That's his one moral law, and having accepted it, he has no qualms or doubts. He works this law passionately and with straightforward conviction. What is Yeats's line?
“The worst are full of passionate intensity"? That's it. That's Lamar. A sly genius at disorder, a prince of chaos.
These thoughts rocketed through Richard's oh-so-busy brain as he drove the little trio in Willard Johnson's four-year-old Dart west of Ada toward Ratliff City, toward Mr. Bill Stepford, Sr's place, where Mr. Stepford, Sr.” and family had some guns that they would take, by any means possible. Richard tried not to think of that part. These poor people were condemned: Hurricane Lamar would hit them, abetted by Cyclone O’Dell, and wipe them out. They were the dead, sitting there in their little farmhouse even now, watching the television, finishing up the peach cobbler, wondering about the upcoming Grange meeting, deer season, and the possibility of Oklahoma ever getting some sort of major professional sports franchise.
They had fought in wars and paid taxes and said their prayers for sixty-odd years and loved each other and the land that supported them, and they were dead. The existential majesty of it overwhelmed Richard.
Both Lamar and O’Dell were asleep in the back. He could hear them breathing, the even-odd-even-odd rhapsody of their snores, broken now and again by a belch or the rippling percussion of a smelly fart (O’Dell farted all the time and then smiled and said, "O’Dell ma key stinky.") Their presence held not only terror but squalor and banality as welclass="underline" They were so crude, bald, itchy, raw, unvarnished, brutes of the id.
Richard looked out the window at the silent alfalfa fields of Oklahoma, the long and dreadful wait in the van at last over. He fought down a sob and studied a patch of sky, riddled with stars.
Richard thought: I could do it. I could slew the car off the road, throw the door open, and run, run away, flee. The police would find me eventually. I could explain. Just like the other thing: It's not my fault. Really. I was made to do it, I had no choice.
But he knew this was complete illusion. He could no more get away from Lamar than he could face him down and kill him. Lamar was everything.
Lamar would run him down and break his neck with those strong hands, watching him with those superficially charming but ultimately em-pathyless eyes; then, as he was dying of asphyxiation, his spine having punctured his lungs, Lamar would fuck him in the ass, laughing; that would be how Richard left this world.
He wouldn't do it, of course. It made him nervous to even consider such a thing. If Lamar could see what he was thinking, Lamar would kill him for thinking it. Lamar was an absolute god: he demanded obedience as sternly as the figure in the Old Testament.
He looked out the window again.
“Be easy, wouldn't it, Richard?” Lamar asked softly from behind him.
It startled Richard; he jumped.
“You scare so quick, Richard,” Lamar laughed in a whisper.
“But it would be easy, wouldn't it?”
“What, Lamar?”
“You know. Dump us. Take off. Go on, admit it. You thought of it.”
“It's not my nature to be bold.”
“No, it ain't. I could see that from the start. But I will change that. Richard, I swear to you, you stick with me, I may not make you rich or even free, but by God, you will be a man. Do you read me?”
“Yes sir,” said Richard.
“Don't youSir' me, boy. I ain't no goddamned officer.
I'm your friend, Richard, do you believe me? Your only friend.”
“Yes, Lamar.”
“You don't like the killing, do you?”
“No, I don't.”
“Son, what that means, you raised in a different place than Lamar and O’Dell. Where Lamar come from, you hadda fight like shit every damn day or someone take it all from you. I do not enjoy it. I am not a low-down, trashy man. But a man has to do what he has to do to look after his people.
Do you understand?”
“I do.”
“That's good. That's very good.”
No, it was very bad, because in the glare of their headlights a solitary mailbox stood against the glinting black tarmac before it and the fields of wheat country, now fallow in summer, behind it. It said simply stepford
“Party time,” said Lamar.
It fell to Richard. Lamar explained patiently.
“This old farm lady, she take a look at me and she's on the phone to the county sheriff. I got something about me scares people. You, Richard, you got no tattoos and a girly body, you couldn't hurt a flea.
So you knock on the door and get us in and when I come in, you make sure that old man don't make it to no gun.”
They parked halfway down the farm road. Richard could see the house, its windows glowing, standing in the middle of a barnyard, the barn towering nearby. It looked like a Christmas card. He yearned for moral destitution, some sign of country decadence, so that there'd be some sense that these people deserved what Lamar had in mind for them; but no. It was too pretty, a banal quaintness, possibly too studied. A farm from a Potemkin village.
O’Dell split off back; he'd come in the rear when Lamar came in the front. It was about ten o’clock. Why were the old people up so late?
“Y-you won't hurt them if you don't have to?” Richard asked.
'"Course not,” said Lamar.
“I ain't low-down. Only, see, we do need these guns. Suppose Johnny Cop pulls down on us. Go back to the pen? Let the niggers do us up?
You too, up so fine? Even O’Dell? No sir, can't let that happen.”
“Okay. Just so I have your assurance.”
“You can count on me,” said Lamar.
Richard watched as he melted into the darkness. He stood alone, breathing hard, in the brisk night, hearing the wind beat through the trees and now and then the squawk and rip of small things in the dark, fighting or dying. There was no moon; the stars rolled like wheat fields, torrents of them, high above, remote pinwheels of ancient fire.
Richard wanted to weep but he could only obey: he counted in his head and when he reached the number three hundred, off he went.
As he approached the house he could see the old man sitting in his study, under some mounted game animals; a glass gun case stood against the wall; there was no old lady anywhere in sight, but he saw the blue glow of a television from an upstairs room.
He prayed there weren't grandkids or something in the house, or visiting relatives.
He knocked on the door. Maybe they'd be smart. Nobody just opened the door to strangers in the night these days. Maybe they'd be smart and call the sheriff, or get a gun and drive the interlopers away. He knocked again, praying for inaction.
The door opened wide.
“Why hello,” the woman said.
“Er, hello. I'm, I'm an art teacher in Oklahoma City. My car broke down on the road. I was wondering if you could call the Triple A. I don't have to come in.”
“And wait out there in the cold? Why, I wouldn't hear of it. That's the silliest thing I ever heard say. You come on in out of the chill and we'll get the tow truck on its way. Do you like coffee?”
Lamar slid in like a shadow of a cat and seemed to envelope her, muffling her cry. He had the shank hard against her throat, and Richard fixated on the way its blade pressed against her white, loose skin. She made a weeping sound, and in her desperation her eyes settled on Richard; they were widening in terror and begging, please, for mercy.
Richard shuddered and looked away.
Two loud crashes boomed through the house, and O’Dell, for some bizarre reason without his shirt and with his hair wet and slicked back, broke in from the rear, an ax in his hand. He paused to howl at the ceiling or the sky beyond the roof, and Richard watched in abject fascination as the cry arose from him and his body shivered in rapture. All his demons were free and dancing in the room. He raced for the study where the old man looked up at him in utter befuddlement, then cowered from the blow he seemed about to receive from the immense half-naked man with the ax.