The boy’s vacant eyes signified that he was lost.
“Well, anyway, someday you’ll understand all this. What you got to do next, you got to clean up your mess. You got to make it right. If it’s busted, you got to fix it. You got to face the consequences. Do you see?”
The boy just looked up at him.
“Well, so you don’t. You will, I know, and you’ll be a fine man and not make the mistakes your poor, stupid old daddy made. Now I have to go. You tell your mama that I love her and I’ll see y’all tonight, do you hear?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
Earl got in the car, took one of his swift, practiced U-turns, the maneuver of a man who drove beautifully and with great confidence, and pulled away. As he drove he saw his son in the rearview mirror, standing there in the fading light, one arm lifted to say goodbye. He put a hand out the window and gave a little waggle of acknowledgment, hit the main road and sped off.
“That was the last thing I remember,” Bob said.
“The wave?” Julie asked.
“Yep. He just put his big old arm out the window and gave a little, you know, a little wave. Then the car turned and off he went. Next time I saw him, he was in a casket with a pink-frosted face and a smile like a department store dummy and all these grown-ups were saying sad things.”
He paused, remembering the wave, not the man in the casket. It seemed to sum his father up, a little masculine salute from an arm thickened with muscle, hand big and loose and square, three yellow chevrons gleaming in the failing light, hat set square on his head in silhouette as he went off to do something—no one could ever tell Bob what it was—called duty.
“Would you let me be, please,” he said.
“Are you all right, honey?”
“I’m fine. I need to be alone a bit, is all.”
“I’ll be downstairs if you need me,” she said, and departed softly.
When she left, Bob cried hard for the first time in his life since July 23, 1955.
9
Russ had his Lamar Pye dream again that night. As they usually did, it started out benignly. He was sitting in a Popeye’s, eating greasy chicken and red beans, and Lamar walked in, big as a house, friendly as life itself. The fact that he had never seen Lamar but only pictures of him freed Russ’s subconscious to invent interesting details for Lamar. For example, tonight Lamar was wearing a clown suit and had a bright red Ping-Pong ball for a nose. His teeth were bold and shiny. He radiated the power and the glory.
As he saw Russ sitting there, Lamar came over and said, “Are you a spicy kind of guy or a regular kind of guy?”
That was the key question for Russ. And it was another test and he knew he’d fail it.
Bravely, he said, “I’m a spicy kind of guy.”
Lamar’s mean but shrewd eyes locked on his, squinting with intellectual effort. He looked Russ up and down, and then he said, “The hell you say, boy.”
“No, it’s true,” Russ argued through a tide of liar’s phlegm rising in his throat. “Really, I’m spicy. Been spicy all my life.”
A rhinolike flare of rage blossomed behind Lamar’s clown makeup and the urge to strike viciously displayed itself in the narrowing of his pupils to pinpoints, but he controlled himself.
“I say you’re regular and I say to hell with it.” Only he said it “reg-lar,” two syllables.
Russ cowered in Lamar’s force. Lamar was huge and strong and knowing and decisive, unclouded by doubt, untainted by regret. He was definitely a spicy kind of guy.
“All right,” he finally allowed, “we’ll see what kind of guy you are.”
With a magic wave of his hand, the clown-god Lamar made the Popeye’s disappear. Instead the two were deposited on the front lawn of Russ’s family home in Lawton, Oklahoma. It was a small rancher on a nice piece of land, a well-worn house where Russ and his brother had been treated to stable, loving childhoods by their parents. From the smoke curling out the chimney (though it was full summer in the dream), Russ understood that the family was home. Lamar willed it and in the next second he had some kind of tacky X-ray vision, as if he were looking into a house onstage through the old invisible fourth wall.
His brother, Jeff, was in his room, lacing up a baseball glove with the intensity that another boy might spend jacking off. Not Jeff. Jeff just poured his whole heart and soul into the effort, trying to get the glove just right, limber, supple, soft but not too soft. It was the central issue of his life.
In the kitchen, Russ and Jeff’s mama, Jen, a handsome though somewhat hefty woman in her early fifties, slaved over a hot stove. Mom was always cooking. He had a sense of his mother as cook to the world. That’s how he would think of her always, having traded all chances at happiness and freedom and self-expression to spend her time instead in the kitchen, whaling away at this dish or that, concocting elaborate dinners, never displaying an iota of disappointment or despair, rage or resentment. She just gave it up for her family.
Downstairs, his daddy was doing something to a gun. His dad was always doing things to guns. He was in his trooper’s uniform and totally lost in his own world, as he usually was, just working away. There was a young woman with him, nude, watching him and asking him to hurry up, please, goddammit, she was getting tired of waiting and he kept saying, “Just let me get this bolt oiled up, and we’ll be outta here.”
Finally, Russ saw upstairs again and saw himself: a grave boy, as usual doing nothing but reading. By the time he was fifteen he had read everything there was to read, twice. He read like a maniac, soaking it up, trying to draw lessons from it. He had a freak gift for the written word, which, when regurgitated crudely, became in turn a crude gift for his own writing. He had a small fluency, a big imagination and enough doubt to sink a ship. Why did he work so hard in this area? To escape Oklahoma? Was there some sense that he was too good for Oklahoma, for this little life of homey platitudes and small-beer deceits and easy pleasures? He, Russ, he was too good for it? He deserved such wonderful things in his life? He deserved the East, he deserved bright lights, fame, adoration? No little-town blues for him, no sir.
“See, that ain’t healthy,” Lamar said. “You just a-sittin’ up there. You oughta be out doing things.”
“My brother’s the jock,” Russ said. “I had a mind. I didn’t want to waste it.”
“Well, here’s the deal,” Lamar said. He drew a chain saw out of nowhere and dramatically pulled the ignition cord, and it leaped to churning life, filling the air with that high, ripping scream. “The deal is, I’m going in there and I’m going to kill all them people. You go stand by that tree. I’ll deal with your sorry young ass when I get out.”
“Please don’t do it,” Russ said.
“Oh, and who’s to stop me?”
“My dad will stop you.”
“Your dad. All that old bastard cares about is fucking that girl and his guns. He don’t care about you or your mom none.”
“No, he’ll stop you. You’ll see. He’s a hero.”
“He ain’t no hero, sonny. Just you watch.”
And so Lamar walked to the house and commenced an atrocity. It actually duplicated several such episodes that Russ had seen on the silver screen, and thus it unfolded according to the rules of the movies. Lamar kicked down the door. The young woman screamed, Russ’s dad reached for his gun but this time Lamar was too fast for him. The saw dove through them each, and they fell. Behind each, on a far wall, blossomed a blood spatter like a red rose opening to the sun, aesthetically perfect, showing the devotions of a supremely gifted art director.
“See,” Lamar called back, “he weren’t no trouble at all.”
Lamar climbed the stairs. Jen looked at him and said, “Don’t hurt my boys. Please.”
“Lady, I’m hurting everybody.” Lamar instructed her laconically in the second before he swiped at her with the saw, driving her backwards into the refrigerator which had been rigged to collapse as she crashed into the jars and cartons and cans. She died in bloody sple
ndor amid a smorgasbord of brilliantly conceived food effects, with mustard and ketchup and Coke flung every which way by the grinding chain of the saw.
Jeff, a hero, heard the noise, picked up a bat and came running. But a bat and heroism are no match for a chain saw, no sir. Lamar got Jeff on the stairs, and the camera, which loves the destruction of the young and tender best of all, zeroed in on the poor boy’s face, flecked with his own blood, as the life in his eyes shut down into blankness. That left Russ, reading something obtuse and meaningless, as the killer stalked him. Russ had no defense when Lamar kicked his way into the room. He begged, he sniveled, he quivered, he raised two trembly hands.
Lamar turned away from begging Russ weeping for mercy by his bed to the Russ who watched from outside.
“Should I do his young ass?”
“Please don’t kill him, Lamar. Please.”
“Can you stop me?”
“No, I can’t.”
“Then you ain’t worth a turd on a hot day.”
He stepped forward with the chain saw and Russ awoke.
It was really not one of the truly bad ones, an essay more in dream-state illogic and pernicious movie influence than in sheer vomiting violence. He’d had those too, though not so bad lately. One night he’d awakened screaming and someone thought to call the Princeton cops, who took him in for drug testing. Another time he’d evidently rolled off the bed in stark fear and badly bruised himself. Once he cut himself thrashing in the night and awoke in his own blood.
This one: not too terrible. Survivable, at least. Were they getting easier? He didn’t know. You just couldn’t tell when it was going to explode over you, and to his knowledge nobody in his family, not even his father, suffered the same.
But perhaps he alone had worked out the logic: Lamar Pye was coming to kill them. That is, the family: to punish Bud Pewtie for his crimes, he would kill Bud’s family. It was only a twist of fate that the drama played out elsewhere and that only Lamar and his minions died. But the weight of it settled on Russ for some reason: the idea that, not randomly, not accidentally, not out of whimsy or malice or the sheer force of the universe’s irrationality, Lamar Pye had targeted the Pewtie clan for extinction.
It sat upon Russ like a fat black cat in the night. So do not send to know for whom Lamar comes: he comes for thee.
Russ blinked. He was still in the motel room, daylight showed wanly through the cheap curtains. He felt hung over but he hadn’t been drinking. Rather it was the caffeine he’d had in the Diet Coke at Bob Lee Swagger’s that had kept him awake, full of ideas and theories and arguments that he hadn’t made, until well after four. Finally, he had been permitted to sleep. He checked his watch. It was close to eleven.
Nothing to do. He tried to figure out his next move but there was no next move. He thought he’d go back to his apartment in Oklahoma City and maybe work something out. But that idea filled him with boredom. His big book was going the way of all flesh: that is, toward lassitude and indolence and ultimately nothingness.
Russ showered, dressed, checked his wallet. He had less than fifty dollars left. It was about a ten-hour drive back to Oklahoma City, through New Mexico and across Texas and half of Oklahoma. It filled him with despair and self-loathing.
He threw his dirty clothes in the suitcase and went out to dump it in his car. Then he settled up with the motel—his credit card didn’t bounce, not quite yet—and gassed up. Driving through Ajo, he pulled into the little cantina where he’d had so many lunches.
He went in, took his familiar seat at the bar, and without even having to order it, the usual plate of excellent barbecue was served, with a draft beer. Russ ate, enjoying it. That woman sure could cook.
“Well,” he said to the bartender, “I didn’t quite spend a thousand on the barbecue, but it’s pretty damn close.”
“You did okay, son,” the bartender said. “Now I take it you’re moving on.”
“Yep. Gave it my best shot. Got to the man, put it before him and maybe for just a second I saw something in his eyes. But no. He said no.”
“You worked as hard as any of ’em. But he’s a tough nut to crack, that one.”
“That he is. Well, anyway, I really enjoyed your barbecue. No kidding, it was the best. I’ll miss it. I—”
But then he noticed how quiet it had become in the bar and that the barkeep was standing almost gape-mouthed and goofy. He looked left and right and there was only silence and men staring quietly. Then he looked in the mirror across the bar and at last saw the man standing behind him, tall and sunburned, with a shock of tawny hair and gray, narrowed eyes.
Swagger sat down next to him.
“Howdy,” he said.
“Er, howdy,” said Russ.
“Barbecue’s pretty good here, so they say.”
“It’s great,” said Russ.
“Well, one of these days I’ll have to get some. You still interested in writing that book?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Nothing in it about Vietnam? Nothing about 1992? That still the deal?”
“Yes sir.”
“You all packed?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Well, then,” Bob said, “you and me’re going to Arkansas.”
10
The corporate headquarters for both Redline Trucking and Bama Construction are located in a suite of offices in a flashy modern building on Rogers Avenue in east Fort Smith, Arkansas, as befits firms which annually bill over $50 million. In fact, it was Bama Construction that, on a federal contract, built the Harry Etheridge Parkway, which runs between Fort Smith and Blue Eye, seventy miles south, in Polk County.
The offices, which occupy the top two floors of the Superior Bank Building right across from Central Mall, are everything one might imagine of dominant prosperous regional corporations, complete to potted palms, soothing wall-to-wall carpeting, leather furniture and exposed brick in the public and presentation areas, all of it designed and coordinated by one of the finest (and most expensive) corporate interior design firms in Little Rock, no Fort Smith firm quite being up to the owner’s tastes. In these offices, lawyers and secretaries and engineers labor intensively on Bama Construction’s far-reaching plans, such as the Van Buren Mall or the Planters Road residential development; meanwhile trucking executives supervise the hundreds of routes and accounts that Redline controls, as Fort Smith is ideally located for east-west commerce, given its central location on the huge U.S. 40 route between Little Rock and Tulsa. It all hums along perfectly. The only oddity is the huge corner office, jammed with antiques, with two vivid picture windows that yield powerful views of the city. From here, one can see the old downtown, the bridge over the mighty Arkansas River and even a little of Oklahoma.
It’s a beautiful office, some say the most beautiful in Fort Smith. It displays on one wall civic awards and family mementos, pictures of visiting dignitaries and political figures, examples of philanthropy and civic involvement, all signifying a solid career and a solider place in the community. Yet the office is almost always empty.
Rather, Randall T. “Red” Bama prefers to spend his time in the back room of Nancy’s Flamingo Lounge, on Midland Boulevard in north Fort Smith, on an uneasy tribal border where the black district spills into a poor white one, where the city’s surprisingly large Thai population has begun to contest its more lengthily settled Vietnamese one, where a workingman can get an honest but tough game of pool and a shot and a beer, all for under five dollars, and a stranger can get a steely look that tells him to get lost fast. Perhaps such quarters are an unnecessary indulgence. To keep his empire running—or at least that part of the empire which the newspapers so regularly chronicle—Red must make dozens of calls a day to his middle managers, for of course he makes all decisions himself. It helps that he has a supremely organized mind and a special gift for numbers. It’s said he can add as many as eight three-digit numbers accurately in less than ten seconds, which qualifies him not quite as a prodigy but certainly as a
man with a flair for integers.
Red arrives at ten, parking his gray Mercedes S-600 on the street where it will not be molested, stolen, ticketed or even touched. He always drives himself, enjoying the time alone on his spin down from his family’s complex on Cliff Drive above Fort Smith, clearing his mind for the day’s tasks. But he’s preceded by two extremely professional men in a black Chevy Caprice who are authorized by the state of Arkansas to carry the SIG-Sauer P229 .40-caliber semiautomatics they wear in shoulder holsters under their jackets. They are tough, calm and decisive, excellent shots. Each wears Kevlar Second Chance body armor, capable of defeating all handgun and most shotgun ammunition. They are never far from Red.
Red doesn’t say hello to Nancy because there is no Nancy and nobody can remember or cares much if there ever was. He makes his way to the back room, where he hangs up his expensive suit coat, sits at a navy-surplus desk and begins to drink black coffee out of Styrofoam cups from the bar while a continual stream of supplicants, acolytes, gofers, errand boys, emissaries and the summoned go before him for judgment or assignment. It is here that he receives reports on his nineteen pawnshops, his seven porno stores in the greater Fort Smith area, on his heroin dealerships and his crack franchises, mostly located in the black section of town, his six brothels and his seven rural gambling cribs, located across the river in Oklahoma, and the jewel of his night empire, the Choctaw Gentleman’s Club, in Holden, Oklahoma, five miles west on Route 64, where rubes pay five dollars admission and sit there drinking overpriced beer and slipping one-dollar bills between the plastic-engorged breasts of the strippers, who must give forty-five cents on the dollar to the boss man.
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