Dirty White Boys

by Stephen Hunter

  “You won’t flunk out. No man who works as hard as you has a thing to worry about. Then you go on and go to work doing what you want and you have sons who’ll make you just as proud as you two make me.”

  “You-all listen to your daddy,” said Jen. “He’s speaking the truth. You boys have been a great thing for us, made us so happy. Not a lick of trouble between the two of you, thank the Lord.”

  Bud had more roast beef.

  “Bud, do you think we should order some champagne?” said Jen. “I think these boys are man enough.”

  “Mom,” said Jeff, “that stuff costs eighty dollars a bottle.”

  “Well, Jeff,” said Bud, “your brother has just saved us about a hundred thousand dollars, so I think we can spend eighty bucks.”

  “Jeff, the domestic is forty-two fifty,” Jen said.

  “You can buy it in a liquor store for about fourteen dollars a bottle,” Jeff added.

  Bud called the waiter over and ordered a bottle of champagne, slightly shamed by Jeff into choosing the domestic one. When it came, he ordered it poured for the whole family.

  Then, dramatically, he said, “And here’s to Russ and all the hard work he’s done.”

  They all lifted their sparkling glasses and drank; but Bud only let the stuff touch his lips and did not swallow.

  “Here, let me pour some more,” he said, giving each a half glass more, until it was all gone.

  The boys and Jen finished the champagne and then it was time to go. Bud looked at his watch: about ten. He called for the check and paid it with his Visa card without wincing, though it was about forty dollars more than he had expected. Still, except for Jeff’s strange sullenness, it had been a wonderful evening.

  Is it the last? he wondered.

  Am I about to do some fool thing and move into a little house near the airport with a young woman?

  * * *

  “Bud?”

  “What?”

  “You were talking to yourself.”

  “I must be going crazy.”

  They drove in Jen’s station wagon through Lawton’s quiet streets and pulled in the driveway about ten-thirty.

  “Dad, do you mind if I go over to Nick Sisley’s?” asked Russ. “He’s having a party.”

  “No, fine, but don’t be home late. Isn’t that right, Jen?”

  “That’s fine.”

  “How about you, Jeff? You have any plans?”

  “I think I’ll go over to Charlie’s,” he said. When the boys had disappeared, she said to Bud, “And I see you’re going out, too.”

  “Oh?”

  “You didn’t drink any champagne.”

  “I may go. Have to make some phone calls first.”

  “Bud, what’s going on?”

  “Oh, got me just the tiniest idea that might lead us to Lamar. Probably nothing. Just want to check it out.”

  “Tonight? Can’t it wait?”

  “Jen, it’s nothing. I’m just going over to the Tribal Police Department over at the Comanche complex. I just want to ask some questions, is all.”

  She fixed him with her harshest stare, as if she’d never heard of such a thing in her life. Then disillusionment crept across her features and, utterly defeated, she went upstairs. He heard her wheezing disappointment. He watched her go, feeling as though he ought to say something. But no words arrived at his lips, and she just turned into the bedroom and closed the door.

  * * *

  Lawton was two towns. It was a church-going, tree-shaded small Oklahoma city, with wooden houses nestled on streets that Andy Hardy would have been proud to call home, where every third block sported a park or a school or a church, a town where all life coagulated toward the Central Mall and the county seat for Comanche county. And it was a soldier’s town, jammed up with pawn shops and girlie bars and porn stores, from Fort Sill Boulevard around to Cache Road and out Cache Road for a mile or two.

  The Fort Sill Boulevard strip, just beyond Gate No. 3, was hopping tonight. Cars jammed its narrow way and it blazed with neon. Young artillerymen, freed from the day’s duty of delivering their 155-mm packages into the mountains, their ears booming still, their heads aswarm with the computations necessary to send the shell in the right direction, wandered in packs up and down it, looking for diversion. This usually involved fleshly appetites, and there were places on the strip where for an honest hundred bucks a man could get a good drunk with a good blow job thrown in for good measure; in others, two hundred could be spent with no blow job to be had anywhere on the premises. You had to know where you went.

  But among the girlie joints, and the Mailbox USAs and the porn shops and the pawn shops, there was to be found now and then a tattoo joint: Skin Fantasy was the title of one; the Flesh House, another; Skin Art still another; Little Burma Art House, the Rainbow Biceps, and on and on.

  It was crowded, as it always was in the hours approaching midnight, and the Toyota crawled along through the traffic.

  “You sure this is safe?” said Richard.

  “Sure it is,” said Lamar. “Down here it’s mostly MPs, looking for drunken soldiers. The city boys stay clear. Besides, this car’s been checked by the great Bud Pewtie himself and passed with flying colors. There’s nothing in the system on the car.”

  Ruta Beth drove through the traffic very carefully, nudging an inch ahead at a time. Nobody paid them any attention; mostly it was cars full of soldiers looking for a place to light.

  “How’s that look, Richard?” Lamar asked.

  The place was called Tat-2’s, with a gaudy neon sign on it, and underneath it said “Best in the West” and under that, “Trained By the Great Sailor Jerry Collins of Honolulu, complete to Liner and Shading Machines. Custom work available. Bikers welcome.”

  “Hey, that looks like the kind of place, huh, Richard?” said Lamar.

  “It looks promising.”

  “Well, go check it out, son.”

  Gulping, Richard got out of the car and went into the small shop. Two semihuman forms lounged behind a counter, and on the walls were hundreds and hundreds of little designs. Of the two, the one that appeared to be the woman watched him most closely; the other was completely zoned. The odor of disinfectant hung in the air.

  “Ah, hello,” said Richard.

  The woman looked at him up and down, squint-eyed. She must have weighed 350 pounds and wore a cutoff biker denim shirt; her huge arms bulged from them and were inked from top to bottom in webbed darkness, with jots of color here and there. When she lifted her face to him, he saw the tattooing extended from her shirt up her neck to her chin. He turned and looked at the other morose character; he was equally gaudy, but what Richard first took to be skin disease was actually a rather elaborate spiderweb that covered half his face. He wore a leather vest, exposing a whole blue museum on every square inch of his cellulite, but the best touch was the gold pin that pierced his nipple.

  An involuntary shiver glided through Richard.

  “Hep, sport?”

  Hep?

  Help, she meant.

  “Ah, yeah,” he said, trying to sound tough. “Was thinking of a piece. Chest. Multicolored. Private design.”

  “Custom-like, you mean?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Don’t do much custom. More a West Coast thang. Movie stars. These goddamn soldier boys just want ‘I Luv Mama’ pricked on.”

  “Ah, it’s not for me. For a friend. Let me show you the design.”

  Richard walked over to the counter and unfolded the lion, rampant, and the beautiful woman, and the castle.

  “Shee-it,” said the woman. “Rufe, you touch that?”

  Rufe came out of his stupor, bending to see.

  “Glory,” he finally said. “That’s a two-thousand-dollar custom tattoo. Take me best part of a week.”

  “Could you get it?” Richard asked. “The subtlety. The line running down from his mane to his body to his paws, the way it captures his tension and strength. The neck. Look how coiled and
alive the neck is. Also, the loft in the woman’s breasts. See how elastic and alive they are? We don’t want tracing. We don’t want a dead line. We want something vibrant! Can you do it?”

  “Sure he could. You could do it, cun’t you, Rufe?”

  But Rufe bent over and studied very carefully.

  Then he said, “Jamie, show him. The crucifixion.”

  She turned and bent and pulled her blue denim shirt up. What Richard saw on her broad back was indeed the crucifixion, only it was a handsome biker being crucified, etched there in the flesh in vivid blues and reds, surrounded by state troopers in the roles of Roman centurions.

  Richard could hardly keep a straight face.

  “Pretty goddamned great, ain’t it?” said the woman.

  “It’s a goddamned masterpiece,” said Rufe.

  “It’s something,” said Richard, meaning it differently than Rufe and the woman took it, but as he looked at it carefully, he saw that it wasn’t quite what he had in mind. What the piece had in drama and detail it certainly lacked in subtlety of line. The figures all had a stiffness through them, and they all stood at the same angle; the faces were identical. It was like a drawing by a sick, crazy boy, high on amphetamines and inner sadomasochistic fantasies of penetration and blood but lacking entirely any grace or sense of life.

  “It’s just not what we’re interested in, sorry,” he said.

  “I’d do it for fifteen hundred,” Rufe said. “Just like that picture you showed me, every last line and detail. Ain’t nobody can do work like that around here but me.”

  If he’s the best, thought Richard.

  “Okay, well, maybe so,” said Richard. “Still, it’s a little … you won’t be offended?”

  “Tell me. I’m a man. I can take it.”

  “It’s a bit stiff. The person on whom you’d be working … he wouldn’t want it stiff. It would upset him and when he gets upset, things happen. Take it from me. You don’t need this job.”

  “Okay. Your money, your skin.”

  “Who’s the best? The very best. It’s worth twenty bucks for the time it’ll save me.”

  He pushed the bill across the counter.

  “Well,” said Rufe, “truth is, the big action’s dried up and left Lawton. It’s mostly a West Coast thing. But—well, there’s one guy left around here. He don’t work much. But, I have to say, he’s a goddamn genius. Done it his whole life.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Jimmy Ky. He’s a good fella. Born in Saigon. Started in the Orient, where it’s an art. See the spider on my face. Had that done in sixty-five in Tokyo by the great Horimono.” He leaned forward. “See how much lighter it is; them boys got the touch, I must admit. Jimmy Ky studied under Horimono. He’s got the touch himself. If he’ll work on you.”

  “Oh, he’ll work on this guy. Where’s his place?”

  It was Bingo Night.

  HIGH STAKES BINGO! the sign said, lighting up’ the night sky. The Bingo Palace was the largest and most vivid building in the Comanche Tribal Complex off Highway 65, where an obliging U.S. government had constructed a quartet of sleek structures for people who cared very little for such things.

  The parking lot was jammed, and in the windows of the Palace, Bud could see a full house of farmers and city folks bending over their cards while gaudily costumed “squaws” and “braves” walked among them, selling new cards, Cokes, bags of peanuts, and the like.

  “Okay, folks,” came a voice booming over the PA that even Bud could hear out in the dark, “we have an I-6? I-6, everybody! And remember: You win on two cards, you win four times the jackpot!”

  But Bud turned from that spectacle and instead walked through the dark to a lower building a hundred yards away. He tried not to notice the high, unkempt grass or the beer cans and coke bottles that lay in it, and he tried not to notice the graffiti defacing the nice new buildings.

  Comanches. Once dog soldiers, the most feared of the Plains Indians, a magnificent people, ride a week on pemmican, fight and win a major cavalry engagement against numerically superior and better-equipped foes, then ride another week on pemmican. Now they tended their gambling franchise and watched their customs crumble as their young people were lured away to the cities. Bud shook his head.

  He reached his destination, which bore the designation COMANCHE TRIBAL POLICE, and slipped into what could have been any small-town cop shop, a dingy, government-green holding room with a sergeant behind a desk and two or three patrolmen lounging at their desks. All of them wore jeans and baseball hats and carried SIG-Sauers in shoulder holsters. They were lean, tough young men, none too friendly.

  “Howdy,” he said to the sergeant. “Name’s Pewtie, Oklahoma highway patrol.” He showed the badge. “I’m looking for a lieutenant called Jack Antelope Runs. He around?”

  “Oh, you state boys, you always come by when you got a crime to solve and you can’t solve it. Gotta be an Indian, don’t it?” said the sergeant.

  “As a matter of fact, it don’t,” said Bud. “It’s gotta be a piece of white trash mankiller that makes the average brave look like your Minnie Mouse. But I got a matter Jack might be able to help me on.”

  “That’s all right, Sarge,” said Antelope Runs from an office, “don’t you give Bud no hard time. For a dirty white boy, he’s not as bad as some I could name. Howdy, Bud.”

  “Jack, ain’t you looking swell these days?”

  Jack Antelope Runs had a cascade of raven black hair running fiercely free and was wearing a little bolo tie that made the thickness of his neck and the boldness of his face seem even more exaggerated. He was a huge man, approximately 240 pounds, and his eyes beamed black fire.

  “Come on in, Bud. Glad you still walking among the palefaces, brother, and not with the wind spirits.”

  “Well, old goddamned Lamar Pye tried to show me the way to the wind, I’ll tell you.”

  Bud walked in and sat down.

  “So what’s it all about, Bud? Is this a Lamar thang?”

  “Yes it is.”

  “I figured a Gary Cooper boy like you’d take it personal.”

  “Now, Jack, it isn’t that way, no sir. I just had an idea I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “So, talk, brother, talk.”

  “I seem to remember a circular some months back. Isn’t there a big Indian gang making a move to take over narco from the bikers? Seems I been bulletinized on that item a few times in the past few months.”

  “They call themselves N-D-N-Z,” said Jack. “Mean and nasty boys, yes sir. Started up in prison. You put our brothers in white prisons and sure enough they going to start up their own gang, to stand against the niggers and the Mexicans and the white boys.”

  “It’s another thing we’re guilty of, yes it is,” said Bud.

  “It ain’t strictly a Comanche thing, though some of our young men have done the dying. But it’s run mainly by Cherokees. You might talk to Larry Eagletalon at the Cherokee tribal complex. He’s—”

  “Now, actually, I ain’t interested in the gang.”

  “Except you think maybe Lamar might be profiting from native American hospitality in some jerky tribal backwater?”

  “No, it’s not even that. One of the hallmarks of N-D-N-Z, as I recall, is a really and truly fine ceremonial tattoo around the left biceps? No? Yes?”

  “Why, yes it is.”

  “Now, sir, I got me a funny feeling whoever’s doing that work is a real fine tattoo boy. Maybe the best in these parts.”

  “The N-D-N-Z braves wouldn’t have any less. That’s what cocaine money buys these days. Fast cars, white women, bold tattoos.”

  “Yes sir. Now, suppose Lamar wanted such a fine tattoo. Where’d he go? To those goddamned scum joints on Fort Sill Boulevard? Catch hepatitis B in them places.”

  “It don’t sound like a Lamar, but you never can tell.”

  “But he wants the best. And isn’t the boy doing this work the best?”

  “So it’s said.”
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  “Where’d such a boy be found?”

  “Hmmm,” said Jack Antelope Runs.

  “I just want to check it out. See if Lamar’s been around. Maybe that’s another step. Maybe we stake out. Lamar shows up, our SWAT boys are there, and Lamar goes into the body bag. No one has to know any information came from the Comanche Tribal Police.”

  “Bud, for a white boy, maybe you ain’t so dumb.”

  “I’m just a working cop.”

  Antelope Runs thought a minute, and then finally said, “You know what happens to me if I start giving up Indian secrets to white men? The N-D-N-Z boys leave me in a ditch and nobody comes to my funeral and nobody takes care of my widow and my seven little kids.”

  “I hear what you’re saying.”

  “I’ll ask around, but that’s all I can give you. Understand?”

  “I guess I do, Jack. I just hope Lamar doesn’t decide to stick up your high stakes bingo game next. He could send a lot of boys to wander among the wind spirits.”

  “I hear you, yes I do. But it’s a white-red thing. I can’t change that. You can’t change that.”

  “Okay, I see I been wasting your time.”

  “Here Bud. Give you a card. Let me write my home phone in case something comes up and you have to get in touch.”

  “It ain’t—”

  But Jack Antelope Runs scrawled something and handed it over to Bud, who took it and sullenly walked out.

  He felt the laughter of the boys in the squad room as he left. Another white boy bites the dust.

  In the parking lot he heard, “N-2. N-2. Last call, N-2.”

  He got into his car, feeling old. Another wasted trip.

  Then he looked on the card, and at Jack Antelope Run’s writing.

  It said: Jimmy Ky. Rt. 62, Indiahoma.

  It looked deserted. The neon was out, but if you pulled up you could see that, if lit, the sign would have read—under three or four Chinese letters—TATTOO KEY. You’d have to know where to look, though. The parking lot was deserted and the place was way out on Route 62, near Indiahoma. It was a clapboard shack by the roadside, across from a deserted gas station.

  “Nobody’s home,” said Richard. “We’ll have to come back.”

  “I think tonight’s the night. Come on, Richard. Y’all wait here while we take us a lookiesee.”