he let the work flow from his id—or from Lamar's.
Heaven was a mountaintop, purple and swarming with clouds. Our Lord was a benevolent biker king, a Daddy Cool aslouch on the throne of his Harley, his powerful features radiating justice and serenity; at his left foot was his only son, Jesus as Road Captain, his leathers glistening, his narrow, ascetic face made more prominent by a ponytail that hung down from a bandanna. He had a tattoo that said jesus loves and he, too, radiated benevolence and forgiveness.
And Baby O’Dell. It was with special affection that Richard evoked the Baby; he cured his harelip and gave his eyes focus and wit; he gave him not the slob by body of an overgrown farmboy but the sleek muscles of a weightlifter.
His mouth was no longer small and overshadowed by the dark fissure above it, but firm and eloquent, just as he now had cheekbones and spine and the one thing that poor O’Dell never in life acquired, for it requires some kind of primitive self-awareness: dignity. It was about halfway through that he realized he was reinventing O’Dell as Al Capp's Li'l Abner, but that was okay: there was something barefoot and down-home to both Abner and O’Dell that made it appropriate.
It was nearly midnight when he finished the rough sketching for the first half of the drawing; but now, in a fever, he could not stop. He was consumed with fire, as high as he'd ever, ever been before in his life.
Oh, Mother, he thought, if you could see me now.
For Bud Pewtie, he tried to imagine a pain so everlasting and consuming it would be almost beyond comprehension.
How does one get the total squalor of torture, of ultimate and total degradation, into a mere representation? He tried to think of atrocity—the blown-away old people in this very house; but more, scenes from Auschwitz, the endless litter of scrawny corpses; or the famous photograph of the searing flame of napalm in Vietnam, out of which with such utter delicacy the little girl had run, leaving her mother and baby brother cooking behind; the Zapruder film frame in which Kennedy's skull explodes, a fragment launching into midair and trailing a plasma gossamer; a picture of the rent, headless corpse of a third-trimester abortion that an anti choice zealot had once sent him.
Yet none of this stuff really worked; it didn't get him where he needed to be.
What is the worst, he thought, the worst thing you know or have ever heard of? The screwball in Silence of the Lambs with his "woman suit"?
The German officer who forces Sophie to choose which child shall live and which shall die? The cries of the Scottsboro boys as they were dragged to their trees, knowing they were innocent?
No, he thought, the worst thing you ever heard of was the boy who blinded his mother. He didn't have the guts to kill her. He wasn't strong enough, though he hated her almost as much as he loved her. He tried to remember the mechanics of his strokes with his stiff arms, his sudden explosiveness, the sound of the blade cutting into the skin and into the sockets. He remembered her wailing. God, how she wailed for mercy. But she was so weak. She had dominated him for so long, but she was so weak! The power he'd felt, the obscene sense of gratification after all those years.
“There, Mother, there! Now you know how it feels!”
That's what he'd said to her.
Now, trapping that sickness and storing it like a fossil fuel, he began once again to draw.
Lamar sat like Rodin's Thinker, watching the sun come up. It crept over the rim of the plains out beyond the highway, foreshadowing another hot, clear Oklahoma day. This early, it was still a farmer's sun, appreciated wordlessly only by men who rose before it to get a good part of their immense day's labor finished before it got truly hot. It was swollen and bloodshot, and almost orange, but still cool.
Lamar regarded it dully. It was as if he'd spent his rage and collapsed, finally, after so many long, sleepless days and nights battling fever and pain and that goddamned big cat that was still stalking him. His face was slack, his eyes dull.
He was shirtless, the half-lion looking almost abstract, like a scribble, on the planes of his chest. His hair fanned wetly over his broad back. He breathed through his mouth, drawing the air over a dry, dead tongue. Nothing moved on his body; he looked as passive as a piece of stone, though the veins on his muscular right arm were distended and now and then a rogue impulse caused one of his remaining fingers to twitch.
He'd been sitting there since three o’clock, when he'd returned from another of his long night walks.
Richard approached gingerly. He felt as if he were a small boy in the presence of greatness.
He stood, waiting to be recognized.
After a long time, Lamar finally looked over.
Richard saw two glistening tracks running down his cheeks, which connected with no knowledge of Lamar that he'd ever had, until at last he recognized that tears had left their mark. Lamar was weeping silently.
“Lamar, are you all right?”
“Oh, I'm hurting something mighty, Richard,” Lamar said.
“I'm hurting so fierce I doubt if I'm a-going to make it.”
“Please, Lamar. What would we do without you? You can't talk like that. You've got to make it. It always seems darkest just before the dawn.”
“Goddamn Richard, that poor boy, he never'd done a thing wrong if I hadn't a-steered him to it. It's me should be lying on that slab, not him. And I promised him I'd take him to his mama's grave and I never done that. And now he ain't even going to git no funeral. They going to dump him in some goddamned pauper's grave and that's the end of it.
It's so sad. It kills me how sad it is.”
“Lamar, I finished the drawing. I'll put the colors in tomorrow if you like it.”
He held it out to Lamar, who took it and examined it closely in silence for some time. Then Richard heard a shuffle, a choke, a sob, as Lamar broke down completely.
Richard stood there feeling as if he'd violated some immense privacy of Lamar To see a man so bold and strong and fearless weeping hysterically—it befuddled Richard. It was like seeing his own father crying, when all the signals always said that fathers don't cry. His never did. Mothers cry. But his never did, either.
But then Lamar looked over and said, "Richard, goddamn, what you done here, that's wonderful. The Baby in heaven, Bud Pewtie in hell.
Goddamn, Richard, you are a great artist. Just looking at that lets me imagine it in some way I couldn't before. I do know that he's up there, a-waitin' on me. Goddamn, Richard, boy, it's like you done lifted a huge weight off my shoulders.”
“Why thank you, Lamar,” said Richard, stunned at the response.
Then Lamar looked at the bottom part, the hell part.
“Now what's this?” he said, his features darkening.
“I thought I told you he was supposed to burn, like in hell.”
“Lamar, Lamar, I thought hard about it, and I came up with something different. Something so… strange it would make you famous. Famous forever. It's so horrible.”
Lamar's features knitted as he tried to penetrate the image.
Gradually, they lightened.
“His face,” he said.
“You got me doing something to his face.”
“Yes,” Richard admitted shyly.
“I don't get it, Richard.”
“What is a man, Lamar? A man is many things, and you can take them from him, but the one thing, if you take it, you take everything.”
“Everything?”
“Yes. Everything. Not his life, not his family, not his balls, but—his face.”