Black Light

by Stephen Hunter

  “I didn’t mean to,” he said. “She started to scream. I had to stop her from screaming. I never meant to.”

  Bob lowered the gun.

  “My friend is a newspaper reporter,” he said. “We’ll go to the paper and publish this. We’ll get the case reopened. There’s been enough killing.”

  He slipped the .45 back into its holster and turned to face Red Bama, who now held the loaded Krieghoff.

  Through the lenses, Russ watched Red Bama pick up the shotgun from a hundred yards out. He watched the man raise the shotgun, watched its barrels pivot lazily.

  Do something! he told himself.

  Involuntarily his fingers closed on a trigger. But there was no trigger. He had no rifle.

  Why didn’t you give me a rifle! he screamed to Bob Lee Swagger, his eyes glued in horror to the binoculars. I could have done it!

  “Red, thank God,” said Hollis.

  “Yes,” said Red, “thank God,” and he fired both barrels, one two, fast as they could be fired.

  The No. 7½ shot hit its target; it didn’t have time to open or spread but delivered an impact similar to that of a nineteenth-century elephant gun, a tremendous package of weight and velocity and density; the first charge literally eviscerated the chest, the heart and lungs, the spinal column; the second hit just above the mouth and destroyed the skull, all the facial structures, the features, the hair. The body was punched backwards and came to sprawl in the bushes.

  Gun smoke hung in the air.

  Russ, watching from a hundred yards away, bent and puked.

  “Nice shooting,” said Bob.

  “It’ll cost me a million dollars,” Red said, “to straighten this out. And it’s the first fatal accident in the history of sporting clays.” He shook his head. “He would have been Vice President, you know. It was set. He might very well have been President.”

  “Everybody has to pay. It was his turn,” Bob said.

  “Yes,” said Red, “but do you know why I did it? To save me the trial? To save the humiliation? To save the legal fees? To avenge that poor girl, because he broke the rules and hurt a child? Maybe. But the real reason is that I now realize he not only killed your father, he killed mine. My father must have been the only man alive who wasn’t an Etheridge but who knew the secret. And when Boss Harry died, son Hollis got to worrying about that. So: there you have it. Did we pay our fathers back for what they did for us? Not really. But I’ll say this, Swagger: we sure as hell tried.”

  “Damned right,” said Bob.

  But Red had a last surprise for him.

  He looked up, his eyes narrowed in sly concentration.

  “And I know you think you’re much smarter than I am, because you figured all this out and I didn’t. So I give you that. But I have a surprise for you too.”

  Bob looked at him.

  “When you go home, I want you to say hello to Julie and YKN4 for me.”

  There was a long moment.

  “My family?” said Bob.

  “The pay phone. We tracked your collect call. I had your wife and daughter, Swagger. I could have used them to get at you. You made a mistake.”

  Bob saw how it could happen.

  “But I don’t do families. That’s my policy. Now you have no more business around me and mine and I’ll have none around you and yours. You evened your scores, I evened mine. It’s over, it’s finished, it’s done. We are free men, right?”

  “That sounds like a deal to me,” said Bob.

  46

  State police investigators descended on the accident scene in their legions, along with hundreds of media types, and for a few days, the little sporting clays range in West Arkansas was the most famous site in America, leading all the network news shows. The newspapers were full of the Etheridge tragedy. A grand jury was swiftly empaneled by Sebastian County prosecutors.

  But by the end of the week, no true bill of indictment was voted and prosecutors announced their acquiescence to the inevitable ruling of accidental death. There just wasn’t any evidence to the contrary: Red Bama clung to his story, and his two bodyguards and the trapper, all of whom had witnessed the event, confirmed his account. He’d just loaded the Krieghoff when his cellular rang, and he turned to step out of the constricting cage to get it off his belt, momentarily forgetting that he held the loaded shotgun, and he banged the stock against the cage and somehow the gun fired, although investigators could not get the gun to duplicate the accident in the ballistics lab. But that is the tragedy of the firearm: so enticing, so alluring, so beguiling, so damned much fun is the gun, and yet when a mistake is made with it, the consequences are beyond all scale to the act itself. A man grows confused with a gun in his hand, turns and bumps and boomboom! The end of a promising and already distinguished career.

  Editorials appeared nationwide, lamenting the decease of Hollis Etheridge, former two-term senator, respected legislator, beloved husband, son of one of the most powerful politicians the state of Arkansas had generated, but a man who insisted on making it on his own, not riding his father’s coattails. He was the kind of American who had done so much to help so many. His party’s leaders issued proclamations; flattering posthumous profiles ran in all the big magazines and on TV shows; in the Arkansas State Legislature, a bill was introduced to rename the parkway now called solely after his father the “Hollis and Harry Etheridge Memorial Parkway,” and it passed within a week, though no money could be found in the budget to remake the signs so that will have to wait until a better year.

  As for Red Bama, after the grand jury refused to indict him, he joined his family in Hawaii for the remainder of the summer. They had a wonderful time, and returned in the fall, fit and tan and rested. His children prosper, even poor Nicholas; Amy is planning on Yale Law School and wants to go to work as a prosecutor and Red has told her he can arrange it and she still sniffs at him. But occasionally she wears that gold Rolex. He is, after all, her father. He is still married to Miss Runner-up but rumors persist he has been seen in out-of-the-way clubs with an actual Miss Arkansas of early nineties vintage.

  Bob and Russ left Arkansas that very afternoon; they drove all night, after turning in the rental car and paying a healthy fee to get the green pickup, much battered, out of the airport parking. Late that afternoon, they were in Oklahoma City, where Russ still had his apartment in an old house.

  Bob pulled up outside it.

  “Okay, bub, here you be,” he said.

  “God,” said Russ, “I can’t believe it’s over.”

  “Over and done,” said Bob. “Or as done as it can be.”

  “Jesus,” said Russ.

  “You’re a great kid, Russ. You write that book. I know it’ll be a success.”

  “I never really got enough. Not enough facts, not enough documentation. But it turned out to be exactly as I thought it would be, didn’t it? A profound endorsement of the genetic theory of human behavior. Good fathers, good sons. Bad fathers, bad sons, straight down the line. Like a laboratory experiment.”

  “Write it as a story.”

  Russ wondered: a story? Then he realized Bob meant as fiction.

  “You mean as a novel?”

  “That’s the ticket. Make up the names, change the locale, that sort of thing. All them Johnnies do it, no reason you shouldn’t.”

  “Hmmmmm,” said Russ. That’s a good idea.” It was a good idea.

  “And let me give you one last piece of advice, all right?”

  Russ said, “Okay.”

  “Make peace with your father. You’ll be a lot happier. He’ll be a lot happier. He’s your only father. You only get one. I’d give anything for another few minutes with mine.”

  Russ laughed cynically. Then his bitterness came washing over him.

  “Yeah, well,” he said. “Your dad was a hero. He was a great man, a great American man. They don’t come any better. But my dad’s just a man. He’s an asshole. He finally gave in to his selfishness. That’s all there is.”

&nbs
p; Bob was quiet for just a second and then he said, “You know, you’re a very bright kid. You were right on so many things. You were right about the Parker crime and how important it was. I was wrong, dead wrong. You were so smart, you saw so much, you were quick and brave. You’d make a hell of a marine.”

  “I—”

  “But you missed something, Russ. You missed something big.”

  Russ turned. What could he have missed? What surprise was left?

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Ask yourself this: if the child who became Lamar Pye was born nine months after Jimmy’s death … when did Jimmy get his young wife pregnant?”

  Russ paused, considering.

  “He never made it back to Blue Eye,” said Bob. “My father stopped him in that cornfield. Edie Pye never saw her husband alive from the last time she visited him in jail a month earlier.”

  Russ shook his head. What did …? Where was this going?

  “I think Miss Connie might have figured it out, but she was the only one. If she did, she didn’t let on.”

  “I don’t—” Russ began.

  “Oh yes, you do,” said Bob.

  Russ looked up at Bob.

  “My daddy was alone with Edie that last day for at least an hour. He liked her a lot. She liked him a lot. Later, when he left to go for Jimmy, he told me about two kinds of bad. Bad evil, where you decide to do wrong and say fuck it, and bad mistake, where you want to do the right goddamn thing but it gets clotted up and confused sometimes and before you know it, never meaning to, you done made a mess. He was talking about himself.”

  “You’re saying …?”

  “That’s right, Russ. Big bad old Lamar Pye? He was my brother.”

  47

  Russ didn’t stop having Lamar Pye dreams right away; in fact, two weeks after he got back, he had a terrible one, the worst yet, a screamer, full of Lamar, shotguns, this time Jeannie Vincent thrown in, his hero Bob’s gun empty and not shooting, a real monster. But as the weeks passed, the space between them seemed to widen and then one day in late September he’d been so busy with his arrangements and his goodbyes, he suddenly realized it had been almost a full, clear dreamless month.

  So he knew it was time for the last thing.

  It was a small house, much smaller than he expected, and he checked twice to make sure he had the address right. But he had. The day was beautiful, now chilly with the coming fall, but very clear, and the constant Oklahoma wind pushed through the trees, shaking them dry of leaves.

  Russ got out of the truck and went up to the house, climbing up the porch and going to the front door.

  I feel like an idiot, he thought.

  But he knocked anyway, and after a bit, the door opened—it was still the Midwest and people opened doors without looking out first—and a young woman stood before him. She was in her late twenties, strikingly attractive, thin, with a spray of red freckles on her whitish skin and a crop of reddish-blond hair.

  “Yes?” she asked.

  “You’re Holly?” he said.

  “Yes. I’m sorry, who are—”

  “I’m Russ.”

  She still looked blank. She was not getting this.

  “Russ Pewtie,” he said. “My dad lives here.”

  “Russ! Russ! Oh, God, Russ, I didn’t recognize you, it’s been so many years and you were a teenager. Come in, come in, he’ll be so happy!”

  She all but pulled him into the house, which was modest but clean and had a lot of books and gun magazines around. Little indicators of domestic intimacy irritated Russ: a Lawton Constitution TV guidebook, a pair of Nike running shoes, his father’s by the size, a table with a checkbook and a stack of bills where someone had been paying what was due, a frame displaying a batch of decorations from the Oklahoma State Police. But he pushed the anger and the pain away.

  This is the way it is, he told himself.

  From somewhere deeper in the house came the sound of a football game.

  “Bud, Bud, Bud honey, guess who’s here?”

  “Goddammit, Holly,” came his father’s irritated voice from the sunporch where the TV evidently had been placed, “it’s the fourth quarter. Who the—”

  “Bud, it’s Russ.”

  “Russ!”

  His father came booming out of the doorway and stood there, huge and looking more like John Wayne than ever. His hair was shorter, but just as gray, and he’d lost that pallor and grimness that had been so evident when he’d been recovering from his wound several years back, Russ’s freshman year. He no longer seemed halting or confused.

  “Oh, Russ, it’s terrific to see you,” he said, beaming, his face flushing with pleasure.

  “Hi, Dad,” said Russ a little sheepishly, feeling fourteen again.

  “This is making him so happy,” said Holly, crying a little. “He just said to me, Oh, gosh, I’d like to see Russ again.”

  “Holly, get the boy a beer. No, get the man a beer, Lord how he’s grown and toughened up. I talked to your mother on the phone: she said you were going back to school.”

  “Vanderbilt. In Tennessee.”

  “That’s a good one, I hear.”

  “It’s real good. It’s better for me because it isn’t so eastern.”

  “You think you’re going to stay in the newspaper business?”

  “Well, sir, I’m going to give it a try. I’m majoring in English, and I’ve got some projects in mind.”

  “Is that why you were in Arkansas?”

  “Yeah, you won’t believe this: I decided to try and write the life story of Lamar Pye,” he said. “So I went back there and looked into his background. He had quite a background.”

  “Russ, why? Why? He was a violent scumbag. He lived as he died. He hurt people.”

  “Yes, I know, Dad, and I wanted to know why.”

  “Did you find out?”

  “Yes,” said Russ, “I did. It has to do with family. Anyway … how’ve you been? You look great! What’ve you been up to?”

  They talked for three hours.

  The sun hid behind pale clouds. The day was gray and dreary. In the distance, the prison showed white, the only source of radiance in the grim day; as always, it looked exactly like it was what it wasn’t, a magic city, an enchanted castle.

  The tall, thin man climbed the scruffy little hill. Around him, the Oklahoma plains rolled away toward the horizon. He walked among the grave markers, seeing the names of felons long forgot, bad men who’d done terrible things and now lay unlamented in this forgotten parcel of America. The ever-present wind whistled, kicking up a screen of dust that swirled across the ground and between the gravestones.

  At last he came to the one he’d been seeking.

  “LAMAR PYE” was all it said. “1956–1994.”

  “That one,” somebody said. “That was a bad one.”

  Bob looked and saw the old black trusty who’d been here before, when Russ showed him the spot.

  “Wasn’t you here a few months back?” the trusty asked, his face screwing up in the effort to remember.

  “Yes, I was,” he said.

  “You was looking at old Lamar then too, right?”

  “We came to see Lamar, that’s right,” he said.

  “We don’t get many people stopping by. You was the only one ever came to see old Lamar. I’d remember if there were more. Nope, you and that boy the only ones.”

  Bob looked at the gravestone. There wasn’t much to see, just a flat stone, overgrown and dusty, showing the wear of wind and dust and time.

  “A bad, bad boy,” said the trusty. “The worst boy in the joint. Lived bad, died bad. Bad to the bone. Bad at the start, bad at the finish.”

  “He was a bastard,” Bob said. “No one could deny that.”

  “Pure evil,” said the trusty. “I do believe God sent him to us to show us what evil is.”

  “Maybe so,” said Bob, “but from what I understand, someone did a good job of beating it into him. I’d say men put the evil
in him, not God. It’s what happens when you don’t got nobody pulling for you or nobody who gives a damn about you.”

  The old black man looked at him and didn’t know what to say.

  There was the sound of other vehicles and both men turned as a tractor with backhoe began to lumber down the prison road, followed by a long black hearse.

  “What the hell?” said the trusty.

  Bob reached into his jacket and pulled out a document.

  “Here. I’m supposed to give this to the supervisor but he’s not here so I guess I give it to you.”

  The old man opened the document with a puzzled look, fumbled with some glasses and tried to make sense out of what was there.

  “It’s an official exhumation order,” Bob said. “We’re taking Lamar back to Arkansas. He’s going to be with his father.”

  The old man’s eyes were filled with incomprehension, but no further explanations came.

  Bob turned and headed down the hill, where his wife and daughter stood waiting.

  Acknowledgments

  The author would like to issue particular thanks to Weyman Swagger, who gave especially of time and effort. Then John Feamster, of Precision Shooting, pitched in with another large chunk of help.

  Other friends were involved as well, notably Bob Lopez, Mike Hill, Lenne Miller, my brother Tim Hunter, and Barry Neville. A whole slew of people were of great help in Arkansas, including the three antiques dealers in Fort Smith, who helped me find maps from the fifties, and the librarian who dug out the microfilm of the Southwestern Times Record for July of 1955. In fact, the people of Arkansas were unfailingly kind to me in my peregrinations in that state.

  Peter R. Senich’s The Long Range War was invaluable in explaining the difference between Army and Marine sniper programs in Vietnam, though it should be emphasized that any judgments made on those programs are mine and not his.

  Two other points should be made. Polk Countians and other Arkansans will recognize that I’ve yielded to the godlike temptation to create and destroy at my own whimsy. For example, I’ve created the Harry Etheridge Memorial Parkway out of whole cloth; I’ve also disappeared the town of Mena and dumped the wholly fictitious town of Blue Eye, with a far more tragic racial history, in its place.