“Lamar… where are we going?”
“Don't you worry, son, I got it all figured out. Now, what was that about the wrists, boy? Remember, the other night you was telling me about the wrists.”
Willard was still screaming; he sobbed and heaved and begged, but O’Dell kept him captured with a single immense hand while eating Twinkies with the other.
The wrist? The wrist? Now what the fuck?
Then he had it: art. Art!
“Oh, yeah. Well, I think actually, ah, you see, what makes a painting or a drawing so fluid, actually, so lifelike, is the flexibility of the wrist and the exquisite relationship of the articulate muscles of the wrist and hand to the vision and the imagination. That's why a free-painted line is always called a living line.”
“Goddamn,” said Lamar, rapturous with delight.
“Yes sir, you sure can talk. You can talk and you can draw! You are a goddamned interesting young man, ain't he, O’Dell?”
“Awoooooah,” said O’Dell Pye, his broad, crippled mouth knitting up into a smile, his lips crusted with flecks of weightless white custard filling, Willard weeping in his grasp.
“Well, now, Richard, boy, you be thinking on your next drawing. I think I want to go back to lions. I liked the eagles and I liked the tigers, but damn, there's something about that old king of the jungle that just tickles me where I itch the worst!”
Richard watched as a black-and-white Highway Patrol car flew by across the way. He checked his watch. Clearly they hadn't been discovered yet.
Lamar had one more item on his agenda. He crawled back into the rear of the van. He reached over and lifted the rabbit's head, so that the man's face looked into his. What he saw was what he expected to see: no surprises at all.
Fear. The eyes were stone bright, like the rabbit had been high on crank, but the drug that made him so mad was just the fear. You could now do anything to Willard the Rabbit.
You could fuck him, fuck his daughters, kill his wife, set his house a-fire, and he'd just look at you like that, baby lips aquiver. He wasn't no man, goddammit. He was a rabbit. Even a nigger will fight you, you push him hard enough or corner him. But not a rabbit. Rabbit just look you over while you decide which part of him to bite on. He may even help you make that decision. And he will sell you anything, anything at all.
“Now, Willard, listen here, I need some more help.”
“W-what?” said Willard.
“Guns. I need some guns. Man like me, man with enemies, got to have a gun, you know. Not to hurt, to protect.
Now, Willard, you got any guns?”
“I hate guns,” said Willard.
“Gwus,” said O’Dell.
“Bangy like bangy.”
“Son, that doesn't surprise me.”
“I know where there's a gun store,” said Willard, trying to help.
“Now, Willard, I can see you're trying to get with it. But a gun store don't fill the bill. How can I rob a gun store if I don't got no guns? And if I had a gun, I wouldn't need to rob no gun store. Plus, these days, you run into your scum in gun stores. Them boys all pack and they just looking for excuses to shoot a man. Read about it in gun magazines, they want to blow someone away. Peckerwoods, trashy boys, your basic Okabilly scum. No sir, gun store ain't no place at all. I need a citizen with guns. A man who keeps guns, a hunter, something like that. Willard, I know if you think real hard, you'll be knowing somebody who’s got guns.”
Willard scrunched up his face in despair until at last a little light came on behind his eyes.
“Mr. Stepford says his father hunts,” he said.
“Says his old man sends him a haunch of venison every fall.”
“Hmm,” said Lamar.
“Now who would Mr. Stepford be?”
“Mr. Bill Stepford, regional vice-president for Hostess Baking Division of Oklahoma. My boss's boss. He give me the job. He said his father been up in Canada hunting elk, been to Mexico to shoot them doves, wants to go to Maine to hunt bear before he dies.”
“Where his father live?”
“Uh, he's a big farmer. Owns a spread out near Ratliff City.”
“Do this old man have a first name?”
“Sir, I don't-You're not going to hurt him, are you?
He's an old man. Fought in World War II as a bomber pilot.
He was a hero. He was a—”
“Do he have a first name?”
“I don't know,” said Willard.
“Except that now that I think it over, I kind of think Mr. Bill Stepford is a Mr. Bill Stepford, Jr. You're not going to hurt that old man, are you?”
“Now, Willard,” said Lamar.
“I cut a square deal. You helped me, I didn't hurt you. Would I hurt that old man? Do I look like that sort? O’Dell, don't hurt him none. Makie still.”
“Yoppa-yoppa,” said O’Dell.
And O’Dell didn't hurt Willard. He strangled the young man to death as peacefully as he could, though the young man squirmed and bucked.
The van accelerated to close to ninety. Lamar turned and yelled, "Goddammit, Richard, you slow this thing down, you stupid little cocksucker, you get us chased by the police and I will have your ass for breakfast.”
Richard tried to get control of himself. The boy's struggle had at last ceased. He checked the mirror as he dropped back down under sixty-five, and saw no red flashing light.
He was all right. He tried to breathe slowly.
“Dink-ie.” said O’Dell.
CHAPTER 4
The world had ceased to make sense back in the seventies, and it just got worse and worse and worse: crazed kids with automatic weapons, crimes against children and women, these nutcase white boys who thought they were God's chosen, niggers gone plumb screwball on delusions of victimization and fearfully nursed grudges. Sometimes he believed the communists or the trilateralists or somebody, some agency—the CIA, the FBI, the KKK—was behind it all. But still It. C. D. Henderson clung to certain convictions against the mounting chaos. Primarily, he believed in logic. He was a detective, that most specialized and refined and renowned type of lawman, the most famous detective in Oklahoma, a celebrity at police conventions, a consultant on cases far and wide. His core belief was that if enough data could be assembled, a clever fellow could find a pattern in it somehow and make sense of it, and bring it to its logical conclusion.
He was sixty-eight years old, and still a lieutenant. He'd always be a lieutenant, just as inevitably as when they needed someone to run an investigation, they'd always call him. Careers had been built on his intelligence and insight, and still he made less than forty thousand dollars a year.
The men he'd broken in with were mostly dead, the men he'd trained had retired or gone to other, better jobs, and he was now primarily working for rude young people. But he still had the gift: he saw the connections the others missed, he was willing to do the dreary work, the collating, the sifting, the endless examination of details.
“These kids,” he often lamented to the Missus, "these damned kids, they just don't want to do the work. Get a wiretap, bust a raid, go to SWAT, sweat an interrogation, call forensics. They ain't got the patience to nurse the answer;?
out. They won't look at the stuff and just figure it out.”
“Carl,” she'd say, "they ain't worth a glass of hot gravy in July.”
It was the bitterness, mainly, that drove him to the loving arms of I. W. Harper. With his daily pint of Harper's resting comfy and promising in a brown paper bag in his right inside pocket, he could get his mind loose and fluent and quell the seething anger that dogged him like a mean little dog. Maybe he made a few more mistakes, maybe he missed a trick or two, maybe the younger men could smell the whiskey on his breath and knew to leave him alone after four in the afternoon, it didn't matter. It was drink or eat the gun, he knew that.