Stephen Hunter - Black Light

“Now, what the hell you want to do that for, boy?”

“I just want to know what happened. The diagrams may lie and the newspapers may lie and all the official documents may be gone, but the body is going to tell the truth.”

“Bob, it was forty years ago.”

“I know there’s not much left. That’s why we need a good man. Now, what’s it going to take?”

“Well, I file a Motion of Exhumation with the county clerk and the Coroner’s Office and you have to find a good forensic pathologist. Get a doctor, not an undertaker like they got in too many counties down here.”

“Someone from Little Rock?”

“There’s someone in the medical school up at Fayetteville who’s well thought of. I could call him. Then I suppose you have to make an arrangement with a mortuary to clear out a place for him to work. Bob, you want to go to all that trouble? It was open-and-shut.”

“It’s the only way my daddy can talk to me. I think I ought to listen to what he has to say. I have to find out what happened that night.”

Sam slept on the way back and when they pulled up to the old house where he’d lived and raised his kids and married his daughters and his sons and buried his wife, they waited for the stillness in the car to wake him. But it didn’t.

“Sam?” Bob finally said softly. It was twilight, with the sun lost behind Rich Mountain, which towered over Blue Eye from the west.

Sam made some wet, gurgling sound in his sinuses, stirred a bit but then seemed to settle back.

“Sam,” said Bob a little louder, and Sam’s eyes shot open.

He looked at each of them.

“Wha—where—what is—”

“Sam, Sam,” said Bob, grabbing the old man’s shoulder. “Sam, you been sleeping.”

But Sam’s eyes lit in panic and his body froze in tension.

“Who are you?” he begged fearfully. “What do you want? Don’t hurt me!”

“Sam, Sam,” said Bob calmly, “it’s Bob , Bob Lee Swagger, Earl’s boy. You just done forgot where you was.”

The old man was shaking desperately.

“You’re okay, Mr. Vincent,” said Russ. “Really, it’s fine, you’ve forgotten.”

But Sam’s eyes flashed between them, wide with horror.

“It’s okay,” said Bob. “It’s okay.”

E arl eased into the cornfield road. The dirt felt soft, and he progressed slowly. Around him, illuminated in the shafts of his headlights, the stalks of corn towered, eight feet tall and quivering ever so gently in the breeze.

Off the shoulder of the road, in the field, the earth looked loose and he was afraid if he got off into it, he could get stuck. Wouldn’t that be a goddamn mess!

The road curved a little to the left, until eventually it paralleled what, from the darker texture of the night, had to be the rise of Ferguson’s ridge. He’d taken a deer on the ridge, though several miles away. That same day, some sharecropper woman had given Sam a tongue-lashing for shooting so close to her children. Served him right, though to hear him tell it, Sam’d never made a mistake in his life.

When he was about a hundred yards in, that is, so far in he couldn’t see the U.S. 71 for the thickness of the corn, he halted the car and tried to think. He wanted to be able to put the light on Jimmy and Bub. That meant he had to turn the car. He got out, looked around, kicked at the shoulder and the dirt off the shoulder to tell if it would support the weight of the Ford. It appeared that it would. He climbed back in and painstakingly ground the wheel toward the left, cranking the car in a tight turn until the front wheels were just about off; then he spun the wheel in the opposite direction, backing slowly. This put him on the left side of the road, pointed outward. He turned off the engine, then leaned out the window and tried his spotlight. It threw a harsh circle of white light down the road that collected in a vivid oval a hundred feet out. With one hand he pivoted it, tracked it up and down like an antiaircraft searchlight, then turned it off.

He looked at the radium dial of his Bulova. Nine-fifty. Ten minutes to go.

Why am I so nervous? he wondered.

He’d been nervous in the war, or at least on the night before an amphibious operation.

Reason to get nervous. Amphibious operations were tricky and dangerous . At Tarawa, the Traks had run aground on coral a thousand yards out. It was a long walk in through the surf laden with equipment, with the Japs shooting the whole way. You get through that, you could get through anything.

But just some little goddamn nervous thing was flicking at him. He felt cursed. He’d made a big mistake today. He hadn’t meant to but he’d sure as hell wanted to and so he did it and now what? So he’d clean it up tomorrow. He’d clean up the mess he’d made, he’d be a man. These things could be handled and to hell with everything else. He knew he’d do it. He just didn’t know what it was to do.

It was all running together on him, the whole goddamned, messed-up day. Shirelle Parker Jed Posey Pop Dwyer Jimmy Pye Lem Tolliver Bub Pye Miss Connie Longacre Sam Vincent Buddy Till Edie White Pye Edie Edie Edie his son Bob Lee Shirelle dead missing her underpants her eyes eternally open the barking dog Mollie “He’s got it, she’s here .”

Forget about it , he told himself. Concentrate on the job .

He got out of the car when he could feel his limbs begin to tingle with lack of circulation. He stood, breathing in the country air. It was so incredibly quiet. But no, it wasn’t: just as a man in war learns the darkness isn’t really darkness, but a texture of different shades that can be learned and read, so quiet wasn’t really quiet. He heard the snapping of the cornstalks as they rustled in the hiss of the breeze. He heard crickets off on some spring by the ridge, and bullfrogs too, low and mournful. He thought he heard a man cough far away. No, couldn’t be. Nobody out here. Some goddamn frog thing or something, or maybe some freak of nature carrying a real cough miles and miles. It happened all the time.

Up above stars, not like the Pacific, but still towers and piles of stars, almost a smoke of stars. Constellations that he had showed his son, trying to remember the stories that went with them and feeling he wasn’t doing a very good job. There were no city lights out here to bleach them out; the closest town was Boles, a good five miles back, and in Boles they closed up for the night around nine.

“What’s that one, Daddy?” someone asked.

No, no one asked. It was his son’s voice, but it was only in his mind; he remembered the question from a hunting trip last fall.

“That’s the North Star, Bob Lee. Always find your way home with that one. Secret to night navigation.”

“What’s night ’gation?”

Damn kid had so many questions!

Concentrate on the job , he told himself.

He checked his watch. It was ten o’clock. Nothing.

Bub drove. He couldn’t hardly see nothing. Just corn on both sides of the road, and now and then a rhyming set of Burma Shave signs or on a barn a MAIL POUCHor a COPENHAGENor even a JESUS SAVES. He felt lost. It was so dark. He was very scared and also very tired. He was hungry. Hadn’t eaten since the burger.

Jimmy looked out of the car, peering intently.

“There it is,” he said. “Right up there, on the left, you see it?”

“Yes sir,” said Bub. He saw a gap in the corn and what looked to be a road leading back. Far off was a ridge.

“You ain’t forgot what you’re going to say?” he asked. It was very important that Jimmy tell him again. It stopped him from getting so scared.