-I'd have to see samples of his work. I think they have magazines full of tattoos. You could find a guy from them. And then we could—”
“No, no,” said Lamar, 'that would take too long. He does something this fancy, I'll be laid up for a month while it heals. Longer I wait, longer it's going to be. Want it done now, tonight.”
“But Lamar, I—”
“The Fort! Don't you get that?”
“The Fort?”
“Fort Sill. Outside the Fort, on that Fort Sill Boulevard.”
“Tattoo parlors?”
“You got that right. We go tonight, we check ’em out, if you find a boy who can do what I want, then we do it tonight. We lay up, 'bout a month. I figure another job. We pull it off, then by God it's Mexico and a vacation!”
“A vacation,” said Ruta Beth.
“Oh, Daddy, you think of everything.”
It happened rarely enough anymore, because everybody had such different schedules and agendas, but it happened tonight, and Bud was a happy man.
They were all there, his wife and his two sons, gathered around a dinner table in the Mahogany Room of Martin's, Lawton's finest restaurant for forty years. And the place still knew how to put out a pretty good plate of roast beef, its specialty, though tonight Jen had decided to have some fish thing and Russ, though the honoree, had chosen a plate of linguini with pepper sauce.
But he was happy. Bud was. They sat there eating, Bud shoveling down the forkfuls of reddish meat that always so delighted him. The boys looked great. Russ, the object of all attention, had slicked up his act a bit: He wore a white shirt buttoned at the top and a pair of black jeans over his black boots, and his long hair smoothed backward.
The earring was still a little one. Jeff, in a blazer and tie, looked a little more like Bud's idea of a Princeton student.
“We are so proud of you, Russ,” said Jen.
“See, what's so great isn't just that Russ is smart,” said Bud.
“The world is full of smart people. Lamar Pye, he's smart. He's smart as hell. But Russ works. That's what's rare. The world is full of people who think they're just too damn smart to work.”
Russ was modest through all this but seemed to be enjoying it. Only Jeff was unusually quiet, although he also had good news: He had been moved up to varsity.
“Well,” said Bud, 'they say a man is rich to the degree his sons make him proud—”
“Who says that, Dad?” said Russ, teasing the old man.
“Well, I don't know who exactly it was, maybe a Russian, maybe a Greek, and maybe I just made it up, but if it's true, then I'm the goddamned richest man in Oklahoma tonight.”
“Well, Dad,” said Russ, 'maybe I'll flunk out.”
“You won't flunk out. No man who works as hard as you has a thing to worry about. Then you go on and go to work doing what you want and you have sons who’ll make you just as proud as you two make me.”
“You-all listen to your daddy,” said Jen.
“He's speaking the truth. You boys have been a great thing for us, made us so happy. Not a lick of trouble between the two of you, thank the Lord.”
Bud had more roast beef.
“Bud, do you think we should order some champagne?” said Jen.
“I think these boys are man enough.”
“Mom,” said Jeff, 'that stuff costs eighty dollars a bottle.”
“Well, Jeff,” said Bud, 'your brother has just saved us about a hundred thousand dollars, so I think we can spend eighty bucks.”
“Jeff, the domestic is forty-two fifty,” Jen said.
“You can buy it in a liquor store for about fourteen dollars a bottle,” Jeff added.
Bud called the waiter over and ordered a bottle of champagne, slightly shamed by Jeff into choosing the domestic one. When it came, he ordered it poured for the whole family.
Then, dramatically, he said, 'And here's to Russ and all the hard work he's done.”
They all lifted their sparkling glasses and drank; but Bud only let the stuff touch his lips and did not swallow.
“Here, let me pour some more,” he said, giving each a half glass more, until it was all gone.
The boys and Jen finished the champagne and then it was time to go. Bud looked at his watch: about ten. He called for the check and paid it with his Visa card without wincing, though it was about forty dollars more than he had expected. Still, except for Jeff's strange sullenness, it had been a wonderful evening.
Is it the last? he wondered.
Am I about to do some fool thing and move into a little house near the airport with a young woman?
“Bud?”
“What?”
“You were talking to yourself.”
“I must be going crazy.”
They drove in Jen's station wagon through Lawton's quiet streets and pulled in the driveway about ten- thirty.
“Dad, do you mind if I go over to Nick Sisley's?” asked Russ.
“He's having a party.”
“No, fine, but don't be home late. Isn't that right, Jen?”
“That's fine.”
“How about you, Jeff? You have any plans?”
“I think I'll go over to Charlie's,” he said.
When the boys had disappeared, she said to Bud, 'And I see you're going out, too.”
“Oh?”
“You didn't drink any champagne.”
“I may go. Have to make some phone calls first.”
“Bud, what's going on?”
“Oh, got me just the tiniest idea that might lead us to Lamar. Probably nothing. Just want to check it out.”
“Tonight? Can't it wait?”
“Jen, it's nothing. I'm just going over to the Tribal Police Department over at the Comanche complex. I just want to ask some questions, is all.”
She fixed him with her harshest stare, as if she'd never heard of such a thing in her life. Then disillusionment crept across her features and, utterly defeated, she went upstairs.
He heard her wheezing disappointment. He watched her go, feeling as though he ought to say something. But no words arrived at his lips, and she just turned into the bedroom and closed the door.
Lawton was two towns. It was a church-going, tree shaded small Oklahoma city, with wooden houses nestled on streets that Andy Hardy would have been proud to call home, where every third block sported a park or a school or a church, a town where all life coagulated toward the Central Mall and the county seat for Comanche county. And it was a soldier's town, jammed up with pawn shops and girlie bars and porn stores, from Fort Sill Boulevard around to Cache Road and out Cache Road for a mile or two.
The Fort Sill Boulevard strip, just beyond Gate No. 3, was hopping tonight. Cars jammed its narrow way and it blazed with neon. Young artillerymen, freed from the day's duty of delivering their 155-mm packages into the mountains, their ears booming still, their heads aswarm with the computations necessary to send the shell in the right direction, wandered in packs up and down it, looking for diversion.
This usually involved fleshly appetites, and there were places on the strip where for an honest hundred bucks a man could get a good drunk with a good blow job thrown in for good measure; in others, two hundred could be spent with no blow job to be had anywhere on the premises. You had to know where you went.
But among the girlie joints, and the Mailbox USAs and the porn shops and the pawn shops, there was to be
