Black Light

by Stephen Hunter

  The disappointment was ripe on the boy’s face.

  “You going out, Daddy? You go out every night.”

  “Tomorrow, I swear to you, I’ll stay in. Got me one little thing to do. When that’s over, I’m going to take a rest. Come on, boy, let’s see what she’s got in the kitchen.”

  In they went, and in no time, Earl had slapped some ham on his wife’s good bread and opened two root beers. He took it all out on the porch, and Bob went with him. They ate in silence. Earl looked at his watch. It was now 8:30 and he had close to an hour’s drive up to near Waldron and the cornfield. He finished the sandwich, took a last gulp on the root beer, draining it.

  “Walk me to the cruiser, Bob Lee.”

  “Yes sir,” said the boy, adoring the private time with his father.

  They got to the car. Earl opened the door, ready to climb in and pull away. The sun was setting. It was the gray hour of perfect stillness and clarity in the world; here in eastern Polk County, the Ouachitas changed subtly in character and became lower, rounded hills, crested with pine and teeming with game, like islands rising out of a flat sea. Earl didn’t do much farming, but it was nice to have some land to hunt and to shoot on. He’d made a good life for his family, he thought.

  An immense melancholy and regret suddenly flooded him; there was a kind of hole in his mind where he’d exiled his most recent memories and focused instead on the perfection of the here and now. He reached down and grasped his son and gave him a crushing hug.

  “You be a good boy, now, Bob Lee,” he said. “You tell your mama how much I love her. I just have this one last little thing to do, you understand? Then maybe we’ll take some time off. It’s been a rough summer. Time to go fishing, you understand.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Got a surprise for you. In a month or so, the Chicago Bears goin’ come down to Little Rock and play the New York Giants. Saw an ad in the paper. They call it the Football Classic of the South. War Memorial Stadium, September 10. You send off for tickets. They’re pretty expensive, three-eighty apiece, but what the heck. Figure you, me and Mommy’d go down to Little Rock, have us a nice dinner and see that game. How’d you like that?”

  “At night?”

  “Yes sir. They rig these big old lights and it’s bright as day.”

  “That’d be great,” the boy said.

  But he had picked up the strangeness in his father.

  “Daddy, you okay?”

  “I am fine,” said Earl. “I am—” He paused, perplexed. He felt he had to explain something to his son.

  “I’m going to arrest a bad boy,” he said. “A boy who made a big mistake. But there’s two kinds of bad, Bob Lee. This boy’s bad was he just decided to be bad. He said, I will be bad, and he did bad things and now he’s got to pay. See, that’s one kind of bad.”

  The boy looked at him.

  “But you ain’t ever going to be like that. Most nobody’s ever like that. That other kind of bad, see, that’s the kind that a good boy like you or any good boy could fall prey to. That’s the kind of bad that says I will be good but somehow, not meaning to, not facing it, not thinking about it, lying to yourself, you just sort of find yourself where it’s easy to be bad and you don’t have the guts or the time or whatever, maybe you don’t even realize where you are, and you just do it and it’s done. Then you know what?”

  The boy’s vacant eyes signified that he was lost.

  “Well, anyway, someday you’ll understand all this. What you got to do next, you got to clean up your mess. You got to make it right. If it’s busted, you got to fix it. You got to face the consequences. Do you see?”

  The boy just looked up at him.

  “Well, so you don’t. You will, I know, and you’ll be a fine man and not make the mistakes your poor, stupid old daddy made. Now I have to go. You tell your mama that I love her and I’ll see y’all tonight, do you hear?”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  Earl got in the car, took one of his swift, practiced U-turns, the maneuver of a man who drove beautifully and with great confidence, and pulled away. As he drove he saw his son in the rearview mirror, standing there in the fading light, one arm lifted to say goodbye. He put a hand out the window and gave a little waggle of acknowledgment, hit the main road and sped off.

  “That was the last thing I remember,” Bob said.

  “The wave?” Julie asked.

  “Yep. He just put his big old arm out the window and gave a little, you know, a little wave. Then the car turned and off he went. Next time I saw him, he was in a casket with a pink-frosted face and a smile like a department store dummy and all these grown-ups were saying sad things.”

  He paused, remembering the wave, not the man in the casket. It seemed to sum his father up, a little masculine salute from an arm thickened with muscle, hand big and loose and square, three yellow chevrons gleaming in the failing light, hat set square on his head in silhouette as he went off to do something—no one could ever tell Bob what it was—called duty.

  “Would you let me be, please,” he said.

  “Are you all right, honey?”

  “I’m fine. I need to be alone a bit, is all.”

  “I’ll be downstairs if you need me,” she said, and departed softly.

  When she left, Bob cried hard for the first time in his life since July 23, 1955.

  9

  Russ had his Lamar Pye dream again that night. As they usually did, it started out benignly. He was sitting in a Popeye’s, eating greasy chicken and red beans, and Lamar walked in, big as a house, friendly as life itself. The fact that he had never seen Lamar but only pictures of him freed Russ’s subconscious to invent interesting details for Lamar. For example, tonight Lamar was wearing a clown suit and had a bright red Ping-Pong ball for a nose. His teeth were bold and shiny. He radiated the power and the glory.

  As he saw Russ sitting there, Lamar came over and said, “Are you a spicy kind of guy or a regular kind of guy?”

  That was the key question for Russ. And it was another test and he knew he’d fail it.

  Bravely, he said, “I’m a spicy kind of guy.”

  Lamar’s mean but shrewd eyes locked on his, squinting with intellectual effort. He looked Russ up and down, and then he said, “The hell you say, boy.”

  “No, it’s true,” Russ argued through a tide of liar’s phlegm rising in his throat. “Really, I’m spicy. Been spicy all my life.”

  A rhinolike flare of rage blossomed behind Lamar’s clown makeup and the urge to strike viciously displayed itself in the narrowing of his pupils to pinpoints, but he controlled himself.

  “I say you’re regular and I say to hell with it.” Only he said it “reg-lar,” two syllables.

  Russ cowered in Lamar’s force. Lamar was huge and strong and knowing and decisive, unclouded by doubt, untainted by regret. He was definitely a spicy kind of guy.

  “All right,” he finally allowed, “we’ll see what kind of guy you are.”

  With a magic wave of his hand, the clown-god Lamar made the Popeye’s disappear. Instead the two were deposited on the front lawn of Russ’s family home in Lawton, Oklahoma. It was a small rancher on a nice piece of land, a well-worn house where Russ and his brother had been treated to stable, loving childhoods by their parents. From the smoke curling out the chimney (though it was full summer in the dream), Russ understood that the family was home. Lamar willed it and in the next second he had some kind of tacky X-ray vision, as if he were looking into a house onstage through the old invisible fourth wall.

  His brother, Jeff, was in his room, lacing up a baseball glove with the intensity that another boy might spend jacking off. Not Jeff. Jeff just poured his whole heart and soul into the effort, trying to get the glove just right, limber, supple, soft but not too soft. It was the central issue of his life.

  In the kitchen, Russ and Jeff’s mama, Jen, a handsome though somewhat hefty woman in her early fifties, slaved over a hot stove. Mom was always cooking. He had a sense of hi
s mother as cook to the world. That’s how he would think of her always, having traded all chances at happiness and freedom and self-expression to spend her time instead in the kitchen, whaling away at this dish or that, concocting elaborate dinners, never displaying an iota of disappointment or despair, rage or resentment. She just gave it up for her family.

  Downstairs, his daddy was doing something to a gun. His dad was always doing things to guns. He was in his trooper’s uniform and totally lost in his own world, as he usually was, just working away. There was a young woman with him, nude, watching him and asking him to hurry up, please, goddammit, she was getting tired of waiting and he kept saying, “Just let me get this bolt oiled up, and we’ll be outta here.”

  Finally, Russ saw upstairs again and saw himself: a grave boy, as usual doing nothing but reading. By the time he was fifteen he had read everything there was to read, twice. He read like a maniac, soaking it up, trying to draw lessons from it. He had a freak gift for the written word, which, when regurgitated crudely, became in turn a crude gift for his own writing. He had a small fluency, a big imagination and enough doubt to sink a ship. Why did he work so hard in this area? To escape Oklahoma? Was there some sense that he was too good for Oklahoma, for this little life of homey platitudes and small-beer deceits and easy pleasures? He, Russ, he was too good for it? He deserved such wonderful things in his life? He deserved the East, he deserved bright lights, fame, adoration? No little-town blues for him, no sir.

  “See, that ain’t healthy,” Lamar said. “You just a-sittin’ up there. You oughta be out doing things.”

  “My brother’s the jock,” Russ said. “I had a mind. I didn’t want to waste it.”

  “Well, here’s the deal,” Lamar said. He drew a chain saw out of nowhere and dramatically pulled the ignition cord, and it leaped to churning life, filling the air with that high, ripping scream. “The deal is, I’m going in there and I’m going to kill all them people. You go stand by that tree. I’ll deal with your sorry young ass when I get out.”

  “Please don’t do it,” Russ said.

  “Oh, and who’s to stop me?”

  “My dad will stop you.”

  “Your dad. All that old bastard cares about is fucking that girl and his guns. He don’t care about you or your mom none.”

  “No, he’ll stop you. You’ll see. He’s a hero.”

  “He ain’t no hero, sonny. Just you watch.”

  And so Lamar walked to the house and commenced an atrocity. It actually duplicated several such episodes that Russ had seen on the silver screen, and thus it unfolded according to the rules of the movies. Lamar kicked down the door. The young woman screamed, Russ’s dad reached for his gun but this time Lamar was too fast for him. The saw dove through them each, and they fell. Behind each, on a far wall, blossomed a blood spatter like a red rose opening to the sun, aesthetically perfect, showing the devotions of a supremely gifted art director.

  “See,” Lamar called back, “he weren’t no trouble at all.”

  Lamar climbed the stairs. Jen looked at him and said, “Don’t hurt my boys. Please.”

  “Lady, I’m hurting everybody.” Lamar instructed her laconically in the second before he swiped at her with the saw, driving her backwards into the refrigerator which had been rigged to collapse as she crashed into the jars and cartons and cans. She died in bloody splendor amid a smorgasbord of brilliantly conceived food effects, with mustard and ketchup and Coke flung every which way by the grinding chain of the saw.

  Jeff, a hero, heard the noise, picked up a bat and came running. But a bat and heroism are no match for a chain saw, no sir. Lamar got Jeff on the stairs, and the camera, which loves the destruction of the young and tender best of all, zeroed in on the poor boy’s face, flecked with his own blood, as the life in his eyes shut down into blankness. That left Russ, reading something obtuse and meaningless, as the killer stalked him. Russ had no defense when Lamar kicked his way into the room. He begged, he sniveled, he quivered, he raised two trembly hands.

  Lamar turned away from begging Russ weeping for mercy by his bed to the Russ who watched from outside.

  “Should I do his young ass?”

  “Please don’t kill him, Lamar. Please.”

  “Can you stop me?”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “Then you ain’t worth a turd on a hot day.”

  He stepped forward with the chain saw and Russ awoke.

  It was really not one of the truly bad ones, an essay more in dream-state illogic and pernicious movie influence than in sheer vomiting violence. He’d had those too, though not so bad lately. One night he’d awakened screaming and someone thought to call the Princeton cops, who took him in for drug testing. Another time he’d evidently rolled off the bed in stark fear and badly bruised himself. Once he cut himself thrashing in the night and awoke in his own blood.

  This one: not too terrible. Survivable, at least. Were they getting easier? He didn’t know. You just couldn’t tell when it was going to explode over you, and to his knowledge nobody in his family, not even his father, suffered the same.

  But perhaps he alone had worked out the logic: Lamar Pye was coming to kill them. That is, the family: to punish Bud Pewtie for his crimes, he would kill Bud’s family. It was only a twist of fate that the drama played out elsewhere and that only Lamar and his minions died. But the weight of it settled on Russ for some reason: the idea that, not randomly, not accidentally, not out of whimsy or malice or the sheer force of the universe’s irrationality, Lamar Pye had targeted the Pewtie clan for extinction.

  It sat upon Russ like a fat black cat in the night. So do not send to know for whom Lamar comes: he comes for thee.

  Russ blinked. He was still in the motel room, daylight showed wanly through the cheap curtains. He felt hung over but he hadn’t been drinking. Rather it was the caffeine he’d had in the Diet Coke at Bob Lee Swagger’s that had kept him awake, full of ideas and theories and arguments that he hadn’t made, until well after four. Finally, he had been permitted to sleep. He checked his watch. It was close to eleven.

  Nothing to do. He tried to figure out his next move but there was no next move. He thought he’d go back to his apartment in Oklahoma City and maybe work something out. But that idea filled him with boredom. His big book was going the way of all flesh: that is, toward lassitude and indolence and ultimately nothingness.

  Russ showered, dressed, checked his wallet. He had less than fifty dollars left. It was about a ten-hour drive back to Oklahoma City, through New Mexico and across Texas and half of Oklahoma. It filled him with despair and self-loathing.

  He threw his dirty clothes in the suitcase and went out to dump it in his car. Then he settled up with the motel—his credit card didn’t bounce, not quite yet—and gassed up. Driving through Ajo, he pulled into the little cantina where he’d had so many lunches.

  He went in, took his familiar seat at the bar, and without even having to order it, the usual plate of excellent barbecue was served, with a draft beer. Russ ate, enjoying it. That woman sure could cook.

  “Well,” he said to the bartender, “I didn’t quite spend a thousand on the barbecue, but it’s pretty damn close.”

  “You did okay, son,” the bartender said. “Now I take it you’re moving on.”

  “Yep. Gave it my best shot. Got to the man, put it before him and maybe for just a second I saw something in his eyes. But no. He said no.”

  “You worked as hard as any of ’em. But he’s a tough nut to crack, that one.”

  “That he is. Well, anyway, I really enjoyed your barbecue. No kidding, it was the best. I’ll miss it. I—”

  But then he noticed how quiet it had become in the bar and that the barkeep was standing almost gape-mouthed and goofy. He looked left and right and there was only silence and men staring quietly. Then he looked in the mirror across the bar and at last saw the man standing behind him, tall and sunburned, with a shock of tawny hair and gray, narrowed eyes.

  Swagg
er sat down next to him.

  “Howdy,” he said.

  “Er, howdy,” said Russ.

  “Barbecue’s pretty good here, so they say.”

  “It’s great,” said Russ.

  “Well, one of these days I’ll have to get some. You still interested in writing that book?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Nothing in it about Vietnam? Nothing about 1992? That still the deal?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “You all packed?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Well, then,” Bob said, “you and me’re going to Arkansas.”

  10

  The corporate headquarters for both Redline Trucking and Bama Construction are located in a suite of offices in a flashy modern building on Rogers Avenue in east Fort Smith, Arkansas, as befits firms which annually bill over $50 million. In fact, it was Bama Construction that, on a federal contract, built the Harry Etheridge Parkway, which runs between Fort Smith and Blue Eye, seventy miles south, in Polk County.

  The offices, which occupy the top two floors of the Superior Bank Building right across from Central Mall, are everything one might imagine of dominant prosperous regional corporations, complete to potted palms, soothing wall-to-wall carpeting, leather furniture and exposed brick in the public and presentation areas, all of it designed and coordinated by one of the finest (and most expensive) corporate interior design firms in Little Rock, no Fort Smith firm quite being up to the owner’s tastes. In these offices, lawyers and secretaries and engineers labor intensively on Bama Construction’s far-reaching plans, such as the Van Buren Mall or the Planters Road residential development; meanwhile trucking executives supervise the hundreds of routes and accounts that Redline controls, as Fort Smith is ideally located for east-west commerce, given its central location on the huge U.S. 40 route between Little Rock and Tulsa. It all hums along perfectly. The only oddity is the huge corner office, jammed with antiques, with two vivid picture windows that yield powerful views of the city. From here, one can see the old downtown, the bridge over the mighty Arkansas River and even a little of Oklahoma.