Black Light

1

Today you can drive south from Fort Smith down to Blue Eye in Polk County in about an hour, by way of the Harry Etheridge Memorial Parkway. It’s a bright band of American road, one of the finest in America, even if it didn’t quite have the anticipated effect of turning Polk County into the Branson of West Arkansas and even if some local cynics call it a porkway and not a parkway. Fast-food restaurants and super gas stations cluster at its exit ramps, pennants flapping in the breeze; the high signs of national motel chains—Days Inn, Holiday Inn, Ramada Inn—can be seen from the roadway, even if the motels are never more than half full and the anticipated Polk County land boom never quite took off. The land, especially as you near Blue Eye, county seat of Polk, becomes spectacular for the Ouachita Mountain range, the only east-west range in America, a heaving sea of pine-crusted earth and rock.

The parkway was finished in 1995, under the sponsorship of Boss Harry’s son, Hollis Etheridge, then a member of the United States Senate and later a presidential aspirant. It was the son’s idea to honor his father, an authentic great man, who had been born dirt-poor in Polk County and had found his fortune first in the intense ward politics of Fort Smith and then in the true corridors of power in Washington, where he was a fifteen-term congressman and the chairman of the House Defense Appropriations Committee. It was only fitting that Polk County and Fort Smith should honor a man who’d brought so much glory—and so much patronage—their way.

In 1955 no parkway existed, nor could one even be imagined. You got from Blue Eye to the big city the way Harry had when he’d moved up there just after the Great War—that is, along snaky, slow Route 71, as piss-poor an excuse for a road as could be imagined, two lanes of shabby blacktop cranking through the mountains and the farmland, widening every ten miles but just slightly for one-horse towns like Huntington, Mansfield and Needmore or Boles or even, the poorest and most pathetic, Y City. It was just the hardscrabble landscape of one of America’s most wretched states, hills too mean to be farmed, valleys where desperate men eked out some kind of subsistence-level survival, and now and then some cultivated land but more usually the bleak shacks of sharecroppers.

One hot morning in July of that year, a Saturday, at the Polk and Scott county line on U.S. 71 about twelve miles north of Blue Eye, a state police black and white Ford pulled over to the side of the road and a tall officer got out, removed his Stetson and ran his sleeve over the sweat on his forehead. He wore three yellow sergeant’s stripes on his shoulder and, under a gray brush cut, had the flat-eyed, incapable-of-surprise face of a noncommissioned officer in any army or police force in the past four thousand years. A whole phalanx of wrinkles moved across his leathery face, which had been baked in the sun for so many years it resembled a scrap of ancient hide. His eyes were slitted and shrewd, eyes that missed nothing and also expressed nothing. He had a voice so deep and raspy it sounded like someone cutting through a three-hundred-year-old hardwood pine with a three-hundred-year-old saw. His name was Earl Swagger and he was forty-five years old.

Earl looked about. The road was cut into the slope here, so that there was a high bank on one side, and on the other the land fell away. Not much to see, other than a goddamned billboard for Texaco gasoline: just a south-slope close-grown forest, hard to walk through, a cutting maze of shortleaf pine, black oak and black hickory with a tangled undergrowth of saw brier and Arkansas yucca. Dust seemed to hang in the air; there was no breeze, no sense at all of mountain crispness. You looked back toward Blue Eye and your vision was cut off by the hump of Fourche Mountain up ahead, which just appeared to be a huge wall of green. On the road, an armadillo had been smeared to meat and blood and shattered shell by a logger’s rig. In the still heat, cicadas hummed, sounding like a drunken quartet of Jew’s harps. It hadn’t rained in weeks: forest fire weather. It reminded Earl of other hot, dusty places he’d been: Tarawa, Saipan and Iwo Jima.

He checked his Bulova. He was early, but then he’d been early most of his life. It was 9:45 A.M. The others were still fifteen minutes off. Earl put his Stetson back on. A Colt Trooper .357 rested under a flap on a holster at his right hand; he hitched it up, for the heavy weight of the big pistol was always drawing his belt downward and it was a continual battle to keep the gun where it was supposed to be. Thirty gleaming high-velocity soft-point cartridges rode in the belt loops, gleaming because unlike other officers he removed them each night from the loops and wiped them off to prevent them from corroding in the moisture the leather attracted. His fifteen years in the Marine Corps had taught Earl many lessons, but the most important of them was: always take care of your equipment.

It was a melancholy day, which, just yesterday, had promised so much happiness: July 23, 1955. Jimmy Pye was getting out of prison after ninety days up in the Sebastian County jailhouse at Fort Smith. Jimmy’s cousin Bub would meet Jimmy at the jail gate and the two would take the Polk County bus. Earl would pick them up at 4:30 P.M. and take Jimmy over to Mike Logan’s sawmill in Nunley, where Mike had promised Jimmy a job. That was important: Jimmy had to get off on a good start if he was to make a go of it, and by God, Earl had promised Jimmy’s wife, Edie, that he would see to it that Jimmy got himself straightened out this time. Earl had reluctantly first arrested Jimmy in 1950, when Jimmy was sixteen, on a routine breaking and entering; he’d busted him again in 1952, twice in 1953. Each time, Jimmy’d charmed his way out of it, for that was one of Jimmy’s gifts: he wasn’t just handsome and the best high school athlete ever seen in Polk County, but he had a sweet charm; he made people care for him. He’d grown up wild: his father, after all, had been killed on Iwo Jima, and Earl had sworn to the dying man that he’d look after Jimmy, and pledges made on a battlefield have a huge weight back in the real world. Earl’s wife, June, had once even said, “I swear, Earl, you care more for that wild white-trash boy than you do for your own son.” It wasn’t true. Earl knew, but he also knew that people might see things that way. When you looked at Jimmy you just knew he could be everything that his poor father had dreamed of: he was smart enough for college and if steered right could go on to a wonderful life. He’d married the prettiest girl in all of Polk County when he was twenty-one years old just four months ago. But it was as if he had some twisted wire in him: just when he got a thing that no one else could get—Edie White, for instance—he’d throw it away.

So it was set to be a day of celebration, on the premise that ninety long days in the jailhouse would straighten out anybody: a new life for Jimmy and Edie, all of Earl’s obligations to Jimmy’s dad taken care of and the future before them all.

Then Earl watched as another vehicle drew into sight, a black squad car rolling up 71 from Blue Eye. It pulled over and a Blue Eye deputy named Lem Tolliver, a big man, got out and Earl remembered why he was there.

“Howdy, Earl,” called the deputy, “we late or you early?”

“I’m early. Besides, the damn dogs ain’t here yet. I hope that goddamned old man don’t forget.”

“He won’t,” called the man, then turned and opened the rear door of the car. “Okay, boys, out you go. We’s here.”

In prison denims, two sunburned old boys climbed out of the back of the truck. Earl knew them: Lum and Jed Posey spent more time in the Blue Eye lockup than out of it. They were always in petty trouble with the law for every damned little thing you could imagine, usually whiskey running, which was the federal boys’ problem, but also petty larceny, car theft, shoplifting, anything that’d put a bite of food down their gullets. But Earl had thought of them as essentially harmless.

“You sure you wanta go to all this trouble for a nigger gal?” said Jed Posey. “What difference do it make? Let the niggers take care of it.”

“Shut up, Jed,” said Earl. “Smack him upside the head, Lem, if he gives you any more shit. He’s here to work, not to talk.”

“You just goin’ soft on the niggers,” said Jed. “Everbody knows it. The niggers everwhar is gittin’ uppity. They say they got them northern commie niggers comin’ on down here to stir up our niggers. It’s a Jew thing. Them hebes got a master plan to take over, you watch, and give our gals to the big niggers. You watch.”

“You just shut up, there, Jed,” said Earl. “I done warned you, now. I don’t but usually give a man a single warning. It’s you I’se going soft on.”

Earl was known for his courage and toughness; in a fair fight, or even an unfair one, he would have broken Jed Posey in a hundred places, then used what was left to wipe off his shoes. Jed, seeing Earl’s flare of anger, knew it was time to back down; nobody stood against Earl Swagger.

“Just shootin my mouth off, Earl. Don’t you pay me no mind.”

Lem used his penknife to cut a wedge off a plug of Brown’s Mule. He stuck it in his mouth, on the left side, where it bulged like a sack of gold pieces, and offered the plug to Earl.

“No thanks,” said Earl, “it’s one goddamned bad habit I ain’t yet picked up.”

“You don’t know what you’re missing, there, Earl,” smiled the swollen Lem, expelling a squirt of the sweet brown juice to explode in the dust at the side of the road.

At that moment, the third and last vehicle swung into view way down the blacktop. Pulling a tail of blue smoke and grinding through ancient gears, a twenty-year-old Nash chugged wheezily up the slope, seemed to lose its energy once or twice, but at last pulled off the road by the first two vehicles. Most of the top had been blowtorched off, forming the semblance of a pickup. Out jumped a spry old fellow, of indeterminant age, sheathed in a wad of beard under an old engineer’s cap and filthy overalls. You could smell Pop Dwyer a mile downwind, it was said, and on this day there was no wind, so Pop’s odor hit Earl like a blunt instrument. But it wasn’t just the odor of unwashed man, it was also the odor of dogs.

“Keep that old man away from me,” said Jed Posey. “He smell like a damn sty.”

“You don’t smell so pretty yourself after what you been in last night,” said Lem Tolliver over his plug. “Howdy, Pop.”

“Howdy, all,” said Pop, his nutty grin flashing through his beard. “Brought my best boys, Mr. Earl, just like you said.”

“Fine,” said Earl, watching as Pop went to the back of the truck, messed with the kennel cages there and leashed up three liquid, squirming dogs. Two were blue tick hounds, smooth and slick and muscley under their bright sheen, dark-gummed and eager; the third was some kind of beagle, its muzzle swathed in folds of flesh.

“Mr. Mollie’s the best,” said Pop. “If it can be found, old Mollie boy will find. These other pups are just along to learn the damn ropes. Mr. Mollie’s getting old.”

The two blues yapped and showed white teeth and pink tongues and a swirl of saliva dense and foamy; they took an immediate dislike to the Posey boys, sensing Jed’s contempt for Pop. Jed Posey drew back.

“You keep that damn bitch away from me.”

“Ain’t no bitch. That un’s got a pecker size of a corncob on him, you dumb billy,” said Pop. “And I ain’t wearing no chains neither, I’m a free man on a po-lice contract.”

The dogs barked in the dull, hot air, swirls of energy against the dolor of the heat and the dryness of the timber. They actually unsettled Earl just a bit, though he tended to discount his superstitions. But on Tarawa, during the mop-up, 2nd Marine dog teams worked over the blown-out bunkers and pillboxes, hunting for the few living Japs among all the dead ones. To save them? No sir. If the dogs howled and came scurrying out of a bunker, it meant a Jap inside still breathed or moaned. In went two or three pineapples, followed by the call “Fire in the hole!” After the blasts, a marine with a flamethrower squirted ten seconds’ worth of flaming gas into the small space, roasting it out. It was twelve years ago and Earl would remember it forever: the yapping of the dogs, the flat, anticlimactic blasts of the grenades, the stench of gas and flesh, the buzzing of the flies.

“You got something Mr. Mollie can work on?” said Pop, squinting up his eyes. “It don’t work without something to start on!”

Earl nodded; now he really felt an ache. He reached into the backseat of his cruiser and withdrew the pink wool sweater.

“See if they can pick up a scent off this,” he said, and watched as the dainty pink garment was seized in Pop’s huge, grimy hand and dipped to the dogs, who nuzzled and rampaged with it. One of the blues got a good hold on it and shook the other two hounds away, but both shivered and closed, and got nose and fangs into it, seeming somehow to absorb or suck it in. Then, just as quickly as it had started, it was done: the dogs had beat the scent somehow into their sharp but narrow dog brains and the object itself lacked interest. It fell, moist and ripped, to the earth.

“You didn’t want it back, did you, Mr. Earl?” asked Pop.

“No, no, that’s all right,” said Earl. “Let’s get going.”

“You sure it’s the right spot?”

“I’m sure,” said Earl. He looked over his shoulder: there, sixteen feet high, it said, “Texaco with Knock-Free Power and Sky Chief Secret Ingredient Petro X,” over a vivid painting of five dancing service station attendants, currently big on some show on the goddamned television set that Earl had never heard of and didn’t care about but somehow knew of anyway.

In the odd way a policeman’s mind works, he’d noticed an entry in the Polk County Sheriff Department’s incident log, which he made a point of checking once or twice a week, even though it wasn’t in his jurisdiction proper. It simply said, “White lady called in to say late last night she was driving up toward county line when she noticed, in her headlights, a Negro boy acting strangely right there at the Texaco sign. She thought she ought to report it, since she’d heard many things about dangerous and uppity Negro behavior farther south.”

It stuck, somehow, lodged there, meaningless in itself. But then last night he got home late and was surprised to see his son, Bob Lee, standing alone in the moonlight in front of his farmhouse, wearing his ever-present Davy Crockett coonskin cap. Bob Lee was a quiet, almost studious boy, but not one to panic or frighten easily.

“What’s going on, son?” he asked.

“They’s some people here to see you, Daddy,” the nine-year-old answered. “They wun’t go in the house, though Mommy ast ’em to.”

Something in the boy’s voice told him immediately an oddity was occurring and indeed it was: a Negro man and woman stood stiffly on the porch, evidently too frightened to take June’s offer of hospitality.

Earl walked up to them.

“Hep you folks?”

It was extremely unusual for black people to pay a house call on white people, particularly strangers, particularly after dark. So Earl knew in a second something was wrong. Though it seemed ridiculous, as he approached, he let his right hand brush against the holster flap over the Colt Trooper, freeing it in case he had to go to pistol work fast.

But in the next second he realized he’d overreacted.

“Mr. Earl, I’m the Reverend Percy Hairston down at Aurora Baptist. I do hate to bother you at home, sir, but this poor lady’s so upset and the town police didn’t pay her no mind at all.”

“That’s all right, Percy. Sister, won’t you sit down and git your load off?” He called through the screen door, “June, can you git these people some lemonade?” He turned back to the Negro couple. “You just tell me what it is, and I can’t make no promises, but I will look into it.”

But a part of him blanched: Negro problems were not a specialty of his. He had no idea how Negroes lived or thought; they seemed to happily occupy a parallel world. He also knew that they had a tendency to get into thorny problems of the sort only the lowest kind of white people ever managed. It seemed they were always stabbing each other or someone’s brother was running away to the big city with someone’s wife, leaving ten scrawny kids at home and an out-of-work daddy or something. None of it ever made any sense, at least to a white man, and if you let it suck you in, you might never get out. Policeman’s wisdom: let the niggers go their own ways, as long as they don’t get in our way.

“Mr. Earl,” said the woman, who looked to be about forty, with a big hat on, in her Sunday best to come to see the Man. “Mr. Earl, it’s my girl Shirelle. She went out last Tuesday night it was, and she done never come back. Oh, Mr. Earl, I’m so scared somethin’s done happened to Shirelle.”

“How old is Shirelle?” Earl asked.

“She’s fifteen,” said the mother. “Prettiest little thing in the whole town. She my sweet baby daughter.”

Earl nodded. It sounded like some typical kind of Niggertown thing: the girl had been picked up by a handsome buck in a fancy suit of clothes, hauled off to what they called their “cribs” out on the west side of town where the music and the dancing never stopped and the alcohol and God knew what else were passed around for free, despite the fact that Polk was a dry county. Then the buck had the girl and left her by the side of the road. Maybe the girl woke up ashamed and left town or maybe she went to live with the buck. You never knew; it played out different each time, but it was always the same.

“Well, honey,” Earl said, “maybe she met a feller and went to a party. You know these young kids these days.”

“Mr. Earl,” said the reverend, “I’se knowed Sister Parker and her people nigh on two decades. I know Shirelle since I baptized her. She be a good child. She be the Lord’s child.”

“Hallelujah and a-men, please Jesus,” said Shirelle’s mama. “My baby daughter be a good baby daughter.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Earl, beginning to lose patience now that they were going all holy on him.

“You know, them white polices they got in town, them boys don’t give no two nothings about what happens to a Negro girl, even a high-class Negro girl like Shirelle,” said the minister bitterly.

Earl was surprised that Percy dared express himself so clearly; but he knew it to be true. The Sheriff’s Department wouldn’t do squat to help a Negro problem or solve a Negro crime.

And then Earl made the connection: the strange Negro boy out by the road, where he shouldn’t have been, late at night, when he shouldn’t have been. The girl who’d disappeared the same night. Who knew?

“Y’all have some lemonade, now,” said June, coming out with a pitcher and two glasses on a tray.

“All right,” said Earl, “as I said, I will look into it. I know some bucks who might tell me a thing or two. And—well, that’s the best I can do for y’all. But I’ll give her a fair shot.”

“Oh, Mr. Earl, you so kind. Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you, Jesus, you done answered my prayers,” said the lady, as the Reverend Hairston tried to calm her down.

Earl walked the two back to the minister’s old car, a prewar De Soto that had seen a lot of miles. When he got the lady settled he followed the old man around and drew him aside.

“Percy, I may need something of Shirelle’s, if it comes to it,” he said, playing his last card. “You know, a piece of clothing, something she kept close to her body. Can you manage that when you drive Mrs. Parker home? I’ll make some phone calls tonight about some things, get some boys I know, and I’ll stop by the church early tomorrow, say, ’round nine.”

“Yas sir. What you need them things for—”

But then the old man stopped and looked at him.

“I ain’t necessarily saying anything,” said Earl, “but yes, we may have to go to the dogs. You go home now and pray them dogs don’t find nothing in the morning.”

Earl was a methodical man and before he let anything happen, he carefully inscribed each man’s name in big, blocky print on the inside cover of his notepad.

“Jed Posey,” he wrote. “Lem Tolliver. Lum Posey. Pop Dwyer,” and under that: “Search team, 7-23-55.”

“Earl?”

“All right, all right,” he said, hearing the impatience in Lem’s voice. “Okay, let’s get her a-goin’.”

The old man worked the dogs beautifully. It was as if he spoke to them in a secret language, a low, soft vocabulary of mutterings, whispers, clicks and crackles and, most expressively, a kind of smooching sound. The low fat beagle seemed to understand that he was the special one; like a movie star, he didn’t do much work and nosed the earth with an affected casualness, unimpressed by everything. The younger, bigger dogs were wilder and more exuberant; they seethed with impatience and immaturity. Pop took them up and down the road for half a mile in each direction, and got no response from any of them, except once one of the blues broke hunt discipline and went straining toward a coon that shimmied in panic across the asphalt. Pop gave it a mean swat and it fell into line behind the offhanded master sniffer.

At the same time Earl, Deputy Tolliver and the Posey brothers eyeballed the vegetation, looking for—well, who knew for what? Signs of a disturbance? Tracks? Articles of clothing, shoes, socks, ribbons, anything? But they saw nothing, except Lum Posey found a Coke bottle, which he carefully cleaned and put into his overall pocket for the penny it’d bring.

The sun climbed, and burned more fiercely. Jed Posey was muttering about nigger gals and how pointless all this was, loud enough to be heard, not loud enough quite to provoke Earl. Earl felt the sweat collecting in the cotton of his shirt and watched as the other men sweated through their own shirts. It was god-awful heat.

“Well, Earl,” said Lem, when they’d finished trekking in each direction, “what you want to do now? Want to go into the forest and up the damn hill? Your call.”

“Goddamn,” said Earl. He checked his watch. It was close to noon. Jimmy Pye was out now. He’d be at the Fort Smith bus station with Bub; Earl knew the schedule by heart. The Blue Eye bus didn’t leave till 1:30.

“Ah, maybe give it another damn hour or so. Say I tried, anyhow.”

“Mr. Earl?”

“What is it, Pop?”

“My dogs is gittin’ hot. They can’t work in this weather much longer.”

“Pop, you’ll get your damn seventy-five cents an hour from the state, but you ain’t done till I say you’re done.”

Shit! Earl wanted to leave too. He had things to check on. Maybe he could talk to a nigger he knew who owned a pool hall in west Blue Eye. That’d be one more thing he could check. But he still had four and a half hours till Jimmy’s bus arrived.

“Let’s take it about a hundred yards back through them damn trees and do a goddamn sweep,” he called. “You boys keep your eyes open.”

Jed Posey hawked a gob of something yellow and thick into the dust as his comment on the decision, but wouldn’t meet Earl’s glare. The old man yanked hard on the leashes of the three animals and the little squad set off toward the trees.

As they penetrated, the land seemed to fight them. The slope increased, to wear against their legs; no clear path yielded through the dense pines, and the saw brier slashed at their legs. The sunlight fell in slanting sheaves through the darkness but it wasn’t a cool darkness, and was instead hot and close. Sweat burned Earl’s eyes.

“Goddamn,” screamed Jed Posey, stumbling for the tenth time in the saw brier as the frustration built, “this ain’t no goddamned picnic, Earl. This ain’t white man’s work. Git some niggers if you want to fight your way through this shit.”

Even Earl had to agree. It was pointless. You could hardly see ten feet ahead. The dust rose and swirled.

“All right,” said Earl, admitting defeat. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Mr. Earl?” It was Pop.

“We’re leaving, Pop. Ain’t nothing back here.”

“Mr. Earl, Mollie’s got something.”

Earl looked. The two stupider young dogs had collapsed, their heads forward on the loam, their pink, wet tongues spread out under half-opened jaws. Their bodies heaved with effort and disappointment. But Mollie sat quietly, his head cocked, his eyes quizzical, very calm. Then he began to keen. The sound seemed to come from some other orifice than his throat: it was pure animal, a single howl throaty with texture and meaning. Then he bobbed up, pivoted, his tail wagging smartly, and pointed with his nose.

“He’s got her, Mr. Earl,” said Pop. “She’s here.”

“Goddamn,” shouted Jimmy Pye. “Shoot and goddamn, boy, turn that damned dial! Git me some noise!”

Jimmy’s hair was blond and longish, slick with Brylcreem, which glinted in the sun like a sheet of beaten gold above his beautiful, fine-boned face.

Bub’s thick fingers worked the dial, but the trace of musical energy that Jimmy claimed to have heard as Bub slid through the possibilities seemed to vanish.

“J-J-Jimmy. I cain’t f-f-f-find—”

“Spit it out, boy. Just go on, goddammit, and spit it out.”

But Bub couldn’t. The word hung up somewhere between his brain and his tongue, trapped in a molasses of frustration and pain. Goddamn, when would he learn to talk like a man?

Bub was twenty, a thickish, sluggish young man, who had worked as an assistant carpenter at Wilton’s Construction in Blue Eye until he’d been let go because he’d never quite got the hang of it. He had grown up totally in awe of his older cousin, who was the best running back Polk County had ever produced and had hit .368 his senior year at Polk High and could have gone either to the minor leagues or the University of Arkansas, if he hadn’t gone to jail instead.

But today Bub was more than in awe: he was possibly in love. For Jimmy’s golden power seemed to fill the air, radiating the magic of possibility.

“Go on, boy,” yelped Jimmy, his face alight with glee, “find me some music. None of that nigger shit. No hillbilly shit, neither. No sir, want to hear me some rock and roll, want to hear me ‘Rock Around the Clock,’ by Mr. Bill Haley and his goddamn Comets.”

Bub hunted, earnestly sliding the radio dial left and right, seeking a powerful Memphis or St. Louis station, but for some reason the gods weren’t cooperating, and exactly the kind of shit Jimmy didn’t want kept coming up loud and clear, KWIN out of Little Rock or that nigger beam KGOD from Texarkana. But Jimmy wasn’t angry. He was enjoying Bub’s struggle and gave him a little pat on the shoulder.

Jimmy was driving. Where the hell had he got a car? Well, goddamn, Bub was so overwhelmed with love when he arrived at the jailhouse in west Fort Smith, he just hadn’t bothered to ask, and Jimmy hadn’t explained. The car was a goddamned beauty too, a sleek white Fairlane with Fordomatic gearshift, a convertible no less, looking brand spanking new, as if it’d just been driven off a showroom floor. Jimmy drove it like a god. He whipped out Rogers Avenue, zooming in and out of traffic, blowing by the slower vehicles, honking merrily, waving with a movie star’s sexy confidence whenever teenage girls were glimpsed.

The girls always waved back and this was one thing that left Bub a little confused. Jimmy was married. He was married to Edie White, who was Jeff White’s widow’s daughter and a legendary beauty. Why would Jimmy want to go and wave at strange girls? It was all set up, it was perfect. Mr. Earl had gotten Jimmy a job at the sawmill in Nunley and Jimmy and Edie was going to live in a cottage outside Nunley on the late Rance Longacre’s cattle ranch; Miss Connie Longacre, Ranee’s widow, had said they could have it for free if Jimmy pitched in at driving time. Meanwhile, Jimmy would learn a trade at the sawmill. He might even become a manager. Everybody wanted it to work out.

“Lookie them gals,” said Jimmy, as the car sped by a Pontiac station wagon. Four pretty blond girls who looked like cheerleaders smiled as Jimmy shouted, “Hey there, pretty missies, y’all want to git some ice cream?”

The girls laughed, for Jimmy was so handsome and outrageous they knew he meant no harm, though it was Bub who noticed that he had crossed the centerline and that a truck was bearing down on them.

“J-J-J-J—”

“Or how about a drive-in movie, we could go to the Sky-Vue and see Jail Bait,” Jimmy hollered.

The truck was—

The truck honked.

The girls screamed.

Jimmy laughed.

“J-J-J-J—”

With just the flick of his wrist, Jimmy jiggered the wheel and stepped on the gas and with his athlete’s coordination shot into the tiny space left between the station wagon on the right and the rushing, honking, squealing truck just ahead; the car dipped and swooped ahead.

“Whooooooie!” sang Jimmy. “I’m a goddamned free man.”

He took the next left, fishtailing in a spray of gravel, and headed back downtown.

“You find me some music, Bub Pye, you old dog, you.”

Bub caught something familiar, with at least the kind of banging rhythms he had figured his cousin needed.

“That’s a nigger,” said Jimmy.

“N-n-n-n-no,” finally Bub got out. “That’s a white boy. He sounds like a nigger.”

Jimmy listened. It was a white boy. White boy with rhythm. White boy with nigger in him, full of piss and cum, hot and dangerous.

“What’s that white boy’s name?” he wanted to know.

Bub couldn’t remember it. It was something new, some name he could never remember.

“Cain’t ’member. Goddamn,” said Bub.

“Well, you ain’t no damn good, then,” said Jimmy with a big old smile, in the way of saying in code, it don’t matter a damn.

Jimmy looked at his watch. He seemed to know where he was going. Bub had only been up to Fort Smith a few times before; he had no idea.

Pretty soon, Jimmy pulled over.

“Just about noon,” he said.

They were on a busy street, Midland Boulevard, across from a big grocery store. “IGA Food Line,” it said on the sign. It was the biggest grocery store Bub had ever seen.

“Goddamn,” said Jimmy. “Lookie that, Bub? Lookie all them people in and out a place like that. All of them with their goddamned money just spent on food. Hell, boy, must be fifty, sixty thousand dollars in that place.”

Bub wondered what the hell Jimmy could be talking about. Something he didn’t quite like about it.

“J-J-J-J-J—”

But goddamn, Jimmy’s luck was good.

The unleashed dogs found her. Earl heard them baying wildly, their voices a-gibber with excitement.

“Them dogs won’t—”

“Won’t touch a goddamned thing,” said Pop.

“Over here, over here,” shouted Jed Posey. “Goddamn and a half, over here!”

Earl, breathing hard, struggled uphill through the trees and saw brier and broke into some kind of clearing, where, the shade vanished, the full, killing force of the heat struck him.

Earl saw Jed standing, his chest heaving, next to a shale wash, where the earth was stony and broken, the sun harsh. On the other side of the wash, the three dogs sat obediently, barking to drive the devil away. But the devil had already been here and done his work.

Shirelle lay on her side, her pink gingham dress crunched up around her hips, her panties gone, her blouse ripped off. She was beyond shame. Her eyes were wide and lightless. Her skin was gray, almost colorless, sheathed in dust. Her body was fat with bloat so that she seemed some balloon version of herself, and the left side of her face was swollen into a massive yellowish bulge crusted with a fissure of gore, where someone had smashed her with a rock. A yard away, the rock lay stained with black.

“You can see her cooze,” said Jed. “G’wan, look everbody, you can see her cooze.”

You could, of course, and Earl looked and saw what appeared to be a black gruel of blood on the child’s privates and what looked like contusions and abrasions. The buzz of flies, the stink of rot.

Earl had seen death in all its forms over three major island invasions. He’d done more than his share of dealing it too. But the girl looked so broken and thrown away, so blasphemed by the gases that filled her, then abandoned on the side of a rough hill, it broke a heart he thought would break no more after the long walk through the tide at Tarawa and the flamethrower work on Saipan and the up-close tommy-gun killings, so very, very many of them, on Iwo. No Jap or dead American boy ever looked so uselessly, pointlessly wasted.

Lem Tolliver spat his plug out explosively.

“Them niggers,” he said. “What they do to their own kind! We never should have brought ’em over. They belong back in the African jungle.”

“Lem,” said Earl, “you get these boys out of here and go on down to my car. I want you to—”

“Hey, Earl,” said Jed Posey. Jed’s brother laughed. “Hey, Earl, you mind if I jump on for a free one? I mean, I might as well, before you close her up. She ain’t going to mind none. And she sure ain’t no virgin no more.”

Earl hit Jed with his balled fist just under the ear, toward the jaw, a short, vicious, completely satisfying jab. He hit him so hard the man was driven backwards as he chomped on his own tongue, opening a terrible wound, and blood began to gurgle out of Jed’s mouth and darken on his overalls. A storm of dust floated up as Jed thrashed a bit and then lay still, one hand raised in surrender. Earl stepped toward him as if to work on him some more. Jed scurried back on his hands and knees, his face gone to the fear a man feels when he knows he’s way overmatched.

“Don’t hit him no more, Earl,” begged Lum Posey.

“Git this piece of shit out of here,” Earl said to Lem. “I want him out of here. You go to my car, you call on the goddamned radio to the Greenwood barracks, tell ’em it’s a real bad ten-thirty-nine, I want the Criminal Investigations team here as fast as they can git it. And the Criminal ID team, just in case our boy done left prints or something. You put in a call to Sam Vincent, I want him out here representing the Prosecutor’s Office. He’ll be the one heps me put this fucker in the chair. You call your sheriff, you tell him I want his people out here to close the site and search for evidence. You call the Coroner’s Office ’cause we gonna need some real careful body work done. You got that, Lem?”

“I got it, Earl.”

“Pop, you rest and feed them dogs now and git ’em into the shade. We might need them see if they can get up a scent on whoever done that. You understand, Pop?”

“Yes sir.”

“Now, go on, git.”

The men turned back down the hill, Lum Posey helping his bleeding brother.

Earl was alone with the body.

Okay, baby girl, he thought, time for you to talk to me, so’s I can find who done this to you. And I swear to you: I’m gonna nail his ass and watch it fry in the chair.

Earl was not Sherlock Holmes; he wasn’t any kind of big-city homicide cop. He hadn’t even worked a murder before, that is, as opposed to a killing, where the killer’s identity was obvious from witnesses or known grudges. This was different: a body, abandoned for close to a week. It was a true mystery. It went way beyond anything Earl had ever tried before. But Earl Swagger was a serious professional law enforcement officer, committed to, perhaps even obsessed by, the twin masters of duty and justice. His mind was so rigid that he could only see one possible outcome of the event before him, the execution of the murderer, and until that happened, he would feel a serious hole had been blown into the wall of the universe. It was up to him to plug it.

He set about it methodically, oblivious first to the odor of death which attended, second to the flies that hung and buzzed and finally to the obscenity of the crime itself. First thing: drawing the scene. Let the photogs do what they would later, he wanted to record, for his own uses, the overall look of the body, its relationship to the setting. He used the triangulation method, useful in outdoor settings where no baseline such as a road could be located. He chose as his three points the closest tree, about twenty-five feet beyond the child’s head, the edge of the vegetationless shale on which she lay and, off to the right, a stone humping out of the surface of the earth. Crudely, he did a stick-figure version of her broken body, placing it between the landmarks.

Then he began an immediate site search for footprints or other signs of disturbance in the earth, as well as other bits of personal evidence of the man or men who’d brought or dropped her here. But the land was so hard and dry it would register no such impression; instead a breeze kicked up, unfurling Shirelle’s dress, throwing vapors of dust. Then, just as quickly, it subsided.

Earl went to the body itself. Later the Criminal Investigations team, the professionals, could make a more intense examination in search of microscopic information: fibers, body fluids, possible fingerprints, bloodstains, that sort of thing. But he wanted to learn what he could from the poor child.

Speak to me, honey, he said, feeling such an aching tenderness come over him he could hardly abide it. Something in him yearned to take her up and cradle her against the pain. But there was no pain, there was no her anymore, only her swollen remains. Her soul was with God. He shook his head clear and spoke again to her in his mind: Come on, now, you tell Earl who did this to you.

He looked into her blank and depthless eyes, at her utter, broken repose, at her bloodstains and bruises and cruel abrasions, and something hot and hopelessly unprofessional stole over him: he saw a vision of his own child, that serious, somber, hardworking little boy who seemed almost never to laugh: saw Bob Lee, snatched and brutalized like this, left to swell so much it spread his features over his face, and for a second Earl stopped being a police officer and became any avenging father and through a red fog had an image of blowing a shotgun shell into the heart of whoever had done the thing, in the name of all fathers everywhere.

But then he had himself back and was cool again, asking dry professional questions, things easily measured, easily known. She was quite dusty. Was it from lying here these many days? Possibly, but more likely, he now believed, she’d been murdered somewhere else and dumped here. If indeed that rock was the murder weapon, there’d be a lot more blood. He bent and looked at the bloodstain congealed under her skull. The pattern of dispersal was regular and there was no sign of spatter, only a pool: that suggested that the blood had thickened and leaked out slowly. Surely, if the girl were thrashing as she was being killed, the blood would be more widely scattered. So he thought that whoever had done this had simply bashed her dead skull with a rock in order to make it look as if he’d killed her here. But why? What difference would it make? He bent close to her throat: yes, it was bruised under the gray swollen skin. Had she been strangled, not beaten, to death? He recorded the fact in his notebook.

Then he saw on a sliver of shoulder revealed by her twisted blouse a red smear, not wet but dry. He touched it: dust, red dust. Hmmm? He turned to her hand and gently opened it. He bent and looked at her nails: under each of the four fingers was a half-moon of what might have been blood but looked more like the same red dust he’d found on her shoulder. The forensics people would have to make that determination.

Red dust? Red clay, possibly? It hung in his mind, reminiscent of something. Then he had it: about ten minutes outside Blue Eye, out Route 88 near a wide spot in the road called Ink, was an abandoned quarry noted for its red clay deposits. It wasn’t so marked on any maps, but by the consensus of oral folklore, folks called it Little Georgia, in homage to the red clay state.

He wrote “Little Georgia” on his notepad, among his other recordings.

He went to the other hand, which was twisted under her, still clenched in a deathly fist. But he thought he saw something in it, a scrap of paper or something. He should leave it, he knew, but the temptation to know more was overwhelming. Gently, with his pencil as a kind of probe, he pried open her tiny hand, trying not to disturb a thing.

A treasure fell out. In Shirelle’s left hand was a ball of material, crumpled and desperate, something she’d grabbed from her killer as he killed her. With his pencil, Earl opened it up. It appeared to be the pocket of a cotton shirt. And it was monogrammed!

Three letters, big as day: RGF.

Could it be that easy? Earl wondered. My God, could that be all there was to it? Finding Mr. RGF with a shirt with a pocket missing?

“Lawdie, Lawdie, Lawdie,” someone was chanting.

Earl looked up. Lem Tolliver’s considerable bulk was moving through the trees under the propulsion of great agitation.

“Earl, Earl, Earl!”

“What is it, Lem?” said Earl, rising.

“I called ’em, Earl, and they gonna git here when they can.”

“Why, what’s—”

“Earl, Jimmy Pye and his cousin Bubba shot up a Fort Smith grocery store. Oh, Earl, they done killed four people, even a cop! Earl, they got the whole state out looking for that boy!”