Dirty White Boys by Stephen Hunter

you know, they always go off, do the goddamndest things.”
    “But not you, Willard. You do good work.”
    “Yes sir.”
    “Now, Willard. You got any money?”
    “Sir, I only got ’bout ten dollars on me, cash. And I got lots of quarters. Maybe five hundred dollars in quarters and loose change.”
    “Ah,” said Lamar, calculating. “What about a bank-card? You got a bankcard, Willard?”
    “No sir. I only make fourteen thousand dollars a year. I don’t have enough money for no bankcard.”
    “Do you have any money at your house?”
    “Please, sir, don’t go to my house. I got two little girls. Oh, Jesus, why is this happening?”
    It was as if Willard’s need to know
why
finally exasperated Lamar beyond endurance. He felt no man had the right to ask such elemental questions of him.
    “Here’s why, Willard. You see what it says here?”
    He held out his big right fist, the one that said F U C K .
    Willard nodded.
    “Yes, you do.”
    And he held out his big left fist.
    Y O U ! it said.
    The fear radiated from Willard’s eyes like heat. Lamar liked that in a man.
    “Do you get it, Willard? Do it make sense now?”
    Desperately, Willard nodded.
    “Yes.
Now
it makes sense. Odell, break his goddamned thumb.”
    Odell cakey, cakey good. Sweet
.
Cakey like mama, sweet
.
    Cakey, all cakey in whole wurl. Lookie cakey! Lookie!
Truck full cakey. Cakey white, cakey good brown, cakey milklike cakey
.
    Mar like loud up sudden “Odell break his goddamned thumb.”
    Hurty man Odell do. Hurty bad hurt hurt. Thumb no go
.
Thumb
no go! Thumb no go!
    Thumb go like pop!
    Pop go thumb
.
    Now me cakey Mar. Mar like now you go cakey
.
    Willard screamed while Odell broke his thumb. He screamed so loud it irritated Lamar, who crawled forward, below eye level, to talk to Richard.
    “How you holding up, Richard?”
    “Do you have to hurt him so?” Richard asked.
    “Hurt him? Hell, you ain’t seen a thing, Richard, in your short life if you think that’s hurting.” Lamar gave a little chuckle at the stupidity of Richard’s observation.
    “Anyway,” he continued after a pause, “I think you’ll be wanting to hit the turnoff up ahead, into Ada, I do believe. Then we look for Davis Street and when we head down, you give me a call.”
    “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 Odell kept him captured with a single immense hand while eating Twinkies with the other.
    The wrist? The wrist? Now what the flick?
    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. “Yessir, you sure can talk. You can talk and you can draw! You are a goddamned interesting young man, ain’t he, Odell?”
    “Awoooooah,” said Odell 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 somethingabout 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