What did I miss?”
“Lieutenant, I don't know.”
“Did I miss a category? Felons, known informants, fences, criminal lawyers, anybody in the culture. What category could I have missed?
What other category is there?
That's what I believe I'm missing. I'm missing a category.
Bud, you got any categories?”
“Lieutenant, as I said: This ain't my line of work.”
“See with Freddy Dupont, the missing category was secondary experience.
That is, reading. That's what done it. So I'm missing a category, goddammit.”
“Lieutenant, I wish I had an idea.”
“See, it's points. You need two points to draw a line.
One point: criminal community. Another point: the car-tire track. But… goddammit, nothing. I need a third point.
Goddamn, a third point! A third category. Another drink, Bud?”
“Lieutenant, I got to get on home. I got a boy hearing about college today.”
“The baseball player?”
“No sir. The student.”
“A ball player and a student. It sounds like a fine family, Bud.”
“It is,” said Bud.
The lieutenant took another hit from his paper cup, and the whiskey seemed to bring a tear to his old eyes, or maybe it was just that something blew into them. Anyway, he said, "Nope, never had kids myself. Just never had the damned time.” Then suddenly he lit up and for a second his melancholy seemed to evaporate.
“Say, Bud,” he said, "one of these days why don't you bring them boys over? Love to meet ’em. Bring ’em over to the house and we'll sit ’em down and give ’em their first drink. Best a boy learns to drink with his daddy and not out behind the woodshed. I won't have much to do hanging around the house. I'd like that. Bud.”
Bud knew it was the drink talking, just as when he said, "That sounds like a damn fine idea. Lieutenant,” he knew he'd never do it. It would be horrible: His two sons, who were already from different planets than their old fart of a father, locked in some strange little house with this bitter old coot who was from still another planet. It would never happen. Besides, he didn't think the old man really wanted it to happen either.
He checked his watch. It was nearly four. Damn, he was late.
“I ought to be going now, Lieutenant.”
“You go, Bud. You done good work, all my boys done good work. I'd rise to shake your hand, but I pissed up my pants a few minutes ago and I'm too embarrassed to move.”
“Oh, Lieutenant, I—”
“Don't pay it no never mind said the lieutenant.
He poured himself another drink, emptying the bottle, and threw the bottle into the wastebasket, where it shattered.
Then he looked up and seemed surprised to see Bud still there.
“Go on, get out, get about your life!” he commanded darkly, and Bud hurried out.
“Bud,” said Dispatch, "your wife called when you were in with the lieutenant. She wants you to call.”
Thank God he was here when she called!
He found a phone.
“Sweetie, it's me.”
“Bud, Russ got in. They're going to give him a full scholarship. He's going off to Princeton University!”
“All right! Hey, isn't that great!” Bud said. A surge of joy leaped in him. Something was turning out in his life!
“He'll have so many chances. He'll meet so many people.
A whole new world will open for him!”
“That's great. I'll be home in a little bit and we'll go out, if that's what he wants.”
“He said he would. He wants to see some friends later, but he'll go out.”
“On my way!”
Russ deserved it. He'd worked hard at his studies and he was a very bright boy, the school counselors had told them.
It was in this mood that, as Bud drove home, he passed a large gray structure on Gore Boulevard, which he had passed perhaps five hundred times before; but for the first time, he noticed the lions.
CHAPTER 21
It was the fucking neck.
The key to the lion lay in its neck. Somehow, in the density of muscle and bone, in the knots of hair, in the fucking shortness of the structure, there lay the secret to that amazing regality, that kingly magnificence.
Yet Richard could not free it, not, that is, with a pencil or a crayon or any conventional drawing implement.
Lord how he had tried. Like popcorn puffs, his crumpled-up failures lay scattered about him in the upstairs room of Ruta Beth's farmhouse.
He felt a killing headache.
He could not get it: his beasts all had a strange tightness to them. He drew them in his sleep, he drew them in the air with an empty hand, he drew them in his mind, he drew them on paper, and he had never quite brought it off.
In fact, if he thought about it, his best lion had been done in the liquid medium of peanut butter. It was the image he'd crafted on the mock cake: something in the wet fluency of the material and the ease of its manipulation and the lack of pressure or expectation had freed him to really achieve the pure essence of lion hood And his first dumb drawing in the Mac and maybe a doodle here and there, on a place mat in the margins of a book or magazine, those, too, had had the freedom he needed.
You think too much, he thought. What had Conrad said?
“Thinking is the great enemy of perfection.” Boy had he gotten that one right!
Richard stood, yawned, trying to shake the tension from his back and neck and the weariness from his wrist. Lamar and O’Dell were out in the fields on some absurd agricultural project, Ruta Beth was behind the barn working at her fucking wheel. He was alone.
Of course it would help if Lamar had told him the point of the lion.
Did he want a formal portrait? What was his thing about the lion, where would it go, what would it become?
If he knew that, then maybe it would be better or easier. But Lamar wasn't saying; he was too sly. It was as if in some preliterate, instinctual way, Lamar knew it was wisest not to disclose this information. He wanted Richard to struggle and build the lion out of that struggle, rather than providing for him a neat little dedicated, purpose-built image. He was a tyrannical patron!
So: the lion.
What is the essence of the beast?
He was a hunter. He hunted. He roamed the savannah, took down the helpless, and stole their meat. He hunted to live.
But no—he also killed to live. The hunting wasn't the point, the hunting was only the rationale. Something in the lion loved to close in, enjoy the fear and the pain of the quarry, and experience that sublime moment when its spastic struggle ceased and its eyes went blank, and, bathed in the black torrents of its own blood, it passed into limp death. What a Godlike moment, what a sense of cosmic power, how thrilling!
Richard tried to find that impulse in himself. No such luck.
Knock-knock, who’s there? Only us lambs. He shivered, disgusted. Such a thing did not exist for him. That's why it was hopeless.
He stood and restlessness stirred in his limbs. He suddenly ached for freedom. He needed to move. He began to roam through the upper story; not much, three bedrooms and a bathroom that Ruta Beth kept immaculate, especially with, as she put it, "three big, strong boys in the house.”
The toilet seat was down.
He wandered into the room Ruta Beth and Lamar shared.
Again, it was farm- and convict-neat, the sign of people used to living to very high standards of imposed discipline.
Yet you could look at it for a hundred years and never divine from its clues that a Lamar Pye, killer and robber and butt fucker had taken up occupancy.
It titillated him a bit to be in Lamar's private space. The blood rushed to his head. He knew how the Angel Lucifer must have felt when he wandered into God's bedroom before his exile. For just a second he tried to imagine what it would be like to be Lamar, the Lion: to look upon all living things as prey, and to know with blood-boiling confidence that you had the magic power to drive them to the earth and rip their bloody hearts from them, to taste the hot blood and feel the weakening of their quivers as they slid into death.