Black Light

by Stephen Hunter

  “Reginald Gerard Fuller, the state of Arkansas, in full accordance with the laws thereof, finds you guilty of murder in the first degree and sentences you to death this sixth, uh, seventh, day of October 1957. Reggie Gerard Fuller, do you have any last words?”

  It was silent, though the mike caught Reggie’s ragged breathing. Then he took a deep breath and spoke through sobs: “Sir, I apologize for wetting myself. Please don’t tell nobody I peed my pants. And I am sorry for Mr. George if I got pee on him as he always done treated me nice.”

  He broke down, losing his words in a string of choking sobs. But then he breathed deeply, fighting the anguish. A dribble of snot ran out his nose, irritating his lips, but he could not do a thing. He looked out to the men behind the window. He took another deep breath: “And I miss my mama and my daddy and love them very much. I didn’t kill Shirelle. God bless all the people who was nice to me and I hope someday somebody be able to tell why this had to happen.”

  “Are you done, Reggie?”

  “Yes sir. I am ready for Jesus.”

  “Jesus probably ain’t ready for him,” said a man next to Sam in the dark.

  The warden leaned over him, unsnapping something in the top of the beanie, and a blank mask unfurled, sealing off Reggie’s features.

  The warden left the chamber. Reggie sat still in the chair and for a second there was no change. Sam almost thought that—but no, the first charge hit him.

  From his experiences, Sam knew it was a cliche of the movies that the lights dim in prison when an electrocution takes place: the chair and the prison lighting systems draw their power from separate generators. What happens is that witnesses involuntarily flinch, for to watch the cold extermination of a man, no matter how evil, is not an easy thing; and in memory, they recall the diminution of illumination and ascribe it to a power drain. But Sam didn’t flinch or look away and had no illusion of flickering lights; he watched the whole thing, because that was his duty. He represented Shirelle and he hoped that by witnessing he was in some way liberating her soul from the agony of her death.

  Reggie stiffened against the restraining straps as two thousand volts hit him. The shot lasted over thirty seconds. A vein on his neck bulged. He fought like a bull. His hands seized up into fists which held so tight Sam thought they’d explode. He seemed to pivot in the chair, just a shade, as if he were daintily trying to sidestep his fate. A small wisp of smoke rose from his skull and another from one of his wrists. His head lolled forward, but then somehow picked itself up again. He coughed and a spasm of vomit, mostly liquid, spurted out from under the mask to cling in globules to his naked chest. Huge crescents of perspiration blossomed moonlike under his arms.

  “Another,” said the warden into the phone.

  The second surge bucked through Reggie but beat him down. He was limp by second 10, but the executioner held the circuit closed for another twenty, and by the small vibration of Reggie’s now limp fingers could Sam tell that he was riding the bolt still. But then it ceased.

  The odor of electrification reached Sam when the warden, two guards and a doctor entered the chamber. It wasn’t the smell of burned meat or hair, but rather connected with Sam’s memories of Christmas, when he’d given various of his boys Lionel train sets and usually set them up and ran them for a bit, until the kids tired of them: but they had an odd, metallic odor to them, heavy and pungent at once.

  Sam flashed back from Christmas: in the room the doctor took out a stethoscope and pressed its cup to Reggie’s chest, bare because the buttons had been ripped off his shirt. He stood and shook his head. The four retreated so that the executioner could hit Reggie again. It took five charges before the heart finally stopped beating.

  “That boy just didn’t want to die,” said somebody.

  The last official document in the file was the certificate of execution, meant to close the file out, mark it as justice delivered. Sam stared at it numbly.

  Reggie, boy, why did you do it?

  It was one of the great mysteries of the human heart, why one person will up and kill another. Sometimes it’s money, sometimes sex, sometimes anger, sometimes simple meanness. Sam had studied it for most of his life and didn’t know, not really. In this one, it seemed so simple: He figured Reggie must have picked the girl up after the church meeting and asked her for a kiss. She gave him the kiss. A young buck, a kiss, maybe he’d had a bit to drink at an Oklahoma Nigra crib, though no evidence as such was ever produced, and off he went. The more she fought, the more he wanted it. Finally, he did it and once he did it he was afraid she’d tell. So he drove her out Route 71 and smashed her over the head with a rock, just not noticing she was ripping at his shirt while he was smashing her. That simple. Usually when a Negro killed a Negro in those days, nobody much cared. Under usual circumstances he would have gotten away with it. It just happened to be Earl’s last case and that made it important to white people like himself, nothing else.

  The remaining documents in the file were the letters crazy Mrs. Fuller had written him until her death. They arrived, sometimes three and four a week, as the woman fought so desperately for her son’s life before a brain aneurysm killed her. He had stopped reading them quite early and evidently a forgotten secretary along the line—he could never remember his secretaries’ names—had just taken to dumping them unopened in the file. Fool woman! What was the point? If she were here and he could remember her name, he’d yell at her, like he did all his secretaries, which is why he had so damned many of them over the years! Most hardly lasted a year.

  Sam looked at the letters. Now they seemed strange to him. He was on his knees in his basement looking through an old file. Why? He couldn’t remember. Goddamn, it was happening again!

  He looked at the file name. Parker. Parker. Oh, yes, the girl, Reggie, now it came back. Earl’s last case.

  All the letters from Reggie’s mama, on their pink stationery. But why was one of them on blue stationery? Hmmmm? He plucked it from the stack, saw that it was in different handwriting. He had no memory of ever seeing it before. The date was September 5, 1957.

  He turned it over and looked at the signature.

  Lucille Parker.

  It took him a second to realize that it was the dead girl’s mama.

  Thirty-nine years late, he opened the letter at last and started to read.

  18

  So who would have moved your father’s body?” asked Russ.

  “Stupid question,” said Bob.

  He stood up. They were bunked in Bob’s old trailer on land he still owned seven miles out of Blue Eye on U.S. 270, abutting Black Fork Mountain. In the years since he’d left, the souvenir hunters had taken their toll and so had the graffiti writers, but his keys still opened the padlocks. In just a little time they’d restored the place to livability, though of course there was no phone and no electricity. But a fire kept the water hot and Coleman lanterns kept the place lit at night. It was a hell of a lot better than camping and a hell of a lot cheaper than staying in the Days Inn.

  It was dark outside and the drive back from the cemetery was bleak and silent. Bob wasn’t talking. He’d paid the laborers, and the doctor said he’d bill him for expenses but not for professional services. They’d stopped at a diner and eaten and now they were back.

  “Why is it stupid?” Russ asked.

  “Don’t they teach you nothing at that fancy university? I thought you were supposed to be smart.”

  “I didn’t say I was smart,” said Russ. “I said I wanted to be a writer. Different things.”

  “I guess so. You can’t ask who until you first find out if, and then how. Who don’t have no meaning until you have figured out that there was a who. Got it?”

  “Well—”

  “Well, yourself. Think about it. How could it have happened?”

  “Could the ground have shifted in some way?”

  “No. The earth doesn’t work like that. I thought you grew up in Oklahoma, not New York City.”

 
; “I did, but not on a farm. Anyway, they could have come at night and made an exchange with another body somewhere in the cemetery and—”

  Russ paused.

  “You saw for yourself how hard it was to excavate a body,” said Bob. “It took three strong men the best part of a morning to uncover one. We didn’t even get to the moving. It would involve block and tackles, a hearse or some kind of cart or something. Then you need the same thing with the other body. Then you got to patch up all that dirt so nobody would notice. Couldn’t get all that done in a single night. Too much to do. So they’d have to do it in the day, under some kind of legal guise. But that wouldn’t do ’em no good neither. You’d have to have lawyers, you’d have to concoct some kind of legal justification, it would end up doing exactly what maybe it was trying to avoid, and that is draw a lot of attention to itself.”

  Russ nodded.

  “So what do you do?” asked Bob. “Think, son. Either come up with it or call that Princeton place and get back the half million or so your poor dad spent to get you educated.”

  “He didn’t spend a cent,” said Russ.

  “Oh, that’s right, I forgot your dad was such a bastard. Anyhow, think. Think!”

  “I can’t—”

  It came from nowhere. Hooray, humiliation momentarily avoided!

  “The stones. They move the gravestones! Two men could do it in a few hours under the dark of night. No problem. Especially since the original records have long since disappeared and whenever they did it, no one was there to give a damn.”

  “Not bad,” said Bob. “But you are ahead of yourself. Maybe some night in the sixties a bunch of high school kids got drunk and went gravestone tipping. And maybe they was caught and maybe some judge made ’em replant the stones. But they were kids, they didn’t give two shits. So they just stuck ’em in any which way. So what does that leave us?”

  “Fucked,” said Russ.

  “Yes, it does. On the other hand—well, well, lookie here.”

  Russ saw headlight beams sweep across the windows and heard the car engine.

  Bob opened the door.

  “Howdy, Deputy,” he called. “Come on in.”

  He stepped back and Duane Peck entered. Without his sunglasses, his eyes were small and dark.

  “Mr. Swagger, I just wanted to tell you something. Remember I told you I’d see about getting the sheriff’s records?”

  “Why sure, Duane. You want a cup of coffee? Russ, put some coffee on.”

  “No, no,” said Duane, then paused quickly to look around and up and down the room. “I’m on duty, got some patrol patterns to run. I just wanted to say they moved them records over to the courthouse basement. That’s where most of the municipal records was stored. You know, it burned down in 1994.”

  “Damn!” said Bob. “I knew the court records were lost but I was hoping maybe the sheriff’s records were different. Damn!”

  “I’m real sorry.”

  “Duane, don’t you fret on it. So far we got pretty much a big zero. With the body lost and no cemetery records, the whole damn thing is falling apart on us. We just may have to hang it up.”

  “Okay, I just wanted to tell y’all.”

  He gave each man a hearty smile, then backed out.

  They waited until they heard the car pull out.

  “Now, where were we?” Bob asked.

  “You were saying that if it was kids who messed up the tombstones we were screwed. On the other hand …”

  “On the other hand, if just for the hell of it we figure someone did this on purpose, then don’t it follow only two tombstones were exchanged?”

  “Yes.”

  “And we know the wrong one belonged to a twenty-five-year-old fellow killed in the Civil War?”

  “I got it, I got it. We try and find records—in the courthouse, dammit, burned again, no, no, the historical society—on deaths in Polk County during the Civil War. Maybe we can find the names of the young men who fit that category. That would cut way down on the possible alternative grave sites. But what—excavate ten or twenty of them? I don’t—”

  But Bob was fishing through the familiar manila folder of clippings and soon enough produced the front page of the Southwest Times Record, July 26, 1955.

  HERO TROOPER BURIED, it read.

  Under a spreading elm, on rolling fields filled with trees, a group of mourners stood, somber people putting a good man into the ground.

  “I don’t—” Russ said. “The trees are all gone. You couldn’t get much out of that picture. It’s just a field.”

  “The trees are gone but the land’s the same. Look at the rolls in the earth, the orientation to the sun, the mountains in the distance. I’m betting I can read the land from the photo and pretty much triangulate on that part of the graveyard. We link that with a name and bingo.”

  “You’re not thinking of giving up?” said Russ.

  Swagger fixed him with the sniper’s glare.

  “Not hardly,” he said.

  Duane Peck drove away from Swagger’s, then, a mile or so down, pulled over. He snatched the little cellular folder from the glove compartment and pushed a button.

  When the phone beeped, he made his report.

  “Swagger and the kid seem stuck. They got nowhere to go ’cause they couldn’t find no body. I went over to see ’em tonight and they were both down in the dumps. I think they may be moving out or giving up. So far they have nothing.

  “Also, I went over to Sam Vincent’s. I knocked on the door and he wasn’t there. So I went around back and looked into his basement. Goddamn, he was sitting there, reading some old file. Couldn’t tell what it was but I seen a picture on the floor of some nigger gal. I knocked and knocked. I yelled, I did everything. That old goat’s losing it big-time. Wherever he was, he sure as hell wasn’t on this earth. Didn’t even hear me, though I was but ten feet away. Maybe he’s going deaf.”

  He hung up and started to drive home. But in ten minutes the phone rang. He picked it up.

  “Duane?”

  “Yes sir?”

  “Duane, you keep an eye on Sam Vincent. He may be old but he’s sharp.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “You may have to break in and find out what file, do you see?”

  “Yes sir,” said Duane.

  Bob stood in the sun in the field of the dead. Around him, neat as Chiclets in a child’s game, the gravestones fell away in rows. So many dead, from so many American wars.

  He took a look at the picture. In the light it seemed to fall apart on him. He’d stopped that morning at a photography shop to inquire about a more useful enlargement but the man pointed out that without the original negative, he’d simply be enlarging the dots of which the photograph was composed in the old hot-metal rotogravure technology: the bigger the photo, the bigger and farther apart would be the dots. It was at its clearest as it was in the paper.

  Russ had a thought about computer enhancement and thought they could FedEx it back to Oklahoma City, where a friend on the staff of the Oklahoman might be able to do more with it. But Bob said no, that would take too much time and he wasn’t letting it out of his hands, so he would make do with what he had. So he sent Russ to the historical society in search of names that might link up with Bob’s efforts in the boneyard.

  He turned to the four compass directions, hoping to identify the mountain silhouette in the background, but it was difficult to make out, because only fragments of the line could be seen in the photo and even then he wasn’t sure that it was mountain or some imperfection in the photographic process. And he didn’t want to look too hard at the photo: the more he looked at it, the more the details disappeared among the dots. It was like a magic photo: it was only potent in small glimpses. To study it was to destroy it.

  He looked up from the picture to the stones.

  Martin.

  Feamster.

  O’Brian.

  Lotsky.

  Kummler.

  Kids’ names. Lost bo
ys, what did it earn, what did it matter? Why? A darkness settled over him. He could remember still the name of the boys in his first platoon, 1965, or at least the thirteen out of the twenty-six that didn’t make it back. And the five that lost limbs or the ability to walk. And the one that went into the nuthouse. And the one who shot himself in the foot. That left seven who made it home exactly as they’d gone, or some reasonable facsimile thereof. Those names he could not remember at all.

  He looked about: so many of them, a starry skyful of them. Too many of them. Maybe coming to this place by himself in the middle of the morning was a mistake. He yearned to talk to Julie or to YKN4, to someone human and whole and normal. Get me off this frozen star, he thought, let me back in the world.

  Bensen.

  Forbes.

  Klusewski.

  Obermeyer.

  As he moved, his perspective shifted and it seemed almost that the parade of white gravestones was itself moving. He thought of old Roman armies, phalanxes they called them, which moved in steady company formations against hordes of savages, calm, determined, believing in the unit concept and the spirit of the legion. That’s what it felt like: moving through phalanxes of the dead, who stared at a living man and wanted to know: Why aren’t you among us? Why are you special?

  Gunning.

  Abramowicz.

  Benjamin.

  Luftman.

  Because I was lucky, he answered. Why did a line come at him? It was some poetry thing he’d read years back when he tried to understand what a war was and read every goddamn thing on it there was: the orient of thick and fast.

  That’s what it was too: an orient of thick and fast, a total world where one damn thing after another happened, and maybe you got out and maybe you didn’t, and not much of it had to do with skill. His daddy, now maybe there was a man with skill. His daddy was a hero. His daddy killed the Japanese on Iwo Jima and Tarawa and on Saipan. His daddy must have killed 200 men. He himself had killed 341, though the official fiction read 87. So much death, their boys and our boys, marines and Japs, marines and gooks or slopes or whatever they called them back then. He shuddered. So many men who could have had children or written poems or become doctors.