Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [6]
And so on, through his youth. Bud endured several bouts of probation and then served nearly two years on a breaking-and-entering charge, made worse because he was carrying his pistol when arrested. The low-security teenager prison was fenced barely stronger than a poultry yard, but Bud chose to serve his entire term. It didn’t do him much good, though. He might as well have skipped out. Nearly all the anxious psychological counselor had to recommend was that Bud learn to defer immediate gratification and find a hobby. Such as listening to jabber from overseas on a shortwave radio. Bud said, How about shooting rats at the dump with a shotgun pistol? But that didn’t seem to qualify, and not only because shotgun pistols were illegal for some obscure reason. It was more like a mind problem, to be marked down on the counselor’s notepad and held against you if you summed up the wrong answer. Like when the counselor delved into your habits of using a public toilet, such as do you flush with your foot and use your elbow to open the door? If yes, woe unto you. You’re crazy. From now on, all the doors of opportunity will be rigged to slam shut in your face.
After his release, Bud scrabbled for some years. Short-time jobs and larceny. Selling various forms of dope, kind of as a sideline to pumping gas. And then he got a job with the railroad in the capital city. For a time, he actually drew a paycheck every Friday. He told people he was a railroad bull, but his friend Billy was the bull. Bud had been demoted after only a week. He couldn’t be relied upon to kick the asses of hoboes, and not because he was unwilling. It was a matter of prudence. First day on the job, he came up against a big fullback-looking bum who was not the least intimidated by Bud’s nightstick and company badge. Bud immediately panicked and ran away, knowing he was overmatched and about to take a beating. And then, soon after, the thing that lost him his position was going too far with a frail old man who’d been riding the rails since the stock market crash in ’29. Knocking the man down with his stick and then kicking him with railroad boots past the point of consciousness. After that, Bud’s job became more custodial. Pushing a broom, hosing concrete aprons, dumping small containers of garbage into larger containers. His greatest responsibility was using a big Tin Man oil can to lube metal parts that rubbed against each other around the boxcar couplings.
During that strange time of normal employment, he met a pretty young widow with bad judgment and two little children. Nobody who knew Bud considered violence to be his main calling as a criminal. Various forms of theft and violations of substance codes were his specialties. So it was a surprise when Bud married Lily and then soon killed her.
AS A CHILD, Bud was made to attend a church where the preacher spent most of his time at the pulpit talking about Christ’s wounds and Christ’s blood. The message was clear. Blood mattered above all else, the sacred shedding of it. The rest of Christ’s life—his actions, his pithy sayings, his love—became incidental compared to the dark artery offering that covered the globe. Some Sundays the preaching was pitched so fervent and descriptive that little Bud couldn’t shake slaughterhouse images out of his mind until the next morning. Which