Stephen Hunter: Black Light

“He won’t,” called the man, then turned and opened the rear door of the car. “Okay, boys, out you go. We’s here.”

In prison denims, two sunburned old boys climbed out of the back of the truck. Earl knew them: Lum and Jed Posey spent more time in the Blue Eye lockup than out of it. They were always in petty trouble with the law for every damned little thing you could imagine, usually whiskey running, which was the federal boys’ problem, but also petty larceny, car theft, shoplifting, anything that’d put a bite of food down their gullets. But Earl had thought of them as essentially harmless.

“You sure you wanta go to all this trouble for a nigger gal?” said Jed Posey. “What difference do it make? Let the niggers take care of it.”

“Shut up, Jed,” said Earl. “Smack him upside the head, Lem, if he gives you any more shit. He’s here to work, not to talk.”

“You just goin’ soft on the niggers,” said Jed. “Everbody knows it. The niggers everwhar is gittin’ uppity. They say they got them northern commie niggers comin’ on down here to stir up our niggers. It’s a Jew thing. Them hebes got a master plan to take over, you watch, and give our gals to the big niggers. You watch.”

“You just shut up, there, Jed,” said Earl. “I done warned you, now. I don’t but usually give a man a single warning. It’s you I’se going soft on.”

Earl was known for his courage and toughness; in a fair fight, or even an unfair one, he would have broken Jed Posey in a hundred places, then used what was left to wipe off his shoes. Jed, seeing Earl’s flare of anger, knew it was time to back down; nobody stood against Earl Swagger.

“Just shootin my mouth off, Earl. Don’t you pay me no mind.”

Lem used his penknife to cut a wedge off a plug of Brown’s Mule. He stuck it in his mouth, on the left side, where it bulged like a sack of gold pieces, and offered the plug to Earl.

“No thanks,” said Earl, “it’s one goddamned bad habit I ain’t yet picked up.”

“You don’t know what you’re missing, there, Earl,” smiled the swollen Lem, expelling a squirt of the sweet brown juice to explode in the dust at the side of the road.

At that moment, the third and last vehicle swung into view way down the blacktop. Pulling a tail of blue smoke and grinding through ancient gears, a twenty-year-old Nash chugged wheezily up the slope, seemed to lose its energy once or twice, but at last pulled off the road by the first two vehicles. Most of the top had been blowtorched off, forming the semblance of a pickup. Out jumped a spry old fellow, of indeterminant age, sheathed in a wad of beard under an old engineer’s cap and filthy overalls. You could smell Pop Dwyer a mile downwind, it was said, and on this day there was no wind, so Pop’s odor hit Earl like a blunt instrument. But it wasn’t just the odor of unwashed man, it was also the odor of dogs.

“Keep that old man away from me,” said Jed Posey. “He smell like a damn sty.”

“You don’t smell so pretty yourself after what you been in last night,” said Lem Tolliver over his plug. “Howdy, Pop.”

“Howdy, all,” said Pop, his nutty grin flashing through his beard. “Brought my best boys, Mr. Earl, just like you said.”

“Fine,” said Earl, watching as Pop went to the back of the truck, messed with the kennel cages there and leashed up three liquid, squirming dogs. Two were blue tick hounds, smooth and slick and muscley under their bright sheen, dark-gummed and eager; the third was some kind of beagle, its muzzle swathed in folds of flesh.

“Mr. Mollie’s the best,” said Pop. “If it can be found, old Mollie boy will find. These other pups are just along to learn the damn ropes. Mr. Mollie’s getting old.”

The two blues yapped and showed white teeth and pink tongues and a swirl of saliva dense and foamy; they took an immediate dislike to the Posey boys, sensing Jed’s contempt for Pop. Jed Posey drew back.

“You keep that damn bitch away from me.”

“Ain’t no bitch. That un’s got a pecker size of a corncob on him, you dumb billy,” said Pop. “And I ain’t wearing no chains neither, I’m a free man on a po-lice contract.”

The dogs barked in the dull, hot air, swirls of energy against the dolor of the heat and the dryness of the timber. They actually unsettled Earl just a bit, though he tended to discount his superstitions. But on Tarawa, during the mop-up, 2nd Marine dog teams worked over the blown-out bunkers and pillboxes, hunting for the few living Japs among all the dead ones. To save them? No sir. If the dogs howled and came scurrying out of a bunker, it meant a Jap inside still breathed or moaned. In went two or three pineapples, followed by the call “Fire in the hole!” After the blasts, a marine with a flamethrower squirted ten seconds’ worth of flaming gas into the small space, roasting it out. It was twelve years ago and Earl would remember it forever: the yapping of the dogs, the flat, anticlimactic blasts of the grenades, the stench of gas and flesh, the buzzing of the flies.

“You got something Mr. Mollie can work on?” said Pop, squinting up his eyes. “It don’t work without something to start on!”

Earl nodded; now he really felt an ache. He reached into the backseat of his cruiser and withdrew the pink wool sweater.

“See if they can pick up a scent off this,” he said, and watched as the dainty pink garment was seized in Pop’s huge, grimy hand and dipped to the dogs, who nuzzled and rampaged with it. One of the blues got a good hold on it and shook the other two hounds away, but both shivered and closed, and got nose and fangs into it, seeming somehow to absorb or suck it in. Then, just as quickly as it had started, it was done: the dogs had beat the scent somehow into their sharp but narrow dog brains and the object itself lacked interest. It fell, moist and ripped, to the earth.

“You didn’t want it back, did you, Mr. Earl?” asked Pop.

“No, no, that’s all right,” said Earl. “Let’s get going.”

“You sure it’s the right spot?”

“I’m sure,” said Earl. He looked over his shoulder: there, sixteen feet high, it said, “Texaco with Knock-Free Power and Sky Chief Secret Ingredient Petro X,” over a vivid painting of five dancing service station attendants, currently big on some show on the goddamned television set that Earl had never heard of and didn’t care about but somehow knew of anyway.

In the odd way a policeman’s mind works, he’d noticed an entry in the Polk County Sheriff Department’s incident log, which he made a point of checking once or twice a week, even though it wasn’t in his jurisdiction proper. It simply said, “White lady called in to say late last night she was driving up toward county line when she noticed, in her headlights, a Negro boy acting strangely right there at the Texaco sign. She thought she ought to report it, since she’d heard many things about dangerous and uppity Negro behavior farther south.”

It stuck, somehow, lodged there, meaningless in itself. But then last night he got home late and was surprised to see his son, Bob Lee, standing alone in the moonlight in front of his farmhouse, wearing his ever-present Davy Crockett coonskin cap. Bob Lee was a quiet, almost studious boy, but not one to panic or frighten easily.

“What’s going on, son?” he asked.

“They’s some people here to see you, Daddy,” the nine-year-old answered. “They wun’t go in the house, though Mommy ast ’em to.”

Something in the boy’s voice told him immediately an oddity was occurring and indeed it was: a Negro man and woman stood stiffly on the porch, evidently too frightened to take June’s offer of hospitality.

Earl walked up to them.

“Hep you folks?”