“The guns, Richard,” ordered Lamar.
Richard ran to the gun case. Its glass stopped him. Inside, the gleaming treasures lay in repose. He could see green and yellow boxes of cartridges stacked neatly in the corner. He tried the handle, but the thing was locked. It baffled him, and then the bafflement departed as the glass seemed to explode out at him. O’Dell had just blasted it with the ax.
“Wook oub,” said O’Dell, raising the ax in another mighty effort.
Richard fell back as the ax smashed the door off the frame, and O’Dell greedily pulled a long-barreled gun from the rack and a box from the shelf, and began inserting red tubes into the weapon. With an oily klak he cycled it and turned.
“Dwan mub,” he commanded, but the old man hadn't.
He sat there shaking, literally stunned into shock from the way the universe had conspired in an instant to deconstruct his life.
Lamar had dumped the old woman, and came over to examine what lay before him.
“Goddamn,” he said almost immediately.
“Shotguns!
Shotguns! You don't got no pistols? What the fuck is the matter with you, you old piece of shit!”
Angrily, he kicked the case. Then, grasping his fury, he took a shotgun off the rack and threaded shells into it. He pumped it, pointed it upwards, and fired.
The noise was terrific.
Richard had never been near a gun going off before in his life. The pain of it assaulted his ears. So loud! A satisfying rain of plaster cascaded down on Lamar, who smiled at this tiny victory over the world.
O’Dell was dancing merrily around the room. Now and then he would smash something and holler. The two old people found each other at the couch, the woman weeping in the old buzzard's arms.
At last, Lamar went over to them.
“I thought you hunted, old fuck. You! I'm talking to you.
You want me to gut the heart out of that old bitch? You talk to me, motherfucker.”
The old man glared up at him.
“I gave up hunting deer last year. Sold all my center fires
“You what?”
“I killed over one hundred deer, two elk, three bears, and a moose. It was enough.”
“You fucking pussy, I want CENTER FIRE I want OOOMPH! I want AUTOMATIC! I want a goddamn BERETTA! I want COLT! I want MAGNUM! You dick sucking old puss, I wouldn't even fuck your scrawny ass, I'd give it to Richard. Richard, if he don't tell where the pistols are, fuck his ass. You hear me: Fuck him good up the ass and fuck his old lady up the ass.”
“Tell him. Bill,” said the woman.
“I can't,” said the old man.
“Tell him, Bill,” said the woman.
“He'll just take them and go out and kill people in the world. He's going to kill us anyway. We're dead already. It don't matter none.”
He turned to Lamar.
“You know, back in 1944, a lot of blond young men tried to kill me, in airplanes called Messerschmitts. But I bombed their factories and killed their wives and children and destroyed their filth. You're them, you prison scum. Go ahead, fuck my ass and fuck my old wife's ass. You can hurt me but you can't scare me.”
Lamar, for the first time in his life, seemed a little unsure.
“Richard, you hear that? A goddamn hero. O’Dell?”
“It's the Pyes,” the old man told his wife.
“On the news, the escapees. Just the worst trash. A sane society would have executed them both years back. Well, to hell with you, Lamar Pye and this simpleton and your little homosexual pal.”
“I'm not a homosexual,” said Richard.
The old man spit on Richard.
Richard looked at the glob on his shirt. Then he looked at the old man. He was one of those scrawny old types, mostly leather and sinew, with furiously burning blue eyes. He looked like the sort of man who rose at four a . every morning and gave hell in buckets to any' and all that had displeased him over his long life. He probably had a million dollars in the bank and believed he could take it to heaven with him. His children probably all secretly hated him, just as Richard had secretly hated his father. But like Richard, this man's children would never dare express their contempt directly.
“You goin' to let him do that?” said Lamar.
Why did he have to do that? thought Richard.
“You can't let a man do that. An old man with two shotguns on him, who thinks he's a hero. You got to break him down, boy.”
“He's afraid,” said the old man.
“I can smell it on him.
His underpants are brown and smelly. It happened in the Eighth Air Force all the time. Men like him/ they never made their twenty-five missions. Your underpants—a mess, right?”
Richard swallowed. Yes, as a matter of fact, they were.
He wasn't sure when it had happened but now he knew that it had. He swallowed again, wondering who he'd explain this to, then kicked the old man in the leg.
“Way to go, Richard. You show him. You be a goddamned man, Richard,” shouted Lamar.
Everyone always talks, Lamar knew. That's the rule. But the old man had more grit than you find on the average yard, and Richard didn't have the stuff to get it out of him, even though he kicked him a batch of times as he lay curled on the floor in front of his weeping wife.
“Okay, Richard,” Lamar finally said, not because he felt a pang of mercy for the square John but because Richard was truly disgusting him, his face all knit up like a girl's as he pranced his prissy way around him, kicking without a lot of force.
Richard looked at him, face twisted in emotion. Not rage, exactly; just some kind of terrible excitement. Shit, Lamar thought he looked like someone had stuck a pickle up his ass.
“O’Dell” Lamar commanded.
O’Dell turned the old man over on his back and twisted his arm backward and up like a corkscrew until the old man screamed. Meanwhile Lamar went looking for liquor.
Could these people be Christian teetotalers? He had heard of such a thing but found it hard to imagine. The screams behind him were irritating.
He wandered into the pantry. Didn't quality usually keep booze in a pantry? Lamar looked around. He had never been in a house like this before. He wondered what it would be like living in a house like this.
Pictures of a bunch of kids on the walls. He looked closely: it was like they were from Mars or something. All these kids and these pretty women and handsome boys who had to be the old man's daughters or sons or something. He wondered what it would be like to fuck a woman who looked like that? They didn't look like the Penthouse bitches, with the perfect round tits and the creamy skin. It looked fake, even if most evenings it got you off. These gals looked real, somehow, and sweet and tender. He imagined the fear in their eyes if he decided to fuck them. Lamar hadn't had true pussy in almost a decade. He'd almost forgotten what it would be like. Even now, he was a little unsure if he'd taste it before they finally got him.
There it was: brown bottles in a row, in a locked cabinet.
He yanked the door open and a little piece of lock broke off. Some lock. Jack Daniel's Old No. 7, Tennessee drinking whiskey. Couldn't do better than that. He unscrewed the cap, took a swallow. Goddamn.
Like wet smoke. Burns all the way down, your eyes tighten like fists and little tears come to them. Only way the world would ever get tears out of Lamar Pye. He took another quick swallow, then put back the bottle. Best not to let O’Dell know. Sober, O’Dell could be hard enough to handle. Drunk he could be death, and impossible. If Billy Cop came a-knocking, it wouldn't do any good to let O’Dell be drunk, because Lord knew that goddamned Richard boy would be no good in a fight with the law.