Shit!
Where was he?
He scanned the lights disappearing down the road, goddamn it, and saw nothing, and felt a raging emptiness.
“Lamar, I don’t—”
“Shut up, Richard, Daddy’s working.”
Then he saw it, the small jot of red reflected light under a taillight that signaled Bud. Lamar gunned his Trans Am, slid through the traffic, darted through two left-hand passes, and soon enough fell in a hundred yards back in the right lane.
“He ain’t seen shit,” he said. “Hot damn.”
Bud pulled up outside the little house, now glowing in the dark. It looked merry and friendly. The black kid with the trike was nowhere to be seen. He climbed out, waited by his car for a second.
That goddamn house. She moved here to be with you and now you got to do this goddamn thing. You’re going to hurt her so. You will hurt her and hurt her and then walk out.
He tried to put a nice spin on things. It was better for her. Really, she deserved a fresh start, not some half-life with a retread full of lead and freighted with kids and guilt and his own memories of a betrayed wife and a dead partner, who was her husband. She deserved so much. A little frog worked into Bud’s throat as he looked at the house.
Then it was time and he went in.
He walked up the walk. It was only eight hours since his last trek up the walk. What it had led to that time was sex with her. Smoke rose in his mind as images came to him. There was the business in the living room, on the sofa; and then the business on the steps; and the final business in the bedroom. They had stretched it out, moving from room to room, as if to celebrate the freedom they now enjoyed after so many motel rooms. Interesting things happened in each room, but the stuff on the steps—he didn’t think they’d done anything like that before.
Gone, all gone.
An enormous sense of loss suffused Bud.
Had to do it, he thought. His sons. His wife. His family. This was hard, the hardest thing yet, but he could do it and save his family and win it all back.
He climbed the steps and before he could reach the door, it popped open.
“Well, howdy there, Mr. Bud Pewtie himself,” she said,
“Hi, Holly.”
“Well, get you in.”
Bud walked in. Same house, same Holly smell in it.
“Do you want a beer?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Bud, you have that do-I-have-to-go-to-church? look on your face. Why don’t you spit it out so’s we can get to the nut-cutting part.”
“Oh, Holly.”
She sensed the remorse in his voice. A grave look came across her, as if she’d been slapped. She knew, instantly. He could tell.
“Bud, no. We’re so close.”
“We’re not close.”
“Bud—don’t do this to me. Please, sweetie.”
“Holly, I—”
He stopped, stuck for words again.
“You what?”
“I never meant to hurt you. That was the last thing I ever meant. I wanted everybody to be happy.”
“But everybody can’t be happy.”
“No, they can’t. Holly—Jeff’s found out. My son is in so much pain. I’m going to try to put his life together again.”
“Bud.”
“Holly, you are a young and beautiful woman. You can have your whole life. You can have anything you want.”
“Bud, I want you. I want us. I want what we said we’d have together.”
“I can’t give you that. I’m sorry.”
“Bud—”
“Holly, I have to be a better father to my son than mine was to me. Without that, I ain’t shit, and I know it. I took something from him. I want to give it back.”
“Bud, it’s not an either-or thing. You can have both. I’m not saying it’ll be easy, but you can have both.”
“Holly, I’m setting you free. Goddamn, you can have anything. Anything. You just wait. Your life is going to turn out swell, you’ll see. You get through just this little bit, and then the good times start.”
She stared at him furiously, and after a bit began to cry. He wanted to go to her and comfort her. She had given him such comfort over the months.
She sat down.
“I don’t see how you can live a lie. You go back, and it’s some kind of fake thing where you’re pretending to be noble, and then I’m gone, and you’re stuck with a wife you don’t love. So then what have you got? You’ll end up with nothing.”
Bud himself sat down. Now she put her head in her hands and began to sob.
Help her, he thought. Stop her hurting.
Her face smeared and swelled and turned red and patchy. Her nose ran. Quiet, racking shudders raced through her shoulders. He’d seen women cry that way on the turnpike when they looked at the carnage that had been their husbands or their children. There was nothing you could do for them except hope that they healed and went on.
“Bud, I love you.”
“Holly, it ain’t about love. My son can’t get another father and I can’t get another family.”
“Bud—”
“Holly, I can’t be the kind of man who runs away. That’s where all this crime comes from—everybody cutting and running. I can’t be that kind of a man.”
“You lied to me. So many times.”
“Maybe I did. But I lied to myself, too. I thought we had a chance. I ain’t the man to give you that chance. You deserve the man who’ll give it to you.”
“It’s so easy for you.”
“No ma’am, it’s not. It’s not anything like easy. Holly—I love you. Don’t you see that?”
“Oh, Bud,” she said. “Why are you doing this to me?”
Lamar thought it would be a bigger house. He was disappointed. He knew cops weren’t rich unless they were crooked, and he didn’t think Bud was crooked. But he thought they did all right. This little, run-down house?
“He can’t be doing too well,” he said.
“He ain’t doing as good as us,” said Ruta Beth. “This is a shitty neighborhood.”
“Really,” said Richard from the back, “it’s just a crummy civil service job. He doesn’t make twenty-five thousand a year, I bet.”
They were parked on the street, half a block down from Bud’s house. They could see his big truck parked out front.
“We going to hit them now, Daddy? In, out, bang, bang?”
“Let me think some,” said Lamar.
It was a sweet thought: blow through the door just like at the Stepfords’, catch him completely flat-footed, and pump out 12-gauge until nothing in the house lived. Then head out fast.
But … he hadn’t realized it would be in such a dense little neighborhood. At the sound of shots there’d be witnesses everywhere; they’d get a fast ID, and before Lamar could get them back to the farm, the law would be on him. Second, Pewtie was fast himself, that was the trouble. He was wearing a coat, he was probably carrying, Richard might panic, who knew what might happen? If he got to that goddamned Colt, all kinds of hell might happen.
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. The
n we done our duty to Odell 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?”
“Yessir.”
“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
30
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.
For some reason it seemed to stink of a thousand meals tonight, of backed-up toilets and spilled beer and TV dinners and pizza kept in the refrigerator too long. God. How had all this happened? How did he end up in a house he didn’t love with—
“Well,” she said. “About time.”
“All right, Jen,” he said.
“So where is he?”
“He’s with his friends. I got him out in time to play and drove him over. That coach said officially his suspension didn’t start till tomorrow so the old geezer let him play. Git himself in a lot of trouble, you ask me. Anyway, Jeff did fine, a double and a single, made a nice running catch late in the game.”
“It went into extra innings?”
“No, no, it didn’t.”
“He’s with his friends. Bud, where were you?”
“Oh, I had some business.”
&n
bsp; “What business? Bud, what’s going on?” Her face was grave and her eyes locked onto him. He could not meet their power.
“Ah—”
It hung in the air.
Finally he said, “Look, I understand I haven’t been the best of husbands lately, Jen. I just had my head somewhere else. Okay. I’ve told you some lies, I’ve done some things I shouldn’t have done. But, Jen, I want to tell you now, flat out, straight to your face, that’s all over now. Now I am going to be father to my boys and husband to my wife. I want us to have our old life back, the one we loved for all those years.”
“Bud?”
“What?”
“Bud, I won’t ask you for details.”
“I’m glad.”
“I’ve heard things and I don’t want to know if they’re true or not. I just want you to tell me whatever it was, it’s all over now. You have a good life, Bud, fine, strong, brave sons. No man could have better sons.”
“I know that.”
“I know I’m not so young as I once was. I can’t help that. Like you I got old, and like you I got fat. I just got fatter.”
“It’s not that.”
“Oh, who knows what it is, Bud. I do know that I can forgive you maybe once. But, Bud, don’t you ever do anything like this again. If you want to be with her, just go and be with her. But no more of this running around.”
“I will make it up. I’ll make it so you won’t notice there was a bad time. It was all good times, you, me, the boys.”
“Okay, Bud. Then I don’t want to hear of it again. We close the book and we lock it and I don’t want to hear about it again. Is that clear?”
“I understand.”
“Good. Now I think we should go to bed. I think you should show me that you love me still. In the physical way, I mean. It’s been nearly a year, are you aware?”
“I didn’t know.”
“It’s been a long, long time, Bud, and I have needs, too, though you don’t like to face it.”
“Well, then let’s go.”
Dirty White Boys Page 36