they went off, their illumination brought the world into sharp, instantaneous relief; he could see the farmhouse and the highway far away, and the abutments against the horizon that were the Wichitas; but the flashes were like gun flashes and the thunderclaps like the sounds of guns.
“He should see a doctor,” said Richard.
“He'll get a fever and die. Or he'll go insane out there in all that rain and lightning, and do something crazy and take us with him.”
“You shut up now, Richard,” said Ruta Beth, blinking as a particularly vivid flash filled the dark kitchen with sudden shadows.
“Daddy's in pain. He's in real pain. He needs -time to get a grip.”
“He needs a doctor. You don't get two fingers shot off and not see a doctor.”
“What little you know, Richard. I heard that back in -fifty-four, my daddy's brother Cy lost a whole hand to a threshing machine and there wasn't no doctor in these here parts. So they just wrapped him up tighter'n a drum, and few days go by and he's up and spry as a weed.
It^s only goddamned city folks need a doctor ever time their nose git a little runny.”
“How long did Cy live?”
“Well, he died the next year of a fever, but that don't have nothing to do with it.”
“Ruta Beth, I—” The door blew open; rain whistled in and at that moment, as if in a cheap movie, a lightning flash illuminated the ravaged features of Lamar, his hair a mottled and wild mess, his eyes crazed, his muscles tensed and hard against the sting of the rain, with just the faintest outline oh ion on his chest.
“Richard,” he commanded.
“I want you to git your art stuff. I want you to draw me a picture.
Boy, draw me a picture as if your life depended on it. I got to see that picture or I'm going to die, Richard.”
Richard leaped up.
“Yes, Lamar. Tell me what it is. I can draw it. I'll draw like I drew before. You just tell me and I'll do it.”
“Richard, I want to see Baby O’Dell happy in heaven.
He's sitting at the Lord's right hand. He's playing with a cat, a little kitty. He's got a halo. Then on the Lord's other hand, there's Jesus, and he's just as pleased as punch because his new buddy O’Dell done joined him up.”
“Y-yes,” said Richard, thinking it seemed a little ambitious for his modest talents.
“Yeah, but that's only in heaven. That's going on up top.
Down here on earth, Richard, down here on earth, that goddamned Bud Pewtie, he's being burned. You know what I mean? He's on fire. His flesh is burning in the everlasting fires of hell. He's screaming for mercy, but they ain't none.
No mercy for him. Do you get that?”
“Yes, I do, Lamar. And you? You're in the picture?”
“Hell yes, boy,” said Lamar.
“I'm the one with the match.”
Richard drew as if he were the one on fire. He knew it was an absurdity, but in some way it satisfied him to reach out and at last help Lamar, if only in this crazy way.
He tried to remember the Sistine Chapel, for it had that crazed scope to it—heaven and earth, reward and punishment, the duality of existences, a classical Renaissance theme. He of course was no Michelangelo, but he doubted if Lamar knew who Michelangelo was, so he doubted his plagiarism would get him in much trouble. That's how he envisioned it—an insane white-trash Sistine Chapel, full of pure rage and the criminal's need to dominate and hurt, and at the same time full of a kind of innocence. It would be a lunatic masterpiece, a crackpot piece de resistance, of the sort that is rare but does in fact exist—the works of Celine, for example; or Mahler, a horrible man; or Sam Peckinpah, that deranged maker of nihilistic cowboy movies whom some actually believed to be a very great artist.
It was as if he had been liberated. His fingers flew and discovered new and interesting ideas as they plunged ahead, each new line leading to yet another line in a mad scramble, a helter-skelter, a kind of artistic release. Whatever Lamar had done for him or to him, he had now at last released Richard's inhibitions; no thought of what was 'proper” attended his brain, no reluctance, no phony patina of 'sophistication';
he let the work flow from his id—or from Lamar's.
Heaven was a mountaintop, purple and swarming with clouds. Our Lord was a benevolent biker king, a Daddy Cool aslouch on the throne of his Harley, his powerful features radiating justice and serenity; at his left foot was his only son, Jesus as Road Captain, his leathers glistening, his narrow, ascetic face made more prominent by a ponytail that hung down from a bandanna. He had a tattoo that said jesus loves and he, too, radiated benevolence and forgiveness.
And Baby O’Dell. It was with special affection that Richard evoked the Baby; he cured his harelip and gave his eyes focus and wit; he gave him not the slob by body of an overgrown farmboy but the sleek muscles of a weightlifter.
His mouth was no longer small and overshadowed by the dark fissure above it, but firm and eloquent, just as he now had cheekbones and spine and the one thing that poor O’Dell never in life acquired, for it requires some kind of primitive self-awareness: dignity. It was about halfway through that he realized he was reinventing O’Dell as Al Capp's Li'l Abner, but that was okay: there was something barefoot and down-home to both Abner and O’Dell that made it appropriate.
It was nearly midnight when he finished the rough sketching for the first half of the drawing; but now, in a fever, he could not stop. He was consumed with fire, as high as he'd ever, ever been before in his life.
Oh, Mother, he thought, if you could see me now.
For Bud Pewtie, he tried to imagine a pain so everlasting and consuming it would be almost beyond comprehension.
How does one get the total squalor of torture, of ultimate and total degradation, into a mere representation? He tried to think of atrocity—the blown-away old people in this very house; but more, scenes from Auschwitz, the endless litter of scrawny corpses; or the famous photograph of the searing flame of napalm in Vietnam, out of which with such utter delicacy the little girl had run, leaving her mother and baby brother cooking behind; the Zapruder film frame in which Kennedy's skull explodes, a fragment launching into midair and trailing a plasma gossamer; a picture of the rent, headless corpse of a third-trimester abortion that an anti choice zealot had once sent him.
Yet none of this stuff really worked; it didn't get him where he needed to be.
What is the worst, he thought, the worst thing you know or have ever heard of? The screwball in Silence of the Lambs with his 'woman suit'?
The German officer who forces Sophie to choose which child shall live and which shall die? The cries of the Scottsboro boys as they were dragged to their trees, knowing they were innocent?
No, he thought, the worst thing you ever heard of was the boy who blinded his mother. He didn't have the guts to kill her. He wasn't strong enough, though he hated her almost as much as he loved her. He tried to remember the mechanics of his strokes with his stiff arms, his sudden explosiveness, the sound of the blade cutting into the skin and into the sockets. He remembered her wailing. God, how she wailed for mercy. But she was so weak. She had dominated him for so long, but she was so weak! The power he'd felt, the obscene sense of gratification after all those years.
“There, Mother, there! Now you know how it feels!”
That's what he'd said to her.
Now, trapping that sickness and storing it like a fossil fuel, he began once again to draw.
Lamar sat like Rodin's Thinker, watching the sun come up. It crept over the rim of the plains out beyond the highway, foreshadowing another hot, clear Oklahoma day. This early, it was still a farmer's sun, appreciated wordlessly only by men who rose before it to get a good part of their immense day's labor finished before it got truly hot. It was swollen and bloodshot, and almost orange, but still cool.
Lamar regarded it dully. It was as if he'd spent his rage and collapsed, finally, after so many long, sleepless days and nights battling fever and pain and that goddamned big cat that was still stalking him. His face was slack, his eyes dull.
He was shirtless, the half-lion looking almost abstract, like a scribble, on the planes of his chest. His hair
