Dirty White Boys (35 page)

“No, no,” said Lamar, “that would take too long. He does something this fancy, I’ll be laid up for a month while it heals. Longer I wait, longer it’s going to be. Want it done now, tonight.”

“But Lamar, I—”

“The Fort! Don’t you get that?”

“The Fort?”

“Fort Sill. Outside the Fort, on that Fort Sill Boulevard.”

“Tattoo parlors?”

“You got that right. We go tonight, we check ’em out, if you find a boy who can do what I want, then we do it tonight. We lay up, ’bout a month. I figure another job. We pull it off, then by God it’s Mexico and a vacation!”

“A vacation,” said Ruta Beth. “Oh, Daddy, you think of everything.”

It happened rarely enough anymore, because everybody had such different schedules and agendas, but it happened tonight, and Bud was a happy man.

They were all there, his wife and his two sons, gathered around a dinner table in the Mahogany Room of Martin’s,
Lawton’s finest restaurant for forty years. And the place still knew how to put out a pretty good plate of roast beef, its specialty, though tonight Jen had decided to have some fish thing and Russ, though the honoree, had chosen a plate of linguini with pepper sauce.

But he was happy, Bud was. They sat there eating, Bud shoveling down the forkfuls of reddish meat that always so delighted him. The boys looked great. Russ, the object of all attention, had slicked up his act a bit: He wore a white shirt buttoned at the top and a pair of black jeans over his black boots, and his long hair smoothed backward. The earring was still a little one. Jeff, in a blazer and tie, looked a little more like Bud’s idea of a Princeton student.

“We are so proud of you, Russ,” said Jen.

“See, what’s so great isn’t just that Russ is smart,” said Bud. “The world is full of smart people. Lamar Pye, he’s smart. He’s smart as hell. But Russ
works
. That’s what’s rare. The world is full of people who think they’re just too damn smart to work.”

Russ was modest through all this but seemed to be enjoying it. Only Jeff was unusually quiet, although he also had good news: He had been moved up to varsity.

“Well,” said Bud, “they say a man is rich to the degree his sons make him proud—”

“Who says that, Dad?” said Russ, teasing the old man.

“Well, I don’t know who exactly it was, maybe a Russian, maybe a Greek, and maybe I just made it up, but if it’s true, then I’m the goddamned richest man in Oklahoma tonight.”

“Well, Dad,” said Russ, “maybe I’ll flunk out.”

“You won’t flunk out. No man who works as hard as you has a thing to worry about. Then you go on and go to work doing what you want and you have sons who’ll make you just as proud as you two make me.”

“You-all listen to your daddy,” said Jen. “He’s speaking the truth. You boys have been a great thing for us, made us so happy. Not a lick of trouble between the two of you, thank the Lord.”

Bud had more roast beef.

“Bud, do you think we should order some champagne?” said Jen. “I think these boys are man enough.”

“Mom,” said Jeff, “that stuff costs eighty dollars a bottle.”

“Well, Jeff,” said Bud, “your brother has just saved us about a hundred thousand dollars, so I think we can spend eighty bucks.”

“Jeff, the domestic is forty-two fifty,” Jen said.

“You can buy it in a liquor store for about fourteen dollars a bottle,” Jeff added.

Bud called the waiter over and ordered a bottle of champagne, slightly shamed by Jeff into choosing the domestic one. When it came, he ordered it poured for the whole family.

Then, dramatically, he said, “And here’s to Russ and all the hard work he’s done.”

They all lifted their sparkling glasses and drank; but Bud only let the stuff touch his lips and did not swallow.

“Here, let me pour some more,” he said, giving each a half glass more, until it was all gone.

The boys and Jen finished the champagne and then it was time to go. Bud looked at his watch: about ten. He called for the check and paid it with his Visa card without wincing, though it was about forty dollars more than he had expected. Still, except for Jeff’s strange sullenness, it had been a wonderful evening.

Is it the last?
he wondered.

Am I about to do some fool thing and move into a little house near the airport with a young woman?

*  *  *

“Bud?”

“What?”

“You were talking to yourself.”

“I must be going crazy.”

They drove in Jen’s station wagon through Lawton’s quiet streets and pulled in the driveway about ten-thirty.

“Dad, do you mind if I go over to Nick Sisley’s?” asked Russ. “He’s having a party.”

“No, fine, but don’t be home late. Isn’t that right, Jen?”

“That’s fine.”

“How about you, Jeff? You have any plans?”

“I think I’ll go over to Charlie’s,” he said. When the boys had disappeared, she said to Bud, “And I see you’re going out, too.”

“Oh?”

“You didn’t drink any champagne.”

“I may go. Have to make some phone calls first.”

“Bud, what’s going on?”

“Oh, got me just the tiniest idea that might lead us to Lamar. Probably nothing. Just want to check it out.”

“Tonight? Can’t it wait?”

“Jen, it’s nothing. I’m just going over to the Tribal Police Department over at the Comanche complex. I just want to ask some questions, is all.”

She fixed him with her harshest stare, as if she’d never heard of such a thing in her life. Then disillusionment crept across her features and, utterly defeated, she went upstairs. He heard her wheezing disappointment. He watched her go, feeling as though he ought to say something. But no words arrived at his lips, and she just turned into the bedroom and closed the door.

*  *  *

Lawton was two towns. It was a church-going, tree-shaded small Oklahoma city, with wooden houses nestled on streets that Andy Hardy would have been proud to call home, where every third block sported a park or a school or a church, a town where all life coagulated toward the Central Mall and the county seat for Comanche county. And it was a soldier’s town, jammed up with pawn shops and girlie bars and porn stores, from Fort Sill Boulevard around to Cache Road and out Cache Road for a mile or two.

The Fort Sill Boulevard strip, just beyond Gate No. 3, was hopping tonight. Cars jammed its narrow way and it blazed with neon. Young artillerymen, freed from the day’s duty of delivering their 155-mm packages into the mountains, their ears booming still, their heads aswarm with the computations necessary to send the shell in the right direction, wandered in packs up and down it, looking for diversion. This usually involved fleshly appetites, and there were places on the strip where for an honest hundred bucks a man could get a good drunk with a good blow job thrown in for good measure; in others, two hundred could be spent with no blow job to be had anywhere on the premises. You had to know where you went.

But among the girlie joints, and the Mailbox USAs and the porn shops and the pawn shops, there was to be found now and then a tattoo joint: Skin Fantasy was the title of one; the Flesh House, another; Skin Art still another; Little Burma Art House, the Rainbow Biceps, and on and on.

It was crowded, as it always was in the hours approaching midnight, and the Toyota crawled along through the traffic.

“You sure this is safe?” said Richard.

“Sure it is,” said Lamar. “Down here it’s mostly MPs, looking for drunken soldiers. The city boys stay clear. Besides, this car’s been checked by the great Bud Pewtie himself
and passed with flying colors. There’s nothing in the system on the car.”

Ruta Beth drove through the traffic very carefully, nudging an inch ahead at a time. Nobody paid them any attention; mostly it was cars full of soldiers looking for a place to light.

“How’s that look, Richard?” Lamar asked.

The place was called Tat-2’s, with a gaudy neon sign on it, and underneath it said “Best in the West” and under that, “Trained By the Great Sailor Jerry Collins of Honolulu, complete to Liner and Shading Machines. Custom work available. Bikers welcome.”

“Hey, that looks like the kind of place, huh, Richard?” said Lamar.

“It looks promising.”

“Well, go check it out, son.”

Gulping, Richard got out of the car and went into the small shop. Two semihuman forms lounged behind a counter, and on the walls were hundreds and hundreds of little designs. Of the two, the one that appeared to be the woman watched him most closely; the other was completely zoned. The odor of disinfectant hung in the air.

“Ah, hello,” said Richard.

The woman looked at him up and down, squint-eyed. She must have weighed 350 pounds and wore a cutoff biker denim shirt; her huge arms bulged from them and were inked from top to bottom in webbed darkness, with jots of color here and there. When she lifted her face to him, he saw the tattooing extended from her shirt up her neck to her chin. He turned and looked at the other morose character; he was equally gaudy, but what Richard first took to be skin disease was actually a rather elaborate spiderweb that covered half his face. He wore a leather vest, exposing a whole
blue museum on every square inch of his cellulite, but the best touch was the gold pin that pierced his nipple.

An involuntary shiver glided through Richard.

“Hep, sport?”

Hep?

Help, she meant.

“Ah, yeah,” he said, trying to sound tough. “Was thinking of a piece. Chest. Multicolored. Private design.”

“Custom-like, you mean?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Don’t do much custom. More a West Coast thang. Movie stars. These goddamn soldier boys just want ‘I Luv Mama’ pricked on.”

“Ah, it’s not for me. For a friend. Let me show you the design.”

Richard walked over to the counter and unfolded the lion, rampant, and the beautiful woman, and the castle.

“Shee-it,” said the woman. “Rufe, you touch that?”

Rufe came out of his stupor, bending to see.

“Glory,” he finally said. “That’s a two-thousand-dollar custom tattoo. Take me best part of a week.”

“Could you get it?” Richard asked. “The subtlety. The line running down from his mane to his body to his paws, the way it captures his tension and strength. The neck. Look how coiled and alive the neck is. Also, the loft in the woman’s breasts. See how elastic and alive they are? We don’t want tracing. We don’t want a dead line. We want something
vibrant!
Can you do it?”

“Sure he could. You could do it, cun’t you, Rufe?”

But Rufe bent over and studied very carefully.

Then he said, “Jamie, show him. The crucifixion.”

She turned and bent and pulled her blue denim shirt up. What Richard saw on her broad back was indeed the crucifixion, only it was a handsome biker being crucified, etched
there in the flesh in vivid blues and reds, surrounded by state troopers in the roles of Roman centurions.

Richard could hardly keep a straight face.

“Pretty goddamned great, ain’t it?” said the woman.

“It’s a goddamned masterpiece,” said Rufe.

“It’s something,” said Richard, meaning it differently than Rufe and the woman took it, but as he looked at it carefully, he saw that it wasn’t quite what he had in mind. What the piece had in drama and detail it certainly lacked in subtlety of line. The figures all had a stiffness through them, and they all stood at the same angle; the faces were identical. It was like a drawing by a sick, crazy boy, high on amphetamines and inner sadomasochistic fantasies of penetration and blood but lacking entirely any grace or sense of life.

“It’s just not what we’re interested in, sorry,” he said.

“I’d do it for fifteen hundred,” Rufe said. “Just like that picture you showed me, every last line and detail. Ain’t nobody can do work like that around here but me.”

If he’s the best
, thought Richard.

“Okay, well, maybe so,” said Richard. “Still, it’s a little … you won’t be offended?”

“Tell me. I’m a man. I can take it.”

“It’s a bit stiff. The person on whom you’d be working … he wouldn’t want it stiff. It would upset him and when he gets upset, things happen. Take it from me. You don’t need this job.”

“Okay. Your money, your skin.”

“Who’s the best? The very best. It’s worth twenty bucks for the time it’ll save me.”

He pushed the bill across the counter.

“Well,” said Rufe, “truth is, the big action’s dried up and left Lawton. It’s mostly a West Coast thing. But—well, there’s one guy left around here. He don’t work much. But,
I have to say, he’s a goddamn genius. Done it his whole life.”

“What’s his name?”

“Jimmy Ky. He’s a good fella. Born in Saigon. Started in the Orient, where it’s an art. See the spider on my face. Had that done in sixty-five in Tokyo by the great Horimono.” He leaned forward. “See how much lighter it is; them boys got the touch, I must admit. Jimmy Ky studied under Horimono. He’s got the touch himself.
If
he’ll work on you.”

“Oh, he’ll work on this guy. Where’s his place?”

It was Bingo Night.

H
IGH STAKES BINGO
! the sign said, lighting up’ the night sky. The Bingo Palace was the largest and most vivid building in the Comanche Tribal Complex off Highway 65, where an obliging U.S. government had constructed a quartet of sleek structures for people who cared very little for such things.

The parking lot was jammed, and in the windows of the Palace, Bud could see a full house of farmers and city folks bending over their cards while gaudily costumed “squaws” and “braves” walked among them, selling new cards, Cokes, bags of peanuts, and the like.

“Okay, folks,” came a voice booming over the PA that even Bud could hear out in the dark, “we have an I-6? I-6, everybody! And remember: You win on two cards, you win four times the jackpot!”

But Bud turned from that spectacle and instead walked through the dark to a lower building a hundred yards away. He tried not to notice the high, unkempt grass or the beer cans and coke bottles that lay in it, and he tried not to notice the graffiti defacing the nice new buildings.

Comanches. Once dog soldiers, the most feared of the
Plains Indians, a magnificent people, ride a week on pemmican, fight and win a major cavalry engagement against numerically superior and better-equipped foes, then ride another week on pemmican. Now they tended their gambling franchise and watched their customs crumble as their young people were lured away to the cities. Bud shook his head.