Black Light bls-2

by Stephen Hunter

  “No!” screamed Jimmy. “Goddammit, Mr. Earl, these boys is loaded for bear. They got machine guns and shotguns and deer rifles and dogs. I killed a cop. They got a taste for blood. I walk in there hands up and by God I end up on a slab with dimes on my eyes next to some tinhorn deputy smiling for the camera and thinking about how famous he’s gonna be. Poor Bub too!”

  Jimmy was right, of course. Earl knew it. Too many hotheads with guns, too many chances for a slipup, a mistake. He thought of the fool Buddy Till with the big tommy gun and the fifty-round drum, just itching to cut loose and make himself a state hero. The man that got Jimmy Pye! Jimmy would die certainly, poor Bub probably, as well as whatever citizens happened to be standing around. Shit, Jimmy, what’d you do this for?

  “Mr. Earl, I’ll surrender to you! You can put us both in cuffs. Please, please, please just give me a minute or two with Edie afterwards, one last time with her, and promise me you’ll call Sam and help out with Bub. That’s a lot, I know, but please, Earl, please, Mr. Earl, I know you got it in you, help me clean up my mess.”

  “How the hell you going to get up here?”

  “I can make it up there okay. We won’t move till after dark, and I know the back roads like the other side of my hand.”

  “Jimmy, no one else can die! Do you understand? Do you swear it?”

  “I swear to you, Earl. I swear to you. I got it all figgered out, how we can work it. I’ll meet you at ten. Swear to you.”

  Earl thought darkly. He didn’t like it at all. Jimmy crossed the line, you couldn’t cut him that slack. It went against so many principles. Be rigid, he told himself. Live by your rules. You have rules, now live by them.

  But Lannie Pye, Jimmy’s dad, begged Earl to look out for his boy, help his boy. That cut to the quick. He gave his word on Iwo and it wasn’t a thing he could walk away from, goddamn his own soul.

  “There’s a cornfield just below Waldron, maybe ten, twelve miles,” said Jimmy. “It’s right off 71.”

  “Which side of Boles?”

  “The Fort Smith side. Just beyond Boles. On the right as you’re coming up. Beyond the mountains.”

  Earl had lived the past ten years on Route 71.

  “I know it.”

  “There’s a cornfield road. I’ll pull in maybe a hundred or so yards.”

  “No, I’ll pull in first, Jimmy. I want to see you approach and throw the beam on you. You git out of the car with your hands up, you and Bub both. You show me your guns, then throw ’em on the ground.”

  “Okay, Mr. Earl. That sounds square. Ten.”

  “Ten. If you get jumped or chased before, you throw your hands up, you hear? Nobody else can die!”

  “Tell Edie I love her.”

  “I’ll have her waiting in town. We’ll take you boys into Blue Eye. I’ll be with you every step of the way.”

  Jimmy hung up.

  “It sounds like he’s trying to do right by what he done wrong,” he said.

  He looked at Edie, who’d gone over back by the window. In the distance, they could see Buddy Till, arms folded, leaning against his fender, chewing a long stalk of grass.

  Earl picked up the phone and pushed the button a couple of times.

  “Operator.”

  “Betty, it’s Earl, calling from the Longacre cottage.”

  “Why, Earl, you do git around.”

  “What you hearing?”

  “The coloreds is all excited about that poor little gal. They’re blazing away on the line. Them people really talk a lot. There’s talk too about Jimmy Pye, and what he done. The coloreds don’t care about him, though. They only care about their own, just like people everywhere.”

  “Is there any talk about Edie and Miss Connie?”

  “Folks wonder about how they’ll take it when Jimmy gets his reward. Pity, lots of pity. Pity and palaver. And a little about you, Earl.”

  “Me?”

  “Earl, you are a mighty man, but there’s an element that don’t care for you. They think you’re too big for your britches, ever since President Truman hung that ribbon on your neck. There’s talk that if you’d taken a hard hand with Jimmy when he was young, he’d not have turned out as he did. There’s talk—Earl, do you want to hear this?”

  “I suppose.”

  “There’s talk it’ll serve you right and bring you down a peg or two. You tried to invent some fairy-tale life for Jimmy and that poor girl who maybe didn’t love him as much as you told everybody she did. You and Miss Connie, you got together and wrote a fairy tale and never really knew what was going on.”

  “And what was that?” asked Earl.

  “The Pyes are trash and always will be. It’s as wrong to mix trash and quality as it is to mix black and white. It’s not meant to be and there’s consequences. Earl, sometimes as smart as you are, you can be a very thick old boy.”

  “All right, Betty, thanks.”

  He hung up. There was no news there, nothing he hadn’t felt or suspected before. What was important was that Betty couldn’t have gotten through that performance if she’d just heard Earl talking to Jimmy; she’d been too busy eavesdropping on the others. He felt safe at least; if the sheriff and his machine gunners showed up when Jimmy came in, it could be a disaster.

  He went over to Edie, who simply sat and stared out the window.

  “You all right?”

  She smiled and put a hand on his wrist.

  “Yes, Mr. Earl. I am fine.”

  “Some are saying Miss Connie and I tried to set up a life for you and Jimmy out of something of our own. I never thought of that. If it’s the case, I apologize. I tried to help. Sometimes helping just makes it worse.”

  “Mr. Earl, you did what you thought was best.”

  “I swore to Lannie Pye I’d help his boy. That’s what it was. I went too far.”

  “Jimmy is no child anymore, Mr. Earl. He’s twenty-one. He made up his own mind. But he does have a gift for selling. I bought because I wanted to buy. Except for the poor folks in the store, maybe this is best for all of us down here in Polk County. Now we all have a chance to start over.”

  “That’s the smart way to look at it. Okay, you’re okay, then? I’ll be moving out. I have other places to cover before tonight. I’ll—”

  “Earl?”

  “Yes?”

  He was aware she’d never called him that. It made him slightly uncomfortable.

  “Earl, if I was you, I’d call in your buddies. If Jimmy gives you even a twitch, I’d have them shoot that boy down like a dog. And Bub too. Earl, I don’t trust him. In honest-to-God truth, I don’t trust him a bit.”

  “Edie, I have to give the boy a chance. And on top of that, I don’t trust my own people. They might shoot no matter what. I can bring this thing off, you watch.”

  “Earl, Miss Connie would tell you your word to a killer doesn’t matter. You look out for Mr. Earl first.”

  “This is the best way,” he said. “I know it in my heart. We can set this thing as right as it can be set, and then we can go find whoever killed that poor little Negro girl.”

  A weird light shown in Edie’s eyes. He’d never seen it there before. She was gazing at him with such admiration.

  “Earl, Miss Connie says no man ever carried more of the world around on his shoulders than you do. You’re going to carry this whole thing around until you set it right. Where do they grow men like you? I never met a one.”

  “They grow us on trees, in the thousands. Don’t you put no account on it. You’re still young. You’ll meet plenty now. You have some great things ahead of you.”

  She looked at him as he’d never seen her look at him before. Late in a very long afternoon. Her face was calm, grave, lovely in the serene light. She was so young. He’d never let himself look at her before. She was someone else’s daughter who grew to be someone else’s wife. The most beautiful girl in the county, and so what? He was married to a good woman, had a son, enough responsibilities to choke a cat, a goddamned duty tha
t would never, ever stop.

  “Earl,” she said.

  Put it away, he told himself. Put it far, far away.

  7

  Sometimes the thirst for whiskey was so palpable it ached. This was such a night. He lay in the bed, hearing the warm desert breeze run through the night and the low, even breathing of his wife. In a room down the hall his daughter slept.

  He dreamed of whiskey.

  In whiskey was the end of pain: whiskey blurred the images of boys shot in the guts crying for mama and mama wasn’t there, only Sergeant Swagger screaming “Medic!” at the top of his lungs while pouring M-16 fire off into the paddy breaks. Whiskey banished the stench of the villes after the Phantoms had laid down napalm, the odd blend of burned meat and scorched straw and fried water buffalo shit. In whiskey disappeared the emptiness of emotion when the recoil spent itself against one’s shoulder and the rifle settled back and the crosshairs reimplanted themselves on a man so far away, who was now horribly altered, his posture destroyed by death arriving in packages of 173 grains launched at 2,650 feet per second. Sometimes they staggered, sometimes they instant rag-dolled. Always they went still forever.

  Gone too in the whiskey was this one:

  He woke late, to a lot of commotion downstairs, the sounds almost of a party or meeting. He blinked sleep out of his eyes, confused, a little scared.

  “Daddy,” he called. “Daddy?”

  Outside another car pulled up and then another. He was wearing underpants and a Davy Crockett T-shirt which he had got by sending fifty cents and six caps from Mason’s root beer off to Chicago. It took weeks for it to arrive and he wore it every day and every night. He was nine. He heard his mother crying downstairs and listened to a man’s footsteps on the stairs. He heard creaking leather, the sag of the floorboards, the squeal of the stairway banister, all familiar from a thousand times his father came home late as he always did, letting the duty day stretch out sometimes for eighteen and twenty hours. But there was a heaviness to the tread which he knew was not his father’s. He sat up as the man entered and it was some other state policeman. The crickets were chirping desperately in the dark just beyond the open windows and outside it was a clear night, glittery with starlight.

  “You’re Bob Lee, is that right?” said the man in his daddy’s uniform, the flat-brimmed, round-topped hat, not quite a cowboy’s hat, and the big gun in the holster, not quite a cowboy’s gun. He stood in the doorway, just a silhouette, the light behind him blazing.

  “Yes sir,” he had said.

  “Bob Lee, may I come in? Have to talk man-to-man to you.”

  Bob nodded. He knew something was wrong. Another police car pulled up out front of the house.

  “I’m Major Benteen. You’re going to have to be a man now, son,” the man in his daddy’s uniform told him.

  “What you mean?”

  “Son … son, your daddy was killed in the line of duty this evening. He’s in heaven now, where all the good soldiers and policemen and men who do their duty have to go eventually.”

  “What’s duty?” Bob said.

  “I can’t explain it. I don’t even know. It’s what special men like your dad lived by and for,” said the major. “It’s the best thing a man can have. It’s why your daddy’s a hero. It’s—”

  But the man stopped and Bob saw that he was crying too.

  Now Bob shook his head; that big officer bawling away in the dark over his father’s death, trying so hard to be manly but so destroyed by the bitter futility of it he had no chance.

  That was a whiskey memory. You wanted to soak that motherfucker in amber fluid that roasted your tongue as it went down your gullet and sent its radiant message of hope and love to the far precincts of your body and numbed out your mind with the buzz of alcoholic bliss. That’s what whiskey was for, to kill those lost black memories that when they came out from hiding would try and kill you like this one was now trying to kill him.

  Bob sat up in the bed. He was glad there was no whiskey in the house for if there were he knew he’d grasp it and drown himself in it, going down so far there’d never be an up. He could hardly breathe.

  He rose, a tall, thin, strong man, graying, but still with a gift for silent movement and a face famous for the little that it showed. He had slept alone for so long: now he wasn’t alone in the bed anymore and he looked at her, dozing softly under the sheets, such a beautiful woman. Who’d have thought it?

  He slipped down the hall and pushed open the dark door into the next room, hearing the child’s breath. He snapped on the light. YKN4 was curled up, her little nose fluttering ever so gently. She stirred, disturbed by the light. She looked as if she were made of candy, a moist, perfect little thing, her wide lids enveloping her wide eyes, her curled lashes as perfect as the tracing of a doily, her tiny little nose cusping her tiny perfect seal of lips. She rubbed a hand against an eye, shivered in some sort of animal delight, pushed some hair off her face, and pulled the blanket tighter, dreaming, no doubt, of horses. He wondered if he would ever be the mystery to her that his father was to him. He hoped not. Bob turned off the light, bent to her and kissed her smooth cheek gently, feeling a radiance much stronger than whiskey’s and much truer.

  That’s worth getting through it all, he thought.

  Suddenly, he felt a bit braver. Resigned almost, steady at least, and aware at last of what must be done.

  He walked down the hall, pulled a lanyard so that a section of the ceiling pivoted downward with a groan, and a section of wooden ladder slid out. He climbed into the attic, pulled the light switch. It was any attic: jumbled trunks, racks of old clothes, sheaves of pictures, most of it Julie’s. But a small portion of it was his, loaded into the trailer for that drive out from Blue Eye years ago, after he’d buried his guns. He climbed and looked toward his small claim of the space. He saw an old seabag full of marine utilities, boots, the like, his dress blues hanging off a rack, a leather shooting jacket with its many buckles and straps, a few old pieces of luggage.

  And at last, what he was looking for. It was an old shoe box, with a red ribbon tied prettily outside it. The label on the box said “Buster Brown, Size C7, Dark Brown Oxfords,” the container for his Sunday shoes sometime in the fifties. Though it was sheathed in dust, he could make out handwriting, his mother’s ornate script: Daddy’s Things, it said.

  He tugged on the old ribbon, which, easily enough, gave up the ghost and popped. Dust stirred like vapors of lost memory. He carefully lifted the lid off, and there, kneeling in the yellow light in a pair of sweats, he began his exploration.

  This is what remained of Earl Lee Swagger, USMC, Arkansas State Police, killed in the line of duty, July 23, 1955. First, Bob saw old brown photographs on stiff, slightly wilted papers. He picked them up to enter an alien universe that seemed built around a little farm boy with a chubby face that showed but a trace of the bone structure that would eventually yield the face he would recognize as his father’s. In this brown world, there was a farmhouse, a trellis, a scrawny old goat in a straw hat, a three-piece suit even in summer’s full blaze, a bow tie and starched collar, a face chipped out of granite who must have been a father, that is, Bob’s grandfather; he also wore a circled star on his chest that was a sheriff’s badge and a wide belt festooned with cartridges and a holster that swallowed up all but the Colt Peacemaker’s curved grip. Next to him was the grandmother, a dour woman in a shapeless dress and a face that looked as if it never had worn a smile. He turned it over and in faded ink read the date: 1920, Blue Eye, Ark. There were others, various arrangements of the same three people, sometimes together, sometimes alone or in twos. None of them had ever gotten fat off the land, Bob saw. A final shot showed Earl in his twenties, in a marine olive-drab service uniform, with that tight tunic collar, a glistening Sam Browne belt diagonally transecting a manly chest and a sergeant’s three stripes on the shoulder, looking proud and ramrod-straight. He’d joined in 1930, at twenty, and had made his rank fast: turning the picture over, Bob s
aw in his grandmother’s flowery penmanship the inscription “Earl home on leave, 1934.” Earl’s hair was slicked back over white sidewalls and he looked dapper as possible.

  Next he found the medals. There was a nest of them, police marksmanship badges (his father was a natural, extraordinary shot), Pacific Battle Star and campaign ribbons, the Purple Heart with four clusters, a Presidential Unit Citation for the 2nd Marines, another one for the 3rd Marines, a Distinguished Service Cross, a Silver Star and of course, the big one, the Medal of Honor, a chunk of metal in the configuration of a star that hung on a necklace of now faded but once sky-blue ribbon. He hefted the ornament: it had weight and density, gravity almost, dignity perhaps. Its gold plating was grimy from years of neglect and he realized that he’d never seen the thing itself before; his father never had it out or displayed it and his mother must have dumped it in this box sometime after the funeral, and sealed the box and herself off from the pain.

  He held it in his hand for a few seconds, waiting to feel something. It was only a chunk of dirty metal, a trinket. He’d won medals himself and knew the odd distance a man feels from them, looking at them and thinking, so what? They explain so little, they have no connection with the reality of what they signify.

  The citation was there too, on official Department of the Navy paper, a fancy-looking, thick piece of paper dated 10 December 1945, that had the look of formal ostentation that he despised. It could have hung in a dentist’s office.

  He read it, wondering if he’d ever read it before or only heard it told by other men. His father never spoke a word about the war.

  On 21 February 1945, on Charlie-Dog Ridge two miles inland from Beach Red 2, Platoon Sergeant Swagger’s unit from E. Co., Second Battalion, Ninth Regiment, Third Marine Division, came under intense fire from several enemy machine-gun positions. All his flamethrower operators dead or wounded, Platoon Sergeant Swagger led a squad off on a flanking maneuver, but only he reached the ridgeline in sufficient condition to continue the attack, the others having been killed or wounded. Wounded himself three times, Platoon Sergeant Swagger climbed into the first nest from the rear, killing the enemy soldiers with his submachine gun.