The pitcher, a tall and whippy black kid, wound and delivered, and Jeff took a called strike. The ball popped sharply into the catcher's glove, dust rising from the impact like a gunshot. Bud thought again: The bullet hits, Ted's hair flies, and Ted is gone. He shook his own head, as if to clear the troubling thoughts from alighting anywhere, and dialed back into reality to check as Jeff took what was apparently the second of two balls.
“This should be his pitch,” he said to Jen.
The pitcher fired and Jeff, overeager, swung wretchedly.
He looked like a crippled stork, and the ball ticked weakly off into foul territory to the third-base side.
“Damn,” Bud said.
“He should have parked that one in the wheat.”
He thought: Oh, Christ, I would give my life for my son to do well.
On the fifth pitch. Bud thought the pitcher uncoiled with a particularly venomous spasm, almost snakelike in the strike of his arm, and the ball swept toward Jeff in high theatrical light just as Jeff himself seemed to unscrew from the hips up, shoulders following hips, arms following shoulders, bat following arms. The whole thing was liquid somehow, punctuated by the sharpest crack Bud had ever heard, much louder and more decisive than the shots Lamar had launched at him.
The ball rose, the noise of the desultory crowd rose. Bud himself rose, screaming "Yes, yes, YES!” and the ball sailed outward.
Go you bastard, GO! Bud willed it, oh please.
He saw the left fielder crouching at the fence, and as the ball descended, the boy leaped and it seemed he had it zeroed. But felt despair rise like a black tide into his heart, but the leap wasn't high enough by three feet and the ball bounded away in the darkness.
“Oh, God,” Bud said, grabbing Jen's arm, "he hit a home run! Jeff, Jeff, WAY TO GO!” He was crying, literally, as his son trundled sheepishly around the bases to be greeted, at home by some of his fellow players.
“God,” he said to Jen, "I'm so damned happy.”
“Bud,” she said, "my God, you're bleeding.”
CHAPTER 11
O’Dell sat with the AR-15 in his lap and a red wig on his head. He had tits. He was wearing lipstick and a blue fur trimmed coat from the year 1958, the year that Ruta Beth's daddy had bought it for Ruta Beth's mother at Dillon's Department Store in Oklahoma City. He didn't look much like a woman. He looked like a gigantic transvestite with an assault rifle, if you looked close.
But who would look close?
He sat benignly in the back seat of Ruta Beth's little Toyota twelve miles beyond the Red River on the outskirts of Wichita Falls, Texas, just off Interstate 44 on its long pull from Oklahoma City. Sitting next to him was Richard, also with tits (tennis balls taped inside the dress), also with a wig (black), and a red hat with feathers curling down as well, all of it having at one time belonged to Beulah Tun.
Ruta Beth had done the makeup, though Richard thought she'd gone a bit overboard on the rouge. In the mirror, he'd looked like some kind of corpse. If O’Dell didn't seem to mind, Richard certainly did, but of course he would say nothing.
In jeans and sunglasses, his ponytail tucked out of sight under the brim of Bill Stepford's Stetson, Lamar sat, chewing on a long stalk of wheat. Next to his right leg, "also out of sight, was the cut-down Browning A-5 12-gauge, though it was not loaded with birdshot but double-ought buck shells. He had the long-slide .45 in the waistband in the small of his back. And next to him, in the driver's seat, with Bud's Mossberg, sat Ruta Beth herself, also in a cowboy hat.
“That's it,” said Lamar.
“What we come this piece to see. That's it, our ticket to tomorrow.” But Richard didn't get it.
“I don't see anything,” he said.
“Use your magi-nation,” said Lamar.
They were parked at a Denny's Restaurant, just off the interstate ramp.
The sign said Maurine Street. Its lot jammed with cars, the restaurant sat on a small podium of land like the king of everywhere, the remnants of a crowd visible through the double-glass doors out front and the windows that circled it like a bright necklace. At the entrance to the parking lot stood a proud art mo deme sign, turquoise and red; at night, it would blaze like a beacon up to the interstate.
“I just see… a Denny's,” said Richard.
“Ennys,” O’Dell said and giggled.
“Is there a problem here, Aunt Lucy?” said Lamar.
“Aunt Lucy, you trying to take command of the outfit? You got a better idea?”
“But… wouldn't a bank be better? It would certainly be more dignified.”
“Di-fied,” said O’Dell, rocking ever so slightly.
“Well now, let me explain,” said Lamar.
“You got to keep up with the times. Bank robbing ain't what it used to be. A, they keep the big money in the vault, with a time lock so you only got what loose money's up front, sometimes less'n a hundred or so bucks. B, you got the goddamned cameras all over the place. Aunt Lucy, are you listening?”
“Lamar, I'm sure you're right.”
'"Then you got silent alarms, you got money packs rigged to explode and cover you with red dye that don't wash off for a week, you got private security services, sometimes you got guards. A bank can be a pickle.”
“I see.”
“Now, a Denny's, in a little as swipe Texas city on a late Sunday afternoon? Let me tell you what you got. You got the big old breakfast money from about a thousand Texas Baptists. Them Baptists, they like to go to church and pray all morning, then stroll on down to Denny's for breakfast.
They shovel down the goddamn home fries and pancakes and eggs and bacon and syrup and butter and coffee like hogs at a trough. They bloat up and begin to belch and pick their teeth. Whole goddamn families. It makes ’em feel close to the Lord, don't ask me why. So 'round about four, you got maybe ten, twelve thousand in small bills in the manager's safe. You got no cameras. You got no guards.
You got no heroes. You got nothing but a staff of assholes what hates their goddamned jobs and ain't about to die for no Denny, whosoever the mother fuck he may be.”
“Enny,” said O’Dell, cheerfully.
“Daddy, I swear, you know everything,” said Ruta Bern.
“You are so smart.”
“Now if you like. Aunt Lucy, we'll drop you off and you can rob a bank while we do this here Texas Denny's.”
“No, Lamar,” said Richard.
“Thank you, Aunt Lucy. Ain't you the sweetest thang.
All right, darling', let's go for a little drive through the neighborhood, then park and you and me head in for a lookiesee. We'll leave the two ladies in the back.”
“Yes, Daddy,” she said.
Ruta Beth pulled the car out, turned right into a residential area, turned and turned again, passing by small white houses, well tended, with green lawns. Squares' houses, and now and then a square could be glimpsed, hosing down a mid sized car, pushing a mower, just bullshitting with another square.
Richard looked at them, seeing a lost world flee by. Once he'd had such contempt! The people! Fools and jerks, parvenus and philistines, without a brain in their head, nothing to sustain them but delusions like… baseball… family… work. Yet now their dreariness broke his heart; it looked so comforting.
“Git that long, sad look off your beautiful puss, there, Aunt Lucy,” said Lamar.
“You git to looking that sad and I wonder if you ain't about to make a break on us.”
“Lamar, I was thinking no such thing.”
“Yeah, I heard that before. He acts up, O’Dell, you conk him good.”
Eventually Ruta Beth swung around and they pulled into the Denny's parking lot.
“Okay, you gals stay put for a bit. O’Dell, you tuck that big piece away case anybody looks in. We're going to check the place out.”