Little thud in Bud's heart. The world fell out of focus, and then came back.
“Jeff, I—” But again he came up dry.
“It was the phone. Dad. About three months ago, I heard you talking on the phone late at night. Low voice, hushed.
The noise came up through the floorboards. The next morning I looked at the phone for an hour. And then I punched redial. Don't you know about redial? How could you not know about redial? It dialed the number and the voice answered, a woman's, and she said hello and I said hello, and I remembered her voice from the time you and Mom had them over for dinner. And I said 'Mrs. Pepper?” and she said yes and I hung up. And I heard you—every night, I heard you, heard that voice coming up through the vent.
You had to call her from the house? You couldn't call her from someplace else but you had to do it from the house?”
“Jeff, I—”
“You're screwing this woman and then you're coming home and acting like everything's okay, and then at night you call her and make plans for the next day? And you've got it all figured out, I bet! How you and her are going off, and you're just going to leave poor Mom and the rest of us.
And we have to pick up your pieces and go on, while you're out partying. God, Dad, how could you do that to her? How could you?”
Bud swallowed hard.
“Jeff, these things aren't so black and white as you make them out to be.”
“No, it is simple. You got tired of us. We bored you. So you went somewhere else. And every morning I had to wake up and wonder if this was the night you were leaving us.”
He had begun to cry. The tears ran down his cheeks. His nose began to issue terrible liquids. He hated to cry. Bud knew, hated losing control, but now he did and in seconds he was sobbing hysterically. Bud pulled over and put out a hand to touch him.
“No!” Jeff said, recoiling savagely.
“I'm sorry, Jeff,” Bud said.
“I never meant to hurt you.
I don't think I ever would have left, not really. It wasn't something I planned or dreamed about. It just happened.”
“Dad. Dad, Dad, Dad.”
“Jeff, one thing a son always has to learn is that his father ain't a hero, he's just another man trying hard and making mistakes like everybody else. Now I suppose I cut myself too much slack. My old man was a drunk and he beat me up a lot, too, and he drove my mama out early. So I always thought if I was better than him then I'd really accomplished something. But now I see that being better than that don't mean shit.”
They sat there for a long while.
“Well,” Bud finally said, 'at least I figured out what I'm going to do.”
He took a deep breath and faced the future.
“I'll make it work. I can make it work. You know I can make it work.”
“Are you just lying again?”
“Jeff, I never told you no lies. Yes, I lied to your mother.
Someday when you're an aging man and a pretty young woman takes an interest in you and you can't find it in your heart to say no, then maybe you'll know what it is.”
The boy looked at him through a ravaged, swollen face and said nothing.
“Don't you have a game tonight?” Bud asked.
He nodded.
“Will they let you play?”
“I don't know.”
“Well, how's this? I'll take you to the game. When the game is over, I'll go over to Holly's and I'll tell her the news. I owe her that much. I have to tell her straight up, you understand. Then I'll go to home, and I'll tell your mother what a bad husband I've been. And I'll ask her to forgive me, and maybe she will and maybe she won't. But the lying will be over, that I swear to you. All right? The lying and the cheating, it's all over. Then pretty soon, when school is out, we'll all go on a nice trip. We have some money saved up, but I think the whole family going on a trip, maybe that's more important. I will set my house in order, Jeff, I swear to you.”
The boy said nothing. Then maybe he gave a nod.
CHAPTER 28
Lamar stole a '91 Trans Am out of the very same library parking lot and followed Ruta Beth and Richard back to the farm.
When they arrived, he had it all mapped out.
“Okay,” he said, 'this is how we do it. We don't do nothing at the game. Too many people, too much traffic, too much you can't control.
We hook onto goddamn Bud Pewtie though, and we follow his ass home. We wait till he's all snug inside with his goddamn family. Then we blow the doors down and start shooting. We leave hair on them walls. I want that kid and the mama dead and whoever's else in that house. I want Bud Pewtie to know what loss is. I want him to suffer as I suffered. Then I'll cut his face off, Richard, and then we're out of here, you got that?”
“All of them?” said Richard queasily.
“Son, you ain't up for this work? It don't mean nothing to you that I save you from being the niggers' fackboy, that I save your goddamn life in Denny's and in the goddamn river, and that this sonofabitch done shot poor Baby O’Dell full of holes? Richard, this is a raid. It's man's work. You got to go in hard and shoot straight and put all of them down. Yes, all of them. The whole goddamn family. Now, either you going with us, or we'll leave you here and you won't be a happy boy scout.”
“I can do it,” Richard said. In a funny way, he now believed it. It was, after all, only a mechanical thing: You point the gun, you pull the trigger. There was no higher meaning.
“You, Ruta Beth. Can't do a job like this 'less you believe in it the whole goddamned way. You with me?”
“Yes, Daddy,” she said.
“The kids, the women, all of them. It's for the baby. We'll show them what it means to hurt a baby.”
“Good. Now I want us to change into some uppity clothes. We got to look like we got a boy playing ourselves.
Any clothes from your daddy and mommy left, honey?”
“There's a trunk.”
“Can you and Richard git it? Then we'll change and go.”
“What are you going to do. Daddy?”
Lamar smiled.
“The guns,” he said.
“I'm checking the guns.”
Lamar went upstairs and saw what there was to see. The SIG .45 that he'd taken off the Texas Ranger, the Smith357 Magnum from Pewtie and two other .45s from the Stepfords, and two sawed-off shotguns, the Browning automatic and the Mossberg that had come from Bud Pewtie's cop car. Ruta Beth had bought ammo: 185-grain hollow tips for the .45s, 125-grain hollow tips for the .357, and six boxes of double-ought buck for the two shotguns.
He lovingly threaded shells into chambers and magazines, thrilled, as always, at the fitting together of parts, the slick cam ming of slides and pumps and bolts, the heavy feel of them all, until each gun seemed alive with its charges. The SIG, one of the other .45s, and the Browning semiauto would be his; he'd give Ruta Beth the pump gun and a .45, and poor Richard could carry the .357.
Then, gathering them, he went downstairs. Richard had washed up and changed into a nice pair of slacks and
