But not quite.
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6
Fort Worth, Texas
Nanny is behind the wheel. She will not ride in the chauffeur-driven limo, not to a place of worship. It is not seemly. She would be embarrassed if her girlfriends would see her and the little boy get out of the rich folk's ostentatious car. And she loathes the filthy-minded chauffeur as well.
Her voice is loud in his ear as she sings the doxology in the pew at church.
"Praise God from whom all blessings flow…" The words, without true meaning, run together inside his head.
They drive past Sunday lawns manicured by workers of dark skin pigmentation and she turns the radio sermon on. A preacher from some distant station in West Texas is pleading for money. Bobby gazes out the window at the lush streets lined with weeping willows, magnolias, frangipania, bougainvillea, yuccas, and their more exotic cousins, The yards are landscaped here and lawn jockeys still wait at curbside. The homes have names. Entrance archways proclaim this is Fandangle and Fandango, Twin Forks and Twin Pines, Cedars and Big Oak, Rocking R and X-IT, San Sebastian and San Ciello, Chisholm and Lazy L. The men are named Clint, Bubba, Billy Bob Ray, and Billy Ray Bob.
The neighbors here may be faceless strangers who own an immense Arabian horse stud ranch.
Dappled sunlight filters down through three-hundred year-old oak, and mighty Dutch elms that arbor the clean streets as they wait to die of Dutch elm disease, and catches in the turrets of the catty-cornered mansions.
"Hal-lay-lool-ya!" Nanny says to the radio, enthusiastically, startling the boy.
The men are real men here, and they swill down the Pearl and the Lone Star to chase their Dick'l 'n' branch wattah. There are no beauty salons in evidence. These rich suburbs are unsullied by either mine, mill, factory, plant, or other industrial blight. This is serious old-time money.
Bobby Price has his childhood memories. He was almost seventeen when he and his father's lawyers decided he'd best opt for military service.
He remembered Beaumont, the Panhandle, Big Bush, Baghdad on the Bayou, Waco, San Antone (where you could still shoot a black panther with it declawed in the cage, and call it sport), Lubbock, the Cowboys, White Rock Lake, South Oak Cliff, TCU, SMU, the Metroplex, River Crest Country Club, where a girl once reached up the leg of his swimming trunks to see what was "hidin' in that ol' hair." She had told him something he would file away forever:
"Lord, Bobby, they ain't but two things he didn't give you and both of 'em was a dick."
He recalled the doctor who had written "…it will not be possible for him to achieve penetration." He would prove that good medical man wrong a hundred times. He would do some damned flat hog wild penetrating before he was done. (In 1966 he was driving a blood-red 'Vette with dual glass packs—as phallic a ride as there was back then—the sort of kid who'd never be street legal, and he was afraid of nothing.)
"Olivia," he called his mother. She was distant and beautifully cool, and the wrinkles had fallen from her face and neck to gather on hands encrusted with platinum and rocks from Harry Winston and Van Cleef and Tiff's. "Ma'am" was the intimate form of address permitted her only child.
The dining room was a long expanse of table with the tallest throne chairs at either end. Heavy, carved, ecumenical TexMex and El Grecoesque murals, tapestries, and ancestral oils mixed among the open beams, adobe moderne, and the showpiece wall of leaded glass. Here, in these rich Texas suburbs, the "cathedral" ceiling started.
In the dining room, Bobby Price sat in solitary silence, hypnotized by the images in the colored glass, hearing the man ask him the question from the pulpit again and again:
"Bobby…have you renounced Satan?"
Kansas City
Bobby Price a.k.a. "Shooter" woke up, as he sometimes did, instantly and fully awake. The first thing that he did was eyeball DeMon, the detection monitor, which confirmed for him visually that all was well. Big Petey was status quo.
The beeper and the sensor alarm would have had him on his feet had it been otherwise, but he liked the reassuring visual confirmation. He wore his monitor the way some folks wear their wedding bands—everywhere.
He hit the cold floor and did twenty slow push-ups. Then five the hard way, one handed, his weight balanced on the fingertips of his right hand. It killed him to do those and he let himself drop to the filthy carpet for a moment, remaining in a prone nose dive for as long as he could stand it, letting the foul odor of the carpet cleaner, room deodorizer, booze spills, and the residue from a carload of tobacco ashes force him to recoil away from the floor.
Bobby was on his feet, breathing deeply. He went over and hit his weights, doing a few slow, s-l-o-w serious reps with the special fifty-eight-pound job. Arm curls that made those powerful bikes and trikes pump. As always he tried to do one with the left arm and couldn't get the chrome off the floor. He breathed some more, did a few squats, then went into the doorway of the bathroom for isos.
Bobby put everything he had into the isometrics, breaking a sweat as he pushed against the immovable forces, doing the iso groups the same way he did everything else, with total dedication and concentration.
He finished. Showered quickly, warm water then ice cold, surveying the clean, lean, mean Shooter Price in the door mirror. He didn't like himself nude, so 'he toweled off, pulling on a pair of royal blue briefs that hid the useless appendage that had controlled so much of his life.
In the mirror, he examined himself again. The reflection was that of a trim, muscular, extremely good-looking man in his mid-thirties, which wasn't bad for forty-one. Well-developed upper torso, arms, and legs. A self-confident face that could be described as "handsome," and few would challenge the adjective. Five feet six inches. Well, he would be, as soon as he dressed. He wore shoes with high Cuban heels. Short? Okay. But perfectly shaped. The 159 pounds distributed properly over his frame. And with the briefs on, he couldn't see the tiny sleeping bird that mocked him from its hairy nest, the superfluous and recalcitrant hunk of meat that was a source of great puzzlement to all.
Chisel-featured, flaxen-haired, brilliant, fastidiously well-groomed, he was and always had been tremendously attractive to women. And like so many persons who appear to have been wound too tightly, his energy force gave off a strong animal magnetism. So both his physical appearance and the coiled-spring ambience of Bobby's inner conflicts produced the expected dynamics. A long succession of beautiful and sexy women had been left unfulfilled and puzzled by the inexplicable impotence of Shooter Price.
Completing his morning ritual, he dressed in elegant Neimann's doeskin slacks, a sandy tan cashmere sweater, and four-hundred-dollar handmade Italian loafers, then filled his pockets and stepped out into the sunlight, pulling the motel door closed and locking it.
He unlocked the gleaming bone-colored M-30 and slid into the cold seat, kicking on the engine. He touched a button watching the windows disappear, as power augers released the top. It was too humid, he decided, and he raised the top back up, pulling out of the motel parking lot, the three-liter V-6 growling out into the stream of late-morning traffic.
Big Petey was a dead white blip on the OMNI, which was on Locator/Focus-lock, Automatic, and Monitor B. The OMNI paged his beeper if Big Petey, his private name for P.T.—primary target—went into motion beyond a proscribed radius of his current location.
Bobby Price flipped open his gold-trimmed alligator-hide notebook to the last entry: P.T. had been out of action since 0140. He clicked his slim gold pen and jotted down the time.