“Lamar? I don't know. I doubt it.”
“If you say so.”
“Well, you can't predict. But these boys out front'll prevent anything bad from happening.”
Bud waved at the two—sullen youngsters, under huge cowboy hats, with hooded eyes—who nodded in return and went back to eyeballing the neighborhood.
Bud went in—he had a moment of bliss, walking in his own front door, even if each step felt as if it pulled him through a bucket of glass.
Still, it felt good: to survive a goddamned gunfight and come back to this and see that everything was just as it had been, that Jen's sense of order had made certain that it was neat, that it was still a house rank with the odor of boys. He felt as if a weight had been lifted.
He went to the gun safe in the downstairs closet, spun the dial, and the thing opened up: his guns, gleaming in the low light, three short of course, lay in there. He decided to get a short-barreled shotgun out just in case, removed it, slid five 12-gauge double-oughts down its tube, but didn't crank the slide to jack a round into the chamber. He locked the door and laid the shotgun to rest against the wall.
“Honey, I got a shotgun out. You just have to throw the pump if it comes to it. In the closet. Next to the safe.”
“Okay, Bud.”
“Where're the papers?”
“In the living room.”
“I'm going to take them upstairs.”
She didn't answer.
Bud got them and took them upstairs. He slid out of his boots, took another Percodan, and lay back in his bedroom.
He read all about it, saw himself referred to by name as a highway patrol undercover officer—now there was a joke!
—and read quotes by the colonel and half-a-dozen other officials on what a good job he'd done. There was a murky official photo of him.
Generally, the press business was pretty favorable. It treated him as some kind of hero, and none of them mentioned that he was the patrolman jumped by Lamar and O’Dell three months back; that was good, it didn't make it look like this "revenge” thing, as everybody seemed to think it would. Maybe the stupid reporters were too dumb to put it together but more likely, someone had said to them, don't stroke this angle and, for once, they'd agreed.
But he didn't like the games they played with the story of the fingers.
They almost seemed to think it was funny, that he'd done it on purpose.
If he'd been an expert shot, one bullet would have killed O’Dell, not thirty-three, and the second one would have killed Lamar.
Around one, he fell asleep. At three he awakened, saw that a note from Jen was on the bureau. She'd gone out on errands; Russ and Jeff would be back late; they wanted to go to the Meers Store tonight, was it all right? Or should they stay in?
Bud rolled over and dialed Holly's number.
“Hi,” he said, "how're you?”
“Oh, Bud, they say you're a big hero! Bud, you're famous!”
“Oh, it'll go away, believe me. These buzzards forget as soon as they write something.”
“You're all right?”
“I'm fine, I swear to you. I'm done with the eyepatch but I have scabs on my face and a bandage on my leg, where there's still swelling and some pain, but I seem to be tougher than beef jerky. Lamar just can't git me dead. I can't git him dead either.”
“Bud, when can I see you? I want to be with you so bad.
I want to help you through this.”
“No help needed. I'm fine. Honey, I told you—it just depends. A day or two, when the ruckus settles down. You can wait, can't you? We're so damned close.”
“Bud? You're going to do this, aren't you? You keep putting me off, but you're going to be with me. I couldn't stand to lose you, Bud. I just couldn't. I'm so afraid you're going to change your mind and go running back to what's easiest.”
Bud had never promised he'd leave. He knew that. He could not force himself to. He'd promised to consider it. The distinction may have been slight, but it was powerful in his mind; it was the difference between adultery and blasphemy.
At the same time there was such eagerness and, underneath, such despair in Holly's voice. How could she love him so? Was she crazy? What would happen when she saw him as Jen saw him—a largely immobile and inert chunk of solitude, who didn't give much and took a lot, and whose idea of a good time was to reload .270s for the fall? It scared him a little. He wasn't quite sure he trusted it. But he didn't have it in him to hurt her.
“Well, I'm working on it. When them boys was shooting at me, it was you I was thinking about seeing. Okay?”
“Good, Bud. I have to hear that.”
“Holly, soon. I swear to you.”
He hung up and got up. He walked around the empty house, feeling the ache in each step. He looked out the window at the black OSBI car with its two radio antennae and the slouchy young men. He was once again at complete loose ends, too agitated to sleep, yet not really able to go anywhere. He went downstairs and turned on the TV for the six o’clock news, to see if there was anything on Lamar.
There wasn't. The big news was the Lamar cult. It had struck again that night at the high school.
Someone had painted ode ll was murdered in huge letters on the blank brick wall of the gymnasium. And next to that, LAMAR WILL BE BACK.
CHAPTER 24
Lamar thought he could get through anything. The hand wound coagulated and scabbed over, and no infection set in; it only hurt, hurt like the devil, but pain was no problem.
And the disappointment that Lamar felt when he looked at his unfinished chest, with the outlines of a lion just barely sketched in, rough and crude, incomplete, was palpable, but a man who’s spent most of his life in prison has trained himself at least to patience, and so he knew that his disappointment, too, would vanish eventually, as all things did.
The grief was something else. Lamar had not known grief in his violent thirty-eight years; his father died on the highway before he himself had even been born, so he never knew to miss him. Then there was his mother, a wan and sickly woman, without much in the way of personality, who passed him around to aunts and cousins and whatnot; he was in reform school when she died a drunkard's death in a ditch, with a bad man. He felt nothing, not even a stab of loneliness. When O’Dell's mama, Camilla, died when he and O’Dell were on a straight eighteen month slide for aggravated assault—plea-bargained down from second degree murder—he felt a twinge. She'd been the best woman he'd ever known, kind and gentle, and she had so loved her Baby O’Dell, though not quite enough to stop her husband from chaining him up in the barn and beating him with a razor strop. Lamar had stopped that himself. But that was more a single moment's passing, like a cold breeze through his insides.
Here it came, there it went, it was gone forever.
But now O’Dell. He didn't think it would ever stop hurting.
He thought of it as weight. It took the form of a fat black cat that crawled upon his chest, suffocating him. He got the idea that if he ever lay down and went to sleep, that cat would kill him. He imagined it having mousy breath and a white blaze between yellow saucer eyes that never blinked but only looked on him with utter stillness and without interest. But it wanted him dead. It would creep up during the night, warm and cuddly, and just plant itself on his chest, acquiring weight as the night passed until he clawed for air, but by that goddamned time the cat weighed a ton and its purrs had the quality of a file's gritty grasp, squashing him down into the feathers until he was no more.
“Goddamn cat” was all Lamar would say as to why he no longer slept but instead roamed the farm at night, striding grimly about on the rolling, open prairie, amid the craggy mesquite trees that seemed to be trying to claw the moon from the sky in black rage. Sometimes he ventured as far afield as across the highway into some farmer's grazing lands, where he walked madly between the cattle, who soon grew accustomed to his presence.