Black Light

by Stephen Hunter

  “Say, you do talk a mite, don’t you?” said Bob.

  “Well—”

  “It ain’t like I haven’t thought about this, you know.”

  “All right,” said Russ. “One of my least lovely characteristics. I am a talker. I can’t shut up. I don’t feel things, I yap about them. And you’re the original Wyatt Earp and you’re stuck with me.”

  “Son, I ain’t no Wyatt Earp. I’m just a beat-up old marine trying to stay on the goddamn wagon.”

  Russ said nothing. In the fading light, Swagger’s face looked as if it were carved out of flint; his eyes hardly showed a thing. He hadn’t said a word in hours, and yet he drove with the perfect adroit grace of a race driver. He just swung the truck in and out of traffic, smooth and light as could be, hardly moving himself. He was the stillest man Russ had ever seen; no man seemed to care less what the world thought of him.

  “I’ve worked out a plan,” said Russ. “I want to approach this coherently and methodically. I know where we’ll begin and—”

  “The plan,” said Bob, “is that we go grocery shopping.”

  It was full night when they got there, but the store was still open. If once it had been the flagship of a national chain, that identity was long since faded, though if you looked, in the neon you could make out the silhouettes of the letters when they removed the “IGA” from the big sign. It just said “Smitty’s,” hand-painted on plywood, nailed halfway up the big struts of the old sign. But it was still at 222 Midland Boulevard.

  Brown light sustaining a cloud of insects beamed down from the pylons installed as a crime deterrent. The store looked ratty, even threadbare, and through the broad windows, Russ could see a few shoppers rushing among junky, sparse shelves. It occurred to him that the neighborhood had changed in forty years: everybody he saw in the store, everybody going in and out, was black or Asian or Hispanic.

  “So,” Bob said, “you’re a writer. You figure things out. You tell me: why here?”

  “Huh?” said Russ.

  “Begin with a beginning. That day, it starts here at this grocery store at about eleven in the morning. Now: you tell me why.”

  “Me?”

  “Yep, you.”

  “Ah, maybe they just fell into it. They were—”

  “Russ, they’d stolen a car and somehow come up with two guns and ammunition. They were fixing to rob something. Now, if they went to all that trouble, you think they’d just walk into it? First place they saw? The jail is downtown. Blue Eye’s the other way, south, out of town. Why’d they come north to this place?”

  “Ahh—” Russ had no answer. It shocked him, though. Clearly, Bob had mastered the material at a much deeper level than he’d expected, surprising from a man who seemed as far from formal intellectuality as he could imagine.

  “Look at it as a military problem. What is it about this place that recommends it for an operation?”

  Russ looked around nervously. It was on a long straight stretch of road, a main drag into and out of town from the north, but now looking grim, three or four miles removed from downtown proper. There wasn’t much to be seen. Long, straight road leading off in both ways, trees, a commercial strip full of bars and car dealerships and decaying retail outlets. Now and then cars moved up and down the block just by them, but there wasn’t much.

  “I don’t see a thing,” he admitted.

  “Or, consider this way,” Bob said. “There were two other big grocery stores in Fort Smith in 1955: Peerson Brothers, on South Thirty-first Street, and Hillcrest Food Market, on Courtland, in Hillcrest. Do you want to drive there and see what’s different about them?”

  “Er,” said Russ. Then he asked, “Do you see something?”

  “I didn’t go to no college or anything,” said Bob. “What would I know?”

  “But you see something?”

  “I see a little thing.”

  “What is it?”

  Bob looked up and down the road.

  “Now, I’m no armed robber. But if I was an armed robber, what I’d be most afraid of is that while I’m in robbing and before anybody even got an alarm out, a cop might come along.”

  Russ nodded. It seemed logical.

  “Now, what’s different about this block?”

  “Ahhhh—” He trailed off in acknowledgment of his stupidity.

  “It’s long. If you look at the map you’ll see that it goes for an unusual length. Look, no side streets and there ain’t a stoplight in either direction for more than a bit.”

  Russ looked. Indeed, far down in each direction a stoplight glowed, one red, one green.

  “Now, if you looked each way, and you knew no cop was in sight, you’d have about a clear minute or so to git in and out and you’d be guaranteed no cop could sneak up on you. In fact, a cop did come, but the boys were out and old goddamn Jimmy Pye had plenty of time to set up a nice clear shot. That cop didn’t have a chance.”

  “Wow,” said Russ, surprised. Then he added, “Jimmy was smart. He wasn’t just improvising, he’d worked it out. It figures. His son was very smart. Lamar was very, very clever when he set up his jobs, and he always knew exactly what to do. That’s something he got from his old man.”

  “Yeah, he was a regular genius,” said Bob. “But how could he have scouted it out if he was in jail for three months?”

  “Uhhh—” Russ let some air out of his lungs but no words formed in his brain.

  “Now, let’s consider something else. The guns. All the newspapers say Bub brought the guns. They was planning a job, Bub got the guns together, had plenty of ammo, they went right into action.”

  “Right.”

  “But Jimmy’s was a Colt .38 Super, not a common gun, a kind of special gun, very few of ’em made. I’d love to find out where that gun come from. The .38 Super never really caught on; it was invented by Colt and Winchester in 1929 to be a law enforcement round, to get through car doors and bulletproof vests. But the .357 Mag come along a few years later and did everything it did better. So the Super just sort of languished. It wasn’t your street gun, the kind a punk kid like Bub would come up with. It’s not a hunting gun. It was never accurate enough to be a target round. It’s not a nineteenth-century cartridge, a .38-40 or a .32-20, say, that could have been lying around a farm for sixty years. No, it didn’t have its day until the eighties, when the IPSC boys begun loading it hot to make major. But in 1955, let me tell you, it wasn’t something you’d just find. You’d have to ask for it: a professional’s gun, real good velocity, nine shots in the mag, smooth shooting. If you were a cop or an armed robber, it’s just the ticket. How’d Jimmy know that? He a gun buff? He into guns? He a hunter, an NRA member, a subscriber to Guns magazine? How’d he end up with just the right gun for that kind of work?”

  “Ah—” Russ flubbed.

  “And how’d Bub get it?”

  “Stole it, I guess,” said Russ.

  “Guess is right. But no one ever reported it stolen, not so’s I’d know. What’s that tell us?”

  “Ah,” said Russ, not quite knowing what it told him.

  “It tells us maybe someone’s putting this thing together who knows a little bit about what he’s doing.”

  Russ said, “Like I say, Jimmy was smart, like his boy, Lamar.”

  “Not that smart” was all that Bob said.

  Where is this going? What’s this guy up to? Russ wondered.

  The next morning, they took the new Harry Etheridge Parkway down toward Bob’s hometown. It was a strange experience: the road was not yet built when he left Blue Eye, seemingly forever, three years ago. Now it seemed so permanent, he could not imagine that it hadn’t been there forever, four wide lanes of white cement gleaming in the sun. The road, however, was practically deserted. Who went from Blue Eye to Fort Smith and back again? As a recreation area, Blue Eye had yet to be developed.

  It was strange, almost dislocating. He’d walked these hills and mountains daily for the seven years he’d lived alone on a mountain i
n a trailer with the dog Mike, just forgetting the world existed. He knew them a dozen different ways, all their trails and switchbacks, their enfilades and shortcuts, the subtle secrets of terrain that no map could yield. Yet penetrated from this angle, they gave up visions before unseeable as the highway almost seemed to rearrange the mountains themselves in new and unusual ways. It troubled him, announcing the mistake of going back thinking that things have stayed the same, for they always change and must be relearned again.

  A part of him hated the damn road. What the hell was the point, anyhow? They say Boss Harry Etheridge never forgot he came from Polk County and he wanted to pay back his home folks, give them some shot into the twentieth century. They say that his son, Hollis, when he was in the Senate before he began his presidential quest, wanted a monument to his father. They say that all the politicians and businessmen wanted a free feed at the expense of the U.S. government, which is why so many people called it the porkway and not the parkway. But it was meant as a monument to a father’s love of his home and a son’s love for his father.

  “This Etheridge,” Russ asked, “is this the same guy that’s running for President? The guy that’s finishing third in all the primaries?”

  “Same family,” Bob said. “The father was the big congressman. The son was a two-term senator. Handsomest man that ever lived. He thinks he can be the President.”

  “He’ll need more than pretty looks,” said Russ.

  “Umm,” grunted Bob, who had no opinions on politics, or particularly on Hollis Etheridge, who was only an Arkansas fellow by political convenience. He’d been raised in Washington, been to Harvard and Harvard Law School and only came back during symbolic trips with his father when he was a youngster. In Arkansas, he was a tribute to name recognition. His two terms in the Senate were marked by obedience to the rules, blandness, party-line votes, rumors of a flamboyant adultery habit (and if you saw his wife, you’d know why) and a great willingness to siphon funds back to the statewide political machine that had put him in office.

  Whatever, the road he built got Bob and Russ to their destination in less than an hour where by the old twisty Route 71 it was a close-to-three-hour trip.

  “That’s a hell of a road,” said Russ. “We don’t have anything in Oklahoma like that. Too bad it doesn’t go anywhere.”

  The end of the highway yielded a futuristic ramp that swirled in streamlined hurry to earth—but it was the earth of beat-up old Blue Eye, depositing them quickly enough in the regulation strip of fast-food joints: McDonald’s and Burger King but also some more obscure regional varieties. Bob noted there was a new place called Sonic, a classic fifties drive-in that boasted pennants snapping in the breeze, clearly a hot dog joint, but it didn’t look like it was doing too well otherwise. The Wal-Mart had moved across the street and become a Wal-Mart Super Saver, whatever the hell that was, and it looked like some kind of flat spaceship landed in the middle of a parking lot. A few blocks on they came to the same scabby, one-story town hall and across the square, the razed remains of the old courthouse, which had burned in 1994 and had simply been flattened and cemented over, until someone figured out what to do with the property. Some Confederate hero stood covered in pigeon shit and graffiti in the center of the square, saluting the empty space where the courthouse had been; Bob couldn’t remember the Reb’s name, if he ever knew. Off the main drag, the same grubby collection of stores, general merchandising, men’s and women’s clothing stores, the life sucked out of them by Mr. Sam’s Wal-Mart. A beauty parlor, a sporting goods store, a languishing tax accountant’s office. And, to the left, the professional office building where two doctors, two dentists and a chiropractor had an office, as did one old lawyer.

  “We’ll start here,” Bob said. “Good to see this old dog again. Hope he can still hunt.”

  “Is this the great Sam?” Russ asked.

  “Yes, it is. They say he’s the smartest man in the county. For close to thirty years Sam Vincent was the county prosecutor. In those days, they called him Electrifying Sam, because he sent twenty-three men to the chair. He knew my daddy. I think he was assistant state’s attorney for Polk in 1955. We’ll see what he has to say. You let me do the talking.”

  “He must be in his eighties!”

  “He’s eighty-six now, I think.”

  “Are you sure he’s even here? He could be in a rest home or something.”

  “Oh, no. Sam hasn’t missed a day since he came back from the war in 1945. He’ll die here, happier than most.”

  They parked and got out. Bob bent and reached behind the pickup’s seat and removed a cardboard box. Then he led Russ up a dark stairway between Wally’s Men’s Store and Milady’s Beauty Salon; at its top, they found an antiseptic green hallway that reminded Russ of some kind of private-eye movie from the forties; it should have been in black and white. The lettering on the opaque glass in one of the doorways read SAM VINC NT—Atto ney a L w.

  Bob knocked and entered.

  There was an anteroom, but no secretary. Dust lay everywhere; on a table between two shabby chairs for waiting clients lay two Time magazines from the month of June 1981. Cher was on one of the covers.

  “Who the hell is that?” a voice boomed out of the murk of the inner office.

  “Sam, it’s Bob Lee Swagger.”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  They stepped into the darkness and dank fumes and only gradually did the shape of the speaker emerge. When Russ got his eyes focused, he saw a man who looked as if he were built out of feed bags piled on a fence post. Everything about him signaled the collapse of the ancient; the lines in his baggy face ran downward, pulled inexorably by gravity, and his old gray suit had lost all shape and shine. His teeth were yellowed and his eyes lost behind Coke-bottle lenses. He was crusty and unkempt, his rancid old fingers blackened from long years of loading and unloading both pipes and guns. A yellowed deer’s head hung above him, and next to it some kind of star on a ribbon and a couple of diplomas so dusty Russ couldn’t read the school names.

  He squinted narrowly.

  “Who the hell are you, mister? What business you got here?”

  “Sam. It’s Bob. Bob Lee Swagger. Earl’s boy.”

  “Earl. No, Earl ain’t here. Been dead for forty years. Some white-trash peckerwoods killed him, worst damn day this county’s ever seen. No, Earl ain’t here.”

  “Jesus,” whispered Russ, “he’s lost it.”

  “Sonny,” said Sam, “I ain’t lost a thing I can’t find soon enough to whip your scrawny ass. Go on, get out of here. Get out of here!”

  Bob just looked at him.

  “Sam, I—”

  “Get out of here! Who the hell do you think you are, Bob Lee Swagger?”

  “Sam, I am Bob Lee Swagger.”

  The old man narrowed his eyes again and scrutinized Bob up and down.

  “By God,” he finally said. “Bob Lee Swagger. Bob, goddamn, son, it’s great to see you.”

  He came around the desk and gave Bob a mighty hug, his face lit and animated with genuine delight.

  “So there you are, big as life. You on vacation, son? You bring that wife of yours? And that little baby gal?”

  It was a little awkward, the sudden return to clarity of the old man. But Bob pretended he hadn’t noticed, while Russ just looked at his feet.

  “She ain’t so little anymore, Sam,” Bob said. “Nicki’s big as they come. No, I left ’em home. This is sort of a business trip.”

  “Who the hell is this?” demanded Sam, looking over at Russ. “You pick up a long-lost son?”

  “He ain’t my son,” Bob said, “he’s someone else’s.”

  “My name’s Russ Pewtie,” said Russ, putting out a hand, which the old buzzard seized like carrion and crushed. Christ, he had a grip for a geezer!

  Bob said, “Here’s the business part: this young man is a journalist.”

  “Oh, Lord,” said Sam. “The last time anybody wrote about you I sued ’em for you and we made
thirty-five thousand.”

  “He says he isn’t going to write about me.”

  “If you don’t have that on paper, you better get it there fast, so that when his book is published we can take him to the woodshed.”

  “It’s not about Mr. Swagger,” said Russ. “It’s about his father. It’s about July 23, 1955.”

  “Oh, Christ,” said Sam. “That was the longest goddamn day I ever lived through, and I include June 6, 1944, in that reckoning.”

  “It was a terrible day,” said Russ. Leaving out the personal connection, he tried to explain his book but Bob had heard it and Sam appeared not to care much.

  “So anyway,” he concluded, aware he had not impressed anyone and getting a headache from the plummy odor of the tobacco, “that’s why we’re here.”

  “Well, goddamn,” said Sam, exhaling a burst of smoke that billowed and furled in the room. “Probably a day doesn’t go by I don’t wonder why all that had to happen. Lots of good people all messed up. Your own mother’s decline begun that day, I believe.”

  “I believe it did also,” said Bob.

  “And poor Edie White. Edie White Pye. I always fergit she married that piece of trash. Her decline begun then, too. Nine months later she gives birth and in a year she is dead. Whatever happened to Jimmy Pye’s son, I wonder.”

  “He continued in his father’s footsteps,” Russ said. “They were two of a kind.”