Black Light

by Stephen Hunter

  “Yes sir.”

  “Off the record?”

  “Hell yes, maybe you could just point us in the right direction.”

  “You in town?”

  “I’m actually home in Arkansas. Eight hours away maybe. Could drive up tonight.”

  “Get here tomorrow morning. Let me see. Hell, I have a meeting with Sales. Oh, fuck, I’ll shift it. Jean, call Sales, tell them we’ll have the meeting tomorrow afternoon!”

  “That’s it,” said Bob. The general gave him an address.

  “See you tomorrow.”

  Bob hung up.

  “Let’s go.”

  “Now?”

  “I ain’t getting any younger.”

  Some nights it was good and other nights it was beyond good, into some kind of great. Tonight was great. When he was done and when she had given him the ritual compliments, he rolled over and went downstairs. The huge house on Cliff Drive was more or less quiet except for the shiftings of his sleeping children. The light snapped off and she went to sleep. He poured himself a glass of Jim Beam, walked out on the patio and saw, far below, the winking runway lights of the airfield. He took a sip of the whiskey and enjoyed for just a second the illusion that everything was fine in his empire.

  Then the beeper in his bathrobe pocket began to vibrate. Red checked the number and saw that it wasn’t goddamned Duane Peck at all but instead the number of Jorge de la Rivera’s phone. Quickly he dialed.

  “So?”

  “Sir, ain’t got nothing. Goddamn been up, down and around this place. Left a man at his trailer, just picked him up, ain’t seen nothing all day. Maybe they gone.”

  Red thought a bit.

  “You want us to book time in a hotel, sir?”

  “No, no, that would look odd, ten men in three cars and a truck pulling into a Holiday Inn all at once. No, head back up here, get back to the farmhouse. What, by the parkway that’s only an hour.”

  “Yes sir. We hunt again tomorrow?”

  “Ah, let’s wait on that. Get ’em some good sleep. No fucking around. When we need ’em, we’ll need ’em fresh and fast.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Red waited a second, then called Duane Peck’s number.

  “Hello? Who is …”

  “Who do you think this is?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m outside the old man’s house, just like you said. He did the craziest things today. I swear, this old man’s lost it. He—”

  “Make a report after I’m off the phone. Listen, Duane, tomorrow, first thing, you go in uniform to every motel, every restaurant, every gas station, every camp store there around Blue Eye and you see if anyone’s seen Swagger and the boy. They’ve disappeared. We have to find them, fast.”

  “Yes sir. Instead of the old man?”

  “For now, yes. Then you call me. You get something, you call me immediately, you understand?”

  “Yes sir.”

  Red hung up, finished the bourbon and went to bed in a foul mood.

  22

  Sam woke in a fury, but he couldn’t remember about what.

  His anger, unmoored, floated about blackly in his mind, looking for a target.

  “Mabel!” he screamed. “Where’s my goddamned coffee?”

  Then he remembered that Mabel had been his secretary in 1967, for seven months, before she quit and went off to have a nice, quiet nervous breakdown. He thought she’d died sometime in the eighties, but he wasn’t sure.

  Mabel’s untimely death did, however, mean one thing: no coffee. So he got up, struggled to find his glasses—nope, they hadn’t taken them yet—and straggled through the house until he found the kitchen. Somehow he got some coffee going; some things a man never forgets. The coffee perking, he bumbled back to his room, got himself showered and dressed, though he had to wear a white sock and a blue sock, and headed back for the coffee.

  Fortunately, the mail had come. Unfortunately, it was from 1957. He struggled to put two and two together for a while, unable to comprehend why this letter was lying out here on the dining room table, blue, in neat, precise womanly penmanship. He looked at the signature. Lucille Parker. Who the hell was Lucille Parker?

  Then, of course, he had it: it blasted into his mind.

  “Goddamn woman!” he bellowed. “Goddamned woman!”

  He grabbed his car keys, there on the vestibule right next to his meerschaum pipe and his sunglasses and—

  His meerschaum pipe!

  Where the hell did that come from?

  Anyhow, he grabbed it and raced out to his Cadillac in the garage. He fired her up and backed out. Evidently, his neighbors had mischievously placed their garbage cans in his driveway, for there came a clatter and he looked up in his rearview mirror to see them rolling in the street, spewing their contents everywhere. Why would they do such a stupid thing?

  He drove toward Niggertown.

  West Blue Eye, it was now called. You couldn’t say nigger anymore. You couldn’t even say Nigra. It wasn’t allowed.

  The streets seemed to fill. People were staring at him and he wasn’t sure why. He felt like the Queen of the May on some float in a parade. Horns were honking, children screaming. What the hell was going on?

  Suddenly a patrol car, its siren blaring, its flasher pulsing, shot by him, in pursuit of some miscreant. But oddly, the car forced him to the side of the road.

  A tall, lanky, pale-eyed man got out, spat a wad on the ground and approached.

  “What’s the story, Mr. Sam?”

  “Who the hell are you?” Sam wanted to know. He read the plaque on the pocket: PECK, it said.

  “Duane Peck, Mr. Sam. You know me as well as you know your own name.”

  “I don’t know no such goddamned thing. What the hell do you want?”

  “Mr. Sam, that was a traffic light you went through back there and you almost hit two cars, and some people had to run to get out of the way. You must have been doing sixty.”

  “I’m in a hurry, goddammit. What is this all about?”

  “Well, sir, I’m just a little worried about your safety and the safety of the public.”

  “You gonna give me a ticket?”

  “No sir, no need. If you tell me where you’re going, I’d be happy to follow you, make sure you keep your speed down and all. Or maybe you’d best let me drive you. That’s all.”

  “Why, I never heard of such a thing. Peck, get out of my goddamned way or I’ll call the sheriff and you’ll spend the rest of your life on night shift. Do you know who I am?”

  “Everybody knows who you are, Mr. Sam. Sir, I guess you can go on now, but I am going to follow you, so there ain’t no problems, all right? You make sure you obey them traffic lights, do you hear?”

  Sam muttered something black but Peck had already headed back to his car. Arrogant sumbitch! Sam remembered when all deputies treated him like a Caesar.

  Peck finally pulled away and Sam started up again. He was very careful not to drive fast and to obey all the traffic signs. No one honked at him, although he did honk at one goddamned lady who took her goddamned time getting across the street with her baby. What did she think, she had the entire right of way for as long as she wanted?

  He rolled over the tracks and down the dusty streets of Nig—… of west Blue Eye. These people still lived like Bantus. Why didn’t they clean up? They wanted to be full citizens, they could at least keep their grass trimmed. No excuse for it, none at all.

  But in his anger he also felt sadness: they were so sad. Who would take care of them? Who would direct them? Why did they always misbehave? Couldn’t they see that wasn’t the way. He shook his head.

  He passed the church and the shell of mansion that had once housed Fuller’s Funeral Parlor but was now a ruin, and in time he came to the house of the address, which was still trim and nice and had flowers on the trellis. He parked in the street and two little Negro children came up and watched him with those big eyes they had.<
br />
  “Go on, shoo, get out of here!” he waved them aside, and stepped up the wooden steps to the porch.

  He banged hard on the door.

  A woman in her forties answered, looked at him quizzically.

  “Did you write this?” he demanded.

  She took it and looked at it.

  “Sir, I was five years old when this was written. It’s from Mrs. Parker.”

  “Let me talk to her.”

  “Sir, she does not live here. Who are you?”

  “You don’t know me? Everybody knows me. I’m Sam Vincent, the county prosecutor.”

  “No sir, I do not know you.”

  “You must be new in town.”

  “I have lived here for five years.”

  “Damn! I can’t believe you don’t know me.”

  The woman shook her head, and a certain expression came across her eyes. He knew the thoughts that ran through her head began with the words “White folks” and went on to chronicle something that she found utterly unknowable about Caucasians. But he didn’t care.

  “Well, where is she?”

  “Where is who?”

  “Mrs. Parker.”

  “Sir, do you really think any black person knows the whereabouts of every other black person?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t know about that. Never thought about it much. I want to help her. That’s why I’m here. She wrote me, don’t you understand?”

  “You say you the law?”

  “Yes, I am, in a way. But I’m not here to arrest a colored person. It’s about her little girl. She—”

  “Oh,” said the woman. “Yes, I know. We don’t never forget that. You wait here.”

  She disappeared and then came back in five minutes.

  “She’s at her other daughter’s. Out in Longacre Meadows, the development.”

  It never occurred to Sam that Negroes could buy homes in Longacre Meadows, a fairly nice residential development east of Blue Eye, where Connie Longacre used to live.

  “Do you have an address?”

  She gave it to him.

  “I’m sorry for being so loud,” he said. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “Oh, Mr. Sam,” she said, “I wasn’t here, but Sheila”—now, who the hell was Sheila?—“told me how you tried that white man Jed Posey for beating poor Mr. Fuller to death. No white man ever tried a white man for hurting a black before.”

  It had cost Sam an election and a job he loved more than any other.

  “Oh, that,” he said. “He deserved the chair. I tried to get it for him but the state of Arkansas wasn’t about to execute a white man for murdering a black one in 1962. At least he’s still in the penitentiary, rotting to hell slowly. Death would have been better, but rot has its place in this world.”

  “Somewhere, I believe you trying to be a good white person. I hope Jesus is with you.”

  “He’s probably busy today, but I do thank you for the thought.”

  Sam drove cast out of Blue Eye down Arkansas 88 with an odd feeling. Goddamned Duane Peck went with him the whole way and Sam tried to concentrate on not speeding and staying on the right side of the road, a task built on the assumption that he knew which side of the road to drive on in the first place, which he did, usually, unless he forgot, as now.

  Duane honked and Sam looked up to see an automobile coming right at him. Fool! Why didn’t he turn? Then he saw he was on the wrong side of the road. Had they changed that recently? Agh! Filling with rage, frustration and anguish, he moved back where he belonged. The driver gave him the finger! Now, whatever for?

  Eventually, the town fell away. There seemed to be a pleasant space of country, then he passed the double pillars of rock and Cyclone fence that led to Mountaintop, as Boss Harry’s place was called, another ruin now that that goddamned ambitious son of his was running for President and hardly came back to Arkansas at all and when he did he stayed in Fort Smith, not down here in Polk.

  Then he felt not a shock, but a terrible melancholy, and he remembered why he’d stopped coming this way. It was when they tore the old Longacre place down, once such a grand house where old man Longacre lived and where his son, Rance, had come with his new bride, Connie, in 1932 and where Connie had raised her son and buried her husband and then buried her son and his young wife, and then lent her cottage to Edie White Pye and soon enough buried Edie. Then when the county took the child and wouldn’t let Connie keep it because she was no relation, and it was taken off by Pye people and then seemed to disappear, Connie, her heart broken for the very last time, seemed to finally give up and acknowledge that Arkansas somehow wasn’t really meant for her, though she loved it so.

  Where had Connie gone? Back to Baltimore? He thought so. Connie wouldn’t tell him.

  He had driven her to the bus station that last day, after she’d closed the house.

  “It’s such a beautiful state,” said Connie. “And the men are so strong: Rance, of course. And my son, Stephen. And Earl, poor, beautiful, brave, doomed Earl. And you, Sam. You’re such a man. I don’t think I’ll find your like in the East.”

  “Connie, you don’t have to go, you know.”

  “Yes, I do. If I lose another man out here, I might not recover.”

  She was still beautiful and Sam had loved her secretly for many years.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t get the boy for you.”

  “Poor child. He’ll grow up without knowing his father.”

  “Well, that’s one thing I don’t care to worry about,” said Sam. “He’s better off not knowing Jimmy.”

  She just looked at him and something passed behind her eyes but whatever it was, she let it slide.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “About the hearing. I thought the judge would understand.”

  This was the custody hearing: the child she had named Stephen after her own son and which she had raised for three months as Edie languished, and which she had held and comforted and loved when Edie had then died, was to be given to the Pyes. They named it Lamar and took it from her and drove off in a beaten-up old truck, a gaggle of tough-as-nails men and gristly women.

  “The state paints with a broad brush,” she said. “It believes in family and in kin. I agree with that just as broadly. Occasionally, however, it makes a mistake. Oh well. If they love him, he’ll be fine, I suppose.”

  Sam didn’t see much love in that brood, but he didn’t say anything. The bus pulled in. Miss Connie, of course, was rich; she didn’t have to take a damn bus. But she was also without airs, and if the bus was good enough to the poor white and black people she had loved and loved her, she would take it.

  She smiled brokenly and climbed aboard while the driver loaded her considerable luggage into the compartment. He watched her as she found a seat. The bus shivered as the driver put it in gear and just as it lurched into motion, Connie turned and their eyes met and Sam made a little twitch of a smile and she smiled and disappeared forever. He always wondered: suppose he’d yelled, Connie, don’t leave, goddammit, stay with me. Connie, I love you, don’t go, please, we will work it out.

  But he hadn’t and knew he’d done the right thing. He was married with three children and a pregnant wife; what could be done about that? Nothing. So Connie drove away on the bus and that was all there was to it.

  Where her house had been there were now fifty houses and the tasteful sign before them, where once the Longacre mailbox had hung, read LONGACRE MEADOWS, A SUBSIDIARY OF THE BAMA GROUP, and the houses were white and looked spacious and well lived in, though they were spread with such rigid orthodoxy on the gridwork of new streets that nothing seemed spontaneous or alive, quite.

  Sam turned in, watching damned Duane Peck turn in behind him, but soon forgot about the deputy as he tried to negotiate the dazzle of cutely named streets. It was almost more than he could handle: he felt sucked into a vortex of houses that looked exactly alike. When did this happen? he wondered. But by a religious miracle, the only one he’d ever witnessed in his eighty-
six years, he happened upon Barefoot Boy Garth, as the street was preposterously called, and soon enough came upon a house hardly different from any other with the address 10567. How on earth could there be ten thousand other houses on this little lane? Anyway, he pulled into the driveway and sat for a second.

  Now, when perhaps he needed it most, a blessed wave of clarity washed across him. He felt focused, alive, intense; he knew exactly why he was here and what he had to find out. He got out and went and knocked on the door. A young black woman answered, her eyes hooded in hostility.

  “Yes?” she said.

  He was a little nonplussed: most people in these parts called him “sir” axiomatically, possibly because they recognized him and possibly out of respect for his age.

  “Ah, I’m looking for Lucille Parker.”

  “What for?”

  “It’s old business. About a letter she wrote me.”

  “You’re not some cracker segregationist Bible thumper here to tell her the Lord took her other daughter.”

  “Ma’am, I’m a graduate of Yale Law School and Princeton University. Though I respect the Bible, I’d never thump it. It is about Shirelle, yes, but I don’t believe God had anything to do with it.”

  “You’re Mr. Sam, then. Go on back,” said the woman. “We heard you’d come around. Mama’s waiting for you.”

  She led him through the neat house—Sam was amazed that Negroes lived so nicely; when had this happened?—and out back where the old lady sat on a lawn chair, under a scrubby little tree. The chair was a frail, almost gossamer thing, possibly bowed in strain; she was immense, serene and queenly in her bulk, sitting in her best purple clothes, sagacious and calm.

  “Mrs. Parker,” he said, “I am Sam Vincent.”

  “Mr. Sam,” she said. “I remember you from the trial.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I remember you too.”

  “No, you don’t,” she said. “You never once looked at us or cared about us colored folks at all. You never talked to us or anything. Nobody ever visited us; we got us a phone call from someone at the Coroner’s telling us Shirelle’s body could be picked up. That’s all we ever got from anybody.”

  “Ma’am, I ain’t going to lie to you. In them days, we hardly thought of colored people as human beings. It’s the way it was. I was the man I was and now I’m the man I am. But if I say I remembered you, I did: You wore a black dress because you were in mourning still. You wore a white hat with a camellia atop it and a veil. Your husband wore a dark suit; he wore horn-rim glasses and walked with a limp, I believe from a combat wound in North Africa. I came about this.”