Stephen Hunter - Black Light

“Your goddamned father done socked me in the jaw,” he said. “That’s how come my face is broken. I’ve had forty years of pain on account of your sumbitch old man.”

“If my daddy smacked you, Jed, by God, it was a smack you’d earned and I’ll bet it was a smack you ain’t never forgot.”

Jed seemed to melt backwards a step. Something flashed through his little eyes, and told them yes, yes by God, no matter what had happened, Jed Posey had never forgot the day Earl Swagger broke his jaw.

“What you want?” he said. “All that’s long time ago. Jimmy Pye kilt your daddy and your daddy kilt Jimmy Pye and his cousin Bub.”

“I got some questions.”

“Why the hell should I answer one goddamn question for a goddamned Swagger? Nothing in the law or nowhere says I got to talk to you.”

He hawked a squirt of tobacco venom into the dust.

“No sir, you don’t,” said Bob. “But a old goat like you understands one goddamn thing. Money. You gimme an hour of your time, I’ll give you twenty dollars.”

“Twenny dollar! Mister, you must think I’m stupid. Twenny dollar! Cost you forty dollar, Swagger. For forty dollar I’ll tell you any goddamned thing you want to know.”

Russ started forward, but Bob caught him.

“I said twenty dollars and I meant twenty dollars. I don’t bargain with scum. Come on, Russ,” and he pulled the boy back and turned.

Russ shot him a what-the-hell look but Bob yanked him backwards and they turned and started walking back toward the woods.

“Goddamn you, Swagger, thirty dollar.”

Bob turned. “I said I don’t bargain with trash. You take what’s on the table or I will leave the table and that’s true today or a hundred years from today and you won’t never make no twenty dollars.”

“Goddamn you, Swagger.”

“Goddamn me one more time, you old coot, and I will come up on that porch and knock in the other side of your face and finish my daddy’s work.”

“Let me see the twenny.”

Bob pulled his wallet and removed a twenty.

Jed considered narrowly, as if he had a lot riding on the decision.

“You give me the twenty now.”

“If you want to hang on to something, you hang on to your dick, you egg-sucking piece of trash. I’ll hang on to the money until I am finished with you and then I will hand it over. You know no Swagger in these parts or any other ever broke his word or welshed on a bargain.”

“There’s a goddamned first time for everything,” said Jed bitterly. “You come on, then. But you keep your distance.”

Bob and Russ climbed the rickety steps into the dark dwelling. Russ was always amazed at how things diverged from his imagination of them, but this time he was absolutely correct. It was one grim big surpriseless room, rank with odor. A deer’s shabby antlers were nailed to a crossbeam; the stove was old and stank of cold, ancient grease, the bed, a pallet in the corner, supported a scurvy nest of swirled blankets. One wall had been transfigured into Jed’s hall of fame by the industrious use of thumbtacks as his front page from the paper had been pinned to the wood, where it was now yellow and crackly with age—COUNTY MAN SLAYS NEGRO, it said, uniting him and Davidson Fuller in journalistic immortality. The smell of unwashed clothes, dead animals, human destitution and loneliness hung everywhere in the thick air.

“Ah, could I have a decaf cappuccino and a mocha for my son?” asked Russ. “And the chocolate biscotti.”

“Shut up, Russ,” Bob said, as Jed’s squirrelly little face fell into anger, “this ain’t no time to be smart.”

The old man threw down at an oilcloth-covered table, clinging to the shotgun, and Bob sat across from him. There was no place for Russ to sit and there wasn’t enough money in the world to induce him to physical contact with that bed— yccch , he shuddered—so he just sort of leaned against the closest wall.

“Tell me about that day,” said Bob.

Jed pulled a pack of Red Man from his pocket and stuffed some of the stringy tobacco in his mouth, did some manipulating with his tongue until he got it lodged between cheek and gum on the right side, where it bulged like a tumor. He smiled, showing brown gums.

“Ain’t much to goddamn tell. They woke me in the Blue Eye drunk tank along with my brother, Lum, rest his soul, and that fat old deputy Lem tole me he had work detail. I’se so hung over, I didn’t realize where we was until we got there. Let me tell you, Swagger, I wasn’t in no mood to go horsing around in them hot woods lookin’ for no nigger gal.”

“What happened?” Bob said. “Talk me through it.”

Jed looked around, spat at an overflowing Maxwell House can on the floor and then narrated a rambling account of the day, of the heat and dust of the forest even high in the mountains, of the agony of picking through the saw brier and the bracken, of the mosquitoes and other things that buzzed and bit, and the stench of the dogs, and the final thing, the girl.

“Shit,” he said. “She was a ripe one, all blown up like b’loon. You could see her goddamned li’l mouse, tell you what. Just out there in the open. Now they show that stuff in the magazines. In them days, boy, you never saw no mouse. Heh, heh.” He absently chortled in memory of the smoky pleasure of it and Russ saw a flicker of rage play across Bob’s face, then subside.

“Why did my father belt you?”

“’Cause he’s a mean sumbitch is why,” said Jed, not meeting Bob’s eyes.

“My father was many things but he wasn’t a bully. Why’d he hit you, old man?”

“I didn’t mean no harm. I said a little something about riding the gal is all. Bastard. He had no cause to do that. She was a nigger gal and I was right. A nigger boy kilt her. I said so then and that’s way it turned out. Then that nigger boy’s daddy he go all around pretending to be some kind of big shot. Well, I showed him. I ripped open his skull with a goddamned spade. Best feeling I ever got, yes it was, by God, and worth ever damn day of prison. Niggers tried to kill me in prison, you know. Yeah, look at this.”

He pulled down the strap of his overall and the bib fell, and Russ saw a long purple crescent of scar tissue, a witless smile of pucker, running from one nipple almost down to the appendix.

Jed’s eye lit with yellow madness. “Niggers done that. Two hunnert and thirty-five stitches! Doc sewed me up like a burlap sack. But they couldn’t bleed me out. No sir. I got more damn blood in me than a sloat pig on slaughter Friday. By God, not no niggers, not no Earl Mr. Fancy Medal Swagger done got the best of me, by goddamn!”

He sat back, spent, and awarded himself a recreational gob of tobacco juice which he launched like a missile in an arching parabola until it hit dead center in the can, raising a tiny mushroom cloud. Russ shuddered in revulsion and looked away. But Jed wasn’t done. He looked up.

“I was right about the niggers too. I said, you give them people anything, next thing you know, they be shooting and fucking and killing all over the goddamned place. And they is too, ain’t they? Niggers is fine in Africa. Bring ’em over here and look what good it done us. Niggers. They’s the end of America, that’s for damned sure.”

Bob kept still through this tirade, as though he were waiting patiently for a dark storm to blow over. Then he said, “Tell me about my father. What was his mood? What was he doing? How did he act?”

“He was soft on the niggers, that was his problem,” said Jed. “I could smell it on him. This little missing gal: hell, you’d a thought it was his little gal, not some nigger’s. He was sad . Whole goddamned morning. That is when he weren’t coldcocking me. I could take him in a fair fight.”