He knew he was onto something; it scared him, it exhilarated him, it made him angry, it made him sad. Quickly, he jotted some notes on a big yellow legal pad, so he wouldn’t forget, but he knew he wouldn’t forget. He felt dynamic, forceful, brilliant.
By God, he thought, I will get to the bottom of this and Earl’s son and that damned boy Rusty will help me.
Duane Peck called in and made his report.
“Sir, I don’t know, but this old guy’s onto something. He’s all excited, I can tell. He discovered something and I don’t know what. He’s been looking for something for three days, and by God, now he’s found it. What should I do?”
The call came almost immediately. Bama sounded downcast, depressed, angered; a bad day at the office?
He made Peck go through it again, very slowly, he considered and then he told him what to do.
26
hey stood on a little yellow hill under the blinding sun. Off to the east, like a white-walled city from a fairy tale, lay some intricate structure, with towers and mansards and sub-buildings: McAlester State Penitentiary. Off to the west, simple rolling Oklahoma countryside. Here there were markers, bleak and unadorned.
“So that’s it?” Bob asked. “You brought me all this way to see this?”
“Yes, I did,” said Russ. “That’s what became of Jimmy Pye’s only son. That’s what remains on this earth of what happened July 23, 1955.”
The inscription simply said, “Lamar Pye, 1956-1994.” A few feet away lay another one. “Odell Pye,” it said, “1965-1994.”
“His cousin,” said Russ. “Jim Pye’s brother’s boy. A hopeless retardate. Belonged in an institution, where no one would bother him. You see what the Pye blood got the two of them.”
“Russ, I just see two gravestones on a bare hill on a little bit of nowhere in Oklahoma. It’s like Boot Hill in some goddamned cowboy movie. It don’t mean a thing.”
“It’s just so obvious,” said Russ. “Don’t you see it? It’s all here: murder, a family of dysfunctional monsters, the seed going from father to son. It’s The Brothers K set in Oklahoma and Arkansas over two generations.”
“Son, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. But if it helps you to come look at it and say, ‘Yeah, he’s dead, he’s gone,’ that’s fine. Glad to oblige.”
Russ looked at him sharply.
“You scream at night, Russ,” said Bob. “Sometimes two, three times. ‘Lamar,’ you scream, or ‘Dad, Dad.’ You got a mess of snakes up there. You best get yourself some help. See the chaplain, we’d say in the Corps. But see somebody.”
Russ shook his head. “I’m all right,” he said. “I just want to get this thing done with.”
“It ain’t about you and Lamar Pye. Your daddy took care of that, all right? Lamar is in the ground, he’s finished, it’s over. That’s your dad’s present to you: the rest of your life.”
“And his girlfriend was his present to himself. The end of the family, that was his present to himself.”
“Russ, things aren’t as easy as you make them. Nothing’s that clear.”
“It feels clear,” said Russ bitterly.
“You going to be all right? This thing could go crazy at any second. Maybe you ought to stay here in McAlester, take the bus back to Oklahoma City. You could get your old job back, work on the book from there. I’d let you know what I eventually found out.”
“No, this is my project, I invented it. We’ll solve it together.”
“Okay, Russ, if that’s what you want.”
They walked down the hill. A black inmate trusty waved at them.
“You find what you want?”
“Yes sir,” said Bob.
“That was Lamar Pye’s grave you stopped at, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, it was,” said Russ. “Did you know him?”
“Oooo, no,” said the man, as if a taboo had been violated. “No, Lamar was not friendly toward the brothers. He was as mean as they come. Got to say this for him, though: he was a brave man. He stood up in the joint, and when it came his time, he went down like a man. He kilt two polices.”
“Actually, he just killed one. The other one lived,” Russ said.
“My, my, do tell,” said the old trusty mildly.
They walked another fifty feet to the truck, finding themselves in some kind of depression in the land, so that down here the white-walled prison was not visible.
“You drive,” said Bob.
Russ climbed into the truck, parked a few feet away.
“Shall we head back up to U.S. 40?”
“Hell no,” said Bob, looking at a map. “We’ll go back the scenic way. I got some thinking to do. We’ll head down to Hawthorne and then over to Talihina. There’s a real pretty road down that way, takes us back over the mountains to Blue Eye. The Taliblue Trail. You’ll like it. We’ll be home for supper.”
Around noon, Red filed a flight plan that set him on a course of 240 degrees south-southwest toward Oklahoma City. It took him another half an hour to fuel up the Cessna 425 Conquest and ten minutes after that for a takeoff clearance, as American Eagle’s 12:45 . from Dallas into Fort Smith was landing. But at last he was airborne.
The plane surged upward as Red eased the stick back, seemed to catch a little thermopane and rushed even faster skyward. He leveled out at 7,000 feet, well below commercial traffic patterns, scudded southwest toward the green mounds on the horizon that were the Ouachitas. The first leg all twenty minutes’ worth, was easy flying; beneath him the land was a blue haze, rolling and vague, without true detail, not particularly revealing.
He loved to fly and was quite a good pilot: perfect solitude, the fascinations of the intricate machine that held him aloft with its clever compromise of dynamic forces and its endless stream of numerical data. Yet at the same time, as mechanistic an equilibrium as it was, there was still the wildness of the unpredictable, the sense of being a true master of one’s fate. Also, it was for rich people mainly, and Red liked that quite a bit.
When he got ten miles north of Blue Eye, he dropped down to 4,000 feet and the details sharpened considerably; he had no problem picking up the parallel roads of 270 and 88 as they plunged westward from just above Blue Eye, which itself looked like a scatter of dominoes, blocks, cards and toys against the roll of the earth. As he flew west, the town disappeared and below him were just two roads cutting across the rolling mountains and valleys. Traffic on both of them was very light.
He leaned to his radio console, switched to the security mode in the digital encryption system and keyed in the code he’d selected from the 720 quadrillion possibilities, the same code selected in de la Rivera’s radio on the ground; the radio was now secure from intercept.
He picked up the microphone, punched the send button and said, “Yeah, this is Air, come in, please.”
The radio fizzed and crackled and then de la Rivera’s slightly Hispanic tones came back at him.
“Yes, I have you loud and clear.”
“That extender is working nicely,” said Red, “I have you loud and clear. No trouble installing it?”
“No sir. One of the boys did army commo.”
“Good. Position report, please.”
“Ah, I have you visually, you just buzzed my position. I’m at the wayside just inside Oklahoma. I got a car with three men with me. I got my other two units about twenty-five miles ahead, right where 259 cuts across 1.”
“What units are those?”
“We’re just calling them Alpha and Baker. My car here is Charlie, I’m Mike.”
“Alpha and Baker, you there?”
“Yes sir,” came a voice.