Stephen Hunter - Dirty White Boys

Bud almost laughed. Richard! With a big gun like that!

His own gun!

“Richard, boy, it's all over. Put the gun down. You don't want to hurt nobody. Not now,” C.D. was saying.

Richard looked at the gun, almost amazed to find it there.

Bud heard vehicles revving, roaring toward them. A chopper suddenly hovered overhead, throwing out a searchlight beam that lit the three of them and beating up a storm of dust.

Richard blinked.

“I—I—” began Richard.

“There now, Richard, it's all over. You just put that old gun down so nobody gets hurt,” C.D. crooned.

Richard looked up at C.D. and then at Bud. In the light Bud saw huge eyes webbed with red and full of fear, trembling lips, drops of dew on the nose.

“Richard, put the gun down, those boys mean business.

It's all over. Nobody has to get hurt now, not you, not nobody. You were a victim, too. He made you do them things.”

Richard nodded numbly.

“Drop the gun, Richard,” said Bud, suddenly anguished, afraid the troopers would shoot this poor, pitiful child.

Richard took a step toward them, seemed to turn and watch the men from the helicopter racing at them, and turned back to Bud and C.D. He faltered, as though he were losing his grip. C.D. reached out to help him.

Richard started to bend to set the gun down as the troopers surrounded him, and it was fine, it was great, it was the happy ending everybody dreamed about.

But something suddenly came into Richard's eyes, from nowhere.

“Daddy!” he cried, and raised the pistol and fired.

Long after the funeral, which was one of the biggest in the history of the state, long after the newspapers and the television had lost interest, long after people had stopped asking about it, the Ford F250 pulled into the parking lot of a small cemetery in Kiowa county. It was November, the day before Thanksgiving, when Oklahoma turns chilly and ocher and seems somehow drained of its brightness.

The wind snapped through the air and Russ Pewtie, step ping out of the passenger side, pulled his jacket tight around him; when he breathed, ragged plumes of breath leaked from his nostrils and his eyes began to issue tears from the cold. He'd just flown in that morning from a surprisingly more temperate New Jersey.

Beside him, his brother Jeff, who had driven up to Oklahoma City to pick him up, also shivered.

“Damned cold,” said Russ.

“Damned cold,” said Jeff.

Russ was back from his first two months in the East; he hadn't had an easy time of it and had already dropped a course; but he felt better and knew that somehow, he'd make it through. Jeff was looking good.

He'd gotten his grades up and now, a junior with a driver's license, his own inherited truck, he even had a girlfriend, a pretty young woman who was the daughter of a colonel at the fort. He was working out every day after school to get ready for ball in the spring.

The two young men left the truck, which smelled so of their father.

They looked around, shifting a little on their feet to stay warm, but without much luck.

Russ looked at his watch.

“We may as well go on out there,” he said.

“Yeah,” said Jeff.

“Get it over with.”

They stepped between gnarled scrub oaks and through a frail metal gate, and walked among the gravestones on the prairie. There were so many of them. The wind rose and whipped and snapped, and the high grass bent in its force.

Out here: always the wind.

There was no wind like this back in New Jersey, thought Russ. There's no wind like it anywhere.

After some minutes of hunting, they came at last to the stone, which was one of but many in a neighborhood of stones. Like its companions, it was nondescript polished granite, about as austere a symbol of a life as could be imagined, completely without frill or sentimentality.

Russ tried to feel something but he really couldn't. He felt phony, ridiculous, absurd.

He looked down at the marker, which summed up a man's life in a set of years.

1926–1994.

And beneath that, the inscription: A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER.

And beneath that another inscription: HE DID HIS DUTY.

“Poor old bastard,” said Jeff.

“I wonder why he did it,” said Russ.

And below that the name: carl d. henderson.

“He did it because he thought it went with the job,” said their father, rising from the other side of CD."s gravestone, where he'd been alone for some time. And then he said, "Thank you boys for coming. I appreciate it much. Hi, Russ. You're looking great.”

“Thanks Dad, I'm okay. I didn't see your car.”

“I didn't feel like driving today, that little thing with its piddly automatic. Mommy dropped me off. She had to go to pick up the turkey.”

Russ looked at his father and remembered the last time he'd seen him, near death in the hospital. The survivor was a graver man, thin and solemn, his skin still almost gray.

Now and then a faraway look would come over him. The bullet that had gone through C.D. Henderson's aorta had then struck Bud, breaking his clavicle and destroying the nerves in his right arm, then coursing downward to destroy a lung before coming to rest behind his spleen.

Thank God there'd been a doctor on the chopper; he'd taken one look at C.D. and known it was all over, cut Bud's chest open there in the grass and massaged his heart back to life before they medevacked him to Comanche General Shocktrauma where he'd fought the reaper for three months until finally pulling out of it.

“You're looking great. Dad,” lied Russ.

“This goddamn retirement's got me cranky as a mule,” Bud said.

“But I'll get used it. Well, you boys ready for the party?”

“Yes sir,” said Jeff.

Bud pulled out a fresh bottle of I. W. Harper and cracked it open.

Without much ceremony he took a long, smoky swallow. He passed it to Russ and then to Jeff, who each took a gulp.

“Wow,” said Jeff, blinking at the power of the fluid.

“I ever catch you doing that on your own, I'll wale the hide off you!”

Bud said, taking the bottle from Jeff.

Then he turned and poured the rest of the liquor into the ground next to C.D.'s stone.

“The old goat was always trying to git me to drink with him,” Bud said.

“Well, now I finally got around to it. And I brought my boys, too, just like he wanted. This one's on you, old man.”

Then he turned, and looked at his two sons. Russ for once wasn't wearing the habitual scowl of the young intellectual; and Jeff looked a little wobbly for his first taste of hard liquor.

“All right,” he said.

“Let's go home.”

Some time that same week, Richard blinked, and blinked again, as the doors opened and he stepped out of the ambulance onto the sidewalk of Prison Boulevard with his guards. He had a little impulse to shield his eyes, though it was impossible; handcuffs and ankle cuffs bound to an iron belt held his limbs secure.

The wind was chilly, the sky bright. He shivered, and felt phantom aches. He, too, had recovered from his wounds, which were surprisingly minor given the fact that four state troopers had fired at him in almost the same second that he had fired into Henderson and Pewtie.

What was it Lamar had said?

“Ain't nobody knows how to shoot no more"?

Well, another thing Lamar had been right about.

One bullet broke his rib; another passed cleanly through his chest, and two more through the fleshy part of his leg.

He'd known he wasn't going to die. In fact what hurt the most was that one trooper had kicked him in the head as he lay on the ground. He thought they were going to let him bleed to death. But he disappointed them and would not die.