Dirty White Boys

by Stephen Hunter

  “Bud, Mrs. Ryan says we could knock down one of these walls and make the two littler bedrooms into one big one.”

  Now why would they want to do that? If his boys came, he’d want them to have a place to stay and some room, even if it was small.

  “You could turn it into your office, honey,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “My fiancé is a highway patrol officer,” Holly explained to the woman.

  “I’m glad you’re a law officer. I seen that gun on your backside. I thought maybe you were that awful Lamar Pye.”

  “I’m no Lamar Pye,” he said, “though I’ve spent considerable time looking for him.”

  “He’s a terrible man,” said the woman. “My daughter lives in Wichita Falls and I’ve eaten many Sunday breakfasts in that restaurant. I think it’s terrible what he did. I hope you-all catch up to him and kill him dead. I’d hate to see him go to court and some fool decide he was the true victim in all this.”

  “We’ll get him,” Bud said.

  “Bud, honey, Mrs. Ryan says she’d let us have the house for only three-fifty a month. We could move in right away. It would be so wonderful. It’s a nice quiet neighborhood.”

  Bud smiled, and said, “Holly, we’ve only begun looking. Don’t you think you ought to see some other places?”

  “Yes, honey,” said Mrs. Ryan. “Your fiancé is right. You should see a lot of places, so you don’t feel you’ve rented in a panic. I’ve seen too much of that.”

  “You don’t have any other prospects?”

  “No, I don’t, honey. You take your time.”

  “Don’t we have other houses to see today, honey?”

  “Yes. Okay, I’ll call you later in the week, Mrs. Ryan. Thank you so very much.”

  They walked to the truck and got in.

  “Now, let’s see,” Holly said. “I think this next one—”

  “Holly, can we just hold off on this? We saw a house today, it was fine, don’t we want to think this thing through a bit?”

  “Bud!”

  “I just—I don’t know, Holly, it just suddenly didn’t feel right to me. You could move into that house by Friday. And what then? I might not be ready for—well, I don’t know.”

  “Bud!”

  “And Holly—my God, that woman was talking about Lamar Pye, who shot and killed your husband. Blew his brains out. And you didn’t even blink an eye. You just went ahead with your question about if the house was available. This boy killed your husband, damned near killed me, and killed a mess of poor folks. You got to have some response. You can’t be human and not.”

  “Well, aren’t you Mr. High and Mighty? I didn’t notice you getting solemn about Mr. Lamar Pye the last time you had me every which way from Sunday. You didn’t give a damn about Lamar Pye then, or about Ted Pepper either.”

  “Holly, I’m only saying—”

  “Bud, I have to get out of that trailer.”

  “I’m sorry, Holly.”‘

  Her face knit up in a small flinch of pain.

  “Oh, Bud, I just want a house of my own. Please. You don’t have to move in. Just help me move. Please.”

  “Holly.”

  “Please. I ain’t saying you have to move in. But—you’ll have a place.”

  “Holly.”

  “Just say yes, Bud. Just on this one thing. Think of the fun we’d have up there.” Fun was her word for sex.

  “Oh, Holly—if it makes you happy.”

  She squealed in delight and gave him a big kiss. Then she ran off to tell Mrs. Ryan.

  After a lunch, he dropped Holly off and drove quickly to the Annex so that he could see it and feel it and know what was going on and in that way his lies to Jen about having spent the day there would be that much more authentic. He entered to find it all but empty. Dispatch manned the radio unit, but there was no traffic. A few clerks sat at their computer terminals listlessly, but none of the Ranger types were around.

  “Any news?” Bud asked Dispatch.

  “Not a thing, Bud. We going to have to wait for old Lamar to strike again, that’s all, and hope we get luckier.”

  “I wonder how many he’ll kill this time,” Bud said.

  “Bud, Bud, get your goddamn ass in here,” came a scream from the inner office.

  “What the hell is going on?” said Bud.

  “You don’t have to go in there, Bud. In fact, probably best not to. I ain’t seen him so bad.”

  “Then I’m—”

  “Bud, come in! Get in here, damn you!”

  The words were slurred and desperate.

  “Shit,” said Bud, and headed in to discover the office a disaster, with paper, computer printouts, books everywhere. A paper cup sat before Lt. Henderson on the desk, and Bud could see that it was half full of amber fluid.

  The old cop stared at him. He had one of those wrinkled prune faces under a thatch of hair, but now it was rosy with the power of bourbon. He reeked. His chin seemed to want to pitch forward as he fought for a bitter consciousness and blinked back the darkness.

  “Bud, have a drink with me. Just one. Do both of us a world of good,” he said, adding a sloppy and uncharacteristic smile.

  “Can’t say no to that,” said Bud, and watched as the older man poured a couple of fingers’ worth into another paper cup he pulled from his desk.

  Bud tasted the whiskey. Fire and memory and buzz, all at once.

  “That’s a good drinking whiskey, Lieutenant.”

  “Bud, I think they’re going to let me go.”

  “Lieutenant, I am sorry.”

  “Goddamn their black fucking hides. I give ’em close on forty years. Now I come up dry and it’s enough to push old C.D. out the goddamned door.”

  “I’m sorry, Lieutenant.”

  “Sorry ain’t got but piss to do with it,” said the old man, pouring himself another shot and draining it with a gasp.

  “It was my idea. Took a mess of convincing. All that overtime. Cost the state about five hundred thousand dollars but I told my boss and yours—and they told the governor—that it’d get ’em Lamar Pye.”

  “But it didn’t.”

  The old detective stared into the grim space.

  “What the hell did I do wrong? What did I miss?”

  “Lieutenant, I’m not a detective. I’m a road cop, that’s all.”

  “Dammit, Bud, there aren’t any more detectives. I’m the last one. Your metro boys, your young Feebs, your Treasury agents or ATF boys—they’re not detectives, not any of them. They’re clerks. They do crime scene or they tap wire or they interview witnesses and take notes. But they don’t do no goddamned detective work, not a one of them.”

  The old man’s head lolled forward and his lower lip hung loose. He seemed to breathe heavily through his mouth, and once again fought for consciousness. His eyes closed, but then like a lizard’s peeped open again.

  “You listen to my thought on this problem and tell me what I done wrong. Here’s how I broke this sucker down. They always run to their own kind. They do. That’s the first principle, sure as summer heat. No place he could go but into the criminal community. He’s got to be somewhere, among folks who’d give him aid. We got the biker groups nailed, he ain’t there. And we got the goddamned car-tire type. So, if we cross-reference, we come up with close to. two hundred possibilities. He has to be there. Has to be. What did I miss?”

  “Lieutenant, I don’t know.”

  “Did I miss a category? Felons, known informants, fences, criminal lawyers, anybody in the culture. What category could I have missed? What other category is there? That’s what I believe I’m missing. I’m missing a category. Bud, you got any categories?”

  “Lieutenant, as I said: This ain’t my line of work.”

  “See with Freddy Dupont, the missing category was secondary experience. That is, reading. That’s what done it. So I’m missing a category, goddammit.”

  “Lieutenant, I wish I had an idea.”

  �
�See, it’s points. You need two points to draw a line. One point: criminal community. Another point: the car-tire track. But … goddammit, nothing. I need a third point. Goddamn, a third point! A third category. Another drink, Bud?”

  “Lieutenant, I got to get on home. I got a boy hearing about college today.”

  “The baseball player?”

  “No sir. The student.”

  “A ball player and a student. It sounds like a fine family, Bud.”

  “It is,” said Bud.

  The lieutenant took another hit from his paper cup, and the whiskey seemed to bring a tear to his old eyes, or maybe it was just that something blew into them. Anyway, he said, “Nope, never had kids myself. Just never had the damned time.” Then suddenly he lit up and for a second his melancholy seemed to evaporate.

  “Say, Bud,” he said, “one of these days why don’t you bring them boys over? Love to meet ’em. Bring ’em over to the house and we’ll sit ’em down and give ’em their first drink. Best a boy learns to drink with his daddy and not out behind the woodshed. I won’t have much to do hanging around the house. I’d like that, Bud.”

  Bud knew it was the drink talking, just as when he said, “That sounds like a damn fine idea, Lieutenant,” he knew he’d never do it. It would be horrible: His two sons, who were already from different planets than their old fart of a father, locked in some strange little house with this bitter old coot who was from still another planet. It would never happen. Besides, he didn’t think the old man really wanted it to happen either.

  He checked his watch. It was nearly four. Damn, he was late.

  “I ought to be going now, Lieutenant.”

  “You go, Bud. You done good work, all my boys done good work. I’d rise to shake your hand, but I pissed up my pants a few minutes ago and I’m too embarrassed to move.”

  “Oh, Lieutenant, I—”

  “Don’t pay it no nevermind,” said the lieutenant. He poured himself another drink, emptying the bottle, and threw the bottle into the wastebasket, where it shattered. Then he looked up and seemed surprised to see Bud still there.

  “Go on, get out, get about your life!” he commanded darkly, and Bud hurried out.

  “Bud,” said Dispatch, “your wife called when you were in with the lieutenant. She wants you to call.”

  Thank God he was here when she called!

  He found a phone.

  “Sweetie, it’s me.”

  “Bud, Russ got in. They’re going to give him a full scholarship. He’s going off to Princeton University!”

  “All right! Hey, isn’t that great!” Bud said. A surge of joy leaped in him. Something was turning out in his life!

  “He’ll have so many chances. He’ll meet so many people. A whole new world will open for him!”

  “That’s great. I’ll be home in a little bit and we’ll go out, if that’s what he wants.”

  “He said he would. He wants to see some friends later, but he’ll go out.”

  “On my way!”

  Russ deserved it. He’d worked hard at his studies and he was a very bright boy, the school counselors had told them.

  It was in this mood that, as Bud drove home, he passed a large gray structure on Gore Boulevard, which he had passed perhaps five hundred times before; but for the first time, he noticed the lions.

  CHAPTER

  21

  It was the fucking neck.

  The key to the lion lay in its neck. Somehow, in the density of muscle and bone, in the knots of hair, in the fucking shortness of the structure, there lay the secret to that amazing regality, that kingly magnificence.

  Yet Richard could not free it, not, that is, with a pencil or a crayon or any conventional drawing implement.

  Lord how he had tried. Like popcorn puffs, his crumpled-up failures lay scattered about him in the upstairs room of Ruta Beth’s farmhouse. He felt a killing headache. He could not get it: his beasts all had a strange tightness to them. He drew them in his sleep, he drew them in the air with an empty hand, he drew them in his mind, he drew them on paper, and he had never quite brought it off.

  In fact, if he thought about it, his best lion had been done in the liquid medium of peanut butter. It was the image he’d crafted on the mock cake: something in the wet fluency of the material and the ease of its manipulation and the lack of pressure or expectation had freed him to really achieve the pure essence of lionhood. And his first dumb drawing in the Mac and maybe a doodle here and there, on a placemat, in the margins of a book or magazine, those, too, had had the freedom he needed.

  You think too much, he thought. What had Conrad said? “Thinking is the great enemy of perfection.” Boy had he gotten that one right!

  Richard stood, yawned, trying to shake the tension from his back and neck and the weariness from his wrist. Lamar and Odell were out in the fields on some absurd agricultural project, Ruta Beth was behind the barn working at her fucking wheel. He was alone.

  Of course it would help if Lamar had told him the point of the lion. Did he want a formal portrait? What was his thing about the lion, where would it go, what would it become? If he knew that, then maybe it would be better or easier. But Lamar wasn’t saying; he was too sly. It was as if in some preliterate, instinctual way, Lamar knew it was wisest not to disclose this information. He wanted Richard to struggle and build the lion out of that struggle, rather than providing for him a neat little dedicated, purpose-built image. He was a tyrannical patron!

  So: the lion.

  What is the essence of the beast?

  He was a hunter. He hunted. He roamed the savannah, took down the helpless, and stole their meat. He hunted to live.

  But no—he also killed to live. The hunting wasn’t the point, the hunting was only the rationale. Something in the lion loved to close in, enjoy the fear and the pain of the quarry, and experience that sublime moment when its spastic struggle ceased and its eyes went blank, and, bathed in the black torrents of its own blood, it passed into limp death. What a Godlike moment, what a sense of cosmic power, how thrilling!

  Richard tried to find that impulse in himself. No such luck. Knock-knock, who’s there? Only us lambs. He shivered, disgusted. Such a thing did not exist for him. That’s why it was hopeless.

  He stood and restlessness stirred in his limbs. He suddenly ached for freedom. He needed to move. He began to roam through the upper story; not much, three bedrooms and a bathroom that Ruta Beth kept immaculate, especially with, as she put it, “three big, strong boys in the house.” The toilet seat was down.

  He wandered into the room Ruta Beth and Lamar shared. Again, it was farm- and convict-neat, the sign of people used to living to very high standards of imposed discipline. Yet you could look at it for a hundred years and never divine from its clues that a Lamar Pye, killer and robber and buttfucker, had taken up occupancy.

  It titillated him a bit to be in Lamar’s private space. The blood rushed to his head. He knew how the Angel Lucifer must have felt when he wandered into God’s bedroom before his exile. For just a second he tried to imagine what it would be like to be Lamar, the Lion: to look upon all living things as prey, and to know with blood-boiling confidence that you had the magic power to drive them to the earth and rip their bloody hearts from them, to taste the hot blood and feel the weakening of their quivers as they slid into death.

  He had to laugh. Yeah, right. The feeling was hopelessly counterfeit. It didn’t belong to him. Who are you trying to kid, he wondered.

  Then Richard noticed something: It was an envelope, manila, on the closet shelf hidden behind shoeboxes. It struck him as odd, for nowhere else in Ruta Beth’s strange little house was there a hidden treasure.

  Feeling just a little daring, Richard snatched the envelope, saw that it was stamped “Kiowa County Prosecutor’s Office, March 15, 1983.”

  Now what the—

  He opened the flap and reached inside.

  There were two of them, green with age, in frozen copper postures of the hunt. B
ud pulled to the side of the road and looked up at the building and saw what it was: the Harry J. Phillips Fine Arts Society.

  Bud paused for a second, as an intriguing thought whispered through his mind. He glanced at his watch. Had some time. He decided, what the hell.

  He got out, reached behind the seat, and removed his briefcase. Setting his Stetson right, he climbed the low concrete steps, pausing for a second to look at one of the lions close up. All the power and glory of its musculature stood captured in the art; the piece was an homage to the power of the lion, and even Bud felt a little thrill at looking at it.

  He went inside, where it was dark and had the feeling of a cathedral, hushed and almost religious. A uniformed guard watched him come.

  “Closing time is five P.M., sir,” the guard said.

  Bud flashed his badge.

  “Looking for the head man. Who’d that be and how’d I find him?”

  “Dr. Dickstein. He’s the curator. Admin offices, down on the left.”

  “Thanks.”

  Bud walked down the corridor. He looked at the paintings. They made him feel insignificant. A few made no sense at all; others seemed like photographs of explosions. Now and then one would throw up an image so arresting it stopped him in his boots. But in time, he made it to the office of the curator and stepped inside to find a young man in shirtsleeves and wire glasses sitting at a computer terminal. He was one of those wiry boys, with great coils of hair, like electrified springs. He looked a little like Russ, Bud couldn’t help thinking.

  “Ah, excuse me.”

  “Can I help you?”

  Bud pulled his badge.

  “Sergeant Bud Pewtie, Oklahoma Highway Patrol. I’m looking for Dr. Dickstein. He in there?”

  “Er, no. I’m Dr. Dickstein. Dave Dickstein. Sergeant, what can I do for you?”

  God, they were growing them young these days! Bud immediately felt he’d screwed up, not getting that the guy who ran such a place could be so young.

  “Sir, I was hoping you could give us some help.”

  “Well—” said the young man, some ambivalence leaking into his tone.

  “You may have heard, we had three convicts break out of McAlester State Penitentiary a couple of months ago. Now they’ve set to armed robbery and they killed four policemen and two citizens a few weeks back.”