Stephen Hunter - Black Light

“Goddammit, boy, don’t you tell me where the hell we are. I traveled all this on horseback in the thirties, I hunted it for fifty years and I’ve been over it a thousand times. Tell him, Bob.”

“It’s the new road,” said Bob. “I think it’s throwing us off.”

For old 71, with its curves and switchbacks, slalomed between the massive cement buttresses that supported the straight bright line that was the Boss Harry Etheridge Memorial Parkway. Sometimes the huge new road would be to the left of them, sometimes to the right of them and sometimes above their heads. There would be times too when it disappeared altogether, behind a hill or a screen of uncut forest. But it was always there, somehow mocking them, a symbol of how futile their quest seemed: to recover a past that had been destroyed by the coming of the future.

But at last the two points of their peculiar compass jibed to form some sort of imaginary azimuth to where they wanted to go: Sam’s memory and Bob’s to the corrected version of the Arkansas Gazette of July 24, 1955.

They had just passed an odd little place set by the side of the road called Betty’s Formal Wear, in a ramshackle trailer a few miles out of a town called Boles. It was Sam who shouted, “Here, goddammit, here!”

Bob pulled off the side of the road. A little ways ahead, an Exxon station raised its corporate symbol a hundred feet in the air so it could be seen from the parkway, the inescapable parkway, off to the right. The roadway was thirty feet up, a mighty marvel of engineering, and even where they were, they could hear the throb as the occasional car or truck whizzed along it.

“Aren’t we looking for corn?” Russ asked. “I thought it was a cornfield.”

“Ain’t been no corn or cotton in these parts for two decades,” said Sam. “All the land’s in pasturage for cattle or hay fields. No cultivation no more.”

They were parked next to a GTE relay station, a concrete box behind a Cyclone fence.

“Back there?” said Bob.

“Yeah.”

Someone had planted a screen of pines in the sixties and they now towered about thirty feet tall, as if to block the ground from public scrutiny. Bob could see the flat, grassy field through the pines, however, shot with rogue sprigs of green as small bushes fought against the matted grass for survival.

“Yeah,” said Sam. “Corn, it was all corn then. Couldn’t hardly see nothing. I was the fifth or sixth car out here, but it was getting busier by the moment.”

Bob closed his eyes for just a second, and he imagined the site after dark, lit by the revolving police bubbles, punctuated by the crackle of radios, the urgent but futile shouts of the medics. It reminded him somehow of Vietnam, first tour, 1965-66, he was a young buck sergeant, 3rd Marine Division, the aftermath of some forgotten nighttime firefight, all the people running and screaming, the flares wobbling and flickering in the night the way the flashing lights would have ten years earlier, in 1955.

“You okay, Bob?”

“He’s fine,” snapped Sam. “His father died here. What do you think he’s going to do, jump for joy?”

Russ seemed stricken.

“I only meant—”

“Forget it, Junior. It don’t mean a thing.”

Sam opened a flask, took a tot.

“Believe a man named O’Brian owned it, but he tenanted it out to some white-trash families. Over there, where that goddamned highway is, that was the crest of the ridge, woods-covered then. Took a deer there in 1949, and one of the white hags without teeth came out and gave me hell, shooting so close to her cabin where her damn kids were playing.”

“She was right,” said Bob.

“Yes, goddammit, I believe she was. Buck fever. I had to shoot. Silliest damned thing I ever did—that is, until today.”

“Where were they?”

“The cars were back through there,” Sam said, lifting a blackened claw and pointing. “I believe you can see traces of the little road that ran between the cornfields. About a hundred yards in. Your daddy’s cruiser was parked slantwise of the road, Jimmy’s twenty yards farther down.”

“The bodies were where they were in the diagrams?” said Russ.

“Yes, they were. Believe I answered that one yesterday. No decent lawyer ever asks the same question twice. He remembers the question he asked and the answer.”

“I couldn’t remember.”

“All right,” said Bob. “I want to go back there, look at the land.”

“Believe I’ll rusticate here,” Sam said. “You boys go on ahead. Sing out if you get lost or need me to haul you out of the mud. And watch out for snakes. Mac Jimson killed a big rattler in the road the night your daddy was killed. Scared the hell out of us. Shot it in the head. Had to. Just crossing the road. Never saw no snake act like that before.”

“A rattler?” said Bob.

“Big goddamn timber rattler. Strangest goddamned thing. All the cops around, the rattler skedaddles across the road. Mac had to shoot it.”

“I hate snakes,” said Russ.

“Hell, boy,” said Sam, “it’s just a lizard without legs.”

Bob and Russ left the old man, cut through the trees and headed across the overgrown, weedy ground. It was field now, no corn anywhere, junk land that crouched in the shadow of the highway. Bob made it to the trace of road, not road so much but simply an opening where the vegetation hadn’t grown so high because it had gotten a late start. The trace went back toward the big highway, then began to curve around. Bob got about a hundred yards back.

“Here?” asked Russ.

Bob took a deep breath.

“I do believe. Ask the old man.”

“Sam! Here?” screamed Russ.

Bob watched the old man, who studied them, then nodded up and down.

“Here,” said Russ.

Bob had never been here before. So odd. He stayed in Blue Eye eight more years and he’d never come out here and stood at the spot. Then he went away to the Marines, and then came back and went up in the mountains, and never once, either before or after, had he been to this spot.

Never laid any flowers or felt the power of the blasphemed earth. Why? Too much pain? Possibly. Too close to going under with a poor drunken mother who just could not hang on and the terrible, terrible sense of it all having been taken from them. The bitterness. It could kill you. You had to let the bitterness go or it would kill you. He knew he’d been by, though. As he remembered, Sam had driven him up U.S. 71 to Fort Smith to join the United States Marine Corps on June 12, 1964, the day after he graduated from high school.

“Here,” said Russ, consulting the diagram from the newspaper. “Here’s where Jimmy ended up parking. Now”—he walked past Bob, hunched in concentration, nose buried in the clipping before him—“here is where your father’s car was. And your dad was found in the driver’s side, sitting sideways, fallen slightly to his right and hung up on the steering wheel, his feet on the ground, the radio mike in his hand.”

“Bled out?” said Bob.

“What?”

“That was the mechanism, right? That’s what killed him. Blood loss. Not shock to his nervous system or a bullet in a major blood-bearing organ?”

“Ah, that’s what it says here. I don’t—”

“Russ, how does a bullet kill? Do you know?”

Russ didn’t. A bullet just, uh, killed . It, uh—

“A bullet can kill you three ways. It can destroy your central nervous system. That’s the brain shot, into the deep cerebellum, two inches back from the eyes and between the ears. Instant rag doll. Clinical death in less than a tenth of a second. Or it can destroy your circulatory and arterial system, depressurize you. The heart shot or something in the aorta. That’s fifteen, twenty seconds till clinical death, your good central body shot. Or, finally, it can hit a major blood-bearing organ and you essentially bleed to death internally. A big stretch cavity, lots of tissue destruction, lots of blood, but not instant death. Say, three, four, sometimes ten to twenty minutes without help. Which of those?”