Black Light

18

So who would have moved your father’s body?” asked Russ.

“Stupid question,” said Bob.

He stood up. They were bunked in Bob’s old trailer on land he still owned seven miles out of Blue Eye on U.S. 270, abutting Black Fork Mountain. In the years since he’d left, the souvenir hunters had taken their toll and so had the graffiti writers, but his keys still opened the padlocks. In just a little time they’d restored the place to livability, though of course there was no phone and no electricity. But a fire kept the water hot and Coleman lanterns kept the place lit at night. It was a hell of a lot better than camping and a hell of a lot cheaper than staying in the Days Inn.

It was dark outside and the drive back from the cemetery was bleak and silent. Bob wasn’t talking. He’d paid the laborers, and the doctor said he’d bill him for expenses but not for professional services. They’d stopped at a diner and eaten and now they were back.

“Why is it stupid?” Russ asked.

“Don’t they teach you nothing at that fancy university? I thought you were supposed to be smart.”

“I didn’t say I was smart,” said Russ. “I said I wanted to be a writer. Different things.”

“I guess so. You can’t ask who until you first find out if, and then how. Who don’t have no meaning until you have figured out that there was a who. Got it?”

“Well—”

“Well, yourself. Think about it. How could it have happened?”

“Could the ground have shifted in some way?”

“No. The earth doesn’t work like that. I thought you grew up in Oklahoma, not New York City.”

“I did, but not on a farm. Anyway, they could have come at night and made an exchange with another body somewhere in the cemetery and—”

Russ paused.

“You saw for yourself how hard it was to excavate a body,” said Bob. “It took three strong men the best part of a morning to uncover one. We didn’t even get to the moving. It would involve block and tackles, a hearse or some kind of cart or something. Then you need the same thing with the other body. Then you got to patch up all that dirt so nobody would notice. Couldn’t get all that done in a single night. Too much to do. So they’d have to do it in the day, under some kind of legal guise. But that wouldn’t do ’em no good neither. You’d have to have lawyers, you’d have to concoct some kind of legal justification, it would end up doing exactly what maybe it was trying to avoid, and that is draw a lot of attention to itself.”

Russ nodded.

“So what do you do?” asked Bob. “Think, son. Either come up with it or call that Princeton place and get back the half million or so your poor dad spent to get you educated.”

“He didn’t spend a cent,” said Russ.

“Oh, that’s right, I forgot your dad was such a bastard. Anyhow, think. Think!”

“I can’t—”

It came from nowhere. Hooray, humiliation momentarily avoided!

“The stones. They move the gravestones! Two men could do it in a few hours under the dark of night. No problem. Especially since the original records have long since disappeared and whenever they did it, no one was there to give a damn.”

“Not bad,” said Bob. “But you are ahead of yourself. Maybe some night in the sixties a bunch of high school kids got drunk and went gravestone tipping. And maybe they was caught and maybe some judge made ’em replant the stones. But they were kids, they didn’t give two shits. So they just stuck ’em in any which way. So what does that leave us?”

“Fucked,” said Russ.

“Yes, it does. On the other hand—well, well, lookie here.”

Russ saw headlight beams sweep across the windows and heard the car engine.

Bob opened the door.

“Howdy, Deputy,” he called. “Come on in.”

He stepped back and Duane Peck entered. Without his sunglasses, his eyes were small and dark.

“Mr. Swagger, I just wanted to tell you something. Remember I told you I’d see about getting the sheriff’s records?”

“Why sure, Duane. You want a cup of coffee? Russ, put some coffee on.”

“No, no,” said Duane, then paused quickly to look around and up and down the room. “I’m on duty, got some patrol patterns to run. I just wanted to say they moved them records over to the courthouse basement. That’s where most of the municipal records was stored. You know, it burned down in 1994.”

“Damn!” said Bob. “I knew the court records were lost but I was hoping maybe the sheriff’s records were different. Damn!”

“I’m real sorry.”

“Duane, don’t you fret on it. So far we got pretty much a big zero. With the body lost and no cemetery records, the whole damn thing is falling apart on us. We just may have to hang it up.”

“Okay, I just wanted to tell y’all.”

He gave each man a hearty smile, then backed out.

They waited until they heard the car pull out.

“Now, where were we?” Bob asked.

“You were saying that if it was kids who messed up the tombstones we were screwed. On the other hand …”

“On the other hand, if just for the hell of it we figure someone did this on purpose, then don’t it follow only two tombstones were exchanged?”

“Yes.”

“And we know the wrong one belonged to a twenty-five-year-old fellow killed in the Civil War?”

“I got it, I got it. We try and find records—in the courthouse, dammit, burned again, no, no, the historical society—on deaths in Polk County during the Civil War. Maybe we can find the names of the young men who fit that category. That would cut way down on the possible alternative grave sites. But what—excavate ten or twenty of them? I don’t—”

But Bob was fishing through the familiar manila folder of clippings and soon enough produced the front page of the Southwest Times Record, July 26, 1955.

HERO TROOPER BURIED, it read.

Under a spreading elm, on rolling fields filled with trees, a group of mourners stood, somber people putting a good man into the ground.

“I don’t—” Russ said. “The trees are all gone. You couldn’t get much out of that picture. It’s just a field.”

“The trees are gone but the land’s the same. Look at the rolls in the earth, the orientation to the sun, the mountains in the distance. I’m betting I can read the land from the photo and pretty much triangulate on that part of the graveyard. We link that with a name and bingo.”

“You’re not thinking of giving up?” said Russ.

Swagger fixed him with the sniper’s glare.

“Not hardly,” he said.

Duane Peck drove away from Swagger’s, then, a mile or so down, pulled over. He snatched the little cellular folder from the glove compartment and pushed a button.

When the phone beeped, he made his report.

“Swagger and the kid seem stuck. They got nowhere to go ’cause they couldn’t find no body. I went over to see ’em tonight and they were both down in the dumps. I think they may be moving out or giving up. So far they have nothing.

“Also, I went over to Sam Vincent’s. I knocked on the door and he wasn’t there. So I went around back and looked into his basement. Goddamn, he was sitting there, reading some old file. Couldn’t tell what it was but I seen a picture on the floor of some nigger gal. I knocked and knocked. I yelled, I did everything. That old goat’s losing it big-time. Wherever he was, he sure as hell wasn’t on this earth. Didn’t even hear me, though I was but ten feet away. Maybe he’s going deaf.”

He hung up and started to drive home. But in ten minutes the phone rang. He picked it up.

“Duane?”

“Yes sir?”

“Duane, you keep an eye on Sam Vincent. He may be old but he’s sharp.”

“Yes sir.”

“You may have to break in and find out what file, do you see?”

“Yes sir,” said Duane.

Bob stood in the sun in the field of the dead. Around him, neat as Chiclets in a child’s game, the gravestones fell away in rows. So many dead, from so many American wars.

He took a look at the picture. In the light it seemed to fall apart on him. He’d stopped that morning at a photography shop to inquire about a more useful enlargement but the man pointed out that without the original negative, he’d simply be enlarging the dots of which the photograph was composed in the old hot-metal rotogravure technology: the bigger the photo, the bigger and farther apart would be the dots. It was at its clearest as it was in the paper.

Russ had a thought about computer enhancement and thought they could FedEx it back to Oklahoma City, where a friend on the staff of the Oklahoman might be able to do more with it. But Bob said no, that would take too much time and he wasn’t letting it out of his hands, so he would make do with what he had. So he sent Russ to the historical society in search of names that might link up with Bob’s efforts in the boneyard.

He turned to the four compass directions, hoping to identify the mountain silhouette in the background, but it was difficult to make out, because only fragments of the line could be seen in the photo and even then he wasn’t sure that it was mountain or some imperfection in the photographic process. And he didn’t want to look too hard at the photo: the more he looked at it, the more the details disappeared among the dots. It was like a magic photo: it was only potent in small glimpses. To study it was to destroy it.

He looked up from the picture to the stones.

Martin.

Feamster.

O’Brian.

Lotsky.

Kummler.

Kids’ names. Lost boys, what did it earn, what did it matter? Why? A darkness settled over him. He could remember still the name of the boys in his first platoon, 1965, or at least the thirteen out of the twenty-six that didn’t make it back. And the five that lost limbs or the ability to walk. And the one that went into the nuthouse. And the one who shot himself in the foot. That left seven who made it home exactly as they’d gone, or some reasonable facsimile thereof. Those names he could not remember at all.

He looked about: so many of them, a starry skyful of them. Too many of them. Maybe coming to this place by himself in the middle of the morning was a mistake. He yearned to talk to Julie or to YKN4, to someone human and whole and normal. Get me off this frozen star, he thought, let me back in the world.

Bensen.

Forbes.

Klusewski.

Obermeyer.

As he moved, his perspective shifted and it seemed almost that the parade of white gravestones was itself moving. He thought of old Roman armies, phalanxes they called them, which moved in steady company formations against hordes of savages, calm, determined, believing in the unit concept and the spirit of the legion. That’s what it felt like: moving through phalanxes of the dead, who stared at a living man and wanted to know: Why aren’t you among us? Why are you special?

Gunning.

Abramowicz.

Benjamin.

Luftman.

Because I was lucky, he answered. Why did a line come at him? It was some poetry thing he’d read years back when he tried to understand what a war was and read every goddamn thing on it there was: the orient of thick and fast.

That’s what it was too: an orient of thick and fast, a total world where one damn thing after another happened, and maybe you got out and maybe you didn’t, and not much of it had to do with skill. His daddy, now maybe there was a man with skill. His daddy was a hero. His daddy killed the Japanese on Iwo Jima and Tarawa and on Saipan. His daddy must have killed 200 men. He himself had killed 341, though the official fiction read 87. So much death, their boys and our boys, marines and Japs, marines and gooks or slopes or whatever they called them back then. He shuddered. So many men who could have had children or written poems or become doctors.

Bergman.

Deems.

Ver Coot.

Truely.

It was a great puzzle. He stood and realized that he was on a ridge, one of the folds in the land that wasn’t really visible until you actually walked it. He stood, now a little higher, and unfolded the photograph and compared what he saw with where he was.

The site in the photo seemed to be on a ridge too. Could he make out other ridges behind it, all the way to the trees? He could not. The background was lost in blur, as the dots became nonsense. He saw that the key had to be the trees, now gone for whatever reason. His daddy lay under a big tree. Maybe one hundred yards behind it was another tree. And that smudge in the dots, was that a tree? If so, that meant three trees in a rough line heading—in which direction? Couldn’t say.

Hey, boys, help me. Help the one among you who should have been with you, help him.

But the dead were silent.

Feeling lost and a complete failure, he took another step to leave the ridge and find another, when in his far peripheral vision some anomaly registered. He turned to track it down and saw nothing. He turned back, moving, and again there came a signal from his subconscious that something should be noted.

Were the dead speaking in some odd way?

Come on, boys, tell me. Give me your message.

No, nothing, only silence. Far off, the sound of a power mower. Above, a jet glinting high in the sky, a commercial job leaving a fat contrail. A white car in the distance.

Duane Peck’s, of course. Keeping watch.

Duane, who are you working for?

Someday soon, we may have to have a discussion with you.

He turned again: another strangeness assailed him.

He tried to sift through it. What was he feeling or noticing? It seemed only to come when he moved and in his peripheral, as if in focusing on it, it went away. He set out to duplicate the phenomenon.

He stepped, turning, trying to keep his eyes focused straight ahead and his mind emptied. Nothing. Did it again. Nothing. Felt like an idiot.

Did it the third time.

Now he had it. Far off, in the orthodox line of gravestones, was a gap. No, not a gap, an irregularity. One stone was slightly out of line. Why would that be?

He sighted on it and walked. It was 150 yards away.

Mason.

Mason, what’s your goddamned problem? You a fuckup, Mason? You a mama’s boy, you think the rules don’t ever apply to you? That’s how a sergeant would talk to a man out of formation. Why are you buried about a foot to the right of Shidlovsky and Donohue? Isn’t Murphy pissed, you moving in on his territory?

Was it a mistake or—

A tree.

It was gone now, but when poor Mason went into the earth back in 1899 with a Spanish Mauser bullet in his heart, a giant tree must have been right here on this spot, and so they made a slight adjustment. Later the tree died, but Mason stayed out of whack until eternity.

Bob took the picture out.

If he looked hard, he could force himself to believe that if this was the spot for the tree, and since this spot was quite close to the boundary of the cemetery, then maybe this was the third tree in the line.

He looked again at the picture. What time of day was the picture taken? He ransacked through forty long years of memories, putting aside much that was not pleasant, and a little that was, and at last he remembered a formidable presence named Miss Connie rushing him through breakfast and dressing him because his mother kept breaking down. That put the funeral in the morning, before noon in any case. Figuring then that the photographer would have moved until the sun was behind him, and that it would have been reasonably low, Bob guessed that the photographer was facing west, his back to the east. So if this was the last tree, then the other two in the rough line would be to the east.

He orientated himself that way and saw only crosses. But he took off his blue denim shirt and draped it on Mason. He didn’t think Mason would mind. Then he turned to the east and began to walk the line.

He found the second gap fifty yards beyond and rushed ahead. But where the first one should be, according to his reading of the photo, he found nothing, except a damned sidewalk that led to a little park of what appeared to be abstract statuary a little bit farther out. The rows were nice and even. He looked, uncomprehending how such a huge tree, had there been one, wouldn’t have thrown the lines of graves out of whack. What the hell was wrong?

He looked more carefully at the picture.

Sidewalk, he thought. Where the hell is it going?

He found it, walked to the little garden. Some Confederate thing? No, dammit, Vietnam. The county had erected a little memento mori to the boys of Nam, a plaque, inscribed with words like honor and duty and sacrifice and of course the names. He looked, then looked away. He knew Harrison, and Marlow, he knew Jefferson too, though Jefferson was black. Jefferson was AirCav, right, a brother of the Black Horse? What about Simpson? Straight-leg grunt, draft bait, caught a booby when he was down to days until DEROS, the town’s favorite hard-luck story.

Now Bob’s head ached and he couldn’t deal with the problem anymore. He turned to leave, and as if in giving up, he got it.

The tree comes down for whatever reason, but it was so imposing that its very presence had intimidated the gravediggers, so they’d never gotten near to it. And when it came down, that’s where they build their garden to the Vietnam War dead, and that’s where they build the sidewalk. So that would make his dad’s now hidden grave somewhere along the sidewalk, probably to the right of it. He thought it made sense too. If some guys were exchanging gravestones that probably weighed two hundred to three hundred pounds apiece late at night, they’d need a wheelbarrow or cart and the sidewalk would be helpful. He walked a bit until he reached a halfway point and then just turned west. He saw nothing, then moved up and back and at last up a bit more. He was on a ridge. He could see two gaps in the line before him to the west, one of the tombstones by the farthest gap the blue of his shirt.

“Hey.”

He turned. It was Russ.

“Those old records were miserable, but I got at least thirteen names. Man, it’s amazing the records that place keeps.”

Bob looked to his immediate right.

“I bet one of them says Jacob Finley.”

Russ dug out his paper, looked them over and then said, “Yeah. Jacob Finley. Fifth Arkansas Light Infantry.”

Bob looked at the grave marker, limestone corrupted by the passage of time, untended, leaning ever so slightly to the right.

He knelt and put a hand on the cold stone.

Hello, old man, he thought. I’ve come. It’s time.

This time it was easy. They went back to the County Coroner’s and refiled the exhumation papers for poor Jacob Finley, according to them Bob’s long-lost cousin. No lies had to be told regarding the reasons for changing the request, because, the first paperwork already in order, nobody in the Coroner’s Office particularly cared. Sam wasn’t even necessary. A few phone calls later and all the mechanisms of the day before were reinstalled.

Mr. Coggins and his two boys were luckier this time. The grave site, being accessible off that helpful sidewalk, was now approachable by backhoe, and Mr. Coggins was an expert with the machine. In less than an hour he excavated the coffin, and just as the machine uncovered the box, Dr. Phillips showed up.

“How did you find him?” he asked.

Bob explained.

“Well, maybe you’re right and maybe not.” He went and looked as the quickly erected tackle drew the box from the ground.

“I will say this, that’s a metal casket, circa the fifties. Do you remember the funeral home?”

Bob said no and then a name shot into his memory like a flare out of the void.

“Devilin’s,” he said.

“Yep,” said the doctor. “And your father’s name was Earl Swagger.”

“Yes sir.”

“That’s what it says here. That’s him. Okay, boys, load it into the hearse and we’ll be off.”

It didn’t take a long time at the mortuary.

Bob and Russ waited outside, while a funeral procession formed up in one of the viewing rooms and people filed out to cars. The hearse that took Earl to the mortuary took some other poor joker back to the boneyard a half an hour later.

“I feel soaked in death,” said Russ.

Presently the doctor came out. They went over to a little shady remembrance garden tastefully sculpted into the earth near the funeral home. Beautiful day late in the afternoon: the sun was just setting.

“I can put this in writing for you, but it’ll take a day,” he said, lighting a cigarette.

“Writing’s not necessary. The boy’ll take notes.”

“Fine. First of all, then, I found the physical remains of a man in his midforties in a state of some advanced decomposition. What that means is that little tissue remains, which in turn means that some pathological determinations are impossible. Bullet tracks, for example. We can’t tell which directions the bullets went through the body and what damage they did to soft-tissue elements like organs and the central nervous or respiratory system.”

“Damn!” said Bob.

Speak to me, Daddy, he thought. This is your only chance.

“But,” the doctor continued, “the skeletal remains were in good shape and the marks of the wounds were recorded there.”

“Yes,” said Bob. “Go on.”

“I initially noticed two wounds. The first was on the leftside ulna, the outermost bone of the forearm, just down from the thickness of bone we call the olecranon, an inch or so beneath the elbow. I could tell from impact beveling that a bullet struck and shattered that bone; there was a traumatic ovoid indentation visible on some of the fracture segments. This is characteristic of a high-velocity solid-point bullet delivered at close range.”

“Thirty-eight Super.”

“A jacketed .38 Super would get the job done nicely, yes. The bones were in such fragmented disarray that, pending further lengthy examination, I couldn’t rearrange them to get a caliber reading on the damage.”

“Not necessary,” said Bob.

“The second wound resembled the first. The same shattered bone, the same fragment presence, the same ovoid groove in some of the pieces, again characteristic of a smaller-caliber, high-speed bullet. This was observed at the frontal curve of the third rib of the left-hand side of the cadaver.”

Bob mulled this over.

“Could he move, hit like that?”

“If he wanted to.”

“Both wounds were survivable?” he finally asked.

“Well, that’s a subjective judgment, dependent upon the subject’s viability. Given that your father was in extremely robust health, that he’d been hit before and understood that getting hit didn’t automatically equate to death, and given that he stanched his blood flow and that help arrived within a few hours, and given that there were no serious soft-tissue wounds not registered in the skeletal system, then yes, my judgment is that those two wounds were survivable. But there was a third wound.”

“Go on,” Bob said.

“I missed it at first,” said the doctor. “Some tissue remains were present and the condition of the bones was not pristine. Of course I’m not in my lab working under the best conditions.”

“But you found something?”

“Yes, finally, I did. In the sternum, a frontal plate of bone that shields the heart and anchors the ribs. There’s a very neat round hole, or almost round. Ovoid actually, suggestive of a downward angle, that is, a high to low shooting trajectory. There’s impact beveling suggestive of an entry wound. If you extrapolate from the placement of the penetration of the sternum on that angle, you get a real solid heart shot. The bullet path leads straight into the right ventricle where the pulmonary artery pulls the deoxygenated blood in. That artery and the ventricle would have been instantaneously destroyed. Brain death would have followed in, say, ten to twelve seconds.”

“So he couldn’t have been shot in the heart and walked three hundred feet back to where he was found?”

“He couldn’t have moved a step. I doubt he was conscious much more than three seconds after impact.”

Bob nodded and turned to Russ.

“So how’s goddamn Jimmy Pye hit him a hundred yards out in the corn and he walks all the way back to the car?”

Russ just looked at him.

“You measured the hole, I take it,” Bob asked the doctor.

“Yes, I did.”

“I’m guessing it wasn’t .357 or .429, right? It was, what, .311, .312 inches?”

“Good. Actually, .3115.”

“As I understand it, the impact beveling always widens the diameter by a couple of thousandths of an inch?” “Typically,” said the doctor.

“So the bullet that killed my father, it was, say, .308 in diameter? That would make it a .30-caliber rifle bullet?”

“That’s what every indicator says,” the doctor replied.

“I don’t get it,” said Russ. “What’s all this with the numbers?”

“It tells me who killed my father,” Bob said, turning to look at him. “It sure as hell wasn’t no Jimmy Pye.”

“Who killed your father?” asked Russ.

“A sniper,” said Bob.