Stephen Hunter - Black Light

“Hah,” said Sam. “Walk the site! I believe the famous Harry Etheridge Memorial Porkway buried it under a ton or so of concrete in memory to the greatest man Polk County ever produced. Son, you’re looking for a past that ain’t hardly there no more. There’s no Pyes left in Polk County. I heard that Jimmy’s father, Lannie, had a brother in Oklahoma.”

“Anadarko,” said Russ. “He was murdered in 1970, by parties unknown.”

“Miss Connie Longacre knew Edie the best. But she left town after Edie died and the child went to some Pye kin. She tried to get that baby herself, but they said she was too old. Nineteen fifty-six, I think.”

“Was there an autopsy?” Bob asked.

“There was,” said Sam. “State law in the case of unlawful deaths. Paperwork all gone, however, in that courthouse fire.”

Bob nodded, chewing that one over.

“A long and terrible day,” said Sam. “It has always seemed to me a tragedy of the Republic that it can no longer produce men the caliber of Earl Swagger. I’ve said this to you many a time, Bob Lee. He was a quietly great man.”

“He did his duty,” said Bob, “more than some.”

“Fortunately, Polk County has never had such a day since. Four dead. It marked the community for many years that followed. In some places, the pain even yet hasn’t—”

“Excuse me,” said Russ. “You mean three dead. Or are you counting the victims in Fort Smith? Then it would be seven dead. Just a little—”

“Young man, where did you go to college?”

“Ah, Princeton, sir.”

“Did you graduate?”

“Er, no. I, uh, left after two years. But I may return.”

“Well, no matter. Anyhows, Princeton? Well; if you want to climb up and blow the dust off that picture frame”—he gestured to the wall—“you’d see old Sam Vincent, the country rube lawyer from Hicksville, Arkansas, he went to Princeton University too! And if you blow the dust off the other frame, you’d see he went to Yale Law School. And though he’s old, he’s not as dim as you seem to think, at least on good days. And if he says four, he goddamn-your-soul means four.”

Russ was stilled.

“I’m sorry,” he finally said. “I meant no disrespect. But who was the fourth one?”

“Earl’s last case. A poor girl named Shirelle Parker. A Nigra child, fifteen years old. She was raped and beaten to death out in the Ouachitas, and it was Earl who found her that very morning and made the initial reports. I felt it was his legacy and I pursued it with a special attention to duty. Fortunately, it was open-and-shut too. In that one, there was some justice.”

“I think I remember,” said Bob. “Some Negro boy. Wasn’t he—”

“He was indeed electrocuted. I watched him die up at the state penitentiary at Tucker in 1957. Reggie Gerard Fuller, it was a terrible tragedy.”

“You going to put that in your book?” Bob asked.

“I don’t know … it is very strange, isn’t it?”

“Earl spent the morning out there. Possibly he was still thinking of that case when he ran into Jimmy and Bub and that’s how they got a jump on him.”

“It was open-and-shut?”

“Like a door. The poor girl had ripped his monogrammed shirt pocket as he had his evil fun with her. We checked among the colored folk for the proper initials, and when we found one that matched, we raided. I’m happy to say that even in those benighted days, I arranged for the proper warrants to be issued. Here in Polk County, we run it by the goddamned rules. We found the shirt stuffed under his bed, the pocket missing. It was smeared with her blood, by type. She was AB positive, he was A positive. The boy made a mistake, he got carried away, he couldn’t stop himself. She died, he died, both families devastated. I don’t hold with the theory Nigras can’t feel pain as white people do. The Parkers and the Fullers felt plenty of pain, as much as I’ve ever seen.”

Russ shook his head, which now profoundly ached. He wanted to get away: this was like something out of Faulkner or Penn Warren, blasphemed southern ground, soaked in blood a generation old, white trash and black, white innocence and black, all commingled in a very small area on the same day.

“Sam, we’ve tired you. I may have some things I want you to do. You’ll take my money, I suppose,” Bob was saying.

“Of course I will,” said Sam.

“Here’s a box,” he said, handing over the cardboard container. “You have an office safe, I guess?”

“I’m so old I may have forgotten the combination.”

“Well, can you keep this stuff here? It’s my father’s effects. For some reason, I thought it might come in handy. I don’t want to be carrying it about.”

Sam took the package and they all rose.

“Tomorrow,” Bob said, “I think we may go see where it happened. Sam, could you come? You were there?”

“Oh, I suppose.”

“In the meantime, you’ll look for that document and any others?”

“I will.”

“This afternoon I think we’ll go to the library, see what the old papers said.”

“Fair enough,” said Russ.

Sam shook Bob’s hand and ignored Russ, leaving the younger man to face the fact that nobody gave a damn. He thought he could live with it.

The two went out, down the dark stairs, and stepped out into bright daylight.

“He seemed a little daffy there at the beginning,” said Russ. “I hope he’s up to this thing. What did he call them? Nigras? Colored folk? God, what Klan klavern did he come from?”

“That old man is as tough as they come. Not only did he keep my bacon out of the fire a few years back, he was the first prosecutor in Arkansas to try a white man for killing a black man back in 1962, when it wasn’t the easiest thing in the world. He may say ‘Nigra’ where you say ‘African American’ to show everybody how wonderful you are, but he risked his goddamned life. They shot up his house, scared his kids and voted him out of office. But he stuck to it, because he knew it was right. So don’t you go disrespecting him. He’s solid as brass.”

“Okay,” said Russ. “If you say so.”

Then they saw a big deputy sheriff looking into Bob’s cab window.

“What’s this all about?” Russ said.

“Oh, just a small-town cop who noticed an out-of-state plate.” He walked over to the cop.

“Howdy there,” he said.

The cop turned, flashing pale eyes on Bob; then those same eyes hungered over to Russ and ate him up. He was a lanky, tan man, with a thick mat of hair that was maybe a bit too fussed over, hipless and lean and long-faced, with a Glock at a sporty angle on his belt. He looked mean as a horse whip.

“This your truck, son?” asked the cop.

“It is, uh, Deputy Peck,” Bob replied, reading the name off the name tag. “Is there some kind of problem?”

“Well, sir, just checking up is all. We got a pretty nice little town here and I like to keep my eyes open.”

“I grew up in this town,” said Bob. “My daddy’s buried in this town.”

“Bob Lee Swagger,” said Peck. “Goddamn, yes.”

“That’s right.”

“I remember—”

“Yes, all that’s finished now. You want to run my tag and name you go ahead. I come up clean, you’ll see. That was all a big mistake.”

“You back on vacation, Mr. Swagger?”

“Oh, you might say. Got a young friend here with me. It’s just a sort of a sentimental trip. Looking at my old haunts and the places I went with my father.”

“Well, sir, you got any trouble or need any help, you come see me. Duane Peck’s the name.”

“I’ll remember that, Deputy Peck.”

Peck drew back, let them pass, but Russ had an odd feeling of being sized up, read up one side and down the other. He didn’t like it.