lamar Pye, killer and robber and butt fucker had taken up occupancy.
It titillated him a bit to be in Lamar's private space. The blood rushed to his head. He knew how the Angel Lucifer must have felt when he wandered into God's bedroom before his exile. For just a second he tried to imagine what it would be like to be Lamar, the Lion: to look upon all living things as prey, and to know with blood-boiling confidence that you had the magic power to drive them to the earth and rip their bloody hearts from them, to taste the hot blood and feel the weakening of their quivers as they slid into death.
He had to laugh. Yeah, right. The feeling was hopelessly counterfeit.
It didn't belong to him. Who are you trying to kid, he wondered.
Then Richard noticed something: It was an envelope, manila, on the closet shelf hidden behind shoeboxes. It struck him as odd, for nowhere else in Ruta Beth's strange little house was there a hidden treasure.
Feeling just a little daring, Richard snatched the envelope, saw that it was stamped 'Kiowa County Prosecutor's Office, March 15, 1983.”
Now what the-He opened the flap and reached inside.
There were two of them, green with age, in frozen copper postures of the hunt. Bud pulled to the side of the road and looked up at the building and saw what it was: the Harry J. Phillips Fine Arts Society.
Bud paused for a second, as an intriguing thought whispered through his mind. He glanced at his watch. Had some time. He decided, what the hell.
He got out, reached behind the seat, and removed his briefcase. Setting his Stetson right, he climbed the low concrete steps, pausing for a second to look at one of the lions close up. All the power and glory of its musculature stood capured in the art; the piece was an homage to the power of the lion, and even Bud felt a little thrill at looking at it.
He went inside, where it was dark and had the feeling of a cathedral, hushed and almost religious. A uniformed guard watched him come.
“Closing time is five p.M.” sir,” the guard said.
Bud flashed his badge.
“Looking for the head man. Who’d that be and how'd I find him?”
“Dr. Dickstein. He's the curator. Admin offices, down on the left.”
“Thanks.”
Bud walked down the corridor. He looked at the paintings.
They made him feel insignificant. A few made no sense at all; others seemed like photographs of explosions.
Now and then one would throw up an image so arresting it stopped him in his boots. But in time, he made it to the office of the curator and stepped inside to find a young man in shirtsleeves and wire glasses sitting at a computer terminal.
He was one of those wiry boys, with great coils of hair, like electrified springs. He looked a little like Russ, Bud couldn't help thinking.
“Ah, excuse me.”
“Can I help you?”
Bud pulled his badge.
“Sergeant Bud Pewtie, Oklahoma Highway Patrol. I'm looking for Dr. Dickstein. He in there?”
“Er, no. I'm Dr. Dickstein. Dave Dickstein. Sergeant, what can I do for you?”
God, they were growing them young these days! Bud immediately felt he'd screwed up, not getting that the guy who ran such a place could be so young.
“Sir, I was hoping you could give us some help.”
“Well—” said the young man, some ambivalence leaking into his tone.
“You may have heard, we had three convicts break out of Mcalester State Penitentiary a couple of months ago. Now they've set to armed robbery and they killed four policemen and two citizens a few weeks back.”
“The TV's full of it.”
“Sir, it seems that one of them was an artist. He studied art back East in Baltimore.”
“Yes. I still don't—”
“Well, I have some of his drawings here. It turns out he likes to draw lions. Lions.”
The young man looked Bud over intently.
“Sir, I'm no art expert,” said Bud, 'and the truth is I couldn't tell one joker artist from another. I can't even remember which one sawed off his ear. But I thought I might find an expert and have him look at the drawings. Maybe he'd see something I wouldn't. Maybe there's a meaning in them I just can't grasp. And somehow, maybe, I don't know, it would lead me another step of the way.”
“Well,” said Dr. Dickstein, 'I did my Ph . on Renaissance nudes.
That doesn't have much to do with lions. But I'd be happy to look at them. Did you see our lions, by the way. Sergeant?”
“Yes, sir, I did. That's what brought me in here.”
“Replicas of the lions outside the Chicago Art Institute.
The lion has been a theme in romantic art for a thousand years. It usually represents male sexuality, particularly in the Romantic tradition.”
“These boys ain't so romantic.”
“No, I don't suppose they are,” Dr. Dickstein said.
Richard slid out the photograph. He stared at it with some incomprehension; its details were exact and knowable but they had been arranged into a pattern that made no sense at all. He saw a bedroom slipper, a bedroom, a bed, two sleeping forms, a nice nightdress, a bathrobe.
