Dirty White Boys (45 page)

Then the team broke into its cliques and the players began to filter out in twos and threes, some with parents, others without.

Jeff slipped up to him.

“We were going to meet at Nick’s,” he said. “You know, like we always do.”

“You have a ride?”

“I’m going with Tom and Jack and Jack’s girl.”

“Don’t stay out too late. Don’t worry your mother any.”

“I won’t, Dad.”

The moment hung between them.

“Okay,” Bud said, “now I’m going to take care of that business I told you about. And everything’s going to be all right.”

“I know, Dad.”

“You just go and have a good time. Don’t stay too late. No beer.”

“Yessir.”

Jeff slipped away, engulfed in a tide of boys, and Bud knew it was time to go.

Lamar was just a little bit nervous. He left the parking lot and parked a hundred yards or so down the road, so that he wouldn’t have to start out of the nearly empty lot exactly as Bud did, because such a thing might give him away to a sharp-eyed man. He swallowed.

He was driving himself because he didn’t trust Ruta Beth or Richard. But still, it was a touchy thing: to follow Bud’s truck through traffic, ever so gentle, never losing touch, never being too tight, just close enough to track his rabbit to its hole. It was plain, old-fashioned hunting.

But he’d helped things along; after leaving the game in the seventh inning, he’d placed a piece of reflecting tape flat under each of Bud’s taillights, low on the bumper; that way, he could drop back a hundred or so yards and still keep sight of the truck by the unusual pattern. He didn’t have to see the truck proper, only the lights.

He watched Bud now leave the rinky-dink stadium, among the last. The lawman was by himself, moving with something akin to melancholy that Lamar couldn’t quite figure, though he read hesitancy and regret in the body language. Before the trooper had seemed to swagger. He
was under a goddamn black cloud. Even Ruta Beth noticed it.

“What the hell he so down for?” she wondered.

“Yeah, Lamar,” said Richard, “you said the boy got lots of hits.”

“Who knows?” asked Lamar. He thought he was sad now, imagine what he was
going
to feel.

Bud got in, turned on the lights, pulled out. Lamar turned on his lights and sped down the road so that he actually beat Bud’s entrance into traffic, making his man wait while he lazed on by. Bud pulled into traffic behind Lamar, but Lamar wouldn’t let himself look; some little thing like that, a look at the wrong time, and the whole goddamned shaky thing could fall apart.

“There he—”

“Shut up, Richard. Goddamn it, boy, keep your mouth shut and look right straight ahead.”

Lamar slowed just a little; with a hasty spurt, Bud dipped into the oncoming lane and shot by, lost in his own thoughts. Good—that meant Bud couldn’t have picked up someone coming into the traffic behind him, then hooking up; he’d have to be a genius to pick up the cue.

Lamar dropped a few car lengths behind.

“Can we turn on the radio?” asked Richard.

“Shut up, Richard,” said Ruta Beth.

The cars ambled through the early evening traffic in the fading light. Up and down the streets, the streetlamps and shop signs were coming on, blurring in the windshield, making it hard to track the set of lights that was Bud’s truck. But his concentration was so intense it was as if he were some other man: he just saw the two red lights and the bright strips that were Bud’s and nothing else in the universe.

Then Lamar saw a problem up ahead. It just came, all of
a sudden, from nowhere. Bud signaled a left just as his truck was moving into yellow. Lamar would never make the intersection before red, and he knew if he blew through the light, he might be spotted by a cop or even Bud. You can’t be too careful.

Lamar calculated quickly, figuring the least risky of two very risky courses in a split second. He took his left now, down a side street that he didn’t even know went through. Out of Bud’s sight, he hit the pedal, raced wildly, swerved by a slowpoke who honked, frightened two women back on the curb, wheeled right up another street, and came to the street Bud had turned left down. There was a steady stream of traffic.

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. Then 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.