“Look at them,” said Ruta Beth.
“Lord, how they work.
They work like my daddy worked.”
“They're basically elemental men of the earth,” Richard said grandly, though this insight was lost on Ruta Beth.
She simply looked at him through guared little slits of eyes, nothing showing on her grim face, and said, "Richard, sometimes you say the craziest things.”
A major disappointment: He had not impressed Ruta Beth at all. She took one look at poor, pitiful Richard and abandoned him before the relationship had even begun; it was Lamar, beaming with testosterone and sweat, who drew her like a beacon.
Ruta Beth Tun was twenty-eight years old and sinewy as a wild dog. She usually wore Sears jeans, a thin, cheap wool sweater over a faded blouse, heavy farm boots, and a black hair band which pulled her dark cascades of hair into a rope behind her head. She had chalky skin and mean little eyes, with which she constantly scanned the world for threat or aggression, never relaxing, never giving, always on alert.
Her fingernails were chewed to grimy nubs, and she was always hugging herself in a slightly unseemly way. But her grimness hid a romantic streak once directed at Richard and in a second's passing redirected toward Lamar.
When she had seen Richard's picture in the paper during his trial for criminal assault against his mother, she had cut it out. She wrote him a letter that went out in the next batch of correspondence, among other missives—to President Clinton, the governor, Meryl Streep, Hillary Clinton, Robin Quivers of The Howard Stern Show, Nancy Reagan, Ronald Reagan, Barbara Bush, two ofcharle Manson's female followers she'd seen in a TV interview, and Reba Mcentire—on a variety of noteworthy subjects. She had never before gotten an answer, except the routine "Thank you so very much” from the Clintons, which she didn't count as a real answer. But in the case of Richard, her answer showed up three months later, at eleven p .” spattered with blood, along with Lamar Pye, and his damaged cousin.
The document that initiated this unlikely course of events was the strangest, looniest letter Richard had ever read; it even shocked him a bit.
“Dere Mr. Peed,” it began, though you cannot know me, at the same time we are One. I believe in another life, in many other lives, we must have been boy and girl friends. We must have offended the Gods with the purity of our passion and so they cursed us and sent us too wondering through time, always close enough to know the other's presence, the other's sorrow, but never close enough too touch, too hold, too kiss, too have secshual untercoarse.
As did you, I lost my beloved parents in a tragedy. It wasn't easy, but now I have made peace with the sorrowful passing of Mother and Daddy. They frequently talk to me from heaven, which is a very nice place. It's like a Howard Johnson's, where someone come to change the sheets every day. It has a very nice salad bar.
Mr. Peed, I miss you, though I have never seen eyes on you. I have stared at your picture so hard in the Daily Oklahoman I have almost wiped it off the page.
Mr. Peed, I believe we could have a wonderful life together if only we could meet. Thank you for your attention.
Yours fondly, Miss. Ruta B. Tun Route 54 Odette, Oklahoma.
When he showed it to Lamar, Lamar read the first paragraph, silently moving his lips across each word, and said, "Richard, I can't make hide nor hair out of it. Is she crazy?”
“I think so, Lamar. Crazy as hell. But… she likes me. She lives in the country. Her parents are dead. I'm thinking maybe it would be a place to put up.”
“Hmmmm,” said Lamar.
“Well, suck my cock, why the hell not? Better'n shittin' in a wheat field, where we'll catch cold and our noses run with snot.”
They found the farm lurking behind a solitary mailbox inscribed with the name tun on Route 54. It was in a desolate sector of Kiowa county, about thirty miles west of Lawton, halfway to Altus. It felt like the true West, all right, prairie for grazing mostly, some fields heroically turned for wheat, but generally the feeling of wide-openness in every direction except due east, where the mountains lay. The highways transected Kiowa like lines in a geometry problem, and off of the asphalt now and then a ribbon of red dirt would run, disappearing in subtle folds of the terrain. The farm lay at the end of a mile of such narrow red dirt road and when you stood in its front yard, your back turned to the two-story clapboard house, rotting and dim, and facing outward, you felt as if you were among the last men on earth.
Just flat grass, distant mountains, and the snapping wind as far as the eyes could see.
Ruta Beth asked no questions. She took one look at the trio and knew who they were and why they were there. It was the message from God she had been expecting these long, lonely years. It never occurred to her to be frightened.
She smiled at Richard and nodded knowingly to the astonished Lamar but went first to O’Dell.
“You poor thing,” she said, "you look famished. You come on in. I don't have much but what I've got I'm willing to share.”
“O’Dell likes cereal, ma'am,” said Lamar.
“It's his favorite thing.”
“What do he like?”
“Er, he likes that Honey Nut Cheerios a lot. He likes your sugary ones. He don't like the 'healthy' ones, you know, with the nuts and all.”
“I have Corn Flakes.”
“Ah, he'll eat ’em. But he ain't crazy about ’em.”
“I like cereals, too. I have some others.”
“Cap'n Crunch?”
“No, Mr. Pye. I don't have no Cap'n Crunch. How about Special K?”
“Ain't that just like Wheaties? O’Dell don't like Wheaties. He did, long as there was sugar on it, till they put that Michael Jordan on the box. Where we come from, we hate the niggers. I know we're supposed to love the niggers these days, but you try and love our niggers up at Mcalester and they just laugh and cut your throat. Killed me a big nigger, that's what started this whole goddamned ball rolling.”
“I do have some Frosted Mini-Wheats.”
“Frosted Mini-Wheats! O’Dell, you hear that? Frosted Mini-Wheats! This gal has Frosted Mini-Wheats!”
“Weeny-eets! Weeny-eets!” O’Dell began to chant, his vague features united in a rapturous passion.
“You come along then, O’Dell,” she said, and took the big man inside.
Lamar turned to Richard.
“Your gal's pretty goddamned sweet, if you ask me. You better make her happy or I'll crack your skull.”
That's when Richard knew he was lost.
Lamar was thinking about painting the house. It was a mottled gray, peeling and sad. He wanted it to be cheery, blinding white, the white of happy white folks on a rich farm, with lots of kids. He had a brief rare little brush with fantasy: all of them there, Ruta Beth and Richard and O’Dell and Lamar, all of them happy in that house. But even as he drew some warmth from it, he knew it would never happen.
Goddamn Johnny Cop had seen to that. If Johnny Cop hadn't a-shot his daddy, lo those many years ago, he'd never be in this mess, with all these worries, all these things to think about. And now he was getting hot again.
Still, he could paint the house. That would be his next project. He could scrape the old dead paint off, take a week or so, then sand down to new wood, another week. Take maybe two weeks to give the place another coat. O’Dell could do some of the work, although O’Dell's tiny mind had never had much in the way of skill. O’Dell could dig or hoe or plow all day long, seven days a week, but he couldn't do anything that involved thinking. He just didn't understand.
“O’Dell, now, think we gonna knock off for the day,” Lamar said. It was six-thirty p . of the third day of the second week. They'd finished re roofing the barn, and they'd restrung about a mile of fence between Ruta Beth's and the Mcgillavery's property, because the Mcgillavery's cows kept breaking into Ruta's far field and that meant the Mcgillavery boys would come looking for them, and that would be trouble.