“Odell?”
But Odell’s passive face indicated no measurable mental activity.
What the—
“Goddamn,” said Richard. “He has come.”
Lamar broke the water like a seal, shivered in great animal fury, and snorted merrily, “Hah! Shoulda seen you jump, boy!”
At that moment, Richard loved him.
“Lamar! Lamar!” spouted Ruta Beth.
“Mar! Mar! MARRRRRR!” aped Odell.
“Now folks, hold it down! It ain’t party time yet. I got to git you out of here.”
“Where you been, Daddy?”
“In some damn john’s garage. I managed to git me out by cop car, dumped that, cut crosstown and ended up hunkered down in this garage, waiting for the lights to go down so’s I could jump-start the car and come a-calling on y’all. You got the money?”
“You bet we do, Lamar,” said Ruta Beth. “Come, give me a hug and a kiss, honey.”
“Believe I will,” said Lamar, and as Odell watched happily, the two swarmed toward each other in the grayness for a big sloppy kiss.
Only Richard thought to wonder: How many did he kill to get out?
But, disengaging himself from Ruta Beth, Lamar announced, “Now, it’s time to move. Where’s that goddamned canvas sack, honey?”
“Up on the bank, Daddy. You want me to git it?”
“I do.”
He turned to Richard. “You look cold as a corpse, boy. You chattering?”
“I-i-t’s so cold, Lamar,” Richard said.
“Hell, in three hours Ruta Beth’ll have you eating biscuits by the fire.”
Ruta Beth pulled the big canvas sack close to Lamar.
“Great, babe,” he said, and reached in to pull out a coil of thin, waxy rope. Richard could just barely make it out in the gray light.
“You swim, Richard?”
“Yes,” said Richard.
“Good. Now I want you to swim across and slip-knot this to a tree good and strong so that these folks can pull themselves across.”
“I-I—” gulped Richard.
He looked. The torrent of the Red was strong, swollen with rain; it thundered along and in the gray light was beginning to show the source of its name; it looked like a river of blood, rushing out of a sucking chest wound, pausing only here and there to generate eddies of bubbles where the current curled on itself and lashed downward. Now and then a stick or piece of vegetation would come shooting along. It was the river of death, that’s all. Out there, Richard would surrender, his limbs pummeled by the long night’s cold; he would be sucked down, then shipped downstream, a bloated, leaky corpse.
“Haw!” barked Lamar. “Had you there, son! I’ll swim the goddamned river. You help me git the rope set around a branch here, so it don’t get away. Then you go across hand by hand. You got that? Ruta Beth, you follow. Odell?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“Wop,” said Odell.
With that, Lamar and Odell unleashed the rope and got it secured around the stout trunk of a green willow that grew crookedly out of the bank. Lamar tied some strange superknot that only a bosun’s mate or an Eagle Scout would know.
“Okay, Odell, you hang on to these bad boys,” and he pulled two handguns from under the water. Odell took them eagerly.
“Wish me luck,” said Lamar. “Wish to hell I hadn’t a-skipped all them swimming lessons back at the country club.”
He threw himself into the water like a child at the beach and in several long strokes was gone. It was almost five minutes before they saw him scuttle out at the other end, slither up the bank, and secure the other end of the rope to another limb. He gave the signal.
“Okay, boys,” said Ruta Beth, “Daddy’s calling. Odell, can you go first?”
“Go,” said Odell.
Odell began to pull himself across the river, hand over hand along the rope that ran just under the water’s now pinkish surface. With his great strength he went quickly, even though he carried the money sack.
“Now you, Richard.”
“No, Ruta Beth. You go.”
“Suit yourself, but don’t mess around, Richard. The law gonna come soon and we can’t wait. And if they git you, no matter how much you fear Lamar, you will betray him. We both know that.”
She fixed him with a burning glare. Her small country face, so severe in the gray light, had the aspect of a Botticelli nude’s, so reduced was it to planes and angles. It was as if she were putting the evil eye on him, some furious hex thing, so that he could not escape his fate. Then off she went, and being light and farm-strong, pulled herself along without apparent effort, until he lost her in the rush of the water.
Now it was Richard’s turn. Tentatively he pulled himself out. The current was so much stronger than he anticipated. When the river deepened so that he could no longer stand, it scared him. He almost froze on the spot. But then he got his nerve back up and launched himself farther. With each pull on the rope, his anxiety increased. The rope was deeper, his face was farther in the water, it was so cold, the current was so strong. At one point the rope seemed to sink a good two feet beneath the surface and it was all he could do to keep his head above the water, sucking in half a lungful of air now and then. From his vantage point he could see nothing—no land, no sky, only the glinting surface of the water, as if the universe had become nothing but water. The idea of it terrorized him.
Yet he pulled on. Then he opened his mouth too early and caught a swallow that rocketed down him. The cough racked up through him, seizing his body, but still he clung to the rope. Just a little farther, he thought. He managed to get two more pulls on the rope in before surfacing for air. I must be nearly there, he thought.
But he made the mistake of turning to look at the far shore, which he assumed must be but a few feet away; he could barely see it. He wasn’t even halfway.
The depression of it hit him like a sledgehammer.
Give it up, he said. Give it up.
But he fought on, blindly. It was a long, groping night walk; the world resolved itself into the roar of the water and the exhaustion in his arms. He ached to surrender. At one point, he did, and ordered his hands to release him. But they would not. He found it in himself to go another few pulls and then another. A good, sweet lungful of air got him over his worst despair. Onward, he pulled.
It was going to take forever. But at the next sighting, he was astounded at how close the shore was. And with a mighty pull, he got himself into the shallow waters. He saw them in the brush a few feet back from the river’s edge. His feet touched. He let go of the damned rope. He stood to raise himself and wave.
And then the current had him.
* * *
“Richard,” said Lamar, almost conversationally. Richard was so close, he was coming out of the water, then he just seemed to sit down and the water scooted him along. His face had a silly half-smile, as if he couldn’t believe what was happening, as if this were some damned joke.
“Richard,” said Lamar, irritated. “Git your ass out of—”
But he was gone. The water had him, and as Lamar watched, the silly look melted into one of sheer terror and weakness. Richard panicked, began to flap, lost control, and was out of sight in seconds.
“Wi-chud,” said Odell.
“That boy’s gone,” said Ruta Beth. “Water took him.”
Lamar just watched. He felt something like disappointment. Then he was angry. Goddamned stupid Richard, come all this way, and—
“Shit,” he said.
“Lamar, it’s over. Let it be,” said Ruta Beth. “Let it be.”
Richard sank. The world turned dark and liquid. There was no light down here. Weakly he kicked and waved against his fate, but there was no mercy at all, anywhere. He fought for air, but the water beat its way into his lungs. He gobbled for air, but there was only water. He closed his eyes in the gray light.
He thought of his mother.
Mother, he wanted to cry.
His mot
her was a beautiful woman. She drove his father away with all her “friends.” They were a rich, aristocratic crowd from Tulsa, third-generation oil money long removed from the smell and sweat of the fields, and his father preferred the old boy network of kick-ass riggers and up-from-penury scalawags like himself, who’d made their fortunes on guts and nerve. All these puffy people, all of his mother’s friends with their Eastern pretensions, they finally drove the poor man away, though Richard didn’t think there’d ever been a divorce.
Richard’s mother told him he could be an artist. She took him to art lessons so early and surrounded him with artistic people. He went to Europe when he was six, nine, eleven, and fourteen. It wasn’t her fault he turned out so disappointingly. She had done everything she could.
Somehow, things were always set against Richard. She would arrange for “introductions” to various prominent men in the East when they traveled there, but the men were always disappointed in him. He had a gift but not a great one, that was clear, and he was so much less interesting than Mother, he was a wretched conversationalist, he didn’t have her buoyant charm, her vividness, her confidence. And she told him that, not in subtle ways, but baldly and to his face.
“Richard, you could do so much better if you weren’t so meek. You will not inherit the earth that way, I promise you. You have to learn to project. People don’t find your self-doubts attractive at all. Reach out, open up.”
But the more she pushed him, the more he sealed up. It was as if he was blossoming inward, becoming more retarded and pitiful and self-conscious and crippled with terror. He was afraid of everything!
On the day it happened, he returned home and found her with a friend. Eventually the friend left, and she came downstairs and mixed herself a drink, still beautiful at sixty-one, and asked him how the newspaperman had liked the exhibition.
“Uh,” said Richard, aching with dread, “Mother, he didn’t show.”
“He what?”
“He didn’t show. Mother, I don’t know what happened, maybe he got lost.”
“Richard, I have over four thousand dollars invested in that exhibition! What do you mean, he didn’t show?”
He stood there, thirty years old, quavering like a child. He hated her almost as much as he hated himself.
“Call him,” she said.
“I did. He wasn’t there.”
“Call him again.”
“Mother.”
“Call him, Richard, call him now. You silly little fool. You cannot let people simply walk on you. It’s why you always end up with nothing and why I always have to bail you out. I pay for everything, Richard. You get everything for free.”
He made the call.
The man was there.
“Uh, Mr. Peed, sorry, I told you I’d come by if I could. But the art critic thing is only part of my job; I also have to read all the Sunday feature copy and we got a little behind and I just couldn’t make it. It’s not The New York Times, you know. It’s just the Daily Oklahoman.”
He hung up.
“Call him again,” his mother said.
He was never sure, not then, not in the immediate aftermath, not in the months of meditation, why it happened the way it did when it happened. Why that day, that minute? It could have been any other day, any other minute.
It was the maid who called the police.
He tried to make them see, he wasn’t trying to blind her. He was really trying to kill her. But the knife was short—it was a butter knife, quite blunt—and somehow she had proven so much stronger than he thought; she’d gotten down beneath him so he couldn’t reach her heart. After the first pitiful blow, she’d sort of curled up, so he had to unpeel her, but she was very strong. The only place he could stab her was the face. The eyes? Well, the eyes are on the face, aren’t they? It wasn’t his fault.
Richard suddenly broke the surface of the water. He was way out in the river. The trees were hurtling by. It was much lighter.
A flood of sweet oxygen poured into his lungs. He smiled, but the water sucked him down again.
Richard yielded to death.
It embraced him and he embraced it. He felt its strong arms pull him in, smother him. There was no pain at all, only a persistent tugging that broke through the numbness in his body. He had a last dream of Lamar, of all things: pitiful, crude, powerful, violent Lamar. Odd that he should think of Lamar here at the end.
Lamar had him up on the surface. Richard choked on air.
“Calm down, goddammit, Richard,” screamed Lamar, “don’t fight me.”
He was upside down in somebody’s strong arms. The sky was bright and blue, the clouds rushed by. A helicopter should have come, but it didn’t. Nothing came. The roaring had ceased. He felt as if he were in one of the swimming pools of his boyhood and wanted to spit a gurgle of water to see if he could make Mother laugh.
He felt the ground, and in his exhaustion looked up to see that Odell had him and was pulling him ashore.
Lamar came out of the rushing red water a second later, beautiful in the gray dawn, soaked and muscular, his hair wet, his denim clothes plastered to him, his face grave with effort and pain.
He smiled at Richard.
“You are a peck of trouble, Richard, I swear.”
“C’mon, boys,” said Ruta Beth. “Let’s git before goddamned Johnny Cop shows.”
CHAPTER
18
No one knew how to run a crime scene anymore, the old man lamented. It was stunning they got any evidence at all these days. These sloppy damn kids, rough and eager as untrained young dogs. No one had even erected a windbreak.
“Can’t you do a little something about the breeze, son?” he gently corrected. A young OSBI agent began to look around for something out of which to construct a barrier to prevent more wind erosion, but he was so clumsy in his efforts, C.D. worried that he’d do more harm than good.
The old man hawked a gob of phlegm out of his dry old throat and squatted in the dust. The wind whipped through the scrub oaks and, two hundred yards away, the angry red torrent of the river surged along toward Arkansas. It was high this time of year, full of the melted snows of the winter, and treacherous; other times of the year, it’d dry to a trickle. Had Lamar calculated on that, too? Was he that smart?
“It could be nothing,” said a young Ranger captain named Tippahoe, offered up by the great state of Texas as his opposite number.
“It could be our goddamn break,” said Lt. Henderson.
“I musta run a thousand tire tracks and I ain’t come up with diddly, ’less it’s to tie a specific vehicle to a specific location. Don’t know what good the goddamned track is without the vehicle.”
“Well, son, maybe you’re right and maybe you ain’t. Believe I’ll just play the hand out, as it’s the only one the Good Lord deemed fit to deal me.” He turned from the obstreperous Texas Ranger to a foolish-looking young Oklahoma highway patrolman lurking nearby with a walkie-talkie. “You got any word yet on those evidence technicians?”
“Sir, they’s coming. Tied up in traffic outside of Oklahoma City.”
“They can’t chopper ’em in?”
“Sir, all the choppers tied up in trauma delivery.”
“Okay, tell you what. You tell them Lieutenant Henderson says to call Colonel McClutcheon, the operations officer of the Four Hundred and First Aviation Battalion at Fort Sill. See if he can free up a Huey and get those boys in here before the glaciers arrive from Canada. Colonel Robert M. McClutcheon. He owes me a thing or two.”
“Yes, sir, I’ll tell ’em, but—”
“That’s all, son.”
The small party was standing under a gloomy sky in the wasteland of scrub and low vegetation that was part of the Red River basin, on the Oklahoma side. A half mile or so away, on the Texas side, a Texas policeman had located a stolen Volvo in a ditch. This discovery had led to another: a stolen Camaro, once white, now painted orange and covered in a camouflaged tarpaulin. They were currently being dusted fo
r prints by Ranger technicians, but C.D. knew what the prints would show: These were the various getaway vehicles stolen by Lamar Pye and his crew members. There might be a print of the fourth member of the gang, but C.D. doubted it. Lamar was too smart.
But those discoveries, in turn, had yielded this tiny little scrap of hope on the Oklahoma riverbank. Here, in the dirt, a very, very good track off still another vehicle. C.D. appreciated the orderly way Lamar’s mind had worked, how cleverly he’d planned it out, stashing the legal vehicle at the end of the train of stolen ones so that as they made their final fallback to their hideout, they’d do so in a car that couldn’t, of itself, attract attention and whose plates would run legal if checked. Such a smart boy.
C.D. turned and made as if to mosey off just a bit in search of new evidence. But of course he slipped the brown paper bag from his left inside pocket, unscrewed the lid, and took a fast swig. I. W. Harper, seven years old, like the smoke off a prairie fire. He went to wooziness, then came back out, feeling calmer and more in charge. He screwed the lid back on, lightly, and slipped the pint into his pocket.
He turned back and had that odd feeling that everyone had been staring at him but had just that second looked away so as not to embarrass him. Everyone, that is, except for young Captain Tippahoe, whose face was knitted up with contempt and impatience.
And where were you, Tippahoe, when I shot it out with Luke Sweetwater and Indian Joe Brown in 1957? Where were you when I took six inches of blade in the stomach from crazy Sally Pogue and only saved my life with a .45 fired as she was getting up to my throat? What about the time I faced down two hundred citizens of Gem City and saved the lives of two innocent nigger brothers that I knew hadn’t raped Mrs. McLintock in 1966? Where were you, Tippahoe?
But Tippahoe didn’t know and wouldn’t care. He just stepped back, took off his hat, and ran his hand through expensively trimmed hair and acted vaguely superior.
C.D. looked down at the little trace of ridges and grooves in the dust. It seemed to lose a bit of its distinction even as he watched, as a gust of wind took another quarter inch off the top.
Where are them damn boys, he wondered. He wouldn’t let the Rangers do it. He only trusted his own OSBI team. He wanted another drink.
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