Black Light

36

Bob was still grim and freaky with paranoia. He radiated hostility and sat, hunched and tense, always silent, communicating in grunts. He didn’t want to return to the trailer or get a set of motel rooms or anything to make them easy to find. They sat in the flicker of a Coleman lamp deep in the Ouachitas, the silence even more forbidding than usual.

“What’s eating you?” Russ finally said. “You’re pissed. I can tell. Something’s going on.”

Bob, typically, said nothing. He looked like Achilles again, and Russ thought how the severe planes of his face would fit so appropriately under the bronze of a fierce Greek helmet, scarred from much action outside the walls of Troy.

“You learned something,” Russ said again.

Bob breathed out a wisp of vapor, like liquid anger, possibly enough to allow him to live another moment or two before the demons inside chewed him to pieces. He had an ulcer of anger like a gigantic leach sucking fluid from his soul.

“I ran into a neighbor lady,” he finally said. “I couldn’t get rid of her. And then she said, ‘I wonder where that wonderful deputy is? I’m surprised he isn’t here.’ Seems our boy Duane Peck done been hanging out in Sam’s neighborhood. She saw his car parked there two, three days running and later saw Sam driving ’cross town, Duane right behind. We gonna have us a chat with Duane real soon.”

“You, ought to reconsider that,” said Russ.

“What for?” Bob demanded, flashing a Bronze Age glare at Russ.

“If you call him out and kill him, you’re a murderer. What does that prove?”

“It proves that Duane Peck is dead.”

“But it doesn’t get the man or men who killed your father, for whom we both believe Duane works. You have to wait until Duane moves against you. Then you do him and it’s righteous; nobody cares, you go home to YKN4 and Julie. Put your anger aside until it’s time.”

Bob stared out into the darkness. His eyes narrowed into something pale and bitter and Russ knew he was looking at the pure soul of a killer. It was the first time he’d ever recognized how much anger smoldered in Bob and what terrible things the man was capable of.

But Bob got himself under some kind of control.

“We’ll deal with Peck when the goddamn time comes,” he finally said.

“Good, because I have something to work on.”

“What’s that?”

Russ told him about Jed Posey’s parole.

Bob wanted to know what she’d said. Where had the information come from? Was it tainted? Was it a trap?

Well, no, it seemed to arise spontaneously. Someone in the black community had found out about it. They weren’t even talking about it to white people, but one of Jeannie’s friends, a black student at Vanderbilt, had heard about it from her mother.

“How would the blacks find out?” Bob wanted to know.

“You know, they talk among themselves. A black prison guard tells his wife that goddamned Jed Posey has been paroled; his wife tells her sister tells her friend tells her husband tells his brother; it goes like a telegram; and down here they probably hear faster than anyone. It’s how an oppressed community would survive; it would develop extremely refined communications and intelligence skills.”

“But who originally found out? That’s what I want to know. Where does it start?”

“I don’t know. It’s lost, I guess.”

“It can’t be lost,” Bob said irritably.

“Do you want to go house-to-house knocking on doors in Blue Eye?” Russ said in exasperation. “Look, it’s simple. This guy is one of two people left alive who saw your father on his last day. Maybe his testimony is important. They searched for Shirelle Parker. They were together for, near as we can figure it out, close to three hours. That’s a long time. Maybe he can remember.”

Bob just didn’t like it.

“Why now? Why release him now?”

“He’s been in prison since 1962. That’s over thirty years. It was time. Do you want to go down to Tucker tomorrow and make inquiries as to why? Do you want me to call the paper”—the paper! Russ thought. What about that job?—“and see what their cop guy says? Or do you want to check it out tomorrow, go straight to Jed and find out what he has to say?”

It was like arguing with a stubborn old man. Bob never agreed or disagreed, he simply affected a blank look that stood for a strategic retreat while he reconsidered his options. Nothing ever budged him except himself and he only believed in things he could see or touch.

“We don’t even know where he is,” he said.

“I found Connie,” said Russ. “I will find Jed.”

“Fine,” said Bob. “Get some sleep now.”

Bob himself didn’t get to sleep. Instead, he lay in the hissing light of the Coleman lantern, trying to settle down, put his furies in the far place and nail them to the floor. He was now looking through the materials that John Vincent had handed over: the old book of tickets, the blood-smeared notebook, now yellow and brittle with age, and, fresh, the yellow legal paper with Sam’s notes on it.

He looked the notes over carefully. On the first run-through, it seemed clear that Sam was reinvestigating his father’s last case. Why would that be important? Bob asked himself. What had started him? What could that have to do with anything? It puzzled him; he simply could not imagine a mechanism by which the two could be connected, since the time element was all wrong. The body of Shirelle was found on the day that Earl was murdered; there couldn’t have been time to set something up based on Earl’s discovery.

But on faith, he progressed. Sam seemed to be noting ways in which Earl’s notes diverged from the later, official version of the crime.

Sam had written: “Body moved. What significance?” Then, underneath, in bolder pen strokes, “To disaffiliate body with site of crime!!”

Bob took this in. Sure. What would the point of that be?

He read on: “Fingernail: red dirt under fingernail!”

Would that be Shirelle’s fingernail? And if so, what would the significance of that be?

But Sam himself had solved it. “LITTLE GEORGIA,” he’d written in all caps. Then adding: “Must be authentic murder site.”

Bob himself knew that Little Georgia was a red clay deposit a few miles west of town, a notorious place where teenagers went to neck, just over the town line and in the county. So what? He’d been there, even.

Then: “Mrs. Parker says: it would be a black boy. No black girl in 1955 would get into a car with a white boy.” Then he’d written: “Damn!”

Bob saw why. Had Shirelle gone off with a white boy, some kind of conspiracy theory might actually work, particularly (though he couldn’t imagine how yet) if it was leveraged into the plot against his father. But if she’d gone off with a black boy, nothing made any sense. For, of course, if the murder of Shirelle Parker was another elaborate conspiracy, who in the black community could possibly benefit, and who would have the resources to put together the elaborate plot by which Reggie Gerard Fuller took the fall?

That was the cruncher: Shirelle would not get in a car with a white person in 1955. Bob knew why too. Black girls wouldn’t get in cars with white boys five years later. They probably still wouldn’t because the white boy only wanted one thing.

He rolled over, still confused, and lay there trying to get to sleep.

Bob drove around the town square six times. Russ had never seen him so tense; his eyes would not stop working the landscape, the terrain, the buildings, the mirrors; his muscles were tense and his neck so stiff and rigid Russ thought he’d break it off.

“You okay?”

“Fine, goddammit,” said Bob, breathing harshly.

“There’s no one here,” said Russ. “It’s small-town America, ten in the morning.”

Bob didn’t even listen or stop working security. Finally, he said, “Okay, you git in there and do your goddamned business and git out. No fucking around, no messing with the pretty women, nothing but work. You don’t go to the bathroom, you eyeball anybody comes in. You pick an escape route.”

“I hear you,” said Russ.

“You don’t ask for no help. You don’t let anybody see what you’re doing. You don’t leave nothing behind. You find what you got to find and you fall back, watching your back the whole way.”

“Man,” said Russ, “you got it bad.”

“I’ll watch from out here,” Bob said.

“You know—”

“Don’t you doubt it for a second,” said Bob. “They are hunting us.”

Russ nodded and stepped out of the car. Of course he felt ridiculous: this living in the red zone, what Bob called Condition One—it took too much energy and passion, it left you breathless and actually, he thought, duller than normal. You were beyond paranoia, in some strange and squalid place, where that lady up there with the baby buggy could reach into it and pull an AK-47 or that friendly mailman could reach into his pouch and come out with a sawed-off shotgun. He couldn’t live that way. No one could except some kind of nutcase.

So he put it out of his mind and walked the thirty-odd feet to the steps and bounded in. Nobody shot him; nobody even seemed to notice him.

It took a while but not forever. No phone books listed any Posey family but he requested the bound volumes of the weekly Polk County Star for the year 1962, received the heavy volume in due course and paged through it until he came at last to the big news:

COUNTY MAN SLAYS NEGRO, it said.

There, under the headline, which ran across the top of the page, was a picture of the glum and trashy Jed Posey, his cheeks sunken, his jaw clenched about a mouthful of tiny jagged teeth, his eyes baleful and dark, a Polk County Sheriff’s Office ID number under his chin. There was an odd lopsidedness to his face as if it had been broken apart, then cemented together again imperfectly. Next to it was a picture of Davidson Fuller, a haggard black man in his sixties, with a short Brillo pad of gray for hair and the haunted eyes of a father still mourning his loss. Both pictures were inset upon a shot taken at the gas station soon after the police arrived, with a body supine next to an old truck, its top half covered by somebody’s old blanket, but a raggedy track of black ran out from underneath, and Russ knew it was old Davidson’s blood. He shuddered, then read the account, which gave Posey’s address as County Route 70. He went to the county map and quickly found a RR 70—but was it the same 70? He looked around for someone elderly to ask but then recalled the Federal Writer’s Project Guide to the States, from the thirties. The card catalog yielded a call number and he found the volume in seconds on the open shelves. He paged through, county by county, until at last he came to Polk and to a map that dated from 1938: yes, in the old days, that road was called 70.

Next he went to the filing cabinets for the county land plats and sifted through them. Again, luck or whatever was with him: the plats offered a much more detailed examination of the terrain and he found the area and looked at a map of the place. He found County Route 70, a straight line running perpendicular and east from 271, past Iron Fork Lake. It plunged deeper and deeper into map blankness like an arrow, a road that went nowhere except to the very limits of the known world. Civilization hadn’t reached that far into the dark woods, evidently; not even any sewers appeared to have been laid. But that wasn’t important; instead he looked at the words along the road marking local place-names. Way, way back—maybe twenty miles in—he came across a “Posey Hollow,” in what had to be the shadow of Iron Fork Mountain. The map there was blank except for the ominous word Forest. A squiggle denoted a rough road snaking inward toward nothingness.

As best as he could, he copied the directions down, drawing up a facsimile. Then he headed back outside, feeling good. He’d found him. That fast, that simple.

They drove the 271 until they reached the dirt road that was County 70, where a sign pointed toward Iron Fork Lake.

“There, there!” he shouted.

But Bob did not turn down it.

“Keep your voice down,” he said.

He threw a U-turn when a gap in the traffic permitted and headed back to the closest town, which was called Acorn, where a slatternly convenience store sat in isolation behind some gas pumps across from a one-horse strip of dying retail outlets and a trailer post office. Bob pulled into the convenience lot.

“I need a Coke,” he said, “come on.”

They went in, and Bob took a plastic bottle of the soft drink from the glass case, got one for Russ, then went up to the counter, where a black woman watched them sullenly. He threw something at her that caused Russ to bumble into a movie-scale double take. A smile! A beaming, radiant, howdy-there smile.

She smiled back.

“Maybe you can help me,” he said. “I got some friends supposed to come through from Little Rock to look at some hunting camp property. Damn, I may be lost. You seen any groups of strangers, city-looking boys, very careful types? Truth is, we’re all Little Rock cops. You know that cop look: way the eyes is always traveling, way one guy is sort of hanging back, taking it all in, the way they don’t talk loud and keep to themselves. You see my friends in here in, say, the last few days?”

“Mister, in hunting season you see boys like that all the time. I ain’t seen a soul in months I don’t know his mama and his papa and his brothers.”

“No four-wheel-drive vehicles? Sunglasses, expensive boots, clothes look real new?”

“You ain’t looking for no cops.”

“No, I ain’t, truth is. I am worried about these damn boys and would be grateful if you’d think about it a second.”

“No sir, I ain’t seen nothing like that.”

“Okay, good work. Thanks.” He left a five on the counter.

They walked back to the truck.

“Man, you are careful,” said Russ.

“I am alive,” Bob said, “and I goddamn well intend to stay that way.”

They drove back along 271 to the dirt road, turned down it and began to pick their way along. Periodically, Bob would stop, get out and examine the dirt road for tracks. There were no fresh ones. They passed a lake far off to the right, flat pewter water against the green bulk of a mountain.

They drove and drove. The forest swallowed them, the canopy trees interlocking to block out the sun and the blue sky, as if they plunged through a green tunnel toward blackness. Every mile or so, Bob would pull over, get out, let the dust settle, check the road for tracks, listen intently. His persistence and his patience Russ found really deeply annoying.

Come on, he was thinking.

They crept past deserted farms, timbered or burned-out patches of field, the occasional meadow, but soon enough the forest grew denser, black oak and hickory and winged elm, a curtain of hardwood shot through with an undergrowth of bristly saw brier and yucca.

Finally, they came to a ragged track off to the right.

“That’s it,” said Russ. “If the cabin is here, it’s back there.”

But Bob continued on for at least a mile, then pulled off the road, sliding the car as deep in the woods as he could. “It would be easier to walk down the road,” Russ said.

“It ain’t about being easier. It’s about being safer.”

He got out, waited again for the dust to settle.

“Bob, I—”

“Shhh,” Bob cautioned. “Use your ears. Shut your eyes and listen.”

Russ heard nothing. Bob concentrated for a good five minutes, waiting to discover if the far-off hum of a following car would announce itself. But nothing came. The world was quiet except for the occasional squawk of a bird and the quiet hiss of the wind in the trees.

“Okay,” Bob said, looking at the crude map Russ had drawn from the land plat. “You’re sure this is accurate?”

“It’s almost a tracing,” Russ said.

“Looks to me like the road trends back to the southeast. That would put the cabin a mile and a half in. We ought to be overland from it about a mile.”

Bob shot an azimuth on a small compass he pulled out of his jeans, grabbed a pair of binoculars, and they set off into the woods. The forest absorbed them. It was dense and green, the light overhead filtering through the canopy, more like a jungle than Russ’s idea of a forest.

Every so often Bob would shoot another compass angle, then veer crazily in an odd direction. It was soon enough gibberish to Russ; they seemed just to be wandering through the heavy woods in the heat, the bugs biting, the birds singing. He was hopelessly lost.

“You know where we’re going?”

“Yep.”

“You can get us out of here?”

“Yep.”

“We must have come miles.”

“We’ve walked about three, yeah. By beeline, we’ve come less than one, however. In the jungle you don’t go nowheres in a straight line, ’less you want to be taken down.”

Russ thought: he’s been here before. He’s taken men down before.

Look at him, he thought. A force of nature. Bob slid so easily and silently through the trees, his boots never slipped, he never stumbled or grunted, just maneuvered with the easy grace of the man who’d done it before. His face was blank, his eyes working the edges of the horizon, the demeanor utterly calm and concentrated. Leatherstocking. Natty Bumpo. Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett. Damned John Wayne, like his father, whom everybody always said looked like John Wayne. Soon the sweat showed on his blue denim shirt but Bob paid it no mind; he just kept on trucking, the grip of that .45 sticking out of his jeans above the kidney.

In time, they came to a creek, cool and dark, and swiftly flowing. Russ scrambled over the rocks and got a mouthful of the water, which tasted faintly metallic.

“You make too much noise that way,” Bob said. “Cup it up to your lips and sip it. You never was a marine, right?”

“Not hardly,” said Russ.

“Okay, let’s go. It ain’t far.”

They cut across a path which ran between two low hills and appeared to lead to a clearing in the dim, overgrown trees ahead, but Bob never did things the easy way. Instead, halfway through that little draw, Bob took them off the path, through some heavy growth, and then broke onto the barer high ground under a maze of pines. Ahead, Russ could see the light of vista and openness. But Bob dropped to a low crawl and slithered ahead, coming at last to the edge and setting himself up behind a tree. Russ, feeling utterly like an imposter, did the same.

Two hundred yards below in a hollow by the stream sat the cabin. It was built of logs, low and primitive, with a woodpile, an outhouse, a feed trough for the pigs who scurried in a pen. A beat-up Chevy stood near it, rusted out, one fender gone to primer. Yet it had nothing of rustic Dogpatch, your quaint rural hamlet to it: instead it looked mean and squalid and impoverished.

“No phone lines,” Bob said. “No goddamned TV aerial. No electric wires.”

“Question,” said Russ. “If he’s just out of prison, how come the place looks so lived in?”

“He had a brother named Lum,” said Bob. “The brother had a son, who also lives here. It’s the son’s work you’re seeing, not old Jed’s.”

“Okay,” said Russ. “So let’s go see if he’ll talk to us.”

“No way,” said Bob. “You stay here. You eyeball the place. You got another hour. Then the sun’s too low to the west and it’ll reflect off the lenses. You got a watch?”

“Yes.”

“It’s two forty-five. You eyeball it till three forty-five. What are you looking for?”

“Uh, anything that’s out of the ordinary.”

“How do you look?”

“Uh—” Completely new question. Russ flubbed around.

“Hard,” he finally said.

“No, dummy. Divide it into quadrants. Thirty seconds a quadrant. Blink to black between, then move on. Follow the same pattern for ten minutes, then reverse it or change it around. Take frequent breaks and study the woods around. Use lens discipline. Never let them rise above the midpoint, you might throw a reflection. You’re not looking for men and guns, because you won’t see them and there’s no point. You’re looking for regular outlines. Nothing in nature is regular. If you see a straight line in the woods, you know something’s off. Got it? One hour. Then put the glasses down and just go to regular vision.”

“Where’ll you be?”

“I’m going to circle around and see if I cut any tracks in the woods. I want to know if parties of men have moved through here to that damned place. If it’s empty, and you haven’t seen anything, then we’ll go down.”

“Okay,” said Russ. “We’re not going to get out of here until after dark.”

“Don’t you worry about that, Donnie. You just eyeball the place.”

With that, he slid back and in seconds—the sniper’s gift—had disappeared.

Who the hell is Donnie? Russ wondered.