Black Light

by Stephen Hunter

  “This ain’t no interview. I don’t give interviews. What’s done is done and it’s mine, not for nobody else.”

  “I swear to you, I have no interest in 1992.”

  “And I ain’t doing no I’m-such-a-hero books. No Nam stuff. That’s over and done and best forgotten too. Let the dead lie in peace.”

  “It’s not about Vietnam. I didn’t come about Vietnam. But I did come about the dead.”

  They faced each other for a long moment. Twilight. The sun eased behind the mountains, leaving an empty world of gray light and silence. The dead. Let them alone, please. What good does it do, what good can it do? Why would this boy come before him, claiming to represent the dead. He knew so many of the dead too.

  “So, goddammit, spit it out. A book? You do want to write a book.”

  “I do want to write a book, yes. And yes, it’s about a great American hero and yes, he’s from Blue Eye, Arkansas, and yes, he’s the kind of man they don’t make anymore.”

  “No books,” said Bob.

  “Well, let me go on just a bit,” the boy said. “The great American hero is named—was named—Earl Swagger. He won the Medal of Honor on Iwo Jima, 22 February 1945, D plus two. He went home to America, where he became a state trooper in Arkansas. On July 23, 1955, he shot it out with two armed robbers named Jimmy and Bub Pye. He killed them both.”

  Bob looked hard at the boy.

  “And they killed him too. Your father. I want to do a book about your father.”

  4

  Earl assigned Lem to stay with the body until the state detectives and the county coroner arrived. He got back to the cruiser and noticed Jed and Lum Posey leaning on Pop Dwyer’s hood, the three of them hooting like old drunks. But when they felt his hard glare, they dried up fast. Jed’s face had swollen badly; it looked as if he’d swallowed a grapefruit, yellow and rotten. But Jed was hard mountain trash; you could bang on him for hours without really breaking anything.

  “You boys stay here till the detectives come. Pop, them dogs cool?”

  “Cool as they can get in this weather, Mr. Earl,” said Pop.

  “Good. You stay on station now, you hear.”

  “I do,” said Pop.

  Earl got into his cruiser, turned over the engine and flicked on the radio. The air was full of traffic as the state mobilized for the manhunt, led by the state police, all 111 officers of them, who would inherit responsibility for this job. He listened for a bit in disbelief, as if in disbelieving he could make it go away. But it would not go away.

  “Ah, Dispatch, this is Car Two Niner, ah, we are now in blockade at 226 and I got two units arching down between 226 and 271, you got that, Dispatch?”

  “Roger, Two Nine, we got the state Piper Cub working your area, trying to cover them back roads. He’s on another frequency, but if we get anything, we’ll git to you.”

  “Got it, Dispatch, I’m holding here. Got three units, more coming in.”

  “Wally, the colonel says you might want to send one of your units over toward Lavca. We got good military help out of Chaffee and I think they’re goin’ pitch in some airborne stuff.”

  “Dispatch, I got a unit headed to Lavca.”

  “Good work, and over, Two Niner.”

  Earl recognized Two Niner as Bill Cole, a lieutenant in the Logan County barrack. Dispatch was talking for Major Don Benteen, second-in-command; Colonel Evers must have been calling the shots from somewhere in Little Rock, and was presumably on his way over to take area command.

  Jimmy, you goddamned little fool, he thought with sudden passionate bitterness.

  Where did we go wrong on you? What got into you, boy? How’d you turn out this way?

  There were no answers, as there never had been for Jimmy Pye. Earl shook his head. He’d been as guilty as anybody of telling Jimmy Pye that it was okay. He’d always been there for the kid, easing the fall even as he recognized the remoteness in Jimmy and denied it, even as he began to see how different Jimmy was from poor old Lannie Pye.

  He thought of Bub Pye, Jimmy’s cousin, a poor dim boy who no one ever thought would amount to much, so dreary in comparison to Jimmy. Earl couldn’t even bring Bub’s face up out of memory, even though he’d seen him just yesterday. There was something forgettable about Bub. What would happen to him? Bub had been a carpenter’s apprentice, but he just couldn’t get the hang of things, and they’d let him go. He’d never found another job. He was a decent boy but without much in the way of prospects: but he was no criminal. That goddamned Jimmy had made him a criminal.

  Darkness crept into Earl’s mind. This poor dead colored child, Jimmy Pye, all in one goddamn day!

  It was the worst day he’d had since Iwo Jima.

  Reluctantly, he picked up the microphone and pushed the send button.

  “Dispatch, this is Car One Four, I am ten-eight.”

  “Earl, where you been?” It was the major, taking over for Dispatch.

  “Been at that crime scene, Major, you copy and send units?”

  “Negative, One Four. Earl, you got to let that nigger gal cool till we catch up with Jimmy Pye. I seen the record, he’s a Polk County boy, and you were his last A-O.”

  “I know the family,” said Earl.

  “Okay, good.”

  “You want me on roadblock or sweeps, Major?”

  “Negative, One Four. You go cover the family. Maybe he’ll make some contact with them. Don’t he have a wife, that’s what the records say.”

  “Married her a week before he done his jail time,” said Earl.

  “You check on her, then, Earl. You cover her and any other kin he might have there in Polk. You need help, you wire up with the sheriff’s boys.”

  “Got you, Major. But when am I going to see that forensics team? I want them out here on the crime scene fast as possible.”

  “Maybe by the late afternoon, Earl. Them boys got lots of work still to do at the Fort Smith IGA. It’s a bloodbath. He shot two boys in the office, a nigger outside, and he popped a city officer in a car. He’s bad news, Earl.”

  Earl nodded bitterly, checking his Bulova.

  Earl drove through Blue Eye’s Colored Town, on the west side, under the bulk of Rich Mountain. It was small and scabby; why couldn’t these lost people pick up their garbage, mow their lawns, tend their gardens? Everywhere he looked, he saw signs of decay and lassitude and disconnection from decent living. The children, barefoot and in rags, lolled on the porches of the shanties, staring at him with big eyes and slack faces. They wore ragamuffin clothes and their eyes were huge, unknowable pools as they stared at him, though when he rounded a corner and caught them unawares, he was able to see them playing games like jump rope and hide-and-seek with their natural exuberance; but when they saw the big black and white car and the white man in the Stetson with the harsh eyes, they immediately cooled way down and met him with those empty faces.

  In time, he passed the most impressive building in Colored Town, Fuller’s Funeral Parlor, an old mansion from the days when white people lived in this end of town, nestled under elm trees; and a little farther down, the second most impressive building, a church, white clapboard; and then, finally, down a tree-shaded street where the small Negro middle class lived.

  The Parker house was the third on the right, also clapboard, with a porch and a trellis hung with bright wisteria, tiny but neat and well tended. Mrs. Parker led the choir in the church; her husband, Ray, was a clerk for the gas company, the only colored man employed there.

  Earl was both glad and sick to see no other police vehicles; that meant he could talk alone to the Parkers without the presence of a lot of bulky white men with badges and guns, which would quiet them down and scare them or at the least drive them into the guarded conditions Negroes affected in the presence of a lot of white people; but it also meant he would have to give them the news himself. Maybe he should have called that minister.

  He parked, aware of eyes upon him. The girl’s mother stood on the porch. Her skin see
med not brown at all, but ashen; her features were drawn up as if she’d been stricken and she breathed heavily.

  He took off his hat as he approached.

  “Mrs. Parker?”

  “Did—did you find my girl?”

  “Mrs. Parker, you’d best sit down, now. You sit down, maybe you’d let me call the minister to come over.”

  “Mr. Earl, what is it, please? Just tell me. Oh, Lord, just tell me.”

  “Ma’am, I’m sorry. Your daughter has passed. Someone found a reason to kill her. We found her off the road, twelve miles out of town, ma’am.”

  “Oh, Lord,” said the woman. “Oh, Lord, Lord, Lord. Oh, why do he test me like that? He knows I love him. Lord, I love you, Lord. Amen, I loves you.”

  She began to sob, and rocked back and forth in the chair. It was said commonly and Earl half believed, because he’d never tested it, that Negroes didn’t feel grief or pain like white folks; that there was something undeveloped about their systems. But not here: there was nothing Negro in it at all. Mrs. Parker let the power of the news have its terrible way with her. He recalled seeing men give in to grief like this in the Pacific, just letting it roar out and over them. He thought of his own son, and how he’d feel if he lost that little boy. He wanted to touch the woman, comfort her somehow, but it never worked when people with different skin touched.

  “I’m so sorry, ma’am.”

  “Oh, Lord,” she said.

  He ducked into the house, which was dark and neat. He found the phone and picked it up.

  “Operator.”

  “Betty, this is Earl Swagger.”

  “Earl, what you doin’ in Niggertown? That’s Mrs. Parker’s line.”

  “They got some trouble. You connect me to Reverend Hairston.”

  Betty put him through and he told the minister, who said he’d call Mrs. Parker’s sister and her aunt and be over in minutes to take charge. Earl went back out onto the porch, where the woman still sat.

  “How did my daughter die, Mr. Earl?”

  “It wasn’t very pretty. Looks to me like someone choked or beat her. I don’t think she suffered long.”

  “Was she—you know, did he—”

  “I’m afraid he did, ma’am. You know, these animals get heated up, they just can’t control themselves.”

  “Oh, Lord,” said Mrs. Parker. “He done took ever last thing from us. Every last thing.”

  “Your baby is in heaven where it don’t hurt no more,” Earl said. “Tomorrow, there’ll be some policemen to talk to you. They’ll want to know what time she left, who she was with, who her friends were.”

  She looked at him.

  “Mr. Earl, they don’t care about no Negro girl. They won’t ask a thing. It don’t matter to them.”

  Earl said nothing. As far as the Blue Eye Sheriff’s Department went, she was probably right.

  “Well, ma’am, since this happened outside of town, the state police detectives will have to work it. And I’ll make sure the work gets done. We’ll catch whoever done it, you understand? I swear to you, as I live and breathe, we will solve it.”

  “Oh, Lord,” the woman said again, knitting a tissue up against her ruined face.

  “Mrs. Parker, I know it’s hard now, but I want you to answer me two, maybe three things to get this all started. You concentrate on answering me and helping your baby girl.”

  She said nothing.

  “Do the initials RGF mean anything to you?”

  “No sir.”

  “Okay. Now exactly when did she leave and where was she going?”

  “It was Tuesday night, four nights ago. She went to church meeting, that’s all. She don’t never come back.”

  “You sure she made it?”

  “The Reverend say she was there.”

  “What kind of meeting was this?”

  The woman looked at him, and Earl, who had an instinct for such things, thought he picked up a little something here.

  “Just a meeting. You know, Mr. Earl, a church meeting. For the Lord.”

  He wrote down, “Meeting? What kind? Who there?”

  “Then she left okay?”

  “Yes sir. And come on walking home.”

  Earl looked down the street. It was but two blocks to the church. Lord, she’d been picked up on this very street!

  “Mr. Earl, where is my baby now? She ain’t still there, is she?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I’m afraid she is. We have to wait for the detectives to come out from Fort Smith. Seems we had another crime today. A robbery, some folks killed. A bad boy from right around here did the shooting, they say.”

  “Lord, Lord,” said the woman.

  He was just about to ask her about friends when the Reverend Hairston pulled up in his old car.

  “Oh, Sister Lucille,” he keened, “oh, Jesus help us, Jesus help us.”

  The Reverend swept toward her and so did four or five large-bosomed, distraught Negro women, and Earl stepped to one side as the mourning began in earnest.

  As the full weight of the melancholy fell across him, Earl drove out west of town on Route 8 toward Nunley, where the land was hilly pasturage, green and lovely. This way took him past Boss Harry Etheridge’s summer home, Mountaintop, and the two stone posts that supported the gray wrought-iron gate were testimony to Boss Harry’s importance in the world and how he had risen in Washington in his many terms in the House. Earl could see the road switchbacking its way up the hill to Boss Harry’s compound, which in fact was on the other side of the hill. But all was quiet; Boss Harry had returned to Washington or possibly to his mansion in Fort Smith and there was no sign of habitation on the other side of the fence.

  Earl caught up with the news on the radio network: just call-ins from roadblocks but nothing to report, no sightings of Jimmy and Bub.

  “Dispatch,” he finally called in, “this is One Four, am ten-seventy-six out to the Pye place in east Polk.”

  “Ten-four, Car One Four.”

  “Ah, Dispatch, any word yet on when that forensics team going to arrive at my ten-thirty-nine on Route 71?”

  “Ah, I think they done finished up there in Fort Smith now and will ten-seventy-seven around six. They a little tired. A busy day.”

  “Ain’t that the truth. You call me, Dispatch, if y’all nab Jimmy, ’cause I want to get back to my ten-thirty-nine.”

  “Okay, Earl. Good luck.”

  “Ten-four and out, Dispatch.”

  Nunley was just a few stores and Mike Logan’s sawmill off the road, but beyond it was the Longacre place. He turned left, passed the big house and took a dirt road back through the pastures where the biggest beef cattle herd in West Arkansas grazed, fattening up for the slaughter just four months ahead. The cottage, which Mrs. Longacre had built for her son and daughter-in-law who had died in a car accident in New Orleans and for that reason had never moved into, was a gingerbread romantic fantasy, a mother’s dream of a wonderful site for her beloved son and his wife to live while he was prepared to take over the family properties. But it was not to be.

  Now before it was a sheriff’s car and the lady’s Cadillac. A deputy named Buddy Till leaned on the fender.

  “Howdy, Earl.”

  “Buddy. You’re a little out of your territory, ain’t you?”

  “Sheriff thought it’d be a good idee to keep a lookout case Jimmy made it all this way back. If he comes, by God, I’ll be ready.” He jacked a thumb toward his backseat and Earl looked through the glass to recognize his old pal from the war, a Thompson submachine gun. This one wasn’t the military variant, however; it sported a circular fifty-round drum and a vertical foregrip underneath the finned, compensated barrel, just like Al Capone’s.

  “You scare me sometimes, Buddy,” said Earl. “If Jimmy makes it through fifty roadblocks and seventy miles, I know he’ll come in easy. Why don’t you put that thing in the trunk, before you hurt somebody with it?”

  “Hell, Earl, ever since you won that goddamn medal, you think everybody e
lse is common and you can boss ’em around.”

  Earl never mentioned the medal and it irritated him when it was brought up to him. But he controlled the flare of anger he felt and spoke forcefully in his raspy, powerful voice.

  “I done enough work with them guns in the war to know they ain’t so easy to run smooth. They jump all over the damn place. I don’t want to see you hurting anybody. And you don’t want that. Now put it in the trunk and move a spell on down the road. If Sheriff Jacks asks why, you tell him I told you so.”

  Petulantly, Buddy did what he was ordered.

  Earl climbed the porch and knocked once.

  Connie herself answered.

  “Earl, thank God.”

  “Hello, Miss Connie,” he said. Connie Longacre originally came from Baltimore; she’d met Rance Longacre in the East, married him and come down and made Polk County and its biggest cattle spread her home. She and Rance lived the life of maharajas out here on the most beautiful spread in all Polk County, until Boss Harry bought the mountain some years back. But Connie Longacre never quite escaped death, which dogged her like a little black mutt. Rance died at forty-eight, and just last year her only child, Stephen, had died at twenty-four along with his pregnant wife. So much death: but the woman, in her fifties, was still beautiful, in a proud eastern way that no one in Polk County could ever quite define.

  “You made that awful troglodyte go away?”

  Earl wasn’t sure what “troglodyte” meant, but he got the gist of it.

  “Yes, ma’am. He’s set up down the road now. How’s Edie?”

  “Oh,” her voice trailed off. “Upset.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “Earl, what on earth happened?”

  “Miss Connie, I cain’t say. Jimmy, he—oh, Jimmy, you cain’t figure Jimmy out, what got to him.”

  “I was never a great Jimmy believer, Earl. I’m old enough to look behind a pretty face.”

  “He never had no father.”

  “Yes, I know, Earl, but everyone always used that to excuse Jimmy. Lots of boys had no father and turned out fine.”