As he walked he tried to reconstruct O’Dell in his mind, as if in doing so, he could keep that boy out of the cold and lonely grave. There had been something solid about O’Delclass="underline"
He expected so little, he was almost unstoppable in most kinds of battle, he knew no fear or remorse; he simply lived each moment, then forgot it forever. Lamar had taken care of him for years. He understood his cousin's strange language full of twisted words and broken sentences; he understood the subtleties of O’Dell's face, which most people regarded as utterly impassive and blank. Not Lamar; he could read O’Dell's mood from the set of his mouth, the raggedness of his breathing through that incomplete septum, and the essential sweetness of his character.
For at heart, in some way, though he had done terrible things at Lamar's dark bidding, O’Dell had retained his innocence.
He simply had done what Lamar said and taken no pleasure from it. He had had no need to dominate or kill or steal; he had only needed to be paid a little attention and be fed, and that had lasted him to the end of his days. But Lamar had dragged him along, made him a pale instrument of his own criminal will, and had now gotten him killed.
No, no, he told himself. You can't believe that. You 'da gone on for years, you and O’Dell, you thinking, O’Dell happily following, if it weren't for that goddamned Bud Pewtie.
The thought of Pewtie recalled the gun flashes in the dark, and that made him think of O’Dell hit on the floor, his baby voice keening in pain and hurt, his mouth shot away so that his tiny store of words had been reduced to an animal howl.
"WAHRRRR!"
And then when the lights came on, he saw the blood all over O’Dell and the way his jaw was smashed and hanging, sections of bone blown out, and a torrent of blood squirting out of it. That must have been the very first shot, the jaw shot, the lucky jaw shot that changed the whole nature of the fight.
That Bud Pewtie seemed to have the Pye number all right! Something about him made him special to the Pyes.
Lamar remembered turning with the shotgun after the .45 had run dry at the Stepford place and pumping one last shell into Pewtie. It was like his back exploded! Blood from a butchered pig, a big, fly-catching puddle of it! And the bastard wasn't even badly hurt! Flesh wounds from birdshot!
Pretty goddamned suspicious.
And the second time. A second time Bud Pewtie, big as life and dumb as an elephant, came walking onto Ruta Beth's farm and was just ten feet away and all Lamar had to do was jump across that space and bury the hatchet in the lawman's brain! It would have been so easy! They could have stashed him, taken his truck, and driven to new digs in New Mexico or Texas or California or some such But no-played it safe, and got poor O’Dell blown away.
What haunted him most, as it haunted Bud, was O’Dell's insane lumber across the tattoo shop while Pewtie shot pieces off him. He must have hit him two dozen times as Lamar just stared, his own hand blown to shit so that he could think of nothing; you could just see the bullets tearing through O’Dell, blowing off pieces of bone and flesh like he was nothing. Still, something in O’Dell drove him onward while Pewtie put them into him. O’Dell, goddamn was he a lot of man! He may have been a baby to the world, but to Lamar he was a man, because he had truly given up his life for Lamar's, a sacrifice that was all but unimaginable to Lamar. He'd never seen anything like it in all his years of prison. It just wasn't done. When a man's time came, it came, that was all.
So Lamar roamed the fields at night, thinking these things over, working himself deeper and deeper into a titanic rage. One night it rained and the lightning flashed all around, but Lamar didn't care. He went up on a ridge and stood in the pouring rain, his shirt off, the lightning bolts detonating like artillery shells all around him. When they went off, their illumination brought the world into sharp, instantaneous relief; he could see the farmhouse and the highway far away, and the abutments against the horizon that were the Wichitas; but the flashes were like gun flashes and the thunderclaps like the sounds of guns.
“He should see a doctor,” said Richard.
“He'll get a fever and die. Or he'll go insane out there in all that rain and lightning, and do something crazy and take us with him.”
“You shut up now, Richard,” said Ruta Beth, blinking as a particularly vivid flash filled the dark kitchen with sudden shadows.
“Daddy's in pain. He's in real pain. He needs -time to get a grip.”
“He needs a doctor. You don't get two fingers shot off and not see a doctor.”
“What little you know, Richard. I heard that back in -fifty-four, my daddy's brother Cy lost a whole hand to a threshing machine and there wasn't no doctor in these here parts. So they just wrapped him up tighter'n a drum, and few days go by and he's up and spry as a weed.
It^s only goddamned city folks need a doctor ever time their nose git a little runny.”
“How long did Cy live?”
“Well, he died the next year of a fever, but that don't have nothing to do with it.”
“Ruta Beth, I—” The door blew open; rain whistled in and at that moment, as if in a cheap movie, a lightning flash illuminated the ravaged features of Lamar, his hair a mottled and wild mess, his eyes crazed, his muscles tensed and hard against the sting of the rain, with just the faintest outline oh ion on his chest.
“Richard,” he commanded.
“I want you to git your art stuff. I want you to draw me a picture.
Boy, draw me a picture as if your life depended on it. I got to see that picture or I'm going to die, Richard.”
Richard leaped up.
“Yes, Lamar. Tell me what it is. I can draw it. I'll draw like I drew before. You just tell me and I'll do it.”
“Richard, I want to see Baby O’Dell happy in heaven.
He's sitting at the Lord's right hand. He's playing with a cat, a little kitty. He's got a halo. Then on the Lord's other hand, there's Jesus, and he's just as pleased as punch because his new buddy O’Dell done joined him up.”
“Y-yes,” said Richard, thinking it seemed a little ambitious for his modest talents.
“Yeah, but that's only in heaven. That's going on up top.
Down here on earth, Richard, down here on earth, that goddamned Bud Pewtie, he's being burned. You know what I mean? He's on fire. His flesh is burning in the everlasting fires of hell. He's screaming for mercy, but they ain't none.
No mercy for him. Do you get that?”
“Yes, I do, Lamar. And you? You're in the picture?”
“Hell yes, boy,” said Lamar.
“I'm the one with the match.”
Richard drew as if he were the one on fire. He knew it was an absurdity, but in some way it satisfied him to reach out and at last help Lamar, if only in this crazy way.
He tried to remember the Sistine Chapel, for it had that crazed scope to it—heaven and earth, reward and punishment, the duality of existences, a classical Renaissance theme. He of course was no Michelangelo, but he doubted if Lamar knew who Michelangelo was, so he doubted his plagiarism would get him in much trouble. That's how he envisioned it—an insane white-trash Sistine Chapel, full of pure rage and the criminal's need to dominate and hurt, and at the same time full of a kind of innocence. It would be a lunatic masterpiece, a crackpot piece de resistance, of the sort that is rare but does in fact exist—the works of Celine, for example; or Mahler, a horrible man; or Sam Peckinpah, that deranged maker of nihilistic cowboy movies whom some actually believed to be a very great artist.
It was as if he had been liberated. His fingers flew and discovered new and interesting ideas as they plunged ahead, each new line leading to yet another line in a mad scramble, a helter-skelter, a kind of artistic release. Whatever Lamar had done for him or to him, he had now at last released Richard's inhibitions; no thought of what was "proper” attended his brain, no reluctance, no phony patina of "sophistication";