Black Light

by Stephen Hunter

  He turned and sprinted, his feet flying, ducking along the covered sidewalk, around the odd party of tourists, past some lolling teenagers, feeling like a complete jerk. No: feeling somehow flushed and excited. Once in his career on the Oklahoman he’d had to sub for the vacationing movie critic and go on what was called a junket, where he’d flown down to New Orleans and sat at a table in a hotel banquet room when Kevin Costner and Clint Eastwood were paraded around the room, a half an hour per table. It was of course a completely ridiculous situation, but when he first saw the two men entering the big hotel room, he felt as he felt now: giddy, goofy, unprepared, callow as a pup, completely unworthy. And they were only movie stars and turned out to be, at least as far as he could tell in the time he shared with them at the big tables, fairly decent guys but pretend heroes.

  Now, this guy was a real hero: in war and in peace, he’d done extraordinary things. As Russ ran and as his excitement mounted, his concentration scattered; his mind seemed full of glistening soap bubbles.

  A plan, he thought, you need a plan.

  But before he could hatch a plan, his shoes took him around a corner and into the parking lot that lay in front of the Southern States store. It was a gravel lot and dust hung in the air; Russ stopped, and drank in what looked like a scene from some documentary on America’s working habits. This would be the rural division, as imagined by someone with the mordant glee of Hieronymus Bosch and the eye for detail of Norman Rockwell: Everywhere it seemed that farmers or ranchers or cowboys milled in the yard, swapping yarns near their pickups or backslapping and grab-assing in little clots. In the background were cattle pens and there was some lowing from the imprisoned animals. It looked like Saturday night at the railhead; where was John Wayne? Well, dammit, John Wayne was everywhere.

  These men all had craggy brown faces and seemed woven together out of rawhide and pemmican. All were encased in dusty denim and leather from head to toe in a dozen different shades, all wore boots beat to hell and gone, but the headgear was various: straw hats, Stetsons both domed and flat, brims curly or straight, baseball caps, engineer caps, even a fishing cap or two.

  Out of such chaos Russ could make no sense at all, and felt as out of it as an African American at the local Klan meeting. But they seemed to be so enjoying themselves that they paid him no mind at all, and he wandered among them, looking for a set of features he could match with the features he’d memorized off the magazine cover and the more recent photos. He’d guess a man like Bob would leave a wake of wannabes, would be at the center of a circle of acolytes, so he looked for a king among all these princes. He could make out none, and now, one or two at a time, the boys would peel out and begin to leave.

  “What’s going on?” he asked one old-timer.

  “Friday noontime, they haul in to reload on supplies. Lots of spread-out places here. More’n you’d imagine. The boys all git together for a bit of joshing time on Friday noons.”

  “I see,” he said.

  He wandered on through the thinning crowd, utterly failing to connect any of these tawny, ageless men who seemed from a different race altogether with his image of Bob Lee Swagger.

  He reached at last the supply house, where some laborer was throwing sacks of feed into the back of a weathered green pickup.

  Russ froze and then unfroze and just stared.

  The man was tall and sweaty and had wrapped a red bandanna around his throat to soak up the sweat. He wore the faded jeans and faded denim shirt of a cowboy, but was also wearing a battered, faded red baseball cap that said RAZORBACKS.

  The man felt him staring and looked him hard in the eyes and yes, yes it was him: older than Russ expected, and browner, almost the color of Navajo pottery, without an extra ounce of flesh anywhere on his face. His skin was a nest of fissures and crags, taut yet ruination itself. The pewter eyes were so intense they burned like lasers. He looked not at all romantic or heroic: he looked like a hot tired sweaty man with a lot of work still to do. He looked grumpy as hell, and maybe mean too. He looked like he could whip Russ’s ass.

  “What are you staring at, sonny?” he demanded.

  Russ was overcome with shame. But also excitement, and he ran to him and blurted, “Mr. Swagger? Mr. Bob Lee Swagger. I came a long way to see you.”

  “Well, you wasted your goddamned time,” said Swagger. “You go write your goddamned book on your own. I ain’t explaining myself to a pup like you or the best writer on earth. I hate writers. I really hate writers. Now go on, get out of my way.”

  With that, he climbed behind the wheel of his truck and headed off.

  Bob worked the horse. The horse had an eye condition, an ulcerated pupil which had infected, possibly from fly contamination. The infection had spread mysteriously and monstrously until the eye looked like an eight ball sheathed in mildew, and terrible acne had formed on the face all the way up to the ear and halfway down to the nostrils. He was a beautiful gray gelding named Billy, and the girl who owned him had done a good job building him up and bringing him along until the eye thing.

  “It’s the worst disease anyone in our family has ever gotten,” said the girl’s mother. “He could die from it.”

  “Now, now,” Bob had told her, but mainly told the grave little girl who hadn’t said a word, “the vet’s done all he can. You got to trust the medicine and we won’t miss a night, and you got to trust us. We’ll take the best care of Billy that can be taken.”

  Bob Lee Swagger, having survived nearly fifty years of a life that included various adventures in the Marine Corps (three tours in the Southeast Asian War Games, Second Place Finish) and a private life that was amazingly complex, had ended up the one way he’d never thought he’d end up: happy.

  Now, who in hell would have thought such a thing?

  For one thing, the dry Arizona weather had a miraculously curative power over his reconstructed left hip, where a 148-grain 7.62×54 full-metal-jacketed bullet launched at over 2,600 feet per second had torn out a hideous amount of bone and cartilage. It had taken the government a long year in a vet hospital to get the thing rewired and even then, after all that time, it had been a jury-rigged job and for a good twenty years he’d awakened each morning with the reminder that if you hunt men for a living, they by God hunt you back. The pain possibly had led to the drinking, but possibly not: he’d stayed drunk and mean for nearly a decade to bury pains that maybe had nothing to do with his hip and could not otherwise be rewired, memories of young men thrown away for so much nothing, except possibly a name on a black wall. That took time to work out and make peace with and now the blessed lack of hurt down there where he was rebuilt was extra gravy every goddamned day. But that was only part of it.

  The other part of it was the wife. A woman. Julie Fenn, R.N. She’d once been a picture carried between the helmet and the helmet liner by his spotter, one of the great young men who came home from the land of bad things in a rubber bag in a wooden box. Some short circuit in the universe had decreed that Bob meet Julie many years later; when he’d seen her, he’d known: This is the one. There is no other. And by the same token, she’d known that of him, and now they were married, had a little girl named Nicki who wrote her name YKN4 backwards and scrambled, the age tossed in too, on all her drawings of horses. It was so good, so many of the things he’d thought he’d never have, because he had been exiled from the rest of the human community, because he’d done his country’s bidding with a rifle and gone out and officially killed 87 enemy soldiers, one at a time, over a long distance. He knew, of course, that he’d killed 341. Now all that was somehow forgotten.

  And then the last thing, the goddamned frosting on the goddamned cake: the horses. This was the best work there was. There was something about a horse that he loved. They told no lies and if you handled them well, they responded. He never met one that was ambitious or jealous or hypocritical. They were honestly stupid creatures, strong and dumb as oxen, but with that magic component that he so loved in animals even when he’d hunted th
em, which he did no more: some magic would come over them and in a flash they’d go from grazing herbivores to sheer dancing beauty on the hoof. To watch them run—especially, say, under the tutelage of some small girl like the one that owned Billy or the one that was his own and would grow in time to be a horsewoman herself—to watch them run, all that muscle playing under the skin, all that dust ripping up beneath their powerful hooves, by God, that was a kind of happiness that could be found in no bottle and in no rifle and he’d looked for happiness in both places.

  He worked Billy. It was called lunging; the horse is on a tether and if you work it around in circles, cantering twenty feet out on a lunge line, driving it with a lunge whip or, as now, if you’ve bonded with the horse, with voice alone.

  “Come on now, Billy,” Bob crooned, and Billy’s muscles splayed and flexed as the horse rotated around Bob, though to Bob it was straight ahead of him, because he was rotating with it. The dust rose and clung to the gray’s sweaty shoulders; he’d need a good rubdown afterwards, but that was all right, because they were coming to get Billy that afternoon.

  Twenty minutes. When Billy had begun to recover, Bob had started lunging him, to get the softness and soreness out of his limbs, get those muscles hard and sleek and defined again, get him back to what he’d once been. In the beginning, the animal had balked, still unsure because the ulceration had eaten into his vision and he only saw 60 percent in the bad eye, and could only go seven or eight minutes before beginning to act out; now he did twenty minutes three times a day, no problem, and was looking as if he could show again soon.

  “Okay, boy,” Bob called, and began to draw in the lunge line that ran to a halter called a caveson. Slowly, he brought the horse in and at last halted him. He snapped off the line, removed the caveson and threw a halter over him. Now he’d walk the animal for another twenty minutes to cool him down; you never put a hot horse away. Then he’d wash him off. Mrs. Hastings and Suzy would pick him up at three, and it would work out just fine. Billy would be gone back to his life.

  You had to do something and this was it for Bob. His marine pension still came in, his wife, Julie, still worked three days at the Navajo reservation clinic, and sometimes more if necessary, and there was just enough for everybody to have everything they needed.

  “Daddy?”

  Nicki was four, blond, and a tough little thing. It’s good to raise them on a ranch twenty miles from town, he thought: teach them to get up early and go feed the animals with you, form their character early to hard work and responsibility, as his had been formed, and they’ll turn out fine. He had been raised with a father lost to grotesque tragedy; nothing like that would happen to his child.

  “Yes, YKN4?”

  “Billy’s sweaty.”

  “Yes, he is, baby girl. We got him lathered up fine. Just a good workout. Now we got to get him cooled down.”

  “Are they coming to take Billy today?”

  “Yes, baby girl, they are. He’s all better now. See, some scars, some vision loss, but other than that, he’s okay. We got him through it.”

  “I’ll miss Billy.”

  “I’ll miss him too. But he has to go back to his life. That girl Suzy, she’s missed him too the last four weeks. Now it’s her turn to be happy.”

  YKN4 wore jeans and Keds and a little polo shirt. She was, as are all children who pass the better part of their times in barns among horses, dirty and happy. She bobbed along beside her father as he took Billy in slow, cooling circles around the corral until finally the animal’s breathing had returned to normal.

  “You gonna wash him down, Daddy?”

  “Help me, honey?”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  “You are such a big girl, YKN4,” said Bob, and his daughter’s face knitted up and laughed.

  YKN4 took the horse by the halter line and drew it into the barn, where she strained to link it to a rope. The big animal yielded entirely to her bossy directions. She didn’t give it a chance and she didn’t back down. “Come on, you big old dopey thing,” she shouted, shoving against its shoulder to move it backwards. She brought another line over and clipped it to the halter, effectively tying the horse in the middle of a stall.

  “Can I give him a carrot, Daddy?”

  “Let me finish, honey.”

  Bob turned on the hose and fixed a pail of soapy water, then moved to the horse and began to rhythmically sponge it, neck to shoulders, shoulders to withers, down each muscular leg.

  “Daddy,” said the girl.

  “Yes, honey?”

  “Daddy, there was a man.”

  Bob said nothing at first. A little steam gathered behind his eyes, a little fire. “A skinny man. Thick hair, dark. Looked intense?”

  “What’s intense, Daddy?”

  “Ah. Like he’s galloping only he’s just standing still. Not a smile nowhere on him. Face all tight like a fist.”

  “Yes, Daddy. Yes, that’s it.”

  “Where was he?”

  “He was parked just down the road from where the bus let me off this morning. Rosalita looked at him and he looked away.”

  “In a pickup truck? White?”

  “Yes, Daddy. Do you know him? Is he nice? He smiled at me. I think he’s nice.”

  “He’s just a fool boy with the idea I can make him rich and famous. He’ll get tired. He’ll go away. I thought he got the message but I guess he’s more stubborn than I give him credit for.”

  Would they ever leave him alone? You get your goddamned picture on a magazine cover and the whole world thinks you got enough secrets in you to write a best-seller. Over the years, no end of assholes had come at him. How did they find him? Well, it was like his address was out on some nutcase Internet, and all the losers and loonies came sniffing along. Some weren’t even American. The goddamned Germans were the worst. They offered him money, anything, for ah interview. But he was all done with that. He’d had the worst kind of fame, and it was enough for him. He was done with that.

  “Did he bother you, honey?”

  “No, Daddy. He just smiled.”

  “If you see him again, you tell me, now, and I’ll speak to him, and then he’ll go away. Otherwise, we’ll just wait until he tires himself out.”

  Many of them just disappeared after a while. Their ideas were so absurd and ill formed. Some of them didn’t even want to write about him and make money; they just wanted to see him and draw something from his presence, from the thing that his life had been. So stupid. His life wasn’t a monument or a symbol or a pattern: it was his life.

  It seemed for a time the boy vanished. Then he was back again one night, sitting patiently in the truck across the road. Julie was back; they’d eaten and were sitting on the porch, drinking iced tea and watching as the sun set behind the low mountains in perfect serenity.

  “He is stubborn.”

  “Damn fool boy.”

  “At least he keeps his distance. He has some manners.” In their time, people had pulled into the yard, jumped out and begun offering contracts, setting up camera lights, glad-handing, carrying on, sure they were onto something big, they’d found El Dorado at last. Bob had several times called the Sheriff’s Office, the last time for the Germans, who were extremely obnoxious.

  “But he won’t go home. It’s beginning to feel a little sick. Poor YKN4. I don’t want her to think this is how you have to grow up.”

  “Oh, she can handle it. It helps her to know her father is an extraordinary man. It gives her a little something, I think.”

  Swagger looked at his wife. She was a tanned and handsome woman whose blond hair had begun to show streaks of gray. She hadn’t worn anything except jeans and boots and T-shirts since they’d returned to Ajo. She worked like a dog too. Bob thought she worked harder than he did and that was saying a lot.

  “How old would you say he is?” she asked.

  “About twenty-two or so. If he wants adventures he should join the Corps. He could use a few weeks on Parris Island. He shouldn�
�t hang out here, scaring the child and making me even crankier than I am.”

  “I don’t know why he seems different.”

  “He reminds you a little of Donny, that’s why,” Bob said, naming her first husband.

  “Yes, I suppose he does. He has Donny’s shyness and unsureness.”

  “Donny was a good boy,” Bob said, “the best.” Donny had died in his arms, gurgling blood in little spouts from a lung shot, eyes locked on nothingness, squirming in the terror of it, his left hand gripping terribly into Bob’s biceps.

  Hang on, Donny, oh Jesus, medic, Medic! Goddammit! Medic! Just hang on, it’ll be fine, I swear it’ll be fine.

  But it wasn’t fine and there were no medics. Bob was hung up outside the berm, his own hip pulped by the same motherfucker, and Donny had come for him and caught the next round square in the boiler. He remembered the desperate pressure in Donny’s fingers as the boy clung to him, as if Bob were life itself. Then the fingers went limp and the gurgling stopped.

  Bob hated when that sort of thing came back on him. Sometimes you could control it, sometimes you couldn’t. Blackness settled on him. In older days, it would have been drinking time.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”

  “It’s all right. Hell, I guess I can go tell him face-to-face to get out of here and quit wasting his life.”

  He got up, gave her a tight little smile and walked down the road into the place. The boy was across the road in an old Ford F-150, just sitting. He saw Bob coming and Bob saw him smile. He got out of the truck.

  “Now, what in hell do you want?” Bob said. “Say your piece.”

  The boy stood before him. Yes, early twenties, lanky, with a thick mop of hair and the soft look of college all over him. He wore jeans and a fancy little short-sleeved shirt with some kind of emblem on the chest.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “This was stupid. But I didn’t know how else to talk to you. So I thought if I just showed you I was serious about all this, just let you know I was here, didn’t force it or act like a jerk, they say you’re a very decent guy, anyway, I thought you’d eventually let me talk to you.”