He handed her the letter.
“Yes.”
“I can’t ever remember seeing it. I think a secretary must have put it in the file.”
“Because it wasn’t important.”
“Ma’am, if I’d have seen it, I’d have probably put it in the file too. It doesn’t have any evidence in it.”
“Only one white person ever told me the truth,” said Mrs. Parker. “That was Earl Swagger. He was a fair man. The day that man got killed was a sad day for this whole county. But Mr. Earl said he’d find out what happened to my baby. And I know if he’d a lived, he would have, fair and square, no matter what or who.”
Sam tried to be gentle.
“Ma’am, we found out what happened to Shirelle. Reggie Fuller killed her. And he paid for it. It’s a closed account. Nowadays, accounts don’t get closed so fairly. But we closed that one.”
“No sir,” the old lady said. “I know that boy didn’t do it, just like I said in the letter.”
Sam looked at the letter. She was quoting herself almost verbatim all these years later: “Mr. Sam, I know that boy couldn’t have killed my Shirelle,” she had written in 1957, a week before the execution.
“Mrs. Parker, everything scientific matched. I swear to you. I may not be no civil rights Holy Roller, but neither am I the kind of man who would railroad evidence.”
“I don’t care what the evidence said. That boy Reggie was over to my house when my Shirelle disappeared. He was in the house. He talked to me about her. He looked me in the eye. God would not let him look me in the eye and say he missed Shirelle if the night before he had killed her.”
“Mrs. Parker, I have been around murderers my whole life. Black or white, they are wired different. They can look you in the eye and tell you that they love you and make you believe it, and when you turn your back, they hit you over the head with a claw hammer and take your watch and drink your blood and forget about it in the next second. They ain’t normal, like you and me. A lie don’t carry no weight with them at all.”
“That may be true, sir, but Reggie wasn’t like that. Don’t you understand?”
“Ma’am, facts is facts.”
“Mr. Sam, Mr. Earl said the detectives would come talk to us. No detectives never did. What you call it when you solve a crime? What Columbo does.”
“Columbo is a made-up man. Investigation. You call it investigation.”
“You never did no investigation. You found your shirt, you found your blood and you electrocuted your nigger boy.”
“He was guilty. Who would go to so much trouble to frame a boy like that?”
“The man what killed my baby Shirelle and has been walking around laughing about it all these years.”
“Madam: think about what you’re saying. A man would have to find Reggie, break into his house, get his shirt, take it to the site of the murder, dip it in your daughter’s blood, rip the pocket off, plant the pocket in your daughter’s dead hand, return to Reggie’s house, break in again, hide the shirt under the mattress. Now, who would do such a damned crazy thing? If he does nothing, we only find the body and there ain’t no other evidence to point to a suspect. Without that damned pocket and that bloody shirt, there ain’t no evidence, ain’t no case, ain’t no nothing. There’s only a dead girl.”
She didn’t blink or look away but faced him square.
“I knows all that. But … he did have the time. It ain’t like there’s some limit on the time he had, like a single night. He had four full days between the time he killed my girl and Mr. Earl found the body. It could have been done.”
It was the damn TV! Everybody thought they was Columbo or Matlock or some such and when people’s loved ones got killed, there always had to be some meaning in it. Sam looked into Mrs. Parker’s crazed old eyes: she’d been fulminating on this over the decades. She’d invented a goddamned conspiracy about her daughter’s death. No one wanted to face the squalid, simple, irrational truth, as here: a colored boy lost control and smashed her poor little daughter to death with a rock.
“Mrs. Parker, it don’t never happen that way. It just don’t.”
“Mr. Sam, I see in your eyes what you thinking. You thinking, crazy old colored woman, she be blaming a white person. Every last thing, it’s all the white man’s fault. It’s race, like all the colored, that’s all they think about. That’s what you thinking, right?”
She regarded him with fierce, brilliant eyes.
“Sister, I—”
“You is, isn’t you? Tell me!”
He sighed.
“I suppose I am. There are some things I cannot overcome. Some suspicions about y’all. I haven’t grown as I should have.”
“Then let me tell you something surprise you. I don’t think a white man done it. I think a colored man did.”
This threw Sam. It was the last thing he expected. The old woman had him foxed something powerful.
“What you mean, there, sister?”
“In them days, the one thing we told our girls, and I must have said it a hundred times to Shirelle: you don’t never get in no car with a white boy. White boy only wants one thing from you and you don’t want to give it to him. He may be friendly, he may be nice, he may be handsome, he may have the devil’s ways to him. But he only want one thing, girl, and if you give it to him, he hate you and all the black boys find out and they hate you, but they goin’ try and git the same off of you and really be angry if you don’t give it. So I know she don’t get in no car with no white man. Some colored man done this to her.”
Sam blinked, confounded. The old lady was smart. Not white smart, fancy sentences smart, but somehow she knew things: she had seen into the center of it. He’d known many a detective sergeant who wasn’t as sly as this.
“Mr. Sam, you the smartest man in this county. You smarter even than old Ray Bama or Harry Etheridge and his son, you smarter than Mr. Earl. You got his boy, Bob Lee, off when the whole U.S. govmint say he was a killer. You got Jed Posey to spend his black evil days in prison. Now you a old man and I a old woman. We both be gone soon. Cain’t you please just look at that case again? Just so’s when you goes you knows you done your job as hard at the end as you done it through the middle.”
“Well—”
He thought about it. His was a life of certitude. He was an absolute believer. He hated revisionism, hindsight, detached examination, the whole spirit of equivocation and ironic ambivalence which had become the American style in the nineties. He hated it. Goddamn Nigra woman wanted him to become what he hated.
But … there was time. She was right. It was not technically impossible. Why anyone would do such a thing was beyond his imagining, but it was, in the technical sense, by the laws of the physical world, possible. And the bit about the black man being the one who did it—that was so interesting.
As pure mystery, as pure problem of the intellect, it goaded him powerfully.
“My mind ain’t what it once was. It gits foggy. It clouds up with anger. I can’t find my socks. Seems like people hide things on me. But if I git another clear day like today, I will look at the case records again, or what of them remain. I will look, but don’t you expect nothing. I can’t have you expecting nothing, Mrs. Parker.”
“God bless you, sir.”
“Now, don’t call me sir. Call me Sam. Everybody else does.”
23
It was the football dream, a late variant. Lamar Pye and Russ’s father, Bud, were at his football game. It was 1981 and Russ was eight; he was not a very good football player. In fact he’d only played that one year.
Lamar said, “I think that damn boy’s got too much gal in him.”
“He ain’t no athlete, that’s for sure,” agreed Bud. “You should see his younger brother. That little sucker’s a studpuppy. You can’t hardly git him to quit.”
“I like that in a man and in a boy. When they don’t quit. Old Russ here,” Lamar explained, “not only do he got too much quit, he don’t even got no start.�
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The two old boys laughed raucously on the sideline, and it seemed that everybody there was staring at poor little Russ, waiting for him to screw up.
It didn’t take long. Because he was too small to play the line and not fast enough to play the backfield, he’d been stuck at a position called linebacker. It involved a lot of football knowledge for which he just had no gift and the coaches were always yelling at him for being out of place or slow to react. He was never, ever comfortable. When he charged the line, inevitably a pass zinged to the exact place he’d just abandoned; when he stayed put against a pass, someone blasted through the line and veered through the hole he was supposed to plug. It was a terrible season and he yearned to quit because he wasn’t born with that cool-headed instinct his younger brother possessed in spades, but was, in truth, a spaz.
“Come on, Russ, stop ’em,” yelled his dad.
“Come on, Russ, you can do it,” yelled big old Lamar, ponytailed, charm, charisma, big white teeth, big sickle in his hands which he was sharpening with an Arkansas stone, running it with goose-pimply grinding sounds up and down the wickedly curving blade.
Russ was so intent on them that he missed the start of the play and when he finally snapped to—the coaches were yelling his name—it seemed that a big black kid on the other team had juked to the left then broken outside and was already beyond the line of scrimmage with no one near him but poor Russ in his weak-side linebacker’s slot.
Willing himself to run, Russ found a surprisingly good angle on the running back and zoomed toward him. But as he approached he saw how big the boy was, how fierce with energy and determination, how his legs beat like pistons against the ground, and in some way Russ’s ardor was dampened. Though everyone was yelling “Hit him low” he hit him high. Briefly, they grappled and Russ had the sense of bright lights, stars maybe, the wind rustling and then blankness.
When he blinked he was on the ground, his face mask having grown a fungus of turf, his whole body constricted in pain and as he turned, he could see through the ache behind his eyes the runner continue his scamper down the sidelines, borne by cheers from the crowd, until he crossed the goal line to be festooned with garlands and ribbons.
He tried to get up but Dad and Lamar stood over him.
“Russ, hit him low,” his dad said with contempt.
Lamar lifted the sickle. Its blade picked up a movielike highlight from the sun. He was Jason, Freddy Krueger, the guy in Halloween all combined into one. He laughed loudly.
“Sorry, boy,” he said, “but you shoulda listened to your daddy. Nut-cuttin’ time!”
Whoooshhhh! The blade descended.
Russ awoke in a cheesy hotel room in Oklahoma City, his mind filled with shards of glass, pieces of gravel and infinite regrets. Someone was hacking at him, but no, it was the door, being pounded.
“Russ, come on,” someone was yelling, “you’re late again, goddammit. It’s time to go.”
Oh. It was his other father, Bob Lee Swagger, one more true man to find disappointment in him.
Russ got himself out of bed.
“Isn’t that illegal?”
“Not if you have it displayed.”
“But it isn’t displayed.”
“My, my, if it didn’t just fall off the gun rack here.”
Bob pointed to the empty gun rack above the seat in his truck. Behind the seat, he had just slid the Mini-14 in its gun case, plus a paper bag with three loaded twenty-round magazines and the immense forty-rounder, a curved thing that looked like a flattened tin banana. “What cop is going to give me a hard time? This here’s Oklahoma.”
“That isn’t legal,” said Russ. “My dad catches you with that, you’d go to jail.”
“Well, I’d never mess with your old man, so you’d best come up with a way to talk him out of it,” Bob said, sliding the .45 Commander in its holster behind the seat too, along with the extra magazines.
“I don’t know,” said Russ. “This is getting hairy.”
“It gets hairier. You drive.”
They climbed in. They were in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn, getting ready to call on General Jack Preece, of JFP Technology, Inc.
“What was that address again?” Russ asked.
Bob told him.
“I think it’s near the airport,” he said.
“Go to it, Junior.”
They drove in silence for a while. Then Russ said, “You’d better brief me on some stuff.”
“Why?”
“If you and I are supposed to be doing a book on sniping and it turns out I don’t know shit about it, this guy is going to kick us out on our butts and we get nothing.”
“So what do you want to know? ‘What’s it feel like?’ I used to get asked that a lot. ‘What’s it feel like?’”
“What’s it feel like?”
“Smart-ass punk kid.”
“All right. Why do you hate him?”
“Who, Preece?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t hate him. He’s a fine man.”
“You hate him. I can tell. Even behind the famous Swagger reserve, you hate him.”
“He was a fine officer. He ran a superior program. His people got hundreds, maybe thousands, of kills. They saved the lives of hundreds, maybe thousands, of American soldiers. He’s a fine man, a patriot, probably a father and a Republican. Why would you say I hate him?”
“You hate him.”
“Well … it’s just a thing. You wouldn’t understand it. I’d say it to another sniper and to no one else. What I said to you earlier, that’s what’s important. He’s a fine man, a great officer.”
“You have to tell me. I can’t get through this if you don’t.”
Bob paused. He wondered if he had the skills to articulate what lay at his heart. Or the energy. Damn this kid, with his smart-ass ways and his penchant for always coming up with a question that was pretty damned good.
“If you do write a book, you cannot put this in it. Ever. Do you understand?”
“Yes sir.”
“I don’t want it said, Bob Lee Swagger, he had hard words for an American soldier who in good faith and out of duty and honor risked his life for his country. I won’t have that. That’s shit. That’s what’s killing the country.”
“I swear.”
“Then I tell you this now, and I will never hear of it again.”
“Yes sir.”
“It’s about killing.”
Russ said nothing.
“In war,” Bob said, “death comes in three forms. Usually, it comes from far off, delivered by men who never see the bodies they leave behind. That’s how we done most of our killing in Vietnam. The B-52s did the most, man, they’d turn that goddamn jungle into pulp and chew up everything for a square mile. And artillery. On the ground, the artillery does most of the killing. The king of battle, they call it. You may not like it, but that’s how it is.”
“Yes,” said Russ.
“Second is in hot blood. Firefight. You see forms moving, you fire. Some of them stop moving. You may never see them up close, you may never know if you got a hit or not. Or you may: you see the little fuck go down, you see the tracers cut him up, that sort of thing. What’s going on is really fighting. It’s you or him. You may not like it, but goddammit you do it, because if you don’t, you’re the one goes home in a bag.”
“Yes, I see.”
“The third and last form is cold-blooded killing. That’s what we do. We, being the snipers. We put a scope on a man from a half mile out and we pull a trigger and we watch him go still. Nothing pretty about it, but I would say it’s necessary. I believed it was necessary. I know it makes people nervous. You’re death. They call you Murder, Inc., and God knows what they say about you behind your back. They think you’re sick or nuts or something, that you enjoy it.”
“That’s what you did.”
“I did. But still, distinctions can be made. Somehow distinctions got to be made. I didn’t shoot women or
children and I didn’t shoot anyone that wasn’t out to kill me. If someone has a hard time with that, well, tough shit. I was a hunter. It’s called fair chase. You go into the jungle or along the paddy breaks. You hunt your enemy and you try and find a position where he can’t get you. You take him down. You hit him, you get fire. We lost a lot of men. We had rewards on our heads. The VC put ten thousand piasters out for me and eventually a Russian bastard claimed it, but that’s a different story. What we did was war. Find and destroy the enemy. Shoot him. Try and go home. Finish the mission.
“Now, the army …”
He paused. Something in him recoiled at this; but he had to get it out.
“Different doctrine, developed first at this Project BLACK LIGHT and then deployed through Tigercat, the 7th Infantry Division Sniper School. What they’d do, they’d night-insert four-man teams into a zone, three security boys with poodle shooters and one sniper with a rifle. They liked to do it just after a sweep. So Charlie was out and about, and feeling safe. He thought he owned the night. The shooter had what they called their M-21, which was an M-14 7.62 NATO rifle—.30-caliber, Russ—worked over and accurized by the Army Marksmanship Unit. It carried a suppressor—since you been to the movies, you’d call it a silencer—and a night-vision device, an AN/PVS-2, called a Starlight scope. So these boys set up in the jungle and they just wait; the sniper’s on the scope, the other guys have night-vision binocs. They pick something up and the sniper moves into position. He puts the scope on them. It’s like they’re moving through green water, but he’s got them out to eight hundred yards. The gooks never knew what hit them. They couldn’t get a read on the sniper’s hide because there was no sound. They couldn’t believe he could see them, but through the scope, bright as daylight, he could put them down. Lots of kills. It was easy. One boy got a hundred fifteen kills in about five months. They was getting six, seven kills a night. Were they hitting soldiers? Hell, from eight hundred yards out on a Starlight, who the hell can tell? If they’re moving at night, I guess they’re soldiers, but maybe they were kids going to the john or families trying to move at night so they wouldn’t get bounced by our Tac Air. Who knew? Then, at 0700, a chopper evacs the team the fuck out of there and it’s back to base camp for pancakes and a good night at the body-count factory.”
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