Plus, he didn't know who was there. Maybe the whole goddamn SWAT team.
It was a SWAT team birthday party or something.
Lamar had to fight to control that part of him that screamed to go in and leave hair and blood on the walls.
But he held steady, letting the smart part of his brain take over.
“Okay,” he said.
“We just going to stay calm. Now Richard, I want you to get out and mosey on down the street. Don't stop, don't slow down none, don't stare, goddammit, don't stare, and then you come on back. You let me know what you can see, but don't you push it, boy, or I'll have your balls for breakfast.”
“Yes, Lamar.”
Richard got out of the car, did not slam but rather eased shut the door. Maybe he was beginning to learn a little something: he began to mosey on down.
“Daddy, what you thinking?”
“I just want to play this sucker really right. That's all, hon. Then we done our duty to O’Dell and we be off.”
“I can't wait. I'll do anything you want, you know that, Daddy.”
“I know, sweetie. You are the best.”
He felt her hand touch his neck, gently.
“I could come up front now and put my mouth to you.
You could have me in the mouth,” she said.
“It would help you relax a bit. I don't mind.”
The idea didn't appeal to him.
“Not now,” he said.
“We got work to do.”
He watched as Richard shuffled along the sidewalk slowly, seemed to pause just a second, and then moved on down the road. Then he repeated himself, coming back. It seemed to take forever. But finally Richard got in.
Lamar started the car, drove down the block, and turned before he asked what he'd seen.
“They're having some kind of fight or something. He's yelling at her, she's crying. She came over to him, he yelled something and she went away.”
“Sounds like my mother and daddy,” said Ruta Beth.
“You see anybody else?” said Lamar, turning another corner.
“No sir. No one.”
“You didn't see that boy of his?”
“No. He must still be out.”
“Okay, okay.”
Lamar rounded another corner.
“Where we going. Daddy?”
“I'm just going to come in from another angle, and park in a new place.
I don't want no citizen seeing peoples sitting in a car and calling the cops. That's all we need. Goddamn, I wish his boy was there. That's what would make it really good.”
He returned to the street and parked on the other side, this time well beyond Bud's.
“Okay,” he said.
“What the hell. We go. We get ’em both, we blow ’em away, man and wife, and then it's finished.
Fair enough?”
“Yes sir.”
“You up for this kind of man's work, there, Richard?”
“I can do it, Lamar.”
“I want you in the back. You go in the back. Anything comes your way without calling out your name, you put a bullet in it. But no one's coming your way. I'm blowing them to hell and gone, that's it.”
Lamar got out, went back to the trunk, opened it. He slid out the Browning semiauto, just peeled the bolt back a bit to see the green double-ought shell in there, and let the piece rest in his hand alongside his leg.
Ruta Beth had the other shotgun.
Richard took out his revolver.
“Not yet, you coon-brain. Not till you get in the house.
You ready?”
“Yes sir.”
“You, Baby Girl?”
“Yes Daddy.”
“Then it's butcher day.”
“We can't keep going over the same thing again and again. We're like cats in a damn bag. It ain't going to change.”
“So that's it? You're just going to leave?”
“Holly, I—”
“I can't believe you can just leave.”
“I can't stay here forever. It ain't going to change.”
“Oh, Bud.”
He rose, picked up his hat, and walked to the door.
He opened the door. Then he turned.
She was still on the sofa. She looked like he'd beaten her. Her face was swollen and wet.
“God, Holly,” he said.
“I am so sorry. You deserve so much. You deserve so much more than I could ever give you.”
She just sat there.
He tried to think of something more to say, some magic sentence that would make it all better. Of course there wasn't one. So in the end, he merely turned and walked out.
If she'd have cried out, what would he have done? A part of him badly wanted to go back. A part of him didn't know what the hell he was doing. He only knew he had to get out of there, or he'd never leave.
So he walked as if in a tunnel to the truck.
Lamar was seventy-five feet away when the door of the house suddenly opened. He saw Bud, big as life, looking like John Wayne in the doorway of a hundred westerns, face grim, broad Stetson low over his eyes.
But Bud didn't see him. Instead he walked in a straight line to the truck.
It was too far to shoot. He could run at Bud, but Bud would see or hear him. Again, he fought his thirst for action, and melted back, sinking into the ground behind a hedge, with his hand driving the girl and Richard back.
They watched as Bud climbed into the truck. He was too far away to attack, and they couldn't get back to the car in time to follow him.
Bud started the truck and drove off.
“ Where's he going?” whispered Richard.
“Shut up,” said Lamar.
“What do we do. Daddy? What do we do?”
Lamar thought for a second and thought the same thing:
What do we do?
Then he grinned.
“I know,” he said.
Holly sat there. The sense of loss was on her like a heavy wool blanket. The whole thing played out before her eyes and the words so close, so close kept echoing in her mind.
But she could never get him to see it: how perfect they were, how they'd be more together than they ever would be apart.
Then someone knocked on the door, filling her heart with hope.
She rose and ran, thinking. Bud, Bud, Bud, and opened the door.
But it wasn't Bud. It was Lamar.
CHAPTER 29
Bud drove aimlessly through downtown Lawton in the dark, not really seeing anything except the blurred lights.
He followed no particular path and at various times found himself nearing the airport, the Great Plains Coliseum, and Gate Number Three.
Even Fort Sill Boulevard seemed desolate.
Downtown, those amber lights caught everything in a particularly harsh brown glow, so that no true color stood out.
Bud felt exactly the opposite of how he expected. He thought he'd feel liberated at last, shorn of his secret life, ready and willing to embrace with all seriousness of high purpose his old life, which had been miraculously restored to him. But no. He just felt draggy, slow, morose, grouchy.
He wanted to get in a fight. Impulses toward extreme anger flicked through him. A part of him wanted to lash out, maybe at Jen, maybe at Jeff, maybe at Russ, really at himself.
It wasn't depression so much as plain old regret; images from all the sweet times with Holly kept playing on a movie screen in his head.
So little to show. She'd given him so much and she got so little.
Well, Holly, let that be a lesson to you that will stand you in good stead sometime in the future: no married men. Not worth it. All's you get is promises and sex up front, and pain and abandonment at the back end.
At last he turned down his own street and pulled into his own driveway.
Jen's station wagon was there in the carport.
He got out, walked in. The house seemed especially small and cheesy.
Wasn't much of a house. No room in it big as a motel room. The furniture, except what Jen had been given by her mother, was cheap, bought on time, in ruins before being paid off. The linoleum in the kitchen was dingy; the walls needed repainting; his shop was a mess; the lawn needed cutting.