He actually mouthed the words out loud, so they'd feel familiar in his mind. You didn't want to be making stuff up in an escapade like this, because you could just as easy as pie come up with something that invalidated something you'd said before; pick a nice, simple, believable story, near to the truth as you can make it (not very, in this case, but believable) and stick to it. He had a laugh here, remembering an old story about a football quarterback who was out helling around and his wife caught him sneaking in around seven in the morning, and he had a dandy all set up.
He told her he'd come back at about ten the night before, but since she was already asleep he didn't want to wake her so, since it was such a nice night out, he'd decided to sleep in the hammock out there in the front yard, and that's where he'd been. She said, "That's very nice, but I took the hammock down two weeks ago.” So the fellow said, "Well, that's my story and I'm sticking to it.”
Bud pulled in the driveway, and immediately one of the OSBI youngsters got out and came up to him.
“Sergeant Pewtie?”
“Yes?” he said, suddenly alerted by the youngster's gravity. Oh Christ: What was wrong?
“Sergeant, your wife has been looking all over hell and gone for you.”
“What's wrong?” he said.
“It's your son.”
“My son?”
Bud watched him in horror, thinking his whole life might be about to change: Lamar, his son, vengeance, it all came together in a single, horrifying moment.
“Your youngest boy, Jeff.”
Oh, God, thought Bud.
“He just been arrested by the city police. Assault. He attacked two boys in school. Hurt ’em bad, too.”
CHAPTER 26
The papers, in all their accounts of the famous gunfight at Jimmy Ky's, gave no personal details about this Bud Pewtie. Oklahoma highway patrol sergeant, forty-eight, that was all. His name was in no phone book either, but that was common: Cops seldom had listed phone numbers.
“How are we going to find him, Daddy?” Ruta Beth asked.
“Oh,” said Lamar, "there're ways. He's left a trail. A sly old dog like me, hell, I'll sniff him out.”
Lamar stared at the photo in the paper, and Bud Pewtie stared back. It was a grave, authoritarian face, the face of a manhunter. Lamar had seen it on a few cops in his time, but fewer and fewer of late, as the cops had gotten younger and somehow sweeter. But Pewtie had the gray eyes and flat mouth of a hero type, an ass-kicker, a shooter. And goddamn, he'd done some shooting. Lamar looked at the bandage swaddling his left hand. Two fingers, just gone, as if by surgery.
Luck or talent? Lamar knew it was probably luck, but it left him a little uneasy. No man should be that lucky.
“He's a scary man,” said Richard.
“Richard, when you hold a gun to a man's kid, he ain't scary no more.
And when you blow that child's brains all over the sidewalk, let me tell you, he's going to bawl like a baby. Oh, then he'll know the true cost of mixing up with Lamar Pye. By God, he'll know.”
Lamar thought: He's probably a family man. Looks like the father of a whole tribe, lots of those square tough-guy sons-of-bitches was like that—they were trained that the world was theirs for the taking and their job was to fill it with kids. He thought of Pewtie as the head of a tribe, and saw him living on an estate, though of course he knew how little cops made. But the image was good; it stoked the cold rage Lamar knew he had to taste and hold to do the deeds that he had in mind, that would teach the world how dangerous it is to take something from Lamar Pye.
“Now,” he said, "says here he's forty-eight years old.
Wouldn't a stud like this one have kids? Wouldn't those kids be roughly in high school, figuring he got married in his late twenties, when he got out of the goddamned Marine Corps and got his training done?”
He looked around at Ruta Beth and Richard. No doubt about it, though Ruta Beth was as decent a girl as ever lived, she was not bright. She had some ofo’Dell's dullness in the face, as she grappled with the idea.
Richard, on the other hand, was too goddamned smart.
That was his whole goddamned trouble. He could figure everything out and do nothing. Richard was about the most worthless man he'd ever seen; a bad thief, gutless, a goddamned Mary Jane. He should have let the niggers make him their bitch before they killed him. But no. Not Lamar.
Takes a boy under his wing and all these months later is still stuck with him.
Richard got it first, of course, but when he said it, Ruta Beth got it, and her little dark eyes lit up with something like a baby's glee.
“Sports! His kids would do sports! You know they would!”
“Yes indeed, Richard, I think you got it. We go to the library, look through old newspapers, your high school sports page. Goddamn, I'll guarantee you, this one'd have a fullback or a pitcher or some other goddamned thing. We'll find his name in the paper and we'll know what school he goes to. Yes sir. That gives us the place old Bud Pewtie lives in. We can hunt for that truck, which we all got a good look at when it was parked here, even though you two geniuses didn't recognize it in the parking lot.”
“It was dark, Lamar,” said Richard.
“
“It was dark, Lamar,”
“ repeated Lamar.
“Or maybe we send the boy something—say, a basket of fruit, because he done pitched a no-hitter. Then we ID him when he comes out and follow him. Anyway you cut it, goddamn we'll have us the whole goddamn Pewtie clan, you betcha.”
“Suppose he's guarded?”
“Well, then we wait a bit, and we catch us a Pewtie when the guard is down. Say a kid. Or maybe the mama. Then we call old Bud, and we say, you either come on out to play with us, or we going to start sending you fingers and ears.
Oh, he'll come. Goddamn I know, he'll come.”
It fell to Richard and Ruta Beth to enter Lawton's small branch library at Thirty-eighth and Cherry and take up the bound copies of the months of April, May, and June (not yet finished) for the Lawton Constitution.
Richard paged through the grim newsprint, his fingers darkening with ink stains. Every now and then a headline would reach out and snag his eye. grange slates bake sale, for example, or safety record set at whiz plastics or recital set for tuesday—not news stories per se, but little announcements about this or that thing occurring somewhere in or about the greater Lawton area. They were like bulletins from another life: Richard had been raised to hold lower middle class society in utter contempt, but right then, it seemed the nicest thing he could ever imagine was to work accident-free in the Whiz Plastics plant his whole life, and go to the Grange bake sale on Saturday and his daughter's recital on Tuesday.
Never. Was gone. Couldn't happen. That life was sealed off. He was "special,” he had been trained from an early age, smarter and more talented, and see what it had got him?
Why am I so damned smart? he wondered, pityingly.
Why do I have to see through so much? Why couldn't I be banal, like everyone else?
“What the hell are you crying about?” Ruta Beth said.
“You want us arrested for being weird? They do that in small towns, you know.”
“No, it's just that it's so commonplace, the contents of a newspaper.
There's nothing meaningful in it. It's so ordinary”
“Goddamn, Richard, you are the goddamnedest weirdest man I ever did see. Don't see what Lamar sees in you. Go on, look for the goddamned name.”
Richard pushed his way onward, his eyes roaming through the sports section, pulsing through dreary tales of dreary games played all across the city and surrounding counties. Why did boys love games so? It was a complete mystery to him. Take baseball, for example point? After all, if you hit the ball or not in the long run, what was achieved?