They drove in Jen's station wagon through Lawton's quiet streets and pulled in the driveway about ten-thirty.
“Dad, do you mind if I go over to Nick Sisley's?” asked Russ.
“He's having a party.”
“No, fine, but don't be home late. Isn't that right, Jen?”
“That's fine.”
“How about you, Jeff? You have any plans?”
“I think I'll go over to Charlie's,” he said.
When the boys had disappeared, she said to Bud, "And I see you're going out, too.”
“Oh?”
“You didn't drink any champagne.”
“I may go. Have to make some phone calls first.”
“Bud, what's going on?”
“Oh, got me just the tiniest idea that might lead us to Lamar. Probably nothing. Just want to check it out.”
“Tonight? Can't it wait?”
“Jen, it's nothing. I'm just going over to the Tribal Police Department over at the Comanche complex. I just want to ask some questions, is all.”
She fixed him with her harshest stare, as if she'd never heard of such a thing in her life. Then disillusionment crept across her features and, utterly defeated, she went upstairs.
He heard her wheezing disappointment. He watched her go, feeling as though he ought to say something. But no words arrived at his lips, and she just turned into the bedroom and closed the door.
Lawton was two towns. It was a church-going, tree shaded small Oklahoma city, with wooden houses nestled on streets that Andy Hardy would have been proud to call home, where every third block sported a park or a school or a church, a town where all life coagulated toward the Central Mall and the county seat for Comanche county. And it was a soldier's town, jammed up with pawn shops and girlie bars and porn stores, from Fort Sill Boulevard around to Cache Road and out Cache Road for a mile or two.
The Fort Sill Boulevard strip, just beyond Gate No. 3, was hopping tonight. Cars jammed its narrow way and it blazed with neon. Young artillerymen, freed from the day's duty of delivering their 155-mm packages into the mountains, their ears booming still, their heads aswarm with the computations necessary to send the shell in the right direction, wandered in packs up and down it, looking for diversion.
This usually involved fleshly appetites, and there were places on the strip where for an honest hundred bucks a man could get a good drunk with a good blow job thrown in for good measure; in others, two hundred could be spent with no blow job to be had anywhere on the premises. You had to know where you went.
But among the girlie joints, and the Mailbox USAs and the porn shops and the pawn shops, there was to be found now and then a tattoo joint: Skin Fantasy was the title of one; the Flesh House, another; Skin Art still another; Little Burma Art House, the Rainbow Biceps, and on and on.
It was crowded, as it always was in the hours approaching midnight, and the Toyota crawled along through the traffic.
“You sure this is safe?” said Richard.
“Sure it is,” said Lamar.
“Down here it's mostly MPs, looking for drunken soldiers. The city boys stay clear. Besides, this car's been checked by the great Bud Pewtie him self and passed with flying colors. There's nothing in the system on the car.”
Ruta Beth drove through the traffic very carefully, nudging an inch ahead at a time. Nobody paid them any attention; mostly it was cars full of soldiers looking for a place to light.
“How's that look, Richard?” Lamar asked.
The place was called Tat-2's, with a gaudy neon sign on it, and underneath it said "Best in the West” and under that, "Trained By the Great Sailor Jerry Collins of Honolulu, complete to Liner and Shading Machines. Custom work available. Bikers welcome.”
“Hey, that looks like the kind of place, huh, Richard?” said Lamar.
“It looks promising.”
“Well, go check it out, son.”
Gulping, Richard got out of the car and went into the small shop. Two semi human forms lounged behind a counter, and on the walls were hundreds and hundreds of little designs. Of the two, the one that appeared to be the woman watched him most closely; the other was completely zoned. The odor of disinfectant hung in the air.
“Ah, hello,” said Richard.
The woman looked at him up and down, squint-eyed. She must have weighed 350 pounds and wore a cutoff biker denim shirt; her huge arms bulged from them and were inked from top to bottom in webbed darkness, with jots of color here and there. When she lifted her face to him, he saw the tattooing extended from her shirt up her neck to her chin. He turned and looked at the other morose character; he was equally gaudy, but what Richard first took to be skin disease was actually a rather elaborate spiderweb that covered half his face.
He wore a leather vest, exposing a whole blue museum on every square inch of his cellulite, but the best touch was the gold pin that pierced his nipple.
An involuntary shiver glided through Richard.
“Hep, sport?”
Hep?
Help, she meant.
“Ah, yeah,” he said, trying to sound tough.
“Was thinking of a piece. Chest. Multicolored. Private design.”
“Custom-like, you mean?”
“Yes, ma'am.”
- "Don't do much custom. More a West Coast thang.
Movie stars. These goddamn soldier boys just want "I Luv Mama' pricked on.”
“Ah, it's not for me. For a friend. Let me show you the design.”
Richard walked over to the counter and unfolded the lion, rampant, and the beautiful woman, and the castle.
“Shee-it,” said the woman.
“Rufe, you touch that?”
Rufe came out of his stupor, bending to see.
“Glory,” he finally said.
“That's a two-thousand-dollar custom tattoo. Take me best part of a week.”
“Could you get it?” Richard asked.
“The subtlety. The line running down from his mane to his body to his paws, the way it captures his tension and strength. The neck. Look how coiled and alive the neck is. Also, the loft in the woman's breasts. See how elastic and alive they are? We don't want tracing.
We don't want a dead line. We want something vibrant'. Can you do it?”
“Sure he could. You could do it, cun't you, Rufe?”
But Rufe bent over and studied very carefully.
Then he said, "Jamie, show him. The crucifixion.”
She turned and bent and pulled her blue denim shirt up.
What Richard saw on her broad back was indeed the crucifixion, only it was a handsome biker being crucified, etched there in the flesh in vivid blues and reds, surrounded by state troopers in the roles of Roman centurions.
Richard could hardly keep a straight face.
“Pretty goddamned great, ain't it?” said the woman.
“It's a goddamned masterpiece,” said Rufe.
“It's something,” said Richard, meaning it differently than Rufe and the woman took it, but as he looked at it carefully, he saw that it wasn't quite what he had in mind.
What the piece had in drama and detail it certainly lacked in subtlety of line. The figures all had a stiffness through them, and they all stood at the same angle; the faces were identical. It was like a drawing by a sick, crazy boy, high on amphetamines and inner sadomasochistic fantasies of penetration and blood but lacking entirely any grace or sense of life.
“It's just not what we're interested in, sorry,” he said.
“I'd do it for fifteen hundred,” Rufe said.
“Just like that picture you showed me, every last line and detail.
Ain't nobody can do work like that around here but me.”
If he's the best, thought Richard.
“Okay, well, maybe so,” said Richard.
“Still, it's a little you won't be offended?”
“Tell me. I'm a man. I can take it.”
“It's a bit stiff. The person on whom you'd be working he wouldn't want it stiff. It would upset him and when he gets upset, things happen. Take it from me. You don't need this job.”