“You be a good boy, now, Bob Lee,” he said. “You tell your mama how much I love her. I just have this one last little thing to do, you understand? Then maybe we’ll take some time off. It’s been a rough summer. Time to go fishing, you understand.”
“Yes sir.”
“Got a surprise for you. In a month or so, the Chicago Bears goin’ come down to Little Rock and play the New York Giants. Saw an ad in the paper. They call it the Football Classic of the South. War Memorial Stadium, September 10. You send off for tickets. They’re pretty expensive, three-eighty apiece, but what the heck. Figure you, me and Mommy’d go down to Little Rock, have us a nice dinner and see that game. How’d you like that?”
“At night?”
“Yes sir. They rig these big old lights and it’s bright as day.”
“That’d be great,” the boy said.
But he had picked up the strangeness in his father.
“Daddy, you okay?”
“I am fine,” said Earl. “I am—” He paused, perplexed. He felt he had to explain something to his son.
“I’m going to arrest a bad boy,” he said. “A boy who made a big mistake. But there’s two kinds of bad, Bob Lee. This boy’s bad was he just decided to be bad. He said, I will be bad, and he did bad things and now he’s got to pay. See, that’s one kind of bad.”
The boy looked at him.
“But you ain’t ever going to be like that. Most nobody’s ever like that. That other kind of bad, see, that’s the kind that a good boy like you or any good boy could fall prey to. That’s the kind of bad that says I will be good but somehow, not meaning to, not facing it, not thinking about it, lying to yourself, you just sort of find yourself where it’s easy to be bad and you don’t have the guts or the time or whatever, maybe you don’t even realize where you are, and you just do it and it’s done. Then you know what?”
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
uss 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.