Black Light

38

They came out of the woods into a sudden, late burst of sunlight. Russ felt liberated from the green gloom of the forest. Before them was the squalid cabin. Incongruous wildflowers lit up around its messy base and front yard.

“He’s watching us,” said Bob. “I can feel him and I just seen something move behind that window.”

As they approached, a man semi-emerged from the doorway and stopped, hiding in the darkness. He observed them with ancient, embittered eyes. As they approached he dipped inside and retrieved a shotgun.

“Y’all git on out of here,” he yelled, glaring. “This ain’t no goddamned freak show. You’se on my property and you be gone or I’ll give ya some buckshot.”

Jed Posey had the look of a man whose life had been consumed in fury. He was scrawny, leathery and toothless, and the denim overalls hung on his frame, showing an old man’s wiry body. He was nothing but sinew and hate. His bare arms wore the dapple of three and a half decades’ worth of prison tattoos, and he had two tears inscribed in the taut flesh of his face, though his eyes were tearless and fierce. His hair was the prisoner’s gray bristle.

“You go on,” he said, bringing the gun up, “or I will by God blast you out of your goddamn boots and be damned.”

“We have business,” said Bob.

“We ain’t got no business, mister. You working for the niggers? Bet the goddamned niggers sent you down here. I’m telling you to stop, by God, or I’ll send you to hell where I sent that goddamned nigger.”

“We don’t work for nobody,” said Bob. “I am Bob Lee Swagger, the son of Earl Swagger. I’m here to talk about the day my father died, Jed. I don’t care a damn about nothing else.”

Jed lowered the shotgun. But the aggression that suffused his entire body and made it tight and shivery like a pointing terrier’s diminished not a bit; his dark little eyes narrowed in anger and if possible he got even redder and tenser. He seemed to be breathing hard.

“Your goddamned father done socked me in the jaw,” he said. “That’s how come my face is broken. I’ve had forty years of pain on account of your sumbitch old man.”

“If my daddy smacked you, Jed, by God, it was a smack you’d earned and I’ll bet it was a smack you ain’t never forgot.”

Jed seemed to melt backwards a step. Something flashed through his little eyes, and told them yes, yes by God, no matter what had happened, Jed Posey had never forgot the day Earl Swagger broke his jaw.

“What you want?” he said. “All that’s long time ago. Jimmy Pye kilt your daddy and your daddy kilt Jimmy Pye and his cousin Bub.”

“I got some questions.”

“Why the hell should I answer one goddamn question for a goddamned Swagger? Nothing in the law or nowhere says I got to talk to you.”

He hawked a squirt of tobacco venom into the dust.

“No sir, you don’t,” said Bob. “But a old goat like you understands one goddamn thing. Money. You gimme an hour of your time, I’ll give you twenty dollars.”

“Twenny dollar! Mister, you must think I’m stupid. Twenny dollar! Cost you forty dollar, Swagger. For forty dollar I’ll tell you any goddamned thing you want to know.”

Russ started forward, but Bob caught him.

“I said twenty dollars and I meant twenty dollars. I don’t bargain with scum. Come on, Russ,” and he pulled the boy back and turned.

Russ shot him a what-the-hell look but Bob yanked him backwards and they turned and started walking back toward the woods.

“Goddamn you, Swagger, thirty dollar.”

Bob turned. “I said I don’t bargain with trash. You take what’s on the table or I will leave the table and that’s true today or a hundred years from today and you won’t never make no twenty dollars.”

“Goddamn you, Swagger.”

“Goddamn me one more time, you old coot, and I will come up on that porch and knock in the other side of your face and finish my daddy’s work.”

“Let me see the twenny.”

Bob pulled his wallet and removed a twenty.

Jed considered narrowly, as if he had a lot riding on the decision.

“You give me the twenty now.”

“If you want to hang on to something, you hang on to your dick, you egg-sucking piece of trash. I’ll hang on to the money until I am finished with you and then I will hand it over. You know no Swagger in these parts or any other ever broke his word or welshed on a bargain.”

“There’s a goddamned first time for everything,” said Jed bitterly. “You come on, then. But you keep your distance.”

Bob and Russ climbed the rickety steps into the dark dwelling. Russ was always amazed at how things diverged from his imagination of them, but this time he was absolutely correct. It was one grim big surpriseless room, rank with odor. A deer’s shabby antlers were nailed to a crossbeam; the stove was old and stank of cold, ancient grease, the bed, a pallet in the corner, supported a scurvy nest of swirled blankets. One wall had been transfigured into Jed’s hall of fame by the industrious use of thumbtacks as his front page from the paper had been pinned to the wood, where it was now yellow and crackly with age—COUNTY MAN SLAYS NEGRO, it said, uniting him and Davidson Fuller in journalistic immortality. The smell of unwashed clothes, dead animals, human destitution and loneliness hung everywhere in the thick air.

“Ah, could I have a decaf cappuccino and a mocha for my son?” asked Russ. “And the chocolate biscotti.”

“Shut up, Russ,” Bob said, as Jed’s squirrelly little face fell into anger, “this ain’t no time to be smart.”

The old man threw down at an oilcloth-covered table, clinging to the shotgun, and Bob sat across from him. There was no place for Russ to sit and there wasn’t enough money in the world to induce him to physical contact with that bed—yccch, he shuddered—so he just sort of leaned against the closest wall.

“Tell me about that day,” said Bob.

Jed pulled a pack of Red Man from his pocket and stuffed some of the stringy tobacco in his mouth, did some manipulating with his tongue until he got it lodged between cheek and gum on the right side, where it bulged like a tumor. He smiled, showing brown gums.

“Ain’t much to goddamn tell. They woke me in the Blue Eye drunk tank along with my brother, Lum, rest his soul, and that fat old deputy Lem tole me he had work detail. I’se so hung over, I didn’t realize where we was until we got there. Let me tell you, Swagger, I wasn’t in no mood to go horsing around in them hot woods lookin’ for no nigger gal.”

“What happened?” Bob said. “Talk me through it.”

Jed looked around, spat at an overflowing Maxwell House can on the floor and then narrated a rambling account of the day, of the heat and dust of the forest even high in the mountains, of the agony of picking through the saw brier and the bracken, of the mosquitoes and other things that buzzed and bit, and the stench of the dogs, and the final thing, the girl.

“Shit,” he said. “She was a ripe one, all blown up like b’loon. You could see her goddamned li’l mouse, tell you what. Just out there in the open. Now they show that stuff in the magazines. In them days, boy, you never saw no mouse. Heh, heh.” He absently chortled in memory of the smoky pleasure of it and Russ saw a flicker of rage play across Bob’s face, then subside.

“Why did my father belt you?”

“’Cause he’s a mean sumbitch is why,” said Jed, not meeting Bob’s eyes.

“My father was many things but he wasn’t a bully. Why’d he hit you, old man?”

“I didn’t mean no harm. I said a little something about riding the gal is all. Bastard. He had no cause to do that. She was a nigger gal and I was right. A nigger boy kilt her. I said so then and that’s way it turned out. Then that nigger boy’s daddy he go all around pretending to be some kind of big shot. Well, I showed him. I ripped open his skull with a goddamned spade. Best feeling I ever got, yes it was, by God, and worth ever damn day of prison. Niggers tried to kill me in prison, you know. Yeah, look at this.”

He pulled down the strap of his overall and the bib fell, and Russ saw a long purple crescent of scar tissue, a witless smile of pucker, running from one nipple almost down to the appendix.

Jed’s eye lit with yellow madness. “Niggers done that. Two hunnert and thirty-five stitches! Doc sewed me up like a burlap sack. But they couldn’t bleed me out. No sir. I got more damn blood in me than a sloat pig on slaughter Friday. By God, not no niggers, not no Earl Mr. Fancy Medal Swagger done got the best of me, by goddamn!”

He sat back, spent, and awarded himself a recreational gob of tobacco juice which he launched like a missile in an arching parabola until it hit dead center in the can, raising a tiny mushroom cloud. Russ shuddered in revulsion and looked away. But Jed wasn’t done. He looked up.

“I was right about the niggers too. I said, you give them people anything, next thing you know, they be shooting and fucking and killing all over the goddamned place. And they is too, ain’t they? Niggers is fine in Africa. Bring ’em over here and look what good it done us. Niggers. They’s the end of America, that’s for damned sure.”

Bob kept still through this tirade, as though he were waiting patiently for a dark storm to blow over. Then he said, “Tell me about my father. What was his mood? What was he doing? How did he act?”

“He was soft on the niggers, that was his problem,” said Jed. “I could smell it on him. This little missing gal: hell, you’d a thought it was his little gal, not some nigger’s. He was sad. Whole goddamned morning. That is when he weren’t coldcocking me. I could take him in a fair fight.”

“Not on your best day, you old dick. Ask the Japanese. They knew him well,” Bob fired back. “Who did he talk to? What did he say?”

“Mainly, old Lem. And Pop Dwyer, who run the dogs. He liked Pop but he didn’t like them dogs. I don’t know why, but I could tell. He hung back from them dogs. But mainly, he was fuckin’ around on me. Mr. High and Mighty. He’s on my case like a bastard from the start,” said Jed. “Didn’t your old lady give him none? It was like he hadn’t had nothing in weeks.”

Bob just glared at him.

“So he runs us up and down the road and into the woods, goddammit, it was hot nigger work. All the time he’s jawin’ on me, like I say. And when he finds that damn girl, I hears him telling goddamn Lem to order all this fancy equipment. Teams, shit like that, from Little Rock. Like it was goddamned important or something. Hell, it were just a raggedy-ass nigger gal.”

Bob took all this in evenly, his face drawn and remote.

“How did he know to look there? What led him to that spot? Do you recall?”

Jed’s features knitted up in concentration. As if summoning a memory, he summoned up a gob of juice and fired it toward the can, missing by a wide margin. Russ noticed that the gobs were coming closer and closer to him.

“Something about a lady calling in saying she’d seen a nigger boy acting ‘peculiar’ four days earlier out by the Texaco sign. Yore damn daddy always poking his nose in other people’s business. When he heard the girl was missing, he put ’em together and that’s how he got us out there.”

Bob nodded. It squared: the black boy, in local lore, would have been Reggie Fuller.

But it wasn’t Reggie Fuller, because he was driving people home from the meeting in secret. But if it was a black boy who’d killed the girl, someone was doing an elaborate operation to frame Reggie. Why? Why? What possibly could there be to gain?

“Did he say anything about other investigations or matters?” asked Russ. “Was he consumed with anything else?”

“He’s tired,” said Jed. “That’s all, tired. He always seemed tired.”

“From what?” asked Russ of Bob.

“He didn’t work no regular duty day,” said Bob, recalling. “He’d be gone sometimes fifteen, sixteen hours a shot, sometimes two or three days. He’d work the mornings and the afternoons, maybe come home for a couple of hours at dinner, maybe take a nap. Then he’d go back out on the road, monitor the state police network, look for speeders, mischief, answer calls, that sort of thing. He worked like a goddamned dog.”

Bob ended, letting it hang quiet in the melancholy air.

“Is that it, Swagger?” Jed demanded.

Bob just looked at him.

“That’s all you wanted? Hah! That ain’t worth no twenny dollar! You ain’t got no more questions and I’m still hotter’n a firecracker.”

He laughed, as if he’d won some great victory.

“You boys been here so long it’s dark out! Ha! And what’d you learn? Nary a goddamned thing! Hah! You got my money, Swagger?”

Bob threw the twenty on the table.

“Have a party, Posey.”

It was full dark and Russ felt both exhausted and liberated when at last he sucked in a lungful of air that wasn’t tainted with the odor of bacon fat and stale sweat.

“We didn’t learn much,” he admitted, as they stepped off the porch.

“I told you we wouldn’t,” said Bob. “You keep trying to make this link between poor Shirelle and what happened to my father. You keep trying to do that but it don’t work out in time or in logic.”

“Well—” said Russ. But then he paused. “Consider this. First, coincidence. Is it logical that there would be two elaborate conspiracies engineered within days of each other in a remote backwater of West Arkansas? I mean, things like that hardly ever happen in real life. Doesn’t it make some kind of sense to presume they were in some way connected, that there was only really one?”

Bob said nothing.

“Then consider,” Russ said, “that although each conspiracy is different in terms of objective, they share the same mechanism or pattern. In both cases, there’s two levels. The first, seemingly impenetrable, offers a plain and simple crime, complete to motives and very obvious clues. Jimmy and Bub Pye rob a grocery store; ten hours later they’re confronted by Sergeant Swagger, who guns them both down and is killed himself. Open-and-shut. Shirelle Parker is raped and murdered twelve miles outside Blue Eye. Her hand conceals the monogrammed pocket of her killer. At his house, the rest of the shirt, smeared with her blood, is found. Open-and-shut. But in both cases, at the level of the most excruciating detail, the anomalies begin to assert themselves and if you go beyond the open-and-shut, you see that in each case some genius operator set it up—night infrared for your dad, moving the body from the site of the crime in the other case. Don’t you see?”

“Consider yourself,” said Bob. “The boy that killed Shirelle was black, you dope. Shirelle’s mama told Sam she was raised so she wouldn’t get in no car with no white boy. Now, you got to ask, if he’s a black boy, who the hell in Arkansas in 1955 had the wherewithal to throw together a frame? For a black boy? Don’t make no sense at all. If it were a white boy, maybe. But no: it was a black boy.”

“Shit,” said Russ.

“I’m convinced my daddy was investigating a crime and that’s what got him killed. He learned something, something big, that powerful men wanted stopped. How else would they have had the resources? They had the CIA, an army sniper, state-of-the-art gear.”

In exasperation, Russ shouted, “I am the son of a state police sergeant. My dad couldn’t investigate an outhouse!”

“Shut up, we just passed our mark.”

“What?”

“I’m counting.”

“What?”

“Steps. Once we hit two hundred forty steps from that big boulder, we head off this goddamned path, veer to the left and begin our zigzag back. We move in units of two hundred forty of my long steps, hard left, hard right by the compass, and that gets us back to the car.”

But Russ hadn’t been paying attention. They had now reached the draw where the creek bed, off to the left, cut between the two hills. The trees loomed above them, more felt than seen. The wind gently pressed through them, filling the night with whispers. The dark lay like a blanket, suffocating Russ. A flash of paranoia illuminated a far corner of his mind; he thought of being alone out here with his hyperactive imagination, zero visibility, lost in some maze that wore an ancient cloak, alone completely. He would die.

Then he heard something terrifying: from close by, it was the raspy, dryly cracking rattle of a poisonous snake; it released an almost archetypal toxin of fear into his system.