Stephen Hunter - Black Light

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.

S tate 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.”

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.”

R uss 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.