But Lamar wasn't mad, he was so mellow in his new life.
“Goddamn, was he a tough old boy!” he hooted.
“He was a right tough old buzzard but birdshot didn't get him done!
Won't he have something to tell his grandkids!”
The heavier shells were important for another reason.
“Only one last thing to figure,” said Lamar.
“That's the place where we going to do our next job.”
Richard, smiling, wasn't sure what Lamar meant by job.
“You know. To rob. We're robbers, Richard. Don't you get that? It's our work. And the way I work, them shotgun shells going to come in handy!”
CHAPTER 10
She pulled into the Elgin diner. Erect and brave in sunglasses, she sat in a window booth. She looked pale even through the distorted reflection of the interstate on the surface of the glass. She was not dressed in black but in a neat little sleeveless polka-dot dress. The freckles on her arms matched the pattern of the dress. And when she saw him, her face lit up. She waved her hand tentatively. He waved back.
Oh, lord, he thought, here it is.
He got out of the truck, reached back and tucked the Commander, which had slipped a bit, back behind his kidney.
He'd taken a Percodan half an hour early, after leaving the Stepfords, so the pain had gone down somewhat. Still, he was moving like an old man, a step at a time, as if the air itself sat on his body with a special kind of violence. He was nearly fifty; he felt a hundred and fifty. A geezer, full of melancholy and black thoughts. His legs ached, his body seemed cut from old stone as he climbed the steps.
He entered and her smile lit the place. Goddamn, how the young woman could smile. Was it all young women or just this one? He began to feel a little woozy. As he approached, she rose and took his hand and gave him a quick kiss.
“Well now Bud, who painted you the color of dead roses? Oh, my poor, poor baby.”
“Well, you know how to perk a fellow up, don't you?
I've felt better, that's for sure.”
“Are you in pain?”
“Oh, nothing I can't handle with only the slightest help from a million milligrams of heroin every twenty minutes or so.”
“You'll joke when the devil comes 'round with his bill, Bud.”
“Take my women, take my money, take my life, but don't take my sense of humor. Mister.”
“When that colonel came to tell me about Ted, it took him an hour before he got around to you. That was the worst. Bud, my Bud. I had to sit there playing the grieving widow just crazy to know about you, Bud. Oh, Bud, happiest day of my life they told me you were going to make it. I had to keep crying when all's I wanted was to laugh because they said you were going to make it.”
“Holly, damn, you look good.”
“Oh, Bud. Oh, Bud.”
“Holly, I'm so very sorry about Ted. No man deserves to die like that.
He wasn't a bad boy. I just fouled up. I wish to hell I could do it over.”
“Well, you never can, can you?”
“How are you holding up?”
“Bud, I'm fine, now that the funeral is over and poor Ted's mother and dad have gone home. I don't have to play the sobbing wife no more.”
“You know, the patrol can arrange for a doctor, or somebody to help you. You know, someone to talk to you.”
“Bud, you're the only person I want to talk to.”
“And the insurance. What it is, it ain't a fortune, but it's damn comforting. There's no horrible financial thing crushing down on you.”
“It's fine. Bud. It'll get me through more than a few years, and they said they'd try and help me get a job.”
“Great.”
“Bud, you're not facing this, are you?”
“I don't know.”
“Bud, I don't want to talk about me. I want to talk about us.”
Bud looked out through the goddamned window to green Oklahoma. A hundred yards away he could see the interstate and the cars flashing down it. Where he'd made a living for so long.
“Bud, we can have everything now. I'm sorry Ted got killed but it wasn't your fault and it wasn't my fault, it was Lamar Pye's fault. Now we can be together. It's one less difficulty. It's time, Bud. You know it as well as I know it.”
“Holly, I—” Then he ran out of gas.
“Don't you want to be with me?”
“Lord, yes.”
“Then, Bud, why not? Why can't you just do it.”
“Holly, you should know he loved you very much. What happened to him, he just lost his nerve and it was eating him up. He thought less of himself, not you. He deserves a little time before we up and move in and start sleeping together for the whole world to see.”
“You never cared too much what the world thought.”
“Yeah, maybe. And there's the other thing.”
“What's that?”
“Lamar.”
“Lamar?” Holly said.
“Oh, yeah. Lamar. Now what the hell you think that means?”
“It don't feel right with him still out there.”
“Bud.”
“Holly, I said I'd take care of you for my partner. That was the last thing he asked before Lamar come over with the gun. And I will. I swear to you, I will. But I got to take care of my partner first.”
“Ted's dead. Bud, there's no care to be taken. And nothing with Lamar Pye is going to bring him back.”
“Well,” Bud said, without much more to offer.
“Is that it. Bud? Lamar? You're going to go up against Lamar? The whole goddamned state of Oklahoma can't find Lamar and you're going to find him?”
As usual, he didn't know what he meant.
“I don't know. What I mean is, nothing feels right with Lamar on the loose. Wouldn't necessarily have to be me gets him. Frankly, the last thing I want is to run into Lamar.
It ain't personal.”
“The hell it ain't.”
“Holly, I just ..”
“So you aren't going to touch me?”
“Did I say that?”
“Seems like what you meant.”
“I swear to you, at that moment when Lamar meant to finish me, what was in my heart was the thought I'd never been with you fair, in the open, the two of us, at a restaurant, a barbecue, you know, a damn couple.
Last thing on my mind as I went under.”
Was it true? It felt true about now. But he wasn't sure.
He really didn't remember.
“Damn, Bud, you kill me.”
“Well, that's my job.”
“You know that place two exits back. The Do Si Do Motel?”
“Yes.”
“Got us a room. Bud. Wanted to celebrate being alive.”
Bud looked at his watch. He was due at the hospital by three and it was already near two. But what the hell. It was only a hospital.
Their differences—was it a woman-man thing or a Bud Holly thing?—had to do with being naked. She didn't mind it. She sort of liked it, in fact, and could be so damned casual about it. Bud hated it; just that feeling of vulnerability, of being wide open to assault, of being a fat man whose nakedness revealed his idiocy. So it was that after they had made love, he had to pull the sheets up around his loins. In secret and terrible fact, he yearned always when they were done to dress instantly; but he also knew that the moments afterward were the most hallowed to her, were in some sense the point of the exercise, where her oneness with him was at its most intense, and so he could never deny her them.
“Goddamn, Bud,” she said.
“Lamar may have filled you with lead, but he sure didn't take your manhood. You had plenty left for me.”
Why did she think him that good a lover? In the beginning he'd been a mighty engine, able to climb the mountain two or three times in a single afternoon. It was the incredible joy of freedom, of a new, other life. But the beginning was long past, and it seemed to him at least that his mighty engine only just got up the hill these days. But he figured that what she saw was what she wanted to see: that buck from the first weeks. He knew he'd never be that again, or at any rate, not with her. It saddened him, but he never quite had the guts to put it into words.