Bud didn't feel much like answering any questions. He just said, "What the hell took everybody so long to get here? We had us a goddamned World War. Nobody called it in?”
“Not a goddamned soul. Bud. Nobody to call it in.
Jimmy Ky crawled out of the bushes after Lamar and pals departed, waited ten minutes, tried to call, found out the goddamned car had torn out the phone lines, and walked two miles into town to tell the sheriff's department. Lamar, goddamn his soul, got away.”
“Damn,” said Bud.
“I know I hit him, I seen. blood. I seen him drop his piece. I hurt him bad.”
“That you did, Bud. Wilie, bring ’em here. Bud, take a look at your trophies.”
A highway patrol technician came over with a plastic bag. It seemed to contain two grisly pickles, each somewhat tattered at one end.
“What the hell are those?” Bud wanted to know.
-"Lamar's fingers. His last and second-to-last left hand digits. You shot his fingers off. Bud. You killed his cousin, you stopped his tattoo, and you shot off two fingers. Say you done a hell of a night's work, Bud.”
CHAPTER 23
In Comanche Memorial Hospital, a young doctor and two nurses bent over Bud in the emergency room operating theater and picked pieces of glass out of his face for nearly two hours. During this time they also removed a ragged piece of bullet jacket from Bud's scalp, where it had lodged just under the skin, and a double-ought buckshot pellet that had drilled into the meat of his left calf. That was the nasty one. It hurt like a son-of-a-bitch. The painkillers they gave him helped some, but nothing could blunt the force of the pain of a foreign missile blown deep into the muscle tissue.
By the time the first team was done, an ophthalmologic surgeon had arrived by helicopter from Tulsa to work on his blurry eye. This gentleman probed for several minutes and then removed a particularly gruesome glass sliver from in side his left orbit, where it had sunk into the subcutaneous tissue just under the orb itself.
He held it out for Bud to see: It looked like a blade of pure glass, a vivid little knife.
“You're lucky. Sergeant. A millimeter to the right and you might have lost your vision permanently. I'm going to prescribe antibiotics and give you an eyepatch, but in a few days your vision will return to normal.”
“Thank you. Doctor.”
“No, thank you. It's an honor to work on a man as brave as you,” and he went on with some blah-blah about Bud being a hero.
But Bud didn't feel like a hero. It wasn't a thing of heroes; it had no heroics to it; that was for the movies, where things happened clearly, you could follow them, they made sense, the cleverness was apparent. This was just a mad scramble, like cats in a bag fighting, luck happening or not happening, no strength, no cunning, just the blind happenstance of where so many bullets happened to end up.
And, knowing that, he had to think: You could have done better. It was true.
If he'd just taken a look through the window and made out who Jimmy Ky was decorating, he could have gotten to a phone and called for backup, and all of them would be locked up or in the morgue, not just poor, dumb O’Dell. No one had directly confronted him yet, except for the odd nods from the troopers on the scene. Had he done well?
Someone once said, if you're still alive at the end of a gunfight, you've won. But Bud didn't quite buy it. He'd almost gotten Lamar.
Almost!
Once the doctors were done and Bud was washed and dried, he was rolled to a private room. There, Jen and Jeff waited. She came over and just touched him, lightly, on the arm; she didn't look quite real, because with the patch he had no stereoscopic vision; she looked like a picture. And she was haggard, having been awakened from a sleep at nearly five in the morning with the sketchy news that once again her husband had been shot up. Fortunately, the news soon followed that he wasn't hurt bad.
“Oh, Bud,” she said.
He smiled wanly, feeling his dry lips crack.
“Oh, Bud,” she said again.
Jeff stood aloof in the corner of the room.
“Where's Russ?”
“He's not coming,” she said, "He went up to the lake with his friends.
I didn't call him. They said you'd be all right.”
“That's good. Let him enjoy the Princeton thing. This ain't nothing.”
“When is it going to end?”
“It has ended,” he said.
“I swear it.”
Presently, a nurse came along and shooed them out. They had to wait in the hall. He needed his rest; he was still in danger of shock and he'd need to be sharp the next day, anyway.
But, alone in the dark at last, he couldn't rest. He lay there unsettled. He tried not to think about it. Images from the fight kept flashing back on him. He'd think he was done with it and then it would come back to him, blown up and in slow motion. The slack look on O’Dell's face in that first second. Goddamn, must have beat him to the draw by just a fraction of an instant, that's how goddamn close it was.
It made him almost physically sick; he'd drawn the Colt and thumb-wiped the safety off and fired at a speed that had no place in time. But it was so easy to screw up a presentation like that; suppose he hadn't gotten his grip right and hadn't depressed the grip safety, or he'd missed the safety with the thumb, or he'd missed the shot. But goddamn, he'd put out the telling shot and it kept him fighting. Any single little muff in that complex of movements, and he was a goner.
He'd fired so much! Suppose he'd held back on the shooting? Maybe if he'd placed his shots better and aimed more. He remembered aiming once, at Lamar's big hands on the Colt. How the blood exploded from them on the hit, the gun flying. Funny, in a gunfight they say that you concentrate on your opponent's weapon and that hand and arm wounds are the rule, not the exception. That was it exactly, there.
It was such a close goddamn thing, is what it added up to. Physical violence with guns at close range always involved the fantastic, the unbelievable. Every shooting was a Kennedy assassination in replica, a twisted mess of events where everybody was operating in an ozone layer of stress and nothing made sense. Funny, Bud had done all that shooting and had all that shooting directed back at him, and he couldn't remember hearing a single shot! But his ears rang like somebody was beating on them with a bat. He had no sense of how long it took, either. An hour? More likely three minutes, or two. All that shooting, so much shooting, and how few bullets actually found targets. Even the great Lamar hadn't shot very well. So much for your gunfighter myth.
It was the flashes that haunted him. When the guns fired, they produced huge clouds of burning gas that in the dark blossomed like star bursts blinding and disorienting everybody.
Maybe that's why in all the shooting, so few rounds had gone home? Who could see in the middle of the Fourth of July? But those flashes, cruelly flaring out in the dark, each blindingly white and hot, each a potential death sentence.
He'd see them for the rest of his life, he thought; he'd never be finished with them.
But mostly. Bud couldn't get O’Dell out of his mind. It was like something from some horror movie, the way O’Dell kept eating up the lead and coming for him. He'd seen the boy's heart explode, seen his throat blown out, seen part of his brain fly away. But still O’Dell came, like some robot or something, outside of pain, beyond death. What kept him going, what reserve of pure animal fury? Or maybe it wasn't fury.
Maybe fury couldn't get you through something like that. Maybe it was love. Only person in the world poor O’Dell cared about was Lamar, and by all reports Lamar cared back just as hard. That kept him going beyond the collapse of his nervous system. Finally finished him with the .380. And suppose he hadn't had the belly gun?