Stephen Hunter - Black Light

“So Princeton,” the girl was saying, “why’d you drop out?”

“Oh, my mother and my father separated. I knew it would be hard on my mother, so I didn’t want to be twelve hundred miles away. I spent the last year in Oklahoma City, working on the Daily Oklahoman . That, plus the fact I didn’t really like the East. I spent my life trying to get out of Oklahoma because I was too good for Oklahoma. Then I got to the Ivy League and the people seemed to be so, you know, little . They were fundamentally bigots. They viewed the world through such a perverted prism. Everyone outside was a redneck Nazi, anyone who owned a gun or was in the NRA or voted Republican was subhuman at worst and an amusing ignoramus at best. I just couldn’t stand it. They didn’t know anything . I somehow ended up working for a year on the Oklahoman , where I discovered that I fit in … nowhere .”

“Oh, go on. I’m sure you’ll find a fit. You’re very bright.”

“I was very bright. In Oklahoma, I was so smart. Then I got to New Jersey and I was just another toad on a rock.”

She smiled.

“Aren’t you some sort of writer?”

“The unpublished sort. Very glamorous.”

“Are you going to write a book about Bob the Nailer?”

“No. Bob has secrets so deep ten years of therapy followed by ten years of torture couldn’t get them all out. He’s spent his life trying to live up to his father’s ideal. And, unlike the rest of us, I’d say he made it. He wouldn’t say he had, but I would. Anyhow, the book is reputedly about the dad. Earl Swagger was an extremely heroic man, killed in a shoot-out with white-trash scum, after winning the Medal of Honor on Iwo Jima. I had the idea of doing a long narrative on his last day, how it summoned up a whole slew of American pathologies. But all I’ve done is run around and get coffee.”

“It sounds interesting. I like the idea of a symbolic episode: you learn so much about the macrocosm by evoking the microcosm.”

“Wow,” he said. “You must be an English major.”

“I’m a junior at Vanderbilt.”

“That’s a good school.”

“Thank you. I’m writing my senior thesis on Raymond Carrrrrr,” Russ not quite catching the last name.

Raymond? Writer? Begins with C , has r’s? Russ panicked. Had she said Carver? He’d never read any Carver. But maybe she’d said Chandler . That was much better. He hadn’t read any Chandler either, but at least he could bluff his way through.

“The L.A. private-eye guy? Lots of neon, that sort of stuff.”

“Yes, but so much more,” she said, and Russ sighed with relief. “He could really tell a story. Maybe it’s a southern thing, but I love it when you can just sink into a book’s language. Will your book be like that?”

“Yes,” said Russ, thinking I hope .

“How far are you?”

“Well, we’re really still researching. Listen, I’m sort of mixed up. Who are you?”

“Oh,” she laughed. “One of the grandchildren. You knew Grandpappy?”

Now he got it.

“At the end, I went with Bob to see him. He was a crusty old boy, I’ll say that. He told me a thing or two.”

“Crusty as they come. The original male tyrant king. But somehow, a necessary man,” she said. “And sweet. Underneath. He was getting vague, though.”

“We noticed. But there was something heroic in the way he fought it. He was an Arkansas Lear,” Russ said, really pleased with the Lear remark, though he’d never gotten around to reading it either.

“Such a man. A tyrant, a ruler, but somehow, oh, I don’t know, necessary . They don’t make them like that anymore, do they?”

“No, they make ’em like me ,” he said—she laughed—“and I agree it’s a kind of a comedown.”

“Oh, Russ, you’ll do fine.”

“You’re … whose daughter?”

“My father is John, Grandpap’s oldest son. He’s a doctor in Little Rock, an internist. I’m Jeannie.”

“The New York one? I heard someone call you ‘the New York one.’”

“Oh, that. I interned last summer in New York at Mademoiselle .”

“Oh,” said Russ. Shit, she was ahead of him!

“I just got coffee for assholes in too much makeup who’d done too many drugs and now did too much aerobics. Not helpful.”

“It all helps. Or so they tell me.”

“Have you picked up on the big scandal yet?”

“No, what’s that?”

“All the blacks are scandalized. I just learned this from my friend Tenille. She’s over there with her mother.”

“I don’t—”

“My grandfather won the Silver Star at the Battle of the Bulge but the bravest thing he ever did was prosecute a white man for the murder of a black man. His name was Jed Posey.”

The name rang some kind of bell with Russ, but he couldn’t quite nail it down.

“In 1962 he beat a civil rights leader to death with a spade in a gas station.”

“Oh, yes,” Russ said. “One thing about this, I’m becoming quite an expert on the Faulknerian substrata of Polk County, Arkansas.”

“Faulkner would have won two Nobel Prizes if he’d been born here, that is if he didn’t drink himself to death beforehand. Anyhow, Grandpappy prosecuted him and though he couldn’t get the death penalty, Jed Posey went away for life.”

“Yes?” said Russ.

“It cost Grandpappy the election and he was out of office for twelve years, after eighteen years in office. Finally, in 1974, he won again, and had eight more years. By that time, he’d turned into an anti-gun-control liberal, if you can imagine such a thing.”

“Just barely,” said Russ.

“Anyhow, they just paroled him. Jed Posey. Two days after Grandpappy died, they paroled him.”

“Jesus,” said Russ. “That’s disrespectful.”

“No,” she said. “That’s Arkansas.”

But suddenly Russ wasn’t there. It all fell away, the wake, the noise, the crowd, even impossibly bright and pretty Jeannie Vincent in front of him.

He saw that name somewhere in infantile print, but couldn’t quite pin it down. Jed Posey.

It was part of a list.

Lem Tolliver.

Lum Posey.

Pop Dwyer.

Where?

“Russ? Are you going to faint?”

“Ah no, I just—”

He remembered suddenly. Jed Posey. His name was on the inside of Bob’s father’s last notepad. He was in the party that found Shirelle Parker. He and Miss Connie were the only two people still alive who’d spent time with Earl Swagger on his last day on earth, July 23, 1955.

“Do you know where this Jed Posey would be?”

“I don’t—what’s going on?”

“We have to find him. We have to!” he said, and thought he’d explain it to her, when Bob grabbed him suddenly and pulled him away from the young woman, with a look on his face like the war was just about to start and it was time to load the damned guns.

S ometimes he even impressed himself!

Red Bama sat back for just a moment and reflected upon the wondrous thing that he had brought off and how quickly he had snatched an apparent victory from the jaws of defeat.

He felt now like crowing loudly from the roof of Nancy’s. The secret war he had been fighting was about to pay off.

His lawyer reported: the parole of Jed Posey happened with alarming alacrity. Posey himself was well prepared, initially by a screw whom Red controlled and then by a private detective in Red’s employ: he had been told that he would be paroled and that in order to stay out of stir, he had certain obligations to the man (unspecified) who had arranged all this. He would be located in his old cabin, a mile or so off old County 70 at the foot of Iron Fork Mountain in the densest hardwood forest in Arkansas. By this time, Jed was an experienced professional convict, with over thirty years in stir: surviving and finally flourishing, he had become an adept liar, a shrewd manipulator, a vivid reader of human weakness, a tough, scrawny, tattooed old jail rat, capable of witnessing the most extraordinary violence without a wince. Other people’s sorrow meant nothing to him at all; empathy had been milled out of him by the prison and, in fact, his favorite of all memories was the recollection of that blissful day in 1962 when he had stove in that nigger’s head with a spade, then sat down and had a last Cherry Smash before cops arrived.