Dirty White Boys

by Stephen Hunter

  “Bud, you know you get to talking guns with those boys at that range you won’t be home till well after nightfall.”

  It irked him that she knew him so well.

  “No, I swear it. Just fifty rounds in the Q target, just to see if I can hit a goddamned thing with a nine, much less a Glock, and then I’m home.”

  “Believe that when I see it,” Jen said.

  “Sure, Dad. I have some reading to do anyhow.”

  When they got home, Bud changed into jeans and a loose-fitting golf shirt that wouldn’t rub against the bandages that still criss-crossed his wounds, and took his midday’s ration of Percodans.

  “I’m going now,” he called, but there was only sullen silence from Jen.

  But of course Bud didn’t drive to the range. Instead he drove to Holly’s trailer in Sherwood Village, parked around back, and feeling self-conscious as hell, slid up to the door. As he knocked on it, he took a glance at his watch.

  Now that’s a terrible sign, he thought. Every time you start by looking at your watch, it ain’t going to be a good thing at all.

  But she opened the door in a short white robe, and her perfect, thin, long legs got him to forgetting about the time and for an hour or so, they were the only two people in the world.

  “God, Bud, you sure you ain’t eighteen?”

  “You make me believe I could be, that’s for sure.”

  “I’da hated to know you when you were eighteen. You’da killed me, I guarantee it.”

  “You were one, then. And I don’t think I knew the difference between my pecker and my carburetor. Didn’t until you began showing me three months ago.”

  He lay back, trying to suck all the pleasure out of the moment. The room was sunny and bright, her spare bedroom, because Bud still felt queer about making love to Holly in a room where she and Ted had been, though that spot was but ten feet away from where he now lay, through a thin tin wall.

  “Goddamn, I feel good,” he said. “Nobody ever made me feel as good as you do.”

  “You ain’t so bad in the how-good-it-feels department yourself, Mr. Pewtie,” she said. “But Bud—”

  He lay there a bit, watching the shadows play on the ceiling.

  “Bud, I want to know just one thing. Are you at least working on it? By that I mean, thinking about it. There’s work to be done. We got to find a place. You ought to talk to Jen and the boys. You ought to talk to a lawyer. There’s much to be done. It can’t just happen, up and sudden.”

  Bud faced the ceiling. Everything she said was true.

  “Holly, this ain’t the time.”

  “But it’s never the time.”

  “I told Jeff I’d drive him out sixty-one to the hitting cages.”

  Now she sighed.

  “Okay, Bud, go to the hitting cages with Jeff. But you have to do something. Soon. It ain’t fair to nobody.”

  It wasn’t so bad after that was said. He dressed, she joked with him and wouldn’t sulk or act victimized, and she gave him a good fare-thee-well, so he could go off and be with his son without the cloud of a bad secret scene hanging over him.

  About a mile from home, he pulled into a strip mall parking lot and opened the lockbox in the rear of the pickup. He took out his shooting bag, where he kept his muffs and shooting glasses and assorted tools, and picked up a small brown bottle of Shooter’s Choice bore solvent. He squirted it on his hands and worked it in, like a hand cream, because the odor was so totally associated with firearms in his house. The act itself disgusted him. It was so common and low.

  You have become cheap, he told himself.

  Then he locked it back up and drove home. He checked his watch. He was only half an hour late. He prayed that Jeff hadn’t lost interest or gone off with friends.

  “I’m home,” he yelled, coming in the door. “Sorry I’m late. Jeff, let’s go.”

  “Okay, Dad,” Jeff called.

  “Russ, we’re going to hit at the cages. You want to come?”

  “Nah, thanks, Dad. It’s okay.”

  Jeff came bounding down the steps in cutoffs, a collarless jersey shirt, and his Nikes. He looked ropey as a cowboy, a string bean of a boy, all sinew and muscle and ranginess.

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  “Y’all be home by dinner,” Jen called from the kitchen.

  Now again Bud was happy. Nobody was in any pain anywhere. Once again he’d gotten away with it. Nobody suspected a thing, and even Holly seemed content. The edge he might fall off of wasn’t so close, at least for a little while.

  He and Jeff drove out Route 61 to Mick’s Driving Range and Batting Cages, a down-home entertainment center that had seen better days but for which each had conceived a deep affection.

  “How was the Glock, Dad?” Jeff suddenly asked.

  “What?” Oh. The Glock. The Glock. Now he had to lie to his son, flat out, something he hated to do.

  “It shoots well. Just like a revolver, you pull the trigger and off she goes, no cocking or anything. They got the safety in the trigger, little latch you pull automatically when you pull down. But I don’t know. Didn’t have much feel to it. Not like my Smith.”

  “Could you trade grips?”

  “No, the whole damn frame is one piece of plastic. Technically speaking, it doesn’t have grips. They do have this little rubber sleeve you can pull over it, I hear, give it a palm swell and finger grooves. But I think I like the Beretta nine-millimeter best. It feels just like that Beretta .380 I have.”

  “I heard that Beretta nine’s a good gun. The GIs carry it.”

  “That they do,” said Bud. “Problem is, it costs about one hundred dollars more than the Glocks do. That’s why the cops all like the Glocks. You can own one for about four-fifty. A Beretta run you five-fifty, six. Hell, my .380 was nearly five.”

  “Dad, you ought to buy the gun you like. If you ever have to use it again, it’d be better to have one you liked rather than one you got a good deal on.”

  Bud nodded. The boy was right. At least someone in the family was thinking straight.

  Mick’s Driving Range and Batting Cages was set on a rolling chunk of green Oklahoma farmland that overlooked the surrounding countryside, and now and then, when the artillery students were firing over at Fort Sill just to the north, you could hear the rolling booms of the big 155s as they detonated against far mountainsides. The road ran on a crest, the highest point in the county, and from the complex you could see for miles. It was a windy day, and Mick’s was always festooned with pennants, like some kind of extravagant musical comedy, and the pennants snapped and fluttered in the wind.

  The driving range was full up with golfers driving their little pills out onto the green like tracer bullets, but for some reason the batting cages had never quite caught on. Jeff had no problem finding an empty one.

  “Dad, you going to hit?”

  “Nah, I’ll just watch. I’d pop stitches if I swung the bat too hard. We don’t need that. You need some money?”

  “Yes sir, I do.”

  Bud handed over a ten-dollar bill and took a seat on the bench as Jeff got change and fed the tokens into the machine.

  He stood easily at the plate as the mechanical device ninety feet away issued what sounded like a reptilian clank as it came to life. Then, with a shiver, its arm lashed out, and it dispatched a ball. Jeff just leaned into it and sent it sailing with a satisfying crack.

  Jeff was hot. He was in the zone. He was really seeing it. Bud just sat there and watched him and enjoyed each second of it: the snap as the arm uncoiled and sent a ball whistling inward, Jeff’s seemingly slow stroke, the inevitable contact, and the rise of the ball, a white dot that screamed toward orbit then fell disconsolately to earth.

  “Man, you are really whacking that ball today,” Bud called.

  “Yes sir,” said Jeff. “I am out of the slump.”

  When Jeff used up the first ten dollars, Bud gave him another, and then, when that was gone, offered still another.

  �
�Dad, you don’t have to.”

  “It’s okay. It’s so great to see you out of your slump.”

  “Nah, it’s fine. I feel good.”

  Jeff and Bud headed back to the truck.

  “What are you doing different? Can you tell?”

  “It’s the head. I was leading with my chin and it was throwing the whole swing off. That, plus pressing. So I just concentrate on keeping my head still, watching the ball, and swinging through. It’s working.”

  “Was it set on fast?”

  “Absolutely, Dad. From the start.”

  “Well, if I were a scout, I’d give you a hundred-thousand-dollar signing bonus, on the spot.”

  “I’d settle for a Coke.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  They got Cokes at the machine, nodded to gruff old Mick, and headed home as the twilight passed on toward darkness.

  “You mind if I see if anything’s on the radio, Dad?”

  “Nah, go ahead,” said Bud.

  Jeff fiddled with the stations, looking for KOKY, out of Oklahoma City, the big rock station, but as he slid through the sounds he cut across some urgent chatter that signified catastrophe, built around the last two syllables of the word “robbery.”

  “Wait, stop,” said Bud, but they couldn’t get a clear signal. It must have been some Texas ghost signal or something.

  But Bud grew concerned, in his way, and said, “Switch to the AM. That news station.”

  “Dad, you said—”

  “Jeff.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  Jeff switched bands to get to KTOK, and they heard the weather, a network feed out of Washington, with headline summaries of notable local stories.

  “See, it’s—”

  “Shhh,” commanded Bud, for he’d heard the announcer launch into another story.

  “Authorities in Wichita Falls, Texas, have issued an all-points bulletin for three escaped convicts in connection with a bloody shoot-out and robbery at a Denny’s Restaurant this afternoon. Six persons are dead, including four law enforcement officers, in an armed robbery that netted an undetermined amount of cash. Oklahoma convicts Lamar James Pye, his cousin Odell Warren Pye, and Richard Franklin Peed escaped from the McAlester State Penitentiary in Oklahoma April second. They killed a prison guard, an Oklahoma highway patrolman and a bakery goods driver—and kidnapped an elderly couple—before dropping out of sight four weeks ago. Police say today’s armed robbery and shoot-out in Wichita Falls shows that they are armed and dangerous and at large in the North Texas-South Oklahoma region.”

  CHAPTER

  15

  The eggs lay before Richard. They seemed curdled and dissociative as if they were losing their very sense of eggness; they were disintegrating untouched before his eyes. Next to them, a small mountain range of homefries dried out as if in preparation for an ice age. Altogether, it hardly looked like food anymore. His coffee had grown tepid and rancid.

  He glanced about, consumed with that same queasy feeling he’d had in the car before Lamar and Odell had gone crashing in on the Stepfords. Everywhere he saw families, couples, a few lone Air Force personnel just sitting there eating their food. They had no idea what visitation was about to come crashing down upon them. In just minutes, Lamar, Odell, and Ruta Beth would be upon them, to take the money and threaten them with violence.

  “Coffee?”

  He looked up into the eyes of a waitress.

  “Ah, no,” he said.

  “You okay? You hardly touched your food.”

  “No, I’m fine, I’m okay.”

  “You want me to take it?”

  “No,” he said. “Not yet.”

  “That’s a real pretty picture.”

  “Huh? Oh! Thanks.”

  He’d been doodling. Lions, of course, as per his master’s wishes. He dreamed of lions. They pounced and lunged through his deepest thoughts. He just couldn’t get the neck right, though.

  Somehow the waitress dissolved. He wished he could quiet his rapping heart. His knees were shaking. The big minute hand drew nearer and nearer to four, when everything would start happening, depending on what police call signals Lamar monitored on his new Radio Shack scanner in the car.

  “Could be a bit before four, could be a bit after. Depends,” Lamar had said, dropping him off half an hour before.

  He swallowed. The gun in his waistband hurt. It was a huge thing, and of course they didn’t have a holster for it. He just had wedged it in, though Lamar had done some magical thing with a string, running a little loop down into his pants, tied at either end on his belt, forming a kind of truss that held the gun from slipping further.

  He took a last look around, trying to remember.

  Men in coats, like the one he wore? No, only a cowboy over there or farmworker or something, in a jeans jacket too short to conceal a handgun. A woman undercover cop? No possibility. That was the thing about Denny’s, it was the American melting pot at its best, every stripe and shape of American you could imagine, but in here today were only doughy middle-aged types, with their mamas, and a couple of Air Force enlisted women, Wichita Falls being a big Air Force town. Air Force people flew airplanes, right? They didn’t have guns. They could bomb, they couldn’t shoot. In the kitchen, from what he could see, was just a mess of black men, in their forties, working up a sweat and laughing to beat the devil all the time: certainly not off-duty policemen.

  That left the manager, a fat boy with pimples in his early twenties, with the eyes of a squirrel and a perpetual grimace of near hysteria. He’d be the one Lamar took in back to open the safe. He’d be the one Lamar had said he could break in a minute, never you mind how. He stole a look at the young man, who was officious and neurotic at once, now shooing two waitresses off to fill water glasses or pour more coffee, now rushing back to get on the cooks, now working the register. What a world of pain awaited that boy. Richard felt indecent, exposed to so much imminent hurt and yet so unable to stop anything.

  I’m like a falcon, he thought. It was a metaphor that had come to him when Lamar had driven off in the station wagon. There he had it, his freedom. He could just drive away, nothing held him, he had a car, he could go and go and go. Instead, ten minutes later, he headed back to the farm. That was the falcon part. Falcons are trained by their masters to believe there’s a tether holding them to the master’s wrist. The master manages this by keeping the falcon on his wrist with a tether until the falcon finally falls asleep. Once he falls asleep, he’s convinced, but sometimes it can go for days, man and falcon just trying to outlast the other until sleep. With him, it had taken about ten minutes. Some willpower! Now he believed that no matter where he went, he was tethered to Lamar, until Lamar set him free. And Lamar would never set him free.

  He shook his head, took a last look. Then he felt the pressure of eyes upon him and, turning to look out the window that his table sat next to, saw the station wagon pull into the lot.

  The car paused, waited for another to clear out of the lot and pull into traffic. He took a last look around. He hadn’t thought the room would be so full. It was supposed to be between lunch and dinner. These damn Texans. They couldn’t do anything but by their own rules.

  The car pulled up and into a disabled-only parking place. He saw Lamar, in his cowboy hat, and Odell, rocking gently in the back seat, and Ruta Beth, all staring at him. Richard took the handkerchief out of his pocket and waved it gently. That was the signal. He watched as Lamar slid off his hat and pulled the ski mask down. Ski masks seemed to magically appear on Ruta Beth and Odell. The doors were opening. In long raincoats to conceal their weapons they were out of the station wagon. It was happening.

  Just then, as he looked back toward the cash register, Richard saw the Texas highway patrolman come out of the men’s room, drying his hands.

  Lamar listened to the scanner, set on 460.225MHz, the police car-to-car frequency, as they approached the restaurant. Its messages and strange half-language of ten-codes and regional jargon cr
ackled sporadically.

  “Ah, Dispatch, this is R-Victor-twenty-four, I am ten-twenty-four on the Remington Street accident.”

  “Ten-four, R-Victor-twenty-four, ah, ten-nineteen the station.”

  “Ten-four, Dispatch. I have a ten-fifty-five in custody.”

  “Copy that, R-Victor-twenty-four, you want Breathalyzer?”

  “That’s a big ten-seventy-four, Dispatch, he can’t hardly walk none. Video would be nice.”

  “Ten-four, R-Victor-twenty-four.”

  “Dispatch, this is R-Victor-eleven, I am ten-seventy-six the domestic situation on Wilson Boulevard, can you ten-forty-three?”

  “Yes, R-Victor-twenty-four, suspect is a black male, about twenty-five, over three hundred pounds, with a knife. Be careful, Charlie.”

  “Great. Thanks Dispatch, you always give me the good ones.”

  “Ten-four, Charlie. Let me know when you’re ten-twenty-three.”

  And on it went.

  “Them boys got themselves just a quiet Sunday afternoon. A few drunk niggers, that’s all. Hoo boy, what they got a-coming.”

  Lamar waited for a car to clear, then pulled into the restaurant parking lot. Carefully he navigated his way to the entrance and pulled up in front of it, sliding into the open spot marked for a wheelchair.

  “Lamar, I’m pretty scared,” said Ruta Beth.

  “Sweetie, you gonna be just fine. Odell, you a-ready?”

  “Eddy,” said Odell placidly.

  “Okay, boys and girls, let’s kick ass and get paid,” he said, pulling his ski mask down.

  Each burst from his door. Lamar went first, low and crablike, almost a scuttle, but not a run because there were four steps to climb to get up into the restaurant, but also because when you ran you were out of control and control was the heart of the job.