Black Light

by Stephen Hunter

  Then, once, Sam said, “Here, here, I think it’s here!”

  “It can’t be here,” Russ, the navigator, exclaimed. “We just passed 23 and the papers say it was south of 23. We’re heading north toward Fort Smith. We must have gone too far!”

  “Goddammit, boy, don’t you tell me where the hell we are. I traveled all this on horseback in the thirties, I hunted it for fifty years and I’ve been over it a thousand times. Tell him, Bob.”

  “It’s the new road,” said Bob. “I think it’s throwing us off.”

  For old 71, with its curves and switchbacks, slalomed between the massive cement buttresses that supported the straight bright line that was the Boss Harry Etheridge Memorial Parkway. Sometimes the huge new road would be to the left of them, sometimes to the right of them and sometimes above their heads. There would be times too when it disappeared altogether, behind a hill or a screen of uncut forest. But it was always there, somehow mocking them, a symbol of how futile their quest seemed: to recover a past that had been destroyed by the coming of the future.

  But at last the two points of their peculiar compass jibed to form some sort of imaginary azimuth to where they wanted to go: Sam’s memory and Bob’s to the corrected version of the Arkansas Gazette of July 24, 1955.

  They had just passed an odd little place set by the side of the road called Betty’s Formal Wear, in a ramshackle trailer a few miles out of a town called Boles. It was Sam who shouted, “Here, goddammit, here!”

  Bob pulled off the side of the road. A little ways ahead, an Exxon station raised its corporate symbol a hundred feet in the air so it could be seen from the parkway, the inescapable parkway, off to the right. The roadway was thirty feet up, a mighty marvel of engineering, and even where they were, they could hear the throb as the occasional car or truck whizzed along it.

  “Aren’t we looking for corn?” Russ asked. “I thought it was a cornfield.”

  “Ain’t been no corn or cotton in these parts for two decades,” said Sam. “All the land’s in pasturage for cattle or hay fields. No cultivation no more.”

  They were parked next to a GTE relay station, a concrete box behind a Cyclone fence.

  “Back there?” said Bob.

  “Yeah.”

  Someone had planted a screen of pines in the sixties and they now towered about thirty feet tall, as if to block the ground from public scrutiny. Bob could see the flat, grassy field through the pines, however, shot with rogue sprigs of green as small bushes fought against the matted grass for survival.

  “Yeah,” said Sam. “Corn, it was all corn then. Couldn’t hardly see nothing. I was the fifth or sixth car out here, but it was getting busier by the moment.”

  Bob closed his eyes for just a second, and he imagined the site after dark, lit by the revolving police bubbles, punctuated by the crackle of radios, the urgent but futile shouts of the medics. It reminded him somehow of Vietnam, first tour, 1965-66, he was a young buck sergeant, 3rd Marine Division, the aftermath of some forgotten nighttime firefight, all the people running and screaming, the flares wobbling and flickering in the night the way the flashing lights would have ten years earlier, in 1955.

  “You okay, Bob?”

  “He’s fine,” snapped Sam. “His father died here. What do you think he’s going to do, jump for joy?”

  Russ seemed stricken.

  “I only meant—”

  “Forget it, Junior. It don’t mean a thing.”

  Sam opened a flask, took a tot.

  “Believe a man named O’Brian owned it, but he tenanted it out to some white-trash families. Over there, where that goddamned highway is, that was the crest of the ridge, woods-covered then. Took a deer there in 1949, and one of the white hags without teeth came out and gave me hell, shooting so close to her cabin where her damn kids were playing.”

  “She was right,” said Bob.

  “Yes, goddammit, I believe she was. Buck fever. I had to shoot. Silliest damned thing I ever did—that is, until today.”

  “Where were they?”

  “The cars were back through there,” Sam said, lifting a blackened claw and pointing. “I believe you can see traces of the little road that ran between the cornfields. About a hundred yards in. Your daddy’s cruiser was parked slantwise of the road, Jimmy’s twenty yards farther down.”

  “The bodies were where they were in the diagrams?” said Russ.

  “Yes, they were. Believe I answered that one yesterday. No decent lawyer ever asks the same question twice. He remembers the question he asked and the answer.”

  “I couldn’t remember.”

  “All right,” said Bob. “I want to go back there, look at the land.”

  “Believe I’ll rusticate here,” Sam said. “You boys go on ahead. Sing out if you get lost or need me to haul you out of the mud. And watch out for snakes. Mac Jimson killed a big rattler in the road the night your daddy was killed. Scared the hell out of us. Shot it in the head. Had to. Just crossing the road. Never saw no snake act like that before.”

  “A rattler?” said Bob.

  “Big goddamn timber rattler. Strangest goddamned thing. All the cops around, the rattler skedaddles across the road. Mac had to shoot it.”

  “I hate snakes,” said Russ.

  “Hell, boy,” said Sam, “it’s just a lizard without legs.”

  Bob and Russ left the old man, cut through the trees and headed across the overgrown, weedy ground. It was field now, no corn anywhere, junk land that crouched in the shadow of the highway. Bob made it to the trace of road, not road so much but simply an opening where the vegetation hadn’t grown so high because it had gotten a late start. The trace went back toward the big highway, then began to curve around. Bob got about a hundred yards back.

  “Here?” asked Russ.

  Bob took a deep breath.

  “I do believe. Ask the old man.”

  “Sam! Here?” screamed Russ.

  Bob watched the old man, who studied them, then nodded up and down.

  “Here,” said Russ.

  Bob had never been here before. So odd. He stayed in Blue Eye eight more years and he’d never come out here and stood at the spot. Then he went away to the Marines, and then came back and went up in the mountains, and never once, either before or after, had he been to this spot.

  Never laid any flowers or felt the power of the blasphemed earth. Why? Too much pain? Possibly. Too close to going under with a poor drunken mother who just could not hang on and the terrible, terrible sense of it all having been taken from them. The bitterness. It could kill you. You had to let the bitterness go or it would kill you. He knew he’d been by, though. As he remembered, Sam had driven him up U.S. 71 to Fort Smith to join the United States Marine Corps on June 12, 1964, the day after he graduated from high school.

  “Here,” said Russ, consulting the diagram from the newspaper. “Here’s where Jimmy ended up parking. Now”—he walked past Bob, hunched in concentration, nose buried in the clipping before him—“here is where your father’s car was. And your dad was found in the driver’s side, sitting sideways, fallen slightly to his right and hung up on the steering wheel, his feet on the ground, the radio mike in his hand.”

  “Bled out?” said Bob.

  “What?”

  “That was the mechanism, right? That’s what killed him. Blood loss. Not shock to his nervous system or a bullet in a major blood-bearing organ?”

  “Ah, that’s what it says here. I don’t—”

  “Russ, how does a bullet kill? Do you know?”

  Russ didn’t. A bullet just, uh, killed. It, uh—

  “A bullet can kill you three ways. It can destroy your central nervous system. That’s the brain shot, into the deep cerebellum, two inches back from the eyes and between the ears. Instant rag doll. Clinical death in less than a tenth of a second. Or it can destroy your circulatory and arterial system, depressurize you. The heart shot or something in the aorta. That’s fifteen, twenty seconds till clinical death, your good
central body shot. Or, finally, it can hit a major blood-bearing organ and you essentially bleed to death internally. A big stretch cavity, lots of tissue destruction, lots of blood, but not instant death. Say, three, four, sometimes ten to twenty minutes without help. Which of those?”

  “I don’t know,” said Russ. “It doesn’t really say. It just said he bled to death. The latter, I guess.”

  “It would be nice to know the mechanism. It would tell us a lot. You write that down in your book under things to find out.”

  “Where would we go to find that?”

  Bob ignored him, just standing there, looking about. He tried to read the land, or what little of it was left. This was a hunter’s gift, a sniper’s gift: to look at the folds and drops and rises in a piece of earth and derive meanings from them, understand in some instinctual way how they worked.

  The first thing: why here?

  Standing there exactly where his father had stood, he realized that in high corn, this spot was invisible from the road. Moreover, it took just enough delicate driving to steer back here without losing control and careening back into the corn; there’d been nothing in the papers about a highspeed chase. There couldn’t have been a chase! His daddy’s car would have been behind theirs, not in front of it, unless Bub and Jimmy were chasing him!

  He looked about, trying to imagine it in high corn.

  “You run back to Sam,” he said to Russ. “You ask him about the moon. Was there a moon? We can check, but I don’t think so, not from my memory anyhow. Ask him about the temperature, the wind, that sort of thing. Humidity. Was it heavy?”

  The boy looked at him vacantly. Then puzzlement stole across the delicate features.

  “What is—”

  “I will tell you later. Just do it.”

  “Okay, okay,” said Russ, turning away on the errand.

  A wind rose. The sun was bright. Now and then a car rushed along the parkway, whose buttresses were about a hundred yards farther back. Bob turned in each direction, trying to feel the land. To the south, there was an incline. His father would have come that way. To the north, at least now, the bright roofs of the highway service buildings, the motel and the gas station, and the restaurants. But in those days, nothing but wild forests; the town proper of Waldron still lay eleven miles ahead. To the west, more incline, as the other side of 71, the road fell away toward the prairies of Oklahoma. He turned back to face the east, to face the parkway. But it hadn’t been a parkway then. It had been a ridge, obliterated in the building of the road. How high? How far? The road was a hundred yards off, but possibly the road builders hadn’t placed the road at the center of the ridge; maybe it was at its highest even farther out.

  “He says no moon,” said Russ, breathing heavily from the jog. “He says stars, but no moon. No humidity. About seventy-five degrees, maybe eighty. A little breeze, nothing much.”

  Bob nodded. “All right, now ask him two more questions. The first is, where were all the tenant farmers’ shacks? Were they right here, did this road run back to them? Or were they farther along? Where did this road go then? And second: ask him which direction my father’s car was parked. He said it was aslant the road and the body was behind the steering wheel. I want to know on which side of the road that was, which direction it faced.”

  Russ took a deep breath, then turned and ran back to the old man.

  Again alone, Bob turned to face the highway that towered above him. He walked back through the weeds and came at last to stand next to one of the mighty concrete pylons upon which the road rested. It was cool here in the shade, though the road rumbled. Someone had painted POLK COUNTY CLASS OF ’95, and beer cans and broken bottles lay about on the gravel. Beyond the parkway Bob could see the land fall away into forest and farm over a long slope of perhaps two miles until a little white farm road snaked through the trees.

  He looked back and saw that the action had played out halfway down just the subtlest slope. He saw Russ standing big as day where he had left him. He walked on back.

  “Okay,” Russ said, breathing hard, trying to keep it straight. “The road evidently was an old logging trail and it ran back and up and over the ridge. This area used to be logged back in the twenties. The ‘croppers lived another mile or so down U.S. 71 away from Waldron, toward Boles. That’s where Sam shot his deer and the lady yelled at him.”

  “It wasn’t here?”

  “No sir.”

  “Okay. And my daddy: he was on the left side of the road. Facing east. Facing the ridge, right? Sitting sideways in his seat, with his feet on the ground, not as if he were about to drive away, is that right?”

  Another look of befuddlement came across Russ’s face.

  “How did you know that? It wasn’t in any of the newspaper accounts. Sam says the car was parked on the left side of the road and the door was open and your daddy—”

  Bob nodded.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Oh, just seeing the place gets me to thinking. I got a question or two.”

  “What questions?”

  “How’d they get here? Through the biggest manhunt in Arkansas?”

  “That was my question! Remember, I asked that question. When we were driving in the day before—”

  “But when you asked it, it was a stupid question. It was stupid because we had no idea of the layout of the roads that led to the site and the kind of terrain it was. It could have been there were fifty obscure country roads, far too many for the cops to cover, all leading here. But there weren’t. There’s only Route 71, a major highway, well covered, and this little logging track that don’t go nowhere. So now it’s a smart question.”

  Russ didn’t get the distinction, but he didn’t say anything.

  “Then,” Bob said, “how come here? You tell me?”

  “Ah—” Russ had no answer. “This is where he ran into them. He chased them, they turned off the road, he got by them and blocked them, uh—”

  “You think that little road is wide enough for him to get by them? It’s night, remember, and if he slides off the road into the soft soil of the cornfield, he’s fucked. No, he was waiting for them. He was already here. And it’s off the road, out of public view, so they wouldn’t get surprised by someone coming along. How’d he get jumped by them? Hell, he was a salty old boy. He’d made two thousand arrests, he’d fought in three major island invasions, he was nobody’s fool. Yet they open up and hit him bad, first few shots? How?”

  “Ah—” Russ trailed off.

  “Maybe he was the mastermind of the job. Maybe he had come to get his payoff and split the take.”

  Russ looked at him in horror. “Your father was a hero,” he said.

  “That’s what it said in the papers, isn’t it? He was just a goddamn man, don’t think of him as a hero, because then you don’t think straight about it. No, he wasn’t in on it. He didn’t trust ’em. But he knew they was coming. Reason he swung around to park in the direction he did was so he could use his searchlight, which was mounted outside the driver’s-side window. He had to cover ’em. Hell, they were surrendering to him, that’s what it was. How’d he know where to go, where they’d reach him? Why would he believe them? What was it really about?”

  Russ had no answers.

  “Come on,” said Bob. “There’s only one man who can tell us.”

  “Sam?”

  “No,” said Bob, leading the way, “Daddy himself. He wants to talk. It’s just time we listened.”

  They walked back and found Sam sitting on the open tailgate of the truck, his pipe lit up and blazing away. It smelled like a forest fire.

  “You boys didn’t get lost? That’s a surprise.”

  “Sam,” said Bob, “let me ask you something. Suppose I wanted to exhume my father’s body? What sort of paperwork is involved?”

  Sam’s shrewd old features narrowed under his slouch hat and grew pointed.

  “Now, what the hell you want to do that for, boy?”

  “I just want t
o know what happened. The diagrams may lie and the newspapers may lie and all the official documents may be gone, but the body is going to tell the truth.”

  “Bob, it was forty years ago.”

  “I know there’s not much left. That’s why we need a good man. Now, what’s it going to take?”

  “Well, I file a Motion of Exhumation with the county clerk and the Coroner’s Office and you have to find a good forensic pathologist. Get a doctor, not an undertaker like they got in too many counties down here.”

  “Someone from Little Rock?”

  “There’s someone in the medical school up at Fayetteville who’s well thought of. I could call him. Then I suppose you have to make an arrangement with a mortuary to clear out a place for him to work. Bob, you want to go to all that trouble? It was open-and-shut.”

  “It’s the only way my daddy can talk to me. I think I ought to listen to what he has to say. I have to find out what happened that night.”

  Sam slept on the way back and when they pulled up to the old house where he’d lived and raised his kids and married his daughters and his sons and buried his wife, they waited for the stillness in the car to wake him. But it didn’t.

  “Sam?” Bob finally said softly. It was twilight, with the sun lost behind Rich Mountain, which towered over Blue Eye from the west.

  Sam made some wet, gurgling sound in his sinuses, stirred a bit but then seemed to settle back.

  “Sam,” said Bob a little louder, and Sam’s eyes shot open.

  He looked at each of them.

  “Wha—where—what is—”

  “Sam, Sam,” said Bob, grabbing the old man’s shoulder. “Sam, you been sleeping.”

  But Sam’s eyes lit in panic and his body froze in tension.

  “Who are you?” he begged fearfully. “What do you want? Don’t hurt me!”

  “Sam, Sam,” said Bob calmly, “it’s Bob, Bob Lee Swagger, Earl’s boy. You just done forgot where you was.”

  The old man was shaking desperately.